REVEREND JESSE JACKSON

25 MARCH 2009

  Q20  Margaret Moran: When we are seeing whole countries becoming governed effectively by drugs cartels—Colombia, Guinea Bissau, parts of West Africa are effectively ruled by the drugs mafia, and this is all happening at an incredibly alarming speed—it clearly indicates that our attempts to disrupt the global drug supply have failed to date. What new actions, what different things should we be thinking about, in order to prevent that happening and to disrupt this supply?

  Rev Jackson: We must admit we are failing and not keep giving out false reports, as if someone has a magic wand. There is no magic wand. We do know that what drives the supply is the market and the demand. The nations that have the most money tend to have the highest demand. We also know that the programme so far to, say, destroy the drug-growing fields have not succeeded; but at least we know where the supply is and we know where the demand is. To know that is a step in the right direction. Now comes a serious commitment to stop the flow at the ports or down the highway, at the source of origin. That requires the kind of commitment that we make to fighting a physical war. Now we are fighting essentially an emotional war. The drug growers may have found the soft spot in the moral belly of strong societies. They may know they cannot beat us, as it were, physically or militarily. They may have found a soft spot in the belly of the strong nations. Unless we are able to resist the temptation to make this market lucrative, we will keep losing. I even hate to use the term "losing" and I try to dismiss it from my repertoire; but the fact is that the drug flow and the gun flow are growing. When our leaders, I might add, are able to engage in pre-emptive war, are able to engage in mass thievery of whole economies, and only face reprimands, they lose trust capital. They lose the moral authority to speak to the situation, as indeed leaders at every level must be able to do. Parents, teachers, ministers, politicians at every level must be able to address it.

  Q21  Chairman: Is this also a failure of foreign policy? The drugs that seem to come to America are originating in South America, which in a real sense is an area that has always worked very closely with successive American administrations, be they Democrat presidents or Republicans. What can be done in terms of international co-operation between South American governments and the United States to stop the inflow of this huge amount of drugs, especially at the border between Mexico and the USA?

  Rev Jackson: In that case we lost 6,000 Mexicans killed last year. That is more than were killed in Iraq in five years, for example. So it is serious. There are targeted urban markets for the drug flow. That, with the combination of those drugs and those guns, is in fact real internal wars. The numbers killed in Chicago, New York and LA—these are Baghdad-type numbers but not seen with the degree of seriousness as Baghdad, as unstable. It is not just the Mexico-US border crisis or Colombia; it is Afghanistan as well. We know the poppy seeds come from there; but wherever these drugs are coming from, we have some need to build economic alternatives. That is the other point, Chairman. When Europe was down, we did not say, "Go for yourself"; we invested in an infrastructure called the Marshall Plan, to help rebuild strong societies, schools, hospitals, roads and businesses. The countries that are mostly the producers are poorer countries, which have very little to lose when they are caught or when they are captured. Poorer countries are fighting us with the weapon of a drug that we find irresistible to our values and our appetite. I think they have found a soft spot and that soft spot must be made well; it must be made whole.

  Q22  Bob Russell: Reverend Jackson, for the benefit of the British audience, I understand the Obama Administration has pledged to expand the use of drug courts of which, I believe, there are currently about 2,000 in the United States. How does a drug court operate?

  Rev Jackson: Well, a drug court really means you take the non-violent users, the low-level drug dealers, and work on some process of rehabilitation, not just jailing. We know that locking up these `five grammes of crack' kids in federal prison is creating a jail industrial complex for profit. We have two major jail corporations on the Stock Exchange; the Correctional Corporation of America is on the Stock Exchange. In most southern states the impact of not just them, I might add, but the impact of the drugs and the talk of the risk is having a controlling factor in Illinois, and the Governor sought to close two prisons, with great regret as we need them because, if we do not have half of these prisons, we have lost plants, we have lost farms, but the jail becomes the source. If you have got a 900-cell jail in your county and around that jail you can get your local Wal-Mart and your local drugs store and your local movie theatre, and the former farmers now are prison guards and they then supply food and clothing to those who are inmates, you build a whole economic system around the jail industrial complex and it becomes addictive. Those who are in jail, by the way, are considered to be residents of that county while they are in jail, so they get revenue-sharing based upon the population, half of which may be a jail population. So in the south, where we may have 2.5 million Americans in jail, it is a business, so the privatised jail system for profit is creating some onerous by-products.

  Q23  Bob Russell: I do not think I want to see that job-creation scheme introduced in the United Kingdom!

  Rev Jackson: Well, if I may add, what happened and what kind of drove this in part was a famous basketball player named Len Bias who used to play with the Bostons, so he signed that day, he was going to be a big basketball star, and he overdosed on drugs, it seems, apparently that night and there was a reaction, "How can I save myself from this terrible crack thing?" Within about ten days of diddly, they passed a Bill in Congress to save us from crack, so for five grammes of crack, mandatory sentencing, 500 hundred grammes of powder, probation, a 100 to one ratio, so youths were staying in jail for long periods of time based upon that. That was no drug court, the process at the local level, and there was no plan to, say, monitor this while they got a job skill, there was no plan to let these youths work their way out of their problems through a schooling process, so now these kids who are being recycled back into society and re-entering are now less able to get a job because they have a record, which makes them bait for recycling.

  Q24  Bob Russell: So what is your view then of the effectiveness of these 2,000 drug courts and of the similar initiatives?

  Rev Jackson: Well, the effect is that it works when it is applied. I think that President Barack is right about that. I think the idea of not using these youths in their formative years as financial bait for the jail industrial complex, remember, these youths need to be healed not jailed, they need to be educated not jailed, trained not jailed. This idea that you lock them up rather than lift them up is an idea that is not working. That gave some people emotional satisfaction and a false sense of security. The reality is that these children in their formative years need education and job training and jobs.

  Q25  Tom Brake: Reverend Jackson, can I just go back briefly to what you said about university campuses not being raided. Do you think that the US and possibly UK drugs policy would be much more effective if in fact police resources were targeted on the university campuses where the big users, the rich users, are based?

  Rev Jackson: You can go in one of two ways. You can either begin to raid campuses. If you go up on a couple of high-profile universities in Britain and do a drug raid, you will get a huge reaction from people of power whose children are going to be damaged by that process. Are you going to let the same laws applying to those on the ghetto corners have the same relaxed notion? It points you in one of two ways. You can either begin to take on this, and we know that the big campuses are major consumers of drugs and we know that the police are not going to go up on those campuses and do major drug-busts. We know that, if they do, there is going to be a major political reaction to it, so we do not do it, so at least give the others the same even playing field. We, in America, have made such a crime of marijuana, for example. We have taken low-level drugs and made them as if they were assault weapons and it is not working. It is a very costly non-remedy.

  Q26  Chairman: We are dealing with two issues, knife crime and drugs, which seem to affect, in particular, the black community. Is that a correct way of summarising the problems? Is it just black-on-black crime or does it go beyond this?

  Rev Jackson: You know, there are areas in Britain where it is basically white-on-white, and you tend to stab people that you know or people you are familiar with. In America, in Wyoming and Montana, the ratio of killings has risen in inner-city USA, for example, so there is an ethnic issue to it, but we should not limit it to an ethnic issue. That is why I started out by saying that this issue is about children in the light are driven by hope and children in the dark are driven by fear, the light and dark places bring about the cycle of fear. It is from those dark areas of despair that we are getting our best athletes and some of our most noble soldiers. We are also getting from that same area scientists and it is from that area that we get our athletic champions, football, basketball, baseball, golf and tennis. We get our singers from that area, we get our artists from there, so there is more than rhythm and music in these poor areas. There are scientists, there are philosophers, there are engineers and they simply do not have a way out. If you can play ball well, you are going to get the scholarship and maybe it is a way out. Well, why cannot science be a way out? Why cannot engineering aptitude be a way out? Why cannot medical aptitude be a way out? We must create, I am convinced, more light in the darkness and more ways out. Children of colour being in jail as a proportion does not reflect some DNA problem. It is not natural, it is a social phenomenon and, therefore, it has a social solution.

  Chairman: That brings us on to our final questions.

  Q27  Mr Winnick: Reverend Jackson, this is a wider question, if you do not mind. You have been associated with the Civil Rights Movement in your country for most of your life and I believe you were with Martin Luther King at that terrible moment 41 years ago next month when he was murdered. Can I ask you, did you think in your own lifetime that there would be a black President? Were you sufficiently optimistic?

  Rev Jackson: I did. I did not know who nor when, but I saw America evolving, maturing and changing, and the change agents were the civil rights workers and martyrs. On August 20 1955 Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi. It was tolerated by the State and there was no real pursuit of those who lynched him, but there was a great outcry when his mother brought his withered body back in open casket in Chicago and people saw it, and a new resolve kicked in. It was just after the decision to end legal apartheid, August 20 1955. On August 28 1963, eight years later, the King was speaking in Washington on apartheid. The day he spoke in Washington, I might add, from Texas across to Florida up to Maryland, blacks could not use the same public toilet, nor Latinos, and we could not rent a room at a Holiday Inn or buy through the Howard Johnson's or take pictures on the lawn of the state capital and we were living in the spot of apartheid, but on that day he told America of his promise that he had made a number of years before where he dreamed of the day we would be beyond that situation.

  Q28  Chairman: But you yourself were arrested in the early 1960s.

  Rev Jackson: In 1960, but on August 28 2008, Mr Chairman, President Barack was the Democrat nomination in Denver, so, if I think of August 20 1955 and Emmett Till, August 28 1963 with the King speaking of a dream in Washington and 2008 with Barack Obama becoming a nominee for the President, I see an evolution of our consciousness. During that same period, a lot of things took place. One was affirmative action, and affirmative action is majority black, brown and female. It is illegal to have more access for men than for women, it is illegal. It is illegal to lock out blacks and browns from access to education and jobs and training, so in that process we began to create more interaction in our universities, more people of colour and women became lawyers, doctors, judges and politicians which led to integration, you begin to have African-American and Latino coaches at every level of government, so you had this process taking place and it began to integrate our consciousness. I just say this in closing, that I went to a Super Bowl football game two years ago and walking down the street were two white women and their husbands and babies, wearing Tony Dungy's name on the back of their jerseys, and he was a black coach for the Indianapolis Colts, and two young black guys jogged past us, wearing Brian Urlacher jerseys, and he is a white line-back for the Chicago Bears. As I looked at them, I had cause to pause because of 45 years of more interaction and affirmative action, more inclusion and that we would go to the football game that day and choose really a fine fellow for his skill, it was not about race, not skin colour, learning that we had survived apart and we are now learning to live together. That has been a big jump to go from surviving, and we can survive apart, but we are learning to live together and then we are living in dormitories. President Barack's classmates from Harvard, who were his big supporters in the campaign, are Colombian, and our President and his wife went to Harvard Law School together, so now we see all this interaction. When you have these walls, East and West Germany, as it were, on both sides of the wall there is ignorance, there is hatred, fear and violence. When the walls come down, there is less ignorance, less hatred, less fear, less violence, and that is why, when you look at this report, let us pull down the walls and build up bridges. President Barack's winning did not reflect an advancement in our capacity, but in our opportunity and he ran a marvellous, disciplined, well-financed race. He could only run because the walls were down and because we had gone from something called `winner takes all'. I might add, Mr Chairman, that sometimes we have what I call a `tyranny of the majority' in politics where the majority voted. If you do not include the minorities in that process, you are going to have the tyranny, you are going to have democratic tyranny. We say we walk into Iraq so that Shi'ites and Kurds must have some proportional government, they are included. We say in South Africa whites must be involved, so it does not have black tyranny, but has participation. We, in America and in Britain, must also see proportionality and shared participation as key to making a democracy really work for all of its people under one big tent.

  Q29  Chairman: Do you think that Dr Martin Luther King's dream has now been fulfilled?

  Rev Jackson: No, because his dream kept expanding. One dream in 1963 was to end denial of public accommodations based upon race. The day he gave that dream, black soldiers did not have the same rights as Nazi POWs on military bases, but we won that battle in 1964. Then he dreamed of the right for all Americans to vote and we won that battle. Then he dreamed of open housing, that you could live where you could afford to live, and that was another dream. Then he dreamed of ending the war in Vietnam and then we had to internationalise our struggle. Now, he was castigated and hated for fighting the Vietnam War, saying it was out of his domain. This year, President Barack won because of opposition to the Iraq War because he changed our consciousness. Then the last stage, Chairman, was to fight poverty. His point was that we have all these freedoms and we have these disparities between have and have-not, between white and black where some perpetuate the wealth through inheritance and others cannot earn wealth through working, that that structure created the wall that had to come down, so his last dream was that. I am sure he would be delighted with a level of joy only he could express with an African-American President because it is for America a redemptive, transformative moment and his hope for the whole world is the big deal. On the other hand, while we have this growth of African-American tennis players, soccer players and ball players, we see that growth, but, on the other hand, look at these gaps between who is in jail and who is in school. Look at the low life expectancy of the poor and, whilst we have this joy of having Barack there, we have lost six million people in the Congo and Sudan in the last eight years. We have this joy of the President and we are anxious about the Gaza crisis where 1,100 have been killed, but 3,500 died from cholera in Zimbabwe and maybe even more than that from all the illnesses, so the work of making this a more perfect world by having the basics for all of us, drinkable water for all of us, a commitment to fight HIV/AIDS for all of us, vaccinations for children for all of us, global literacy for all of us, an even playing field for workers everywhere, to me, those are the unfinished dimensions of his dream.

  Chairman: Reverend Jackson, unfortunately, some of those areas go beyond the remit of the Home Affairs Select Committee, but I think I speak for all members of this Committee when I say thank you very much for giving evidence at this very special session, for concluding our inquiry into knife crime and for setting the scene for our major inquiry that we will start in April into drugs. Thank you for coming today.