New Abolitionists Radio Weekly 12/16/2015

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December 15th 2015:

• Lawmakers in Massachusetts want prisoners to pay room and board. Under Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr’s (R-Gloucester) latest proposal, inmates would have to pay $2 a day for their food and housing. They would have two payment options: coughing up the money after they re-enter society or using money earned through prison labor. You heard it right. Work for slave wages so they can take it right back or leave prison in debt to the state.

• The Prison Policy Initiative released its report laying out the numbers in Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2015. We’ll examine their numbers.

• Using a tactic straight out of the black codes circa 1866 four students at Tennessee Bolivar Central High School were charged with indecent exposure for reportedly wearing sagging pants to school in November, and two of the students were jailed for the offense.

• In the oral arguments Wednesday for a Supreme Court affirmative action case, Justice Antonin Scalia—a well-known critic of affirmative action—suggested that the policy was hurting minority students by sending them to schools too academically challenging for them. Basically saying black children are too dumb for white schools.

• Representing a group of black pastors Bishop E.W. Jackson says “Police are an absolute necessity for the safety of law-abiding citizens in the community, and so calling them ‘pigs in a blanket’ and saying insulting things only serves to make things less safe for the average Black person that is not out there committing crimes. Secondly, that the black lives matter groups are disgraceful, demonic and evil. Also saying ” the fact that literally every year thousands of young Black men are dying in the streets in Black-on-Black crime is completely ignored” by Black Lives Matter.” We’re going to talk about this living in a bubble, white Jesus and slave master loving ignorance tonight.

• While Max gets reorganized in the new house our America is Ferguson Series will be on hold. I’m literally running on an internet that has 1/10th the processing power it should have making research online this week very difficult.

• This week’s Rider of the 21st Century Underground Railroad is George Allen Jr. was exonerated on January 18, 2013, in St. Louis, Missouri, after serving over 30 years in prison for the murder of Mary Bell, a young court reporter. Allen was convicted based in part on a false confession, police “tunnel vision” and blood type evidence that was said to include Allen, but actually eliminated him as a possible contributor.

• In honor of the past week’s events pertaining to the celebration of the 13th amendments 150th anniversary s Our Abolitionist in profile tonight is Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

Expect all of that and more tonight on New Abolitionists Radio.

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