Mass Incarceration

U.N. Remains Barred From Visiting U.S. Prisons Amid Abuse Charges

July 23, 2015 Thalif Deen, www.ipsnews.net Educate! Mass Incarceration, Prison, Torture, United Nations

By Thalif Deen in IPS News - When U.S. President Barack Obama visited the El Reno Correctional Facility in Oklahoma last week to check on living conditions of prisoners incarcerated there, no one in authority could prevent him from visiting the prison. Obama, the first sitting president to visit a federal penitentiary, said “in too many places, black boys and black men, and Latino boys and Latino men experience being treated different under the law.” The visit itself was described as “unprecedented” and “historic.” But the United Nations has not been as lucky as the U.S. president was. Several U.N. officials, armed with mandates from the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, have been barred from U.S. penitentiaries which are routinely accused of being steeped in a culture of violence.

Unapologetic Black Anger Can Change The World For The Better

July 21, 2015 Chauncey de Vega, www.alternet.org Strategize! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Law, Mass Incarceration, police brutality, Racial Justice, White Supremacy

By Chauncey de Vega in Alternet - At the Socialism 2015 conference, Martinez Sutton, the brother of Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old black woman killed by an offduty white Chicago cop who recklessly fired five shots into a crowd of people because he was supposedly upset that they were playing loud music, shared his story of anger and pain at a legal system that twisted justice in order to protect one of its enforcers of death and destruction on the black and brown body, as well as the poor of all colors. Sutton told the audience that he and his family will not forgive the cop who killed his sister. He called out how this expectation that black and brown folks should always forgive those who malign and hurt us is an absurdity.

What President Obama Didn’t Hear Or Smell At El Reno

July 21, 2015 Carl Takei, www.aclu.org Educate! Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Solitary Confinement, Torture

By Carl Takei in ACLU - From several years of touring prisons, I’ve learned they all have a distinctive and oddly similar smell: sweat, human misery, and grime — sometimes overlain, but never hidden, by the acrid odors of chlorine and other cleaning products. The sounds give you a sense of the different parts of the institution. Dorm-style general population units are a constant murmur of activity, with TV programs blending into the sound of people talking, playing cards, microwaving overpriced cups of noodles—anything to pass the idle hours, days, months, and years in custody that lay before them. I wish he had reached behind a solid steel door to shake the hand of someone in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, solitary confinement units are filled with the yells of those seeking help, the screams of those battling hallucinations, and the echoing metallic thuds of people banging their hands — or sometimes their heads — against the metal doors of their cells.

“Conscious Capitalism” Icon Whole Foods Exploits Prison Labor

July 20, 2015 Ben Norton, www.counterpunch.org Educate! Capitalism, Libertarian, Mass Incarceration, Prison Labor

By Ben Norton in CounterPunch - Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, whose net worth exceeds $100 million, is a fervent proselytizer on behalf of “conscious capitalism.” A self-described libertarian, Mackey believes the solution to all of the world’s problems is letting corporations run amok, without regulation. He believes this so fervently, in fact, he wrote an entire book extolling the magnanimous virtue of the free market. At the same time, while preaching the supposedly beneficent gospel of the “conscious capitalism,” Mackey’s company Whole Foods, which has a $13 billion and growing annual revenue, sells overpriced fish, milk, and gourmet cheeses cultivated by inmates in US prisons. The renowned “green capitalist” organic supermarket chain pays what are effectively indentured servants in the Colorado prison system a mere $1.50 per hour to farm organic tilapia.

93 Orgs Urge EPA To Consider Prisoners In Environmental Justice

July 20, 2015 Human Rights Defense Center, www.nationinside.org Educate! Environmental Justice, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Prisons

By Human Rights Defense Center in Nation Inside - The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) submitted a public comment to the Environmental Protection Agency today that provides input on the agency’s EJ 2020 Action Agenda Framework, highlighting the lack of consideration for environmental justice among the millions of prisoners in the United States. The comment was co-signed by 93 social justice, environmental and prisoners’ rights organizations from across the country. “It’s encouraging to see the EPA attempting to increase the effectiveness of protecting vulnerable communities that have been overburdened by industrial pollution, but a significant component is missing when impacts on millions of prisoners and their families are ignored,” said Panagioti Tsolkas, coordinator of HRDC’s Prison Ecology Project.

Questions Surround Private Prisons After AZ Riot

July 20, 2015 Donald Cohen, www.capitalandmain.com Educate! Arizona, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Torture

By Donald Cohen in Capital and Main - By now, you have probably heard about the riot at the for-profit Kingman Prison in Arizona. Days of unrest at the prison, run by the privately-held Management Training Corporation, left 15 wounded and forced nearly 1,000 incarcerated people to be transferred to other facilities. The same facility also suffered from a major riot in 2010. Similarly, people detained at an MTC-run camp in Texas names Willacy rioted earlier this year, forcing that facility to close completely. The Kingman riots are focusing renewed attention on the Arizona legislature’s long, cozy relationship with the private prison industry.

Family Of Prison Hunger Strikers Mobilize Against Solitary Confinement

July 17, 2015 Victoria Law, www.wagingnonviolence.org Resist! Mass Incarceration, Solitary Confinement, Torture

By Victoria Law in Waging Non-Violence - “By our silence, this is how they’ve gotten away with decades-long isolation,” Dolores Canales told me as this year’s anniversary of the California hunger strikes drew close. In July 2011, Canales’s son Johnny and several thousand others incarcerated in the state’s Security Housing Units, or SHUs, went on hunger strike to protest the policies allowing them to be placed in 23-hour lockdown for an indefinite period of time. In the SHU, people are locked inside their cells for 23 to 24 hours a day. Although prison policy dictates that they be allowed outside for one hour each day, Canales and other family member report that their loved ones are often held in their cells for several days without respite, then allowed outside for a single five-hour stretch.

Read Mumia

July 13, 2015 David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org Educate! Education, Free Mumia, Liberation, Mass Incarceration, Media, Pennsylvania, Torture

By David Swanson - Yes, I also want to say Free Mumia. In fact, I want to say Free all the prisoners. Turn the prison holding Mumia Abu-Jamal into a school and make him dean. And if you won't free all the prisoners, free one who has been punished to a level that ought to satisfy any retributive scheme for any crime he might have committed. And if you won't do that, free him because he was put into prison by a fraudulent and corrupt trial that hid as much evidence as it revealed, and fabricated the latter. More importantly, Read Mumia. His new book is calledWriting on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and it includes commentaries by Mumia from 1982 through 2014. Mumia went ahead and made his prison a school -- a school in history, in politics, and in morality. And his own moral teaching is primarily by example.

Cops Hold Tasers To Lakota Protesters Stopping Beer Trucks

July 11, 2015 Sarah Burris, www.alternet.org Resist! Indigenous People, Mass Incarceration, Nebraska, police brutality

By Sarah Burris in Alternet - The town sells approximately 5 million cans of beer annually. Protesters have been camping around the clock for weeks holding vigils and doing blockades of the liquor store's delivery trucks. Last week, following a training and workshop, Lakota people took their civil disobedience to a new level with a greater presence and protest of the beer distributors. Bryan V. Brewer, Sr., president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, joined the crowd marching down the road toward White Clay as the beer trucks arrived. "As leaders we should be ahead of the people," he said. "We need to support our activists who are stepping up and confronting this issue." He was quickly arrested by Sheridan County Sheriff Terry Robbins.

2 Yrs After Hunger Strike, What’s Changed For People Inside The Prison?

July 9, 2015 Victoria Law, www.truth-out.org Resist! Calidornia, Hunger Strike, Mass Incarceration, Prison

By Victoria Law in TruthDig - Two years have passed since people confined in California's Pelican Bay State Prison initiated a 60-day hunger strike to protest the conditions associated with the prison's "security housing unit," or SHU. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) continues to claim that "there is no 'solitary confinement' in California's prisons and the SHU is not 'solitary confinement,'" but people inside the Pelican Bay State Prison's security housing unit say they remain locked in for at least 23 hours per day. Meanwhile, in June 2015, the CDCR released proposed new regulations around its use of the security housing unit and administrative segregation - regulations that may, in part, curb participation in future strikes and other prison protests.

12 Corporations Benefit From Prison Industrial Complex

July 7, 2015 Rick Riley, www.atlantablackstar.com Educate! Capitalism, Finance and the Economy, Labor, Mass Incarceration, Prison

By Rick Riley in Atlanta Black Star - According to the Left Business Observer, “the federal prison industry produces 100 percent of all military helmets, war supplies and other equipment. The workers supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.” With all of that productivity, the inmates make about 90 cents to $4 a day. Here are some of the biggest corporations to use such practices, but there are hundreds more. . .

Inmate Claims He Escaped Jail To Get Surgery

July 6, 2015 CNN Wire, www.kdvr.com Educate! health, Mass Incarceration, Tennessee, Torture

By CNN Wire in KDVR - A Tennessee prisoner claims he was so desperate and in so much pain that his only choice was to escape from jail, acording to WSMV-TV. Don Robin White Jr. said he escaped from jail to get surgery. White has previous drug and theft charges and was put in jail last month for violating probation. “I should never have done it, but I got two kids, and I wasn’t gonna lie back there and die,” he said. White said he was suffering from a hernia before he was even booked into the Trousdale County jail. “When I walked in, I had my papers showing I had to have surgery, and nobody ever helped me,” he said. As days went on, White said it kept getting worse, and he kept asking for help. He claims he submitted three or four medical requests and that the guards also submitted a couple.

Twenty-First Century Barbarism

July 6, 2015 Marlene Martin, www.informationclearinghouse.info Educate! Mass Incarceration, Torture

By Marlene Martin in Information Clearing House - It is a wet, dreary day in Chicago when a group of thirty-five people gather at Precious Blood Church on the southwest side of Chicago to make the long drive to Menard Correctional Center. The prison is at the southern end of the state, a six- or seven-hour drive from Chicago, depending on traffic. Julie Anderson has made the trip, on her own, with a friend or with her husband, five times a month — the maximum number of visits a prisoner is allowed — every month for the past twenty years. Her son Eric was fifteen when he was convicted of a double homicide and given a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. “I never knew my life was going to be like this,” Julie tells me. “What I once thought of the criminal justice system has completely changed. I used to believe in it — I don’t anymore.”

LGBT Immigrant Rights Protesters Arrested Near White House

July 2, 2015 Dhyana Taylor and Jacob Kerr, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Immigrant Rights, LGBTQ, Mass Incarceration, Patriarchy, Torture

By Dhyana Taylor and Jacob Kerr In Huffington Post - Six LGBT immigrant rights activists were arrested Tuesday after blocking a street near the White House to protest the Obama administration's treatment of LGBT immigrants in detention. Protesters, organized by advocacy group United We Dream, took turns criticizing Obama administration detention policies as some participants linked themselves with chains or lay in the street and blocked traffic. “We are asking President Obama to free all LGBT people from detention because detention is not protecting them. Detention is brutalizing them,” said Brooke Cerda-Guzmán, an undocumented transgender woman who was arrested. The protest came a week after an undocumented transgender woman was kicked outof the White House for heckling President Barack Obama about immigrant detention.

Santa Cruz Supports Statewide Coordinated Actions To End Solitary Confinement

June 25, 2015 Bradley Allen, www.bradleyallen.net Resist! California, Mass Incarceration, Prisons

Over 14,000 people in California prisons, and 80,000 in the United States on any given day, are kept alone in steel and concrete cells the size of a parking space, with no fresh air or sunlight, for years and decades, some over 40 years. Many more are in solitary confinement in jails, juvenile facilities, and detention centers. Activists gathered on June 23 outside the Santa Cruz Post Office to expose and end the torture of solitary confinement in all lock-ups, in Santa Cruz County, statewide, nationwide, and worldwide. On the 23rd of each month, since March 23, 2015, Statewide Coordinated Actions To End Solitary Confinement (SCATESC) are held in cities throughout California.

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