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Homeless, Continued
From Page 1
appropriate shelter; enforce existing federal
programs that should be aiding the homeless;
and restore funding for federal housing
programs to 1981 levels.
Lesbians and gay men appear to suffer
from a greater susceptibility to being
victimized by the current landlord-
government relationship. With the advent of
AIDS in society, many PWA's have become
homeless, with a hospital their only home
while acutely ill, the streets and charity
shelters their only refuge between bouts of
illness.
In addition to homeless PWA's, many
lesbian and gay children are homeless,
becoming "throwaways" upon reaching
puberty. These young people continually
migrate to large urban areas. The Covenant
House in New York estimates that at least 10
percent of the homeless children in New York
City are HIV seropositive.
Chris Minor, secretary of NAPWA-
Atlanta, countered that it is not just the
recognized risk groups who are testing
positive for the HIV. "In New York City, the
leading cause of death for women between 25
and 40 years old is AIDS... (most) are
homeless women with children."
In a pre-march interview, Robert Hayes,
Counsel for the Coalition, warns, "The states
are going to go bankrupt through
unnecessary, chronic hospitalization... the
remedy (to the homeless problem) is one we
know of, it's not a complicated technology."
Despite the presence and vigorous scrutiny
applied to the issues by the lesbian and gay
contingent at the rally, none of the candidates
chose to address the issue of lesbians and gay
men on the street, with or without AIDS.
-Karl Boyce and Chris Duncan
Photo by Gerald Jones
The World Congress Center, site of the Atlanta Journal- Constitution presidential
candidate debates. The Democratic candidates left the March for the Homeless to attend
the debates. Although the candidates had pledged to make "the plight of the homeless a
national priority", none carried the rhetoric into the nationally televised debate.
AIM Continued
From Page 1
"I was having trouble with her wearing my
bathrobe or making up the bed differently than
I do and I yelled at her and we had to laugh."
Now Sarah has feelings about everything and
expresses them. She talks about having all the
feelings wear her out. "Sometimes I've been
feeling so much that I just want to stop for three
days and rest," she says, "but I tell myself that I
just have to go to work ex make a phone call or
do one more thing and then I do and I feel
better."
When Sarah was in prison, there was no
support system to help her contact her son or
deal with her own guilt for having him taken
away from her and his friends. Her son became
one more victim of his mother's crime. There
were staff counselors for the prisoners but they
were overloaded and there were no groups in
the prison to share the pain. There are over
250,000 children of incarcerated women
around the country who are separated from
their mothers, generally with no contact and
generally with no understanding between
mother and children.Only 25% of those
children ever see their mothers during the
incarceration period. Most of the convicted
mothers are haunted by that separation.
Sometimes their children don't even remember
than by the time they are released.
Aid for Imprisoned Mothers (AIM) was started
in Atlanta by Attorney Sandra Barnhill. One of
the services provided by AIM is transportation
for children to visit their imprisoned mothers in
orda to strengthen mother-child bonds.
Barnhill says that 70-80 percent of the women
in prism should not have been incarcaated in
the first place. She goes on to say, "If they had
better representation or a better understanding
of the criminal justice system, things would be
different for them."
Sandra Barnhill, an Attorney who graduated
from the University of Texas Law School in
1984, is the founder and visionary behind AIM
in Atlanta. There are similar programs in
Boston, Massachusetts and Montgomery,
Alabama. Barnhill, who has worked with the
Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, sees
AIM as "an outgrowth of my desire to be
empowered and to be a change agent for the
empowerment of other women. There is so
much talk about justice and equality but that’s
just a farce. Justice is, after all, just-us: just-us
women, just-us blacks, just-us prisonas."
About 50% of the women in prison in Georgia
are there for property crimes; about 23% for
drug sales or possession and 16% for violent
personal crimes. Sixty pacent are black. The
over-representation of blacks in prison is based
on the fact that, according to Barnhill, "race and
sex are two real important factors in who gets
soitenced and what the length of their sentoice
might be." The average age of women
imprisoned in Georgia is thirty-one, and 78%
have at least one child with two-thirds of these
having sole custody. Most of the women are
poor. Barnhill sees a connection
between poverty and cutbacks in public aid
related to property crimes. "I think it's a direct
causal connection to the life circumstances. I
think people who find themselves in desperate
situations act in desperate ways."
Supportive long-tom relationships have beat
recognized as one of the few factors that can be
shown statistically to influence rehabilitation
and reduce the rate of return to prison. Since
most mothers in prisons have little or limited
contact with their children, this important
stabilizing and rehabilitative factor is often
neglected. AIM is providing transportation to
try to address this need. AIM also provides
lawyer referrals for cases primarily concerning
civil matters such as divorce, child custody and
public benefits. Aim also offers workshops for
prisoners in parenting skills and training for
volunteers to work with incarcerated women.
There was no project like AIM to make Sarah's
isolation and absence from her child easier.
Now Sarah works with AIM as a volunteer to
make sure otha incarcaated womoi have
better opportunities than she did. She plans to
talk with her son, to allow all those feelings to
surface, to be a person who recognizes and
supports ha feelings as good and healthy.
Sarah now undostands that it is less painful to
express ha inner feelings than to withhold
them or to bury them beneath drugs and risk
losing the love of a soa
-Rebecca Ranson
How Do They Get There From Here?
The Democrats
In all but two of the ten Congressional
Districts in Georgia, five delegates will be sent
to the Democratic National Convention in
Atlanta. Congressional District Five will send
six delegates, and Congressional District Seven
will send four delegates to the Convention.
Those people who are eligible to be sent were
elected at party sub-caucuses January 30th in
their home districts when they promised to
support a presidential candidate for one vote of
the full Convention nominating system.
When the popular vote is cast March 8th,
Supa Tuesday, each candidate's percentage of
the total will be tallied by Congressional
District. Each delegate elected is ranked
against all of the other delegates based on the
numba of votes he/she received in the sub
caucus.
When the votes have been tallied, the
candidate who wins the District by total votes
will automatically send their first delegate to
the DNC. A candidate must receive a
threshold of 15% of the popular vote in orda
to send their first delegate to the Convention.
The remaining delegates will be apportioned
among the candidates receiving more than
15% of the vote, in descending orda of votes
received. Due to the small number of
delegates and the large numba of candidates,
it is conceivable that a candidate could gama
15% of the vote and not receive a delegate.
EXAMPLE: If Candidate 1 receives 48% of
the vote, Candidate 2 gets 20%, Candidate 3
receives 17% of the vote, and Candidate 4 gets
15% of the vote, the delegates they would send
to the DNC are:
Candidate 1-48%
* The candidate's delegate 1 for winning the
district.
* Die candidate's delegates 2 and 3 fa
winning approximately half of the votes
cast in the district.
Candidate 2 - 20%
* The candidate's delegate 1 fa taking one-
fifth of the district.
Candidate 3-17%
*The candidate's delegate 1 for taking
approximately one-fifth of the district
Candidate 4-15%
*No delegate, since all are already taken, even
though the candidate won 15% of the total vote
cast.
The Republicans
The Republican process, like in many states,
is entirely different from the Democratic
process. The Republican party uses a five-step
process to detomine the Congressional District
delegates to the Republican National
Convention.
The first step involves all interested voters at
the local precinct level. Delegate candidates do
not pledge themselves to candidates, but ratha
are elected based on personal merit. The
precinct delegates go to a county convention,
where they elect from among themselves the
delegates to go to the Congressional
Distria Convention. The Congressional
District delegates then vote from among
themselves delegates to the statewide
convention as well as delegates directly to
the national convention. At the statewide
convention, the delegates to the national
convention are elected.
Die most impotant distinction between
the two systems is that the Republicans
assign only three delegates to each
Coigressional Distria. Those delegates are
pledged to the candidate who wins the
majority of votes in the district, and are not
divided between candidates on the basis of
thepacentageofthe vote they win. It is a
"winner take all" syston.
-Chris Duncan
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