5 most educated American cities= Quantifiable Value of Education

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/the-5-most-educated-cities-in-america-and-the-5-least/ss-BBgl825?ocid=iehp

Dec.1-Dec.5 Calendar

Weekly Snapshot/Week at a Glance Dec 1 – Dec 5

Monday 12/1	Tuesday 12/2	Wednesday 12/3	Thursday 12/4	Friday 12/5	Saturday 12/6
Eng I EOC Retest Smal Talk with STUCO Tutoring sessions PLC for NON EOC	Alg I EOC Retest EOC PLC DA2 Meeting with Dr. S Guitar Club	Eng II EOC Retest EOC PLC DA2 Meeting with Dr. S Team Leader Meeting STUCO Meeting	Bio EOC Retest Student picture retakes NHS General meeting	US His ECO Retest 2nd 6 week grade failure report due to PDAS supervisor Luncheon with ladies Action Team Meeting Friday night tech Friday Night School	CIS Workshop Posada

PRISON ARTICLES

America Behind Bars

Incarceration Nation

By LINN WASHINGTON, Jr.

Herman Garner doesn't dispute the drug charge that slammed him in prison for nine years.

Garner does dispute the damning circumstance that doing the time for his crime still leaves him penalized despite his having ended his sentence in the penal system.

Garner carries the "former felon" stain.

That status slams employment doors shut in his face despite his having a MBA Degree and two years of law school.

"I've applied for jobs at thousands of places in person and on the internet, but I'm unable to get a job," said Garner, a Cleveland, Ohio resident who recently published a book about his prison/life experiences titled Wavering Between Extremes.

Recently Garner joined hundreds of people attending a day-long conference at Princeton University entitled "Imprisonment Of A Race," that featured presentations by scholars and experts on the devastating, multi-faceted impact of mass incarceration across America.

The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country on earth, accounting for 25 percent of the world's prisoners, despite having just five percent of the world's population.

America currently holds over two million in prisons with double that number under supervision of parole and probation, according to federal government figures.

Mass incarceration consumes over $50-billion annually across America – money far better spent on creating jobs and improving education.

Under federal law persons with drug convictions like Garner are permanently barred from receiving financial aid for education, food stamps, welfare and publicly funded housing.

But only drug convictions trigger these exclusions under federal law. Violent bank robbers, white-collar criminals like Wall Street scam artists who steal billions, and even murderers who've done their time do not face the post-release deprivations slapped on those with drug convictions on their records, including those imprisoned for simple possession, and not major drug sales.

"Academics see this topic of mass incarceration as numbers, but for millions it is their daily lives," said Princeton conference panelist Dr. Khalilah Brown-Dean of Yale University.

Exclusions mandated by federal laws compound the legal deprivations of rights found in the laws of most states, such as barring ex-felons from jobs and even stripping ex-felons of their right to vote.

"Mass incarceration raises questions of protecting and preserving democracy," Dr. Brown-Dean said, citing the estimated five-million-plus Americans barred from voting by such felony disenfranchisement laws.

Many of those felony disenfranchisement laws date from measures enacted in the late 1800s which were devised specifically to bar blacks from voting, as a way to preserve America's apartheid.

During the 2000 presidential election Republican officials in Florida fraudulently manipulated that state's anti-felon voting law to bar tens of thousands of blacks from voting. For example, many people with common names like John Smith who shared their name with a felon were also barred from voting, despite having clear records.

Yet George W. Bush won by Florida – the state where his brother Jeb served as Governor – by 537 votes. That victory in the state where George W.'s brother Jeb served as governor sent him to the White House.

Policies creating barriers to things like education and employment make it "increasingly difficult" for persons recently released from prison to "remain crime-free" according to a report released earlier this year by the Smart on Crime Coalition.

More than 60 percent of the two-million-plus people in American prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.

"The U.S. imprisons more than South Africa did under apartheid. A nation that promotes democracy has a racial caste in its prisons. We must break that caste system," said the special guest speaker at the "Imprisonment" conference, Pennsylvania Death Row Journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who telephoned from prison.

Racism is written all over the economically/socially debilitating practices embedded in mass incarceration.

A recent University of Wisconsin study found that 17 percent of white ex-con job seekers received interviews, compared to only five percent of black ex-con job seekers – a race-based disparity that is additionally devastating for people of color like Garner.

Ohio State University Law Professor Michelle Alexander, the featured speaker at that Princeton conference streamed live on the internet, said a major reason why imprisonment rates soared during the past four decades despite decreases in crime rates is anti-crime policies craftily manipulated by conservative Republican officials for political purposes.

Harsh anti-crimes policies of the 1970s and 1980s were largely a "punitive backlash" to advances of the Civil Rights Movement, said Alexander, author of the hugely popular 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Pennsylvania's prison population, for example, soared from 8,243 in 1980 to 51,487 in 2010, while the California prison population leapt during the same period from 23,264 to over 170,000.

Incarceration costs are particularly obscene when compared to college costs.

A report released in January 2011 by Pennsylvania's auditor general that noted the Keystone State now spends $32,059 annually to imprison one person…a cost that exceeds the annual $20,074 tuition for the MBA degree program at Penn State University.

A report released in January 2010 by a UCLA professor noted that the Golden State spends over $48,000 annually to imprison one person, more than four times the tuition cost of UCLA for a California resident. Back in 1980, California spent more of its state budget on higher education than on prisons, but that had reversed by 2010, with more of that state's budget going for prisons than for higher education.

America's corrosive War on Drugs – a "war" that basically ignores drug kingpins – has devastated black families, author/professor Alexander said.

"A black child today is less likely to be raised in a two-parent household than during slavery," she said. "In major urban areas almost one-half of black men have criminal records. Thus they face a lifetime of legalized discrimination," encompassing exclusions from employment and access to financial assistance required to secure a viable quality of life.

Africa-Americans are 13 percent of America's population and 14 percent of the nation's drug users but are 37 percent of persons arrested for drugs and 56 percent of the inmates in state prisons for drug offenses, noted the 2009 congressional testimony of Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project and a conference panelist.

Both ex-felon Herman Garner and Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of Princeton's Center for African American Studies, which hosted the conference, expressed similar views on the impacts of mass incarceration.

Dr. Glaude said mass incarceration is a "moral crisis with political and social consequences for America's future," during his remarks opening the conference.

Garner, in an interview, described the US prison system as the "biggest problem" in the American black community.

While politicians pushing punitive policies help drive mass incarceration, its budget- busting persistence implicates the blind-eye of society, said one conference panelist, history professor Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the new director of the fabled Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

"Middle-class whites and blacks in the U.S. are a new kind of 'Silent Majority' regarding mass incarceration," Dr. Muhammad charged. "This 'Silent Majority' supports unjust policies of increased law enforcement and incarceration as the only way to address crime," ignoring proven alternative approaches like "jobs, education and ending societal inequities."

Famed Princeton Professor Dr. Cornell West criticized both the black middle class and black leadership for inaction on mass incarceration.

"The new black middle class and black leadership are not attuned to the suffering in poor black communities," West said during the conference's Keynote Conversation between him and Professor Alexander.

"We need more middle-class people with genuine respect for the poor. This is more than serving as role model mentors," he said.

Author Alexander said ending the "mind-boggling scale" of mass incarceration requires "a major social movement."

One attendee at the Princeton conference, Daryl Brooks, an activist in Trenton, NJ who operates the popular "Today's News N.J." blog, backs Alexander's suggestion.

"To fix this problem we need mass boycotts. America only understands money and violence. We need to shutdown businesses like during the 60s," said Brooks, who spent three-years in prison for a conviction he says was false and aimed at crushing his activism.

"Blacks leaders allowed this incarceration to happen by doing too little to challenge this repression," he said.

The Obama Administration is doing too little to address mass incarceration and its impacts, many of the Princeton panelists and conference attendees agreed.

These critics blast the Obama Administration for what they called its tepid approaches to the torturous scourge of 240 sexual assaults daily in state and federal prisons, charging it with foot-dragging on the Prison Rape Elimination Act which was approved by Congress during the administration of George W. Bush.

While Obama fulfilled a campaign pledge to address the sentencing disparity penalizing powder cocaine more harshly than crack cocaine (a drug derived from powder cocaine), Obama's proclivity for bipartisan consensus has resulted in legislation that lower but did not eliminate the disparity.

That legislation did not apply retroactively, thus failing to mitigate stiff ten-year-plus crack cocaine sentences that have already left many blacks and Hispanics languishing in federal prisons.

"Obama and [US Attorney General Eric] Holder have no courage when it comes to the prison-industrial complex," said Dr. Cornell West.

November 13, 2007

A Small Louisiana Town Struggles to Shut Down a Prison and Build a School

Education Versus Incarceration in Tallulah

By JORDAN FLAHERTY

Tallulah is a small town in Northeastern Louisiana, one of the poorest regions in the US. It is about 90 miles from the now-legendary town of Jena, and like Jena it is a town with a large youth prison that was closed after allegations of abuse and brutality. Also like Jena, residents of Tallulah are involved in a modern civil rights struggle. Their town has become a battleground in the national debate on whether to spend money to educate or incarcerate poor, mostly Black, youth.

On a recent Saturday afternoon I visited Hayward Fair, a civil rights movement veteran from Tallulah. Mr. Fair is one of the founders of People United for Education and Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to transforming the local prison (now called Steve Hoyle Rehabilitation Center and primarily holding adults convicted of nonviolent offenses) into a "success center" which would give classes and training. If they succeed in their struggle it will be the first time in this country - where for decades funding for education has been cut while prisons have been built--that a prison has been shut down and replaced by a school, a groundbreaking reversal of the nationwide trend.

When I met with Mr. Fair he was going door to door with activists from the grassroots organizations Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, Southern Center for Human Rights and Safe Streets Strong Communities. At nearly seventy years old, with muscular arms and a shaved head, he shows no sign of slowing down. "I've been doing a little community organizing," he explained, modestly. As he went from house to house, it seemed everyone in the city knew and respected him, and everyone had an opinion about both the prison and what Tallulah needs. Wielding respect from both his age and his reputation for fighting for justice locally, Fair was bringing a vision of a new Tallulah to residents who have seen a town die around them.

Speaking in a gravelly voice and a deliberate step weighted with experience, Mr. Fair led me to the site of the prison. "When the prison came to town most people weren't even aware of what it was going to be," he said. "It was something that produced jobs and people needed jobs so there wasn't no real resistance to it." But now, the local economy is devastated, and Fair blames the prison, at least in part. "It's killing the economy of the area, in my opinion," he claims. "Prisons only bring money to the owners."

When you enter the city limits, the first thing you see after you pass the "Welcome to Tallulah" sign is the prison, a large complex of 33 buildings surrounded by fence and barbed wire. Standing nearby, Fair gestures down the street. "We're about a block and a half from the junior high school, we're about 5 blocks from the senior high school. Our children have to walk out from the classroom and the next thing they see is all these bars and towers and all these big buildings. It had a psychological effect on the children and the adults as well. It really just devastated this whole city." For several years, the people of Tallulah, aligned with Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, have fought this struggle, to not just close the local prison, but to open something different in its place, to demonstrate that small rural towns don't have to turn to prisons for jobs.

Tallulah, which is seventy percent Black, used to be a town that Black folks would travel from all around the region to visit. To demonstrate his point, Fair took me to the downtown, to street of shuttered storefronts, with virtually no people out. "On a day like this, on a Saturday evening, you could hardly walk down the streets of Tallulah, you'd be bumping into people. You had all businesses on this end of town," he gestured across the street. "All the way down, nothing but businesses; grocery stores, cafes, clothing stores, barrooms, you name it. The town was wide open, stayed open 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Now Fair says, the town is a very different place. "We are working trying to bring our image back up, but we are now labeled as a prison town." As in much of the country, prisons are a big business in rural Louisiana, and this part of the state has several. "You go east you got a youth prison. West down here you got this facility, you go south you got two prisons right outside the city limits." Tallulah is now far removed from its former glory. Young people move away as soon as they're able. "We lose maybe 70% of our young people," he says. "Why should they stay? There's no opportunities here for them."

The prison in Tallulah has a long and notorious reputation. Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone visited in 1998, and incarcerated kids broke onto a roof to shout out complaints about their treatment. The New York Times wrote several articles that same year, including a front page report calling Tallulah the worst youth prison in the US, and the US Justice Department sued the state of Louisiana over the systematic abuse at the prison, where even the warden said, "it seemed everybody had a perforated eardrum or a broken nose."

New Orleans-based journalist Katy Reckdahl chronicled the beginnings of the struggle to transform this prison in an important series of articles several years ago. But now the effort is nearing its final days. Activists have lined up local and statewide support for this important transition, from the community level to meetings with the Governor, to support of national allies such as the Center for Third World Organizing and the Southern Center for Human Rights. With a new Governor on the way, the next few weeks will be crucial for this struggle, and for the fate of Tallulah. If the people of Tallulah win, it will be an important victory for people everywhere concerned about issues of race, education, and criminal justice.

Mr. Fair is proud of the civil rights history of Tallulah, which is located not far from where the Deacons for Defense, a pioneering Black armed self-defense group active during the civil rights movement, was formed. "We had some people here that went off to world war two, then they come back here and were second class citizens," he explained. "They had to ride in the back of the bus. They said were not going to put up with this. So we started a movement ourselves, to eliminate that."

Fair experienced intense white resistance to basic rights for Black folks. "At one point the Klan met about three miles outside of town and had a rally and they was going to come into town that evening. They thought they were going to run all the Blacks out of town," Fair says. But resistance in the town was strong. "When they came into town the streets was crowded. People were walking stiff legged, with their shotguns down under their pants. We told the police were going to take care of ourselves; we don't need you to take care of us. They thought they were going to scare somebody, but nobody here was afraid of them."

I asked Fair how Tallulah fits into a wider struggle. "All the eyes of the world is focused on the Jena Six. But every small community in the south, and in the north, has its Jena Six. Maybe you can't visualize it or maybe you don't want to visualize it, but this is not just small rural towns. Look at New Orleans, during the storm. When the people was trying to cross the bridge to get out of the flood, there were people on the other side, armed, that would not let them cross. In the rest of the nation people are being treated the same way. Chicago, New York, it don't matter where you are."

Before leaving, I asked Fair what kept him in the struggle. "I ain't struggling, I'm free," he answered, explaining that this struggle is not about him. "I'm gonna do what I know is right, and I don't care who you are. I see the young people in the community that need help. That's what keeps me going. If you see something and you feel it aint right, don't say they ought to change it, get in there, roll your sleeves up and say lets change it. That's the only way. You gotta keep a cool head and do the thing that's right. When you know right and fight for it, you're gonna win."

The Hard Sell

The nation's 2 million inmates and their keepers are the ultimate captive market: a $37 billion economy bulging with business opportunity.

By Michael Myser, Business 2.0 Magazine

March 15 2007: 12:37 PM EDT

When crimes does pay

…a massive and expanding $37 billion prison economy.

There are more than 2 million inmates serving time in the United States, up from 744,000 in 1985. America has the world's highest incarceration rate, and the revolving door helps keep those prisons packed: A 2002 study by the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 52 percent of released convicts were back in jail within three years.

"All of these things are terrible, but they are good for business," says Martin Roenigk, CEO of CompuDyne (Charts), a security software and hardware provider to the corrections and homeland security markets.

State prison systems spend more than $30 billion annually, and the Bureau of Prisons budgeted $5 billion for just 182,000 federal inmates this year. That translates into plenty of work for companies looking to crack the prison market.

"Our core business touches so many things - security, medicine, education, food service, maintenance, technology - that it presents a unique opportunity for any number of vendors to do business with us," says Irving Lingo, CFO at Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison operator in the country, with 65 facilities.

$14,000 cells: ready to order

CompuDyne broke into the market in the mid-'90s, when the Annapolis, Md., company was just a $20 million outfit, by purchasing two prison security businesses. The company integrated their electronic and hardware security products - lockdown control and perimeter alert systems, closed-circuit television, blast-proof doors, and bullet-resistant windows.

Since then CompuDyne has ridden the prison market expansion and anticipates $60 million in prison-related sales this year on overall company revenue of $140 million. CompuDyne's latest product, MaxWall, is a modular, prefab prison cell (think high-security cubicle). MaxWall can be dropped quickly into an existing building to accommodate a growing inmate population or serve as a building block for new prison construction.

With 2-inch hollow steel walls, the cells feature built-in lighting, beds, and plumbing. MaxWall, which typically sells for $14,000 to $18,000, is shipped like an erector set and stitch-welded together onsite. The cells can save 10 square feet of space each over conventional cell construction techniques, allowing prisons to accommodate more inmates.

That's particularly important to prison administrators as they grapple with overcrowding and limited budgets. For example, California recently declared its prison system in a state of emergency, in large part because of a lack of cells. The feds, meanwhile, expect the Bureau of Prisons to be about 30,000 beds short by 2011.

That certainly bodes well for MaxWall sales. The company has installed 4,500 cells since December 2002 and has contracts to triple that number in the next year alone. "We expect unchecked growth for the next two or three years," says CompuDyne executive Gary Mangus.

From Park Ave. to Penitentiary Row

The burgeoning prison economy was on display in August at the annual American Correctional Association convention, a sort of Consumer Electronics Show for correctional entrepreneurs. Some 400 exhibitors attended the confab in Charlotte, N.C., showing off their wares - everything from "finger-puppet toothbrushes" and suicide-resistant toilets to transport vehicles and uniforms.

Hundreds of companies also pay to advertise thousands of products and services in ACA's annual buyers' guide, which reaches 125,000 readers of ACA's Corrections Today magazine. Corrections Corporation of America, one of ACA members' biggest customers, forecasts a continued boom.

"We feel very, very good about the business prospects," CCA's Lingo says. The company's profit of $47 million during the first six months of 2006 nearly matched that for all of 2005. The Nashville, Tenn., company is currently building new prisons or expanding existing facilities to accommodate nearly 3,700 more inmates by the end of 2007. California, for instance, recently announced plans to send roughly 1,000 of its inmates to CCA prisons.

…budget, earnings, and prison population trends point to a significant increase in business across the industry. Companies with the patience and products to successfully navigate the prison market should hear quite another sound: ka-ching.

Michael Myser is a writer in New Jersey. 

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I am from…..

I am from ________________________ (an everyday item in your home)
from ________________ and _______________ (products or everyday items in your home)
I am from the ___________________________ (description of your home)
_________________________________ (a detail about your home – a smell, taste, or feel)
I am from the____________________ (plant, flower, natural item)
The __________________________ (plant or tree near your home)
whose long gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.
I’m from _______________ and ________________ (a family tradition and family trait)
from ______________and ______________________ (family members)
I’m from _________________and _________________ (family habits)
and from_____________________. (family habit)
I’m from _______________ and _______________ (things you were told as a child)
and ____________________________________ (a song or saying you learned as a child)
I’m from_________________________ (a family tradition)
I’m from ____________ (place of birth) and ___________ (family ancestry, nationality or
place)
_______________and _________________ (family foods)
From ___________________________________ (a story about a family member)
___________________________ (detail about the story or person)
_____________________________ (description of family momentos, pictures or treasures.)
_________________________ (location of momentos – under my bed, on the wall, in my
heart)
______________________________________________ (more description if needed)
_______________________________________________
By (student name)__________________________ Date_____________
“I Am From” Poem Template

The Gettysburg Address

The Gettysburg Address Gettysburg, Pennsylvania November 19, 1863

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Vocabulary 1.19

Vocabulary

~Recurring- occur again, periodically, or repeatedly.

Ex : Lots of people have recurring health problems, such as back pain or sore knees.

~Reproaching-(someone) in such a way as to express disapproval or disappointment.

Ex : The boy cried and his family watched him with distaste, his mother reproaching him: "Will you control yourself, Edmond?"

~Plodding- slow-moving and unexciting

Ex : every time i walked towards the bus stop i was plodding.

~Sordid- involving ignoble actions and motives; arousing moral distaste and contempt.

Ex : Why is this sordid affair being in the pages of the New York Times?

~Intertwined- twist or twine together.

Ex : my boyfriend i intertwined together.

~Amid- surrounded by; in the middle of.

Ex : the robbers then run towards a dead end and they were amid by policies.

~Exists- have objective reality or being, living .

Ex : discovery channel had found a mermaid standing in a rock , and when it saw them, it went back to the water real fast . discovery channel now thinks mermaids exists.

~Identity- the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.

Ex : some people from north korea hide their identity in china because they don't want to be sent back.

~Contribute- something is to provide a part of the whole.

Ex : If we don’t stand up to a problem, we contribute to it, he said

Vocab 2.4

Organization	Point of view	Ideas	Vignette	Proverbs	Bias
Sentence fluency	Rhythm	Conventions	Irony	Analyze	Critique

Vocabulary 2.3

    Vocabulary 2.3

1. liberation- the process of freeing from control

2. marginalization- to relegate to an unimportant or powerless position within a society or group
3. diversity- state of having many different forms or types; the state of having people who are different races or who have different cultures

4. redemption- the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil; the act of making something better or more acceptable

5. human rights- inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being

6. conflict- fight, argument, or opposing forces

7. allies- friends, groups, or governments joined in association for mutual benefit 

8. absolve- declare free from blame, guilt, or responsibility.

9. internment- imprisonment without trial

10. genocide- mass murder of group of people based on race, religion, culture, etc.

11. odyssey- journey or quest with a goal

 

Vocab Prezis

www.prezi.com

Precis

 

O Me! O Life!

O Me! O Life! BY WALT WHITMAN Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d, Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me, Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined, The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.