Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

A federal report released Thursday finds that Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., an advocate for controversial immigration enforcement and detention measures, has committed a “wide range of civil rights violations.”

The Associated Press reports:

The federal government issued a scathing report Thursday that outlines how Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office has committed a wide range of civil rights violations against Latinos, including a pattern of racial profiling and discrimination and carrying out heavy-handed immigration patrols based on racially charged citizen complaints.

The report, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release, is a result of the U.S. Justice Department’s three-year investigation of Arpaio’s office amid complaints of racial profiling and a culture of bias at the agency’s top level.

The AP adds that federal authorities will continue to investigate, among other complaints, “a large number of sex-crimes cases that were assigned to” Arpaio’s office “but weren’t followed up on or investigated at all.”

In a press release issued Thursday, the Department of Justice states that the ongoing civil rights investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office found “reasonable cause to believe that MCSO, under the leadership of Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio, has engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal law.”

The department found

a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas, including:

• Discriminatory policing practices including unlawful stops, detentions and arrests of Latinos;
• Unlawful retaliation against individuals exercising their First Amendment right to criticize MCSO’s policies or practices, including but not limited to practices relating to its discriminatory treatment of Latinos; and
• Discriminatory jail practices against Latino inmates with limited English proficiency by punishing them and denying them critical services.

Arpaio has said he trains his deputies with federal immigration officials, has the largest group of cross-certified law enforcement men and women (160 of them) and proudly talks about his “tent city,” where about 2,000 detainees live “in Korean War tents” and “sleep in bunk beds, 20 to a tent.”

Asked what he would do if the Supreme Court decides to strike down Arizona’s immigration enforcement law S.B. 1070, Arapio said on CNN this week:

It doesn’t change anything. I do like certain parts of that new law, but I’ll tell you one thing, we’ve been doing it under two other state laws. We have two other state laws, one is the employer sanction that the Supreme Court ruled in our favor. So, it’s not going to change anything I’m doing, regardless of what that decision is.

Arapaio endorsed GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry in late November, saying Perry “has done more to combat illegal immigration and secure the border than any other candidate in the Republican presidential field.”

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., has granted Sen. Bill Nelson’s request for field hearings into Florida’s controversial new voting law that many say could disenfranchise minorities, young voters and low-income citizens.

Earlier this month, Nelson sent a letter to Durbin asking him to consider “conducting investigative field hearings” to see if the new voting laws were “an orchestrated effort to disenfranchise voters” in a manner that is possibly illegal.”

Durbin replied in a letter yesterday saying he agrees that “regardless of its state intention, Florida’s new voting law will almost certainly disenfranchise a wide swath of young, minority, senior, disabled, rural and low-income voters.”

“In a democracy as vibrant as ours there is perhaps no right more fundamental or sacred than the right to vote. I am deeply troubled by the disenfranchising impact of these recently passed state voting laws,” he wrote.

Durbin wrote that he will hold a “field hearing of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights in Florida … that will explore the impact of the Florida law, as well as the impact of similar laws recently passed in neighboring states.”

Nelson also sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder requesting that the Justice Department launch an investigation into whether the “new state voting laws resulted from collusion or an orchestrated effort to limit voter turnout.”

Florida is currently waiting for a ruling on controversial aspects of the law from a court in the District of Columbia.

Photo credit: Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. (Pic by jonworth, via Flickr) 

In Alabama, comparisons to the civil rights battles of the 1960s are hard to avoid. From local press to the New York Times and beyond, reporters and those they interview are connecting the dots, not generally in a way flattering to the state.

The New York Times was blistering in an editorial published Monday, all but calling Alabama and its lawmakers racist.

Alabama is far from alone in passing a law whose express aim is misery and panic. States are expanding their power to hasten racial exclusion and family disintegration, to make a particular ethnic group of poor people disappear. The new laws come cloaked in talk of law and order; the bigotry beneath them is never acknowledged.

But if there is any place where bigotry does not go unrecognized, it is Alabama.

“It is a fear of folks who are not like us,” said Judge U. W. Clemon, a former state senator and Alabama’s first black federal judge, now retired. “Although the Hispanic population of the state is less than 5 percent, the leaders of the state were hell-bent on removing as much of that 4 percent as possible. And I think they’ve been fairly successful in scaring them out of the state of Alabama.”

If it was just the big-city national media piling on, that would be one thing, bu the local press has more than held its own in this regard.

From al.com:

The nation’s harshest immigration law… is creating nothing short of a “humanitarian crisis” that mirrors the fear and racism felt during the Jim Crow era, opponents of the law said Thursday.

During an afternoon news conference about Alabama’s immigration law, lawyers, educators and children’s advocates said the effects of the law mirror the fear and racism felt during the Jim Crow era and have led to thousands of children being kept home from school, pregnant women being afraid to give birth in a hospital and families having their water supply cut off.

When Alabama’s law was enacted, the Southern Poverty Law Center established a hotline to hear people’s concerns and offer guidance. The SPLC, which has taken a leading role in fighting the law, received more than 2000 calls in the first week the line was open.

The Center for American Progress Monday released a number of lists attempting to quantify the effects of the law.

Among the Center’s findings are that if only 10,000 of Alabama’s 120,000 undocumented immigrants quit or were forced out of their jobs, it would cost the state $40 million in lost productivity. If the federal government was to deport all 120,000, the Center says it would cost taxpayers $2.8 billion.

The Center’s study concluded that undocumented immigrants paid $130 million in taxes last year.

It’s well documented that farmers and Alabama’s agriculture sector in general have struggled mightily since the law went into effect. As both undocumented and documented Alabamans of Hispanic descent or appearance have fled the state, leaving farmers with no one to harvest crops.

One tomato farmer told PBS he had lost $300,000 so far. He’s hired new people to do the work, but few of them have lasted, saying either that the work is too hard, or the pay is too low.

Where do all the immigrants fleeing places like Alabama and Arizona go? any head to the small towns of the Midwest. There is nothing new about this migration to the Midwest, apparently. As small towns in Kansas and Nebraska lose residents to more prosperous places, people of Hispanic descent move in, opening businesses and stabilizing local economies. Mostly, they are welcomed, reports The New York Times. In many cases, when Hispanic children grow up in these small towns, they end up staying to raise their own families instead of moving on in the grand American tradition.

From Monday’s New York Times:

For generations, the story of the small rural town of the Great Plains, including the dusty tabletop landscape of western Kansas, has been one of exodus — of businesses closing, classrooms shrinking and, year after year, communities withering as fewer people arrive than leave and as fewer are born than are buried. That flight continues, but another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region.

Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places. In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave.

That demographic shift, seen in the findings of the 2010 census, has not been uniformly welcomed in places where steadiness and tradition are seen as central charms of rural life. Some longtime residents of Ulysses, where the population of 6,161 is now about half Hispanic, grumble over the cultural differences and say they feel like strangers in their hometown. But the alternative, community leaders warn, is unacceptable.

…

There has long been a strong Hispanic presence throughout the region, which is rich with difficult work in meatpacking plants and on farms, feedlots and oil fields. But over the last decade, as their population in the rural Great Plains spiked by 54 percent — a figure comparable to gains in metro areas in the region — Hispanic residents have pushed from hubs like nearby Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal into ever smaller communities, buying property on the cheap, enticed, many say, by the opportunity to live quiet lives in communities more similar to those in which they were raised.

In the sparsely populated western half of Kansas, every county but one experienced a decline in the non-Hispanic white population, two-thirds of them by more than 10 percent.

At the same time, a vast majority experienced double-digit growth in Hispanic population, more than offsetting the declines in seven counties and many smaller cities and towns. Those places with the highest percentage of Hispanic residents tend to have the lowest average ages, the highest birth rates and the most stable school populations.

The New Mexico Department of Corrections is fining GEO Group, a Florida-based private prison operator, $1.1 million for understaffing one of its prisons.GEO manages three of the four private prisons in the state, including Lea County Correctional Facility, where from September of 2010 to March of 2011 one out of every four jobs were vacant.

The Santa Fe New Mexican reports:

GEO will pay the $1.1 million over several months, the corrections secretary said. In addition, GEO has agreed to spend $200,000 over the next calendar year to recruit new correctional officers for the Hobbs facility.

By contract, New Mexico can penalize The GEO Group and Corrections Corp. of America, the two firms that operate the private facilities, when staffing vacancies are at 10 percent or more for 30 consecutive days.

The settlement represents the first time in years — possibly ever — that New Mexico has penalized the out-of-state, for-profit companies for not adequately staffing the facilities they operate.

GEO is the second largest private prison company in the country, after Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and it operates over 60 facilities in 15 states. The company reported $1.2 billion in earnings and $58.8 million in profit during the first nine months of this year.

The Corrections Department has faced criticism in the past for failing to penalize GEO and CCA for understaffing their facilities in the state. Much of that criticism occurred under a previous corrections secretary, Joe Williams, who called the private prisons “outstanding” despite their high number of vacancies. As the New Mexico Independent reported at the time, Williams had also been hired by GEO as a warden at Lea County Correctional, the very facility for which the company is now being fined.

Isaiah Dennard, the jail services coordinator for the Florida Sheriffs Association, tells The Florida Independent that while regulations are not stipulated in the Florida Model Jail Standards, “specific jails each have their own policies protecting pregnant women.”

“This has been done for years,” he says.

Legislation was recently introduced that would set rules for the treatment of incarcerated pregnant women throughout their pregnancy and even into labor. Although the state Department of Corrections currently has a policy very similar to the proposed legislation, Florida jails do not follow uniform rules to protect pregnant women. The new bill would ensure that no matter where a pregnant woman is detained, she would receive the same protections and treatment.

When the legislation was introduced last session, the state Department of Corrections stated the bill was unnecessary because the department already had similar rules in place.

ACLU of Florida Policy and Advocacy Counsel Julie Ebenstein has said that while the department has uniform policies for prisons, jails do not. There are currently no policies specified in the Florida Model Jail Standards.

Ebenstein says the problems associated with shackling pregnant women “are more prevalent in jails” than in prisons. According to her, the proposed legislation “is not at odds with the Department of Corrections policy.”

However, the Sheriffs Association maintains that the absence of a written policy does not mean that no protections exist.

According to a statement from a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Association:

The Florida Model Jail Standards are just that “standards,” not agency wide policies and procedures. The Florida Model Jail Standards Committee has established state standards for inspections of local detention facilities. The development of operational procedures lies with each individual agency, not a policy decision by FSA through the Florida Model Jail Standards. Each Sheriff or County Jail Administrator have policies and procedures in place to address the use of, type, and when restraints are to be placed on “pregnant females.”

We feel the current system of standards and policies are more than adequate to protect inmates in these facilities. Florida Model Jail Standards are minimum standards, unlike accreditation standards that are at a higher level of jail operations you will see where specific “written directives” are either mandatory or non-mandatory in nature. FMJS can not be written to plan for all “what if” type of scenarios, individual agencies has to take the proactive approach in the development of their policies and procedures.

Dennard says that jails are already “taking care of these women.” He says the Association supports caring for the women in their custody.

Photo credit: Pic by Smithers7, via Wikimedia Commons

The influential lobby for the environment said Friday that it was jumping into the same-sex marriage debate because of its commitment to social justice.

“To achieve our mission of environmental protection and a sustainable future for our planet, we must attain social justice and human rights at home and around the globe,” said Margaret Levin, the state director of the Sierra Club North Star Chapter. “The Sierra Club North Star Chapter has a long history of working together to protect our communities and our planet. We do not tolerate injustice, and we will not stand by and allow our state constitution to be used as a means of dividing communities and harming families.”

It’s one of the first times a chapter of the powerful environmentalist group has backed an LGBT rights issue. The group declined to get involved in California’s Prop 8 battle in 2008 and Maine’s Question One in 2009.

President Barack Obama aboard Air Force One (Pic by The White House, via Flickr)

North Dakota is on its way to becoming the first state in the country to have an operating health insurance exchange program. Each state is required by the Affordable Care Act to have some infrastructure in place by January 2013 for an exchange. Florida remains one of the lone states dragging its feet.

The Grand Forks Herald reports that North Dakota is on track to pass legislation that would set up its state exchange.

According to the Herald:

House Bill 1474, drafted by the Health Care Reform Review Committee after the regular legislative session ended this spring, would create a North Dakota health insurance benefit exchange system.

Under the federal legislation, all states must have an operational health benefit exchange by Jan. 1, 2014 or the secretary of Health and Human Services must create one.

Pam Sharp, director of the North Dakota Office of Management and Budget, said the key component of the exchange would be a new website that would allow residents to compare costs and benefits of affordable health insurance plans.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report (.pdf) that said as of “August 17, 2011, 39 states and the District of Columbia have introduced some form of legislation promoting exchange implementation.”

“Among the 34 states where the legislation would fully establish a state exchange program, ten states enacted such bills into law,” the group reports.

Only 11 states, Florida among them, have not introduced any legislation to establish a state exchange program.

Florida is among only five states not using federal grants meant to help the state plan and research for an exchange. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that “Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire and Oklahoma reportedly will return exchange grant funds.”

This week, health advocates touring the state warned that Florida had done “virtually nothing” to follow the law’s mandates. The groups also warned that the state would cede their authority to the federal government if the state did not meet the deadlines.

The Associated Press reports:

Some doctors, crisis pregnancy centers and women who say they’ve had abortions want to help defend a new North Carolina law that would set more ultrasound requirements before an abortion.

The potential defendants filed a motion Tuesday in Greensboro federal court with the help of legal groups opposed to abortion. They want to intervene in the case to present evidence on why the law should be enforced in its entirety.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles put implementation of the law on hold “until she can hear more arguments.” The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation, Planned Parenthood Health Systems, Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit against the state in October alleging that “the new law violates the rights of health care providers and women seeking abortions.”

This week, anti-abortion groups Jubilee Campaign’s Law of Life Project and the Alliance Defense Fund have filed a motion to intervene in the ruling to defend the law.

Crisis pregnancy centers have been created to attract women facing an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy in order to convince them to keep the pregnancy. NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina recently released an undercover investigation into crisis pregnancy centers. The report said the centers were “a threat to public health.“

Fifty-eight percent of New Mexico teachers are white, despite minorities constituting an overwhelming majority of the state’s student body.

The findings come out of a set of reports published by a Washington, D.C. think tank that examined the dearth of minority teachers in states having a student body less than 50 percent white.

New Mexico’s student-teacher race disparity ranked in the top 12 nationwide, according to the report. The state’s scored a “29,” meaning the percentage of minority students was 29 percentage points higher than the number of minority teachers.

California scored the highest: 72 percent of the state’s students are of color while only 29 percent of teachers identified as non-white. In Texas, Two-thirds of students are non-white yet only one-third of teachers have similar backgrounds.

Others studies also point to the educational benefits of having more teachers of color.

A 2004 paper  analyzing teacher racial composition and pupil test-results in Tennessee found a small boost in student performance on standardized tests when teachers of the same race taught the class. After four years of receiving instruction from a same-race teacher students improved test scores by a range of 8 to 12 percentage points. Those findings applied to white students as well.

More recently, a 2011 working study by economists focusing on a large community college in California pointed to strong gains by minority students taught by instructors from any minority background.

“Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans are 2.9 percentage points more likely to pass courses with instructors of similar background and 2.8 percentage points more likely to pass courses with underrepresented instructors,” it found.

The authors added: “These effects represent roughly  half of the total gaps in classroom outcomes between white and underrepresented minority students at the college. The effects are particularly large for Blacks. The class dropout rate relative to Whites is 6 percentage points lower for Black students when taught by a Black  instructor.”

“Now in making this appearance, I should point out that I am taking into consideration a very profound belief, that I have expressed publicly on many occasions, in the vital necessity for the confidentiality of presidential communications,” Nixon said in an opening statement. “It seems to me today that when we pick up the papers, and particularly in recent weeks, and read of former presidents, President Kennedy, for example, President Johnson, even President Eisenhower, being accused of approving or participating in discussions in which there was approval of assassination of other people is very much not in the national interest, and probably it is, of course, not true.”

There were no drones back then targeting untried suspected enemies of the U.S., but there were approved assassination attempts, as Nixon well knew.

Nixon expands on the need for secrecy:

“Nevertheless it makes the point very strongly that I am going to make right now, and that is that in the Office of the Presidency of the United States, the nation, which is, not by choice, but by the destiny of history, the most powerful in the free world and the only guarantee of peace and freedom in the world, it is necessary for the president to have no- holds-barred conversations with his advisers.

It is necessary for his advisers to believe that they can give him their unvarnished opinions without regard and without fear of the possibility that those opinions are going to be spread in the public print. It is necessary for them to feel, in other words, that they are talking to the President and that they are not going to the press and that is the reason why confidentiality, which I know, not perhaps you gentlemen, but some of the members of your staff, and certainly some of the members of the House and Senate, and most of the members of the press think is not important. That is why it is important and, in my opinion, absolutely vital. That is the reason why I have resisted in the courts, unsuccessfully up to this point, attempts to impinge upon the privileged status of such conversations.”

The transcripts are available for Scribd perusing or download here.

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