Monthly Archives: March 2021

OMS: What is hard for me to reconcile with these critics is these are people who have never talked about police brutality or mass incarceration. You cant just ignore all of the issues the movement is talking about and only criticize. There are people who think Black Lives Matter activists want to destroy the family. One priest even called them maggots and parasites last year. They dont want to sit down and understand the history of the movement. They dont want to learn from these activists.

JG: You write that the goal of your book is to help Catholics, and all Christians, work toward a Christ-centered, Black liberation. Can you explain what you mean by that and what would that look like if we achieved it?

OMS: For me, it means becoming a Church that cares about equality for Black and Brown people and all marginalized communities. We know our country has not prioritized marginalized people. We need to be a Church that rejects the very public displays of whiteness that our Church associates with being Catholic, and that centers Catholics of color in order to become the universal Church we think we are. And that means bishops publicly apologizing for the Churchs white supremacy, talking about abolition of police, and meeting with organizers. This is what liberation work means to me.

JG: As you document in the book, the Church has a very long history of entanglement with racism and white supremacy. Until recently, not many people have been talking about this. Why do you think there has been so much silence for so long?

OMS: The reason is that people hold power because of that silence, and our Church has internalized white supremacy. People dont want to relinquish power. To do actual reckoning you have to ask yourself, How have I been complicit? People dont want to do that. Liberal Catholics also have to ask how they have been complicit. You cant just say Black Lives Matter. We really dont know how to do this reckoning work. Bishops should be showing us how to grapple with the sin of racism.

JG: You praise Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso for speaking out strongly against white supremacy and kneeling in protest with a Black Lives Matter sign. But youre critical of most statements the bishops have released, including the U.S. bishops 2018 pastoral letter on racism, Open Wide Our Hearts. What do you think the bishops should be saying that they are not saying?

OMS: The statements should not be so long or written in language that doesnt resonate with people. I also want to see every white bishop talk about white privilege. I want to see them grapple with the same topics I was grappling with in the book and talk about racial capitalism and how our health-care institutions grew out of exploitation of Black bodies. People are afraid to do this public work because its hard and they are afraid to mess up. Its okay to mess up.

JG: The Black Lives Matter movement doesnt seem to have as many connections with churches or other houses of worship in the way that civil-rights leaders of the past were shaped by and deeply connected to the Black church as an epicenter of resistance. Is that simply a generational reality or are other things going on?

OMS: This is a movement that was born online and uses social media to share its message. So I think its generational. Its also a decentralized movement that doesnt have one very established leader or headquarters. But there is spirituality and there are religious folks in the movement, especially after Ferguson. There was heavy church participation there, but its so decentralized it means people are not necessarily telling these stories. I think religious media needs to take this movement more seriously. When I spoke with Alicia Garza [a co-founder of Black Lives Matter], she welcomed faith leaders getting involved. I can tell you this movement has made me a better Catholic.

JG: What advice do you have for white Catholics who want to be allies of Black Lives Matter and be anti-racists?

OMS: The number one question that every white Catholic has to ask themselves is, How have I been complicit in white supremacy, and how can I be better? You need to ask: How can I center marginalized people? Can I give other people the opportunity to do this work instead of me? As an editor, am I only giving bylines to white people? People need to ask themselves how they can shift power. This is difficult because it requires sacrifice, but that is what solidarity is. A lot of people will need to realize they need to step aside. Its not supposed to be easy.

JG: What are some things in the Church that give you hope when it comes to confronting our history and taking steps to end white supremacy?

OMS: The thing that really gives me hope is Black and Brown Catholic women. Amid all this suffering in the past year and as I was trying to write a book, I found a community of Black and Brown Catholic women who remind me why I stay in this Church and what this Church should be. Black women are teaching me Christ-centered liberation.

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Becoming the Church We Say We Are - Commonweal

I was speaking to a friend of mine who employs hundreds of people in Silicon Valley and he said that he did a simple survey of his staff in the United States asking, who would like to move to Australia? and more than half put their hand up, Frydenberg tells The Australian Financial Review.

The level of recognition Australia has attained across the world for our performance on the health and the economic front as well as the opportunities it creates is very significant.

Frydenberg says these opportunities are perfectly timed to deliver genuine reform in the key area of skilled immigration and domestic skills matching.

We have work under way to identify those opportunities. We have departments that have come together to look at a whole range of issues that affect Treasury to immigration to state governments. The goal is very clear, he says.

I have spoken to state Treasurers. I recently met with the new CEO of Rio Tinto Jakob Stausholm and I told him about this idea of attracting the best and the brightest.

Ultimately, in the long run, human capital is even more important than working capital, Frydenberg says.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has left no doubt that skills reform over and above tax reform will be the likely key target for productivity improvements and long-term economic growth prospects.

Building the scale, capacity and skills of our workforce, I believe, is the single greatest economic challenge our country faces, Morrison said at The Australian Financial Review Business Summit last week.

It is why we established JobTrainer and are working closely with the states and territories to develop a new and reformed National Skills Agreement.

The chief executive of Wesfarmers Rob Scott along with plenty of other corporate leaders have suggested the reforms need to be wider and deeper.

Regulation and delays, outdated state taxes, difficulties with enterprise bargaining agreements all impact the future risk of projects and this outweighs the benefits of the short-term cost of funding, Scott told the Business Summit.

The chief executive of Australias biggest diversified property developer Mirvacs Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz has also been asking whether Australia can accelerate the silver linings of COVID-19.

Can we leverage the spirit of co-operation to together solve the global challenge of climate change? Can we maintain collaboration between government and business to drive a sustainable job-based recovery?

We cannot afford to slip back to the older, unsustainable ways of doing things. I am hopeful that we can take the opportunity to recast the nation into a better version of itself.

Frydenberg defends the efforts made so far and those efforts marked in the governments diary.

Reform is a never-ending task, Frydenberg says, There is no starting point, and there is no finishing line.

What we have shown through the pandemic is that we can simultaneously respond to the immediate needs of the community with targeted temporary economic support, including significant regulatory changes while at the same time putting in place longer term structural reforms.

The work weve done on micro economic reform with the digital platforms, the changes we have made to insolvency law, the improvements weve made through super, the tax cuts including the abolition of a full tax bracket are all structural reforms.

Before parliament now, the Morrison government is trying to push through reform that seeks to cut back onerous regulations on industrial relations and responsible lending obligations. These will be key tests for how realistic any federal reform will be this year.

With respect to industrial relations reform, weve been opposed every step of the way, Frydenberg says, Even after extensive deliberation between employer and employee representatives, something as simple, as important as extending the life of enterprise agreements as they apply to Greenfield sites has been opposed by Labor.

The reforms may not have to be the big bold ideas of floating the currency, introducing a Goods and Services Tax or striking an accord between workers and employers.

Productivity Commissioner Michael Brennan has said that the future of productivity gains will be more likely to come from a thousand smaller reforms than one big reform.

For all the success of past waves of reform, the future economic policy agenda will necessarily look a bit different. And it wont be helped by nostalgia or pessimism, Brennan has said.

It is likely that the bigger challenge for the Australian economy today is one of dynamism: the capacity to generate new ideas, products, business models, production techniques and diffuse them quickly through the economy.

There are dozens of suggestions; a further simplification of income taxes, more competitive rates of corporate tax, potentially even a business cash flow tax to replace the GST; broader based GST; reforms such as replacing stamp duty with land taxes as NSW has proposed. Road user charge to replace fuel excise, motor vehicle registration fees and stamp duties on motor vehicles, exemptions from tax all scholarships, pensions and other government transfer payments.

Then there are ideas around permanent incentives.

In the October budget the Morrison government offered 3.5 million businesses with turnovers of up to $5 billion to deduct the full cost of eligible capital assets in what is called the business investment allowance.

It has started working fast.

The Business Council are now pushing for the allowance to be much more broadly based so that companies with turnover of more than $5 billion will be allowed to participate. The BCA also wants to make the allowance cover digitisation-type spending, which doesnt necessarily fall within traditional notions of business investment.

Opening the allowance up to greater digital investments is something the Treasurer is conscious of.

There will be new opportunities for Australia, on the other side of this crisis, the way we work, the way we shop, the way we communicate,is changing with the the rollout of new technology, and the adoption of technology through this crisis, and it has been so much faster than would otherwise have been the case, Frydenberg says.

The likelihood of people travelling interstate for one meeting will reduce as they use the Zoom call, the likelihood of people working from home is going to increase as people get comfortable with those new settings. And the likelihood of people moving to the regions where theyre digitally enabled will increase.

We have undertaken a lot of work to enable the digital transformation across the economy. We announced a number of new initiatives before the budget, he says.

Frydenberg likes to point out the governments reforms in the digital space should encourage businesses that there will be clearer regulatory path for businesses navigating the rapidly advancing technologies.

Its also the competition reforms, the micro economic reforms that we announced in the context of big tech and the digital platforms. This was world-leading economic reform based on more than three years work by the ACCC.

The approach that we adopted is similar to our approach in other areas of reform.

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Australia's lure will last only as long as its reform - The Australian Financial Review

The Stop Ecocide campaign, supported by Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, seeks to enshrine extreme damage to the natural world, termed ecocide, into international law.

This includes ocean damage, deforestation, fracking and air pollution. The campaign specifically wants to see ecocide added to the list of crimes that can be tried at the highest level by the International Criminal Court alongside genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

But while the campaign more appropriately reflects the scope and complexity of environmental harm caused by governments and corporations than most other proposed measures, it is the wrong solution.

Despite its intentions, criminalising ecocide fails to tackle the root causes of ecological harm.

Environmental laws as they currently stand are exceptionally weak. Nature and natural resources have been commoditised since the days of colonialism, leaving those who seek to turn them into profit far more protected than the resources themselves. Likewise, the people and communities who reside on the land, disproportionately low-income Black and Indigenous people and people of colour, are displaced and killed as a result.

The legal system has, in some cases, mandated financial compensation in situations of ecological damage. For example, in 1996 The Pacific Gas and Electric company (PG&E) were forced to pay a $333 million settlement (278 million) over poisoned water in California, as depicted in the film Erin Brockovich. But this legal process lasted decades, decades in which thousands of lives were affected and many people died. Money cant replace human life, no matter how much our political and legal systems try to convince us otherwise.

The Stop Ecocide campaign would prefer to see a case like this tried within a criminal context, but that would likely slow rather than speed up the process. There is also no evidence that it would effectively prevent ecological harm. Criminal charges including felony manslaughter were brought against BP after their 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, yet the corporation continues to dominate the fuel market.

Additionally, global government policies, UN sustainable development goals and environmental protection laws have not thus far prevented natural destruction nor reduced global warming.

Currently, one million animal and plant species are at risk of extinction, many within a matter of decades. We are on track to eradicate all of the oceans coral reefs by the end of this century and we have already destroyed over half the worlds tropical forests since 1960. This is despite legally binding documents such as the Paris Agreement, and national and local government commitments. The UK government, for example, declared a climate and ecological emergency in 2019, but it continues to implement ecologically harmful policies and schemes like the HS2 rail project.

Now, the Stop Ecocide campaign argues that criminalising ecocide would create a deterrence effect. But this does not translate into sentencing data - in the US, studies show that states with the death penalty have higher murder rates than those without, for example.

The practicalities of who would be held responsible also presents a complex challenge. A companys CEOs would seem the obvious choice, but in the PG&E case, it wasnt the CEOs who placed the chemicals in the water - so this may not stand up in a legal setting. Its likely, then, that the onus would fall on the workers or the engineers. Given systemic class and wealth gaps between those who own large corporations and those they employ, this would surely perpetuate systemic divides and disproportionately target working class people.

Criminalising ecocide would deepen the core problem of corporate power rather than diminish it, and this power is part of the problem in the first place.

This links to a wider view of the legal system that is crucial to consider. Prison and criminalisation do not fix harm, they cause it. Any policy or law that expands the system is therefore adding harm rather than preventing or reducing it. Central to [prison] abolitionist work are the many fights formeasures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the systems inability to solve the crises it creates, state Dan Berger, Mariama Kaba and David Stein in a Jacobin article.

Prisons and the systems that support them the police, state institutions and private corporations were created with the aim of upholding and perpetuating systemic racism, maintaining class inequalities and making profit. Policing exists to manage the consequences of inequality in ways that benefit those people who are creating the inequality, says Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing.

These same disparities are present in the causes of the climate crisis, and in the way its consequences play out. Low-income and unwaged people, disproportionately Black, brown and Indigenous, are exploited and their land mined for resources by wealthy, mainly white-owned corporations.

In a fossil fuel economy, this means fracking and the construction of oil pipelines occur within these communities, the people who live there regarded as having less value than the product. The consequences of these processes air pollution, unsafe drinking water and, overall, global warming also disproportionately affect these very same communities.

Like oil, the prison complex is a profit-making machine. Private companies benefit from incarceration, human rights abuses and violence by supplying products and services to prisons and other detention centres. Incarcerated people are also an exploited labour force in the US they are legally considered slaves under the thirteenth amendment to the American constitution. The stringent laws and rules around employment of people with criminal convictions in many countries also maintains the cycle of poverty and harm for societys most marginalised and oppressed communities, benefiting businesses who rely on cheap labour.

This system is a mirror image of the very same extractive, exploitative premise of the global fossil fuel economy.

Prison abolition focuses on replacing harmful conditions with ones that seek to reduce them in order to prevent and minimise harm overall. This means investing the money that is currently invested in the prison complex in social welfare, mental health services, education, housing, jobs and other support services instead.

These same principles can be applied to the climate crisis: instead of investing in a fossil fuel economy based on exploiting marginalised communities, we should invest in programmes, schemes and services that repair colonialist destruction (reparations, for example), reduce poverty, class inequality and provide anti-racism education at an individual, community and institutional level.

Though the physical infrastructure of the prison is not the only focus of abolition thinking, its another important consideration when it comes to the environment. Prisons are often built on land containing dangerous polluting chemicals.

The Environmental Impact Assessment for a prison application in Leicester, UK states that construction work would cause unacceptable pollution risks and contaminate soils and groundwater. Another concern is that prisons are a key part of the state apparatus used to repress social movements and maintain a capitalist and ecologically-destructive society, outline CAPE and Fight Toxic Prisons, abolition-environmental movements focusing on alternatives to prisons and detention.

They point out that it is campaigners and activists who are increasingly targeted by the growing power of the law just this year Priti Patel has promised to crack down on environmental protesters through passing a spate of new legislation.

Through an abolitionist lens, we can see the campaign to stop ecocide would only worsen the issues causing ecological damage and its consequences. It will not prevent the destruction of our natural world, nor protect communities already impacted by the climate crisis.

The aim of all climate justice advocates should be to reduce the conditions that lead to such harm in the first place, and criminalisation is anathema to this.

Every weekday at 15.30 CET, Euronews Living brings you a cutting edge, environmental story from somewhere around the world. Download the Euronews app to get an alert for this and other breaking news. It's available on Apple and Android devices.

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Why making ecocide a crime won't tackle the root causes of the climate crisis - Euronews

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RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL Between 1821 and 1865, thousands of enslaved African Americans crossed the Rio Grande to seek a different future; however, their stories and of those who aided them, remained buried in obscurity until recently.

Unlike the so-called Underground Railroad the network organized by abolitionists in the 19th century to help slaves escape to northern states and Canada the history of which is taught to high school students in the US the route south has remained ignored on both sides of the Rio Grande.

The concept is the same as the underground railroad to the north, the difference is that on the route to Mexico there wasnt such an organized network and there werent as many people available to help the slaves, says Roseann Bacha-Garza, head of the Community History and Archaeology Program (CHAPS) at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Nevertheless, what happened on this escape route was not insignificant and historians estimate that between 5,000 and 10,000 slaves managed to cross into Mexico between 1821 and 1865.

In Mexico you could be free.

The reconstruction of this chapter in the history between Mexico and the United States has not been easy, largely because of the lack of records.

Escapes were clandestine and there were squads hired by slaveowners to hunt down people fleeing to Mexico, so they often wanted to remain anonymous when they crossed to the Mexican side, explains Mara Camila Daz Casas, who did her doctoral thesis on this topic at the National School of Anthropology and History of Mexico and is now a professor at the Javeriana University in Colombia.

Despite these limitations, the history of the existence of the southbound route has been reconstructed through scattered records of local communities, newspaper records of the period in whose pages slaveowners published notices offering rewards for those who helped them recapture the runaways and testimony collected in the 1930s and 1940s from former American slaves as part of the so-called Federal Writers Project.

One such testimony is that of Felix Haywood, who lived in San Antonio (Texas) when he was interviewed in 1941, at the age of 92, and offers a clear picture of the views that former slaves retained of Mexico.

Occasionally someone would come along and encourage us to escape north for freedom. We would laugh about it. There was no reason to run north, all we had to do was walk, but walk south, where we would be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo), Haywood recounts.

In Mexico you could be free. They didnt care what color your skin was: black, white, yellow or blue. Hundreds of slaves fled to Mexico and did well. We heard about them and that they became Mexicans. They raised their children to speak only Mexican, he adds.

Bacha-Garza explains that many slaves knew how to get to Mexico because part of their job was to follow the cotton shipments from Texas plantations to markets in towns like Brownsville or Matamoros.

Those slaves knew the routes and how to get to the river. They realized how easy it would be to cross and gain freedom in Mexico, the historian points out.

According to the testimony of Sallie Wroe, who was born as a slave on a plantation near Austin (Texas), this is what her father and 3 of her uncles did when they reached the Rio Grande River driving wagons loaded with cotton, which the owner of the hacienda was going to sell in Brownsville.

Daddy and the others left the wagons on the river bank, hurled a bale of cotton into the river and the four of them rode on it, paddling with poles across the river to Mexico. That was during the war. Daddy came back with us after being free and said he had done well in Mexico. He learned to speak just like they did, he told Federal Writers Project researchers.

A dangerous route

Although most of the enslaved African Americans who fled to Mexico came from Texas, the idea of finding freedom across the southern border traveled much farther.

US historian Maria Hammack has found accounts of individuals who crossed the Rio Grande from nearby states such as Louisiana and farther afield such as Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina. Bacha-Garza explains that the border was not nearly as heavily guarded as it is today and that the river could even be crossed on horseback at a few points.

Still, it was a difficult journey due to the extremely hot weather for much of the year, the abundant presence of dangerous animals such as snakes and scorpions, and the lack of water and shade to escape the harsh sun. In addition, they had to avoid the main roads and watch out for bounty hunters who roamed the area in search of runaway slaves.

It was very difficult for them, but they were driven by the freedom they could achieve in Mexico and the fact that Mexico wasnt going to send them back to the United States. That was the main issue, Bacha-Garza notes.

Allies on the southern route

The slaves found several allies on their way to freedom. Among these, historians mention German immigrants who were very sensitive to the fugitives. In the 1830s and 1840s, Germanic settlers became one of the most significant migrant communities in Texas.

Another important support group were Texan-Mexicans (those who had lived in Texas from the time that territory was part of Mexico), as well as other Mexicans who migrated to the US later to work on ranches as laborers.

Many of these Mexican laborers, particularly after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, migrated to Texas and began to work on the ranches, often coexisting with the enslaved, says Daz Casas.

Then, a number of associations between Mexicans and enslaved people began to be created there, which the Texas press denounced with great alarm and one can see, for example, many ads offering rewards to recapture fugitives who say that they escaped with a Mexican or that they were guided by Mexicans, or that Mexicans instigated them to escape, she adds.

The expert points out that this association between enslaved people and Mexican laborers led to the stigmatization of the latter. She considers that this could be a factor that helped the birth of an anti-Mexican sentiment in Texas.

In addition to this support, Roseann Bacha-Garzas research over the last decade has helped identify individuals who helped slaves in the US flee to Mexico.

These are two mixed-race families: the Jacksons and the Webbers, headed by a white husband and a black wife a freed slave who settled on the US side of the Rio Grande River in the 1850s, after the end of the Mexican-American War, which turned the waterway into the new border between the two countries.

They moved to the border and decided to stay on the US side and bought land. They integrated in society which was not very populated changing their names and learning the customs and language. So, for example, John Ferdinand Webber became Juan Fernando Webber and his daughter Sarah Jane became Juanita Webber. They were very happy to blend in with the community, she says.

Webber began a relationship with a neighbors slave, Sylvia Hector, with whom he had 3 children before he was able to buy his freedom in 1834.

In total, they had 11 children and for years they lived comfortably in Austin (Texas), but when the population grew in the area, animosity towards them also increased because they were an interracial couple with mixed-race children. In 1851, things got really bad for them and they decided to move down to Mexico and settled on the border, says Bacha-Garza.

Nathaniel Jackson and his partner, Matilda Hicks, traveled in 1857 with their children from Alabama to Hidalgo County, Texas, trying to escape intolerance of interracial relationships. The couple had 10 children. The journey, more than 1,600 kilometers long, was made in covered wagons and in the company of 11 free African Americans. Like the Webbers, the Jacksons bought land and established a ranch along the river.

Bacha-Garza points out that both families moved toward the border fleeing racial intolerance and that both ranches had docks with boats that could be used to cross the Rio Grande at any time, something that not only allowed them to help the slaves escape, but also provided them with the assurance of being able to flee themselves if necessary.

Between 1851 and 1865, these families gave shelter and food to the fleeing slaves, accepted them into their community and helped them cross the river to reach their freedom, although some of these people decided not to go all the way to Mexico because they felt welcome in these small communities along the river and decided to stay on the US side of the border, knowing that if any bounty hunters came they could always cross and stay hidden on the Mexican side, Bacha-Garza points out.

Across the Rio Bravo

But what happened to the enslaved people once they crossed the border?

As far as historians know, some of the former slaves were able to join the military posts in the north of the country, which at that time were trying to bolster their forces. Joining the Mexican army was a way for the former slaves to stay safe and rely on a way to survive, because they had food and a roof over their heads. They may not have paid much, but it was a way to find some comfort, says Bacha-Garza.

Mara Camila Daz Casas points out that there are known cases of former US slaves who went on to become officers in the Mexican army, although she notes that there were very different experiences.

There were people who settled in Tamaulipas and became landowners or dons, which is a designation of political, economic and social importance. They managed to be accepted by society, live well and have economic and social capital that would have been impossible for them in the United States, even if they had been free, she says. At the same time, there were people who ended up working as laborers, which in Mexico was virtually a form of slavery, she adds.

Both among those who were luckier and those who were not, many eventually returned to the United States when the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished.

Slavery and political calculation

Mexicos reputation as a land of freedom among African-American slaves had its origins in the days when Mexico was a Spanish colony. This was not entirely unrelated to political calculation.

As Daz Casas explains, from the 18th century on, the Spanish Crown began to give refuge to runaway slaves from enemy powers and to declare them free in its territories. At that time, slaves from Louisiana tried to escape to Texas to obtain their freedom.

When Mexico became independent in 1821, slavery had not been abolished, but it began to wane.

Daz Casas notes that between 1824 and 1829, Independence Day began to be commemorated with ceremonies in which enslaved people who were bought from their owners or donated by them were freed, arguing that it was a matter of patriotic values, because of the freedom that independence had brought to the country.

But while in the south of Mexico slavery was losing steam, in the north of the country it was growing, as the Mexican government interested in populating and protecting the northern border granted authorization for US settlers to establish themselves in Texas and set up an economy based on slave labor.

This led to tensions when President Vicente Guerrero declared the abolition of slavery in Mexico in 1829, but under pressure from the settlers he was forced to make an exception for Texas a few months later.

Guerreros government fell shortly thereafter and the abolition of slavery was declared unconstitutional in 1831. However, differences on this issue between settlers and the central government would mark the beginning of the process leading to the loss of Texas as part of the Mexican territory. It was not until 1837, after the separation of Texas, that Mexico would permanently eliminate slavery.

Daz Casas points out that Mexican authorities never accepted returning or extraditing former slaves to the United States and that, on many occasions, they gave protection to fugitives and did not allow bounty hunters crossing the border to take them back.

However, she considers that these policies were part of a specific political context of border definition and the construction of the Mexican nation and state in a context of US territorial expansion.

In any case, according to the expert, the flight of slaves from the US to Mexico is a critical chapter in the history between the two countries.

We would not be able to understand how the border was built if we do not know what happened to these populations and if we do not understand that enslaved people of African origin were also involved in shaping the border. These escapes were linked to all these important moments in the history of Mexico and the United States, she adds.

Source: BBC Esp

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"In Mexico you could be free. They didn't care what color your skin was." The little-known story of the escape route of American slaves to...

In March 2012, six state senators and Gov. Dannel Malloys criminal justice point person, Michael Lawlor, visited twoprisons: Northern Correctional Institution, a supermax prison where the men on death row were incarcerated, and MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, the largestmaximum security prison in New England.

The goal: to convince lawmakers on the fence all Democrats to vote to repeal the death penalty.

The legislature had already sent a bill to end capital punishment to the governors desk in 2009, but it was vetoed by then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell. Fast forward three years, however, and the math had changed. Several lawmakers were reconsidering their earlier votes, hesitant to go against the wishes of Dr. William Petit, whose wife and two daughters were murdered at their Cheshire home just a few years earlier, in 2007.

At every point of every conversation on criminal justice after July 2007,the Cheshire murders were the focal point, Lawlor said in a recent interview. Now an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, Lawlor also served 12 terms in the General Assembly.

Northern lived up to its reputation during that March tour. Lawmakers saw prisoners locked up 22 hours a day in tiny cement rooms, under guard when they moved outside their cells.

The totality of the living conditions there, the grimness of the living conditions there, the totality of the grimness of the living conditions, had a profound effect, formerSenate President Pro Tem Donald E. Williams Jr., told the CT Mirror in 2012.

Then the group went to MacDougall. Natural light poured in through the generously-sized windows in the facilitys atrium. Because the senators arrived midday, many prisoners were out of their cells.

To get the senators to a yes on repeal, a compromise would need to be struck: those originally sentenced to die must remain in conditions more akin to Northern than MacDougall.

One of those Democrats was Sen. Edith Prague, D-Columbia, who was in favor of abolishing the death penalty until she met with Petit, who told her a repeal would make it more difficult for prosecutors to get a death sentence for Joshua Komisarjevsky, one of the two men who killed his wife and daughters. I want to give [Petit] a little ounce of consideration here and thats my reason at this point in time to not support repeal, Prague told The Hartford Courant in 2011. I have to live with myself. I could not for one second cause this family any more stress.

The trip to Northern, however, assuaged Pragues doubts.

I did go to Northern and saw death row and saw how horrible it is there Spending life in prison without the possibility of parole on death row, in a situation that is just like death row, is very, very, very, severe punishment, Prague told her colleagues in aSenate floor debate on April 4, 2012, recalling the visit to the Somers prison the previous month. So and that was our Amendment A.'

That amendment would become 18-10b, a statute that requires the Department of Correction to impose severe conditions of confinement on the former death row inmates. The bill created special circumstances that would ensure the men would not livecomfortablelives in prison,even if they were spared lethal injection.

The Cheshire murders factored into every second of the death penalty abolition, said Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, who was serving in the House of Representatives during the 2012 vote to repeal the death penalty. Lawmakers didnt want death row inmates particularly the Cheshire murderers, Komisarjevsky and his accomplice Steven Hayes to be able to just roam free in the prisons, he said. They wanted them to have restrictive ways of living and all the things that made people feel better about casting a vote in the affirmative.

It worked. Proponents of ending the death penalty in Connecticut succeeded in 2012, butnot until they strucka deal that ensured those on death row would be held in conditions more onerous than thegeneral incarcerated population.Not only did they codify many of the special conditions of confinement for death row inmates,the bill they passed was also prospective, meaning capital punishment would not be sought as punishment for future crimes. But lethal injection would remain a distant possibility for the 11 men on death row at the time, until the state Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 2015.

Ive always thought they were the sacrifice so we could all feel better, said Hope Metcalf, a researcher and clinical lecturer at Yale Law School and the Executive Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights, of the fewer than a dozen men who remained on death row when capital punishment was repealed. Because now Connecticut no longer has the death penalty.

Gov. Dannel Malloy signs the death penalty repeal bill into law. Photo courtesy of Michael Lawlor.

Malloy signed the billon April 25, 2012, enshrining 18-10b into statute.

I dont think you would have repealed the death penalty if you didnt make that compromise, said Winfield.

All seven of the men formerly on death row who are still locked up in Connecticut on special circumstances are at Northern. Joseph Silva, convicted of murder with special circumstances in 2018, is also subjected to those conditions of confinement. Like the others, he remains at the Somers prison.

Last month, DOC Commissioner Angel Quiros announced Northern will close by July 1. He cited the declining number of people in prisons and jails a decline hastened since the pandemics onset and his obligation to the tax payers of Connecticut as the basis of his decision to shutter the supermax.The closure is symbolic to many advocates who see the facility as a monument to a past ethos that the purpose of incarceration is to punish and break people.

Now, with Northerns closure looming, prison officials must decide where to incarcerate the men who had been sentenced to die. Lawmakers, meanwhile, have an opportunity to change the conditions in which they live.

If Richard Reynolds gets his way, they might not have much of a choice.

For the past quarter of a century, Reynolds has beenconfined alone to a room the size of a parking space, a 12-by-7-foot cell in which he can walk from one end to the other in two and a half steps.

Reynolds was sentenced to death in March 1995 for killing a Waterbury police officer. His sentence was changed to 999 years after the state Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that it was unconstitutional to execute the 11 men who were on death row. Over the next few years Reynolds and most of his peers were re-sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release. They would still die in prison but by the passing of time, not by lethal injection.

In an affidavit, Reynolds said that two weeks after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling, prison officials removed the death row signs from the cell doors of those who had previously been sentenced to die. Nothing else changed, he said.

Like the other men held under special circumstances, Reynolds has been locked in his cell for up to 22 hours a day since he was sentenced.He hasnt hugged a loved one for more than two decades, because all his visitors must stay behind plexiglass. Heis escorted or monitored if he leaves his cell, which is searched twice a week, and he is transferred to a new cell at least every 90 days.Its been a quarter of a century since he interacted with any incarcerated people other than those originally sentenced to death.

A window slot in a cell at Northern. The image is a still photo corrections officers took of an empty cell for a documentary about the prison.

Reynolds filed a lawsuit challenging the conditions of his confinement in 2013, four years before he was resentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Plaintiff was sentenced to death only, Reynolds scrawled in his original 36-page handwritten complaint. Not a sentence of death and psycological (sic) torment and solitary confinement.

U.S. District Court Judge Stefan Underhill, who heard Reynolds amended complaint after he was re-sentenced and subject to life on special circumstances status, ruled in August 2019 that the conditions of confinement were unconstitutional. In his 57-page ruling, Underhill observed that the way Reynolds is locked up is more restrictive than any other form of incarceration available within the State of Connecticut prison system.

Now 52, Reynolds most likely still has decades of life left in prison.

Reynolds will never interact with inmates who were not previously on death row, never touch a friend or loved one, and never have another opportunity for meaningful social interaction for the rest of his life, Underhill wrote.

The law does provide for an annual reclassification of the people incarcerated on the special circumstances status, however.

Some of the guys in death row would meet those criteria, said Lawlor, referring to a DOC risk assessment that gauges whether an inmate poses a threat to correction staff or other prisoners. Which conversely means if they dont meet those criteria, they dont end up in those conditions.

But legal filings by the state in Reynolds case make clear prison officials have not moved any former death row inmates off the special conditions of confinement.

The defendants are obliged to follow the mandate of Conn. Gen. Stat. 18-10b and there is no provision in the statute for an inmate to be released from this classification, wrote Assistant Attorney Generals Madeline Melchionne and Steven Strom in a legal filing from Jan. 4, 2019. That having been said, the defendants cannot read into the future and it is always possible that there could be statutory changes in this regard.

The state has appealed Underhills ruling, leaving Reynolds case unresolved.

Theclosure of Northern later this year, however, puts the state at a crossroads, with at least two possible paths forward.

State officials can keep to the status quo and simply hold the former death row cohort at another prison under the same conditions while they wait for a higher court judge to issue a final decision in Reynolds case on whether 18-10b is constitutional.Or,lawmakers can act proactively and pass a law striking 18-10b and change the conditions of confinement for the former death row inmates.

For its part, the DOC said it has not asked lawmakers to make a statutory change. The men will be sent to a similarly secure prison either MacDougall, Cheshire, Garner or Corrigan following Northerns closure.

Well be looking for a location thats operationally feasible for our staff to manage them, said Karen Martucci, the agencys director of external affairs.We will just manage them as theyre managed now, at a different location.

It is thesecond option, however, that offers achance for the legislature to reconsider how Connecticut should treat people incarcerated for some of the most heinous crimes. It could be a litmus test to gauge whether lawmakers thinking has evolved in the nine years since they abolished the death penalty for future crimes,said Winfield.

The Judiciary Committee has raised a bill in this session that would largely end the practice of solitary confinement. That measures public hearing could be an opportunity for lawmakers and others to reconsider the special circumstances conditions of confinement, said Rep. Steven Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport and committee co-chair.

With Northern closing, now is the time to have that conversation, he said.

In a deposition for Reynolds lawsuit filed with the court in Nov. 2018, former Department of Correction Commissioner Leo Arnone who also was on the 2012 tour at Northern and MacDougall said he didnt believe the 18-10b statute made the prison system more secure.

This is punishment, thats why it was built that way, he said of 18-10b. This is the way it was designed, to be a punishment for these specific crimes.

Arnone isnt the only former DOC commissioner to acknowledge the law wasnt crafted with security in mind.

Optimally, you would want to have a situation where you lean on the risk assessment formulas, and then make a determination to place someone based on those formulas, said Scott Semple, former commissioner of the DOC. It flies in the face of the formulas that you rely on in terms of how you make decisions on how to manage people. So, no matter what the risk assessment scores say, you have to apply certain standards based on that statute.

Semple said he anticipated the statute would be found unconstitutional. When he spoke with officials from other states that had abolished the death penalty, they told him they relied on risk assessment formulas and reclassified men formerly on death row accordingly.

Find me another state that has these types of requirements, Semple said of 18-10b. It doesnt exist.

Lawlor agrees.

The real goal was to get rid of the deathpenalty, and this was the price to pay to get that to happen, in my opinion: putting thislanguage in, knowing full well it may not be enforceable, Lawlor said.

CTMIRROR.ORG

Former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, center, flanked by Scott Semple, left, and Michael Lawlor during a prison visit in 2016.

Most of the men formerly on death row likely would be placed under maximum security type of oversight, Semple said, butthe DOC lacks the discretion to reclassify the men to a different type of confinement.

Semple said the men filed a lot of lawsuits, but most of them were low key, and no more dangerous than other inmates.

They were definitely people you want to pay attention to, Semple said, but they dont generally cause chaos within the prison system.

In his 2018 deposition, Arnone recounted what happened the last time the state abolished the death penalty. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Furman v. Georgiathat placed a moratorium on the death penalty until, four years later, the courtruled capital punishment was constitutional,allowingexecutions to resume.

Prison officials took the men who had been on death row and released them to the general population, maximum security only, he said.

The mens names were never in the newspaper again, Arnone said, which he found interesting because those on death row were frequently the subject of media reports.

They were serving life, like 75, 80, 150 other guys, and they became nobodies, just another inmate, Arnone said, So they went from a big, you know, a big somebody, to just another inmate.

In 2009 two years after the Cheshire murders it wasnt as difficult to sell lawmakers on the idea of abolishing the death penalty. There was momentum nationally and within Connecticut for repeal. New Mexico had abolished capital punishment, and legislators in Colorado, Montana and Maryland came close to getting rid of it, as well.

Legislators had passed a number of criminal justice reform measures in 2008 changing the rules governing how the Board of Pardons and Paroles functions, mandating the DOC and parole board use a risk assessment toolso they could identify who is high-risk to release, and allowing prosecutors, parole boards and other members of the criminal justice system to share information on cases.

Capital punishment, meanwhile, had been a perennial issue in the state legislature for years.

The death penalty debate was like a biannual event ever since I got in the legislature, sometimes to make it easier to impose, sometimes to get rid of it altogether, Lawlor said, who became a state representative in 1987.

Lawlor said there were several arguments in 2009 for repealing the death penalty, but he remembers the most compelling being that capital punishment in Connecticut was a fraud. Michael Ross was the first person executed since the 1960s, and he spent the last 10 years of his life working with prosecutors so he could get the death penalty, Lawlor said.

ctmirror.org

Rep. William A. Petit Jr., R-Plainville, on the floor of the House in 2016.

It wasnt just all of a sudden people became liberals. It was, It doesnt work, it cant work, and theres no way you can fix it,' said Lawlor.

Over Petits objection, legislators passed the bill and sent it to Rells desk. She vetoed it.

The conditions of confinement language was not in the 2009 bill.Those only were formulated after that visit to the prisons [in March 2012,] where a number of those legislators said, I will only vote to repeal the death penalty if you add some language that makes it clear they wont ever be in general population,' Lawlor said.

Malloy took office in January, 2011. During his campaign, Malloy said he would sign a bill repealing the death penalty but as time passed, and the political landscaped morphed, repeal was no longer a sure bet by 2012.

Theres a magic to that kind of thing. But when you do that thing, strangely enough, the magic wears off, Winfield said. And people are now faced with the fact that theyve taken a certain vote and people are reacting to that vote and all of the things that come with it the landscape changed, even though the people didnt really change.

The Cheshire murders began to take up more and more space in the states subconscious. As their trials played out in 2010 and 2011, Hayes andKomisarjevsky seemed to be constantly in the news.While the horrific crime tapped into the primal fears of upper-middle class families who thought they were insulated from random acts of violence, the trials renewed both those fears and public sympathy for Petit.

That sympathy was so strong that when Petit asked legislators not to abolish the death penalty while Komisarjevskys case was still pending, they were inclined to listen. His sister, Johanna Petit Chapman, also warned the legislature that abolishing the deathpenalty for futurecrimes would lead to the end of capitalpunishment for all,includingthe 11 people who were on death row at the time.

Hayes was sentenced to death in November 2010. Prosecutors portrayed him as a sadistic, violent man who abused his brother when they were younger, and who threatened suicide as a way to manipulate jurors to give him a life sentence and spare him from execution.

Jurors spent four days weighing the evidence before determining a death sentence was an appropriate punishment for Komisarjevsky. Superior Court Judge Jon Blue sentenced him to death in early 2012, three months before legislators would pass the bill to repeal the death penalty for future crimes.

Petit later ran for office as a Republican. He won a seat representing Plainville in theHouse of Representatives in the 2016 election, a position he still holds today.

He declined to be interviewed for this story.

Reynolds was transferred from jail to Northern in 1995 shortly after the supermax opened.

I have been locked in a concrete cell alone every day for the past 23 years, Reynolds said in an affidavit in 2018. I can only communicate with my neighbors by shouting through the vent, and even shouting can be hard to hear over the constant noise in the unit.

In the same sworn statement, Reynolds noted that he is the specialcircumstances unit barber. Each month, he cutsother inmates hair, giving him about 15 minutes of interaction. But he can only cut the hair of the men in his own unit, and all but two of the men are either bald or dont leave their cells.

At the time of his deposition, Reynolds said a couple of the former death row inmates have such severe mental health problems that they rarely leave their cells.

Over the last 23 years I have seen many of the other men on death row lose their minds. In some cases, they have attempt [sic] to kill themselves, Reynolds wrote. I fear that one day I will lose my mind, too.

Despite his status as a special circumstances inmate, Reynolds conditions of incarceration are not unique among prisoners who are held on otherrestrictive statuses. The DOC will move some of these prisoners to different cells every few months, search inmates cells at least twice per week and lock people up in solitary for long periods until they complete special programming.

Department of Correction

Richard Reynolds was convicted of killing a policy officer and sentenced to die. He was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release after the state Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was unconstitutional in 2015.

The difference is thatrestrictive statuses are internal DOC policies aimed at correcting a behavior; special circumstance status was a law created by the legislature and applied to a specific criminal offense.Reynolds and the other men formerly on death row are never taken off their status despite the required annual reclassification due to the states interpretation of the statute.

Youre talking about a prison within a prison, said Reginald Dwayne Betts, a member of the states Criminal Justice Commission and a poet who spent eight years in prison before graduating from Yale Law School. Atsome point, the question has to not be, What does somebody deserve? but, What it is that we should be willing to do to people.'

In his 2019 ruling on Reynolds case, Underhill said the conditions of confinementfor the former death row inmatesare unconstitutional because, among other reasons, the legislatureretroactively punished these men for their crimes after they had already been sentenced. He issued an orderrequiring prison officials to give Reynolds more time out of his cell and prohibiting prison officials from segregating him from other prisoners not on the special status.

Notably, Underhill also prohibited the state from enforcing 18-10b against any inmate being held in a Connecticut prison.

From the moment the repeal was passed, I felt like it was inexorably leading to this showdown. You cant simultaneously save someones life and then subject them to this kind of torture for the rest of their life, Metcalf said. Think about what thats like as they start to age and one-by one they die off. Its like a nursing home from hell.

The DOC began planning for Reynolds transition into the general prison population, but the state appealed,putting the transition plans on hold. Reynolds attorney,Brett Dignam, Reynolds attorney and clinical professor of law who worked on the case with law students at Columbia Universitys Challenging the Consequences of Mass Incarceration Clinic,argued the case before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals last May. The judges granted a stay, keeping the special circumstances status in place until the case is ultimately decided.

Lawmakers options

If the state waits until Reynolds case finishes wending through the courts to make any changes to the ways inmates on special circumstances are confined, lawmakers can act now. Stafstrom, co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, noted that the committee has raised the PROTECT Act, which, among other things, would largely end solitary confinement for all people in prisons and jails, including those held on special circumstances.

Where I stand is, someones risk level should not be based on the crime they committed in society but how they comport themselves within the correctional facility, said Stafstrom, who was not in the legislature 2012 when his colleagues voted to abolish the death penalty.

Winfield, now a state senator representing New Haven and a co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, said he thinks the legislature has little impetus to take up the issue, since the DOC isnt asking for a statutory change, and lawmakers havent been asked to grapple with the constitutionality of the special circumstances conditions of confinement. Plus, Winfield expects some of his legislative colleagues might feel hamstrung, like they were betraying constituents by proactively voting to change prison conditions for those originally sentenced to die.

I think oftentimes the reason why the court must act is because the legislature is immobilized, Winfield said. Whether we think theres a value to the legislature acting or not, this is one of those situations where ultimately the courts need to act.

The PROTECT Act was proposed by Stop Solitary CT.Rahisha Bivens, an organizer with the group and a licensed clinical social worker, said each mans punishment is their lifelong loss of liberty, not permanent solitary confinement. Barring extraordinary circumstances a commutation or sentence modification each of the men held on special circumstances will all die in prison.

People being confined for the rest of their lives behind bars, in a cell, for most of the day, where theyre never gonna return to society, is punishment enough, Bivens said. I think that we underestimate what thats like for people, and the impact that has on people changing, to whatever degree its possible to change, and not have the mentality they had when they committed their crime.

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Connecticuts sole supermax prison is closing. What comes next for the men who used to be on death row? - The CT Mirror

Submit your letter to the editor via this form. Read more Letters to the Editor.

In his rambling (Trumpism without Trump? Whats next for the GOP? Page A7, March 5), Victor Davis Hanson refers to President Bidens ineptitude. Check the record.

Biden has set up a task force, working to reunite families separated by Donald Trumps cruel immigration policy. Over 500 families have been located. Trump, the ultimate science denier, withdrew from the Paris Accord, stating climate change is a hoax. The United States has rejoined, working to address this issue.

Trump also pulled us out of the WHO, the organization working on health issues (think COVID). We have now rejoined. Praising Putin and world dictators, Trump denigrated our allies. Biden received congratulatory calls from world leaders and restored respect for the United States.

Trump repeatedly called COVID a hoax, claiming it would disappear, and did virtually nothing, ignoring the danger. Over 500,000 Americans have died. Biden has taken more action in two months than Trump did in a year, purchasing vaccines and getting them into arms.

Caroline RackowskiMorgan Hill

Re. Wildfire smoke especially harmful, Page A1, March 6:

Past fire suppression and unnaturally thick forests are not to blame for our current wildfire problem. This simplistic timber industry propaganda is used to justify aggressive thinning that, by decreasing needed sequestered carbon, causes more harm than good.

True poorly managed forests are those that have been clear-cut and replanted with same-age, same-species trees. Unlike lower intensity fire behavior observed in biodiverse, natural forests, fire in monoculture plantation farms is explosive and highly destructive. The Camp Fire is a good example.

Flammable timber-industry-created unnatural forests coupled with higher temperatures, decreased rainfall, and stronger winds due to anthropogenic climate change have resulted in our out-of-control wildfires. To think we can prevent them with massive $1 billion thinning projects is absurd and ignoring the role of clearcutting is even more absurd. Lets not let big timber blow this harmful smoke anymore.

Jennifer NormoyleHillsborough

If anyones thinking about going maskless, Id keep mine on a bit longer if I were you.

Why? Well, youve got Easter and churches full of singing and energetically participating people. Youve got Texas and Mississippi and the like encouraging risky behavior. Youve got bars open and crowded. And youve got a growing cast of virus variants, trying to mutate into something scary our vaccines cant stop.

Just saying, dont bet against a resurgence in April/May.

Monte LorenzetCupertino

Re. How private equity squeezes cash from U.S. coal, Page C8, March 8:

The article on private equity and U.S. coal raises two important points:

1. Coal is still filling an important niche; standby power for periods of peak demand like we just witnessed in the February cold snap. Renewables and storage still have a ways to go.

2. Billions of dollars are still being invested and healthy returns are being realized in this dirty technology.

We should pursue the opposite:

End the Trump administration coal plant incentives.

Implement a carbon tax on fossil fuels to cover the costs of the pollutants they generate and accelerate the transition to renewables.

Our energy mix is complex and evolving and we as consumers need to be educated. Thanks for highlighting an important facet.

Tom CalderwoodLos Gatos

If you thought Millard Fillmores 19th century Know Nothing Party was a historical anomaly, think again.

Its hard to believe that so many today are anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, climate change deniers who still believe that Donald Trump somehow won the election. I fear that this way of thinking is not just a temporary blip in U.S. history. I think its always been there lurking under societys radar.

This large swath of the American public who Richard Nixon deemed the Silent Majority was given a voice by Newt Gingrichs Tea Party and by radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh. But it was Donald Trump who handed these millions a megaphone to espouse their anti-science views and permission to act out their antiquated thinking even resorting to violence.

Now that the know-nothings have reared their ugly head, how will a more enlightened America emerge?

Bob ParkerSan Jose

I am writing in hopes of raising awareness and emphasizing the importance of abolishing capital punishment. The United States is still one of the countries using capital punishment. As of now, the death penalty is still legal in 28 U.S. states. This practice is an irreversible and irreparable act, which does not advance public safety, nor does it work as a deterrent.

In January, three offenders were executed by the use of lethal injection. There are currently seven more offendersscheduled to be executed this year.

Capital punishment is an immoral practice that allows the state to choose who deserves death and does so lawfully as a means of obtaining justice. The death penalty is discriminatory and violates fundamental human rights. Its important to bring more awareness to this topic and advocate for the abolition of capital punishment.

Abbyana SifuentesSan Jose

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Letters: Bidens achievements | Forest management | Spring surge? | Tied to coal | Modern Know Nothings | Death penalty - The Mercury News