Rebellious track of the day: Flying Burrito Brothers - My Uncle Read more after the jump

*NEW* Workshop added: Workplace Raids First Responder Training

We've added a new workshop called "Combating the Chaos of Immigration Raids: First Responder Training"! Students from Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) will relay their experience creating the Workplace Raids First Responder project in the D.C. metro area, under the supervision of Professor Muneer Ahmad and in cooperation with CASA de Maryland, a community-based organization dedicated to protecting immigrant rights. The workshop will showcase the curriculum developed by GULC and provide participants with a blueprint for launching Workplace Raids First Responder teams on their own campuses to provide legal aid in the immediate aftermath of an immigration workplace raid.

There are now 6 different workshops to choose from when you register. If you've already registered for different workshops and would like to switch to First Responder Training, please send an e-mail to rebellious.law.questions@gmail.com with the subject line "First Responder Training Workshop" and list your new top 3 preferences. More information on this workshop and the workshop leaders can be found on the conference website: www.law.yale.edu/reblaw.

p.s. We are getting ready to post the final program schedule very soon-- keep checking back here and on the conference site for updates!
Read more after the jump

A couple of rebellious tracks - enjoy!
Public Enemy - Revolutionary Generation
Sun Ra - Nuclear War Read more after the jump

Guest Blog Post: Reblaw Panelist Veronica Monet

Below is a guest post by Veronica Monet, Certified Sexologist (ACS) and Sex Educator (SFSI), Ordained Minister (ULC) Trained for the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence (CARDV), and Author of Veronica Monet's Sex Secrets of Escorts (Alpha Books 2005). She is a panelist on this year's Reblaw panel, "Sex Sells, But Should We Sell Sex?"


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After I graduated with honors from Oregon State University I headed south to California to embark on my corporate career. I worked a desk job for a telecommunications firm and was quickly promoted to office manager. I would make a few lateral moves to other companies in Silicon Valley over the next several years eventually landing a job as a marketing representative for a radio station. Seven years after receiving my college diploma and despite numerous certificates, awards and other forms of recognition, I was still making a pitiful salary. My next move would shock many.

If I had not met a beautiful redhead in a red Mercedes convertible, I probably would not have embarked upon this next chapter in my life. But she was beautiful and she had a ton of money and I found myself seduced in more ways than one. Married with three children, Heather defied the stereotypes about prostitutes. She approached escorting like any other small business and even paid her quarterly taxes. I was impressed and I wanted to learn everything she knew. I asked her to train me. This fact alone was a bit unnerving. After all, I had a college degree and seven years in corporate jobs. What on earth could a prostitute teach me?

Fortunately, I knew instinctively that I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to conduct business in her profession so I didn’t even attempt it without the benefit of her years of experience. There was plenty to learn not the least of which was safety. She taught me the tricks of the trade which make safer sex hot and erotic. She taught me how to screen the phone calls so I only saw the good clients. And most importantly she taught me how to avoid arrest. Turned out that vice cops were rather obvious in their demeanor and not all that difficult to weed out from the legitimate customers.

My life as a high-end escort was like a fairy tale in many ways. I dated some amazing men for very large sums of money and I was treated like a princess at every turn. Dining at five star restaurants and staying in the finest hotels, I flew from city to city to meet my high powered clientele. I eventually married and continued to work as a courtesan while I lived the typical quiet suburban life. My husband and I traveled the world to exotic scuba destinations. We enjoyed a particularly memorable diving excursion to Papua New Guinea but the Caribbean was also a favorite stop.
And then it happened. After working in the prostitution profession for twelve years without a single negative experience except the occasional bore or clod, I accepted an outcall to the home of a serial rapist.

He seemed nice enough at first but it quickly became apparent that he had a mental disorder and was imbalanced. I knew that meant he could be dangerous so I smiled and took his phony check even though I didn’t accept checks from first time customers. It was too late though. As I scanned the apartment I realized that all the windows and doors had bars on them and locked with a key only. Without the key I was trapped. And I knew there was no way he was going to let me go until he got what he wanted.

I was one of the lucky ones. I managed to get him to wear a condom and when he was done, I got the hell out of there and made a bee line to the bank to confirm my suspicions that it was indeed a bad check that he had passed me. The bank manager told me this man was passing about 20 bad checks every month! I asked her why she allowed him to continue to bank with her branch and that was when I was asked to leave the bank.

So he was obviously inviting a lot of prostitutes to his apartment every month and forcing his fake checks and his fat self on them before they were allowed to leave. This man was committing rape, false imprisonment and fraud. Surely the authorities would want to know.

But I was afraid to report him because I knew the police would probably arrest me for prostitution. So I contacted a women’s organization and asked them to help me convince the Oakland police to take my rape report without arresting me. They wrote a series of letters imploring them to get their priorities straight but the Oakland PD refused.

So the rapist continued to rape and just three weeks after he raped me, he stabbed an eighteen year old girl in the face. She was too traumatized to report it to the authorities let alone testify.

I couldn’t believe the police would rather put me in jail for a misdemeanor than get off their lazy buts and find this violent criminal who was committing felonies. The only reason the cops didn’t care was because his victims were prostitutes. That made me very angry.

So I kept working the angles over the next three years and couldn’t catch a break until I met Robyn Few. She had just founded the Sex Worker Outreach Project in San Francisco/Berkeley. She was quite adept at political activism and when I told her about this serial rapist who was still at large and preying on sex workers, she didn’t hesitate to get involved.

Robyn Few used her connections with the press to pressure then Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown to pursue the case. I finally got to give my deposition without going to jail in the process. Of course that didn’t exactly induce the authorities to pull out all the stops to apprehend the perpetrator. They made a lame attempt but gave up pretty quickly. And thanks to the three year delay, his trail had gone cold anyway.

I wish this case was an isolated one. But it happens every day of the week. Laws against prostitution make it unlikely that prostitutes will report their rapes or assaults and so violent criminals are allowed to run free. Perfecting their techniques while they bolster their courage, perpetrators often use prostitutes as practice victims until they get brave enough to start raping and/or killing college coeds and other women our culture deems worthy of protection. The whole system is corrupt. Since when do we as a culture condone designating certain citizens as legitimate targets for rape and murder? Although the law doesn’t spell it out that way, it IS the end result. Prohibition always leads to an underground culture where laws are impossible to enforce. Police priorities only exacerbate the situation.

Of course the irony is that the laws against prostitution are touted as some type of protection for the prostitutes. Proponents of laws against prostitution will tell you that women who work as prostitutes are at risk and need to be rescued. But the very laws which are purported to benefit prostitutes only serve to degrade, stigmatize and marginalize prostitutes while their attackers go free.



Read more after the jump

Guest Blog Post: RebLaw Panelist Udi Ofer of the NYCLU, on the Role of Police in Schools

This year's Reblaw Conference has at least three different panels that explore the effect of prisons and incarceration on American society: 1) Changing Parole Policy: A Collaborative Effort Between Lawyers, Prisoners, and Government Officials; 2) Lost in a Haze: Legalization and the Drug Reform Movement; and 3) Rejecting "Tough on Crime": Fixing a Broken Criminal Justice System.

The guest post below comes from Udi Ofer, Advocacy Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and a panelist on this year's Reblaw panel, "Trading Handcuffs for Diplomas: Exploring Zero Tolerance, Special Education, and the School to Prison Pipeline." For more information on the role of police in schools, please read the NY Times recent editorial on the topics, entitled "The Principal's Office First," http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05mon3.html?ref=opinion.

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Crisis in our Schools:
More Cops, More Arrests, and More Problems

By Udi Ofer, NYCLU

Police personnel handcuffed 5-year-old Denis Rivera and sent him to a psychiatric ward for throwing a temper tantrum in his Queens kindergarten class.

Stephen Cruz was in a bathroom stall in his school in Flushing when a school safety agent kicked open the stall, striking Stephen’s face and cutting him below his hairline. The police agent allegedly responded to Stephen’s bleeding by saying, “That’s life, it will stop bleeding,” and walking away.

School safety agents handcuffed and arrested Chelsea Fraser in front of her classmates at her Dyker Heights school. Her crime? She wrote the word “okay” on her desk.

The above examples, and there are plenty more, are the product of years of education and safety policies that have taken school discipline away from educators and handed them over to the police department.

In New York City, where I work, the problem is particularly bad. There are more than 5,200 police personnel in NYC schools, making it the 5th largest police force in the country—it’s larger than the police force of Washington DC, Detroit or Boston. And today more than ever, children are much more likely to be arrested for minor disciplinary problems that a generation ago would have never been treated as a criminal offense.

What used to be a trip to the principal’s office is now a trip to the local police precinct.

But the problem of overpolicing is not unique to New York. What’s happening in New York City is part of the larger school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon, where students are being pushed out of classrooms and into the juvenile justice and criminal justice systems.

Often, you’ll hear mayors and police officials refer to these policies as “zero tolerance.” They say that these polices will make our schools safer. But in reality, these policies and practices all too often rely on inappropriately harsh discipline and, increasingly, law enforcement, to address trivial schoolyard offenses. Today, children are far more likely to be arrested at school. And way too many of these school-arrests are not for violent behavior.

Children of color and children with disabilities bear the brunt of these harsh trends. Nationally, students of color are suspended at rates of two to three times that of other students. They are also more likely to be subject to suspensions, corporal punishment, and expulsion.

In New York City, children of color are disproportionately subjected to metal detector searches. In schools with permanent metal detectors, 77% of police personnel interventions are in non-criminal matters. High schools with permanent metal detectors issued 48% more suspensions than similar schools

Rather than nurturing and educating children perceived to pose a disciplinary problem, schools are turning to law enforcement to simply get rid of the child.

There are alternatives to arrests and suspensions to deal with school discipline problems. And there are schools across the country that have used positive, rather than punitive measures to address school violence.

Take, for example, the Julia Richman Education Complex (JREC) in New York City. In the early 1990’s, Julia Richman High School was the definition of a failing school. The school had a 66% attendance rate and a 37% graduation rate. There were metal detectors and more than a dozen police personnel. Despite the prison environment in the school, fights were common and guns often found their way onto school grounds.

In the mid-1990’s, a new administration came in to take over the school. It separated the one large school to include six small schools, four of them high schools. The new school leadership refused to allow metal detectors in the schools. The school safety agents were prohibited from enforcing school discipline and instead became responsible for protecting the school from outside intruders

Today, JREC serves the same population but has a 91% attendance rate, 90% graduation rate, and 91% of graduating students go on to college. In 2006-2007, there were four fights, none of which involved weapons more dangerous than thrown fruit.

More police, more suspensions, and more arrests are not the way to safeguard our schools. Instead, educators must take back control over the enforcement of school rules. Police personnel should be limited to legitimate safety concerns and trained to work in the school environment. More money should be spent on guidance counselors, social workers and afterschool programs to engage students, rather than on additional police personnel. Read more after the jump

Rebellious tracks to ring in the year

The Carter Family - Single Girl, Married Girl
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - This Land is Your Land Read more after the jump