Tag: California’s prison crisis

Among many startling findings by legal scholar Michelle Alexander, former director of the ACLU's Racial Justice Project here in the Bay Area, is this: There are more African Americans under correctional control today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

The prison guards' union is built on the backs of human beings in cages. Jerry Brown is cozying up to the prison guards and fighting Proposition 5, a measure that offers drug treatment and a second chance to young people, nonviolent offenders and prisoners.