Rustle up family, friends and loved ones for an inspiring David Rovics concert 8 p.m. Thursday, May 31, at the Houston Institute for Culture, 708 Telephone Rd.

$10.00 cover.

This past week, Connecticut became the 17th state in the Nation to abolish the death penalty.  Of the 33 states that still have the death penalty as a possible punishment for capital murder, 23 never or rarely carry out an execution.  Thus,  in effect, the death penalty is only used as a punishment in 10 states, most of them being in the deep South where slavery once existed.  
 
So, it appears that the death penalty is slowly disappearing in the USA.   That is good news as it indicates an "evolving standard of decency" in the U.S.  Our nation is the only western, industrialized nation to use this punishment.  We are in the company of such countries as China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia when it comes to exacting an eye for an eye.  
 
In Texas, both death sentences and executions continue to decrease.   One reason for this is that more and more citizens are becoming aware that our criminal justice system is not perfect  and innocent people have been sent to death row.   In Texas, 12 people have been exonerated and released from death row in the past 30 years, the latest being Anthony Graves who was released in 2010.  Nationwide, approximately 140 people have been exonerated and released from death row.  It is also true that several people with strong claims of innocence have been executed in Texas, people like Cameron Todd Willingham, Claude Jones, Ruben Cantu and Carlos Deluna.  

First Friday Forum on The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Cherry Steinwender the Executive Director of the Center for the Healing of Racism. She will lead us in the discussion and show some video clips from Michelle Alexander's book on this subject.

In Honor of Struggles Against the Extraction Industry Everywhere, In Memory of the Workers Whose Lives Were Taken By BP Two Years Ago, we claim our right to clean air and water for all. Take back Earth Day: SHUT DOWN THE TAR SANDS AND BLOCKADE AN OIL REFINERY

Houston Peace News is a monthly publication designed to encourage democratic debate on issues of human dignity and global sustainability.

The January 2012 issue is available in PDF format here.

On February 9, 2012,  my wife, Priscilla and I participated in a program sponsored by the Center for the Healing of Racism which focused on a new book by Michelle Alexander titled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.   I thought I knew a lot about the criminal justice system having worked on the death penalty issue for many years.  However, I was shocked by what I learned in this program.

If you want to understand why the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world,  I recommend that you read Michelle Alexander’s book.  After reading this book, you will come to understand why we have over 2 million people incarcerated and another 5 million under court-supervised probation or parole.  You will also come to understand why our prison population is overwhelmingly people of color – it is because they have been targeted in the so-called “war on drugs” that started during the Reagan Administration.  The purpose of the drug war was not so much to fight drugs, but to woo white voters in the south from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.  Unfortunately, when Bill Clinton became President, he strengthened the war on drugs in an effort to woo voters back to the Democratic Party.   The “tough on crime” policies of the Clinton Administration resulted in the largest increase in incarceration of any U.S. President according to the Justice Policy Institute.  It is an amazing statistic that more African American adults are under court supervision today than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.