Mayor Vincent Gray of Washington, D.C. and several members of the D.C. City Council were arrested Monday night as they blocked traffic on Constitution Avenue next to the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The officials had gathered along with over 200 city residents to protest restrictions on D.C. funding included in last Friday’s Congressional budget deal.

They sat for half an hour, chanting, “No justice, no peace,” before being arrested by U.S. Capitol Police. Forty-one people were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly. The activist group DC Vote organized the protest.

The Congressional budget deal on Friday, which averted a government shutdown, prohibited D.C. from using its own locally raised funds to pay for abortions for low-income women. The budget deal also financed a school voucher program, controversial among D.C. leaders.

“I’m tired of being a pawn in a political game,” Mayor Gray said before being arrested, according to The Washington Post. “All we want is to be able to spend our own money.”

The Constitution denies D.C. the right of self-government by authorizing Congress “[t]o exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District.” D.C. has gained greater authority over its affairs since 1791, but—as this budget deal shows—not nearly enough.

All laws and budgets passed by the D.C. Council must be sent to Congress for approval. So that’s one problem: the Congressional veto over D.C.’s local democracy. The other problem: D.C has no voice in the Senate and its delegate to the House cannot vote. The reason: partisan silencing of the 86% of D.C. voters who cast ballots for Obama in 2008.

Residents of D.C., which at 600,000 is more populous than Wyoming, lack that basic democratic right: to have a voice in decisions that affect them. Some 235 years since the original tea partiers protested taxation without representation, the slogan still bites.

Waseem Wagdi, an Egyptian protester at the Egyptian embassy in London:

One, two, three strikes you’re out at the old ball game, as the song goes.

But it took just one strike for Dan Moore and Sarah Szekeresh to get booted from the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, Ohio, last Wednesday after unfurling a banner protesting SB1070, Arizona’s recent bill targeting immigration, over the center field wall during an Arizona Diamondbacks game against the Cincinnati Reds.

Moore and Szekeresh were then arrested for disorderly conduct and spent six hours in jail. The fourth-degree misdemeanor carries a penalty of up to $250 and 30 days in jail. The pair pled not guilty and will have a bench trial on October 4.

In an interview with Waging Nonviolence, Moore said that talking about his arrest misses the point. “Immigrant families get arrested every day for bogus reasons, and these criminal records cause significant damage to their lives,” he tells WNV. “All this talk about being arrested – when I can go home and continue my job and my life – just dramatizes the true catastrophe going on in immigrant communities around deportation. Families get ripped apart. It’s hard to pity myself.”

Szekeresh felt similarly, telling the Cincinnati Enquirer, “It’s not about me.”

The risk of arrest is a real concern for undocumented people. “It highlights the role that allies can play in the struggle for immigration reform,” said Moore. “Immigrants have owned much of it, but when it comes to tactics that would expose undocumented people to unnecessary risks and even deportation, allies must also step up. We must work to responsibly escalate the struggle.”

Protests have followed the Arizona Diamondbacks across the country. “We don’t have ambassadors between states,” explained Moore. “Baseball games are as close as we get, and these actions communicate to people in Arizona that anti-immigrant hate will not be welcome here. It won’t be normalized.” That message, disseminated by the AP, reappeared in local Arizona newspapers.

Moore and Szekeresh planned their action with the help of both immigrant communities and activists in other cities, including those promoting MoveTheGame.org, a website petitioning Major League Baseball to change the venue of the July 2011 All-Star Game, currently scheduled for Phoenix.

Thousands of health care reform advocates rallied at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC, last week outside a conference of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a group that lobbies for the insurance industry. See the video above.

Health care-related protests continued into the weekend, but this time, they were organized by opponents of health care reform. In Minneapolis, for example, thousands of Tea Partiers and Republicans rallied and chanted, “Kill the bill!”

Why might supporters of citizen action sympathize with one side over another?  Facts.  Yes, facts do seem to come cheap these days.  But even if the public thinks the health care bill would create death panels, it still proposes no such thing.

Facts do exist and they matter.

Take the uninsured: 45,000 uninsured people die in the U.S each year – 123 per day – who could have escaped death with health insurance, according to a 2009 Harvard study. The current health care bill, through insurance reforms and subsidies, would at least reduce that number by extending coverage to millions.

Protesters against health care reform may be reading from the same playbook as people in favor of reform. But rallying for a cause does not a just cause make.

Cincinnati’s Fair Hiring Campaign rallied last Thursday, February 25, to ask Mayor Mark Mallory and his appointed Civil Service Commission to end their policy of denying city jobs to qualified applicants with felony convictions.

Over fifty Cincinnati residents, myself included, arrived at Cincinnati’s City Hall for the Commission’s 9 am meeting only to find that the Commission had abruptly canceled its section for public comment.  “Ain’t council chambers the people’s house?” asked one individual in the crowd.  Leaders of the Fair Hiring Campaign negotiated for two minutes of speaking time before the Commission.

Former offenders face employment barriers both de facto and de jure even for seemingly ancient convictions that have no relevance to the job. These restrictions hinder the ability of millions of Americans (one in 99 is currently incarcerated) to reintegrate successfully after completing their sentences.

For at least three years, the City has opposed proposed changes to its no-felon hiring policy.  Frustratingly, the Mayor denies that such a policy even exists.

Ironically, by condemning rehabilitated people to unemployment and under-employment, the no-felon hiring policy ends up increasing the burden on the City’s own overloaded criminal justice and public welfare systems.

Proposed changes would allow city government to consider an applicant’s evidence of rehabilitation. “We’re not asking for guaranteed jobs,” Stephen JohnsonGrove of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center told the Commission.  “We just want fair consideration for people with old and irrelevant criminal records.”

After speaking to the Commission, the group walked to the Mayor’s office to present over 1000 letters from Cincinnatians supporting a fair hiring policy.

The no-felon hiring policy is based on fear, not evidence.  Depending on a person’s age and offense, research finds that after a certain period of time s/he is no more likely to offend than same-aged members of the general population.  For 18-year-olds arrested for robbery in 1980, that point was 7.7 years. Yet people convicted of crimes less serious than robbery still face barriers decades later.

Employment barriers don’t make us any safer.  They serve, instead, to punish people years after they have paid their debt to society.  “You can get over an addiction,” one person told me, “but a conviction stays with you for life.”

A Minnie Mouse lookalike outside Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel striking with union local 681.

Eight Disneyland Hotel workers of UNITE HERE Local Union 11 in Anaheim, California, engaged in a week-long hunger strike to highlight their two-year dispute on health care and other labor issues with the Walt Disney Company.  The eight workers ended their hunger strike on Tuesday, as five more began fasting.

The workers want to keep the health plan that their union provides (paid for in lieu of pay raises), while Disney proposes deducting health care costs from workers’ wages. Disney maintains that their plan would cost $250 a month per family, while the union estimates $500.  Workers typically earn $11-13 an hour.

The Disney dispute mirrors an exacerbating national trend: Employment no longer guarantees satisfactory health care coverage.  Between 2001 and 2007, insurance premiums rose 78% while wages rose 19%. As health care costs rise, employers drop benefits, contributing to the number of uninsured Americans.

One in six full-time workers, or 21 million people, were uninsured for all 12 months of 2008.  Astoundingly, 45% of the nation’s 46 million uninsured actually worked full-time. And the percentage of Americans who receive health insurance through their employer has decreased from 64% in 2000 to 59% in 2008.

The Disney workers seem determined not to become another statistic.

In memory of Howard Zinn, who died yesterday, I reread an address he gave at Johns Hopkins University in November 1970, titled, “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” and reprinted in Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

Zinn discussed his frustration with the so-called “problem of civil disobedience.”  That’s “topsy-turvy,” he said, just plain backwards, like a protester getting clubbed by the police and then getting arrested for assaulting a police officer.

Here’s Zinn:

Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

Facing injustice, we are oblivious if not complacent – a stance that stems from undue deference for the law, as if it were holy.  “There is nothing sacred about the law,” Zinn said.  “The law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond.”

“Prison officials don’t need a gun; they already have full control over you,” said a former Michigan prisoner who was raped by a correctional officer. She shared her experience with Just Detention International (JDI), an organization working to end the sexual abuse of detainees in prisons and jails around the globe.

The horror of prison rape has been well-documented by Human Rights Watch (hat tip, Te-Ping Chen at change.org). But in American popular culture, the issue of prison rape (when it’s not being ignored), is somehow considered funny, the subject of late-night, drop-the-soap humor. Humor can bring relief to conversations of uncomfortable facts, but it can also dehumanize and trivialize.

Just Detention International (note the name’s double entendre) seeks to change that dynamic with a moving new campaign. JDI prepared three sets of images.

The first set challenges the view that prison rape is somehow not really rape:

The second highlights the health of rape victims:

The third targets the alleged humor of people being raped:

Prison rape has reached epidemic proportions in US jails and prisons. Some 60,500 (4.5%) of the 1.3 million people in federal and state prisons were sexually abused in 2006, according to a 2007 Department of Justice study. By one account, one in five male prisoners is sexually abused at some point during his incarceration. Meanwhile, HIV is four times more prevalent, and Hepatitis C is eight to 20 times more prevalent, in US prisons than in society overall.

Among juveniles in U.S. youth prisons, according to a just-released Department of Justice study, one in eight reported being sexually victimized in the past 12 months (or if they were incarcerated for fewer than 12 months, since they were admitted). Eighty percent of these victims were abused by prison staff.

Kudos to Just Detention International for humanizing people in prison by depicting them in something other than prison garb. Rape is awful whether it happens to women or men, free or imprisoned. “No matter what crime someone has committed,” says JDI, “sexual violence must never be part of the penalty.”

Steep tuition raises at California universities have spurred widespread student protests and sit-ins.  These actions were reportedly “the tipping point” that prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to ask a very good question:

Thirty years ago 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons.  Today almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only 7 1/2 percent goes to higher education.  Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future.  What does it say about a state that focuses more on prison uniforms than caps and gowns?

Unfortunately, in this State of the State address, Schwarzenegger found only half the answer.  He proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit California from spending more on prisons than on higher education. To achieve that goal, he recommended privatizing at least some of California’s prisons.  “Competition and choice are always good,” Schwarzenegger optimistically declared.

Other states have tried privatization.  And cost-savings promised by private prisons “have simply not materialized,” according to the Department of Justice (p.68).  But while cost-savings have been scarce, security breaches have been abundant.  One survey found 49% more inmate-on-staff assaults and 65% more inmate-on-inmate assaults in private facilities than in comparable public ones.

Private corporations seek profits by cutting corners.  They attract less-qualified workers by providing inferior wages and benefits than state agencies.  The California Correctional Peace Officers Association has already condemned Schwarzenegger’s proposal.  Private prisons also generate profits by cutting prisoners’ food, medicine, drug treatment, GED classes, and reentry planning.

That’s a mistake.  Inmate welfare is not just a Constitutional requirement; it’s smart policy.  Education, drug treatment, and release planning reduce recidivism.

The California student protests against tuition hikes succeeded in capturing Schwarzenegger’s attention.  California students shouldn’t stop there.  The current proposal pits the interests of students against those of prisoners.  Both groups in fact seek a shared outcome: greater access to public education.

There’s a better way to reduce prison costs: reduce the prison population (e.g., Michigan in recent years).  End lengthy sentences for nonviolent offenders.  Expand probation, parole, and “specialty courts” that emphasize treatment over incarceration for addicted and mentally ill offenders.  Schwarzenegger is right to question prison costs, but his privatization proposal isn’t the answer.

The imprisonment of 2.3 million American citizens, comprising 1 in 99 adults, has been a “success,” according to columnist Ross Douthat in the New York Times:

For a generation now, conservatives, not Dukakis-style liberals, have been making policy on crime. They’ve built more prisons, imposed harsher sentences and locked up as many lawbreakers as possible. Their approach has worked. The violent crime rate has been cut by nearly 40 percent since its early-1990s peak. The murder rate is at its lowest point since Lyndon Johnson was president.

Except… facts are stubborn things.

Mass incarceration has indeed lowered the crime rate, but not by much.  According to The Sentencing Project (pdf), three-quarters of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to factors other than incarceration, such as economic opportunity and treatment programs.  Between 1998 and 2003, for example, states with stable or decreasing incarceration rates experienced the same average drop in crime as states with increasing incarceration rates.

In addition, “80% of the crime prevented by the incarceration of each additional prisoner is for nonviolent offenses,” continues The Sentencing Project, citing research.  That undercuts Douthat’s implication that lower violent crime and murder rates can be attributed primarily to increasing rates of incarceration.

Douthat also ignores the “war on drugs,” a conspicuous oversight given its centrality to the lock-‘em-up ideology.  The war on drugs is by most accounts a policy failure with no end in sight. While drug offenders packed our prisons, drugs became deadlier and more widespread.  “If anything,” writes Georgetown law professor David Cole, “the war on drugs has probably increased the incidence of crime; about half of property crime, robberies, and burglaries are attributable to the inflated cost of drugs caused by criminalizing them.”

Mass incarceration is a human rights disaster that exacerbates race and class disparities.  It would be widely condemned, Cole hypothesizes, if its effects weren’t “concentrated on the most deprived among us.”  Ending this shameful chapter in American history involves not just alternatives to prisons, as Douthat ultimately recommends, but an honest account of their impact on crime.