Meghan Kallman – RI Future

July 5, 2016July 6, 2016

Community supports Benny’s and redemption amid GoLocalProv ‘controversy’

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Last week, GoLocalProvidence published an article provocatively entitled: “New Benny’s Ad Features Convicted Murderer”. A more appropriate title would have been “New Benny’s Ad Features Criminal Justice Success Story”. Or “New Benny’s Ad Illustrates the Potential of Nonviolence”.

The controversy about the ad centered on the presence of Sal Montiero Jr., one of a dozen or so Rhode Islanders in the video. Montiero did a relatively long bid at the state prison for second degree murder. Many have objected to his appearance in the ad because of that record.

I teach college courses at the state prison, and I have students like Sal who spend their time while incarcerated getting an education, improving their self-understanding, and trying to equip themselves to be more effective and compassionate human beings once they are released into society. They are there because they have made mistakes, but almost without exception, the students that I have taught in the prison work very hard to become better versions of themselves.

This is no small task, even for those of us who are not incarcerated. It takes courage to face and atone for our mistakes, especially very serious ones that deeply affect the lives of others. Self-improvement is challenging, and getting an education is a long road.

Montiero, by all accounts, is an example of how we want our justice system to work, and an example of someone stepping into his full potential when given a second chance. He was released from prison, is holding down a job, and importantly, that job is teaching nonviolence through the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence. He is trying to help others avoid making the mistake that he made, and teaching a practice that will benefit everyone. This is important work that our community needs desperately. He took the consequences mandated by the legal system, took advantages of the opportunities for self-improvement within the prison, and has been participating positively in the world since his release.

If our goal is to ultimately have safer, healthier communities that benefit everyone, then we would do well to celebrate, rather than shame, the success stories. Congratulations, Sal. Benny’s, I applaud your inclusivity. You have my business.

June 6, 2016

Rhode Island considers repealing “tampon tax”

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A bill under consideration at the Statehouse, sponsored by Representative Edith Ajello and Senator Louis DiPalma, would repeal the sales tax on tampons, menstrual products, and single-use medical supplies. If Rhode Island passes it (and we should) we would join growing ranks of states that have repealed the so-called “tampon tax”—and we would distinguish ourselves by including other medically necessary items in that repeal.

Tax policy is complicated, and many injustices (intentional or not) are hidden within it. Sales tax in general is considered a “regressive” tax, meaning that it represents a higher portion of poor people’s income than it does of wealthy people’s income. Specifically, taxes on menstrual products and single-use medical supplies penalize people for conditions that they can’t help.

Most states in the US, including Rhode Island, tax “tangible personal property” but make exemptions for select “necessities”. These necessities include groceries, food stamp purchases, medical purchases (prescriptions, prosthetics, some over-the-counter drugs), clothing, and agriculture supplies.

In Rhode Island, as elsewhere, menstrual products (including tampons, sanitary pads, menstrual cups, and panty liners), as well as single-use medical supplies (such as diabetes strips) fall under the category of “hygiene products,” and are considered “luxury items.”

They are therefore taxable.

As almost any woman could tell you, periods are not luxurious. Menstrual products are a basic necessity for reproductive-aged women; the tax is particularly unjust since it targets people already at the wrong end of the wage gap. On average, a woman will, in her lifetime, use more than 11,000 tampons or pads, and is expected to spend approximately $5,600 on these items. Of that, nearly $500 is sales tax.

The same is true for people with illnesses that require regular single-use medical supplies. People suffering from diabetes cannot “opt out” of their daily insulin checks, and those needing regular injections would hardly classify them as “luxuries”.

Of the fifty US states, forty currently tax menstrual products. In the past several years, five states (Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania) have repealed the “tampon tax”. In Delaware, Alaska, Montana, Oregon, and New Hampshire there is no sales tax at all.

Other states have been engaging this question, and there is movement across the country to reconsider, reshape, and/or repeal the tax on sanitary products. Five states (California, Utah, Virginia, Ohio, and New York) either have active coalitions working on this issue, or have introduced bills. Several weeks ago, Chicago repealed the “tampon tax”.

Even President Obama agrees that taxing medically necessary supplies is unjust.

“I have no idea why states would tax [menstrual products] as luxury items,” President Obama said in a YouTube interview to blogger Ingrid Nilsen: “I suspect it’s because men were making the laws when those taxes were passed.”

We support this bill in Rhode Island that would re-classify menstrual products and single-use medical supplies as “necessities,” thus eliminating the sales tax on such items, and we are proud of the fine efforts of our state legislators.

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman, Robin Dionne, and Christina Morra are fellows at the Women’s Policy Institute.

May 9, 2016May 9, 2016

Privatizing our water neither responsible nor just

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Last week Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, based on recommendations from the National Resources Network, explored the idea of selling the water supply board as a way to remedy the city’s financial woes. While I am sympathetic to the challenge of meeting the Providence’s financial obligations, I believe that privatizing water is a dangerous option and should be abandoned immediately. Water is a public good and a human right, and does not belong in the hands of private companies.

We need look no further than the recent disaster in Flint, Michigan, for examples of how private involvement with a public good can be perilous. The Flint story, at the outset, sounds a lot like Providence’s—a broke city government, needing desperately to save money, ended its contract with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department and changed its water source. Nearly a year before the news broke of the widespread lead poisoning, the world’s largest water corporation, Veolia, had judged the water safe. The city of Flint had hired Veolia to evaluate water quality, and Veolia’s report didn’t mention the lead that made thousands ill. Veolia is a company—its first concern is making money, not public health. Those who paid the price were the residents, particularly the children.

2015-11-30 World AIDS Day 006 Jorge Elorza — Elorza

Or there was the case of Cochabamba, Bolivia. Between 1999 and 2000, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets in response to at attempt to privatize the municipal water company. The so-called “Water Wars” put Cochabamba on the map, because the local government sold its values short in trying to make a buck off of the most basic human need. (The citizens prevailed, by the way, after five months of clashes with the police. Privatization was reversed).

Flint and Cochabamba are two examples, but there are many reasons to be skeptical of privatization. On average, privately owned water systems charge 59% more than publicly owned systems. This amounts to a difference of $185 in water costs per year, which can represent a substantial percent of someone’s income, especially if that person is in a lower income bracket.

More broadly, to privatize a public resource relinquishes control over a vital public good. To privatize would limit public accountability—corporations are accountable to their stockholders above all, not to the citizens of Providence. And it follows that the objectives of a profit making water company can, at times, conflict with the public interest. Do we really want to put ourselves in this type of situation?

Six years ago, the UN General Assembly declared that access to clean drinking water was a human right. As climate change makes accessing fresh water progressively more difficult, we will have to be particularly thoughtful about how we manage one of our most precious resources. Privatization is neither responsible nor just.

May 6, 2015May 7, 2015

Non-violence is not non-confrontation

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As the nation watched Baltimore grapple with the latest wave of police brutality, there has been a great deal of outcry in the media and opinion pages touting the virtues of “nonviolence.” We have seen in the past weeks that it is possible to have angry confrontation without violence. Anger is powerful: it represents the pain of the aggrieved, and the stakes of the fight. One can yell peacefully in anger, yet we have no category to understand such behavior. We should be supporting anger; what’s more, we should avoid conflating “non-confrontation” with “nonviolence.” Extolling the perceived virtues of non-confrontation—in the name of nonviolence—weakens a movement.

Protestors in Baltimore have angrily expressed frustration with media coverage of their city. Media, they say, refused to cover the structural injustices that have created the problems Baltimore faces, and yet greedily run images of looting, painting the city and its African-American citizens as lawless. Angry confrontation and violence are synonymous in people’s minds thanks to this kind of representation.

Ta-Nehesi Coates argues that nonviolence, when it “begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, exposes itself as a ruse.” He calls nonviolence the “right answer to the wrong question.” His point is that when nonviolence is advocated as an attempt to avoid the repercussions of oppression, it rings false.

For me, the lesson from this is a little different. It is also straightforward: first, to move a big system, people need to get angry. Second, angry protest—not violent protest— that puts people on the line can effectively do that. Protests are necessary because they move outside the institutionalized form of dissent (petitions, letterwriting, etc.) that are easy for those in power to ignore. Quite literally, protests command attention.

I am a sociologist, and study after study in my field finds that, in order to take on a large and entrenched power structure, people need to break out of the rules that structure imposes. The Civil Rights movement did not achieve success because people wrote polite petitions and met with their legislators, although they did—it was successful because people took to the streets. Female suffragists seeking the vote in America were arrested for picketing because they could not make legislators listen to “polite” requests. Power is rarely, if ever, shared willingly that way. Challenging powerful systems requires acting outside that system. If a political structure is not designed to acknowledge grievances from people, people must go outside of it to be heard. In Baltimore, that means being in the streets. And in Baltimore, it worked.

That, to me, is what the events of the past few weeks are about. It is empowering: 10,000 people protested in the wake of the Freddie Gray murder. Contrary to the popular media accounts, the vast majority of protests were peaceful. People were justifiably angry. And Baltimore officials responded: the city is pressing charges against the six officers who killed Mr. Gray.

Nonviolence is a principle to which I adhere in my own life. It should not be conflated, however, with non-confrontation, or with non-anger. Anger here is rational. It is confrontation of injustice, accompanied by emotional commitment, that moves mountains.

March 19, 2015

Highway protest bill represses free speech, discourages activism

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A bill being considered by the state Senate would make interfering with traffic on a street, sidewalk, or highway, a felony. A felony, we should remember, carries minimum prison sentences, and directly or indirectly disenfranchises people for life. The bill, introduced in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the nation this winter, is sponsored by state Senators Lou Raptakis, Frank Lombardo, Frank Lombardi, Mike McCaffrey and Paul Jabour, who purport to want to protect public safety. There has been a great deal of outcry about the possibility of blocking ambulances during protests. This sort of objection and these sorts of laws, however, are manifestations of the systematic repressions that protests like Black Lives Matter seek to change.

For one, both the United States and Rhode Island prisons are full to overflowing (I know—I teach community college classes in the RI Adult Correctional Institution). As a nation, we also know that we have a problem with mass incarceration. In fact, it is one of the few bipartisan issues that currently has any traction. Filling more prison beds with nonviolent activists does not help.

Designating people felons disenfranchises them—in some ways formally and directly, and in other ways informally and indirectly. Convicted felons can vote in Rhode Island, but that is not the case everywhere, and there are almost universal employment and housing consequences for those with felony convictions. If every Rhode Islander who participated in blocking highways during the Black Lives Matter protests was convicted of felonies, a substantial portion of the activists in our state would not only be locked away for some time, but permanently relegated to second-class citizenship. To suggest that the bill has another purpose is to engage in delusion.

The threat of felony convictions would, of course, discourage activism, which is a grave mistake. Activists—indeed, civil disobedience—is responsible for some of the greatest social transformations in history, including the suffrage and civil rights movements, to name just two. Activism and civil disobedience have an important place in American democracy.

Third, ambulances are routinely deterred from highways for reasons unrelated to protest. Several months ago President Obama visited Providence, and the highway was shut for several miles during his stay, necessitating a full detour around the city for many of us to get home. There was no outcry about closing highways for such an occasion.

Fourth and finally, because of the bill’s language and the great degree of police discretion it implies, the legislation could scoop up the homeless, further criminalizing poverty. The bill targets anyone that “stands, sits, kneels, or otherwise loiters on any federal or state highway” and that “could reasonably be construed as interfering with the lawful movement of traffic”—meaning, of course, that those who live on the streets would be prosecutable for simply being there.

The First Amendment protects our right to free speech. To turn over the decision of determining when a protest has become “interference” effectively passes off that right to free speech to the discretion of the officers patrolling the event. The bill is on the table in Rhode Island, but it has tremendous implications for freedom of speech elsewhere, and could powerfully affect the climate of activism in the entire country.

Senator Raptakis, for example, thinks that highway blockades are “not the best way to protest.”

Hearing this, I am reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous remarks from the Birmingham Jail about the “moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who,” King concludes, “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

Let’s let this bill die.

March 10, 2015March 10, 2015

Hold elected officials to a higher, not lower, standard

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Last week I discussed Gordon Fox’s guilty plea for bribery, fraud, and filing a false tax return with students in my introductory sociology class at the men’s medium prison. Their reactions were immediate and articulate: one indignantly remarked that he himself had stolen a great deal less money than the former speaker, and yet was serving a longer prison term. Where, he wanted to know, was the justice in that?

“You might expect stealing from a guy like me,” he said, baring his arms covered with tattoos. But Gordon Fox had an extra responsibility to behave ethically, as an elected representative who specifically undertook to safeguard the common good.

Much data has shown that rule of law applies differently to different groups of people. One need only read the New York Times’ coverage of Ferguson, or Michelle Alexander’s award-winning book, should one need convincing. While this is deplorable everywhere it occurs, my student’s point was straightforward: that those who we elect to care for the collective should be held to a higher standard of behavior, not a lower one.

Rhode Island has been the laughingstock of the country for well over a century for our unwillingness confront political corruption. If there was any doubt as to the need for reinstating the state ethics commission’s authority (famously dismantled in 2009), one might think such doubt would be assuaged by this most recent display of selfishness and disregard for Rhode Islanders, our tax dollars, and our intelligence.

We need more than Governor Raimondo’s milquetoast pro-forma comment that, “the situation is unacceptable” or current Speaker Nicholas Mattiello’s lackluster statement that he is “disappointed.” We need meaningful action from our leadership. Revisiting the ethics commission would be a good start. A real campaign finance bill would also help. We need for everyday Rhode Islanders to do more than wring their hands and go back to work.

More than that though, our leadership must understand—not just claim to understand—that holding public office is a privilege. Like being a parent or a teacher, it means the onus is always on you to be the “good guy.” You are never off the hook.

Former Speaker Fox should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. His behavior is an insult to all of us who work hard to make Rhode Island a good home and a good example.

February 26, 2015February 27, 2015

The ‘Prison Op/Ed Project’ teaches civic engagement, writing

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Incarcerated students in my CCRI Introductory Sociology course are expected, like my students elsewhere, to write 1-2 page reflection papers each week on themes that we discuss in class. Writing is, of course, one of the most important liberal arts competencies, and it is part of my job as a professor to help students find their “voices”—their tones in writing that permit them to most clearly express themselves.

Sociology is the study of human society, and we talk about everything from gender to class to race to education to inequality to crime and deviance throughout the course of a semester. These weekly class reflection papers (we call them “thinkpieces”) are designed to give students the opportunity to apply theory to real life: to take ideas from the classroom and use them to make sense of their own experiences. This is sociology’s task and, of course, its promise.

These “thinkpieces” of students in prison are generally of extraordinary caliber, and offer both insights into the human beings who serve time, and into the social dynamics that contribute to all of our lives.

In the fall of 2014, a student at the men’s medium-security facility wrote a very compelling reflection paper on the subject of public education. We had been studying social institutions in class, and he had been reading both the textbook and a supplementary piece by well-known academic-turned-journalist Jonathan Kozol.

When grading his paper I noted that it had the skeleton of a good op/ed: it identified a relevant problem in the news, it explained why it was important, it offered a solution, and it was of unsurpassed eloquence, especially for someone that had initially been very hesitant to participate in discussion.

Publication demonstrated for Aaron that he can still make a positive, substantive impact on society. And for society, his publication demonstrated that incarcerated people can still make a positive, substantive impact. RI Future editor/publisher Bob Plain and I knew we had discovered a way to combine our crafts to facilitate constructive participation from people inside.

Thus began the Prison Op/Ed Project, an on-going series of timely op/ed writing to be published on RI Future by CCRI sociology students living in Rhode Island prisons.

With the assistance of Bob and myself, students learn to write sociological analyses of problems that use empirical evidence and consistent argument, rather than anecdote or hyperbole. They learn how to address different audiences, and how to shape those analyses for public consumption. They have a soapbox, and also get—in some cases for the first time—exposure to readership outside their inner circles.

Finding one’s voice and writing for a public is an important part of civic education, and writing has the potential to unlock some of the best of human nature. It is our hope that this project makes students better, more empowered, and more articulate actors and critics, for both themselves and the world.

Prison Op-Ed Project contributors are all students in CCRI’s Introductory Sociology Class, which itself is a part of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections Special Education Program. Read a recent study by the staff of the Correctional Education Association, the US Department of Education, and the Indiana Department of Correction on the benefits of correctional education programs.

Aaron Carpenter: Does racial injustice still exists? Look at our schools