POST FROM MANSFIELD (COOL CLEVELAND) ON BILL MASON, THE CUYAHOGA COUNTY CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AND MORE

FROM COOL CLEVELAND.COM
       An excerpt from: "Mansfield: The End of an Era? Perhaps."




By Mansfield Frazier



Mama, take this badge off of me
I can’t use it anymore.
It’s gettin’ dark, too dark to see
I feel I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.
-Bob Dylan

"When Stephanie Tubbs Jones out-maneuvered and out-politicked all opponents to win the coveted prosecutor’s job back in 1991, the Westside Irish political machine vowed to never again allow what they viewed as an “outsider” — someone not handpicked by them — to hold so powerful a position in Cuyahoga County. With Bill Mason (who, by the way, is not of Irish descent) at the helm, indeed the machine has — with few exceptions — been a controlling factor in every county election since then… especially those for judgeships.

 

 

And county reform did nothing to curb the machine’s power — after all, reforming government is totally different from reforming politics, which is a far more difficult task to accomplish and takes decades rather than one election cycle. As some have wryly noted (and took exception to), the same insider political mechanism (and machinations) that’s always been in place were again used to transfer power to Mason’s successor, Tim McGinty. Mason steps down a few months early so Democratic Party insiders can handpick his successor. “I thought we went through county reform to put an end to that kind of machine party manipulations?” one observer recently queried, in an exasperated fashion. “Fat chance of that,” I replied.

 

 

Mason’s career, however, has a touch of Greek tragedy swirling around it as the end nears. A bright, gifted lawyer, he early on in his career rightfully could have been dubbed the “James Brown of Cuyahoga County”… since he was far and away the hardest working man in local politics. But, alas, he also was — in a sense — a victim of the times he rose to power in.

 

 

He came into office 14 years ago with high hopes of moving up the political ladder to become a U.S. senator, or perhaps governor. But this was a time of Strum und Drang in American criminal justice — the height of the dark period when our nation was about the business of building what would eventually become the largest carceral system the world has ever known. And it was up to local county prosecutors nationwide to feed the beast that was being created if it were to survive… and Mason complied and did his part with alacrity — better yet, even gusto.

 

 

While the U.S. population has increased approximately 2.8 times since the 1920s, the country’s prison population has increased 20 times, with the bulk of that increase coming after 1980. And when governors like Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm proposed commonsense changes to reduce prison overcrowding, the state’s prison guard’s union picketed her residence, complaining such reforms would cause job loss.

 

 

Not satisfied with simply locking up dangerous people who commit violent crimes (something even fools and Pollyannas agree with doing), in the mid-1980s — as the country took a hard swing to the right — we began locking up non-violent people we were simply mad at, along with addicts of every ilk and stripe (except for wealthy ones) and those with mental disabilities. And those targeted to be subjected to the brutality of a justice system run amok were selected by police with a surgical-like precision: young black males were (and often still are) being sent to prison for the same petty drug crimes young white males are sent to bed with no supper for committing. To wit: Blacks, whites and Hispanics all buy sell and use drugs at the exact same rate — 11 percent of each group’s population, yet blacks are seven times as likely to wind up in prison for drugs as whites, and Hispanics are five times as likely. Yet no prosecutor locally or nationally cares to look at this glaring disparity and ask why. I’ll give you a hint: selective enforcement, the dirty little secret of police departments nationwide."

 

Read the rest HERE (at CoolCleveland.com)

 

 

"From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com."