Monthly Archives: April 2021

All of New Zealand's 20 district health boards will be replaced by one, single national health body responsible for the running of all hospitals, the Government has revealed.

Wellington DHBs have reacted to the news of the biggest health system shake-up in a generation, which will see their structure changed significantly from July next year.

New Zealand's 20 district health boards (DHBs) will be replaced by one national body, Health New Zealand, alongside a Mori health authority.

Hutt Valley and Capital & Coast DHBs issued a joint statement through board chair David Smol shortly after the announcement on Wednesday.

"Hutt Valley and Capital & Coast DHBs will work closely with the Government on the implementation of these changes and will continue to work collaboratively as we transition towards the new structure and system," he said.

"In the meantime, we remain focused on providing excellent levels of healthcare and support for the people in our region people, place, and partnership remain at the heart of what we do.

"We remain committed to intensifying support and improving equitable health outcomes for Mori, Pacific people and those living with disability, mental illness and addiction."

Wairarapa DHB Chief Executive Dale Oliff said their "absolute priority" was the health of their community as they transitioned to a new structure.

"We will ensure continuity of care and service and we will support our highly valued staff and healthcare partners, and our community, as we work towards a stronger health and disability system," he said.

"It will take time to transition towards the new structure and, in the meantime, our commitment to improved services and equitable outcomes of care for our Wairarapa population is central to all that we do."

The major changes were announced by Health Minister Andrew Little on Wednesday morning, following on from recommendations made by the Heather Simpson Health and Disability Systems Review last year.

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The changes also included that the Ministry of Health become an advisory and policy agency only, with a new Public Health agency created within the ministry.

Today's announcement goes further than the recommendations made in last year's Simpson report, which only advised the number of DHBs be halved from 20 down to eight or 10.

Porirua GP Dr Bryan Betty, who is also the head of the Royal New Zealand College of GPs, said the scrapping of the DHB system was "totally unexpected".

"It's very, very significant what's been announced, particularly the abolition of DHBs across New Zealand."

He hoped the move would address the existing inequities in the DHB-based system.

"We know over time the system has become inequitable in the way it operates, it depends on where you live which gives access to health care.

"So if this reform changes that and makes the delivery of health care more equitable across New Zealand, then it's certainly the right thing to do."

He said the changes also needed to address generations of inequitable health outcomes for Mori.

"New Zealand has to do something about the appalling statistics we have in this country, and if this delivers on the ability to rectify these statistics, that is the right thing to do."

Manpower within the primary sector and access to secondary and hospital care were also areas of concern.

"We know we have issues with manpower, general practitioners have a workplace crisis at this point. We know there are difficulties in the system in terms of accessing secondary care, the way community care operates with hospitals.

"All those problems need to be fixed going forward so people can get fair equitable access to healthcare in the community and through the hospital system."

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Wellington health bosses react to overhaul that will see DHBs abolished - New Zealand Herald

Authors Note: We wrote this piece before the Chauvin trial verdict was announced, but we wanted to emphasize: what happened Tuesday was not, in any sense of the term, justice. The system cannot and will not indict itself, and anti-Black violence is inherent to its design. What it will do in exceptionally rare circumstances is sacrifice one bad apple in order to maintain the legitimacy of the rotten and corrupt tree that is policing. As the verdict was literally being delivered, police murdered MaKhia Bryant a 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio after she called them for help. Police cannot and will not keep us safe; we need abolition now.

This extends to Stanford University. On Tuesday, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne told the Black community that their voices matter. We recall demands from Black student organizations as recently as last year to dismiss, disarm and divert funding from the Stanford University Department of Public Safety. Stanford has ignored this and done the literal opposite, through its new $34 million Public Safety building, continued hiring of deputy sheriffs, ongoing talks to renegotiate the Deputy Sheriffs Association labor agreement and more. MTLs words are hollow, and nothing short of the complete dismantling of SUDPS will be enough.

Across the country, labor unions face political barriers, corporate opposition, and downright abuse when organizing and advocating for workers rights. But theres one exception: police unions. Police unions secure their power through union contracts that absolve officers of all accountability. Stanford Universitys contract with the Stanford Deputy Sheriffs Association (SDSA), which represents officers who work for the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS), is no different. By protecting officers with impunity, the contract directly endangers all other workers at Stanford. It is set to be renewed for a five-year period this year, with a May 2 deadline to modify or terminate it.

Abolish Stanford demands an immediate halt to contract negotiations, a start to meaningful engagement with community demands and termination of the contract. We encourage Stanford community members to take action and call on the University to terminate the contract before May 2. Call and email contract negotiators and University administration with your thoughts on the SDSA contract, and join the larger fight for abolition by taking part in Cops Off Campuss Day of Refusal on May 3.

Heres why this is so important.

Problems with police unions and the SDSA contract

Police unions often called associations, orders or lodges enjoy a place of privilege with local and state governments to such an extent that their rights have been carved out for protection when the right to organize and bargain collectively is under attack. Police union contracts grant unusual protections that go well beyond the scope of collective bargaining in any other sector.

According to multiple analyses, police contracts frequently erase misconduct from officers records, give officers unfair access to information before interrogations and disqualify complaints if investigations take longer than a set period of time, usually 180 days or fewer. Equally alarming is what these contracts often fail to include: processes for civilian oversight and set procedures in cases where deadly force is used, to name a few. Whereas unions in other industries fight for fair wages, benefits, safe working conditions and recourse for harassment and discrimination, police unions secure protections against misconduct investigations and public oversight, allowing them to act with impunity.

The SDSA contract is like many police contracts around the country: It ensures police are exempt from scrutiny and consequences, while funding an apparatus that leaves civilians terrorized and brutalized in the name of public safety. Officers receive paid leave during disciplinary investigations (sections 9.5 and 9.7B) and can seek outside arbitrators to reverse disciplinary or termination decisions (12.1C). Investigations into misconduct are curtailed in multiple ways: Advance warning is given for locker searches (21.3), officers must be informed ahead of time of the topics to be covered in an interrogation (9.7A) and investigation timelines are determined by the officer being investigated and the SDSA (9.7B). Misconduct records, including arrests, are expunged after three years (9.3C and D), a mechanism that is common in police union contracts and notably kept the man who murdered George Floyd on the force in Minneapolis despite repeated incidents of misconduct and violence. At Stanford, this mechanism allowed Captain Sgt. Chris Cohendet to stay at SUDPS after being arrested for a DUI in 2010.

However, the SDSA contract goes further. Stanford cannot discipline or terminate SUDPS deputies without approval from SUDPS (sections 9.1, 9.6, and 9.8). These clauses reinforce the strange agreement governing policing at Stanford: Police are deputized by elected officials, paid by a private entity, but responsible to themselves. This type of public-private policing was unheard of in California until Stanford invented it to target and eliminate growing campus protests around racial justice and against the Vietnam War.

Police associations and the labor movement

Police associations are a cruel irony to the labor movement. Police are routinely deployed against union organizers and strikes, despite their own unions benefiting from the labor rights secured by those they brutalize. In an interview on the contradictory role of cops in the labor movement, union organizer Halimat Alawode describes the membership of police union locals in the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO): When we were fighting for collective bargaining for ourselves, [police] were clubbing us. And now theyve given themselves the ability to club us with impunity, using the same collective bargaining tools.

Throughout history, police have beaten and murdered workers in struggles remembered by appropriately somber names like Bloody Thursday, when plainclothes officers fired into a crowd of picketers in San Francisco and killed two in 1934; the Memorial Day Massacre, when the Chicago Police Department murdered ten striking steel workers in 1937 and the Battle of Blair Mountain, one hundred years ago this summer, when nearly 100 striking coal miners were murdered by law enforcement in West Virginia. Unfortunately, police violence against organized labor is not a thing of the past Memphis police were recently caught surveilling a union organizers home. Last summer, when Black working class people led the largest protest in the countrys history, police responded with tear gas, tanks and bullets rubber and lead.

Labor organizers know that this contradiction between workers rights and police union interests cannot be sustained. Movements are building within many international unions, including Drop the Cops at Service Employees International Union, Cop-free AFSCME at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, as well as No Cop Union at the AFL-CIO, to push police association affiliates out of unions. There is no place for cops in the labor movement, or in our workplace.

SUDPS poses a threat to other Stanford workers

Cops on Stanfords campus directly harm workers. Graduate student workers who live on campus have been threatened with eviction by cops ostensibly enforcing COVID-19 mandates. In an open meeting with the Community Board on Public Safety, a participant shared a story of a graduate student worker who commutes to campus: They drove to each parking lot near the COVID-19 testing center to find officers patrolling and issuing tickets in all of them, and thus were forced to choose between compliance with the mandatory testing program and a ticket costing over $40. Noncompliance endangers a graduate workers job, while a ticket costs them at least an hour ofwages(and realistically far more, given the realities of graduate-student work), lost wages that go directly back to their employer, Stanford.

Many graduate workers who work late hours on campus, especially Black workers, have been followed by officers, and officers routinely demand that Black workers, including faculty, prove they work at Stanford. The presence of police on campus constitutes an unsafe and hostile work environment.

The SDSA contract severely limits the Universitys ability to investigate, discipline or fire officers in the case of misconduct. In the terms of the contract, deputies under investigation for misconduct retain their job and receive pay continuance throughout the (highly curtailed) investigation. Workers at Stanford bear the consequences of this contract every day when they are surveilled, harassed and threatened by police. It is ludicrous to call the police at Stanford a department of public safety because they are not accountable to the public, and they do not keep us safe.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the racist institution of policing, the University responded to student protests by delaying long term negotiations on the police union contract and instead renewing it for one year (the city of San Jose did the same). This mere delay did nothing to make Stanford a safe place to work and live all of the above stories from graduate student workers occurred since the contract was renewed in July. The demands of Black students at Stanford are still unmet. Stanfords response namely its Community Board on Public Safety, which is charged with fostering trust [and] relationships with SUDPS was designed to re-legitimize SUDPS, not fundamentally change it. We demand that the SDSA contract be terminated.

Action against the SDSA contract

The Cops off Campus Coalitions May 3 Day of Refusal is a chance to exercise power where it truly lies: with the people. By withdrawing our labor as students and workers, we re-center the conversation around abolition, rather than reformist reforms. We remind people that policing is racist to its core and serves to protect private property and the interests of the ruling class. And we re-emphasize the importance of abolition not further policing as the only way to keep our community safe.

We strongly encourage Stanford community members to take action and tell Stanford to terminate the contract before May 2. Protest the presence of cops on campus by refusing to provide labor to the University on May 3 as part of the national Cops Off Campuss Day of Refusal.

Abolish Stanford

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Op-Ed | Tell Stanford: End the collective bargaining agreement with the Deputy Sheriffs' Association - The Stanford Daily

Certain circles maintain that in Punjab the law allows labourers, especially those working at brick kilns, to obtain up to Rs50,000 from the owners in loans, even though the Supreme Court has prohibited this practice. It emerged during the hearing of a case, at the Islamabad High Court, relating to the abolition of bonded labour at brick kilns in the province.

When the counsel for brick kiln proprietors mentioned the legal cover given to the practice, the chief justice expressed astonishment at the existence of any such law as it violates the orders of the Supreme Court.

The IHC ordered the Islamabad administration to end the abominable practice without any further delay, as it works as a debt trap for poor labourers; seldom are they able to pay off the loaned amount.

As a result, not only these unlettered and poor workers but their families become bonded labourers, and they have to work without wages for years.

Brick kiln owners claim that they do a service by extending loans to labourers in times of need, saying if they stopped helping workers, there would be no incentives for labourers to work at their establishments. This argument is fallacious as is evident from the fact that bonded labourers live a miserable life.

The government set up a commission in February to examine the issue and recommend ways and means for the emancipation of bonded labour. The commission in its exhaustive report has rightly described bonded labour as a form of slavery. There are many laws in Pakistan to tackle the issue of bonded labour. Besides, the country signed the relevant ILO conventions way back in the 1960s. Unfortunately, these laws are rarely implemented.

Education can significantly contribute to the elimination of bonded labour. The present instance shows how the orders of even the highest court of the land are ignored. This is happening even though the PM has regularly been stressing the importance of the rule of law.

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Bonded labour - The Express Tribune

For the past year, graduate students have met with University administrators to demand Northwestern prioritize students with marginalized identities. The administration has largely responded with hesitancy, according to some students.

Sarah Peko-Spicer, an organizer of CoalitionNU and Ph.D. candidate, said the collective has demanded inclusive healthcare, increased funding for affinity spaces and other support systems after a year of pandemic mobilization and appeals to the University.

I personally am rethinking if this is an effective pathway to be working down, she said. Are we just wasting everyones time sitting in these meetings?

Still, Peko-Spicer said she hopes a projected return to campus may rejuvenate organizers after a difficult year where the graduate students academic and life responsibilities were exacerbated, particularly for caregiving students and those of marginalized identities.

In Fall 2019, members of The Graduate School affinity groups began meeting to consider collective action after sharing frustrations with leadership, forming CoalitionNU. One of their efforts resulted in an anonymous March letter to administrators, calling for the removal of Teresa Woodruff, former TGS dean. They also urged University leadership to prioritize the wellbeing of students of marginalized identities through funding, space provision, childcare and more.

TGS is responsible for cultivating an accessible and equitable environment that values diverse backgrounds, the letter stated. Under Dean Woodruffs leadership, TGS has fallen short of these goals and, in so doing, has harmed the underrepresented communities they have pledged to support.

Since then, at least one demand has been realized Woodruff left Northwestern at the end of the 2019-20 academic year. The group has since held regular meetings with Interim Graduate School Dean Kelly Mayo, Peko-Spicer said.

CoalitionNUs demands have largely stayed the same since the pandemic began, Peko-Spicer said.

Peko-Spicer emphasized that the coalition prioritizes advocating for University support of Indigenous graduate students, like by designating an outdoor space in the Chicago Campus for land-based spiritual practices.

In addition, the University has failed to prioritize mental health of graduate students, Peko-Spicer said. Along with advocating for inclusive insurance coverage, CoalitionNU is still pushing for the hiring of more mental health counselors for the Graduate School community and expanding the list of referrals to therapists. The group has also been trying to internally prioritize the well-being of its members in the last year.

Ph.D. candidate Erique Zhang said the coalitions demands shifted to include police abolition and supporting NU Community Not Cops and undergraduate activist organizations. Many of the coalitions members helped draft a June 2020 petition calling for the abolition of University and Evanston police and for investment in life-giving practices for Black students, they said.

I do actually think a lot of the organizing has shifted to focus on abolition, Zhang said. I think thats good at this point, thats where our priorities are lying.

Ph.D. candidate Andrew Hull, unity committee chair and former co-chair of Northwestern University Graduate Workers, said the group often collaborates with the coalition.

Many NUGW and CoalitionNU members overlap. Both are united in their goals, Hull said, and NUGW has incorporated the collectives demands into its own letters to the University.

(Coalition work) puts fantastic pressure on the administration itself, Hull said. I think just as importantly, it reveals to other graduate workers just how much power we have when we work together.

Their collaboration also shows that graduate students are not alone in their struggles, Hull added.

CoalitionNUs organizers have a lot of responsibilities beyond the collective that contribute to these struggles, Peko-Spicer said. The groups organizers are currently writing dissertations, looking for jobs and completing other graduate tasks.

Still, Peko-Spicer said she is able to see that CoalitionNU is really a collaborative effort. Through organizing in the past year, she saw other activist groups on campus share visions of what the University could become. This convergence, she said, showed her the power of collective organizing.

One of our organizations on its own is something that the University can fight and stop, Peko-Spicer said. But when we continue to build out and build up together, I think thats going to be an unstoppable force.

Email: [emailprotected]

Twitter: @YunkyoMoonK

Related Stories:

A year into pandemic, NUGW is still advocating for sixth-year funding

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Graduate students demand removal of TGS dean Teresa Woodruff in letter

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CoalitionNU members emphasize collective action and existing demands - Daily Northwestern

A charity devoted to the author Jane Austen has dismissed reports of an interrogation of her alleged links to the slave trade as a misrepresentation.

Reports in several newspapers this week alleged that Jane Austens House in Hampshire would re-evaluate her colonial roots, due to her father's plantation, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

But in response, the charity said: The plans for refreshing the displays and decoration of Jane Austens House have been misrepresented. It said it had been planning to update its displays for several years.

Jane Austen lived during the era of slavery and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807.

According to academics, Austens father George became a trustee of a 294-acre plantation with slaves in Antigua in 1760.

But this information was already widely accessible in the public domain, the charity said.

In a statement on its website, the charity said it was increasingly asked questions by visitors on this issue and it was therefore appropriate that it shared the information and existing research on her connections to slavery and its mention in her novels.

We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea.

We have been planning to refresh our displays and decoration at Jane Austens House for several years.

The overarching aim of this long-term process is to bring Jane Austens brilliance and the extraordinary flourishing of creativity she experienced at the house to the heart of every visit, said the charity.

The charity said the refreshed displays would be nuanced, based on peer-reviewed research and in the authors own words.

Jane Austens House is the latest charity to come under fire for their work in what the think tank the Runnymede Trust described earlier this week as a worrying trend.

The trust was forced to defend its own work from a group of Conservative MPs after it criticised the recent controversial Sewell Report.

The race equality charity accused the MPs of weaponising the charity regulator in a politically motivated attack.

The recent spate of criticism prompted a group of more than 60 charity leaders to put out a statement backing charities right to campaign after another group of Conservative MPs called for the government to stop the worthless work of organisations promulgating weird, woke ideas.

The National Trust has been under fire since last year after it published a report researching its properties links to slavery, despite the Charity Commission receiving just three complaints about the charitys work or purpose.

In addition, childrens charity Barnardo's had to defend itself from a group of Conservative MPs in December who dismissed the charitys attempt to talk about white privilege as ideological dogma used by certain multinational corporates as a means to divide and conquer.

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Jane Austen charity dismisses claims it will re-evaluate the author's colonial roots - Third Sector

Dear Members of the Yale Community,

George Floyds murder was an indictment of our nations failure to address anti-Black violence and racism, but todays verdict was a positive step forward for our country. I am relieved that a jury of Derek Chauvins peers found him guilty of George Floyds murder, but I am no less heartbroken over the number of Black lives that have been cut short due to police violence. We must continue to focus our energy on addressing racism, injustice, and abuse of power by the police and others in positions of public trust and authority.

As an institution with a mission to improve the world, this university has a responsibility to find solutions to this crisis. At Yale, we are taking actions across multiple fronts. Faculty from many parts of the university are conducting research and shaping new teaching in fields that address racism and policing. Hubs of innovative scholarship and education in this area include the Department of African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Yale Law Schools Justice Collaboratory, and the Center for Policing Equity. Their scholarly activities bring understanding to the current crisis and inform national policies and discussions.

We are reassessing and reshaping major aspects of policing on campus based on the 21CP Solutions report, An Assessment of the Yale Police Department, and on the input of students, faculty, staff, and New Haven community members. A key strategic priority is to assign the right resources to public safety needs. In situations that do not require a police response, we will expand the use of unarmed security personnel and enhance coordination with student life and Yale Health resources.

Antiracism is also at the heart of the universitys Belonging at Yale initiative. In October, for the second phase of this initiative, I launched new programs that delve into our history and support members of the university community. Our project on Yales historic entanglements and associations with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition, led by Professor David Blight and the Gilder Lehrman Center, is making progress, with a committed team of scholars and student researchers gathering valuable information from our archives and other sources. Moreover, each school and administrative division at Yale is developing a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging plan that proposes actions to address the needs of historically underrepresented staff, faculty, students, and alumni. Planning together will allow us to align work across the institution and to track progress.

In addition to our studies, research, scholarship, practice, and university operations, people across Yale are galvanizing community-led efforts to shed light on difficult truths, build solidarity, and heal the rifts in our society. Many of Yales campus organizations have created forums for critical dialogue, connection, and learning, including cultural centers, affinity groups, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Yale Alumni Association. We also are working with partners in our home city and with alumni communities across the country and around the world to share our time and resources with the people who need both during this difficult period.

Over the coming days, we will hold forums for discussion, learning, and healing. Yale also is providing resources for those in our community who need support. Information is available at the Belonging at Yale website and will be updated regularly as students, faculty, and staff continue to organize community gatherings.

Todays verdict ensures that a former police officer has been brought to justice, but we have far to go in achieving liberty and justice for all in our nation. We must continue to take action to improve society, so that all of us can live securely and safely. I approach our ongoing work with hope because of the powerful reckoning that has taken place on individual and global scales over the past year. We will build on this energy and remember Mr. Floyd and other victims of racist violence.

Sincerely,

Peter SaloveyPresidentChris Argyris Professor of Psychology

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Today's verdict on the murder of George Floyd - Yale News

Harsha Walia. (Courtesy of Haymarket Books)

The border is not a place. Whether we are talking about the US-Mexico border, the Dominican RepublicHaitian border, the Line of Control dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan, or the scores of other militarized, fortified, patrolled, or even electrified borders throughout the world, these demarcations function neither as simple geographic markers nor as geopolitical organizing tools. They dont even really function as barriers, as walls are easily breached, climbed over, dug under, orthrough visa overstays or by levying an asylum claimavoided altogether. The border, as author Harsha Walia puts it in her new book, Border and Rule, is less about a politics of movement per se and is better understood as a key method of imperial state formation, hierarchical social ordering, labor control, and xenophobic nationalism.

Sites of so much violence, contention, media frenzy, and fanaticism, the walls and all the dog-whistling rhetoric do not, in the end, protect or preserve. What borders do, Walia suggests, is theatrically deflect attention from whatever rot, hatred, or suffering is happening between the walls themselves, obscuring the source of a political shake-up. Walls, and immigration enforcement more generally, also make it easier for politicians to scapegoat migrants for all of the wants and woes of the native populace. And as barrierswhether physical or legalthey serve to mark limits to both empathy and solidarity.

Border and Rule is a wide-ranging analysis of the origins of borders and how US foreign policy violently uproots millions across the globe; it also touches on the destabilizing ills of capitalism, the hyper-exploitation of temporary workers (state-sanctioned programs of indentured work), and the rise of the anti-immigrant far right. It is a damning indictment not only of borders but also of the current global order.

A longtime activist with the No One Is Illegal, a grassroots migrant justice group based in Canada, Walia has been a vocal and mobilizing force in pro-migrant, abolitionist circles for well over a decade.

If only facts could change the worldas a friend sighingly put it to me in discussing Walias bookBorder and Rule could undo a lot of current suffering. And while the worlds many walls may not be pulled down soon, Walias project clearly aims to do exactly that. We spoke by phone in early March, discussing borders and what she imagines for a post-border world. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

John Washington

John Washington: How did you come to this work, and what has kept you putting so much time and intensive thought into it over the years?

Harsha Walia: I come from a family that has dealt with the legacy of one of the bloodiest human displacements in history, which is the partition [between India and Pakistan in 1947]. My grandfather fought in the independence struggle against the British Raj. He would talk about that, but his stories would stop at a particular time period, around the partition. There was deep silence, deep trauma. I returned to those experiences after being politicized. Its only in hindsight when you start to make sense of the world around you that those individual experiences make sense in a continuum of violence. And you shed the shame and the guilt around that.

Experiencing and observing the heightened machinery of detention and deportation, and how there was a synergy between the war at home and the war abroad, and that that was underwritten by racial capitalism and empire We cant think about immigration as a solely domestic issue.

Ive stayed involved because there really is no turning back for any of us who are involved in different movements. You just continue to learn. The people that I meet continue to inspire me. A lot of my thinking and theorizing derives from the principle no one is illegal. Refusing the distinction between good and bad immigrants really came from being in relationships with people who were criminalized and who were in the so-called category of bad immigrants.

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JW: How has your understanding of this field changed?

HW: My previous book, 2013s Undoing Border Imperialism, was a study of organizing, thinking through strategies and tactics and coalitional work and some of the messiness of social movement organizing. What has evolved and expanded for me is the need to look at border regimes with the specificity of their local context, while looking at their similarities across transnational regimes. Being in Canada, theres a lot of focus on the US as the kind of site and originator of many forms of state violence. In Canada, whenever regressive immigration policy is passed, the immediate response to condemning it is, This is an American-style policy. What that erases is Canadas own role in perfecting many forms of state violence, but also it provincializes North America without looking at border regimes around the world.

I really wanted to expand and build on an internationalist and transnational view to how border enforcement works, and to actually look at sites other than the United States as perfecting models of violence. I think its important to look at the ways the US borrows and builds on templates of violence that are imported.

We often think of migrant justice issues as separate from or at best parallel to Black and Indigenous struggles for decolonization and abolition. What I wanted to do is look at the historic formation of the border as completely bound up in anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism and expansionist imperialism. Thats necessary because I think it can be instructive and inform our current moment in how we think about solidarity, how we think of struggles not just as parallel and interconnected but as constituted through each other.

JW: I understand the critique you present in the book of trying to veer away from something like a utilitarian argument on behalf of migrantsthat they add to the economy or dont deplete the welfare stateor absolving migrants of implications that they are cheats or criminals, and that doing so succumbs to the logic of bordering. But dont we have to do some of that practical work of setting the record straight, disabusing people of erroneous and racist ideas, even as we also try to break through the system itself?

HW: I dont think they are necessarily always contradictory. Particularly as an organizer, theres always the balance of holding the deeper systemic critique while tending to the specifics of someones story. Inasmuch as I think its important to reject the politics of innocence, Ive worked with and supported a lot of people who say, Im innocent. I havent committed a crime. Migrating is not a crime. I think its absolutely possible to hold those pieces together. The necessity of pushing back against those logics is that if we only maintain the narrative of innocence or we succumb to the commodification of immigrants by equating them with the economy, then we have to be attentive to how that can bolster the system.

I think its important to highlight the ways migrants contribute to the economy and then very clearly and vociferously refuse the commodification of migrants, because that has been the history of migration, to use migrants as labor. If we look at the history of indentureship, with our current-day bracero program, this is increasingly the template of what migrants are supposed to become: disposable commodities. But that doesnt mean that we dont stand up and support the idea that immigrant rights are workers rights, or dont support immigrant workers in class struggle. Tactically, we can deconstruct myths without upholding them.

JW: You write, Scenes of border death maintain structures of racial violence and, as statistics of deaths pile up, we evade an interrogation of the source of this violence shaped through imperial, racialized, and spatialized control. How do we understand the human consequences, especially for those people not on the ground and only reading about borders from afar?

HW: When youre fighting alongside someone or supporting someone who is facing deportation, its very much about conveying someones story and fighting back against the dehumanization. To be able to talk about them in the fullness of who they are, the fact that their voice and their story needs to be told on their own terms. I think that is absolutely the case. And the reason that Border and Rule is structural is because Ive spent so long trying to fight and being involved in migrant justice struggles where so much of my day-to-day is about individual stories. And not to flatten them, because theyre all fighting detention or deportation, because everyone has their own story and their own journey and that deserves to be told.

But were also inundated in the individual stories at the expense of the structural. For me, thats why I chose to emphasize the structural. I think it is a gap, especially in thinking about the border. Whereas if we are rigorously thinking about other things, like war or imperialism, its possible to do reporting on war zones in a way that humanizes people and also talks about the war as a structural phenomenon, implicating power. But we dont see that as much around migrant justice reporting.

With border deaths especially so, because those deaths are made to be so passive, which is why I call them border killings. I think there needs to be a much stronger pushback to telling the stories of those who have been killed because of border controls, more strongly implicating the state as well.

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JW: Why do you think you dont see as much of a structural critique with border and immigration reporting?

HW: The story of migration and the ways in which mainstream migrant rights organizing has worked have been so focused on the story of humanizing people because there is such a deference to border regimes. People need to prove why they have the right to be here.

JW: You write about how border enforcement is one system in the larger regime of racial capitalism. Do you think that there is something unique in border and immigration issues that can be used to critique the system? If you look at far-right movements across the globe, for example, the thing they have most in common is an anti-immigrant agenda. Is there something we can harness in border and immigration discussions to go after the larger system?

HW: The border is increasingly becoming one of the most critical sites of struggle. By that I mean, its so important to understand whats happening at the border to migrants and refugees and in terms of immigration enforcement, but its something that is so much larger. Increasingly, a number of struggles are, at their core, going to engage with their relationship to the border. I dont think we can fight capitalism or have a global anti-imperialist struggle without looking at how central labor migration is to the continued exploitation and extraction of capital.

And when it comes to temporary labor migration in particular, I think this is so crucial, because so many on the left think that the ways in which we will fight back against the globalizing effect of capital is to have a nationalist responsethat is, well, [if] capital moves freely across borders and people dont, well, then we need to shut the border to capital. But this ignores how increasingly borders are the spatial fix to capitalism. Capitalism requires segmented labor, and bordering regimes multiply the segmentation.

Similarly, its impossible to fight back against the rise of the right, its impossible to fight back against the current era of capitalism, its impossible to fight back against the current era of imperialism without seeing how migration is such a central pillar to all three of them in our era. The border is central to all of those systems.

JW: Whats your vision for the border? Lets take the US-Mexico border as an example. I assume you would bulldoze the actual border wall, but then what? Would there be any checks, or absolute freedom of movement?

HW: I advocate for no borders. But what I think is important and instructive here, and Ill riff off of Ruth Wilson-Gilmore and Mariame Kaba, who say, When were talking about no prisons, were not only talking about getting rid of the physical infrastructure of the prison; its about altering the fundamental conditions that give rise to prisons. For me that is fundamentally what a no-borders politics is. Its not only getting rid of the border and then maintaining all of the social and state violences that gives rise to forced displacement. For me, a no-borders politics has two key corollaries, which is the freedom to stay and the freedom to move. Which means that people shouldnt be forcibly displaced, and people should be free to move.

That means that if there is no border between the United States and Mexico, the social conditions that give rise to the differentiation between what is the United States and Mexico would also evaporate. One of the greatest panics about getting rid of the border is that everyone would rush to come here, but that is assuming the condition of global apartheid, which is that one part of the world gets to reap and create wealth that has been built on exploitationlike imperialism, enslavement, and settler colonialismwhile the rest of the world is supposed to remain in abject poverty and subjugation. And so the panic if there is no border assumes that those conditions will remain. Whereas, when Im thinking of a no-border politics, it necessarily is part of a larger project and vision of eradicating those relations of dominance. Its about eradicating the social organization of difference, about eradicating capitalism such that the division between the so-called North and South effectively collapses.

JW: Underpinning those conditions is the nation-state, which is built on this racial capitalist system, so it seems like a quick series of dominos that would fall. So you undo the borders and logically you undo the modern nation state?

HW: Absolutely. And were undoing capitalism. If we dont have borders to maintain the global segmentation of labor, what would it mean to live in a world where the wage floor is the same around the world? And I dont mean everyone is paid the same, but the wage floor, where if you are producing something in the so-called Global South its not seen as a cheapened labor force.

JW: Who do you feel you need to convince with this book?

HW: I am hoping that what this book can be in service to is an internationalist view and a commitment to internationalism. I have been concerned with the lack of care for internationalist politics. And even issues like the Green New Deal, even those kinds of efforts that really domesticate justice. I am committed to doing work in service to a transnational and internationalist view, and just seeing how fundamentally connected the border is to issues of racial capital, to issues of empire, to other anti-racist struggles. Its not just about cause and effect, but really deeply interconnected and constitutive of each other. I dont think we can have an anti-war movement that isnt connected with migration. I dont think we can have an anti-capitalist movement that doesnt tend with migration. Im hoping the book can break some of that siloing effect.

JW: What practical steps can people take?

HW: You dont have to be organizing day in, day out to dismantle the border, to see how border issues are connected to whatever issue it is youre working on, and that to me, returning to why I hope this book is useful, is that folks see migration and displacement as central to all social struggles and all movements, and think about incorporating it in a meaningful way with an understanding of how it works, to all different struggles.

If youre fighting free trade agreements, migration is a key part of that fight. If youre fighting against drone warfare and imperialism, migrants are the human face and the human consequences of our foreign policies. If youre an abolitionist, its completely congruent to demand an end to cops and prisons and borders at the same time.

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Pulling Down the Worlds Walls: A Conversation With Harsha Walia - The Nation

Read this book. You will be stirred, and maybe you will feel a bit uncomfortable. That is a good thing.

Reuben Jonathan Millers work of narrative nonfiction, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, mixes personal memoir with science, sociological data and anthropology as it describes the brutal effects of the carceral state in the United Statesparticularly on Black people.

Little, Brown

352p $29

Criminal justice reform is on the lips of almost anyone running for political office these days, regardless of party affiliation. But on the streets of Chicago or Detroit or Ann Arbor, Mich., where Miller walked for years to gather his data and stories, one would be hard-pressed to find it in action. There is a massive lack of connection between the platitudes like We must do better and the Black children and adults who have had their entire lives transformed by a war on crime now several decades old.

Using firsthand interviews with about a dozen men and women after their incarceration and release, Miller cuts through the noise about criminal justice reform to lay bare what life is really like on the other side of a prison sentence. Informed by his experience as a Black man who grew up poor in a segregated Chicago, as well as the lives of his own family members touched by the carceral state, Miller is able to coax the hopes and dreams, fears and terrors out of his interview subjects. The result is a searingly honest view of life after incarceration.

Do you have a roof over your head while you are reading this review? Are you housed in a place that feels safe? The majority of men and women leaving prison each year do not share those settings or that safety. Some of Millers subjects, including his older brother, Jeremiah, walk us through their journey of looking for housing. Miller lets them guide us through his ethnography of the community while expertly weaving in social science, empirical data and reflections on public policy to reveal the traps laid for them.

In Chicago, for example, there are more than 50 policies that bar people with criminal records from housing. (The same trend can be seen across the country, thanks to aggressive policies enacted under President Clinton in the 1990s.) The cruelty and negative impact of those policies are clear to see. If you are on parole or probation, it is a crime to be homeless. If you are living in public housing or your private landlord does not permit anyone with a criminal history to be in your apartment, you can be evicted for trying to help out a loved one by letting them stay with you. Some men and women languish in prison for months (or years) after their parole was scheduled to begin because they have nowhere to live.

Miller talks to a halfway house director who gets hundreds of applications every year for between 20 and 40 beds. Miller himself says no to his brothers request to stay with him because he could be evicted from his rented house for having his brother stay there. His brother ends up sleeping in a parking lot from time to time in Ann Arbor while he awaits trial.

This landscape exists for every person leaving prison or jail, and it is often one they have to learn to navigate alone. Want to get a job so that you can pay for an apartment that is not public housing? Good luck if you have a criminal record, even if all you hope to obtain is a minimum-wage job. Want to watch your child graduate from kindergarten? If you were in prison for over a year, your parental rights may have been terminated during your stay, and your child may no longer be yours.

Want to vote for a politician who may be able to make a change in your community? Sorry, a criminal record often revokes your voice in elections. Want to get on track with a new lifestyle and focus on your health? You are far behind the rest of us, as incarcerated persons are more likely than anyone else in the United States to contract communicable diseases and illnesses. Just look at the number of Covid-19 prison deaths in the United States to see the outsized impact this pandemic has had on those behind bars.

The men and women we meet through Miller find themselves rejected time and again in their efforts to establish safe new lives after incarceration. This makes Halfway Home a tough book to read. It should be.

It is an indictment of our society, the one with an ever-increasing wealth gap, the one that let me take out six figures in federal student loans because I am considered a trustworthy candidate but didnt let Yvette, one of Millers subjects, continue to work for her town because of an uncovered 10-year-old drug conviction, despite her excellence at her job.

I am not a stranger to the data points and the policy arguments for criminal justice reform and for the abolition of our current carceral state. As both a criminal defender and family defender for the last five years, I have watched the governments prosecutions tear apart Black families, force evictions and traumatize Black children. But at the end of the day, I can still close my files and go home without those stories following me. Miller brings us along on the car ride home, then shows us the musings on the couch and the celebration on the corners.

Halfway Home is an intimate portrayal of a vulnerable population; it is also important and necessary. Until there are laws and frameworks that clear the minefields of post-conviction life, we are all complicit in setting up our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, for failure. Until that culture of rejection turns into one of reception, this book will be necessary.

Miller does not apologize for having a dog in this fight. His proximity to his subjects and the world of mass incarceration, he believes, gives him the ability to communicate how this social situation feels in a forceful and straightforward way. I could not agree more.

I could not put this book down because I felt so connected to the author, his story and his subjects stories. I will be thinking about it for a long time.

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Review: Platitudes are not enough. We need to see criminal justice reform in action. - America Magazine

This story first appeared on TC Jewfolk and was distributed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Enzi Tanner didnt watch the trial of Derek Chauvin.

Even as the jury returned guilty verdicts Tuesday afternoon on all three counts against the former Minneapolis police officer second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter the community safety organizer at Jewish Community Action, a Minnesota social justice organization, had been thinking of issues bigger than the result.

My biggest concern before was in focusing solely on the trial, it makes us about one incident, Tanner said. Its about that 9 minutes and 29 seconds on May 25. And thats what it ends up being about and not the broader system. Even in the trial, people are arguing that Derek Chauvin is a rogue police officer, that hes not typical. And he is.

ForTanner, a Jew of color, the state of policing and public safety in the country is the intersection of his work as an organizer and who he is as a person. And the April 11 killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer in nearby Brooklyn Center only strengthened his resolve to pursue broader efforts to transform public safety through his work at the Jewish Community Action, whichshifted last year to focus squarely on responding to George Floyds death. (The officer in the Wright killing has been charged with manslaughter.)

This last week actually provided more opportunities and more clarity than before, he said. Before the murder of Daunte Wright and around the trial, we [were] already planning and trying to work on some political education pieces on whats next.

Fueled by a belief that fear is holding back needed changes in policing, Tanner is putting together a workshop for his organization on anti-Black racism, fear and the need to be secure.

We have a narrative in this country about anti-Black racism and fear, and it allows for that confusion between security and actually being secure, he said. Fear is a physical reaction, its not just a psychological thing. When we watch scary movies, we actually react to that, so getting in tune with that, and our initial reactions, I just think thats important.

A virtual training on Sunday started tackling some of the difficult conversations that come around the topic of reimagining public safety. A portion of the training included about 20 minutes of breakout rooms with scenarios of how to practice having conversations about policing.

One of those needed conversations is about the movement to defund police in Minneapolis and beyond a term that Tanner says has a different meaning depending on whom you ask. To him, it means the middle ground between reform, which requires investing more money into police forces, and abolition, doing away with police entirely.

Folks who want to defund, its this middle ground. Its saying that we have enough resources as a community to provide for what we need, he said. When you talk about defunding, youre talking about reallocating, and as youre talking about reallocating, to me it actually opens up the world to dreaming of whats possible. How can we imagine a world in a society that weve never seen? And its scary as hell.

For Tanner, the road ahead is certain to be difficult but its one that he sees traversing nonetheless as an action with a deeply Jewish antecedent.

I just keep imagining our ancestors being at the Red Sea and being like, OK, you go, No, you go first. And then everyone else is like, This is a really bad idea, yall. We dont even know whats over there. We havent even seen it before. And I feel like, in many ways, we get a chance to do this, make mistakes, learn and grow, he said.

The U.S. Justice Departmentannounced Wednesday, a day after Chauvins conviction, that it would investigate the Minneapolis Police Department. Previous investigations have ended with agreements, known as consent decrees, between federal and local authorities to changes in policing and oversight.

Regardless of the conviction, Tanner said justice isnt done.

There is no justice, he said, because there is no redemption or repair in a cage.

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For Minneapolis Jews, Derek Chauvin's conviction is just the beginning J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

Joshua Deveer doesnt try to fight his place in life anymore.

I used to think doing something was everything, and now Im starting to realize that, maybe not doing something is everything, says the 23-year-old from outside of a modest North Conway inn, where he pays $600 per month to live. Maybe restricting my footprint here, making sure that I watch my steps is whats most important.

In July of 2017, Deveer was pulled over by State Trooper Clinton Trussell and arrested on two misdemeanor charges and one violation: operating without a valid license, disobeying a police officer and possessing marijuana.

According to Carroll County court records, police signaled for Deveer to stop by emergency warning signals, but that he took evasive action by turning abruptly, with a signal, behind a building.

I said, I didnt know that I was disobeying an officer, sir. And he basically told me that I was under arrest already. Cause I was disobeying him by pulling into a parking lot. And so I should get outta the car and put my hands on my lock box, Deveer said.

He says he also was not aware that his license had been under suspension, and that he felt he shouldnt have had any charges against him at all. Deveer ended up paying over $700 in fines for two of the charges, but for the marijuana charge, he was offered another option.

With the help of a lawyer, Deveer was able to get the marijuana charge diverted to White Mountain Restorative Justice located in Conway, NH. WMRJ is a non-profit organization offering programs in juvenile court diversion, mediation, adult court diversion, and victim offender mediation.

Upon completing a court diversion program with WMRJ, Deveer was able to have the charge expunged from his record. The program, he says, consisted of first admitting guilt, completing course work, and community service at the humane society for a few months.

I wanted it dismissed completely. I didnt want people, you know...thinking any differently of me, but then it got published in the paper. So I moved away from here for a while after that, he said.

Restorative justice is the practice of repairing the harm caused by crimes or offenses and holding the offender accountable for their actions. It also focuses on the causes of crime, rather than taking punitive measures that are likely to cause recidivism. And as calls for criminal justice reform and police abolition have continued alongside protests throughout 2020, many activists are looking to restorative justice as a solution to the countrys policing and mass incarceration problems.

Diversion for adults often happens pre-conviction, and unlike New Hampshires drug courts and mental health courts if an offender successfully carries out a restorative agreement, the charge will be expunged from the offenders record.

Its a process with a different purpose and goal from the states behavioral health courts, which are reserved for those with serious addiction or mental health problems who are repeat offenders. And with specialized courts, charges remain on an offenders record after completion.

Experts see court diversion as a form of restorative justice, and a powerful alternative to traditional sentencing, that can save lives. The programs often involve not only community service and restitution to crime victims, but also mental health and addiction services.

People shouldnt be defined by the worst day of their life. You can wreck a life with a conviction and a short prison sentence, says Michael Sheehan, a Concord attorney and vice president of New Hampshire Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform.

And restorative justice has the results to prove that it works. According to the most recent department of corrections data on state recidivism rates, 43.2 percent of offenders reoffend after release from prison, a rate 15 percent higher than those who completed a restorative justice program in Belknap county.

But New Hampshires system of court diversion is largely inconsistent, and access to it is not distributed equitably across the state. That also means the state doesnt track adult diversion data and recidivism rates, which makes quantifying the success of diversion nearly impossible.

I do wish they were more widely available, said Robin Melone, an attorney based in Manchester. I think it would spare a significant number of defendants from having criminal records, it would save court resources and would serve to better defendants more than punish them while still holding them accountable and getting them services that could be life changing.

Ive had co-defendants...and one is referred to diversion and the other defendant who has a mirror image background, isnt, says Alyson Mahler, diversion coordinator for Rockingham County. When they tell me, my girlfriend was with me, she was arrested, Im like, is she getting diversion too? No, she doesnt know about it.

It can be a problem for defendants with attorneys from counties without adult diversion as an option, or even attorneys from out-of-state. If the attorney isnt aware of the option, it may not be offered by a judge or prosecutor at all. Diversion practitioners say they do their best to educate as much as they can about their services, but its also attorneys jobs to do that work themselves.

Funding issues, too, have led to constant shifts and changes to where and how diversion is accessible to adults. It varies by county, and three counties in the state Cheshire, Coos and Hillsborough dont have diversion as an option for adults at all. Some counties, like Strafford, only do about 18 adult felony diversions per year. Most wont accept people who have already offended in the past.

In some cases, you may be lucky to have possessed a controlled drug in Belknap County because you can get a second chance. But if you happen to live in Coos or Hillsborough counties, your charge may very likely remain on your record.

Avoiding the criminal justice system can be a matter of luck

Diversion didnt keep Deveer out of trouble. He was able to lose the marijuana charge, but the other two disobeying an officer and driving without a valid license remain on his record. He maintains that he shouldnt have received those charges in the first place.

I guess I didnt think I had to be in the situation in general, so Im kind of on that bias, but at the same time...Even Lance (the director of White Mountain Restorative Justice) kind of knew that kids just had to put their hours in and then they were done. Like, it was very brief, but some of the knowledge mightve been useful to people, Deveer said.

In 2018, Deveer was arrested again, this time for criminal threatening in Derry. Since it was his third charge, he was not eligible for diversion in Rockingham, which is mainly reserved for first-time offenders, but decisions are mainly left up to prosecutors for whether they believe diversion would be appropriate or beneficial.

He says he feels like just another number caught in the system, like theres no escape, even though the point of diversion is to keep people out of the criminal justice system in the first place.

Were not taken as one person. Were taken as a group of people that got mixed up in something, Deveer says.

He grew up with a mother and brother who struggled with mental illness. By age 18 he was enrolled at NHTI, hoping to pursue his interest in history. But he dropped out after his first arrest, tried to enlist in the military and couldnt get in. After a quick stint at New Hampshire Hospital this summer where he was detained for mental health reasons, hes out of a job and continues to feel the impact of his past.

[It has affected] every part of my life. Ive only been able to work construction. I wasnt able to go back to school, I wasnt able to go into the military. Every time I get pulled over, Im questioned way more than I need to be, he says.

If Deveer was in a different county, he might have had better luck. Diversion programs across the state generally do not address violent crimes, but if they have the capacity, some may accept repeat offenders, like Belknap. But since there is no state statute for adult diversion on the books, eligibility is different for nearly every program.

Due to the circumstances that weve seen, not just in our state, but across the country with the opiate issue and with drugs, were seeing a lot more people coming into our program that have previous convictions, whether they be misdemeanors or minor, low level felonies, said Mike MacFadzen, director of Belknap County Restorative Justice.

That wasnt always the case. Restorative justice has existed in Belknap since 2001, when the county received a federal grant to start a program there. Eventually, it was taken over by the Sheriffs office and became a separate department due to its success, remembers Brian Loanes, Belknap County Restorative Justices first director.

Back then, the program only accepted juveniles. But those in the criminal justice field soon saw how it could be beneficial for adults, too.

Very common cases wed have was an 18 or 19-year-old had committed an offense and they had their whole life ahead of them, and having a criminal conviction on their record has adverse effects on serving in the military and going to college, Loanes said.

Today, Belknap County diverts more adults than juveniles. Its more common to divert a younger adult between the ages of 18-25, but MacFadzen says all ages are accepted and determinations are made case by case.

When it comes to counties like Belknap, MacFadzen believes that availability of services could be expanded if only the money was there. He and three part-time case managers dealt with 202 referrals in 2019 on a county budget of $185,000. That ended up covering about 20 percent of total docketed cases in the county, according to County Prosecutor Andrew Livernois.

If we had more funding and more availability of case managers, we could definitely be able to take in and provide services to those who are committing those misdemeanor first time offenses, those young 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds. And right now were not seeing them just because were dealing with the more serious cases, he said.

In 2016, an attempt at keeping youth and adults out of the criminal justice system came to an abrupt end in Carroll County.

Things went south shortly after the program began just a few years before, at least financially. According to an attorney generals report on the Tri County Community Action Program (Tri-CCAP) in 2015, the program was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating costs. And in 2012, state incentive funds for diversion programs had dried up, leading to the closure of several diversion centers across the state.

Diversion has been in the state of New Hampshire since 1980. This conversation has been had 100 times over. For a long time theyve been talking about how to fund this and how to do this, said Nicole Rodler, chair of the New Hampshire Youth Diversion Network. They run on absolute bare bones...at one point we had 33-35 programs across our state that closed their doors after incentive funding dried up.

Keeping the Tri-CCAP program around just didnt seem sustainable, or even worth it based on low enrollment numbers, said Jeanne Robillard, current CEO of Tri-CCAP.

One of the things that the board needed to look at was revisiting our mission, Robillard said. We had a fair amount of mission drift, and we were taking a look at the programs and the services that we were looking at, she said.

Lance Zack, then program director of diversion at Tri-CCAP, decided to take on the mission himself. About three years ago, he opened White Mountain Restorative Justice in Conway, where he now guides first-time low-level offenders both juveniles and adults through restorative justice processes.

While Carroll Countys adult diversion still exists today under Zacks leadership, hes worried about its future. Zacks program is a sole proprietorship and the only one of its kind in Carroll County. He doesnt operate under a county attorney or corrections department like some programs, and he isnt an accredited member of the youth diversion network, meaning he cant access for grant funds through it. Hes been working on incorporating the business in order to have better access to funding, but COVID-19 has put a temporary halt on that process.

My reality is, Ive been without any viable income, basically paying my rent for four months and now laying down $4,000 for the incorporation process itself, Zack said.

White Mountain Restorative Justice survives on only program fees: $250 per person, much lower than most other adult programs. In Grafton, a felony charge can set an offender back $600 plus extra fees for missed appointments or additional classes, which may be mandatory to complete diversion and get ones record expunged.

That can be a barrier to some adults and youth, especially those who are low-income or live far from where the diversion center is based. Paying a court fine may be more affordable and practical than a months-long laborious program.

Money should not make a difference but my time in private practice has made it clear that it does in fact make a difference, said Melone, the attorney from Manchester. I dont think it is that the prosecutors are less sympathetic to indigent clients - I think it is that indigent clients have fewer resources to help an attorney put together an attractive proposal.

But that can cause big problems in a young adults life, especially when it comes to marijuana charges, Zack says. He knows offenders who have decided to pay a court fine for marijuana possession rather than doing diversion and ended being boxed out of college, the military and unions that have zero-tolerance substance use policies.

You put yourself into New Hampshire Tech for two years, intern for a year and find out that after your internship, the union turns you down because you paid a cash fine on an alcohol charge. Ive seen it jam too many kids, he said.

Zack hopes by incorporating White Mountain Restorative Justice, the fee can be reduced or completely eliminated.

That was part of my motivation looking to incorporate, was looking for external funding. I believe diversion should have a fee associated with it, its about personal accountability, but I believe the fee also has to be associated with the fact that this is the second poorest county in the state in a state thats already poor on national ratings, Zack says.

Three counties have no adult diversion at all. One of those is Hillsborough, which, encompassing both Manchester and Nashua, is New Hampshires most densely populated county, the most racially diverse and has the highest crime volume.

Most adult diversion is done as a court sentence or as an order by police or county prosecutors, as opposed to juvenile diversion cases, a majority of which are diverted pre-court by police. Hillsborough County attorney Michael Conlon believes diversion should be done at the pre-court level for everyone and is not the county attorneys responsibility to implement.

Diversion primarily doesnt exist [in Hillsborough] because police departments havent implemented it, Conlon said. Diversion is usually described as a referral to a program or service in lieu of arrest.

And for diversion to be done properly, he believes, it shouldnt be up to each individual county.

What we really need is a uniform statewide funding, programming and services for these things, Conlon said. When we take away the statewide aspect of it, what you get is this mismatch of services that are helping some people in some counties and not helping people in others. And theres no reason for that other than a lack of will to do it and to fund it.

It would take a lot of work to make that happen, and until very recently, there hasnt been a champion for statewide, universal court diversion for adults or juveniles, noted Moira ONeill, New Hampshires Child Advocate.

State defense attorneys, although they have major concerns about equality of accessibility to diversion, are not able to take legal action because of lack of specificity within the juvenile statute, and total lack of an adult statute, said Tracy Scavarelli, director of legal services at the New Hampshire Public Defender.

Diversion is solely within the purview of the prosecutor, so theres no real guarantee for anyone to obtain diversion, so its difficult to make the argument that anything is unfair based on that, she said.

The inconsistency and seemingly arbitrary nature of diversion programs that Scavarelli speaks of is the case in Sullivan County where County Prosecutor Marc Hathaway opposes spending money on diversion.

Hathaway cited scarce resources and the ability of prosecutors and police to create their own diversion by determining what cases are prosecuted, as two reasons why adult diversion programs do not make sense in his county.

I dont think theres a tremendous amount of benefit in a diversion program. The rationale for a diversion is that the individual and the crime combined are unworthy of intervention by the criminal justice system, Hathaway said. If thats true, then why build a program in the criminal justice system around a case that you would not and should not prosecute? We have scarce resources in this community and if we think something is de minimis, society has a very simple way of addressing that. The decision not to prosecute.

Asked whether he agreed with data that shows a reduction in recidivism rates for those who have completed a diversion program compared with those recently released from prison, Hathaway said he doesnt find this to be a fair comparison.

A closer comparison would be those who have no, or minor prior record and are given a suspended sentence with/or without probation because the combination of the offense and the offenders history did not warrant incarceration, he explained. In a world of scarce resources our approach should be more targeted. If we have a program and it fails what do you believe the response should look like? Failure without a consequence is a bad message.

New light for diversion programs is slowly beginning to emerge as new waves of activism have swept the state this summer. Black Lives Matter Seacoast included full support and the usage of diversion programs for those with mental health and substance use issues on its list of demands to local officials.

Clifton West, a co-founder of BLM Seacoast, says he and other organizers have been working with lawmakers and police departments in the area to inform them of diversion services that are already available, and encourage the use of diversion more consistently.

He believes that communities should divest in policing and instead invest in diversion to prevent further crime, and therefore reduce the need for more law enforcement.

To me, its not an option, we have to do it, West says. I think its crazy if you dont look at the statistics that we have seen around the country and go eh, thats an option but we just like funding the police the way we do.

Americas obsession with discriminatory mass arrest and incarceration has its place in New Hampshire as much as anywhere else in the United States. According to the Sentencing Project, the Granite State incarcerates Black people more than five times as frequently as white people.

And people of color are heavily overrepresented in the states justice system: while Black and Hispanic people make up just over 4 percent of the state population, they represent about 14 percent of those incarcerated.

While discrimination is possible within diversion as much as any system, West says with proper representation and training, it could be a remedy to the problem.

If you have these diversion programs, it would help not only bring down mass incarceration and arrest in general, it would I think help bring that type of trust back to the community, it would help bring law enforcement together with the community as well, West said.

And existing adult diversion programs, for the first time, are taking matters into their own hands by creating an adult diversion network to better combine efforts and resources and hopefully create more universality of requirements and services across counties.

One of the big drivers to doing that was, if Tom Smith commits a crime in Merrimack County and completes diversion and then comes to Grafton County and commits a crime, we wouldnt know that they had completed diversion because the charge is nolle prossed. So they could get diversion again, when they shouldnt, says Renee DePalo, Grafton Countys alternative sentencing coordinator.

Theyre hoping to create a database to more consistently track data on who goes in and out of the states adult diversion programs. But that costs money that would, as of now, have to come out of each programs own budget.

Neighboring Vermont, which has community justice and diversion for adults and juveniles written into statute itself used to have a community justice network that recently disbanded due to funding issues and differing philosophies. But since its written into statute and state funded, services are still more consistent than they are in New Hampshire.

If this were statewide and it were actually in the law to refer people to diversion, there would be a lot less criminal issues on our hands I think, Porreca, of Valley Diversion, said.

Editors Note: This series on court diversion is part of a multiyear project exploring race and equity in New Hampshire produced by the partners of The Granite State News Collaborative. The editing team included Scott Merrill, Editor, NH Bar News; and Ben Conant, Editor, Monadnock Ledger-Transcript. The reporting and research team included: John M. Bassett, Jordyn Haime, Kathie Ragsdale, Fiona St. Pierre, and Adam Urquhart.

The series was supported by a competitive grant from the nonpartisan Solutions Journalism Network. The Collaborative and its partners retain editorial control.

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Restorative Justice, Part 2: N.H. adult court diversion can save lives, but is offered inconsistently and not tracked - Monadnock Ledger Transcript