Centers For Disease Control Sells The Anti-Incarceration Narrative

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Considering how badly the CDC handled the Covid 19 outbreak, one would think that the agency would focus on cleaning up its act and doing a more credible job of identifying diseases and helping doctors treat them. Unfortunately, like most other large federal agencies, the CDC is too busy pushing a progressive political agenda including issues that have nothing to do with diseases and public health. In a recent piece in Liberty Unyielding attorney Hans Bader lays out the CDC’s promotion of the progressive anti-incarceration narrative which has helped propel New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and most of America’s other large cities into crime-ridden jungles.

Earlier this Summer the CDC released its report “Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action,” a 1,795-page guide for community activists. Among the strategies and programs advocated by this action plan is to divert offenders into government-funded programs to protect black and Hispanic offenders from “mass incarceration” caused by a racially biased criminal justice system. The CDC also condemns news reporting:

“studies about race and crime in media have found that local television news often overrepresents Black or African American people as criminal suspects and underrepresents White people as criminal suspects. News media coverage can also extend harmful narratives to entire communities through normalizing an over-emphasis on crime in racially segregated neighborhoods without discussion of the historical and ongoing conditions that increase risk for crime and violence.”

This comes right out of the ACLU/Black Lives Matter playbook, labeling the messenger racist for reporting the facts. Among those facts are that volumes of government data show that blacks commit much more crime than other racial groups and most of that crime is committed in minority neighborhoods. It is also a fact that most of the victims of black criminals are other black individuals. The homicide rate for black boys and men aged 10-34 was 20 times higher than for white males in 2022. In essence, the CDC is telling local newsrooms to ignore reality and stop reporting crimes in black neighborhoods committed by black offenders. Who benefits from this?

The report also recommends numerous strategies that communities should implement to reduce violence. Virtually all of these strategies involve government programs or government-funded community groups that address what the CDC suggests are the “root causes of violence,” including structural racism, economic injustice (poverty), educational inequality, and a lack of opportunity. The only recommendations related to law enforcement encourage diversion of offenders to government-funded rehabilitation programs. Under the current administration in Washington, the CDC, with a $25.7 billion annual budget to protect the public from diseases, is empowered to issue a massive report on social and criminal justice policy which recommends expanding the government bureaucracy with billions for additional programs that have no relation to diseases and public health.

Wait, there’s more. Over a year ago, the CDC apparently violated federal rules by distributing drafts of the report to anti-law enforcement advocates and academics, but when The Daily Caller requested a copy of the draft they were turned down. Later the CDC responded to a Freedom of Information Act request by releasing a mostly redacted version of the draft, citing a federal rule that allows agencies to withhold internal communications related to policies. Bader notes:

But the draft version is not internal to the government—it was shared with many outside academics, gun-control activists, and employees of interest groups, like the Community Justice Action Fund and Sandy Hook Promise. The Community Justice Action Fund’s website describes itself as “advocating and demanding change.” “Community Justice Action Fund is a project of Tides Advocacy,” it says. Wikipedia says the “Tides Foundation is a far left-leaning donor-advised fund based in the United States.”

Sharing a draft with outside consultants who have a strong “self-interest” in taking a position, waives the agency’s right to withhold that draft, according to a court ruling in a case I litigated, Competitive Enterprise Institute v. Office of Science and Technology Policy (Feb. 2016). That case ruled that an agency had to release a draft it shared with a climate scientist at Princeton University.

As we have learned several times over the past three years, the rules don’t matter to the CDC or the Biden Administration. Who knows how much of the taxpayers’ money the CDC spent on a propaganda piece pushing the administration’s narratives of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Critical Race Theory, both based on outright lies with the objective of dividing the country.