Tag Archives: feature

Debating Criminal Justice Reform

For more on this topic, join us at the Murphy Institute on October 19th for this month’s Labor Forum: Black Lives Matter & the Fight for Fifteen: A New Social Movement? 

When looking to reform our obviously broken criminal justice and carceral system, at what point must we examine the structural causes of urban crime? Can we address some of the damning injustices of our criminal justice system without first addressing urban poverty and the conditions that produce and uphold it?

blacksilentmajorityThe latest issue of Dissent Magazine features a debate from two corners of the Murphy Institute. Murphy Prof. Michael Javen Fortner, whose new book Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment came out to wide coverage and acclaim this fall, argues that we need to begin by taking an honest look at the roots and effects of urban crime if we want to achieve meaningful and enduring criminal justice reform.

Meanwhile, Marie Gottschalk, professor of political science at thecaught University of Pennsylvania, member of the New Labor Forum editorial board, and writer of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, argues, “Alleviating the poverty and income inequality that are at the root of extraordinarily high levels of violent crime in certain communities will take some time. In the meantime, no compelling public safety concern justifies keeping so many people from these communities locked up or otherwise ensnared in the carceral state.” Continue reading Debating Criminal Justice Reform

Introducing: The Murphy Institute Writing Center

Students at the Murphy Institute have always done a lot of writing, from the short “zaps” Professor Ed Ott assigns his labor studies M.A. students to the major research papers assigned in classes across Murphy’s programs.

As of this fall, they now have a Writing Center to help with the writing process — a place where they can bring any assignment, at any stage of the writing process, to receive feedback and guidance.

Are you a Murphy student looking to improve a piece of work and/or sharpen your writing skills? Sign up for an appointment here.

Watch this page for updates on a program of reading and writing skill-boosting workshops offered by the Writing Center.

Photo Credit: Housin Aziz via Noun Project

Remembering Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015)

Grace Lee Boggs was no ordinary activist. A trailblazer in the civil rights, black power, labor, environmental justice and feminist movements, she formed strong and enduring relationships, reflected deeply, and contributed to the foundation on which so much grassroots innovation, exploration and resistance continues to take place in Detroit.

Boggs died yesterday morning at the age of 100 in her home in Detroit. We remember her as a leader and hero, and look to her legacy for lessons on how we can wage struggles now and in the future: with tenacity, bravery and love.

From the New York Times obituary by Robert D. McFadden:

Born to Chinese immigrants, Ms. Boggs was an author and philosopher who planted gardens on vacant lots, founded community organizations and political movements, marched against racism, lectured widely on human rights and wrote books on her evolving vision of a revolution in America.

Her odyssey took her from the streets of Chicago as a tenant organizer in the 1940s to arcane academic debates about the nature of communism, from the confrontational tactics of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement to the nonviolent strategies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and finally to her own manifesto for change — based not on political and economic upheavals but on community organizing and resurgent moral values.

“I think that too much of our emphasis on struggle has simply been in terms of confrontation and not enough recognition of how much spiritual and moral force is involved in the people who are struggling,” Ms. Boggs told Bill Moyers in a PBS interview in 2007. “We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently.”

For the full obituary, visit the New York Times.

For video clips of Boggs throughout the years, visit Democracy Now!

Photo by Kyle McDonald via flickr (CC-BY).

De-Unionization & the Future of Work

Pacific Standard is working on a special project in which experts and activists weigh in on the future of work. In a recent entry (The Future of Work: The Forces Against Organized Labor, Oct 1, 2015), Murphy Prof. Ruth Milkman outlines the forces producing the decline in unionization in the United States. She writes:

Contrary to popular belief, de-unionization is not primarily due to globalization or new technology: Successful attacks on organized labor have affected many place-bound low-tech industries, like construction or hospitality, nearly as much as manufacturing. The primary driver of labor’s decline is the growing power of corporate employers who are fiercely determined to weaken unions where they already exist and to prevent their emergence elsewhere. That determination is reinforced by the ideology of market fundamentalism, for which both unionism itself and governmental protection of the right to organize are anathema. Continue reading De-Unionization & the Future of Work

More Press for Black Silent Majority

Murphy Prof. Michael Fortner’s new book Black Silent Majority: the Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment has taken the media world by storm, garnering press from publications, radio and television. In addition to coverage in the New Yorker and Chronicle of Higher Ed, the book has been featured in the NYTimes and New York Magazine and on Brian Lehrer.

From Fortner’s own op-ed in the New York Times last week, The Real Roots of 70’s Drug Laws:

Today’s disastrously punitive criminal justice system is actually rooted in the postwar social and economic demise of urban black communities. It is, in part, the unintended consequence of African-Americans’ own hard-fought battle against the crime and violence inside their own communities. To ignore that history is to disregard the agency of black people and minimize their grievances, and to risk making the same mistake again.