Prison

The US-Mexico Caravan For Peace Takes On The Drug War

July 3, 2014 Chris Moore-Backman, www.truth-out.org Resist! Children, Drug War, Immigrant Rights, Mexico, Prison

Like many people in the United States, I've had a vague notion that in recent years, things have gone from bad to worse in Mexico. A notion characterized by images of chaos and sporadic violence related to narco-trafficking. I've pictured skirmishing between competing drug cartels, with disorganized and corrupt law enforcement thrown into the mix. And I realize that the image of Ciudad Juarez with its reputation as the world's most murderous city, has somehow worked as a reference point for me as I've thought of Mexico, every now and then. A few months ago, I was talking with an old friend that I had been out of touch with for some time, and I was describing for him the radio documentaries I've been working on which focus on race, criminal justice and the drug war, and on the growing movement to end mass incarceration. He wasted no time in asking me if I was planning to do a show on the international aspects of the Drug War, and more specifically, he was wanting to know if I was going to do anything about what was happening in Mexico. He said that he thought the movement to end mass incarceration in the United States and the movement to end the drug war in Mexico were deeply connected, but that very few people were seeing it yet or talking about it. He told me that a bi-national caravan was about to travel the length of the US calling for an end to the drug war. He said that many of the people with the caravan would be family members of those who had been killed or disappeared in the drug war violence in Mexico.

Report: Women Sexually Abused In Prisons

July 2, 2014 Middle East Monitor, www.middleeastmonitor.com Educate! Egypt, Prison, Rape, Women's Rights

YouTube clip from Al-Jazeera entitled: A catastrophic report exposes cases of rape inside military prisons. One girl was raped 14 times. Presenter: The delegation submitted a general report about the violations that took place against Egyptian women since the military coup and until the first of June. The delegation also submitted another detailed report about cases of rape and sexual assault taking place against female detainees inside Egyptian prisons and police stations. The delegation submitted an authenticated report of seven cases of rape of female detainees. The report included a list of the names of detention centres and the names of police officers and individuals accused of raping the women including the cases of two women who were raped 14 times in one day in one of the detention centres belonging to Central Security Forces. One of the female detainees was suspended naked and sexually assaulted and was forced to watch obscene scenes. The delegation, which is composed of the European Coalition for Democracy and Human Rights, called for placing Egyptian women under a special category by the Committee for Women and Children and called for opening an investigation, by a neutral committee, into the violations and for opening the prisons and police station for inspection as well as for making police officers and cadets accountable for their actions.

U.S. Reaction To Immigrant Influx Could Violate International Law

July 1, 2014 Michelle Tullo, www.ipsnews.net Educate! Children, Human Rights, Immigrant Rights, Prison

Rights advocates and lawmakers are expressing increased concern over the United States’ handling of the sudden influx of tens of thousands of undocumented child and female migrants from Central America. Last week, President Barack Obama announced that military bases would be converted to detention centres to house the nearly 50,000 unaccompanied minors that have arrived at the southern U.S. border in recent months. Recent data says some 3,000 are being apprehended daily, though the reasons for their arrival remain debated. Meanwhile, sentiment is building against the plan, with some suggesting the detention centres could violate international rights obligations. “We’re very disturbed to hear that the Obama administration plans to open more family detention centre spots, starting with a large facility in New Mexico,” Clara Long of Human Rights Watch, a watchdog group, told IPS. “There’s evidence that detaining children causes severe and sometimes lasting harm, including depression, anxiety and cognitive damage. That’s why detaining children for their immigration status is banned under international law.”

Bronx Protesters Demand Justice For Death Of Mentally Ill Inmate

June 29, 2014 Aviva Stahl, www.gothamist.com Resist! Mental Illness, New York City (NYC), Prison, Protest, Solitary Confinement

When 39-year-old Bradley Ballard was found naked on the floor of a mental health observation unit on Rikers Island last fall, his body was covered in feces and a rubber band was tied around his genitals. He had been held in isolation for seven days after making a lewd gesture at a female guard. On June 3, the Medical Examiner declared Ballard’s death a homicide, finding that he had been denied access to medication despite being diagnosed with both diabetes and schizophrenia. The AP previously reported that while guards looked into Ballard’s cell repeatedly in the days leading up to his death, they declined to enter, and when his door was finally opened on September 10, Ballard was too weak to move. He only received one visit from mental health staff, which lasted about 15 seconds. Ballard’s primary cause of death was listed as diabetic ketoacidosis, brought on by a lack of insulin. Thus far, however, no Correction officers have been fired or indicted in relation to Ballard’s death. Yesterday afternoon, about twenty-five people protested outside the Bronx District Attorney’s Office to demand criminal prosecution in Ballard’s death.

Federal Appeals Court Rejects Torture Survivor’s Case

June 29, 2014 G. Flint Taylor, www.inthesetimes.com Educate! Law, Prison, Racism, Torture

As declared by the United Nations in 1997, June 26 is International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. Unfortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals may have set an alarming precedent for torture survivors around the country with its decision against victim Darrell Cannon late last month. On May 27, the court shocked Cannon and his supporters by opting to deny him full compensation for the brutal treatment he incurred at the hands of the Chicago Police Department starting in 1983. Led by the notorious Commander Jon Burge, who was fired from his position in 1993 and convicted of perjury in 2010, the Chicago Police victimized at least 120 African-American suspects over the course of two decades, including Cannon, who was tortured before being imprisoned unjustly for 24 years. Despite a number of other survivors receiving millions of dollars from the city of Chicago, Cannon was left with almost nothing—suggesting that the U.S. legal system is all too willing to abandon survivors behind a smokescreen of denial and victim-blaming. Cannon’s lawyers argued his case in front of the three-judge federal appeals court in January of 2013.

Documentary On CA Prisoner Hunger Strikes

June 24, 2014 Lucas Guilkey, www.indiegogo.com Organize! California, Fundraising, Prison, Solitary Confinement

This campaign is raising funds on behalf of California Prison Focus, a verified nonprofit. The campaign does not necessarily reflect the views of the nonprofit or have any formal association with it. All contributions are considered unrestricted gifts and can't be specified for any particular purpose. What? On July 8th 2013, California prisoners launched the largest prison hunger strike in United States history. Thirty thousand men—one quarter of all CA state prisoners—refused food in a united message against the use of indefinite solitary confinement. Many were willing to starve themselves to death and refused food for 60 consecutive days in defense of their basic human rights, such as access to sunlight and being able to hug their family. "We prisoners of all races have united to force these changes for future generations," Arturo Castellanos wrote from the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit. The U.N. Special Rapporteur defines solitary confinement for more than two weeks as a form of psychological torture, yet California routinely isolates its citizens for 10, 20, even 40 years—not for acts of violence but for possessing cultural symbols and political literature.

What 43+ Years Of Prison Mean To Eddie Conway And Paul Coates

June 23, 2014 Susie Day, www.truth-out.org Educate! Black Panthers, FBI, Prison

Marshall Eddie Conway and Paul Coates talk about how they met in Baltimore's Black Panther Party and maintained solidarity and friendship for 43 years after Conway was framed, convicted and jailed for murder. Marshall Eddie Conway was born in 1946, grew up in the low-income racial segregation of West Baltimore, and joined the US Army at 18. Paul Coates, "a little bit older," grew up in a similar neighborhood in West Philadelphia, also enlisting in the Army as a youth. Sometime in the late 1960s, they met in the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party. Although both men yearned for racial justice, neither could have known at the time the dimensions of injustice they were to face. It's well known that J. Edgar Hoover directed his FBI to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize" African-American organizations and leaders in general. But the FBI unleashed its worst on the Black Panther Party, which, from its 1966 start in Oakland, California, Hoover saw as "the single greatest threat to the internal security of the country."[1] By 1968, when activists in Baltimore began to form a Panther chapter, there wasn't much that the feds didn't know about them or couldn't "neutralize." The FBI often worked with the local police force to do it.

Egyptian Injustice: Journalists Sentenced To 7 Years

June 23, 2014 AP, www.AP.org Resist! Egypt, Human Rights, Journalism, Prison, Terrorism

An Egyptian court convicted three Al-Jazeera journalists and sentenced them to seven years in prison each on terrorism-related charges in a verdict Monday that stunned their families and was quickly denounced as a blow to freedom of expression. International pressure mounted on Egypt's president to pardon the three. The verdicts against Australian Peter Greste, Canadian-Egyptian Mohamed Fahmy and Egyptian Baher Mohammed came after a 5-month trial that Amnesty International described as a "sham," calling Monday's rulings "a dark day for media freedom in Egypt." The three, who have been detained since December, contend they are being prosecuted simply for doing their jobs as journalists, covering Islamist protests against the ouster last year of President Mohammed Morsi. Three other foreign journalists, two Britons and a Dutch citizen, were sentenced to 10 years in absentia. Media groups have called the trial political, part of a fight between the government and the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera network , which authorities accuse of bias toward the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi. The network denies any bias.

Two Journalists Released, 14 Still Behind Bars

June 19, 2014 Committee to Protect Journalists, www.cpj.org Resist! Egypt, Journalism, Prison

The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the release from prison this week of two Egyptian journalists and calls on authorities to release at least 14 journalists still behind bars, including three Al-Jazeera journalists whose trial continues on Monday. Abdullah al-Shami, reporter for Al-Jazeera who was jailed without charge, was released on Tuesday in connection with his deteriorating health, and Karim Shalaby, reporter for Al-Masder, was freed on Monday after a court acquitted him of charges that included protesting illegally. "Egypt's newly elected president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, has an opportunity to reverse the drastic decline in the country's press freedom record by doing all he can to ensure that journalists are set free from jail," said Sherif Mansour, CPJ's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. "Releasing all imprisoned journalists and allowing them to report freely and safely would be a resounding signal that Egypt is changing course."

Then They Came For The Revolutionaries

June 17, 2014 Bel Trew, www.foreignpolicy.com Strategize! Activists, Egypt, Law, Military, Police, Prison, Revolution

Every night when Egyptian activist Mohamed Kamel goes home, there is a man outside his building who follows him until he enters the doorway. The figure doesn't speak; he doesn't leave his post. He just keeps watch. "I smile at him and tell him, 'Please do come up and have dinner with me,'" said the 38-year-old, Cairo-based high school manager. "What else can I do?" Kamel is part of April 6 Youth Movement, a revolutionary group founded in 2008 to support striking industrial workers. Its members, estimated by the organization to number in the tens of thousands, were also a driving force behind the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak. But now, despite having supported the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, the group finds itself under fire from the military-backed government in Cairo. Last week, an Egyptian court outlawed the movement after a lawsuit accused it of espionage and tainting the image of the state. The group's most prominent voices, meanwhile, have been thrown in jail. In December, founder Ahmed Maher, 32, and Mohamed Adel, 25, were sentenced to three years in prison for participating in an illegal rally and allegedly assaulting a police officer.

Cecily McMillan Interview From Prison: Even More Committed

June 12, 2014 Chris Arnade, www.theguardian.com Educate! Activism, Bankers, Cecily McMillan, Poverty, Prison

A former banker visits the only member of Occupy Wall Street to receive a prison sentence: it sounds like the set-up of a joke or a parable of the modern age. Instead, it was a real scene last Thursday, when I went to see jailed OWS activist Cecily McMillan at Rikers Island. That the opposite would never have happened was not lost on Cecily or me: bankers don't get sent to jail, and, when they rarely do, they certainly don't get sent to Rikers. Rikers is New York City's largest jail, housing a population that is overwhelmingly poor – mostly people who can't post bail, which in some cases is as low as $50. It has become a short-term holding facility for those who can't muster $2,000 in a pinch, or who don't have the 10% of bail to lose to a bondsman. Since her 19 May sentencing for an assault on an officer, Cecily McMillan has lived in a barracks-like room with close to a hundred other women. Cecily herself is a banker-like rarity in Rikers: she has resources, both from the media obsession with her case and the OWS movement that she has come to partly symbolize.

We Deserted Bowe Bergdahl; He Didn’t Desert Us

June 10, 2014 Jeffrey Cavanaugh, www.mintpressnews.com Educate! Barack Obama, Guantanamo Bay, Prison, Wars and Militarism

If you didn’t think that things could get any lower in American politics, then the events of the last week were surely a shocking reminder that no matter how rancorous our discourse, things can always get worse. That’s because a simple prisoner exchange has suddenly, out of nowhere, become a fresh source of outrage for those on the partisan right. If you have been living under a rock and failed to notice it, the right-wing firestorm that erupted over the trading of five Guantanamo Bay prisoners for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had been held captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan for five years, was something completely unexpected. How is it, one can reasonably ask, that recovering Sgt. Bergdahl could have possibly been so controversial? To this, critics of the swap say, look at whom we traded and who we traded them for. If the American right wing is to be believed, the five prisoners released in exchange for Bergdahl were some of the worst-of-the-worst — diehard fanatics dedicated to killing our troops wherever and whenever they could. Bergdahl, on the other hand, is a traitorous deserter who, in leaving, provided the opportunity for a number of his fellow comrades to be ambushed while on a patrol looking for him.

LulzSec Hacker ‘Sabu’ Released

June 2, 2014 Ed Pilkington, www.theguardian.com Educate! Anonymous, FBI, Hacker, Prison

Hector Xavier Monsegur, who by the US government’s calculations participated in computer hacker attacks on more than 250 public and private entities at a cost of up to $50m in damages, was released from a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday after the judge saluted his “extraordinary cooperation” with the FBI. Monsegur, or “Sabu” as the celebrated hacker was known, was sentenced to time served – equivalent to the seven months he spent in prison last year – plus a year’s supervised release, in reward for having spent much of the past three years working as a federal informant. He had been facing a maximum sentence according to official guidelines of more than 26 years. His lenient sentence seals his reputation as one of the hacker world’s most hated figures, a skilled technician who turned from having been a leading figure of the Anonymous and LulzSec collectives into what was in effect an undercover FBI agent.

The Afghan Guantanamo Continues Despite WIthdrawal

June 2, 2014 Spencer Ackerman, www.theguardian.com Educate! Afghanistan, Prison, Wars and Militarism

President Barack Obama’s decision to keep American troops in Afghanistan until 2016 is likely to mean two more years behind bars for America’s most secret detainee population, according to Pentagon officials. On the outskirts of the massive Bagram airfield, about an hour’s drive from the capital of Kabul and in what the military calls the Detention Facility in Parwan, the US holds about 50 prisoners. The government has publicly disclosed nearly nothing about them, not even their names, save for acknowledging that they are not Afghans. These are the last detainees the US holds in the Afghanistan war. It relinquished hundreds of Afghan detainees, and almost all of the detention facility, to Afghan control last year. Sometimes called, in military parlance, “Enduring Security Threats”, the non-Afghans have posed a dilemma for the Department of Defense for years, as officials pondered what to do about them ahead of a pullout that had been anticipated for December 2014.

Why the Capitalist Elite Love Mass Incarceration

May 9, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Acronym TV, ATV 004, Carl Dix, Cornel West, Dennis Trainor Jr, Genocide, Juanita Young, Mass Incarceration, Month of Resistance, police brutality, police murder, police terror, Prison, Prison Industrial Complex, Race, US genocide

In this clip from Acronym TV’s full program, to discuss a planned month of Resistance To Mass Incarceration, Carl Dix breaks the war on drugs and the war on crime as proxy wars for the war on black, Latino, and oppressed people. This war, according to Dix, has been going on for decades amongst a backdrop of are the globalization of industry. With production moved from the United States to many other parts of the world where they can find workers that they can exploit much more viciously in much worse conditions and pay them much less than they could here generating more profit for the people who run this country, that leave generations of young people with no legitimate ways to survive and raise families, and Incarceration becomes the program for dealing with that.

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