Mass Incarceration

OSP Top Staff Refuse To Negotiate With Hunger Strikers

April 6, 2015 Lucasville Amnesty, www.lucasvilleamnesty.org Resist! Human Rights, Mass Incarceration

On Fri April 4th, top staff at OSP visited the hunger strikers to talk about their demands. Warden Forshey, Deputy Wardens Charmain Bracy and Jeff Remmick and Captain Brown visited the cell door of each of the eight hunger strikers for the first time after all the calls and complaints about it. They said the two main demands regarding recent policy shifts on range rec and access to religious programming are non-negotiable. Please call Warden Forshey and thank him for visiting with the hunger strikers. Ask him to honor their request to avoid conflict with problematic COs, and to negotiate with them regarding range rec and religious programming. The prison claims this change is necessary to prevent prisoners passing things to each other. A prisoner taking rec on the range is able to do favors carrying something from one friend's cell to another, this is known as passing.

How Detroit Police Slapped False Murders On Young Black Men

April 3, 2015 Aaron Cantú, www.truth-out.org Educate! Corruption, Law, Mass Incarceration, police brutality, Racial Justice

A 2005 report published by the Northwestern University School of Law traced the first documented use of "snitch testimony" in the United States to 1819, when the state of Vermont convicted Jesse Boorn for murder based on testimony from his cellmate. The cellmate told a judge that Boorn confessed to the crime inside their jail cell while awaiting his trial. In exchange for testifying, the cellmate was freed after Boorn's trial, and Boorn was sentenced to the gallows. This basic reward system underpinning jailhouse informant testimony persists into the present day. It's not difficult to imagine why a prisoner informant would lie about overhearing a confession if it means real material benefits.

Mumia Hospitalized In Diabetic Shock, Family Denied Access

April 2, 2015 San Francisco Bay View, www.sfbayview.com Educate! Mass Incarceration, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Political Prisoner, Racial Justice

From Mumia’s attorney Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center: “Yesterday morning, March 30, Mumia Abu-Jamal was rushed to the hospital after passing out at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Mahanoy. He was admitted to the Schuylkill Medical Center with a blood sugar level of 779. Today, he received visits from his wife, Wadiya, and his brother, Keith Cook. Mumia’s blood sugar had dropped to 333 as of a couple hours ago. This is still elevated and at an unhealthy level. “Mumia does not have a history of diabetes but had been experiencing a series of symptoms that should have alerted medical staff at the prison to the onset of the disease. Instead, he was not given comprehensive diagnostic treatment and a medical crisis emerged that could have resulted in his slipping into a diabetic coma or worse. . .

Corporation Literally Served Inmates Trash

March 31, 2015 Carimah Townes, www.thinkprogress.org Educate! Capitalism, Human Rights, Mass Incarceration

Two weeks ago Progress Michigan uncovered emails revealing that a prison food provider served cakes nibbled on by rats to inmates. They’ve now discovered that employees from this same food vendor, Aramark, served inmates at another facility an equally unsavory meal: garbage. In an email exchange between the company’s general manager, Sigfried Linder, and the state’s Department of Corrections, Linder admitted that prisoners at Saginaw Correctional Facility were served food that was previously thrown in the trash. “Mr. Chisolm discarded the left-overs from the line before the last half unit was in the chow hall.

Mumia Abu-Jamal Hospitalized, Court Hears Mental Anguish Law

March 31, 2015 TeleSur, www.telesurtv.net Resist! Mass Incarceration, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Political Prisoner

The law was enacted in response to a broadcast Abu-Jamal made last year. The family of Daniel Faulkner, who was killed in 1983, claim that it distressed them. A federal judge heard an appeal Monday to a law allowing victims of crimes to file injunctions against perpetrators who afflict “mental anguish.” Meanwhile Mumia Abu-Jamal, the prisoner and activist who inspired the legislation, is held in hospital incomunicado. Little is known about the condition of the black revolutionary, who is serving life for the killing of a Philadelphia police officer, other than that he is being held in intensive care, and his family is unable to contact him.

Cost Of Incarceration In Baltimore’s Poorest Neighborhoods

March 28, 2015 Stephen Janis and Mark Schindler, www.youtube.com Educate! Baltimore, Capitalism, Mass Incarceration

Well, this is a significant issue for the state of Maryland and for the country as a whole, as you talked about. The amounts that we're spending to lock people up in our cities and states around the country is extraordinary. In Maryland, we spend nearly $1 billion on the corrections agency--and just in Baltimore City, almost $300 million a year to lock people up. And so one of the things that we talk about from a policy perspective--and I used to run a corrections agency--is: what are we getting for that investment? Are our communities safer? And, unfortunately, the answer largely is no. And so what we did when there was some data available here in Baltimore, particularly, was look more closely at the data, particularly where people who are incarcerated live prior to their incarceration and what's going on in those communities.

NYPD Is Slowing Down With Stop-And-Frisks

March 28, 2015 Prachi Gupta, www.animalnewyork.com Educate! Mass Incarceration, NYPD, police brutality, Police the Police

While he predicts that the number of cops on the streets of New York is going to increase this year, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton says that the number of stop-and-frisks are going to decline. Bratton told the New York Daily News that the NYPD will have one million fewer interactions with the public “based primarily on dramatic drops in stop-and-frisks, summonses and marijuana busts.” The drop in activity has not led to a spike in crime; in fact, the city currently faces a 10% drop in crime. Bratton hopes that the move will improve relations with communities of color, who are disproportionately targeted by stop-and-frisk.

US Prisons So Bad They Hide Them From The World

March 14, 2015 RT, www.rt.com Educate! Human Rights, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex

The United Nations special rapporteur on torture lambasted the United States for continually obstructing his requests to visit prisons where 80,000 people sit in solitary confinement and to freely speak with inmates at Guantanamo Bay. Juan E. Méndez said Wednesday that he has attempted for more than two years to visit and check conditions at American prisons, including some of the nation’s most notorious maximum security facilities. He added that UN human rights officials have asked for access to Guantanamo prisoners since 2004. "On the federal level, I want to go to ADX in Florence, Colorado and to the Manhattan Correctional Center," Méndez said during a news briefing, Reuters reported. "Those are where people accused of terrorism are taken or where they serve their term."

Rev. Pinkney Denied Appeal Bond

March 4, 2015 Abayomi Azikiwe, www.spyghana.com Resist! Civil Rights, Faith, Mass Incarceration, Racial Justice

Pinkney was convicted by an all-white jury in November and he was sentenced to 30-120 months in prison on Dec. 15. He is currently housed at Marquette Correctional Facility, a 10-12 hour drive from his home in Benton Township. He was indicted after a group of residents collected enough signatures of registered voters seeking to recall Benton Harbor Mayor James Hightower. Dissatisfaction with Hightower stemmed from the poor economic conditions in the majority African American city where unemployment and poverty are widespread. Benton Harbor is a city of approximately 10,000 people in southwest Michigan. Nearly 90 percent of the population is African American yet across the bridge in St. Joseph, the seat of the county, the city is nearly all-white and far more affluent.

How Chicago Police Condemned The Innocent

February 23, 2015 Spencer Ackerman, www.readersupportednews.org Educate! Chicago, Mass Incarceration, police brutality, Torture

Shackled by his wrist to the wall and by his ankle to the floor, Lathierial Boyd waited for the detective to return to the Chicago police station. In what he considered a sign he had nothing to hide, the 24-year-old Boyd had given the white detective permission to search his swank loft. It would be clear, he thought, that Boyd was no murderer. Yes, Boyd had sold drugs when he was younger. But he had turned a corner with his life, and the contents of his briefcase, which Boyd had also handed over, could prove where his money came from. His business papers were in order: contracts for his real-estate business, tax documents, the forgettable dealings of a successful man – hardly what a killer might carry. As soon as Detective Richard Zuley came back, Boyd thought, he’d be free.

Texas Prison Riot: 2,800 Inmates Moved From ‘Uninhabitable’ Facility

February 23, 2015 RT, www.rt.com Resist! Immigration, Law, Mass Incarceration, Prison, Privatization, Texas

After 2,000 inmates, mostly immigrants, took over a Texas prison in a riot over poor medical services, federal authorities have decided to relocate all the detainees from the now “uninhabitable” correctional facility. The riot at the Willacy County Correctional Center erupted on Friday afternoon, when prisoners refused to eat breakfast or report for work to protest medical services at the facility. The prison was practically run over by the inmates, who continue to hold down the fort. It still remains unclear what medical service issues had upset the inmates. Only around 800 to 900 inmates have refused to riot in a facility that holds some 2,900 people, most of whom are immigrants with criminal record.

‘We Must Love Each Other:’ Lessons In Struggle From Chicago

February 16, 2015 Prison Culture, www.usprisonculture.com Resist! Chicago, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, usa

The national protests catalyzed by the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson last August continue even as many (including the mainstream media) have moved on. Some critics have suggested that the uprisings/rebellions are leaderless, lack concretedemands and/or are without clear strategy. Each of these critiques is easily refuted so I won’t concern myself with them here. In Chicago, many have used the energy and opening created by these ongoing protests to re-animate existing long-term anti-police violence campaigns. On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people gathered at the Chicago Temple to show our love for police torture survivors on the day after Jon Burge was released from house arrest.

TPP: Prison For File Sharing? That’s What Hollywood Wants!

February 14, 2015 Maira Sutton, www.eff.org Educate! Freedom of Expression, Internet, Mass Incarceration, Media, TPP

The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States' excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. It contains DRM anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own. The TPP will encourage ISPs to monitor and police their users, likely leading to more censorship measures such as the blockage and filtering of content online in the name of copyright enforcement.

Go To Trial: Crash The Justice System

February 13, 2015 Michelle Alexander, www.handsupunited.org Strategize! Criminal Justice, Law, Mass Incarceration, police brutality, Racial Justice

AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?” The woman was Susan Burton, who knows a lot about being processed through the criminal justice system. I was stunned by Susan’s question about plea bargains because she — of all people — knows the risks involved in forcing prosecutors to make cases against people who have been charged with crimes. Could she be serious about organizing people, on a large scale, to refuse to plea-bargain when charged with a crime? “Yes, I’m serious,” she flatly replied.

Lawsuits Claim Missouri Towns Jail Poor People For Profit

February 11, 2015 Carey Gillam, www.news.yahoo.com Resist! Capitalism, Ferguson, Mass Incarceration, Prison

Ferguson, Missouri and a second St. Louis suburb are being accused in separate lawsuits of operating a "debtors' prison scheme," illegally jailing poor people who are unable to pay traffic tickets or fines tied to other minor offenses. The lawsuits, filed on Sunday in U.S. District Court in St. Louis by 20 black residents, allege that officials in Ferguson and neighboring Jennings have routinely been abusing and exploiting impoverished individuals to boost city revenues. The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status for the cases. The plaintiffs claim the money they are told they owe is often arbitrarily modified, and the individuals are frequently kept locked in a cycle of jail time and indebtedness to the municipal courts as late fees and surcharges are added to initial fines.

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