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Testimony In Opposition To Expanding Jail Facilities
By Stephen Downing

Submitted by:
Stephen Downing, Retired Deputy Chief from the Los Angeles Police Department

On behalf of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

Meeting of the Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles, CA
Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 9:30am, Board Hearing Room 381B

Thank you for the opportunity to present my views in opposition to Agenda Item 19 to reconfigure, modernize, and expand the overall county jail facility system at an ultimate cost of $2.66 billion.

My name is Stephen Downing. I am a resident of Los Angeles County, a retired deputy chief from the Los Angeles Police Department and a member of the executive board of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization of criminal justice professionals who bear personal witness to the wasteful futility and harms of our current drug policies … and their generous contribution to the facility and population growth afforded the prison
industrial complex.

Today, the discussion should not be about building more prisons. It should be about how we can eventually abolish the prison industrial complex.

We continue to nourish its cancerous growth by handing to law enforcement the State’s social, political and economic problems –all in the name of SAFETY and SECURITY.

We take the easy way out by criminalizing those problems and caging our people rather than nurturing the great potential of all of our country’s human resources.

Connie Rice sums it up very well in her book in, Power Concedes Nothing –The font of her outstanding work is to seek means by which to eliminate counterproductive law enforcement strategies and replace them with a community public health approach –and, based upon my 20 years of experience with the Los Angeles Police Department, I couldn’t agree more.

There is a world beyond surveillance, policing and imprisonment and if we invest in that world rather than helping to expand the prison industrial complex we can truly become the country that our founding fathers envisioned.

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