From 1977 to 1981, Democrat
James Earl Carter, Jr.
was the 39th president of the United States.
Waging Peace,
Fighting Disease, Building Hope
No matter where you stand in politics,
you will probably agree that Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn are
outstanding advocates of human rights.
See more at the
Carter Center, which, according
to the site,
has helped to improve life for
people in 80 countries by resolving conflicts, advancing
democracy and human rights, preventing diseases, and improving
mental health care.
Jimmy Carter Tidbits
:: 1977
Here is Jimmy Carter's Address to the Nation on Energy, from April
18, 1977:
On December 2, 1977, Jimmy Carter had nice words for fellow Democrat
Hubert H. Humphrey.
On June 18, 1979, Jimmy Carter and
Leonid Brezhnev met at Vienna
where they signed
SALT II,
a missile reduction agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Father Earl was a professional peanut
farmer. Mother
Lillian was a nurse.
Wee Jimmy
Carter and Dog Bozo, 1937
Jimmy Carter Library
In 1946,
Jimmy married Eleanor Rosalynn Smith.
Rosalynn was also born in Plains, Georgia, on August 18, 1927.
Together they have four children, 3
boys, 1 girl:
John William (Jack), born in Virginia
in 1947, James Earl III, born in Hawaii in 1950, Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff), born in Connecticut in 1952,
and Amy Lynn, born in Georgia, in 1967.
Jimmy Carter — Brief
Biography
1924, October 1 - Birth at Plains, Georgia, USA
1946 - Graduation from U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland and
U.S. Navy
1953 - Goes back to the family's peanut farm after father Earl dies.
Rosalynn is not thrilled but rolls up her sleeves and excels as
the bookkeeper of the operation.
1962 Senator
1964 Re-elected senator
1970 Governor
1976, November - Carter defeats
the incumbent
Jerry Ford
There is an inevitable chasm between
societal leaders who write and administer criminal laws and the
people who fill the jails, often unnecessarily.
The cumulative effect of this gap is a
lowering of barriers against discrimination and violence that
affects racial minorities, women, the mentally handicapped, and
others who are naturally more helpless and vulnerable.
We who are more privileged are not
deliberately perpetuating our status at the expense of others, but
we rarely wish to confront or be involved in the problem.
Exalted
commitments to peace and human rights are abandoned as we accept and
rationalize the privileges we enjoy.
The prison system is just one clear
example.
At that time, in the 1970s, only one
in a thousand Americans was in prison, but our nation's focus has
turned increasingly to punishment, not rehabilitation.
During the
past three decades extended incarceration of people convicted of
drug use and other nonviolent crimes has replaced an emphasis on
rehabilitation with job training and restoration of citizens' rights
after the convicted have paid their debt to society.
There are now more than five times as
many American inmates in federal, state, and local prisons as when I
was president, and the number of incarcerated black women has
increased by 800 percent!
An ancillary effect is that this
increased incarceration has come at a tremendous financial cost to
taxpayers, at the expense of education and other beneficial
programs. The cost of prosecuting executed criminal is astronomical.
Since 1973, California alone has spent
roughly $4 billion in capital cases, leading to only thirteen
executions, amounting to about $307 million spent for the killing of
each prisoner.
Although the number of violent crimes
has not increased, the United States has the highest incarceration
rate in the world, with more than 7.43 per 1,000 adults imprisoned
at the end of 2010.
With only 4.5 percent of the world's
population, we claim 22 percent of the world's prison population.
Many of these prisoners, some now incarcerated for life, have never
been found guilty of a violent crime but have been convicted of
drug-related offenses.
The American Civil Liberties Union
reported in November 2013 that there are now 3,278 persons in
federal and state prisons who are serving life sentences without
parole — for nonviolent crimes! Not surprisingly, 65.4 percent of them
are black.
I gave a major address about drug use
while president in 1979 and called for the decriminalization of
marijuana, but not its legalization, with an emphasis on treatment
and not imprisonment for users who were not involved in the
distribution of narcotics. This proposal was well received at the
time, but the emphasis was placed on punishment and not
rehabilitation after I left office.
Despite the proliferation of excessive
imprisonments, the number of pardons by U.S. presidents has also
been dramatically reduced. I issued 534 pardons in my four-year
term, and in their eight-year terms Ronald Reagan issued 393, Bill
Clinton 396, and George W. Bush 189, but in his first term Barack
Obama issued only 23.
Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action,
Page 34,
Simon & Schuster, 2014
Jimmy Carter on Rape
According to the U.S. Justice
Department, there were 191,610 cases of rape or sexual assault
in the United States in 2006, and 91 percent of the victims were
female. That's more than 475 women assaulted every day.
The estimate is that only 16
percent of these cases are reported to the police; the rate
drops to fewer than 5 percent on college campuses.
Girls and women of all ages and
all background suffer from the same or worse sexual violence
throughout the world, and some traditional practices constitute,
extol, and perpetuate sexual violence against women and girls.
...
The gang rape in Delhi of a
twenty-three-year-old student on a bus in December 2012 is one
of the most horrible examples: she was raped by several men, who
then used an iron rod to penetrate her genitals so deeply that
her intestines had to be surgically removed. She died thirteen
days later.
Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action,
Page 118,
Simon & Schuster, 2014
On to page 191:
[British foreign secretary
William] Hague and Ms. Jolie declared that more than twenty
thousand women were raped in Bosnia and Herzegovina, more than
fifty thousand in Sierra Leone, and at least 250,000 were raped
during the one hundred days of genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Only
a few men have ever been brought to justice for these crimes.
Similar reports are now emerging from the civil conflict in
Syria.
...
It was reported that 74 percent of
survivors of rape treated in a hospital in Goma, in eastern
Congo, were children, and eleven baby girls between the ages of
six and twelve months had been raped!
See also the motion picture In the
Land of Blood and Honey, produced and directed by Angelina
Jolie.
