November 8, 2017
Page 13
VETERAN’S DAY
Special Edition
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O PINION
Mass Incarceration is a Women’s Issue, Too
Breaking up
families and
endangering
children
J essiCah p ierre
Over the last few
years, our broken
criminal justice sys-
tem has become a na-
tional issue as horrific
stories of victims of mass incar-
ceration have made their way into
the mainstream media.
The dominant narrative around
this issue is usually that it dispro-
portionately affects people of col-
or, particularly men.
Many folks have heard of Ka-
lief Browder, a New York teen-
ager who took his own life after
suffering nearly three years in sol-
by
itary confinement, all for allegedly
stealing a backpack. He was never
tried.
Fewer people know Maria Ele-
na Hernandez, a retired California
housecleaner who was jailed after
police rejected her pro-
tests that they’d mistaken
her for someone else.
Although women rep-
resent a small portion of
it, they are currently the
fastest growing segment
of our prison population.
There are 219,000 women cur-
rently incarcerated in the United
States. A new report by the Prison
Policy Initiative and the ACLU’s
Campaign for Smart Justice found
that “a staggering number” of
them haven’t even been convict-
ed. “More than a quarter of wom-
en who are behind bars have not
yet had a trial,” they found.
Worse still, there are a number
of public health and economic
consequences for the conditions
that women suffer in prison.
Firstly, many prisons and jails
are ill equipped to support the
health needs of women, including
basic hygiene and reproductive
health.
According to the ACLU, preg-
nant women who are incarcerat-
ed are still being shackled during
childbirth. Shackling makes the
already painful process of child-
birth and postpartum recovery
even worse.
The American Medical Associ-
ation and the American Congress
of Obstetricians and Gynecolo-
gists have spoken out against this,
deeming it medically unsafe. Yet
there are at least eight states that
have yet to propose legislation to
ban this inhumane practice.
Secondly, incarcerating wom-
en also has long lasting economic
effects, further exasperating the
gender pay gap — and endanger-
ing children.
Pretrial detention dispropor-
tionately affects women because
incarcerated women tend to have
lower incomes them incarcerated
men, making it even harder to af-
ford cash bail. The Prison Policy
Initiative found that the annual
median income of women who
cannot make bail is $11,071 —
and “among those women, black
women had a median annual in-
come of only $9,083.”
Since 80 percent of women
in jails are mothers and primary
caretakers of their children, this
can mean incredible hardship for
their families.
Criminal justice reform groups
are spreading awareness about
this system’s devastating impact
on women and families. And law-
makers in both major parties are
starting to pay attention.
This past summer, Democrat-
ic U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris from
California and Republican Sen.
Rand Paul of Kentucky introduced
the Pretrial Integrity and Safety
Act, a bill designed to empow-
er states to replace the use of the
cash bail system with something
fairer. That wouldn’t just be better
for families, they wrote in a New
York Times op-ed — it could also
save American taxpayers roughly
$78 billion a year.
It’s important that we keep
women at the center of criminal
justice reform. As we continue to
push for gender equity in this coun-
try, we cannot ignore the devastat-
ing effects that mass incarceration
has on women and their families.
Jessicah Pierre is the inequali-
ty media specialist at the Institute
for Policy Studies. Distributed by
OtherWords.org.
A Holiday Hijacked by a Militaristic Congress
Armistice
Day becomes
Veterans Day
by a rnolD
o liver
How in heck
did Armistice Day
become Veterans
Day? Established
by Congress in
1926 to “perpetu-
ate peace through
goodwill and mutual understand-
ing between nations,” and later
as “a day dedicated to the cause
of world peace,” Armistice Day
was widely recognized for almost
30 years. As part of that, many
churches rang their bells on the
11th hour of the 11th day of the
11th month – the hour in 1918 that
the guns fell silent on the Western
Front by which time 16 million
had died in the horror of World
War I.
To be blunt about it, Armi-
stice Day was hijacked in 1954
by a militaristic Congress and re-
named Veterans Day. Today few
Americans understand the origi-
nal purpose of Armistice Day, or
even remember it. The message
of peace seeking has been all but
erased. Worst of all, Veterans Day
has devolved into a hyper-nation-
alistic quasi-religious celebration
of war and the putatively valiant
warriors who wage it. We no lon-
ger have a national day to recog-
nize or reflect upon international
peace.
And the identification of war-
riors as heroes is pretty shaky too.
If you are a veteran, and honest
about it, you will admit that most
of what goes on during wartime is
decidedly un-heroic and
actual heroes in war are
very few and far between.
I have to tell you that
when I was in Vietnam,
I was no hero, and I did
not witness a single act
of heroism during the
year I spent there, first as a U.S.
Army private and then as a ser-
geant. Yes, there was heroism in
the Vietnam War. On both sides
of the conflict there were notable
acts of self-sacrifice and brav-
ery. Troops in my unit wondered
how the North Vietnamese troops
could persevere for years in the
face of daunting U.S. firepower.
U.S. medical corpsmen per-
formed incredible acts of valor
rescuing the wounded under fire.
But I also witnessed a consid-
erable amount of bad behavior,
some of it my own. Among US
troops, racism against any and all
Vietnamese was endemic. There
were countless incidents of disre-
spect and abuse of Vietnamese ci-
vilians, and a large number of truly
awful war crimes. Most un-heroic
of all were the U.S. military and
civilian leaders who planned, or-
chestrated, and profited greatly
from that utterly avoidable war. I
should have taken action to resist
the war while still on active duty,
but I did not.
The cold truth is that the U.S.
invasion and occupation of Viet-
nam had nothing to do with pro-
tecting American peace and free-
dom. On the contrary, the Vietnam
War was fought to forestall Viet-
namese independence, not defend
it; it bitterly divided the American
people.
Unfortunately, Vietnam wasn’t
an isolated example of an unjust
conflict. Many American wars
— including the 1846 Mexi-
can-American War, the Span-
ish-American War in 1898, and
the Iraq War (this list is by no
means exhaustive) — were waged
under false pretexts against coun-
tries that didn’t threaten the Unit-
ed States. It’s hard to see how, if
a war is unjust, it can be heroic to
wage it.
But if the vast majority of wars
are not fought for noble reasons,
and few soldiers are heroic, have
there been any actual heroes out
there defending peace and free-
dom? And if so, who are they?
Well, there are many, from Jesus
down to the present. I’d put Gand-
hi, Tolstoy, and Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. on the list along with
many Quakers and Mennonites.
And don’t forget General Smed-
ley Butler, who wrote that “War is
a Racket”.
The real heroes are those who
resist war and militarism, often at
great personal cost.
Because militarism has been
around for such a long time,
at least since Gilgamesh came
up with his protection racket in
Sumeria going on 5,000 years ago,
people argue that it will always be
with us.
But many also thought that
slavery and the subjugation of
women would last forever, and
they’re being proven wrong. We
understand that while militarism
will not disappear overnight, dis-
appear it must if we are to avoid
economic as well as moral bank-
ruptcy - not to mention the extinc-
tion of our species.
This year on Nov. 11, Veterans
for Peace will bring back the orig-
inal Armistice Day traditions. Join
them and let those bells ring out.
Arnold “Skip” Oliver, syndi-
cated by PeaceVoice, is profes-
sor emeritus of political science
at Heidelberg University in Tiffin,
Ohio.
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