OSI Vice President Remarks to Council on Foundations

Remarks of Gara LaMarche, Vice-President, Open Society Institute, accepting the 2003 Paul Ylvisaker Award for Public Policy Engagement to OSI from the Council on Foundations on April 29, 2003:

I am pleased to accept this award on behalf of our chair and donor, George Soros; our president, Aryeh Neier; our farsighted staff and supportive trustees; but most importantly, on behalf of the many individuals and groups struggling for social and economic justice that the Open Society Institute has been privileged to support, here in the United States and around the world.

I’m pleased to do so in Texas, a state which was once my home and which I love. Receiving an award named for Paul Ylvisaker, for advancing the values he embodied and lived, is particularly poignant for a number of our trustees who knew and worked with him closely—Joan Dunlop, founder of the International Women’s Health Coalition; John Simon, the Yale Law School professor and nonprofit guru; and Herb Sturz, founder of the Vera Institute of Justice, the Afterschool Corporation and many other innovative and visionary institutions.

I hope the day comes soon when the Council gives out as many awards for public policy as it now does for publications, films and websites, because the policy engagement is so rich and varied that it can’t be captured by a single award.

Let me try to give some content to the bland concept of “public policy.” These days, as I think about the state of justice and equality in our country, and the meager response of so many of us with power and privilege, I am often angry. And I’m not ashamed to be angry. There is a lot to be angry about.

I could talk about the anger I feel when lifelines for poor students and families like afterschool and urban debate programs face cutbacks and closings while Halliburton and Bechtel grow fatter rebuilding Iraq. Or when poor single mothers thrown off welfare face ever more draconian work requirements while tax cuts redistribute wealth upwards to those who are already the very richest few. The catalog of outrages is thick. But I want to talk about a matter of particular concern to OSI, at the heart of the award you have given us, and that is the state of criminal justice in America.

America’s bitter legacy of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow lives on in the criminal justice system. The poll tax is no more, but a third of the African-American men in three Southern states are permanently barred from voting because of their criminal records. Not only are our prisons and death rows filled with people of color in gross disproportion to their numbers in the population, but at every stage of the system, from who the police stop and question to who is strapped on the gurney awaiting the executioner’s needle, we make it clear that we value the lives of whites more than those of blacks: you are twelve times more likely to be sentenced to death, for example, if your victim was white than if he or she was black.

This very state has a criminal justice system that should shame all decent people. There are now 77,000 people imprisoned here for non-violent crimes. African-Americans are incarcerated in Texas at a rate seven times that of whites, and nearly one of every three black men in their 20’s in this state is under some form of criminal justice control. The sad fact is that Texas is worse than the other 49 states only in degree. In Tulia, a small town on the Texas panhandle, 15 percent of the black population was jailed on trumped-up drug charges on the sole testimony of a rogue white undercover agent. What finally got them free? For one thing, the investigative journalism by Nate Blakeslee, a young reporter for the struggling independent weekly, The Texas Observer. Who supported it? The Open Society Institute. For another, the brilliant advocacy a few weeks ago before a special hearing of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals by Vanita Gupta, a tenacious young lawyer working at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—her salary paid by an OSI fellowship. If any Texas foundation came to the aid of those working for justice in Tulia, I am not aware of it.

I say this not to boast—though I am very proud of the stands we have taken—but to make the distressing point that I could give dozens of such examples. Marie Wilson, the Ms. Foundation president and last year’s Scrivener Award winner, likes to say that the women’s movement is one foundation away—the Ford Foundation—from welfare. OSI is joined in its work for a fairer criminal justice system by the bold new Jeht Foundation, and a handful of other funders like Arca, Columbia and Public Welfare, but the courageous men and women working round the clock on poverty wages so that a man with an IQ of 75 isn’t put to death in Arkansas or one barely out of boyhood doesn’t go to prison for life under Alabama’s three-strikes law because he stole a bicycle—these American heroes struggle uphill every day, and their work cries out for the support of the foundations assembled in this room.

The late philosopher John Rawls gave us an important test for measuring the quality of justice in a society. Would you view the system as fair if you did not know what your place in the social order would be? I submit that no one in this room can look at the justice system in this state, or wherever you happen to live, and say that you would trade places with a young black man pulled over by the police, or that you would be satisfied, forty years after the Supreme Court’s landmark Gideon decision, with the court-appointed lawyer you would get if you were a poor Latina woman, or think that the state penitentiary would be a fine place for your grandchild to spend ten years because he couldn’t get treatment for his drug abuse problem.

If I am right, please think about joining this fight. Nothing less is at stake than the promise of justice that is every American’s birthright.