Prisons

All-American Torture Camps, It’s Raining Plastic & Oil Companies Dig It

May 14, 2019 Eleanor Goldfield, Occupy.com Resistance Report Alabama, Environment, Plastic, pollution, Prisons

Human rights violations are rife in Alabama prisons – meanwhile, the Alabama Department of Corrections continues to overcrowd these torture centers while blaming mistreatment on staff shortages. Next up, we are effectively laminating our planet in plastic. And while the public recognition of plastic's evil and long life is growing, there are several aspects of this industry we don't talk about – and we really need to.

People In Alabama Prisons Are Shackled To Buckets For Days On End

May 7, 2019 By Ella Fassler, Truthout.org Educate! Abuse, Alabama, Prisons

On March 25, 2019, Christopher Caldwell reportedly found himself nearly immobile, shackled to a bucket at Limestone Correctional Facility in Alabama. His pant legs were taped up, and his belly, feet and hands were shackled. Caldwell’s handcuffs were shackled to his belly, preventing him from moving his hands above his waist. Caldwell had just been transferred to the prison from a relatively coveted work release center, and had already undergone extensive precautionary entrance procedures: several body cavity searches, metal detectors and drug dogs.

Coordinated Hunger Strike At Two Wisconsin Prisons

April 8, 2019 Staff, Perilouschronicle.com Resist! Hunger Strikes, Prisons, Wisconsin

Nine prisoners at two Wisconsin prisons began a hunger strike demanding an end to indefinite solitary confinement. A joint statement listing their demands and signed with their names cited the recently-elected governor’s campaign promises to reform solitary confinement practices. The hunger strike was timed to start on Madison Action Day, an annual prison reform lobby day. Outside supporters also organized a call-in campaign in support of the hunger strike. Six of the prisoners are housed at Racine Correctional Institution and three are at Columbia Correctional Institution.

South Carolina DOC Director Stirling Drafts Facetious Cell Phone Contraband Act

March 30, 2019 Amani Sawari, Sawarimi.org Educate! Prisons, South Carolina, Telecommunications

I purposely chose the word facetious, because South Carolina’s Dept. of Correction’s Director Bryan Stirling has absurdly decided to address serious issued in South Carolin’a prisons with impotent legislation. The problem in South Carolina’s prisons is NOT the fact that a few prisoners have obtained access to cell phones. The problem is that South Carolina’s prisons, some of the most dangerous and deadly in country, are in devastatingly horrific conditions and prisoners have been using cell phones to expose the issues that they are forcibly confined to.

Teaching In America’s Prisons Has Taught Me To Believe In Second Chances

March 20, 2019 Andrea Cantora, Theconversation.com Educate! Education, Prisons

In 2007, I gave someone a second chance. I was in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution recruiting women for a new program for people returning from prison that I was running in New York City. A woman approached me and handed me her portfolio. It was basically a detailed resume of her accomplishments, skills and goals for the future. Over a two-year period before this, I had visited at least six female facilities in New York and Connecticut and met hundreds of women looking to enter our program. But when Jamila approached me, something stood out.

JPMorgan Backs Away From Private Prison Finance

March 8, 2019 David Henry and Imani Moise, Money.usnews.com Create! Banks, Prisons

NEW YORK (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co has decided to stop financing private operators of prisons and detention centers, which have become targets of protests over Trump administration immigration policies. "We will no longer bank the private prison industry," a company spokesman told Reuters. The decision is a result of the bank's ongoing evaluations of the costs and benefits of serving different industries, he said. JPMorgan is one of several banks that have underwritten bonds or syndicated loans for CoreCivic Inc and GEO Group Inc, the two major private prison operators in the United States.

The Prisoner Says No To Big Brother

March 5, 2019 John Pilger, Informationclearinghouse.info Resist! Julian Assange, Prisons, Surveillance

March 04, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Whenever I visit Julian Assange, we meet in a room he knows too well. There is a bare table and pictures of Ecuador on the walls. There is a bookcase where the books never change. The curtains are always drawn and there is no natural light. The air is still and fetid. This is Room 101. Before I enter Room 101, I must surrender my passport and phone. My pockets and possessions are examined. The food I bring is inspected. The man who guards Room 101 sits in what looks like an old-fashioned telephone box. He watches a screen, watching Julian. There are others unseen, agents of the state, watching and listening.

Over 200 People Went On Hunger Strike After Months In Lockdown At California Prison

February 16, 2019 Raven Rakia, Theappeal.org Educate! California, Hunger Strikes, Prisons

Laura (not her real name) hasn’t seen her husband or heard his voice in over three months—and neither has their son. “It’s hard because we’re both each other’s support system,” Laura told The Appeal. “It hurts me to even talk about it because I have a son and it bothers me that he can’t talk to him, and even hear his voice or anything.” Laura’s husband is incarcerated at Corcoran state prison in California and is one of 333 people the prison has put under lockdown since September. On Sept. 23, after a fight occurred in the yard, units at Facility 3C at the Corcoran state prison in California were put on partial lockdown, or what the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) calls “modified programming.”

Protests Support Prisoners Living Without Heat

February 3, 2019 Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Prisoner rights, Prisons

Protests continue inside and outside of the MDC Federal Detention Center in New York where prisoners do not have heat. Prisoners can be heard by people on the outside banging on windows and walls from all over the building. The New York Justice League is outside during the day and night showing prisoners that people on the outside support them. People are bringing warm drinks and food to support Justice League activists. Holding people in prisons without heat in freezing cold weather violates their basic human rights. Protesters are demanding the people being held are treated with dignity and respect as well as treated humanely.

Disabled Prisoners Decry Unfair Treatment

January 10, 2019 Keri Blakinger, Theappeal.org Resist! Disability Rights, Prisons

It started, as prisoner complaints so often do, with a gripe about not being able to visit the law library. In 2015, a prisoner at Wende Correctional Facility in upstate New York contacted attorneys at Disability Rights New York, an Albany-based nonprofit, to complain that he couldn’t get access to the law library to craft an appeal in his case. The law library at the maximum-security facility in Erie County wasn’t closed nor did it lack books; he simply wasn’t allowed in because he uses a wheelchair for mobility. Like the roughly 350 other disabled and ailing prisoners housed in the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision special medical units, prison officials wouldn’t let him visit the law library...

“Prison Reform” Is Not Enough. In 2019, Let’s Fight For Decarceration.

January 4, 2019 By Dan Berger, Truthout.org Strategize! Mass Incarceration, Prisons, Reform

Prison reform is now in vogue, but police power remains as brutal as ever. Policing in the US continues to include the power to cage as well as the power to kill — a reality that is spectacularly evident at the southern US border. By all accounts, 2019 promises to be another brutal year in the arena of prisons and policing. President Trump signed the First Step Act in late December, while threatening a government shutdown to secure funding for a border wall. The act makes it easier for some federal prisoners to seek early release, widens federal judicial discretion in some low-level sentencing issues and limits some mandatory minimum sentences in federal cases.

Noise Demos Ring In NYE Against Backdrop Of Prison Slavery

January 2, 2019 Staff, Itsgoingdown.org Resist! Prison Labor, Prisons, Protest Demonstrations, Slavery

This year in over 20 cities across the US and Canada, anarchists, abolitionists, autonomists, and other rebels took part in noise demonstrations on New Year’s Eve, as has become an ongoing tradition within the movement. Demonstrations were organized outside of a variety of facilities, jails, prisons, and detention centers, and occurred against a backdrop of not only continued struggle and action against prison slavery, migrant detention, and child separation, but also growing anger to the carceral State in general.

In 2019, Let’s Resolve To Organize With Love In The Face Of Apocalypse

January 2, 2019 Adrienne Maree Brown, Truthout.org Strategize! Deportations, Prisons

This is a time to let love guide each step, but it doesn’t seem like that. It seems like time to obsess over how bad it all is. It’s really bad. It’s a hard time for those who have to think in terms of short-term conditions — of surviving deportation, prison, attacks on our personhood. Watching a caravan of displaced people approach our border, as families are violently separated and children are traumatized there; watching as members of our community are killed by police; watching as the language of trans identity is threatened out of existence… it can feel hard to see what we can do that will matter.

Federal Judge To IDOC: Get Your Unconstitutional Shit Together

December 28, 2018 The Uptown People's Law Center, Beachwoodreporter.com Educate! Courts, Illinois, mental health, Prisons

A federal court has ordered the State of Illinois to address its "failure to . . . meet the constitutional requirements with respect to the mental health needs of" its approximately 12,000 prisoners with mental illness. This case reached a settlement agreement in 2016, but the Illinois Department of Corrections failed to live up to the agreement, and constitutional violations continued, according to the plaintiffs' lead counsel, Harold Hirshman, senior counsel for Dentons. In October, the court issued a 50-page decision finding that IDOC has been deliberately indifferent to prisoners' mental health, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Tomorrow Is Far Away: An Anarchist Intervention Against The Construction Of The Migrant Prison In Laval

December 22, 2018 Montreal Counterinfo, Itsgoingdown.org Strategize! Detention Centers, Immigration, Prisons, Undocumented

Citizenship can only exist and be valued if there is also a category of others, those without status. For this distinction to exist, it must be enforced by the state, which has a number of tools to do so. Deportation is one such tool. Deportation is a violent process in which the state removes all agency from an individual in order to exclude them from the territory over which it asserts its authority. To accomplish this task, the state uses different tactics, one of which is detention centers or migrant prisons. Migrant prisons are used as holding centers prior to deportation. People without status can be arrested and imprisoned while they wait to be flown out of the country, sometimes to far-away lands that they have no relationship to.

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