Colorado the Last Great Slave State

This week minority leaders in Denver finally flexed their collective muscles and forced the city's corrupt safety manager, Ron Perea, to resign following his refusal to discipline several Denver law enforcement officers involved in a string of well publicized abuses against minority victims. Instances of recent police abuse range from the unprovoked beating of Michael DeHerrera outside of the LoDo nightclub, to the murder of Marvin Booker, a 54-year-old street pastor, by sheriff's deputies in the Denver County Jail.

Just two hours south of Denver and miles away from the media spotlight lies the 13 prisons that comprise the Fremont Correctional Complex - better known by the inmates as “The Plantation.” This conglomeration of prisons holds hundreds of disenfranchised inmate- slaves that have been kept years past their legislatively intended release date for the sole purpose of the economic and political gain of the plantation owners.

Unfortunately, police and prison abuses are on the rise and there does not seem to be enough outrage or leadership from the NAACP and the ACLU to sustain the social activism needed to pressure the rich white political leaders to end the systemic bigotry and abuse found in Colorado - the last great slave state.

Plantation Owners
The plantation policy and attitude starts at the very top of the state leadership in the historically pale faced Governor’s Office and flows like a polluted river through the Capitol. From to the white former prosecutor turned Governor, to the white former prosecutor and head of CDOC turned Attorney General, to a state legislature that in the next session will have only a handful of Hispanic representatives and possibly not a single elected black representative...not a single one.

Despite campaign promises to the contrary, Gov. Bill Ritter has continued to build the slave state that his white predecessors started. Under Ritter, education funding, often the best way for minorities to raise themselves out of subjugation, was slashed by $260 million. The discriminatory cuts were particularly hard felt in minority districts where recent test results showed that less than 25 percent of black students perform at grade level.

While minority students languished and skilled black teachers fled the state in record numbers, Ritter approved an increase in the CDOC budget and the opening of a new prison in Caucasian dominated Fremont County. Ritter must have decided minorities needed someplace to go after failing out of school...prison.

The heir to fitter's throne is beaver's white Mayor John Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper has overseen a city rife with police abuse against minorities, but has managed to insulate his apathy and support for the status quo by installing fall guys to absorb the political hits of his bigoted policies and practices. (Does anyone believe he would have asked the FBI to investigate police abuse in Denver if it wasn't an election year?) Meanwhile, his white police chief insists we don't have all the facts yet on the spat of criminal actions of his police officers - or maybe he just hasn't invented the truth yet. Hickenlooper on the other hand knows the truth, while minority students were failing in his schools he too christened a new jail - the jail where Booker was murdered by sheriff's deputies. See the pattern here...cut
education...build new prisons...assault minorities...collect
campaign contributions from builders, police, and corrections advocates.

Plantation Economics
Large police forces and a large prison system are economic engines for the civil liberty abusing government plantation owners. Deriving political and economic benefit from the abuse and subjugation of others, the plantation owners pull the strings from Denver and their offices at CDOC and the parole board, while exploiting the servitude of those incarcerated in the almost exclusively white southern counties. The transfer of wealth is staggering. Taxpayers in the rich north pay to fund the ballooning $700 million CDOC budget. Those millions are then distributed through inflated salaries to the largely uneducated unskilled white CDOC employees. These employees purchase goods and services from the mostly white local economy, pay taxes back to the state, fund the oversized police forces, and buy status quo politicians.

This is a closed system of government sponsored self-serving wealth redistribution. Nowhere in this system is justice - true justice, where the punishment fits the crime, considered. The paramount consideration is how long can the slave bosses in the parole office keep an inmate-slave incarcerated for the financial exploitation of the plantation owners. One CDOC official put it this way, “The state loves the indeterminate sentence - it allows them to harvest inmates indefinitely, and that’s money in the bank.”

In the meantime, down on the slave estates, inmates are kept for the sole purpose of the financial gain of state employees and the local economy. As appalling as it is, inmates are harvested, a continuous taxpayer funded cash crop. When the new, unneeded, maximum security prison opened this month, inmates were pulled from required - legislatively mandated - mental health therapy to work in the new prison. The therapy is required for those inmates with indeterminate sentences to be considered for parole.

Unfortunately these slaves are the most prized by CDOC because they are mostly nonviolent and considered the lowest security risk by prison officials. The state's desire to hold onto their cash cow can be seen in the parole statistics of these slaves. Since the state has determined they can hold these inmates indefinitely, less than 4 percent have been paroled in over a decade. Why release your best slave, especially when they are job creation/ security to a whole industry of guards, administrators, and therapists. These inmates are worth their weight to the state in taxpayer gold, and the state is going to make sure they stay on the plantation, no matter what the law says.

Plantation Entitlement
The plantation analogy is not just appropriate inmates are treated and freedom denied, but it is also seen in the attitudes and feelings of entitlement of law enforcement and prison officials. White case managers and guards regularly refer to black inmates as ''niggers.'' The papers are full of examples of cops from Denver to Pueblo using racial slurs during routine encounters with the public. In a recent incident a Fremont prison guard locked two inmates with indeterminate sentences into a freezer and taunted them with derogatory comments, then left them to freeze. No charges were filed against the officer for felony illegal confinement and prisoner abuse. Weeks later, in the same facility, a senior prison officer sexually assaulted an inmate. No charges were filed against the senior officer for felony sexual assault. Like the abusive Denver police, CDOC operates from a mind-set of entitlement and impunity. Slaves after all are property, they exist without rights or feelings, they are not people, but rather a means to an economic gain.

Conclusion
So we have come full circle, from police brutalizing minorities in Denver, to the lack of meaningful minority political representation in the legislature, to diminishing minority academic opportunity, and finally ending with the plantation prison mentality prevalent throughout the state. Police and CDOC lobby for bigger police forces, more prisons, and stiffer sentences all in the name of public safety yet crime rates are decreasing and recidivism rates are low for the population they want to incarcerate the longest.

The parole board lords over a period of decreasing parole rates, but are immune from public transparency laws and do not have to explain their practices - absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Existing prisons are filled, new prisons are justified, more employees hired by the state empires expanded. None of the state's actions have to do with justice or public safety, but everything to do with money, power, and exploitation.

The fair question to ask is how did we get here? What has led to the feeling of entitlement for the majority and the dehumanization of the disenfranchised minority that allows the plantation owners to abuse with impunity? Greed maybe, people have done terrible things for much less than $700 million.

Maybe they feel they are somehow better, smarter, more moral and can therefore exert their will over the weak and take what they want. Or maybe it is scape goating, creating demons for the masses to fear in order to justify abusive actions and inflated budgets.

I do not pretend to know the root cause of Colorado's harmful distortions, but to ignore that this bigotry and plantation culture is not happening is to hide our heads in the sand, to ignore it is to condone the abuse, and it has been condoned too long. While our attention was drawn away from the problem our prisons were filled and a street preacher was murdered while sheriff's deputies high-lived over his dead body. What is almost as sad is that the organizations empowered and trusted to check the unfettered abuse of civil liberties by the government have turned a cold shoulder to the plight of disenfranchised Colorado citizens. The Justice Department has ignored the cries for help.

The NAACP and ACLU have been intimidated into inaction, choosing to champion the rights of white nudists in Boulder instead of picketing City Hall, the Capitol, and the CDOC and parole board offices to advocate for the rights of those oppressed. Civil liberties are not situational, conditional, or subjective - they either apply to all or they apply to none. Where would the civil rights movement be if the founders of the ACLU and NAACP had not protested, had not marched, had not risked much to hold a mirror up to expose the ugly face of bigotry and exploitation.

The struggle to hold Coloradans violent political and justice system accountable is dangerous for those that oppose the corruption. But until these individuals and institutions are made uncomfortable through civil resistance to their actions, slaves will continue to be beat on our streets, murdered in our jails, and used indefinitely to line the pockets of the rich white masters.