I am pleased to announce that we are back on our blog with weekly and daily updates. To keep you informed on what we are doing at TOPS. We are gearing up for this new year with a very intentional effort to making change this year.
Sunday, December 20, 2020
Friday, August 6, 2010
Thank God for the drug reform bill President Obama signed reducing the disparity in federalmandatory sentences between crack cocaine and powder cocaine convictions.The 25 year-old law that Congress just changed subjected tens of thousands of blacks to longprison terms for crack cocaine convictions while giving far more lenient sentences to those,mainly whites, caught with the powder form.
Blacks serve almost as much time for drug offenses (58 months) as whites do for violentoffenses (61 months). Though this new law is a congressional compromise, it is a huge stepforward in reforming our overly harsh and wasteful drug laws.
The old 1986 law was enacted at a time when crack cocaine was considered a violent drug.However, in 2002, twenty-eight U.S. Court of Appeals judges and many District Court Judgeswho were formerly U.S. Attorneys, wrote the Sentencing Commission condemning the notion asnot scientifically accurate and recommended its repeal.
There’s still much work to be done as the law applies to only federal defendants, not state laws.Most drug arrests occur at the state level.
We started this journey for justice in 2001. Our many trips to Washington, DC were coveredby the Dothan Eagle, WTVY, WDHN, Southeast Gazette and Rickey Stokes News. Local andregional debates followed with law enforcement officials that wanted to keep the DraconianLaws. The door opens again for those who have not participated in reform to join in doingso now. Otherwise they will be looked upon as preserving a racial caste system that wasabolished with chattel slavery.
We must continue to locally address related issues like lack of family support, ministry andrehabilitation of those incarcerated because of repressive attitudes toward “lawbreakers”, evenafter being “punished”. How long will we allow local political culture to shape our local socialculture by discretionary drug enforcement practice here–the real morally and socially unjustbehavior that destroys lives?
Pastor Kenneth GlasgowFounder, Executive DirectorThe Ordinary People Society (TOPS)403 West Powell St. Dothan, AL 36303Office / Fax: 334-671-2882Cell: 334-791-2433
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Blacks serve almost as much time for drug offenses (58 months) as whites do for violentoffenses (61 months). Though this new law is a congressional compromise, it is a huge stepforward in reforming our overly harsh and wasteful drug laws.
The old 1986 law was enacted at a time when crack cocaine was considered a violent drug.However, in 2002, twenty-eight U.S. Court of Appeals judges and many District Court Judgeswho were formerly U.S. Attorneys, wrote the Sentencing Commission condemning the notion asnot scientifically accurate and recommended its repeal.
There’s still much work to be done as the law applies to only federal defendants, not state laws.Most drug arrests occur at the state level.
We started this journey for justice in 2001. Our many trips to Washington, DC were coveredby the Dothan Eagle, WTVY, WDHN, Southeast Gazette and Rickey Stokes News. Local andregional debates followed with law enforcement officials that wanted to keep the DraconianLaws. The door opens again for those who have not participated in reform to join in doingso now. Otherwise they will be looked upon as preserving a racial caste system that wasabolished with chattel slavery.
We must continue to locally address related issues like lack of family support, ministry andrehabilitation of those incarcerated because of repressive attitudes toward “lawbreakers”, evenafter being “punished”. How long will we allow local political culture to shape our local socialculture by discretionary drug enforcement practice here–the real morally and socially unjustbehavior that destroys lives?
Pastor Kenneth GlasgowFounder, Executive DirectorThe Ordinary People Society (TOPS)403 West Powell St. Dothan, AL 36303Office / Fax: 334-671-2882Cell: 334-791-2433
AKPC_IDS += "2501,";
Pastor Kenneth Glasgow Writes About Drug Reform
Submitted by People of the Wiregrass on August 4, 2010 – 5:07 pmNo Comment
It’s hard to think of a more wasteful way to spend tax dollars than locking up marijuana users. But, in the midst of a budget crisis, this is exactly what Alabama is doing.
Your legislators could change that. Alabama is already taking a serious look at its sentencing practices — but they need some encouragement. So please, ask them to get their priorities straight and to support sentencing reform. Please urge legislators to introduce legislation to stop wasting money and ruining lives by incarcerating people for possessing marijuana.
There are clear harms entailed in the practice of putting lots of unenforceable or unenforced laws on the books and consigning a significant swathe of your population to the category of “lawbreakers”. On the one hand, this promotes contempt for the law. On the other hand, it allows police and government to lock up many people at will, since most people are always violating some law or another, and that’s a discretionary power that governments tend to abuse for repressive political purposes.
The government also derives extortionary power from its ability to lock people up at will, which leads to corruption. In autocratic countries across a wide spectrum of development, from Guinea to Russia, you tend to find all of these things occurring together: a broad range of normal economic and political behavior is criminalized, the citizens treat the law as an arbitrary set of irritating technicalities to be evaded, government uses police powers to repress political opposition, and police and government officials make their living by shaking people down.
Parts of this syndrome (criminalizing normal behavior, contempt for the law, shaking people down) also describe the way drug laws function in much of America. So the question arises of whether we should legalize pot. Sarah Palin recently said we shouldn’t, but that marijuana use isn’t much of a problem–and should be a low priority for law enforcement.
What I think what we’re seeing here is the wrong-headed notion that an appropriate way to express disapproval of a behavior is to simply make it illegal, but then wink and nod on enforcement as if this is some sort of middle ground.
If you don’t think a law should be enforced, you should support repeal of the law. All “compromise” accomplishes is granting police almost unfettered discretion. If smoking pot is still technically illegal, police can enforce the law when they choose, targeting certain people for arrest while turning a blind eye to others engaging in the exact same activity.
I’ve now learned in some of those foreign countries that are famously tolerant of drug use, it turns out that “tolerant” is the operative word. For example, while there are periodic calls in the Netherlands to move to complete legalization of soft drugs, that initiative never seems to get anywhere. But neither do calls for actual prosecution of marijuana possession and use.
So while the Netherlands, Denmark, and so forth are among the countries that court public contempt for the law and repressive police practices by keeping marijuana use illegal, they also keep the “lawbreakers” unpunished in practice. And yet these countries have failed to turn into Russia.
I think what we’re seeing in the United States is the impact of a national political culture shaping the practices of governance over other national social institutions when it comes to drug laws here. It would be nice if we could arrive at an ethically and logically consistent legal stance on drug use, but it may be that in practice that’s very hard to do, and not actually very important. Basically, while Sarah Palin’s position on this issue, as on many others, is semi-deliberately incoherent, it is in this case a semi-deliberate incoherence that has proven to be effective policy in many countries, and it might be the stance to begin on the issue in the United States.
Pastor Kenneth GlasgowFounder, Executive DirectorThe Ordinary People Society (TOPS)403 West Powell St. Dothan, AL 36303Office / Fax: 334-671-2882Cell: 334-791-2433
Submitted by People of the Wiregrass on August 4, 2010 – 5:07 pmNo Comment
It’s hard to think of a more wasteful way to spend tax dollars than locking up marijuana users. But, in the midst of a budget crisis, this is exactly what Alabama is doing.
Your legislators could change that. Alabama is already taking a serious look at its sentencing practices — but they need some encouragement. So please, ask them to get their priorities straight and to support sentencing reform. Please urge legislators to introduce legislation to stop wasting money and ruining lives by incarcerating people for possessing marijuana.
There are clear harms entailed in the practice of putting lots of unenforceable or unenforced laws on the books and consigning a significant swathe of your population to the category of “lawbreakers”. On the one hand, this promotes contempt for the law. On the other hand, it allows police and government to lock up many people at will, since most people are always violating some law or another, and that’s a discretionary power that governments tend to abuse for repressive political purposes.
The government also derives extortionary power from its ability to lock people up at will, which leads to corruption. In autocratic countries across a wide spectrum of development, from Guinea to Russia, you tend to find all of these things occurring together: a broad range of normal economic and political behavior is criminalized, the citizens treat the law as an arbitrary set of irritating technicalities to be evaded, government uses police powers to repress political opposition, and police and government officials make their living by shaking people down.
Parts of this syndrome (criminalizing normal behavior, contempt for the law, shaking people down) also describe the way drug laws function in much of America. So the question arises of whether we should legalize pot. Sarah Palin recently said we shouldn’t, but that marijuana use isn’t much of a problem–and should be a low priority for law enforcement.
What I think what we’re seeing here is the wrong-headed notion that an appropriate way to express disapproval of a behavior is to simply make it illegal, but then wink and nod on enforcement as if this is some sort of middle ground.
If you don’t think a law should be enforced, you should support repeal of the law. All “compromise” accomplishes is granting police almost unfettered discretion. If smoking pot is still technically illegal, police can enforce the law when they choose, targeting certain people for arrest while turning a blind eye to others engaging in the exact same activity.
I’ve now learned in some of those foreign countries that are famously tolerant of drug use, it turns out that “tolerant” is the operative word. For example, while there are periodic calls in the Netherlands to move to complete legalization of soft drugs, that initiative never seems to get anywhere. But neither do calls for actual prosecution of marijuana possession and use.
So while the Netherlands, Denmark, and so forth are among the countries that court public contempt for the law and repressive police practices by keeping marijuana use illegal, they also keep the “lawbreakers” unpunished in practice. And yet these countries have failed to turn into Russia.
I think what we’re seeing in the United States is the impact of a national political culture shaping the practices of governance over other national social institutions when it comes to drug laws here. It would be nice if we could arrive at an ethically and logically consistent legal stance on drug use, but it may be that in practice that’s very hard to do, and not actually very important. Basically, while Sarah Palin’s position on this issue, as on many others, is semi-deliberately incoherent, it is in this case a semi-deliberate incoherence that has proven to be effective policy in many countries, and it might be the stance to begin on the issue in the United States.
Pastor Kenneth GlasgowFounder, Executive DirectorThe Ordinary People Society (TOPS)403 West Powell St. Dothan, AL 36303Office / Fax: 334-671-2882Cell: 334-791-2433
Thursday, June 10, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
T.O.P.S. (THE ORDINARY PEOPLE SOCIETY)CONTACT: REV. KENNETH GLASGOWADDRESS: 403 West Powell St. Dothan, AL 36303 Phone: 334-671-2882Website: www. http://www.wearetops.org
E-Mail: topssociety@yahoo.com
MISSISSIPPI INJUSTICE: A DOUBLE-LIFE SENTENCE FOR $11.00!
Dothan, Alabama —- In a trial fraught with legal malpractice and witness coercion, Mississippi Judge Marcus Gordon oversaw one of the most blatantly corrupt trials in history, culminating in the staggering over-sentencing of sisters Gladys and Jamie Scott to double-life each in an armed robbery where no one was murdered or harmed and transcripts state that the amount alleged to have been taken was a whopping $9.00 -$11.00.
Human rights activist, Dick Gregory, is urging everyone to support the June 21, 2010 Gray-Haired Witnesses Fast for Justice in Washington, DC. The upcoming day-long event will call attention and bring publicity to the shocking case of the Mississippi Scott Sisters, who have served 15 years 8 months of double life sentences each. The public fast, press conference and rally also calls attention to the entire system of justice which increasingly incarcerates and over-sentences.
The Ordinary People Society is in full endorsement of The Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice National Day of Fast. T.O.P.S is headquartered in Dothan, Alabama and successfully operates as a nonprofit, faith-based organization that offers hope, without regard to race sex, creed, color or social status, to individuals and their families who suffer the effects of drug addiction, incarceration, homelessness, unemployment, hunger and illness, through comprehensive faith-based programs that provide a continuum of unconditional acceptance and care.
In addition to endorsing the Washington, DC Fast For Justice on June 21, 2010, T.O.P.S. is co-hosting The Scott Sisters Education Rally during the Juneteenth Celebration at Dalton Deer Park, 902 Dalton Street – Jackson Mississippi on June 19, 2010 from 11-am to 7pm. President and Founder Rev. Kenneth Glasgow feels that the Scott Sisters travesty of justice is an issue that should remain in the forefront globally. T.O.P.S. has chapters in the United States abroad. Rev. Glasgow has advised that all chapters support freedom for The Scott Sisters.
For more information about the Day of National Fast for the Scott Sisters
Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice1- 866-968-1188, Ext. 2ghwitnesses@gmail.comhttp://www.grayhairedwitnesses.blogspot.com/
var addthis_language = 'en';
T.O.P.S. (THE ORDINARY PEOPLE SOCIETY)CONTACT: REV. KENNETH GLASGOWADDRESS: 403 West Powell St. Dothan, AL 36303 Phone: 334-671-2882Website: www. http://www.wearetops.org
E-Mail: topssociety@yahoo.com
MISSISSIPPI INJUSTICE: A DOUBLE-LIFE SENTENCE FOR $11.00!
Dothan, Alabama —- In a trial fraught with legal malpractice and witness coercion, Mississippi Judge Marcus Gordon oversaw one of the most blatantly corrupt trials in history, culminating in the staggering over-sentencing of sisters Gladys and Jamie Scott to double-life each in an armed robbery where no one was murdered or harmed and transcripts state that the amount alleged to have been taken was a whopping $9.00 -$11.00.
Human rights activist, Dick Gregory, is urging everyone to support the June 21, 2010 Gray-Haired Witnesses Fast for Justice in Washington, DC. The upcoming day-long event will call attention and bring publicity to the shocking case of the Mississippi Scott Sisters, who have served 15 years 8 months of double life sentences each. The public fast, press conference and rally also calls attention to the entire system of justice which increasingly incarcerates and over-sentences.
The Ordinary People Society is in full endorsement of The Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice National Day of Fast. T.O.P.S is headquartered in Dothan, Alabama and successfully operates as a nonprofit, faith-based organization that offers hope, without regard to race sex, creed, color or social status, to individuals and their families who suffer the effects of drug addiction, incarceration, homelessness, unemployment, hunger and illness, through comprehensive faith-based programs that provide a continuum of unconditional acceptance and care.
In addition to endorsing the Washington, DC Fast For Justice on June 21, 2010, T.O.P.S. is co-hosting The Scott Sisters Education Rally during the Juneteenth Celebration at Dalton Deer Park, 902 Dalton Street – Jackson Mississippi on June 19, 2010 from 11-am to 7pm. President and Founder Rev. Kenneth Glasgow feels that the Scott Sisters travesty of justice is an issue that should remain in the forefront globally. T.O.P.S. has chapters in the United States abroad. Rev. Glasgow has advised that all chapters support freedom for The Scott Sisters.
For more information about the Day of National Fast for the Scott Sisters
Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice1- 866-968-1188, Ext. 2ghwitnesses@gmail.comhttp://www.grayhairedwitnesses.blogspot.com/
var addthis_language = 'en';
The Ordinary People’s Society is pleased to announce the second “People’s Family Reunion for Formally Incarcerated People our Friends, Family & Loved ones” will take place at the second US Social Forum in Detroit, MI. TOPS is based in Alabama and is dedicated to solving the injustices around formally incarcerated people locally, state-wide, regionally and nationally. During the first US Social Forum we worked with partner organizations to develop the idea of a People’s Family Reunion to take place during social forums. The goal of the Family Reunion is to develop a space to gather, share strategies, build relationships across organizations & communities that are working on issues related to the prison industrial complex. The first People’s Family Reunion brought together almost 2000 people in a local park in Atlanta with speakers, food, and tables of organizations doing work to end the injustices that formally incarcerated people face in our society. TOPS would like to thank the local leadership in Detroit for helping to organize and host this Family Reunion process because we know what it means to have so many people coming from around the country to your city and the need to respect local leaders who are doing the work every day to make another world possible. Together we can make another historic gathering happen and advance the movement for social change as it relates to the Prison Industrial Complex.
If you would like to be involved in this years People Family Reunion please contact Reverend Kenneth Glasgow at: topssociety@yahoo.com
If you would like to be involved in this years People Family Reunion please contact Reverend Kenneth Glasgow at: topssociety@yahoo.com
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