New Abolitionists Radio Weekly 12/23/2015

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Our stories tonight include;

• A report from the Daily Xexus say The University of California has sold approximately $25 million worth of indirect investments in private prison corporations after the Afrikan Black Coalition, which encompasses UC’s nine Black Student Unions, revealed in November that the University held shares in private prisons.

• A study by Vera Institute of Justice says that U.S. jails now hold nearly 700,000 inmates on any given day, up from 157,000 in 1970, and the Vera Institute of Justice found that smaller counties now hold 44 percent of the overall total, up from just 28 percent in 1978.

Jail populations in mid-sized counties with populations of 250,000 to 1 million residents grew by four times and small-sized counties with 250,000 residents or less grew by nearly seven times, Vera’s analysis shows. In that time large county jail populations grew by only about three times.

• A report from Counter Current news cites an injunction filed by the FOP which insists that preserving records that may be used against corrupt CPD violates Section 8.4 of its bargaining agreement with the City of Chicago and they have begun to destroy evidence.

• In a microcosm example of a widespread issue nearly 10 per¬cent of the Greenwood, Mississippi’s 15,000 population was on probation for minor offenses like traffic violations and owing fees to ta private Probation Company. The company had entitled itself to profits of at least $48,000 a month, all paid for, as one county official said, “off the backs of the poor people.”

•The Los Angeles Police Department has announced that of 1,356 allegations of biased policing against them by civilians, zero of those allegations were valid.
Imagine that.

In our America Is #Ferguson Series I get to speak from personal experience. As a NJ native I feel it is my honor and duty to expose this slave state. So tonight I take it home and show with facts that New jersey is Ferguson.

• This week’s Rider of the 21st Century Underground Railroad is Ramona Brant. Brant, 52, had been serving a life sentence for a first-time, nonviolent cocaine possession charge. Brant was one of 95 federal inmates whose sentences he commuted Friday, the vast majority of whom were nonviolent drug offenders like her.

• Our Abolitionist in profile tonight is Robert Smalls (1839 – 1915).