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Prisoner rights

Cutting Incarcerated Mothers Off From Families Hurts Everyone

June 8, 2022 Mansa Musa, The Real News. , , ,
As Wendy Sawyer and Wanda Bertram recently wrote for the Prison Policy Initiative, “Over half (58%) of all women in US prisons are mothers, as are 80% of women in jails, including many who are incarcerated awaiting trial simply because they can’t afford bail… And these numbers don’t cover the many women preparing to become mothers while locked up this year: An estimated 58,000 people every year are pregnant when they enter local jails or prisons.” In this edition of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Debra Bennett-Austin of Change Comes Now about the shocking number of incarcerated mothers in the US today, the barriers keeping incarcerated mothers from staying connected with their families, and the irreparable damage those severed connections cause for everyone involved.

The Chris Hedges Report: The Long Road Home

June 5, 2022 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. , , ,
The United States has 25% of the world’s prison population, some 2.3 million people, most of whom are poor, although it represents less than 5% of the global population. Its prisons are notorious for their violence, overcrowding, and human rights abuses, including the widespread use of solitary confinement. But what is often not examined is what happens to those released from prisons into a society where they face legalized discrimination imposed by numerous laws, rules, and policies that result in permanent marginalization, thrust into a criminal caste system. These former prisoners are often denied the right to vote, can lose their passports, are barred from receiving public assistance, including housing, and are blocked from a variety of jobs.

June 11, 2022: Call To Support Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners

April 23, 2022 It's Going Down. , , ,
As time moves on and the seasons change, we approach once again the June 11 International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners. Another year has passed, and many of our dear comrades remain captives of the state, subject to its daily subjugation, isolation, and brutality. June 11 is a time to stop the ever-quickening rush of our lives and remember. Remember our imprisoned comrades. Remember our own histories of revolt. Remember the flame – sometimes flickering, sometimes blazing – of anarchism. With June 11, we desire to deepen a critique of prison that challenges the distinction between prisoner and supporter. For us, these differences are conditional: we, as anarchists, see ourselves as potential prisoners. Some of us have been, some of us will be.

Palestinians Observe Prisoners’ Day Amid Increasing Israeli Violence

April 18, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , ,
Israeli forces carried out fresh attacks on Palestinian worshipers inside the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem on Sunday, April 17. At least a dozen worshipers were arrested and scores were wounded. The attack was carried out despite widespread global condemnation of the Friday attacks inside the mosque compound in which at least 150 Palestinians were injured and over 300 arrested. Attacks on Palestinians were also carried out in different parts of the occupied West Bank by the Israeli forces and settlers. The Israeli forces carried out several raids inside Palestinian villages in the West Bank on Monday as well and arrested at least 16 Palestinians, Wafa news agency reported. Amid the widespread violence and oppression, Palestinians observed a day of solidarity with Palestinian prisoners who have been incarcerated inside Israeli jail for fighting against the occupation.

Gross Negligence In For-Profit Prison Health Care

April 17, 2022 Marie Kelly, Workers World. , , ,
By law, people in prison have a right to get the health care they need. In the late 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court decision Estelle v Gamble set the standard for medical rights of prisoners. But prison authorities are being criminally negligent in not providing adequate health care to incarcerated people. As the jailed population ages, 40% have chronic health conditions. The cost of providing health care has skyrocketed and local, state and federal governments have contracted with for-profit prison health care companies as a way of tightening their budgets.  Private companies give a per diem rate for basic and specialty care – which would be lower if services were publicly provided. The negotiated per diem rate creates a huge profit incentive.

Boston Demands ‘Free Leonard Peltier’

February 8, 2022 UAINE, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Jericho Movement Boston,  United American Indians of New England (UAINE), and Boston BDS called for a standout in front of the JFK Federal Building in Boston on Monday, February 7, 2022 at 4:00 pm to call attention to international calls to free Native American prisoner Leonard Peltier, now 77 and ill with COVID-19.  Known internationally as the most famous and longest-serving Native American political prisoner in the US, Peltier has been imprisoned since 1976 on charges that he shot two FBI agents on Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. Peltier was framed up for a crime he did not commit. Witnesses perjured themselves at the behest of federal authorities, and the FBI suppressed ballistics evidence that would have exonerated him.

A Jail Tested Ivermectin ‘Treatment’ On Detainees Without Consent

February 1, 2022 Charles Hopkins, The Real News Network. , , ,
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal lawsuit against the Washington County Detention Center in Arkansas on behalf of inmates who say the jail’s medical staff, led by Dr. Robert Karas, prescribed and gave them ivermectin to treat COVID-19 without telling them what the drug actually was. (Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug that the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Pharmacists Association, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, and others have repeatedly stated should not be used as a treatment for COVID-19.) As Edrick Floreal-Wooten, one of the inmates at Washington County Detention Center and a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, recently told CBS News, “They said they were vitamins, steroids and antibiotics.

President Biden Must Find The Political Will To Close Guantanamo Bay

January 12, 2022 Andy Worthington. , , ,
It is, to be blunt, beyond dispiriting to have to be calling for the closure of the tired and discredited “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay 20 years — 7,306 days — since it first opened. The prison, as I have long explained, is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and every day that it remains open ought to be a source of shame to anyone with any respect for the law — or, for that matter, with any common decency. In countries that respect the rule of law, the only way to be stripped of your liberty is as a criminal suspect or as a prisoner of war protected by the Geneva Conventions. At Guantánamo, the Bush administration threw away the rulebook, holding men without any rights whatsoever as “enemy combatants”, who could be held indefinitely, with no requirement that they ever face charges, and with no legal mechanism in place to ever ensure their release.

Guantanamo Bay: ‘Ugly Chapter Of Unrelenting Human Rights Violations’

January 12, 2022 the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. , , ,
Geneva - On the 20th anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, UN experts* condemned the facility as a site of “unparalleled notoriety” and said its continued operation was a stain on the US Government’s commitment to the rule of law. “Twenty years of practising arbitrary detention without trial accompanied by torture or ill treatment is simply unacceptable for any government, particularly a government which has a stated claim to protecting human rights,” said the independent experts, appointed by the Human Rights Council. “As a newly elected Member of the Human Rights Council, the experts again call on the United States to close this facility and close this ugly chapter of unrelenting human rights violations.”

New Data: Changes In Incarceration System ‘Inadequate, Uneven And Unsustained’ During COVID

January 12, 2022 Wendy Sawyer, Prison Policy Initiative. , , ,
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has released a lot of new data over the past few weeks that help us finally see — both nationally and state-by-state — how policy choices made in the first year of the pandemic impacted correctional populations. Unsurprisingly, the numbers document the tragedy of thousands of lives lost behind bars, and evidence of some of the policy decisions that contributed to the death toll. Drilling down, we also see a (very) few reasons to be hopeful and, for those of us paying close attention, a few notable improvements in what the BJS is able to collect and how they report it. Above all, we see how quickly things can change — for better or for worse — when under pressure, and discuss some of the issues and policy choices these data tell us to watch out for.

Why US Prisons Don’t Want Prisoners To Read

January 5, 2022 Eddie Conway, The Real News Network. , , ,
In a recent piece for Protean magazine entitled “The American Prison System’s War on Reading,” Alex Skopic writes, “Across the United States, the agencies responsible for mass imprisonment are trying to severely limit incarcerated people’s access to the written word—an alarming trend, and one that bears closer examination.” From outright banning books and letting prison libraries fall into decay to the intrusion of for-profit electronic reading services that inmates have to pay for, the assault on prisoners’ ability to read books while incarcerated is one of many calculated cruelties that make the US carceral system so inhumane. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Skopic about the American prison system’s war on reading and its deep (and racist) historical roots.

Steven Donziger’s First Letter From Prison

November 20, 2021 Steven Donziger, Popular Resistance. , , ,
I am finally able to write directly from inside the belly of the beast: the federal prison in Danbury, CT. I am now on day 23 of my incarceration, and the experience has been nothing short of mind-blowing. I am living with another person in a 54 sq ft cell; next door is a 37-year-old man, one of the kindest people I have ever met. He was sentenced to a 35-year term for gang violence when he was 19. Three people in my unit of 80 or so men are lifers and have over 30 years in the system. The length of the sentences for various crimes is astounding. We are unique as a country for the extraordinarily punitive nature of our criminal justice system. And it sickens me to see it from the inside. All of us here are simply raw material for a business built largely on money and politics that has virtually nothing to do with rehabilitation (although there are staff here working miracles against all odds to help inmates adjust to the outside).

The ‘Forgotten Fight’ For Prison Abolition In France

November 14, 2021 Jacques Lesage de La Haye and Scott Branson, ROAR Magazine. , , ,
When I saw that Jaccques Lesage de La Haye had a new book called The Abolition of Prison, published by the French radical press, Éditions Libertalia, I reached out through my anarchist radio networks to find contact information for him. Jacques is a longtime anarchist and abolitionist in France, who for many years hosted the anti-prison radio show Ras les murs. His book promised to be a culmination of all of his experience writing and struggling against prisons and working to support people both inside and outside. As a translator and an anarchist, I am always keeping an eye out for new texts to try to bring into English in order to connect movements around the world and especially to help connect the abolitionist struggles across national divides.

COVID-19 Prevention No Match For Crowded, Poorly Ventilated Housing

October 28, 2021 Juan Moreno Haines, Shadow Proof. , , ,
In the months since COVID-19 wreaked havoc inside California’s 35 prisons and claimed 240 incarcerated lives, practically nothing has been done to address the crowded and poorly ventilated housing units that have helped the virus spread. At San Quentin State Prison, COVID-19 infected three-quarters of its incarcerated residents and dozens required hospitalization. It killed 28 prisoners and a correctional sergeant, prompting a court to call the incident the “worst epidemiological disaster in California correctional history” last October. A near full-scale shutdown from March 2020 to May 2021 didn’t thwart the virus’ disastrous effect on San Quentin residents. The deaths took place while prisoners spent more than 23-hours-a-day locked inside their cells with two people assigned to each one.

Chris Hedges: The Call

October 21, 2021 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
On September 5, 2013, I pulled my old Volvo wagon—a bumper sticker reading “This is the Rebel Base” stuck on the back by my wife, a Star Wars fan—into the parking lot at East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, New Jersey. I had taught college-level courses in New Jersey prisons for the past three years. But neither my new students nor I had any idea that night that we were embarking on a journey that would shatter their protective emotional walls, or that years later our lives would be deeply intertwined. I put my wallet and phone in the glove compartment, emptied my pockets of coins, and dumped them in the console between the front seats. I made sure I had my driver’s license. I gathered up my books, plays by August Wilson, James Baldwin, John Herbert, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Miguel Piñero, Amiri Baraka, and a copy of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
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