Salt of the Earth: Social justice news

Social justice news
August 2000

DNA testing comes to court in San Diego
Putting labor back in the pulpits
Signing on to better global working conditions?
Religious group calls for suspension of capital punishment
New study finds one in four prisoners locked up for drugs

DNA testing comes to court in San Diego
After a number of highly publicized accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, the San Diego District Attorney's Office will begin offering free DNA tests to inmates who say they have been wrongly convicted. A bill under discussion in the California legislature may make such DNA testing mandatory throughout the state.

Court watchers say the new policy may be the first instance in the nation where a prosecutor's office has taking the initiative on DNA testing rather than waiting to be petitioned by defense attorneys.

According to the new procedures, testing will only be conducted on consenting inmates who have maintained their innocence throughout their trials and sentences and where DNA evidence still exists. The new policy is expected to largely apply to sexual assault cases but may also include some homicides. The tests can cost between $3,000 and $5,000.

DNA testing is also in the new in Atlanta. A number of news organizations including the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and CBS News' "60 Minutes" have agreed to underwrite a test of the DNA evidence from a 1981 Georgia murder case. The news organizations hope to determine if Ellis Wayne Felker was innocent of the rape and murder for which he was executed in 1996. If the tests prove that Felker couldn't have committed the crime, it would be the first time DNA testing technology would be used to exonerate an inmate who had already been put to death.

A Georgia judge cleared the way for the news agencies to conduct the test last month.

Putting labor back in the pulpits
Since 1996, thousands of members of congregations around the country have listened to union leaders and activists speak about their experiences as both people of faith and union members during Labor in the Pulpits Labor Day weekend worship services. Starting in a single city in 1996 and growing to about 60 cities in 2000, the Labor in the Pulpits program has placed labor spokespeople in pulpits and incorporated labor issues into worship in churches, synagogues, and mosques. This growth reflects the increasing desire of religion and labor to work together to help decrease the economic gap in the United States, according to the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice (NICWJ), one of the cosponsors and organizers of the event. This year union speakers will participate in an estimated 600 services in 450 congregations across the country.

Planning a Labor in the Pulpits event brings together members of religious communities and local labor leaders. In addition to labor representatives speaking at services, congregations can focus weekend worship on workplace justice concerns through bulletin inserts, sermon notes, songs, and special prayers, and religious education.

"Labor Day provides an opportunity for the religious community and the labor union movement to rediscover their common bonds: social justice, equality, the dignity and respect of all persons, economic justice, and fair treatment in the workplace," said Kim Bobo, executive director of NICWJ. "It calls us to recommit ourselves to work together to be a witness to actualizing these values." By educating congregations about the connections between faith and work, Labor in the Pulpits presents congregations with opportunities for acting on the social teachings of their faith groups in the area of labor. Labor in the Pulpits also provides "an opportunity for religious institutions and unions to share the common vision of working toward a more just society," said Toure Muhammad, NICWJ public relations coordinator, "but this is more than just a one-day relationship. Religion can play a role to encourage corporations to treat their workers as they would treat themselves."

Along with NICWJ, a network of 45 local groups mobilizing the religious community to support worker justice, cosponsors of Labor in the Pulpits include the AFL-CIO, a 13-million member federation of 68 national union affiliates, and local religious communities, unions, and interfaith religion-labor committees. Last year the program was endorsed by Clergy and Laity for Economic Justice and the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church, who mailed letters to more than 5,000 of its pastors urging them to include a Labor Day litany in Labor Day weekend services. These same organizations are expected to do the same this year. NICWJ also sent 18,600 Catholic parishes a "Putting Labor into Labor Day Services" packet that included messages from the late Cardinal John O'Connor, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, and famed labor priest Msgr. George Higgins, as well as a summary of the U.S. Catholic bishops' applications of Catholic social teachings to labor issues.

Resources for the 2000 Labor in the Pulpits include an organizing kit, which provides background materials and resources for a Labor in the Pulpits program in a congregation. New this year is a publication produced through a partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor that will educate workers about their rights and will be available on the NICWJ Web site in early August in nine different languages. Inserts will deal with minimum wage and overtime pay, child labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Information on Labor in the Pulpits 2000 can be obtained from the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, 773-728-8400, info@nicwj.org, or 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave., 4th Fl., Chicago, IL 60690-4627.

Signing on to better global working conditions?
Some 50 multinational corporations, including global commerce powerhouses such as DaimlerChrysler, Nike, and Royal Dutch Shell, signed on to a "global compact" with international labor and watchdog agencies that may lead to greater protection for workers and the environment in places where local government controls are nonexistent or ineffective. The July 26 signing at the United Nations in New York is part of a U.N. sponsored campaign that encourages corporations which do business across borders to spread Western-style human rights and environmental values. The alternative, supporters of global free trade worry, may be the erosion of broad public support of open trade and investment policies.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan told the business executives gathered for the compact signing that "companies should not wait for governments to pass laws before they pay a decent wage or agree not to pollute the environment." Among the companies signing on to the compact have been a number of multinationals that have been the leading targets of critics who accuse global corporations of exploiting the world's most vulnerable workers while showing little regard for the environmental damage they leave behind in developing world nations.

The pact took 18 months to negotiate. It binds signers to a "declaration of principles" rather than a legal code of conduct. Critics of the compact called it a "bluewash," arguing that the agreement allows some of the planet's worst corporate actors to wrap themselves in the blue U.N. flag without committing to meaningful changes in their business strategies and behavior in the developing world. Supporters argue that such protocols are the beginning of a slow process of institutionalizing and broadening labor and environmental codes of conduct for transnational corporations that could "normalize" better standards for treatment of global workers and the environment.

Religious group calls for suspension of capital punishment
The Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago has called for a nationwide suspension of the death penalty. The council is composed of leaders from the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish communities and institutions in Chicago. Though its members do not agree that the application of capital punishment is never justified, they do agree that the manner the death penalty is currently instituted in the United States is often "flawed and unjust."

Illinois Governor George Ryan recently called a moratorium on executions in Illinois after 13 death row inmates were found to have been wrongly convicted.

New study finds one in four prisoners locked up for drugs
Nearly one in four prisoners behind bars in America is incarcerated for a drug offense according to a new study from the Justice Policy Institute (JPI). JPI reports that there are almost as many inmates imprisoned for drug offenses today (458,131) as the entire U.S. prisoner population of 1980 (474,368).

The report, entitled Poor Prescription: The Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders in the United States found that, since 1980, the number of persons imprisoned for drug offenses has increased 11-fold while the number of violent offenders entering state prisons has doubled and the number of nonviolent prisoners has tripled. It will cost states, counties, and the federal government over $9 billion to imprison 458,131 drug offenders this year.

Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Michigan), used the occasion of the report's release to announce legislation that would provide treatment in lieu of incarceration for non-violent drug users, supporting with federal dollars reform efforts like those proposed in New York and California. "The casualties from this nation's drug war have continued to mount, with no end in sight," Conyers said. "The federal government must support alternatives to wholesale incarceration that stress treatment for drug addicted offenders. Only by breaking the cycle of abuse, trafficking and incarceration can we find a way out of this nightmare."

"America does indeed have a drug problem," said JPI Director and report co-author Vincent Schiraldi. "And that problem is that we've focused on imprisonment as the near-exclusive solution to substance abuse, while giving short shrift to treatment and prevention."

Among the report's other key findings:

From 1986 to 1996, the number of whites imprisoned for drug offenses has doubled, while the number of blacks imprisoned for drug offenses has increased five-fold, and the number of young blacks imprisoned for drug offenses has increased six-fold.
Each year since 1989, more people have been sent to prison for drug offenses than for violent offenses.
There was a statistically significant association between higher incarceration rates of drug offenders and greater , not less, drug use in the states examined.
California had the highest "drug incarceration" rate of any state in the United States. The number of Californians locked up for drug offenses increased 25-fold since 1980, and there are now twice as many Californians in prison for drug offenses (44,455) as the entire California prison population in 1980.
Nearly half of all drug offenders imprisoned in California last year were imprisoned for simple possession of drugs. In New York, 91 percent of those imprisoned last year for drug offenses were locked up for possession or one of the state's three lowest level drug offenses.
In six states—Hawaii, Texas, South Carolina, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Maine—drug commitment rates for young whites actually declined between 1986 and 1996, while comparable black rates experienced two- to eight-fold increases.
America imprisons 100,000 more persons for drug offenses than the entire European Union imprisons for all offenses, even though the EU has 100 million more citizens than the US.

"The war on drugs has never been a war on drugs per se. It has always been a war on people," stated report co-author Barry Holman. "As the data show, that war has increasingly become a war against African Americans." The report comes at a time when America's drug policies are under increased criticism, and when policy alternatives have arisen around the country. For example:

In May, an initiative qualified for the November ballot in California which would substantially reduce drug commitments to prison and fund an additional $120 million in drug treatment.
On June 8, Human Rights Watch released a report that found that the war on drugs had been waged overwhelmingly against African Americans.
On June 22, New York State's Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye announced a new drug reform initiative that would provide treatment in lieu of imprisonment for 10,000 New York State drug-addicted offenders.
On July 29 and August 11, two Shadow Conventions are set to coincide with the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, with drug policy reform at the top of their agenda.

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