Announcement

The Sentencing Project is pleased to announce the release of a new publication from our colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies,
"Mandate for Change." 

 

Edited by Chester Hartman, the founding executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, "Mandate for Change" is a collection of progressive policy proposals for the Obama Administration on every major domestic and international topic by more than 70 leading thinkers and activists in the field.  "A New Policy for Public Safety," a chapter on criminal justice reform, was contributed by Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project. 

A Washington, D.C. reception celebrating the release of "Mandate for Change" will be held on Monday, February 23rd at Busboys and Poets from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

In addition to many associates of the Institute for Policy Studies, contributors include:

Nan Aron, Alliance for Justice
Dean Baker, Center for Economic & Policy Research
Sheila Crowley, National Low Income Housing Coalition
Peter Edelman, Georgetown University Law Center
Maria Foscarinis, National Law Center on Homelessness  & Poverty
Kim Gandy, National Organization for Women
Angela Glover Blackwell, PolicyLink
Mark Greenberg, Center for American Progress
Alan Houseman, Center for Law and Social Policy
Doug Nelson and Bart Lubow, Annie E. Casey Foundation
Miles Rappaport and Stuart Comstock Gray, Demos

Monthly Public Meeting Minutes

Lawrence Township Library

Tuesday, February 10, 2009; 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

7:20 PM:  Meeting called to order.  January 2009 minutes approved.  Discussion: 

Ø  “Come to Trenton to support medical marijuana, Monday, 2/23/09.”  The vote by the entire NJ Senate on “The New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act” (S119), as amended, is expected to take place on 2/23/09.  CMMNJ will send Press Releases before the vote to rally support, and after the vote to discuss the outcome.  Contact your senator today.  Members of the national organization, Patients Out of Time, plan to assist in passing this important legislation.  If the bill passes in the senate, it will then go to the NJ Assembly.

 

Ø  Upcoming events:  Chris Goldstein, CMMNJ & Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) will host a free, educational seminar on medical marijuana on Wed., 2/18/09 from 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM at the Rutgers/Camden Law School, Room 207.  Ken & Jim Miller will be on WIFI 1460 AM Radio on 2/12/09 at 4:30 PM.  NORML NJ is meeting on 2/21/09 at 7:00 PM in Toms River, NJ to rally support for medical marijuana.  (For NORML NJ meeting info, contact [email protected] ).  CMMNJ plans to join SSDP Rutgers on May 2, 2009 in a march for medical marijuana in New Brunswick, NJ.

 

Ø  Recent publications: The Times of Trenton published CMMNJ’s OP-ED, "Drug laws vs. medical science" 1/15/09.  The Nursing Spectrum published the article, “The Great Debate: Medical Marijuana or Not?  Will New Jersey legislators pass a law in 2009?”  on 1/26/09.  The Asbury Park Press published Jim Miller’s LTE, “Support warranted for medical marijuana” on 2/9/09.

 

Ø  Recent appearances:  CMMNJ appeared on WIBG 1020 AM Talk Radio on 1/20/09.   A podcast of the live radio show is expected to be available soon.  CMMNJ and Chris Goldstein hosted a free, educational seminar on medical marijuana on 2/3/09 at the Willingboro Public Library.

Ø  Update on Jackson, NJ Crohn’s patient Mike Miceli who was arrested for medical marijuana on 9/4/08.

Ø  CMMNJ has new photos, etc. on Facebook and Facebook Friends of CMMNJ.

 

Ø  CMMNJ attended the Americans for Safe Access (ASA) national conference call 1/28/09.  Federal policy towards medical marijuana is changing!  

Ø  Treasury report: Checking account: $1864.45.  PayPal account: $577.59.  Please consider a tax-deductible donation to CMMNJ, a 501(c)(3) organization, to support public education about medical marijuana.  Donations may be made securely through Paypal or checks made out to “CMMNJ” and sent to corporate headquarters at the address below.  Thank you for your interest and support.

  9:00 PM Adjourn meeting.

Next Meeting: March 10, 2009 from 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM at the Lawrence Twp. Library, 2751 Brunswick Pike (at Darrah Lane), Lawrence Twp., NJ (Tel. #609.882.9246).  All are welcome.  Snacks are served.  Meeting at the library does not imply their endorsement of our issue.  For more info, contact:

Ken Wolski, RN, MPA
Executive Director, Coalition for Medical Marijuana--New Jersey, Inc. www.cmmnj.org, 844 Spruce St., Trenton, NJ 08648, (609) 394-2137

 

Dear friends:

Fresh off our winning ballot initiative campaigns in Michigan and Massachusetts, the Marijuana Policy Project has just launched a campaign to pass a statewide medical marijuana ballot initiative campaign in Arizona.

If passed in November 2010, the initiative would protect Arizona patients from arrest and jail for using marijuana with their doctors' recommendation. This would make Arizona the 14^th medical marijuana state (or possibly the 15^th, 16^th, or even 17^th, depending on what successes we have between now and then).

We're feeling good about this campaign because in November we passed a similar initiative in Michigan with a whopping 63% of the vote — and we know we can do it again in Arizona.

But the first thing we need to do is get the initiative placed on the ballot. To do that, we must collect 153,365 valid signatures from Arizona voters, which means we need to collect about 250,000 gross signatures. We know from our past successful signature drives, like in Michigan, that it costs about $2 to collect every signature (because of the costs of paying canvassers, checking validity, and so forth), which means it will take $500,000 to fund this stage of the campaign.

Want to be part of this exciting campaign and help protect another state's medical marijuana patients from arrest and jail?  Please donate what you can here.

As you can see at the bottom of this message, a major philanthropist is willing to match your donation dollar-for-dollar, so we only need you and other MPP members to donate a total of $250,000. Arizona patients and I are grateful for anything you can do to help.

Sincerely,

Rob Kampia
Executive Director
Marijuana Policy Project
Washington, D.C.

P.S. As I've mentioned in previous alerts, a major philanthropist has committed to match the first $2.35 million that MPP can raise from the rest of the planet in 2009. This means that your donation today will be doubled.

A new analysis by The Sentencing Project highlights the growth in the number of incarcerated parents and their children since 1991.  Incarcerated Parents and Their Children: Trends, 1991-2007 reviews data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and documents the growing impact of incarceration on children and families.
 
As of 2007, 1.7 million children had a parent in prison, an 82% increase from the figure of 936,000 in 1991. The racial/ethnic variation among this group is quite broad: 1 in 15 African-American children has a parent in prison, as does 1 in 42 Latino children and 1 in 111 white children. 
 
Due to the distance from home in which many parents are incarcerated - 62% of parents in state prisons are more than 100 miles from home - visits from children are declining over time.  In 2004, more than half of parents in state prisons and nearly half in federal prisons had never had a visit from their children.
 
To address the issues presented by these developments, The Sentencing Project recommends policy responses that include:

• Supporting parent-child relationships through programs such as that of the Bedford Hills, NY women's prison in which newborn babies can live with their mothers for a period of time.
• Revise legislation that impedes the prospects for successful reentry and uniting parents with children, such as the ban on receipt of welfare and food stamps for persons with drug convictions.
• Reconsider lengthy sentencing policies that are overly punitive and contribute to greater separation between parents and children.

Troubled Neighbor: Mexico's Drug Violence Poses a Threat to the United States

by Ted Galen Carpenter

Policy Analysis no. 631
February 2, 2009

Executive Summary

While U.S. leaders have focused on actual or illusory security threats in distant regions, there is a troubling security problem brewing much closer to home. Violence in Mexico, mostly related to the trade in illegal drugs, has risen sharply in recent years and shows signs of becoming even worse. That violence involves turf fights among the various drug-trafficking organizations as they seek to control access to the lucrative U.S. market. To an increasing extent, the violence also entails fighting between drug traffickers and Mexican military and police forces.

The carnage has already reached the point that the U.S. State Department has issued travel alerts for Americans traveling in Mexico. U.S. tourism to cities on Mexico’s border with the United States, where the bloodshed has been the worst, has dropped sharply. Even more troubling, the violence is spilling across the border into communities in the southwestern United States.

U.S. officials, alarmed at the growing power of the Mexican drug cartels, have pressured the government of Felipe Calderón to wage a more vigorous anti-drug campaign. Calderón has responded by giving the army the lead role in efforts to eliminate the drug traffickers instead of relying on federal and local police forces, which have been thoroughly corrupted by drug money. Washington has rewarded Calderón’s government by implementing the initial stage of the so-called Mérida Initiative. In June 2008, Congress approved a $400 million installment modeled on Plan Colombia, the anti-drug assistance measure for Colombia and other drug-source countries in the Andean region. That program, now in its ninth year, has already cost more than $5 billion, without significantly reducing the flow of drugs coming out of South America. The Mérida Initiative will likely cost billions and be equally ineffectual.

Abandoning the prohibitionist model of dealing with the drug problem is the only effective way to stem the violence in Mexico and its spillover into the United States. Other proposed solutions, including preventing the flow of guns from the U.S. to Mexico, establishing tighter control over the border, and (somehow) winning the war on drugs are futile. As long as the prohibitionist strategy is in place, the huge black market premium in illegal drugs will continue, and the lure of that profit, together with the illegality, guarantees that the most ruthless, violence-prone elements will dominate the trade. Ending drug prohibition would de-fund the criminal trafficking organizations and reduce their power.

The full text of this paper is available here.

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.

Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20001

[Courtesy of The Sentencing Project] 

 

A new report by The Sentencing Project highlights 17 states that enacted sentencing and corrections reforms in 2008. The State of Sentencing 2008: Developments in Policy and Practice finds that a nationwide budget crisis coupled with widespread prison overcrowding has led many states to address critical challenges in the areas of sentencing, drug policy, parole revocation, racial justice, felony disenfranchisement, juvenile justice, and higher education in prison.
 
Highlights from the report include:

• Arizona established a probation revocation and crime reduction performance incentive system to encourage counties to reduce commitments to prison.

• Kentucky amended parole release policies and expanded home incarceration for persons convicted of certain offenses, created a committee to study the state's penal code and made recommendations for reform, and rescinded certain requirements for persons seeking to have voting rights restored after the completion of sentence.

• Mississippi amended parole release policies, and expanded eligibility for compassionate release.