“The cells don’t have any heat. So, they’re sleeping with their clothes on,” a woman named Regina told Truthout of her son’s experience in Hill Correctional Center in Illinois in early December. “They’re not heating the tiers. There’s no heat in the day room. There’s no heat outside the showers.… The water is cold. You can let it run for a little while and you may get a little warm. But it’s not…
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One of Borey “Peejay” Ai’s earliest memories is the sound of gunfire. “My mom would put us under the table,” he recalled. Ai was too young to understand what was happening, but he remembered being afraid like his mother. “Because I felt her fear, I felt fear too,” he said. Ai was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after his mother fled Cambodia to escape the Khmer Rouge genocide. As a small child…
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Sixty-three-year-old Lazara Ordaz has spent the past 24 years behind bars on a 35-year federal prison sentence for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. “I have missed over two decades of births, birthdays, Thanksgivings and Christmases which I will never get back,” Ordaz told Truthout. In 2020, as COVID-19 ripped through prisons, Ordaz applied for home confinement under the CARES Act.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Award-winning journalist and author Mumia Abu-Jamal has been in prison for 41 years in a case infused with racism. The 68-year-old is a former Black Panther and the author of a dozen books, including the celebrated Live from Death Row. After his 1982 conviction in the killing of police officer Daniel Faulkner, Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death. In 2011, his sentence was reduced to life without the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
There’s going to be one less prison in California. On September 8, visiting Lassen County Judge Robert F. Moody dismissed a lawsuit by the town of Susanville that intended to force the continued operation of the California Correctional Center (CCC), a 60-year-old state prison requiring $503 million in repairs. Judge Moody’s ruling marks the end of the town’s year-long fight to stop CCC from…
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On October 11, prison organizer Dawn Brooks’s phone began ringing off the hook. Within three days, she received 50 calls. Colitha Bush, a Texas mother who had been released from federal prison under COVID measures in mid-September, was one of the callers. She had spent 14 days at a halfway house before being released to home confinement at her sister’s house. On October 12…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography is written to be used.
For millions of incarcerated people around the country, receiving mail from our loved ones is a source of momentary joy, a tangible connection to family and friends in the form of birthday cards, baby pictures or handwritten letters bringing news from home.
On many of my worst days inside, hearing my name called out for mail has lifted my spirits; all my problems fade into the background as I tear open an envelope containing photos of the family dog.
But now I’ll never get another piece of mail again while I’m in prison.
In January, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) banned the 86,000 prisoners in its custody from receiving physical mail. All incoming mail (excluding legal documents) will be digitized by JPay, a for-profit contractor. Incarcerated residents will only be able to view scanned versions of our letters and photographs on tablets or at communal kiosks in cell blocks or dorms.
Over the past few years, multiple states have adopted the same restrictions — as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which oversees 122 facilities — in an attempt to prevent contraband like drugs from entering correctional institutions. But according to Nazish Dholakia of the Vera Institute of Justice, out of the 3.1 million items of contraband that entered the FDC between January 2019 and April 2021, roughly just 1 percent came through the mail.
In fact, reports suggest that in most prisons and jails in the U.S., correctional officers are the primary source of drugs and other contraband, not the mail. The Justice Department identified this trend as far back as 2003.
Eliminating physical mail severs one of the only palpable ties we have with the outside world. When my father passed away unexpectedly last year, the many sympathy cards I received brought me a small measure of comfort. I would read the handwritten notes over and over with tears in my eyes. I held the last picture ever taken of my dad — a glossy 3″-by-5″ print sent by my stepmom — in my hands for hours, memorizing his features before placing it reverently in my photo album for safekeeping.
Getting mail in prison is a time-honored ritual dating back centuries. Held inside a Birmingham jail in the Jim Crow South, Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have tucked a letter from his wife into his Bible for inspiration. Oscar Wilde had an illicit pen pal. Many despondent prisoners over the years have found hope from a simple written word or a snapshot of the life they left behind.
We treasure these mementos behind bars because we have little else.
Under the new policy of digitizing mail, incarcerated people are losing the visceral experience of touching a letter or smelling perfume on an envelope, but we must also endure the technical problems associated with a nascent system.
The addition of scanning has resulted in extended wait times for mail delivery, blurry photographs and unreadable letters. Missing pages are a common occurrence, while some mail is just lost in a quagmire of inefficiency.
In the FDC, personal tablets issued by JPay frequently malfunction, and replacements can take months to arrive. Without a tablet, the only option is to view incoming mail on a communal kiosk that continually breaks. Some days the line to use a kiosk is longer than the phone line, resulting in arguments and disorder.
And still, drugs like K2, a synthetic cannabinoid, flood prisons and jails nationwide.
Texas prisons stopped in-person visits and restricted mail in 2020, but that didn’t stop drugs from entering the system. In Pennsylvania, drug positivity rates actually increased after a digital mail service was implemented, according to The Intercept’s Lauren Gill.
Prison mail has long been subject to inspection, but with for-profit companies operating virtually unregulated, new privacy issues emerge: Friends and family of the incarcerated now have their correspondence and photos saved on a database — a digital diary compiled without their consent.
In addition to storing personal information indefinitely, programs like MailGuard, created by the Florida-based company Smart Communications, have the ability to share the sender’s email and IP addresses, GPS location and home address with correctional agencies.
With no real evidence of costly digital mail services preventing the flow of contraband into prisons and jails, one has to ask about other motives.
Companies like JPay have long exploited Florida prisoners for services ranging from phone calls to canteen provisions to medical co-pays. Restricting physical mail could just be the latest ploy to extract money from our hardship.
For example, incarcerated residents in the FDC have the option of paying to print copies of our mail for $0.25 for black-white printouts and $0.50 for color photos, adding to the long list of revenue-generating schemes already thriving in the criminal legal system. Charging for printed copies of our mail is an egregious practice being utilized in many other states who have digitized mail, including California, Washington and Texas. After all, our families have already paid the postage for our mail… why should we pay again?
It’s hard for me to imagine not receiving mail anymore, and harder still to think about losing such an important lifeline to my loved ones. A strong social connection with people on the outside encourages successful reentry back into society. By restricting mail, the FDC has needlessly limited my support system in the name of “security.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
After more than four decades in the shadows, electronic monitors have captured the hearts and minds of law enforcement. In Harris County, Texas, the ranks of those being tracked with electronic devices while awaiting trial skyrocketed from 27 people in 2019 to nearly 4,000 in 2021. Authorities from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increased the number of migrants tracked nationally by the SmartLINK cellphone app from over 86,000 in December 2020 to more than 247,000 in September of this year. And in an unprecedented move, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) released 46,000 people to home confinement from March 2020 to July 2022, most of them forced to wear electronic monitors.
The pandemic contributed to this growth, making the prospect of escaping prison and jail cells through electronic monitoring (EM) an attractive option. But as abolitionist critics have consistently maintained, EM is not a more gentle, humane “alternative” to imprisonment, but rather a form of incarceration that is rapidly expanding in numbers and in its capacity to capture data. To challenge and ultimately abolish this punitive technology, we need a new paradigm to anchor our understanding of EM and all forms of e-carceration. Five key components frame this new paradigm.
First, we must demand more data and information. The annual census collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics on incarcerated populations has proven essential to addressing mass incarceration, especially in unearthing the racist impact of the prison-industrial complex. In an era where data acts as currency, we have no national census on electronic monitoring operations. In fact, only a handful of the nation’s more than 2,000 county and state EM programs have produced a single report or evaluation. The vast majority don’t even make basic stats public. They provide no racial breakdown of those being monitored, and no counts of people reincarcerated for violating EM rules. Nor do they offer any analyses of the impact of these devices on the monitored population. The major companies in the sector — BI, Satellite Tracking of People, Attenti and Sentinel — do no better. Their public media statements consist of puff pieces and praise poems for the technology. The sole state legislation requiring strict reporting by a government agency, Illinois’s 2019 HB0386, remains unenforced. In the absence of political pressure, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board, which is responsible for reporting, has failed to deliver a single piece of the mandated data. Perhaps the recently passed California bill AB 2658, which calls for EM reports on juvenile monitoring, will deliver more results.
Second, we need to recognize that electronic monitors are no longer simply ankle bands that track a person’s location. They are an integral part of the surveillance state. Data captured by EM becomes a tool of criminalization and punishment, stored on clouds owned by Amazon and Microsoft, and used to block people’s access to employment, housing, education and successful outcomes in immigration courts. A recent paper by Kentrell Owens and a team of researchers from the University of Washington revealed how new generation, smartphone-based monitors expand the intrusive reach of EM by incorporating face and voice recognition log-ons. The current large-scale shift from ankle monitors to cellphone-based apps may eliminate the visual stigma of a plastic shackle but opens the door to accessing all the data on an individual’s phone with no clear guidelines as to how it is used or with whom it is shared. As Hamid Khan, an activist with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, told Truthout, such data can become a “critical tool of harm.” In the post-Roe era, Khan’s concerns bear scrutiny as location tracking can become a key vehicle for prosecuting individuals seeking abortions and those who assist them.
Third, we need to place electronic monitoring and surveillance in historical context. Activist researcher Sarah T. Hamid notes that admiration of these technologies as “new” and “innovative” is off the mark. As she told Truthout, acquiring data from oppressed people has a long, problematic history. From the calculation of how much water to pack on slave trading ships to the “science” of apartheid decision makers who determined a person’s racial category by observing if a pencil would stick in their hair, measurement and calibration have been central to systems of oppression. As Yeshimabeit Milner of Data for Black Lives reminds us, we need data but we must engage it “with an awareness of how it represents the product of a series of choices by those empowered to set the research agenda and conduct the studies — and on how those choices impact the outcome.”
Fourth, though often overstressed by EM critics, electronic monitoring has severe effects on individuals in the many jurisdictions where user fees and other charges are exacted. Some local jurisdictions have banned EM fees, but California is the only state to do so. While large EM programs like in Cook County, Illinois, and Ramsey County, Minnesota, do not charge fees, a recent report from the Fines and Fees Justice Center revealed how common user fees have become. According to the report, they range from $1 to $40 per day. In addition, many electronic monitoring programs include a setup fee on the order of $250 plus the requirement to install a landline phone. These charges can create a mountain of debt for monitored individuals and their families, often posing the dilemma of whether to pay the EM assessments or cover necessities like food and utility bills.
Lastly, this new paradigm needs to support the emergence of an organized resistance to electronic monitoring. This resistance contains two components: applying an activist and policy-oriented research lens to EM, and mobilizing impacted populations against this technology. The cutting edge of the research component lies in the immigrant rights movement. Here a series of reports, webinars, toolkits, videos, online classes and research from Mijente, Just Futures Law, Community Justice Exchange and nearly a dozen other organizations have outed companies like Palantir, LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters as major players in tracking immigrants. Informed by the lived experience of thousands of monitored migrants, these investigations show how companies create personal profiles of millions of people that can be sold or used to identify networks of individuals allegedly involved in criminal activity.
Activist researchers in the criminal legal space, who are fighting for the elimination of cash bail and pretrial detention, have also helped lift the veil off electronic monitoring. Working closely with the Illinois Coalition to End Money Bond and the abolitionist Chicago Community Bond Fund, a 2021 report by researchers at Chicago Appleseed, led by Sarah Staudt, statistically showed that electronic monitoring did not reduce failures to appear for court dates.
Appleseed is not alone. Abolitionist-oriented critics from mainstream universities have also entered the EM research fray. Teams headed by George Washington University Law School’s Kate Weisburd and UCLA School of Law’s Alicia Virani have unearthed previously unexplored policies and practices. Weisburd’s team collected documents from 44 states, finding a plethora of egregious EM policies including in Sacramento, California, where fees once ran as high as $47 a day for certain populations. Virani’s work in Los Angeles depicted a “New Jim Code” in EM, with Black people comprising 31 percent of those being monitored in a county where they comprise just 8.1 percent of the population. The Harvard Kennedy School’s Sandra Susan Smith, using a more interview-based approach, published a detailed case study of electronic monitoring in San Francisco.
A final critical area of research work has focused on the technical errors of the devices, particularly false alarms that incorrectly identify a person’s location. Such technical errors can lead to reincarceration for violation of rules. The most startling revelations in this regard came from Chicago’s Lucy Parsons Lab and the nonprofit Triibe. Out of thousands of EM alerts in Cook County, their findings classified more than 80 percent as false alarms. Such a high rate of false alarms meant that rather than using scientific criteria, authorities had to arbitrarily decide which alarms merited a response and which would simply be ignored.
The cumulative impact of this wave of research, especially when it reveals the lived experiences of monitored people, has informed several legislative efforts. In at least three states, activists campaigning to eliminate cash bail and restructure pretrial justice have been able to include measures in statewide legislation to restrict the use of electronic monitors and reduce the harm they do. The Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act, the first law in the country to ban cash bond, included stipulations that guaranteed two days a week of movement for individuals being monitored so that they could do basic tasks like shopping and laundry. The law also mandated a full-fledged court hearing to place anyone on a monitor who is released before trial. Activists in California and New York fought to halt efforts to expand the use of electronic monitoring through clauses in state reform laws. California’s recent AB 2658 ensured that youth on EM received credit for time served while on a monitor and also compelled courts to review the continued monitoring of an individual youth every 30 days.
In addition to research and legislative advocacy, organizing by people incarcerated in federal facilities has added a new dimension to EM resistance. As part of implementing the CARES Act, then-Attorney General William Barr issued a memo to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in 2020, ordering the release of certain individuals to home confinement, particularly those with impending release dates or underlying health conditions. Barr stipulated those released should be “subject to location monitoring services.” Over the course of the next two years, the Feds released more than 40,000 people to home confinement, most on electronic monitoring.
Implementation did not go smoothly. The Feds bypassed many eligible for release. Others were sent back to prison for petty violations like letting the battery on their monitor run out. In response, people at Danbury Women’s Prison, the Connecticut prison on which Orange Is the New Black was based, took the radical step of forming the Danbury 100. They established themselves as a registered nonprofit, set up a website and launched a Facebook group with 171 members where they shared campaign strategies and personal advice. Led by two women released from Danbury, Dianthe Dawn Brooks and Wendy Kraus-Heitmann, the Danbury 100 advocated for those overlooked for release and joined with Families Against Mandatory Minimums to help secure the re-release of 76-year-old Gwen Levi, who was arrested while on home confinement because she didn’t answer a phone call while she was participating in a computer class.
In an interview with Truthout, Brooks said since only eight people — of more than 40,000 — were returned to prison over new criminal conduct after being released following the Barr memo, authorities should recognize that they could release people and communities “could still be safe.” She rejected the viability of incarceration, arguing “there are community outlets that could be utilized to keep people on the outside.”
Electronic monitors have been advanced as a quick-fix solution for mass incarceration for many years. During the pandemic, they became the go-to answer for decarceration. But there are no quick-fix, one-dimensional solutions to either mass incarceration or the surveillance state. No database, algorithm or reporting requirements will be sufficient to ultimately eliminate or even severely restrict this technology of incarceration. Rather, we need a comprehensive framework that acknowledges the need for data as well as the need for that data to be linked to the lived experiences of impacted people.
Too often policy makers and even activists settle for electronic monitoring because they conclude it is “better than jail.” As someone who spent a year on electronic monitoring, I reject this simplistic response. “Better than jail” offers nothing but a false binary, as if we can only imagine two alternatives: a cage or a tether. The third option is what we need: freedom. Advancing e-carceration will never get us there.
Thanks to Emmett Sanders and Kate Weisburd for contributions to this piece.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Recently, mainstream white feminists have called on politicians to fund construction of the Women’s Center for Justice, a “feminist jail” in Harlem, New York. The goal is to build a new, progressive alternative that would provide “better” treatment for women and nonbinary people. But across the U.S., anti-carceral activists and communities in favor of total liberation and abolition are expressing outrage — and rightfully so. Proponents of this “feminist jail” are allying themselves with the existing prison and law-and-order system, which continues to inflict extraordinary harm on criminalized Black, poor, migrant, queer, gender-oppressed and disabled communities. This moment presents a vital opportunity to call out feminist politics and actions that strengthen and expand the legitimacy of the prison system
We can trace two philosophically different approaches to the imprisonment of women and nonbinary people throughout the history of prisons. For example, reformist thinkers and activists chose to “reform” individual women within prisons. Reformists who were white and middle-class organized to improve prison conditions within the existing prison structure. On the other hand, abolitionist thinkers and activists did not want simply to improve material conditions so that incarcerated women would have more rights, safety and access to opportunities — instead, they wanted to bring an end to a legal regime rooted in racism, economic subjugation and gender oppression.
The trend for building alternative women’s centers can be traced back to as early as 1910 in Greenwich Village, New York — the epicenter of radicalism and nonconformity, but also civil unrest and rising crime caused by economic constraints. In the mid-2000s, there was a resurgence of interest in California to fund the construction of alternative prisons to address women’s pathways into crime and imprisonment. Then, former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and progressive reform advocates pushed for alternative prisons framed as gender responsive facilities with specialized programming designed to meet the unique needs and challenges of incarcerated women. Advocates claimed that a gender responsive model would provide a therapeutic and healing environment with opportunities for building essential skills — all designed to address personal issues such as abuse, violence, family relationships, drug use and mental illness, and socioeconomic conditions.
While feminist-centered programming initiatives can provide much-needed services and improve material conditions for those who are currently incarcerated, the argument for building feminist-centered jails and prisons fails to account for the intersections of race, gender identity, sexuality, disability, citizenship and class, and how these social identities converge so that Black women and other women and nonbinary people of color get caught up in the dragnet of incarceration in the first place.
A reformist approach to women’s incarceration places the responsibility of reform on the individual, not the institution.
In these spaces, the explanations for the root causes of women’s pathways into the carceral state (e.g., drug and alcohol use, sex work, violence, socioeconomic status etc.) are framed as an individual failing, requiring women to turn inward and take full responsibility rather than contextualize their incarceration as manifestations of racial and economic inequality. In this way, reform is imposed as the responsibility of the individual. Jails and prisons promoting a “feminist” model are not designed to address the roots of women’s incarceration or the problems they face in these institutions within the broader context of social injustice, because this would undermine the goals of incarceration, which are to punish and maintain a permanent prison class.
Frontline activists against incarceration have mobilized to reject the prison system in all its forms. Survived and Punished, a group which advocates for incarcerated survivors of domestic abuse, has campaigned against the movement to build the Women’s Center for Justice in Harlem. In a social media campaign under the hashtag #NoNewWomensJailNYC! the group stated, “We vehemently oppose efforts to brand the expansion of the PIC [prison-industrial complex] as ‘feminist’ or ‘humanitarian.’”
The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, which advocates for prison abolition, is leading community efforts to pass a jail and prison construction moratorium in Massachusetts. In a Twitter statement, Andrea James, a formerly incarcerated activist and the executive director of The National Council, wrote: “Let’s invest in something proactive for a change with that $50M the state wanted to spend on a new women’s prison.” MCI-Framingham is the state’s only women’s prison, dating back to 1877. Its conditions are dilapidated beyond repair, giving the state an opportunity to build a modern prison to replace it. However, prison abolition activists advocate for decarceration and prime social investments in communities most harmed by the carceral state. While the push for a new women’s prison is not being framed as a feminist prison, the vision for a smaller, modern facility that provides opportunities for people to “heal from trauma and other modern contemporary attributes” dovetails with the goals and aims of progressive feminist reformers.
On the west coast, organizers of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a grassroots statewide abolitionist organization, are currently mobilizing to kick off its Close CA Women’s Prison campaign.
We must not fall into the trap of endorsing “alternatives” that reproduce violence. Feminist organizations such as the nonprofit Women’s Community Justice and its “progressive” advocates have merely repackaged the mobilizing efforts of grassroots movements to create political urgency for their campaign: #BeyondRosies. This campaign aims to garner sympathy and shock over the violence and abuse that people incarcerated in New York City’s women’s prison experience at the hands of male prison guards. But its proposed solution — building a separate institution for women run by carceral feminists — is no better. No true solution can involve building more carceral institutions.
While mainstream, privileged white feminists work to advance their cause within the existing political structure of a carceral system, activists working towards abolition and justice, equity and community power seek total liberation. Violence cannot be separated from women’s incarceration, because carceral institutions, regardless of their model, are inherently harmful.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Across the state of Alabama, where the state’s longest-ever strike is currently ongoing at Warrior Met Coal after over 18 months, another historic labor stoppage is in its second week. Thousands of incarcerated people at every major male prison in Alabama have refused to report to their work assignments.
“The message that we are sending is, the courts have shut down on us, the parole board has shut down on us,” a strike organizer who goes by Swift Justice told a reporter for independent news site Unicorn Riot. “This society has long ago shut down on us. So basically, if that’s the case, and you’re not wanting us to return back to society, you can run these facilities yourselves.”
“It makes no sense for us to continue to contribute to our own oppression,” Kinetik Justice, another striking prisoner, told Unicorn Riot. “We finance our own incarceration through our free labor and spending every dime we get in the canteens and so forth. It is our money and our family’s money that is used to keep us incarcerated and oppressed like this.”
The strike has its roots in years of inside organizing. In 2016, the Free Alabama Movement successfully led a 10-day nationwide strike that aimed to spotlight how the 13th Amendment has allowed the institution of slavery to transform itself, in spite of its abolition on paper. (The 13th Amendment banned slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”) That strike spanned at least 40 facilities in 24 states.
The deplorable conditions across the state’s prisons also make them particularly dangerous. According to a 2020 lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, the Alabama prison system “fails to provide adequate protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions, and subjects prisoners to excessive force at the hands of prison staff.”
Organizers have crafted a list of demands, aimed primarily at Republican Governor Kay Ivey and the Alabama legislature. These demands include:
Swift and Kinetik argue that there is an unbroken line extending from the institution of slavery as it existed in the antebellum era to the modern prison industrial complex.
“Alabama wishes for its slaves to remain passive and obedient to continue bringing millions of dollars of profit from our backs and blood,” Swift said in an October 1 press release.
If slavery is characterized, as sociologist Orlando Patterson contends, primarily by social death, the thread is clear: a person who becomes an inmate gets a number for a name, loses access to communication channels uncontrolled by the institution, is typically moved far from their family, and exists according to the dictates of guards, at least some of whom have been charged with or convicted of assaulting those in their care. Death, in the literal sense, is also a constant feature of Alabama’s prisons, and the full extent of the violence is hard to measure given ADOC’s tendency to provide no updates.
Politicians and administrators continue to find new ways to make a system widely condemned for its brutality even more brutal. The parole board, for instance, has drastically reduced grants of conditional release; 46 percent of applications were denied in 2017, but that number skyrocketed to 84 percent in 2021. The average for the decade prior to 2021 was 37 percent, with the drastic increase in part reflecting the fact that the board very often declines to follow their own guidelines, choosing instead to keep more people locked up even as the Department of Justice has found that the prisons are unconstitutionally overcrowded.
While the criminal justice system disproportionately targets communities of color at every point in the process, the racial disparities in parole denials are still increasing; a Montgomery Advertiser article reports “grants for Black applicants dropping at a much faster rate in 2020 and 2021 than for whites.” As officials strip away any remaining hope many have of ever seeing the outside world again, what remains for inmates to focus on is the trauma the carceral system inflicts.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, ADOC’s strikebreaking tactics are extreme. For instance, where the hedge funds that own Warrior Met Coal have made clear they intend to metaphorically “starve out” the miners in Brookwood, ADOC is employing actual starvation. In addition to adopting a so-called “holiday meal schedule” of only two meals at facilities all around the state, prisoners say those meals are made up of trays containing no hot food and limited nutrients. Numerous images of items such as two “sandwiches” constructed from only cold slices of bread and cheese have made the rounds on social media.
ADOC claims this is merely because they have lost most of their supply of free, forced labor, although it is questionable how much extra labor it would take to serve up a larger scoop of mush or add more bread slices to a tray.
Even beyond the ongoing starvation, prison officials have forced inmates to provide scab labor. If someone on work release (i.e. those allowed to work outside the prison, returning when their shift is complete) declines to cross the metaphorical picket line, prisoners say they are at risk of immediately losing their release status and being moved to Donaldson, a prison notorious—even by Alabama standards—for its extreme violence.
A person brought in from the North Alabama Work Release Center to take the place of the striking Alabama prisoners at Limestone told his story to Kinetik on video, expressing solidarity with the strikers; not even two hours after the video was posted online, the person who recorded the footage, Kinetik, was beaten by guards and locked in solitary confinement—not for the first time. Even for those who are prepared both to face violence from guards and to lose their hard-won work release status, the tremendous isolation folks on the inside face makes it difficult to find out about the strike in the first place.
Thousands of people have built solidarity in these most unlikely conditions. The labor movement depends on all of us recognizing that there is more that connects us than divides us, and that there are many more of us ready to fight for our rights than there are bosses and oppressors.
“Regardless of where we are,” Swift said, “we are humans.”
This piece was originally published in Labor Notes
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On September 7, 2022, after many attempted delays from the City of Susanville, California, a Lassen County judge ruled in favor of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to close one of Susanville’s two prisons. The court case and public debate over the prison closure has been almost entirely based on the anticipated loss of 1,000 jobs in the prison, but the closure of this facility marks an enormous shift in the use of prison labor for public work. The California Correctional Center in Susanville is set to be closed by June 2023. It is one of two remaining training hubs for the California Conservation Camp Program, which, before 2019, made up 192 of 208 hand crews working for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (also known as CAL FIRE).
Although popular references to prison labor today often focus on the production of manufactured goods for private companies, public work programs make up significantly more of the total work assignments in prison. In fact, public work assignments are a larger percentage of prison jobs than government and private manufacturing combined.
Public work is a catchall category that refers to many types of manual labor for state governments including doing road work, cleaning up landfills and hazardous spills, moving debris and clearing roads after a hurricane, filling sandbags to mitigate flooding, carrying out forestry work in state-owned forests and firefighting.
Many Western states — like Nevada, Washington, Arizona and Oregon — have “conservation camp” programs where a few hundred incarcerated people are put to work on behalf of natural resource departments on vegetation management, hazardous fuel reduction projects and wildland fire suppression. California’s conservation camp program is the largest of these by far, employing somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 incarcerated people across the state in an average year to carry out millions of hours of work for CAL FIRE.
A groundbreaking new report on incarcerated workers by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law Center aggregated all types of prison jobs in state and federal facilities. They broke down the types of prison jobs into four main sectors: maintenance of prison facilities (80 percent), production of goods and services for government agencies (6.5 percent), public work (8 percent) and work for private industries (>1 percent). The report estimates that 63,000 of all incarcerated workers are doing public work (8 percent of prison jobs).
Incarcerated firefighters face much higher rates of injury than professional firefighters, and are largely unable to negotiate the conditions of their work. A TIME investigative report found that incarcerated firefighters were four times more likely to be injured from “object-induced injuries, such as cuts, bruises, dislocations and fractures” than professional firefighters working on the same fire.
These types of programs use incarcerated workers to carry out year-round wildfire management labor, largely because they comprise an incredibly cheap labor pool for the state governments dealing with increasingly devastating fire seasons. However, California’s Conservation Camp Program, also known as “fire camp,” has been using this labor force for close to a century, and Susanville’s embattled prison has been at the heart of this program.
Susanville’s California Correctional Center is closing for two reasons. Firstly, the prison would require half a billion dollars in repairs to be up to code, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, making it a prime target for closure. Secondly, there are fewer “low-level offenders” eligible for fire camp, so the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has reduced the size of the conservation camp program and is routing all remaining training for the program through the Jamestown Sierra Conservation Center.
The smaller number of Level 1 (or “low level”) incarcerated people is a direct result of the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling that California must release people from state prisons in order to reduce overcrowding. In tandem with other sentencing reforms and California’s Public Safety Realignment Initiative, federal enforcement of the 2011 ruling has reduced the number of people convicted of so-called nonviolent, nonsexual, nonserious crimes, and these are the people who have historically made up 92 percent of California’s state hand crews.
This year, CAL FIRE reported that there are only 37 hand crews made up of incarcerated people, and only about 75 total hand crews, which is less than 25 percent of the standard 208 hand crews that CAL FIRE had relied upon. To restore the forestry and firefighting capacity of CAL FIRE, it must train and recruit people with livable wages and workplace protections.
The low or unpaid workforce needed for wildfire management in California has long been disciplined by the police and prisons. “Paddywagon raids” carried out by fire wardens and sheriffs targeted “vagrants” who couldn’t prove their employment and thus would be either available to work in the forests or sent to jail if they didn’t. These took place in the early 20th century, as large groups of laborers were necessary for state-mandated projects in wildfire management and timber. The California prisons had auxiliary “road camps” starting in 1913, where incarcerated people built roads and highways throughout the state. The first iteration of “fire camp” was a stop-gap program started by a Los Angeles probation officer during the Great Depression to reduce the costs of incarceration in a crowded city jail.
The Los Angeles model caught on and during World War II, sentenced prisoners were given vacant positions in both manufacturing and forestry. Prison forest camps were established during the war, due to the Board of Forestry’s concerns that the state lacked sufficient labor power to counteract wartime arson attempts from Axis forces, which had occurred on occasion in Oregon. In the same period, the California Department of Corrections was formed as a separate entity from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1944 and these prison fire camps became a centerpiece of this new department. “Forest labor camps were the flagship of the department’s new approach,” wrote historian Volker Janssen.
When Gov. Pat Brown took office in 1959, he sought to expand the number of prisoners in camp and the rehabilitation programming in the Conservation Camp System. The focus on creating good workers and well-adjusted citizens out of the prisoners was particularly apparent in the Conservation Camp Program, which took its name after FDR’s insistence on conserving the resources and men of the nation. Brown’s unique contribution to the conservation program was construction of the Conservation Centers, first in Susanville, then in Jamestown and Chino, in order to recruit and train more individuals to join hand crews for forestry, trail maintenance and wildfire management. Brown championed these centers with the combined support of a state senator from Susanville, as well as the director of corrections and director of natural resources.
The Susanville prison, originally named the California Conservation Center, was built on 1,100 acres with open dormitories with 16 people in each, which was meant to replicate the number of people assigned to each hand crew. Programming at the center was meant to replicate military training for physical aptitude, with additional classroom training on firefighting in order to prepare incarcerated people before they were stationed at one of the Northern California fire camps. However, the number of people who were eligible and interested in working in conservation camps began to wane as drug convictions increased in the late 1960s and more placements were demanded in remote Northern areas of the state. Most prisoners had preferred to participate in the program because of the freedom it afforded them to meet with their family, but camp placements were more than 6 to 8 hours north of Los Angeles urban centers at this point.
The California prison system began to balloon in the 1970s, as it transformed into the “golden gulag,” and the Conservation Center held less and less relevance to the mission of the Department of Corrections. However, when the Susanville Center was slated to be closed in April 1973, the town pulled together a “Save Our Center Committee” which argued that the closure of the Susanville prison would spell economic ruination for the town, which had come to depend on the tax revenue of guards to support local education and government programs.
Even more damning, however, was the argument that the town would not be able to make do without the labor of incarcerated people used for wildfire management, fuel reductions and natural hazards mitigation. They reasoned that if the labor of these prisoners was pulled out of the town, not only would Susanville have less revenue from the employment the prison offered, but their town would also have to pay workers to do what incarcerated hand crews had been carrying out for free as a part of the Conservation Center programming.
After a year of rallies and town hall meetings, the “Save Our Center Committee” successfully lobbied the Department of Corrections to convert the Conservation Center into a medium-security facility. It was renamed the California Correctional Center, and was used as a reception center for other prisons instead of primarily as a training ground for the fire camp program. In the following decades, the prison became overcrowded and held 4,400 people, which was nearly four times the original capacity of 1,200. As the number of guards increased to keep up with the incarcerated population, the prison’s payroll skyrocketed from $1.6 million in 1963 to $34 million in 1995.
The Susanville residents lobbying for the protection of their prison won their demand to safeguard prison jobs — for both free and incarcerated people working in them. They recruited the construction of another facility in their town, High Desert State Prison, and they have kept open the Antelope Conservation Camp in their town as well. However, the pressure to reduce the overcrowded state prison system and sentencing reforms have forced the state to reduce the number of Level 1 prisoners, which has limited recruitment of incarcerated people for wildfire management labor.
The budgets from 2020-2022 have successively implemented Newsom’s “right-sizing” and closure of camps and prisons throughout the state, and a mandate to limit public spending on prisons. Newsom successfully closed one prison in Tracy, and has plans to close three more in the next three years. After writing it into the 2020-21 budget, CAL FIRE and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation released a joint statement announcing the closure of eight fire camp locations, bringing the total in operation to 35 throughout the state. Throughout these projected closures, tenuous agreements have been drawn up between the California prison guards’ union (CCPOA) and Newsom about staffing cuts, salary increases and campaign support in the wake of the decreasing total population of California prisons. Only after Newsom promised a bonus and yearly raise to all prison guards did their union write out a check of $1.75 million for Newsom’s recall defense campaign, which was the single largest contribution from a state employee union.
Throughout the 1970s, lawsuits from prisoners alleged that their living conditions were grotesque. Their discontent culminated in a protest against the guards in 1977. Today, incarcerated people say the facility is worse than ever. More than 100 incarcerated people at the California Correctional Center in Susanville filed an amicus brief in May 2022 testifying about the poor conditions of the facility in order to underscore the urgency of the state’s plan to permanently close the facility. They explained that the roofs of the building often leak and leave their cells flooded for days, which contributes to the growth of algae and black mold throughout the facility. As Truthout has previously covered in the case of other California prisons, environmental justice issues and an inordinate exposure to health hazards are a huge issue for incarcerated people at the Susanville prison.
Reducing prison population and program sizes will reduce state expenditures in one way but will require more spending to replace the millions of work hours that Conservation Camp Program hand crews have carried out on controlled fires, trail maintenance, fuel reduction and firefighting.
The decrease in incarcerated people has meant that there are 100 fewer hand crews available to CAL FIRE. The 2021 and 2022 budgets have replaced the Conservation Camp Program hand crews with people from the California Conservation Corps and California Military Department, but so far, they have only been able to scrape together funding for 24 additional crews, meaning that CAL FIRE is still short about 1,000 frontline wildfire and forestry workers.
Brian Kaneda, deputy director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, one of the state’s largest prison abolitionist organizations, argues that this is exactly the opportunity for a just transition away from carceral facilities supporting town economies, and a need for state investment in careers in wildfire management and conservation to replace prisons. Experts in forestry policy agree with Kaneda, and argue that California’s forest restoration requires coordination with Tribal governments, recruitment of formerly incarcerated firefighters, and improvements in wages and conditions for all forestry and hand crew workers.
The Fire and Forestry Recruitment Program takes this proposal a step further; it trains formerly incarcerated people to become professional firefighters. Many of their program participants were in fire camp themselves and want to join the ranks of CAL FIRE and county fire departments but encounter many difficulties doing so. However, as journalist Adam Mahoney reported in the news site Capital B, Royal Ramey, co-founder of the organization and a former incarcerated firefighter, speaks enthusiastically about the possibilities for careers in firefighting. “We need firefighters, and to be doing a job that is needed by the world makes it more fulfilling,” Ramey told Capital B. “Purpose is something they take from you in prison; this gives it back.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“The Box,” a play about solitary confinement in prison, is going on the road this summer as part of the “End of Isolation” tour. The play is written and directed by Sarah Shourd, one of three American hikers who were imprisoned by Iran from 2009 to 2010. It features formerly incarcerated actors, including John Neblett, who plays “Jake Juchau” in “The Box.” Truthout spoke to Shourd and Neblett about “The Box” and their hopes of moving audiences to understand one of the darkest experiences of prison. The tour kicks off in July with visits in Austin (July 15-17), Chicago (August 5-7), Detroit (August 9-10), Atlanta (September 2-4), and other cities along the way. Tickets are on sale now.
Brian Dolinar: Sarah, tell us about how you came up with “The Box.”
Sarah Shourd: I conceived of the play “The Box” after I got back from my own incarceration. I was held as a political hostage of the Iranian government, and I was in solitary confinement the entire time for 410 days. When I got back, I realized that solitary confinement was used in a completely routine fashion in the United States.
I was a journalist, and journalism didn’t feel visceral enough. I don’t think people’s minds are changed by facts. I think that people will find the facts that support the way they feel. And the way they feel is based on the experiences they have had in life. I think you need a new feeling to open yourself up to new facts.
The idea came from my colleague Jim Ridgeway, one of the cofounders of Solitary Watch, who was a dear friend. He saw that I had experience with participatory theater, this methodology from Brazil, Theater of the Oppressed, which I did a lot with in my 20s, and still do. We use it in engagement circles with the play. Jim said, “You should write a play.” I thought, “I guess I should, that sounds like something I should do.”
I started to travel around the country to visit people in solitary confinement. First, I wrote to people intensively for months and I asked them if they wanted to participate in the project. I sent them prompts. I visited 10 facilities across the country. I tried to see as many of the people I had been writing to as I could. I had a few interns. Luckily, I had some support from UC Berkeley, and we typed it all up, read through it all, and went into a creative, internal space for a while, and hammered out the play.
The play has had a few iterations, so what’s the purpose behind the most recent “End of Isolation” Tour?
Shourd: The play has been produced three times now in California. The play is inspired by the California prison hunger strike in 2013, which was the longest prison hunger strike in U.S. history. A historic settlement from a lawsuit came out of it that finally banned indefinite solitary confinement and put in a system of safeguards and step-down programs so that when people are put in solitary, there’s a way for them to get out. They are not just going to die in there or wait until they might get out of prison. The play contributed to a movement in California. State Sen. Mark Leno said that the buzz from the first production helped him push through legislation to ban solitary for youth in California.
We want to take that same visceral power and contribute to people fighting on the front lines around the country. We’ve reached out to organizations that are mostly led by formerly incarcerated, or system-impacted individuals, which are trying to pass legislation. We’re going to the states on the front lines to help them to bring in new audiences, start dialogue and make change.
How did you capture the experience of solitary, the sensory deprivation, in a play?
Shourd: It’s absurd to try. Because I don’t want to torture my audience. But I don’t want anyone to leave the theater thinking, “Oh, this is not a big deal, this is just like spending a day in your bedroom.” What the play captures is the unbearable intimacy of being celled next to someone for years and never seeing their face. It is the experience of being completely alone, of being overwhelmed by the lack of positive stimulus, and the overwhelmingly negative stimulus around you. You are in a pod with mentally ill people that have no business being there in the first place. You are subjected to their screams, their crying, banging. The play shows the horror to the degree that is fair to our audiences.
More importantly, the play shows the humanity of the people being subjected to solitary, their incredible bravery and courage, and what’s possible in there. These people just don’t give up on life, they don’t give up on resistance and they don’t give up on themselves.
Many people in the audience come up to me afterwards. Often formerly incarcerated people feel empowered, they give me a high five and say, “You nailed it! That’s exactly what the guy’s cell next to me was like, how’d you know?” It’s the power of witness — to have something that’s so invisibilized, so hidden, be witnessed collectively, and then have everyone stand up and applaud them.
John, how did you get involved in “The Box”?
John Neblett: I caught the acting bug in 2006 when I started performing with the Marin Shakespeare Company while I was incarcerated at San Quentin prison in California. In 1984, I killed a man and was sentenced to 15 to life. I did almost 30 years; I’ve been out since 2015. I formed friendships with the community volunteers in the Marin Shakespeare Company, that’s really been my support network.
I knew Lesley Currier, the managing director of the company, who introduced me to Sarah Shourd. Then, in 2016, Jared Rudolph (founder of the Prisoner Reentry Network) brought me to the premier of “The Box.” I never knew I would be in the show as a performer. I later got a call from Lesley — they needed another actor for “The Box,” so I jumped at it. After three interviews, I got the job.
I never did time in solitary, but I can still get into my funks, I can get hardcore depression. You have to have some kind of support system. You have to find purpose in your life to get out of that desolation.
What are your hopes for the “End of Isolation” Tour this summer?
Neblett: I’m happy to be traveling, making connections with my friends in the cast. It’s good for my soul, holding me together, keeping me away from that funk that’s killing other guys that are getting out.
I’m hoping we meet new audiences. The audience is likely to be people in the choir who are already sympathetic. What I’d like to do is I’d like to move people to activism.
I’d also like to keep going with my acting. I’m still working with the Returned Citizens Theatre Troupe, doing shows based on our life experiences.
Have you thought about any parallels between your experience of solitary in Iran and the widespread use of solitary in the United States?
Shourd: We practice solitary in the United States on a far greater scale, astronomically greater than Iran, or any other country. We use it as a control mechanism that enables mass incarceration has gotten so completely out of control. Even a lot of Republicans, “tough-on-crime” people, are saying that this has not worked. It’s not serving the public’s desire for safety. It’s doing the opposite.
Solitary confinement is very similar in this country to what it is in Iran. Twenty-two to 23 hours in a cell with a window that’s covered with a perforated plate. One hour in an open-air cell. It’s exactly what I experienced in Iran, what a lot of people here are experiencing. I was in indefinite solitary; I didn’t know if I would get out or how long I’d be there. That’s true for a lot of people in this country too. The difference I think is just the scale. The scale in this country is truly shocking.
In Iran, they put me in solitary because they didn’t want me to be able to learn from the other prisoners or get information out, so it was more for security reasons. They didn’t want me to leak out what I learned from other prisoners, what was happening to the women inside. That’s not a common reason here, except in cases of political prisoners. We could draw the parallel. A lot of people are put in “the hole” in the U.S. because they are organizing, or they have power, and they are put in solitary to silence them, and to break them. So that’s a parallel you could draw.
Can you talk about producing the play in the midst of the pandemic? Both how you’ve staged the play as immersive, or as a socially-distanced set up. As well, solitary or isolation, 23 hours-a-day, has been the widespread response to the pandemic in prisons and jails. How has the play become even more relevant during the pandemic?
Shourd: Solitary Watch and The Marshall Report released a report that found the use of solitary confinement during the pandemic went up 500 percent.
The pandemic was a reckoning for a lot of people around the harmful effects of isolation in their own lives, being separated from loved ones during quarantine.
It’s definitely a moment to ask ourselves: What is it about our culture that we believe that separation is a necessary thing that makes us safer? Whether it’s separating ourselves from each other in the little boxes of our homes, and not creating enough community spaces. Or what we do to people inside prison.
A lot of people are coming out of the pandemic having experienced some kind of internal transformation. But the laws are still the same, and institutions are still the same. It’s important for us to come together and envision something. We want to hold onto this time of reflection about what’s important in life, what we need, what we mean to each other.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Prominent mainstream feminists have been increasingly advocating for a proposed women’s jail in Harlem. Earlier this month, feminist activist Gloria Steinem urged New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams to act on the proposal.
Steinem claimed the proposed jail would dovetail with the political aims of the feminist movement, saying that, “Women and gender-expansive [people] at [the Rose M. Singer Center state prison at Rikers Island] deserve safety, dignity and justice, and New York City can deliver with a Women’s Center for Justice at Lincoln.” New York Times critic Ginia Bellafante echoed Steinem’s sentiment earlier this month in a column, “What Would a Feminist Jail Look Like?” Bellafante suggested that victims of domestic and sexual abuse could find healing with the social setting of the proposed jail.
However, prison abolitionists resoundingly oppose this proposal and insist that true safety and healing requires the release of incarcerated people and investment in high-quality social services for people upon their release. These opponents of the Harlem women’s facility affirm “there is no such thing as a feminist jail.” As they see it, freedom from violence is a foundational part of feminist politics, and prisons are inherently violent institutions.
The trend of self-described feminists promoting new jail construction in New York in the name of protecting the women trapped within them is over a century old. Jarrod Shanahan’s new book Captives details the history of jail reform and expansion in New York City and shows many instances of jail construction in which progressive reformers led the charge to build safer jails for women and queer people. One after another, plans to fix women’s jails resulted in “reformed” facilities that devolved into crisis, signaling the rise of the next jail — with more funding and more beds.
Throughout the mid-20th century, New York City’s most prominent avatar of women’s caging was the House of Detention for Women, located on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Greenwich Avenue, in the heart of bohemian Greenwich Village.
This facility housed a disproportionately Black and working-class population of prisoners arrested for sex work, drug possession, and other so-called crimes. The Women’s House was characterized, above all, by its proximity to city streets and the noise generated inside; women could shout to passersby, communicate with loved ones in plain sight and broadcast the dismal conditions inside to anyone who would listen. Thanks to this regular practice, the recurrence of prisoner revolt, and the high-profile captivity of political prisoners like abolitionist Angela Davis, the brutality of Women’s House became widely known to the public. Increasingly, broad swaths of New York City activists, including much of the city’s feminist movement, opposed the jail.
But, of course, the Women’s House had not been built with the stated intention of reproducing racist, misogynist class violence. Its construction was advocated by Progressive Era women’s activists, including the temperance movement and the Women’s Prison Association, and it counted many suffragists among its supporters, including the Women’s City Club of New York. The campaign for a new women’s jail to replace squalid facilities for detained women began in 1910 and continued for several decades, during which time many of the same activists fought for and won the right to vote. These activists also pushed for the installation of progressive penologist Ruth Collins as the jail’s first superintendent.
However, most of these reformers did not grapple with the question of whether it was safe or just for women to be locked up in the first place. The call was not to “free them all”; instead, the progressive demand was to build “better” cages.
Soon enough the Women’s House had fallen into infamy, in part because it was used not just for women detained before trial, as had been planned, but also to absorb those who had already been sentenced from the smallpox-laden hovel that housed female prisoners on Blackwell’s Island. Overcrowding, sexual assault of prisoners by doctors and guards, routine rebellions and press coverage of these issues meant that by the 1960s, the Women’s House was a scandal. Department of Correction Commissioner Anna M. Kross, herself a product of the suffragist milieu that had campaigned for the jail, called it a “shocking penal anachronism.”
In response, as part of a centuries-long process Shanahan describes in great detail throughout Captives, the Correctional Institution for Women (CIFW) on Rikers was opened in 1971 with colorful walls and a new architectural style, which planners promised would alleviate the social ills that had plagued the Women’s House. But within a few months of opening, CIFW became the subject of numerous investigations for overcrowding and failing to provide basic medical care to incarcerated people. The charge of keeping up with the increased numbers of arrestees from law-and-order policing turned out to be more than the reformers could handle. As the CIFW fell into disrepair and capital for jail construction flowed into the Department of Correction, plans were made for a new women’s jail with even larger capacity.
In 1988, 17 years after the opening of CIFW, the promise of a new, modern women’s jail facility was part and parcel of larger jail expansions taking place on Rikers Island. This new jail, the Rose M. Singer Center, known colloquially as “Rosie’s,” had a total capacity of 1,150 including connected modules from the CIFW and the nursery for expectant mothers. It was named after the Board of Correction member Rose M. Singer, who long advocated for the humane treatment of female prisoners. The jail was, according to Singer, intended to “be a place of hope and renewal for all the women who come here.” However, it was no such place.
In 2020, Singer’s granddaughter Suzanne publicly criticized her grandmother’s namesake, describing it in The New York Times as “a torture chamber, where women are routinely abused, housed in unsanitary conditions, and denied medical and mental health services.” Suzanne Singer recently endorsed the proposal for the women’s jail in Harlem, agreeing with Steinem, Bellafante, and other carceral feminists that the only solution to the horrendous conditions on Rikers for women is to create a separate and “safer” jailing facility for women and nonbinary people.
What motivates a feminist organization to hawk this jail as the only solution to the violence at Rosie’s? The authors of the original proposal from the nonprofit Women’s Community Justice Association show their hand when they explain how the facility will be run. They state that it would be “operated by a nonprofit ‘reentry upon entry’ model focused on trauma-informed care…. The Department of Corrections’ presence limited to securing the perimeters.”
While guards would still be involved in keeping the facility separate from the Harlem neighborhood beyond the walls of the jail, the Women’s Community Justice Association imagines itself as the warden of the facility. This would put it in a better position to secure long-term city funding and foundation grants, as the first nongovernmental organization to operate a “gender responsive decarceration” human caging complex. That is, until headlines of abuse break, and a new jail plan must be devised once again.
To generate public support for the Harlem jail, the Women’s Community Justice Association has created a campaign called #BeyondRosies to emphasize the horrors of the Rose M. Singer Center and attract pro-jail “progressives” to their cause. This campaign is akin to the #CloseRikers campaign, a to build four new jails in boroughs throughout the city. The group #CloseRosies has recently declared the proposed Harlem jail a “win”.
Though #BeyondRosies and #CloseRosies rightfully condemn the abuse and neglect that people endure at Rosie’s, they simultaneously support the construction of more cages and attempt to co-opt the power of New York City political movements that have rejected incarceration in all its forms. These grassroots, truly decarceration-oriented efforts include the Community in Unity campaign against a similar women’s jail in the Bronx in the mid-2000s; the original grassroots #ShutDownRikers campaign in 2014; and the abolitionist organization No New Jails NYC, which opposed the borough-based jail plan in 2018-2020.
No matter how proponents frame their calls for a new women’s jail, history shows us that the abuse endured by incarcerated people will not be solved by newer cages. The humanitarian crises that typify these jails are symptomatic of the racist and capitalist social order of American society. Only steps that work to undercut this social order will mitigate the social ills that are quarantined in American jails.
As Young Lords militant Denise Oliver explained about CIFW when it first opened, “The only thing that’s nicer about it is that it’s not as old, so there’s probably not as much dirt collected in the place. It is still a prison. The conditions are still the same.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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.
The post The Chris Hedges Report: The Long Road Home appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
On April 25, a Texas appeals court issued a stay halting the execution of Melissa Lucio, a 53-year-old mother and grandmother who has been imprisoned since 2007 while the district court considers new evidence of her innocence. Still, the threat of execution still hangs over her head.
The stay follows a groundswell of grassroots organizing throughout Texas that has drawn attention about her case, including mounting evidence that she was wrongfully convicted for a crime that never happened.
As Truthout reported previously, Lucio was prosecuted and convicted based on a coerced false confession. In February 2007, while she and her family were in the midst of moving from their second-floor apartment, her 2-year-old daughter Mariah fell down a steep flight of stairs. Mariah had a congenital foot deformity that required special shoes. It also made her prone to falling; previous falls had been documented by child welfare agencies and teachers at the Head Start she had attended. (See Article 53 in link.)
Although she cried, the toddler seemed fine after the fall. The following day, however, she threw up after eating breakfast and, by the next day, had lost her appetite altogether. She seemed lethargic, which Lucio attributed to a cold and put her down for a nap. Later that evening, she was unresponsive when her father tried to wake her. One of the older children called 911. Paramedics arrived and unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate the child before rushing her to the emergency room. Mariah was dead by the time they arrived.
Lucio explained that her daughter had fallen down the stairs two days earlier, but not that the accident had happened at their previous home. Their new home had only three steps, raising the paramedics’ suspicions.
The state’s medical examiner found bruises and marks that she claimed were bite marks on the girl’s body — and concluded that Mariah had been severely abused. Nine years later, in 2016, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology would conclude that forensic bite mark evidence is not scientifically relevant. That same year, the Texas Forensic Science Commission reached the same conclusion, calling for an end to bite mark testimony in criminal trials. But all of that was to come years later.
That night, police took Lucio into custody and subjected her to a five-hour interrogation, lasting until 3 am, yelling, berating and threatening her. Lucio, who had experienced a lifetime of sexual and physical abuse from adult men, including her mother’s boyfriend, her husband and her current partner, asserted her innocence more than 100 times. But after five hours, she acquiesced to their demands, mumbling, “I guess I did it.”
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, approximately 40 percent of women who have been exonerated had been wrongfully convicted of crimes involving children. Nearly 30 percent had been wrongfully convicted of killing children and 63 percent had been convicted of crimes that never happened — such as accidents or events that were fabricated.
Armed with her confession, Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos, seeking reelection that year, charged Lucio with capital murder. Her defense attorney, Peter Gilman, had never handled a death penalty case before. Although several of Lucio’s older children had seen their sister fall down the stairs, Gilman failed to call any to the stand.
He did attempt to introduce two expert witnesses to contextualize the ways in which Lucio’s history of sexual abuse had conditioned her to acquiesce to male authority figures, making her more vulnerable to making a false confession, but the trial judge excluded both.
The jury convicted her. Two days later, she was sentenced to die. She is one of six on the women’s death row unit at the Mountain View Unit at Gatesville, Texas. She is also the first Latina woman that the state has sentenced to death.
The following year, Gilman was hired by the prosecutor’s office, where he remains an assistant district attorney. In 2014, Villalobos, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for over $100,000 in bribery and extortion in exchange for prosecutorial discretion, such as minimizing charges or agreeing to pretrial diversion.
Lucio’s conviction and death sentence began garnering wider attention in 2021 after Hulu released the documentary The State of Texas vs. Melissa. Filmmaker Sabrina Van Tassel, joined by Lucio’s now-adult children and her mother, have held screenings and discussions across Texas to raise awareness and outrage.
In January 2022, Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz filed a motion for an April execution date. Judge Gabriela Garcia of the 138th District Court signed an order setting Lucio’s execution for April 27. She would become the first woman executed by Texas since 2014.
On February 8, Lucio’s lawyers filed a motion to withdraw or modify her execution date, arguing that she was wrongfully convicted. That motion remains pending before the same court that set her execution date.
Ten days later, on February 18, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an international body tasked with overseeing human rights in the Western Hemisphere, adopted a resolution requesting that the U.S. not execute Lucio until the commission can reach a decision on the December petition filed by Sandra Babcock of the Alice Project of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and Cornell law students. In the petition, they argued that Lucio had been inadequately represented at trial, and also that her limited cognitive abilities, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder render her more vulnerable to the acute trauma of solitary confinement.
“As with all international law, there is no way the IACHR can force Texas to comply,” explained Babcock. “Nevertheless, other state prosecutors — including a Texas prosecutor in neighboring Hidalgo County, Texas — have agreed to postpone executions so that the IACHR can complete its review process. The IACHR is widely respected throughout the Americas. If Texas ignores its decision, it would place the United States in the position of violating its international legal obligations. This undermines the reputation of the U.S. as a country that upholds the rule of law.”
On March 22, 2022, Lucio’s attorneys filed a clemency petition, which included declarations by four jurors stating that evidence was withheld from them during trial and that they had been pressured into making a decision. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles typically makes its decision 48 hours before a scheduled execution, but following the stay, the board announced that it would not make a clemency recommendation.
On April 15, attorneys filed a 242-page application for a writ of habeas corpus asking the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to stay her execution and vacate her conviction and death sentence. The filing notes new scientific and expert evidence showing that Melissa’s conviction was based on an unreliable, coerced confession as well as unscientific false evidence, such as the bite mark testimony, that misled the jury.
That is one of four requests for a stay of execution currently before the appeals court. Attorneys have also filed federal litigation before the Fifth Circuit and a suggestion for reconsideration pending in the Court of Criminal Appeals.
This is not the first time that a groundswell of grassroots support has stopped an execution. In Mississippi, 14 years after she had been sentenced to death, media attention led to a groundswell of outrage resulting in Michelle Byrom’s freedom.
Like Lucio, Byrom’s life had been marked by sexual and physical violence from the adult men in her life — from her stepfather to her husband, Edward Byrom Sr.
The couple met and moved in together when she was 15 and he was 31. He was verbally, physically and sexually abusive towards her and their son, Edward Jr., who was born when she was 18.
On June 4, 1999, Michelle Byrom was in a Mississippi hospital for double pneumonia. That night, after his father had physically attacked him, Edward Jr. shot and killed him. He told police that his mother had hired his friend to murder Edward Sr.
Police interrogated Byrom in the hospital. According to the Jackson Free Press, she was on at least 12 powerful drugs when questioned but still denied any involvement. It was not until County Sheriff David Smith told her that her son had confessed and encouraged her not to let him take full responsibility that she repeated the details that police wanted to hear — she had hired her son’s friend to kill her husband.
Byrom was charged with capital murder. At trial, Edward Jr. testified against her. Her defense attorneys presented no information about her history of abuse or resulting mental illnesses. She was convicted and sentenced to death.
In 2014, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood requested an execution date, prompting media scrutiny into her conviction. Journalists found a pretrial confession from Edward Jr. to his mother, one that Byrom had never seen. That was not the only confession he had made; he had also confessed to the court-appointed forensic psychologist.
The story — of an abuse victim wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death — garnered outrage. People called the governor’s office to stop the execution. In March 2014, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed her death sentence and ordered a new trial.
But the prosecutor’s office announced it would retry her and Byrom remained behind bars for another two years. In 2016, she took an Alford plea, in which she pled guilty while still maintaining her innocence, in exchange for time served. She was released that June after 16 years of wrongful imprisonment, 14 of which were on death row.
Michelle Byrom had three and a half years of freedom before dying in 2019 of breast cancer that had been diagnosed and metastasized during her imprisonment.
Lucio’s execution has also prompted a flurry of grassroots organizing across the state. Family members joined with anti-death penalty advocates to raise awareness about Lucio’s death sentence. Every Saturday evening, after visiting his mother on death row, Lucio’s oldest son, John, hosts a weekly group update with advocates across the state. Over the past month, the number of attendees has grown from approximately 20 to several hundred.
Organizers throughout Texas have hosted letter-writing parties, both in-person and virtual, in which supporters wrote individual handwritten letters to the Board of Pardons and Paroles as well as to individual board members’ offices. Jordan Martinez-Mazurek of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls estimates that over 800 handwritten letters were mailed to board members.
In Brownsville, organizers held daily mid-afternoon vigils outside District Attorney Luis Saenz’s office. On March 23, during one of those vigils, Lucio’s son John talked to Saenz in the parking lot, urging him to withdraw the execution warrant. Saenz said that he understood the family’s position, but was non-committal.
The heightened attention brought in bipartisan support from over 100 Texas lawmakers, who sent letters to the governor calling on him to stop the execution.
In early April, seven Texas state representatives traveled to Gatesville to meet with Lucio. Several days later, some joined a protest outside Dallas City Hall, calling on Governor Abbott and Saenz to stop the execution.
Several days later, on April 12, they convened a state committee hearing about Lucio’s case. After being questioned for over an hour, Saenz appeared to shift his stance, stating, “If defendant Lucio does not get a stay by a certain day, then I will do what I have to do and stop it.”
On April 22, organizers delivered petitions to Saenz’s office, demanding that he withdraw the execution warrant. That same day, the IACHR sent a letter to Abbott’s office urging him to stay the execution.
The following day, organizers held coordinated protests in 16 cities nationwide. In Texas, they rallied outside the governor’s mansion in Austin, the federal courthouse in Brownsville, and several parks. In Dallas-Fort Worth, one set of organizers rallied outside a pancake house while another group dropped a “Free Melissa Lucio” banner over an interstate where hundreds of passing cars honked their support. In other states, supporters also held rallies outside state houses, city halls and local parks.
On Monday, they drove to the governor’s mansion in Austin to hand deliver petitions demanding that he stop Lucio’s execution.
“There’s been just like a grass fire across Texas fighting for Melissa,” said Martinez-Mazurek. “The fire took a little time to spread, but I’ve heard it spread to every corner of the state by this point.”
While the appeals court has paused her execution date, Saenz has not withdrawn the execution warrant.
Meanwhile, Lucio’s case has been sent to the 138th District Court for an evidentiary hearing about four of her claims — her actual innocence, the use of false testimony at trial, that the prosecution failed to disclose favorable evidence, and that new scientific evidence proves her innocence.
“We’re confident that with the scientific evidence, if Melissa were retried today, she’d be acquitted,” stated Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation at the Innocence Project and one of Lucio’s lawyers, at a press conference shortly after the stay was announced.
From death row, Lucio issued her own statement: “I thank God for my life. I have always trusted in Him. I am grateful the Court has given me the chance to live and prove my innocence. Mariah is in my heart today and always. I am grateful to have more days to be a mother to my children and a grandmother to my grandchildren. I am deeply grateful to everyone who prayed for me and spoke out on my behalf.”
Lucio’s family are also extraordinarily happy that her death has been averted — and hope that she’s one step closer to coming home. “For everybody who has stood by my sister and her innocence, thank you,” her sister Sonya Valencia said at the press conference. “We’re waiting for Melissa to come home.”
That’s what Jaden Janak from Fight Toxic Prisons and another of Lucio’s supporters hopes too. “Though we are happy about the stay and pending evidentiary hearing, we know our work is not done,” they told Truthout. “We will continue pressuring lawmakers, advocating for Melissa, and raising awareness about her case until she is at home with her family. Not on an ankle monitor. Not serving life without the possibility of parole. But at home free from the shackles of the criminal [in]justice system.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Madison, Wisconsin, was recently ranked in one online list as “the best place to live in America.” This kind of accolade begs the question: How are such rankings decided? Who is it the best place for? Everyone? Or just some?
To those of us who look at metrics like diversity, safety and justice, this is a confounding ranking given the rise in violence against Black people in the city, and the fact that in 2020, the state of Wisconsin was rated last in the country for racial equality. Of course, many factors go into studies like these, and such rankings can be easily disputed, but one thing has become clear: Our city and state are not a place where Black people feel safe.
In our city, a queer Black woman survivor is currently being criminalized for an act of self-defense after a group of men stalked and attacked her. Is this “the best place to live in America”?
For years, 24-year-old Kenyairra Gadson suffered abuse, harassment and intimidation from a man in her community. Her gender and sexual orientation made her a vulnerable target, and her abuser often taunted her with homophobic slurs. The abuse even included an incident in which he shot at her.
On Halloween of 2018, the man along with a group of friends followed her as she attempted to get away from them. Once she made it to her friend’s car, they began their attack. Gadson shot one of the men in an attempt to protect herself, and was ultimately imprisoned for two years for first-degree reckless homicide.
The United States is in the midst of a national conversation about crime and safety. This conversation often focuses on the role of police and the criminal legal system. But who do these institutions really serve?
In 2015, 19-year-old Tony Robinson was murdered by police officer Matthew Kenny in Madison. Robinson’s grandmother fought hard to compel the city to take action, and petitioned the court seeking justice for her beloved grandson. But to this day, the officer that killed Robinson was never charged. The government’s treatment of a police officer who killed an innocent young man compared to its treatment of a survivor of violence, who was criminalized for defending herself, is a revealing contradiction. This helps us understand who the criminal legal system serves, and who it abandons.
In September of last year, 59-year-old Doyle Jay Reifert killed his roommate, Brian Swan. District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, who sought 50 years imprisonment for Kenyairra Gadson, released Reifert without any charges, asserting that Wisconsin’s self-defense statute — which is similar to “stand your ground” laws and commonly known as the “castle doctrine” — could apply to the case. No judge. No jury.
The criminal legal system in Madison has declared a woman who was clearly acting in self-defense to be a murderer, while letting men like Kenny and Reifert walk free.
In Madison, who is allowed to be a victim and who is always seen as a perpetrator? Despite courts saying that they aim to protect survivors, their actions have made one thing very clear: Their definition of a victim or survivor doesn’t include Black women.
Gadson’s story is tragic, but not unique. Many survivors of violence face double persecution: first at the hands of their abuser, and then at the hands of the legal system which criminalizes them instead of protecting them from harm. The fact that Gadson faces incarceration should tell us everything we need to know about our system and who it is designed to protect.
First, it shows us that a system that would imprison Black women for defending themselves was never built to protect them, and that it is not up to that task. It also tells us that instead of locking survivors away, we need to be talking about how we can prevent them from experiencing this kind of violence in the first place. We know that we will only be safe when we create the conditions for our safety. We need people in office, and on our courts, who understand how this system works, who it works for and who it systematically excludes. We need our community to understand these issues, and to organize, speak out and hold our elected officials accountable for their role in abandoning Black survivors of violence, like they have abandoned Kenyairra Gadson.
After eight years of a powerful citywide call for justice, it’s time for Madison’s courts to finally be accountable to the social movement led by Black communities.
Black queer women deserve to live free from violence, and we have the right to defend ourselves from harm.
We have the right to exist, and to be safe walking down the street with our friends after a night out.
We have the right to exist in our homes, in the streets, and anywhere and everywhere we go.
We will not rest till we make it so.
If you are interested in supporting Kenyairra Gadson, find out how to take action here.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
I spent six and a half years in prison. Much of that time, I was working on one fiction manuscript or another. I had to stumble around in the darkness to figure out how to do this. So do most writers in prison. Now there’s a book to help change that.
PEN America’s The Sentences That Create Us (Haymarket Books, 2022), edited by Caits Meissner, is the dream of every incarcerated writer: a collection of how-to-write essays by those who can speak to that audience best — other incarcerated writers plus people who have taught writing classes in prison. The book includes pieces by famous formerly incarcerated writers like Wilbert Rideau as well as people who have never published previously. It provides lessons on writing poetry, fiction, plays and autobiography. The Sentences That Create Us is a complete manual pitched perfectly for the target audience.
Meissner’s book will bring some welcome and profound relief to incarcerated people who struggle to tell their important stories. I had the pleasure of interviewing her for Truthout about the book. Frequent Truthout contributor Brian Dolinar — a friend, writer and fellow abolitionist activist in Urbana, Illinois — joined me for the conversation.
James Kilgore: Tell us about how you came to write the book and how you got to this space?
Caits Meissner: I taught in prison for five or six years before I came to my current job as director of Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America, an organization founded in 1922 bringing together a national and international network of writers and protecting free expression. I suddenly had all these resources, famous writers, and an incredible community of incarcerated writers. This over 40-year program that was started by PEN on the heels of the Attica uprising in 1971 fell into my lap. I had the chance to bring it into this new era where mass incarceration is actually something that’s talked about. Abolition is a word that’s being moved from the margins to the forefront.
For years we at PEN America had created in-house and distributed a slim handbook called The PEN America Handbook for Writers in Prison. It was essentially a craft book, teaching the basics of how to write. When I came on, the director said, “I think you have a different pedagogy, I think you could do a new book.”
What I thought it needed was the voices of justice-impacted people speaking to each other. And speaking with allies, because we need each other — as we know, writers in prison need their allies on the outside. And vice versa, we need our people in prison to be reporting from the front lines and to be in community.
The task was then looking at all the mail that came in, the hundreds of letters we get from prison — what are people asking for? It became clear to me that people are really asking about not just “How do I write poetry?” … they were really asking, “How do I be a writer?”
I had access to all of these amazing incarcerated writers at PEN who had made incredible things happen through the walls, really on their own steam. I wanted them to write revealing essays to codify and put into motion what that journey looked like.
I remember ideating with Spoon Jackson about his piece. Spoon has done so many collaborations beyond the walls, he’s become a famous writer in prison. He said, “Well, I’m just real, it’s organic.” I said, “Yes, Spoon, but let me ask you this. When your writing instructor came in and it was a white woman, how did you respond to her in order to develop that relationship?”
I said, “Did you ask your collaborators to do things for you outside of your artistic collaboration?” He said, “Never! It a gift culture between two artists and I kept it there.” I said, “People need to understand that. There’s a lot of need in prisons. Your essay is going to be pulling apart each of these collaborations and what it took in order for each to be successful. That’s how we’re going to teach other people, how to show up in collaboration as an equitable artist, how to be seen that way, and how to see yourself that way.”
Kilgore: I’m wondering about the difficult task of how you decided who was going to be in the book. And how did you manage that team? Did you have meetings? How did you communicate? Did you visit people face-to-face?
It came together in a couple different ways. First, I knew the money we made off this book was going to go right back into sending the book inside. There was no profit to be made off the book, but I wanted to pay contributors. We first got a $25,000 grant from the California Arts Council. That dictated that all the writers in the first section had to be California-based authors, not incarcerated. For the rest of the book the contributors are largely justice-involved people.
I went through my so-to-speak “Rolodex” of relationships. Sometimes I had a very clear idea of what I wanted people to write about. To Piper Kerman (author of Orange Is the New Black), for example, I said, “I want you to write about how you write about people you know, ethically, given that your book turned into a major TV show.” And she agreed.
I was thinking about the book as being inspirational, aspirational, instructional and then historical, when we got Wilbert Rideau on board, former editor of The Angolite. He never gives interviews and decided to give us an interview because of the theme of the book, and who it was for. He closes the interview with a truth he learned and believes deeply: Writing gets people out of prison.
Brian Dolinar: You’re sending copies of the book inside. How are you making that happen? How are you getting around the censorship issues? The authorities are always looking over people’s shoulders, reading their mail, listening in on phone calls. Did you worry about getting censored?
We were lucky enough to get a grant from the Mellon Foundation to send 75,000 copies inside. We called every prison and jail in the U.S. to find out where our allies live and where we can send the book. When the book came out, we also advertised with a form that we’re sending these copies inside and individuals and organizations can request the book. We’ve had over 50,000 requests within the first month of the book’s life, which tells me there is a hunger for this project.
There’s a couple of things I did worry about. This book, while it appears to be a lovely book on writing — if you look a little deeper, it’s a book on organizing in prison. As I think of it, it is a book full of life. And often prisons are very scared of the creative life force, because that’s personal power.
What I was worried about more so even than the book getting inside was what happens to some of the contributors. For example, Thomas Bartlett Whitaker is in the book. When I got my copy of the bound book, and I read it again, I remembered how profound his essay is; it’s called, “The Price of Remaining Human.” He writes about watching 161 men on death row be executed and their stories going with them. His own story is that his sentence was commuted minutes before his execution date and he has run into a tremendous amount of pushback from the prison administration because he writes about death row and he publishes online. Through his allies on the outside, he has a blog called Minutes Before Six.
As I was reading the book, I started to think, wow, Thomas is already in segregation [solitary confinement]; this is what he takes on as a writer. It started to frighten me the world could double down on the punishment he gets for exactly what we’ve asked him to do. Of course, he took the project on knowing the risk, that’s what he’s writing about.
I’ll get calls from our Writing for Justice fellows who are fighting things in the prisons. Recently, one told me, “I’m about to go into solitary confinement for two months, you won’t hear from me, wish me luck.” The sense of responsibility of what it takes to become a writer in prison is immense.
Dolinar: Have you been inside since COVID has lifted and visitations have resumed?
In December 2021 I went to San Quentin, and that was special on a personal level. I did a book tour in 2016 or 2017 for my poetry book, “Let it Die Hungry,” when I went to prisons. I had visited a writing group run by Zoe Mullery at San Quentin. I got to come back and visit this group in December after not seeing folks for almost five years.
It was jarring to be back in a prison; it was visceral remembering how oppressive it feels. I was also reminded of the vibrancy behind the walls. One of the writers said a wonderful quote, “Imagination is a toy.” I shared about our new book. The men were very excited. They kept saying, “We want to see this and this.” I was pleased to be able to say, “It’s in the book!”
I’ve visited over 25 prisons across the U.S., so I’ve talked to a lot of people. One of them is Sterling Cunio, a writer I met when he won our PEN essay contest with this absolutely beautiful essay about discovering his purpose through doing hospice work in prison, and seeing a man through his death process. Sterling was sentenced to life without parole at 16, he was part of the “Oregon Five.” I later sat in on his parole hearing for six hours.
Sterling became a Writing for Justice Fellow in 2019. He received money and a mentor to stage a play in prison. I got to hear the performance via phone. I was blown away. When the book came around, I said, “Sterling, can you write about how you staged this play?” Sterling had to lay out how he worked with administration, how he had to navigate the system and get permission to do good work. An antagonistic stance isn’t going to move projects forward.
Even though Sterling did not make parole at that hearing, a year later his sentence was commuted. Sterling is now home, in his 40s.
Kilgore: How do you see your book as a tool for helping support significant change to this horrible system of mass incarceration that has dominated the landscape for the last four decades?
In order to shift the system, we need justice-impacted voices forefronted. We’re hoping to bring the voices of powerful, directly impacted people into major publications [and] start to shift the needle through narrative change.
There’s a sense that I come across from publishers that prison stories are a specialized niche topic. My response is, with 2.3 million people inside at any given moment, plus parole, plus probation, plus families and friends affected, plus communities affected, this is simply another take on the American story.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The morning of May 24, 2019, found me running for my life through the traditional Jewish enclave of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was the neighborhood of stately red brick mansions and large dun-colored apartment houses where I’d grown up, come of age, learned to freestyle at the benches near the Murray Avenue Post Office and smoked my first furtive joints in the alleys that connect its winding, terraced streets.
The occasion for my flight was that the FBI had pulled over a truck leaving my stash house at 5524 Covode Street, a rust brick apartment house down a cobbled road from the Yeshiva. That truck contained $469,475, and based on the alert I’d received from a trailing driver they’d neglected to interdict; I knew something horrific was about to transpire. The stash apartment had about 245 lbs. of marijuana just delivered and another 159 odd lbs. sitting in orange Ridgid lock boxes bolted to the damp floor of a separate garage below the level I paced on. My vision blurred with panic as I tried to reason with the other two guys there that this wasn’t an accidental pullover and that whoever effected it would soon be at the door in force. The man who had the apartment in his name told me to leave. He said his brother would follow me soon after and he would hunker down until the danger had in theory subsided and then clear out under cover of darkness. I tried a few more times to reason with him before he snapped:
“GO! Walk out the door casual, and as soon as you get off this block, RUN!”
The surveillance cameras, operated by task force agents in a blacked-out car just off the front door of the building — which, when coupled with cooperator testimony, would put me in federal prison — filmed me for the last time doing just that: a faux casual amble up the city stairs that connected Covode to Hobart Street and a 90-degree left pivot into a sprint. They had also captured me that morning as I arrived at the apartment house and when I helped load a box of cash into the car. I didn’t know it then, but my fate was sealed. Doom would just take a long time to arrive. I’d lived 37 years to have my life as I knew it ended in a few dozen seconds.
As I sprinted for the supposed shelter of Schenley Park, its leafy splendor lost on me in my panic, I had several thoughts: I had to see if they were going to raid or not. I had to make sure anyone that got popped got bailed out. I had to stay out long enough to make this all happen, and I had to get back to my wife. My wife. My love. I had to make it back to her. My sprint bogged to a gasping stumble as my phone rang. I answered it:
“They’re here,” my then-friend said.
“I’ll get you out,” I replied.
“See ya,” he said as the line dropped.
Who did this? What agency? How did they get to us? Was I going to prison? Local? State? Couldn’t be federal. My thoughts left the litany of crises at hand. I just wanted to see my wife again. We’d been together for almost two decades. Part of me even then knew that I was done for — but I needed to be with her. I couldn’t let them catch me. I had to get home. So, I ran and I ran and I summoned up every last ounce of will left in my body and I ran.
But federal it was. I saw the eagle stamped atop the search warrant, and when I consulted with my attorney friends, their verdict was succinct: Feds were on it. This case was getting indicted.
A few weeks later, on June 12, 2019, the original two arrestees — one of the men who had departed the Covode Street apartment after me, another customer who hadn’t been there that day, and over two dozen other people that I’d never known, seen or spoken to — were indicted in the Western District of Pennsylvania for a litany of charges.
The FBI and county police had been investigating a street gang in a mill town near the periphery of the city that trafficked in harder drugs like fentanyl, crack, powder cocaine and processed heroin. They purchased marijuana off a man who purchased marijuana off a customer of ours who picked up marijuana from the stash house. That was the architecture of our demise.
There’s nothing to debate in the facts of the case except for the purposely disingenuous tack that the national media used when reporting that we cannabis traffickers were somehow in league with a group that none of us knew existed prior to the indictment. But the mainstream media used prohibitionist logic and laughably relied on the press releases from the U.S. attorney to create single sourced stories that fit the click-reliant “crime and punishment” narrative which gets them optimal eyeballs in the lean times of their waning influence.
Their aim was achieved. Every nonviolent cannabis-related indictee was tied into something the public found far more sinister, allowing law enforcement to get their cannabis arrests and cash seizures while minimizing the public backlash that now follows such cases being pursued independent of other criminality. They need a more dangerous hook to lay their targeting of cannabis providers on and the media always helps them find it. All on the cannabis side of this indictment would forever be branded as operating in concert with a “heroin gang.”
I had the added liability of my previous viral fame. As a former left-wing criminal defense attorney, I created a viral ad for my services titled “Thanks Dan.” In the ad, myself and a bevy of actual streetwise friends and associates mocked the justice system and law enforcement while reveling in beating the man at his own game. A poor prior calling card for a future pot kingpin, to be sure. But in my defense, name a millennial who knows what their next job will be a few years down the road?
The summer of 2019 was one of hazy paranoia. My wife and I were followed, first intermittently, and then near constantly. People I’d done business with in the past called my phone wanting to reminisce about the deals of old. The unspoken motivation for their sudden nostalgia was that the conversation was being monitored by law enforcement. They were cooperating, fishing on orders from their handlers to further implicate me and up my pending charges.
The fright ratcheted by the day. At this point, my family knew, and despite their disappointment, they supported me. I tried to move on as best I could. I turned my back on my past while still offering loyalty and support to those already ensnared who reciprocated with their friendship. But those numbers ticked down to zero. Soon I received word that a superseding indictment was coming for up to 10 new defendants. It was rumored to be for cannabis suppliers, which I knew would mean myself and my friends.
Tired of the fear and the strain on my wife, mother, father and self, I reached out via my counsel and asked to turn myself in. I sought no special favors or treatment. I wanted no deal. I just asked to plead out to the same charges leveled against the others and get this hellish limbo over with. I was willing to take responsibility. I was not willing to inform on others or cooperate.
The government’s response was as chilling as it was predictable: I could not surrender on said charges. I could either come in and rat or sit and wait to get indicted. I knew all the people that I surmised they’d targeted. My plea alone had no utility to them. The feds wanted my testimony.
They would not have it. I would never tell on anyone and I sure as hell wouldn’t tell on any cannabis suppliers, dealers, users or growers. And I’d rather die than tell on my friends.
Federal prosecutors operate so effectively on the basis of cooperation. Whether its active, like wearing a wire and conducting sting operations in conjunction with law enforcement; passive, like codefendants going to the grand jury on still unindicted coconspirators, which allows the prosecutors to build new indictments in secret; or safety valving, wherein first-time nonviolent offenders get a coveted break from mandatory sentencing in exchange for relating the details of their conspiracy to the prosecution in a limited proffer — the entire machine runs on information dispensed for leniency. For those who choose not to utilize these means, the penalties are draconian in the extreme. A mandatory minimum of five years for a 100-kilo marijuana conspiracy and a maximum of 40 years. A mandatory minimum of 10 years and a maximum of life on a 1,000-kilo marijuana conspiracy. With this hammer, the federal authorities have incredible power to apply in the pursuit of cooperation.
With my decision made and the die cast, we sat in misery and waited. Fall turned to winter and nothing happened. Spring came and the world was plunged into the pandemic, a phenomenon that we scarcely feared due to the larger agony that lurked on the periphery.
We called it the “sea monster.” It swam in black waters and you’d only glimpse hints of its existence. A wake here. An enormous malevolent eye there. A tentacle, and then the sound of a ship being sucked into the deep with a loss of all hands.
Even under this strain, we tried to make a life. I started a legitimate business and continued the volunteering efforts we’d begun in 2019, delivering food to seniors in Squirrel Hill throughout the pandemic. I’d made these moves not in hopes of a reduced sentence, but to create a new way forward for us and to undertake self-directed change from within. Months passed. A year. An election. We began to breathe. The terror started to dissipate and I started to make amends with my family.
Rays of hope filtered down to us. We began to dream and plan. We felt blessed, and while traumatized, we swore we’d do our best to live life the way we should have before. The terror of that run on May 24 no longer haunted me every morning with the panic attacks and nightmares of those who hadn’t survived. (One of the men from Covode hanged himself under indictment, leaving behind a wife, three children, eight grandchildren and a great-grandchild.).
The final piece for us was to start a family. We applied for adoption and surmounted every hurdle presented. Now we had feelings of joy. Real happiness. Us, parents. We were so excited. So ready. Maybe we’d made it. Maybe there was a god.
On August 23, 2021, at 9:45pm, my phone rang. It was my federal defense attorney, a man I hadn’t spoken with in two years. My stomach plunged and my vision swam. There could be one reason for him reaching out. I turned to my wife and told her I was sorry. She told me she loved me.
I answered the phone and was swallowed up by the sea monster in one gulp.
A 100-kilo marijuana conspiracy. Same charge I offered to plead out to in 2019.
I was pilloried in the papers for telling the feds that their system was in fact a joke in a 7-year-old YouTube video.
I accepted responsibility for my actions. I never sought to pass my issues onto anyone else. I once said their laws are arbitrary, and now in fulfillment of that contention, I will be sentenced to prison for something that is de facto legal in our nation. While billionaires get richer breaking the same law I did, I’ll rot. Away from my wife and family, not even allowed a hug or kiss due to COVID.
When the prosecution released their sentencing memo, my suspicions were confirmed. While it mentioned my cannabis “crimes,” the majority of its venomous content was focused on my prior commercial. An advertisement and satire that had nothing to do with the current charges or my weed dealing career. Their repeated attempts to flip me were unsuccessful, the assistant United States attorney instead launched a tantrum by document trying once again to smear me with irrelevant First Amendment protected conduct that was legal. Now it was clear. Their motivations for pursuing my case over two and a half years were fueled by law enforcement animus at someone who refused to respect their system. Any shred of pretense was stripped away as each heading of the memo contained a quote from the “Thanks Dan” ad. They had spent hundreds of man hours and untold tax-payer dollars to get me for a crime I had offered to plead to years ago.
They said that hitting me with the minimum would promote respect for the law due to the fact I said that “laws are arbitrary” in the ad. So, to muzzle me they sentenced me under the most arbitrary law they had going. Irony is often lost on fascists however. My refusal to cooperate and help them save face threw them into a lather.
That desperate run for freedom failed.
If you think I am undeserving of mercy or consideration, then I won’t disabuse you of your assertion. I’m not special. There are 40,000 cannabis prisoners in the U.S. today and almost 3,000 in the federal system. Many people stand up and catch monstrous sentences despite being betrayed themselves. I told on no one. Many people told on me.
President Joe Biden has had numerous letters and proclamations demanding all federal cannabis offenders be pardoned in accordance with his campaign promises. As of this writing, he has pardoned two turkeys — and no people.
Cannabis prohibition has destroyed my life and that of my wife. I may be one of the last cannabis prisoners. I hope I am the last one. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
First it was her mother’s boyfriend. Then it was the man she married at age 16. Then it was her next partner. Starting at age 6, Melissa Lucio endured repeated sexual abuse from the men in her life. By the time Texas Ranger Victor Escalon demanded that she confess to the death of her 2-year-old daughter, 39-year-old Lucio had been well-conditioned to acquiesce to adult men, even if it meant confessing to a crime she didn’t do.
None of that was explained during her trial. Now, the State of Texas plans to execute Lucio on April 27, 2022. She is the first Latina woman sentenced to death by the State of Texas and the first woman set to be executed by the state since 2014. Lucio has always maintained her innocence.
“Melissa had multiple vulnerabilities and susceptibilities for making a false incriminating statement in a coercive interrogation setting,” Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation at the Innocence Project and one of Lucio’s attorneys, told Truthout. During an evaluation ordered in earlier years by Child Protective Services, a psychologist found that Lucio had an IQ of 70, placing her in the intellectually disabled range. The National Registry of Exonerations found that in exonerations involving false confessions, 70 percent were by people with mental illness or intellectual disability.
“They took advantage of a woman who had a lifelong experience of gender-based violence,” said Sandra Babcock, faculty director at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and an expert on women and the death penalty. “Prosecutors minimized the impact of gender-based violence and exploit their trauma to obtain criminal convictions and death sentences.”
Approximately 40 percent of women who have been exonerated had been wrongfully convicted of crimes involving child victims, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Nearly 30 percent had been wrongfully convicted of killing children and 63 percent had been convicted of crimes that never happened — such as accidents or events that were fabricated. Lucio’s prosecution also illustrates the ways in which state actors — including law enforcement and courts — twist the effects of ongoing trauma and violence as evidence of a survivor’s guilt.
The majority of incarcerated women have experienced physical and sexual abuse before arrest. This includes Lucio, whose childhood was marked by sexual violence and parental dismissal of that abuse.
Before prison, Lucio lived her entire life in Harlingen, Texas, a town with fewer than 72,000 residents not far from the Mexico border.
Her father abandoned the family when Lucio was an infant. Her mother struggled to support her six children, often working long hours and leaving them in the care of her boyfriends. When Lucio was 6, her mother’s boyfriend began raping her — and continued to do so for the next two years. She was also repeatedly raped by an uncle. She told her mother, but her mother said she did not believe her.
Studies have found that sexual victimization during childhood increases the risk of victimization in adulthood between two and 13.7 times.
That’s what happened with Lucio. At 16, she married 20-year-old Guadalupe Lucio — in large part to escape her family situation — and dropped out of school. By the time she was 24, the couple had five children. But marriage didn’t end the violence. According to court documents, Guadalupe was a “physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic.” His abuse escalated until he abandoned the family in 1994.
Lucio then met and moved in with Robert Alvarez, with whom she had seven more children. Alvarez was also abusive, according to Lucio and others. The principal at Lucio’s children’s school reported seeing Alvarez punch Lucio on school grounds. The family was also economically unstable; during one four-to-six-week period, they lived in a park.
In September 2004, two weeks after Mariah, Lucio’s youngest child, was born, Child Protective Services placed Mariah and six of her minor siblings in foster care after receiving reports of neglect. Lucio was never accused — by Child Protective Services or any of her children — of abuse.
Two years later, in November 2006, Child Protective Services returned Mariah and her siblings to Lucio and Alvarez’s care. By then, the family lived in a second-story apartment which could only be accessed by a steep exterior wooden staircase.
Three months later, in February 2007, while the family was moving to a new home, Mariah, then age 2, fell down those steep stairs. The girl seemed fine after the fall but, two days later, she took a nap and was unresponsive when the family tried to wake her. One of Lucio’s older daughters called 911. Mariah was dead when paramedics arrived. Lucio explained that the girl had fallen down the steps two days earlier, but their new home had only three small steps.
“They immediately doubted her story and rushed to judgment and came to the conclusion that this had to be abuse and murder,” explained Potkin. “From that point on, tunnel vision set in and they didn’t consider any other explanation.”
The state’s medical examiner found significant bruising on the girl’s body as well as a weeks-old fracture in her left arm, missing patches of hair, and marks on her back that the examiner said were bites.
Nine years later, in 2016, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology concluded that forensic bite mark evidence is not scientifically valid. So did the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which called for an end to bite mark testimony in criminal trials.
But in 2007, the medical examiner concluded that Mariah had been severely abused and had died of a head injury that had occurred within 24 hours of her death.
Police interrogated Lucio, who had already been awake for 14 hours and was pregnant with twins. She told detectives that her daughter had fallen down the stairs two days earlier, but the police were fixated on the idea that Lucio had caused her daughter’s death.
“She’s a mother. Her young child has just died. She’s suffering from shock and trauma and immediately taken into interrogation and berated by officers who tell her she’s a horrible mother,” Potkin said. “It was her psychological response to the trauma that was used against her as evidence of guilt. It was a vicious cycle that kicked in — a presumptive questioning and coercive tactics used to break her down and get her to make some inculpatory statement.”
This included yelling and implicit threats, such as one detective telling her, “If I beat you half to death like that little child was beat, I’d bet you’d die too!”
Lucio repeatedly denied hitting or abusing Mariah. She admitted to occasionally spanking her children “on the butt.” She also told police that some of her older children were rough with their youngest sibling, but did not know who caused Mariah’s specific injuries.
By 1 am, Lucio had already been questioned for hours and had neither slept nor eaten when Texas Ranger Victor Escalon took over the interrogation. The Rangers are known for harsh interrogation methods, including coercing false confessions that have sent people to death row.
Escalon showed photos of Mariah’s injuries and prompted her for more details. Lucio told him that she had bit her daughter one day while tickling her although she did not know why she had done so. She continued to insist that she had never hit her daughter in the head and had only spanked her with her hand.
Escalon repeatedly pressed her about the bruises on Mariah’s body until Lucio said, “I guess I did it.” Shortly after, Escalon turned the interrogation camera off.
When he resumed the recording at 3 am, Escalon had brought in a doll, ordering Lucio to show him how she had bit and spanked Mariah and continually urging her to hit the doll harder. He pointed to several sets of bruises and instructed Lucio to spank the doll in those areas to illustrate how she would have caused them. He also had her affirm that she was the only one who spanked Mariah.
Armed with Lucio’s supposed confession, Cameron County prosecutor Armando Villalobos, seeking reelection, charged her with capital murder. If found guilty, she faced execution.
On the trial’s first day, prosecutors played recordings of Lucio’s statements that she was the only one responsible for Mariah’s injuries. They called police and paramedics to testify about Lucio’s demeanor that evening. Texas Ranger Escalon testified about Lucio’s seeming passivity, stating that people who are innocent would have acted outraged and upset.
During their closing arguments, prosecutors replayed portions of the interrogation video and characterized Lucio’s statement as a confession.
Lucio’s lead attorney Peter Gilman attempted to introduce two expert witnesses — social worker Norma Villanueva and psychologist John Pinkerman — to contextualize her responses and counter Escalon’s assertions about Lucio’s guilt. Both had reviewed Lucio’s history and interviewed her several times, and would have illuminated how Lucio’s history of sexual abuse affected her during interrogation, including how the ongoing trauma had conditioned Lucio to acquiesce to male authority figures, thus rendering her vulnerable to repeating what Escalon prompted her to say. Pinkerman concluded that Lucio suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that Lucio’s flat affect in response to Mariah’s death and her own trial were dissociations to numb herself from the pain. The trial judge excluded both witnesses.
Instead, the jury heard three witnesses for the defense — a neurosurgeon who testified that blunt trauma from falling down the stairs could have caused Mariah’s death; Lucio’s sister who testified that Lucio “never disciplined her children,” and a Child Protective Services worker who testified that nothing in the agency’s files indicated that Lucio had been physically abusive to any of her children. In their closing argument, defense attorneys explained Lucio’s statements as products of a coercive and lawyer-less interrogation, not as admissions of guilt.
In July 2008, the jury convicted Lucio of capital murder. Babcock noted that, during the penalty phase, Villalobos called in jail officials to ask if Lucio was ever seen crying or screaming. When told that she spent most of her time lying or sitting on her bed, Villalobos characterized her as “cold-hearted” and “remorseless.” She became the first Latina sentenced to death in Texas.
Villalobos won reelection. Lucio was sent to the women’s death row at the Mountain View Unit, a prison in Gatesville, Texas, where she has remained in solitary confinement for the past 14 years.
In a separate trial, Robert Alvarez, who had a history of assaultive behavior against Lucio and her children, was sentenced to four years in prison for reckless injury to a child.
The following year, in October 2009, Lucio’s defense attorney Peter Gilman was hired by district attorney Armando Villalobos. In 2014, Villalobos was sentenced to 13 years in prison for over $100,000 in bribery and extortion in exchange for prosecutorial discretion, such as minimizing charging decisions and agreeing to pretrial diversions. Gilman remains an assistant district attorney.
On October 17, 2018, a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Lucio was denied her constitutional right to create a meaningful defense. The state appealed to the full 17-member court. Ten judges agreed that excluding Pinkerman’s testimony deprived Lucio of a fair trial; three of those judges then sided with their colleagues in ruling that the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) required federal courts to defer to the decisions of state courts. In other words, explained Babcock, although the majority of judges agreed that she did not receive a fair trial, “Melissa was condemned to die on a legal technicality.”
Lucio turned to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sixteen organizations as well as eight former prosecutors and legal experts submitted an amicus brief in support of her. But last October, the Supreme Court refused to hear her case.
In December, Lucio’s new legal team petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an organization tasked with overseeing human rights in the Western hemisphere. In their petition, Babcock and her law students argued that not only was Lucio inadequately represented at trial and that crucial witnesses were excluded, but also that Lucio’s limited cognitive abilities, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder renders her more vulnerable to the acute trauma of solitary confinement.
The following month, in January 2022, current Cameron County prosecutor Luis V. Saenz filed a motion to set an April execution date. The court granted that motion. If there is no intervention, the State of Texas will execute Melissa Lucio by lethal injection on April 27.
On February 8, Lucio’s lawyers filed a motion to withdraw or modify her April 27 execution date, arguing that Lucio was wrongfully convicted. That motion is currently pending before the 138th Judicial District Court of Cameron County, the same court that set her execution date.
On February 18, the IACHR adopted a resolution requesting that the U.S. refrain from executing Lucio until the commission can reach a decision on her petition.
Texas law requires that any application for clemency, or a lessening of Lucio’s sentence, must be received by the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles no later than 21 days before the execution; for Lucio, that date is April 6, 2022. Lucio’s lawyers must now race against the clock — and the ongoing COVID restrictions — to finalize and present all exculpatory evidence to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Greg Abbott.
In mid-January, Mountain View prison had 52 newly identified COVID cases among incarcerated people and another 27 among staff. “COVID is raging here,” one incarcerated person wrote in a letter to Truthout at the end of January.
“It’s outrageous that Texas has set an execution date while we are still in the midst of a pandemic,” said Babcock. The pandemic imposed a year-long prohibition on in-person contact with Lucio (or any person incarcerated in Texas prisons) and continues to impede lawyers’ and experts’ access to her.
“Texas’s refusal to give her team the time that it would take to put together the most convincing and compelling package is itself a great miscarriage of justice, the likes of which we have not seen in the annals of the death penalty in Texas,” Babcock said.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“Prison iPads” became a lifeline during the pandemic. They also became a new way to squeeze money out of the incarcerated and their families.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
The Biden administration is launching a new program of digital incarceration – otherwise known as electronic monitoring or e-carceration — for migrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a report from Reuters citing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The program, which will involve confining migrants through electronic monitors, is officially called “home curfew,” and is expected initially to include 164,000 people, but could expand to include up to 400,000. It will be run by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the private prison giant GEO Group. Immigrant advocates have criticized the program, arguing that home surveillance continues to criminalize migrants and further entrenches the for-profit immigration enforcement industry.
On Wednesday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib and 24 other Members of Congress delivered a letter to DHS opposing the e-carceration programs, including the new home curfew requirements. The elected officials were joined by 176 humanitarian organizations, which collectively wrote that “ICE has excessively deployed” electronic surveillance measures on “immigrants who would not otherwise have been detained.” They also criticized the program’s massive budgetary increases, from $28 million in 2006 to $475 million in 2021.
The news is further evidence that the Biden administration is primarily seeking to retool some aspects of border enforcement, rather than adopt an approach that radically breaks with that of Donald Trump and his predecessors. Perhaps most controversially, Biden has embraced Trump’s use of a World War II-era law called Title 42 that allows border agents to expel migrants and asylum seekers immediately with no access to the courts to plead their case. The Biden administration has also defended Trump’s family separation policy in court, as well as Title 42 enforcement. Immigrant detention numbers skyrocketed during Biden’s first year in office to nearly 27,000 in detention in July 2021, though the numbers fell in 2022 and currently stand at around 20,000. In August 2019, Trump held a record 55,000 immigrants in detention.
Yet, as of early February, about 182,000 immigrants are confined in some form of “alternative to detention” — mostly involving various types of electronic monitoring — through ICE. That number is up from 83,000 in September 2019. It’s not clear how many of the migrants subjected to the new house arrest program will come from existing programs and how many will be newly added. The Biden administration has massively expanded DHS’s so-called Alternative to Detention (ATD) programs, which include the new home confinement initiative, and consists primarily of using surveillance technology like electronic ankle shackles. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also uses facial and vocal recognition technology to monitor migrants, software that privacy advocates say is often racist and unreliable, and allows the government to engage in bulk surveillance outside the regular criminal legal system.
In other areas, Biden has moved away from some of Trump’s most aggressive policies. His administration has put a stop to worksite enforcement actions (raids), and also ended long-term family detention, which had been in place to varying degrees since 2001. Biden has also extended temporary protected status to hundreds of thousands of immigrants living in the United States after Trump revoked those protections.
Still, the administration’s new embrace of the home confinement program appears to exemplify Biden’s muddled and contradictory approach. On the campaign trail, Biden promised to “end for-profit detention centers,” arguing “[n]o business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence.” In his first weeks in office, Biden signed an executive order that required the Department of Justice not to renew contracts with private prison companies, though immigrant detention facilities were exempted. As of September 2021, nearly 80 percent of detained immigrants were housed in for-profit facilities, according to ACLU research. That number is virtually unchanged from January 2020, when Trump was still in office. Meanwhile, the new expansion of electronic monitoring will significantly extend the reach of for-profit companies.
Importantly, the fact that private companies are benefitting from the program is an effect, not a cause, of the expansion of digital incarceration, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others have noted. Underlying structural injustices and racist, xenophobic and classist policy making are driving the crisis, and private companies are reaping some of the profits.
The new program will begin with pilot programs in Baltimore and Houston, and is set to expand nationwide later this year, according to Axios. Specific details of the program remain unclear, but the migrants controlled under the program are expected to be subject to stricter oversight and requirements than standard ATD protocols. In general, it will require migrants to stay in their home from 8 am to 8 pm, enforced through electronic monitoring.
Migrants and their advocates are often very critical of the ankle monitors they’re forced to wear, sometimes for months or years at a time while they wait for their court hearing date. Common complaints are that the ankle shackles, or grillete as many migrants call them in Spanish, are visible as the wearers go to work, go grocery shopping or pick children up from school, and reinforce a stigma that immigrants are dangerous or violent.
In many cases, the devices need to be charged as well, which can impose challenging scheduling constraints on people who often have little control over their daily schedules. The shackles are also uncomfortable, as they chafe the skin, and can make showering or bathing an ordeal. The devices have also been known to issue pre-recorded verbal commands to their wearers, “reminding” them of mandated check-in dates. Such surprise orders can be disorienting or embarrassing, and could potentially put the wearer at risk if they are in an environment where their status is not public.
GEO Group, and its subsidiary BI Incorporated, was reportedly awarded a $2.2 billion federal contract in 2020 to launch the program, though the companies have said the actual contract was lower. The expanded program could be a boon to the company, whose stock has fallen recently after booming during Trump’s first year in office. The company recently restructured to meet its debt obligations, dropping its status as a real estate investment trust, a business classification that includes companies that own office buildings and shopping centers.
Immigrants’ rights advocates have criticized GEO Group, and its main private prison competitor CoreCivic, for years, arguing that their facilities are poorly maintained, dangerous, expensive and unnecessary. Federal oversight into the facilities is limited, even when it comes to in-custody deaths. A research paper from 2021 found that of the 71 people died in ICE facilities from 2011 to 2018, the Office of Detention Oversight only collected information on 55 of them. Of those 55 deaths, 34 occurred in for-profit facilities.
Like all jails and prisons, immigrant detention facilities had been riddled with COVID outbreaks since the beginning of the pandemic. Last year, a federal judge extended protections to immigrants held at the Mesa Verde facility near Bakersfield, California, after finding that ICE and GEO Group hadn’t created any procedures to protect detainees from the spread of COVID in the facility. “[T]he conduct of key ICE and GEO officials in charge of operations at Mesa Verde has been appalling,” Judge Vince Chhabria wrote in one ruling.
By deepening GEO Group and BI Incorporated’s role in immigration enforcement through the new e-carceration program, the Biden administration is trying to find a technocratic fix for a political problem. As in so many other areas, it has taken a conflicted, contradictory approach in its apparent attempts to reduce the population of detention facilities. There’s no reason why the administration can’t take bold measures toward actually ending detention. Instead, the Biden administration is apparently trying to appease its political opponents by sticking to a hardline approach. The result will be more surveillance and stigmatizing of migrants, and further entrenchment of the for-profit immigration-industrial complex into the country’s approach to border crossing.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
When the U.S. Department of Justice published a rule finally spelling out how the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) would implement the First Step Act of 2018, the headlines trumpeted that thousands of people in federal prisons were now eligible for release. The news spread quickly among the 153, 053 Americans incarcerated in federal prisons, first sparking hope and jubilation, then quickly followed by disappointment and confusion.
I know, because I live behind bars in one of the U.S.’s 122 federal prisons. And while I am among the fortunate ones who will (hopefully) be released early to the community where my four kids and numerous nephews, nieces and cousins live, the anticipation is bittersweet. I look around and see so many other good men who deserve a second chance, yet are denied because the First Step Act (FSA) was written to specifically exclude them. So, while it’s good news that the BOP stopped its foot-dragging and is finally moving to enforce this critical aspect of the act, what we really need is a second look at the law itself.
Passed by Congress during the administration of former President Donald Trump, at first glance, the FSA did seem to address some of the “tough-on-crime” prison and sentencing laws that ballooned the federal prison population and earned the U.S. the highest incarceration rate in the world. To name just a few of the benefits of the act: It eased the harsh sentences required for individuals convicted of drug crimes, made it easier for prisoners to petition for compassionate release, and required the Federal Bureau of Prisons to offer rehabilitation programs and link them to an opportunity for early release and other privileges.
However, the devil, as they say, is in the details. And the details, along with the BOP’s reluctant, fitful and arbitrary implementation, have turned the FSA into, at best, a measure of relief for a select few. At its worst, the First Step Act is a mechanism for further reinforcing the discriminatory nature of the U.S. criminal legal system.
A long list of individuals is excluded from the FSA’s offer of release to home confinement or community halfway houses in recognition of their participation in rehabilitation-related activities and a low risk-assessment score. According to the independent review committee mandated by the FSA itself, more than half of the BOP population is disqualified from participating, even though no significant differences in recidivism risk have been documented between those who are eligible and those who aren’t.
Thus, for example, anyone convicted — often decades previously — of virtually any type of act classified as violent, or who is charged with being an “organizer, leader, manager or supervisor of others” when distributing three of the most common street drugs in use today (fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamines) is ineligible. They aren’t even given a chance to demonstrate that they ready to return to their children or parents. Forty-five percent of people held in federal prisons are incarcerated for drug-related offenses, and as a Black man who is one of them, I can attest to the lax meaning of the “leader” accusation. All it takes is for one other person to claim that you “directed” them to carry some drugs or make a call to get stuck with a charge of being a leader. (Very often, people make these claims as part of a bid to reduce their own penalties.)
I qualify for FSA earned-time credits simply because I was charged with conspiracy to sell cocaine (based solely on the claim of a cooperating witness), instead of one of the other three drugs. Yet one of my friends, who was just 18 when he was sent to federal prison as a first-time “offender,” is shut out, simply because his charges involved methamphetamines and a gun. On what rational basis am I granted the chance to demonstrate rehabilitation and he is not?
Even those of us who win this “lottery” are struggling to figure out how to meet the act’s other requirements. Earned-time credits are received in return for completing approved rehabilitation programs or “productive activities.” But the availability of approved courses varies widely from institution to institution, and due to COVID and staffing shortages, the waiting lists for what is on offer are long. I just asked about education and was told by staff the only courses available are GED and ESL classes. As for jobs, the only FSA-eligible positions at my institution are offered by UNICOR, a for-profit arm of the government that manufactures items for sale, from uniforms to license plates. Yet other prison jobs — duties like janitorial work and food services, which keep the prisons themselves running (and for which workers are paid abysmally low wages) — don’t qualify for earned-time credit.
So, yes, the fact that the Bureau of Prisons finally did what it should have done more than two years ago is good news for those of us who fit into one of the act’s arbitrary categories and manage to jump through the other hoops. But for too many others, it is an excruciatingly small first step. Now, Congress needs to listen to the independent review committee — and to incarcerated people and advocates around the country — and implement broader and more meaningful measures to release people from prison.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The term “black on black crime” is a particularly pernicious trope. It is a ruse used to absolve the systemic racism which kills Black people in a plethora of ways. It invalidates Black people’s suffering and gives license to law enforcement and its many acts of brutality.
Ironically, it also describes what is happening among a group of Black officials in New York City. The new mayor and his police commissioner committed a brazen political mugging of the Manhattan District Attorney.
New York City mayor Eric Adams personifies the political imperative to perpetuate an unjust system. Adams was a police officer himself before he went into politics. He has promised to give the police everything they want, including those things that Black people do not want.
The post Eric Adams’ Black On Black Crime appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Guardian RFID is a virtually unknown, but rapidly growing, company that sells digital technology to jails. It makes ID cards and bracelets that can be scanned by guards when doing head counts, meal distribution and suicide checks.
Guardian RFID is yet another prison profiteer among the ever-expanding number of companies that operate as what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “parasites,” feeding off of the prison-industrial complex. What is most disturbing about Guardian RFID are its plans for super-surveillance in the carceral environment. Guardian RFID was named by Inc. magazine as the 396th fastest-growing private company in 2021, increasing its revenue by 126 percent in three years. Guardian RFID has been around for 20 years selling its products to jails, prisons and juvenile detention centers. The company claims to provide technology for 75,000 correctional officers, who they call “Warriors” protecting “America’s Thin Gray Line.”
As mass incarceration is adapting to respond to crises of legitimacy, companies like Guardian RFID are always ready to sell new solutions to the problem of how to contain and control people. Emerging technologies present previously unimagined levels of surveillance. This system views humans like numbers, or like bar codes to be scanned and counted, not as individuals with families, histories and a future.
Guardian RFID sells high-tech tools that enable tight surveillance in jails. Carceral personnel deploy the hand-held Spartan 3 which is basically an Android phone with apps created for basic jail functions. The Spartan scans ID cards and wristbands worn by those incarcerated. The data is then stored on a remote cloud that, according to a Guardian RFID spokesperson, is “F*#@ing Magic.” The company says it builds artificial intelligence systems with “predictive and prescriptive insights” that will give guards “constant surveillance capabilities.”
Guardian RFID uses slick imagery and hyper-militarized language to sell its products, mostly to sheriffs in rural counties throughout the South, Midwest, and other remote areas of the U.S. where the sheriffs are powerful political figures. As it says on the Guardian RFID website, the Spartan 3 is to work with the speed and precision of a “surgical strike” — like “ISIS strongholds turned to glass.” It is a “weapon of mass data collection.” The goal is achieving “operational dominance,” what is described in further hyperbole, as “a powerful synonym for waterboarding” — a form of torture.
Guardian RFID is headquartered in Maple Grove, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. It was founded in 2001 by Ken Dalley, the company’s self-described “Chief Warrior,” a recent finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Heartland Award. Guardian RFID takes pride in being “Warrior led” but it’s not clear whether Dalley was ever a corrections officer. He did not respond to Truthout’s request for an interview. The company aims to track “every inmate” and estimates its technology tracks more than 10 percent of people incarcerated in the United States. Guardian RFID wants to “digitally transform” jails, prisons and juvenile detention centers.
Guardian RFID won its first contract in 2005 at the Hardin County Jail in Eldora, Iowa, a 107-bed facility. Located 75 miles north of Des Moines, the jail was until recently best known as the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Iowa for two decades. There, the Jail Administrator Nick Whitmore touted the Guardian RFID system for protecting his office from a lawsuit. “If there is an investigation on an assault or suicide occurrence,” said Whitmore, “we’re able to document and prove in court that there was one-on-one contact between the individual detainee and jail guard.”
After the death of Sandra Bland on July 13, 2015, Guardian RFID actively promoted its technology to jails in Texas, attempting to take advantage of reforms made in the wake of national protests. The Sandra Bland Act was passed by legislators in Texas two years after her apparent suicide. Among its requirements was that jails have “automated electronic sensors to ensure accurate and timely cell checks.” Guardian RFID lobbied sheriffs in the counties near where Bland died, winning contracts in Fort Bend County, Bezos County and Wharton County, all suburbs of Houston within an hour of the Waller County Jail where she was found hanging in her cell. Guardian RFID’s system was recently installed at the Bexar County Adult Detention Center in San Antonio, Texas, as part of a $20 million technology modernization effort, in part, to “demonstrate continuous compliance” with the Sandra Bland Act. Dallas, Texas, likely signed a million-dollar deal with Guardian RFID to be in accordance with the new state law. On Guardian RFID’s blog, there’s an entire post about the Sandra Bland Act, instructing jails how to maximize “compliance.”
Moreover, Guardian RFID will surely get more contracts after high-profile news stories like the Jeffrey Epstein scandal where guards fell asleep on the job. A wealthy financier held on federal charges of sex trafficking, Epstein hung himself with a bedsheet at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, which has since been temporarily shuttered due to security and infrastructure issues. Guards were supposed to check on Epstein every 30 minutes the night of his death. As was captured on camera, officers Michael Thomas and Tova Noel left Epstein alone for eight hours while they were napping and shopping online. Authorities charged the pair with falsifying the paper log books — but charges were dropped after the guards performed community service. Guardian RFID argues that its digital system is superior to the old paper method and thus prevents “liabilities.”
One of Guardian RFID’s largest contracts is with Sheriff Marian Brown who runs the Dallas County Jail in Texas, the seventh-largest jail in the U.S. with an average daily population of 6,000 people. The three-year contract, approved on December 15, 2020, was for a total of $1.1 million. The dollar amount for the first year was $477,770, with $391,475 coming from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES), a $2 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2020. What carceral surveillance has to do with COVID relief was not articulated in the proposal before the Dallas County Commissioner’s Court. The remainder of the bill — $86,295 — was to be paid from commissions the sheriff makes off the commissary fund, the money that comes from the inflated prices people at the jail pay for personal items like toothpaste, deodorant and socks. The cost was $314,979 for the subsequent two years of the contract. There is big money to be made in selling total surveillance technology.
At the Polk County Jail System in central Florida, Guardian RFID provides the ID tags that are required for everyone in custody who enters through the jail gates. There are nearly 4,000 people incarcerated in three separate jails — Central County Jail, South County Jail and Central Booking. Guardian RFID makes the audacious claim that people “take pride in their ID cards and even feel important having to wear them.” Guardian RFID founder Dalley took a tour of Polk’s modern processing center, what he says is by far the “most impressive and groundbreaking” of its kind. With the help of Guardian RFID technology, Polk’s guards collect 42 million log entries in a year to “automate” compliance with Florida Model Jail Standards, guidelines established by the Florida Sheriff’s Association. But to Guardian RFID, it seems, the thousands of people they tag are not real people. They are just data points.
The massive data collection project at the Polk County Jail did not prevent the death of Shaun Seaman, who on May 13, 2020, was beaten to death while on suicide watch. The guards were supposed to check the cell every 15 minutes, as was protocol, but failed to physically check on Seaman for four and a half hours after the attack. The family filed a civil lawsuit and is being represented by high-profile civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump.
The website for the DeSoto County Adult Detention Facility in Mississippi, says Guardian RFID’s technology is approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), radio frequency levels are similar to those in consumer electronics, and the devices are hypoallergenic. Those who refuse to wear the “non-implantable devices” will be “subject to fines and disciplinary action, including prosecution.”
Guardian RFID has a contract for the Sherburne County Jail, a 732-bed jail, one of the largest jails in the Twin Cities area of St. Paul-Minneapolis, not far from Guardian RFID’s headquarters. Sheriff Joel Brott runs a “forward-thinking” office said Guardian RFID President Dalley. The jail also generates extra revenue by housing 500 people detained by ICE and U.S. Marshals, as well as individuals from local and regional jails. Sheriff Brott used these extra income flows to pay for upgrading the facility — in this case, installing Guardian RFID’s system. Like many sheriffs, Brott further monetizes incarceration to pay for his jail. Some are more imaginative than others, like one sheriff in Kentucky.
Jailer Jamie Mosley has developed what he says is the first “self-sufficient” jail. In January 2020, Mosley opened the Laurel County Correctional Center, based in London, Kentucky. The new $24 million jail holds twice the capacity of the previous facility. The new jail came in under budget — due to the unpaid labor of individuals in custody. “The flooring in the hallways, and all of the stone work in the showers was done by the inmates,” Mosley told the local press.
Due to a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service, the county is reimbursed $54 per day for each person at the Laurel County jail, plus any medical costs. The federal detainees come from the Eastern District of Kentucky, as well as the larger cities of Knoxville, Chattanooga, Greenville and Nashville. Mosley said the jail is self-sufficient and operates on zero tax dollars. With the extra revenue, Mosley contracted with Guardian RFID, which he says, “gives us so much more accountability than we had before.”
The jail also generated even more revenue for Mosley, who founded his own company called Crossbar to sell bendable e-cigarettes to those in his custody, as well as in other jails. According to a report by Vice, Crossbar sold its e-cigs to 33 jails and in 2018 was expected to make $35 million. Mosley has been unashamed about his exploitation of those he holds under lock and key. “I remind our staff,” he told a local newspaper, “that most of the time our job is to take better care of people than they were taking of themselves.”
Guardian RFID disguises some of its profiteering through what it promotes as humanitarian work. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Guardian RFID formed Warrior Foundation, a nonprofit organization to raise money to purchase masks for guards whose “sacrificial and heroic efforts are unseen.” The Warrior Foundation launched “Operation: Swift Mask” with two other major prison profiteers, Securus Technologies and GTL, that provide phone calls for over-priced rates. They raised money to send 250,000 masks inside to jails and prisons.
On one level, the overall mission of Guardian RFID is nothing new — making money off of locking people up. But by combining more traditional elements of overcharging for services with a cutting-edge surveillance system inside jails, Guardian RFID is opening a new frontier of tightening the screws on a population that already faces systematic repression and dehumanization.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
I know for a fact that there’s no one inside the Swanson Center for Youth or the Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) looking out for the health and safety of my son. And now, due to the OJJ’s new no-visitation COVID policy, I can’t be there for him, either.
As COVID-19 numbers spike among children across the country, parents are understandably growing more and more worried about their kids. While families, teachers and lawmakers all struggle to navigate keeping young people safe amid a constantly evolving pandemic, one group of children gets increasingly neglected from care: those in the incarceration system. I should know — my son was incarcerated by the state six years ago at the young age of 13 and remains under the OJJ’s “care” at Swanson youth prison in Monroe, Louisiana.
Louisiana notoriously has one of the worst youth incarceration systems in the country. Amid a pandemic, the conditions at youth prisons have become all the more inhumane. At Swanson, where my son is held, the facility claimed that they kept up with sanitization, but my son was in the infirmary with COVID for three months, and they refused to share any information about his well-being. I later learned there were times he could not eat or breathe. I still worry about his general health because he has told me about mold in the showers, which makes it clear that the prison is not a clean or safe place. I’m sure every parent can understand how traumatizing is for me to not know the state of my child’s health.
Although the pandemic has worsened conditions in youth prisons, this abusive treatment has been ongoing since the moment my son was placed behind bars. I have seen him bruised and black-eyed during visits, and no one has been held accountable. He recently told me that he and the boys in his dorm had to barricade the door from other boys in Swanson who were trying to hurt them. He and his dormmates couldn’t sleep because they were too afraid. The proof is endless: The conditions at Louisiana youth prisons are unacceptable. There are countless reports of abuse and carelessness, which during the pandemic has led to COVID-19 outbreaks, and other gross mishandlings from the people who are supposed to be in charge of these young peoples’ safety. It’s no surprise then, that these conditions lead to youth attempting to escape.
Given Swanson’s history of horrific abuse, it’s unfathomable to me that Gov. John Bel Edwards could support the rebuilding of the prison. Reports of these instances of violence and abuse are swept under the rug so that the OJJ can open a new facility and grow their profit. Our economy in Monroe is invested in these prisons, but our community deserves better jobs. I have personally tried to talk with numerous people at the OJJ and other officials, including the director of Swanson, but they refuse to be held accountable for their cruelty or try to reimagine our economy.
We have known for a long time that youth prisons are ineffective at keeping communities any safer, but we continue to waste money on them. When state recidivism rates are commonly as high as 75 percent, there’s no question that youth prisons are not the rehabilitative places they claim to be. There are no GED programs, mental health services, job opportunities, skills training or preparation for life after incarceration. Kids are also largely unable to communicate with their families, and when they can, it is always under the supervision of Swanson guards, who are often undertrained to make up for staff shortages. These are the same staff members who physically abused my son. How are we supposed to talk freely when they’re listening to every word?
Most Americans across the country agree that youth prisons are not the answer: Seventy-eight percent of Americans support providing financial incentives for states and municipalities to invest in alternatives to youth incarceration in the communities most affected by youth prisons, such as intensive rehabilitation, education, job training, community services, and programs that provide youth the opportunity to repair harm to victims and to provide communities with life-affirming work. We should be putting our well-being first instead of falling on “tough on crime” approaches that disproportionately lock up Black kids more than their white peers.
My son deserves to be kept safe from abuse, illness and unnecessary cruelty. Young people need mental health services, supportive housing and fair access to education to mitigate crime by attacking the root causes. Swanson, like all youth prisons, only serves to punish kids for their mistakes, not help them grow and learn. We need to shut them down now and rebuild our systems in a way that actually helps our children.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On January 17, 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad, shot through the heart, at Utah State Prison. He was the first person to be executed after the death penalty had been reinstated in the United States in 1976. This year, to mark the 45th anniversary of this execution, which coincided with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Death Penalty Action and a coalition of death penalty abolitionists gathered in Washington, D.C. calling for an end to the federal death penalty and all executions in the United States.
After a 17-year hiatus, the U.S. resumed federal executions a year and a half ago. Between July 2020 and January 2021, the Trump administration executed 13 people who were on federal death row, a number surpassing the total number of federal executions that had taken place over the preceding 70 years (1949-2019) spanning 11 presidential administrations.
Those who were executed under the Trump administration included: Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Mitchell, Keith Nelson, William LeCroy Jr., Christopher Vialva, Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin John Higgs. Among this group, considered “irredeemable” by the U.S. government, was a man living with Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia; another who was a member of the Navajo Nation and was the only Native American on federal death row; and another who was a former soldier. One of the executed men practiced Messianic Judaism, while another was a practicing Muslim. The only woman who was on federal death row under Trump — executed in January 2021 — was sexually trafficked by her mother. These sparse details tell us that their existence was not solely defined by the crimes for which they were convicted and ultimately executed, but that each of these individuals has a much fuller story that comprises who they were as human beings. Discounting and ignoring the humanity of those on death row is intrinsic to a system that kills human beings as part of its judicial practice.
As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden had pledged to end the federal death penalty, but the administration seems to have backtracked on that promise. Last July, the Biden administration placed a moratorium on federal executions in order to review the policies the Trump administration enacted to carry out this unprecedented execution spree. Yet Biden has not taken steps to actually end the practice. And while federal executions have been halted for the time being, the Department of Justice has defended and sought the death penalty in the high-profile cases of Dzhokar Tsarnaev and Dylann Roof.
Cases like Roof’s and Tsarnaev’s are cited by proponents of the death penalty to justify its use. The idea that the death penalty is necessary to punish the “worst of the worst” — those like Roof and Tsarnaev, who commit the most heinous of crimes — is one that has been proliferated in the U.S. in defense of a practice that most countries in the world have outlawed.
In my home state of Illinois, where the death penalty was abolished by the state legislature in 2011 because of the sustained efforts of death penalty abolitionists, the case of infamous serial killer John Wayne Gacy was often cited to justify the ongoing use of the death penalty.
Darby Tillis, who along with his codefendant, Perry Cobb, was the first to be exonerated from Illinois’s death row in 1987, was a fiery and outspoken activist against the death penalty until his death in 2014. We had many conversations about his experience on death row, and once, I asked him about John Wayne Gacy, with whom he was incarcerated. His words were telling. “He was a quiet man who kept to himself,” Tillis told me. “When they executed him, we all knew that we would be next.”
When the death penalty is sought for people like Gacy or Roof and Tsarnaev, these executions do not take place in a vacuum. “By making a monster out of Gacy, it gives the impression that the system works. But what it really does is let the system off the hook for taking the lives of those it deems expendable,” said Renaldo Hudson, who survived 37 years of incarceration in Illinois, including 13 on death row.
Girvies Davis was one of those men considered “expendable” by the state of Illinois. One year after Gacy’s execution, the state executed Davis, a Black man who was convicted by an all-white jury of killing Charles Biebel, an 89-year-old white man. Scholar-activist Dylan Rodriguez argues that “the very logics of the overlapping criminal justice and policing regimes systematically perpetuate racial, sexual, gender, colonial, and class violence through carceral power.” Along these lines, it is not surprising that the evidence used to convict Davis was problematic and filled with holes. Prison guards claimed that Davis had passed them a note confessing to Biebel’s murder while he was incarcerated on another charge. But Davis was functionally illiterate at the time and could not read or write. And, on the night he supposedly passed guards this note, prison logs show that he was signed out of the prison.
Racial bias against defendants of color has always affected who is prosecuted, convicted, sentenced to death and executed. Illinois, now known for its high number of death row exonerations, executed men like Girvies Davis before it abolished the death penalty.
Like Davis, Orlando Hall, who was executed by the federal government during Trump’s spree, also faced an all-white jury. In a written testimony of his journey of redemption, he describes his experience:
How did I feel as a black man when I saw my all-white jury? I felt like the thousands before me — doomed! I was never under the false illusion that I would receive a fair trial or a jury of my peers. The system is set up to punish people of color, especially poor people of color. I was an uneducated man, functioning illiterate at best, but I also wasn’t a fool.
The federal death penalty is not immune from the issues that plagued Illinois. Citing the systemic racism of the death penalty, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Sen. Dick Durbin, and more than 70 of their colleagues reintroduced the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act in 2021. “State-sanctioned murder is not justice, and the death penalty, which kills Black and [B]rown people disproportionately, has absolutely no place in our society,” Pressley said. Before 2021 came to a close, on December 15, Representatives Pressley and Jamie Raskin wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting a briefing on the status of the Department of Justice’s review of the Trump administration’s federal death penalty policies and practices, asking whether the Biden administration plans to resume executions and procure the controversial drug pentobarbital sodium for use in those executions.
It remains to be seen what the Biden administration will do in 2022. To hold Biden to his campaign promise to end the federal death penalty, the coalition of activists who gathered in D.C. to mark the 45th anniversary since the first execution in the modern death penalty era voiced their support for the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act and held a rally and march at the Capitol calling for a new wave of activism to end the death penalty.
At an indoor rally, activist Art Laffin shared that he sought mercy and compassion toward the mentally ill homeless man who had stabbed his brother multiple times and killed him. He called for our society to provide a continuum of care for all people like him “so future tragedies like what happened to my brother won’t be repeated again.”
A growing number of murder victims’ loved ones have joined the call to abolish the death penalty, including for people like Timothy McVeigh, who was the first to be executed by the federal government after the death penalty was reinstated in 1988. McVeigh is often cited as an example of someone who deserved the death penalty, with the “logic” that not punishing him by death would be an affront to all the lives lost in the Oklahoma City bombing.
But Bud Welch, the father of Oklahoma City bombing victim Julie Welch, fought tirelessly to stop McVeigh’s execution. Welch even met with McVeigh’s father, Bill, in his Oklahoma City home. In a powerful account of this unique meeting in Grace from the Rubble: Two Fathers’ Road to Reconciliation After the Oklahoma City Bombing, Jeanne Bishop writes that Bud Welch “extended the hand of grace to one who should have been his enemy. That hand was taken in return.”
Bishop, who is a public defender, knows the power of this kind of grace because she extended the same to her sister’s killer. These death penalty abolitionists hold that state-sanctioned murder cannot be justified even in the least sympathetic cases. What their examples show is that vengeance and punishment do not have to be our society’s response to even the most heinous acts of violence.
Meanwhile, in Illinois where the death penalty was abolished, over 5,000 people are facing life sentences or de-facto life sentences of 40 years or more, according to Parole Illinois. Not unlike their predecessors on death row, they face an in-house death sentence. Increasingly, those advocating for the abolition of the death penalty are calling for an end to harsh sentencing and an end to death by incarceration (life without parole).
Perhaps Renaldo Hudson, now the education director for the Illinois Prison Project and a visual artist whose work will be shown at an upcoming exhibition at the University of Chicago, sums it up best with his words: “Society loses its moral grounds when we stoop to the actions of the most broken people to punish those who hurt people. The state of Illinois decided that there was nothing redeemable about me. But I’m living proof that hurt people not only hurt people — we can heal.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Diversion programs are presented as exit ramps to incarceration, offering alternatives to life behind bars and providing resources to individuals who would have otherwise been arrested and sentenced to prison.
When an individual commits a crime, they are arrested as an entry point into the criminal legal system and transitioned through a traditional court trial and sentencing. Through diversion, individuals avoid this process altogether or partially by instead receiving treatment or rehabilitation programming designed to address what led them to commit the crime. But what happens when those diversion programs intended to help end up doing more harm than good?
The Prison Policy Initiative, a research and advocacy nonprofit organization that exposes the broader harms of mass criminalization, brings this question to the forefront, informing us that not all diversion programs are created equal. For Black and Brown youth who face the brunt of arrests, incarceration and criminalization, diversion programs can be good, but not when they center the institution of policing to carry them out.
An example of this is Philadelphia’s police school diversion program, piloted in 2014 to combat the rise of youth arrests in schools and provide them with community-based resources. The program, in partnership between the Philadelphia Police Department and the School District of Philadelphia, at first appears to be a successful program. The Philadelphia Inquirer boasted that the program was a “promising reform,” and that its founder, former Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, “broke the school-to-prison pipeline.” After all, the program decreased youth arrests across the school district in a moment where youth arrests and incarceration rates have fallen throughout the U.S.
Entry into the program begins when a school-based incident occurs. The school has a choice to then make an independent disciplinary decision but will generally inform the school safety office or a Philadelphia police officer. The officer assesses whether that child can or should be diverted. If the child has no prior school record and the officer deems the crime to be “low-risk” or “non-serious,” they may offer diversion. Otherwise, they are arrested.
For youths who are diverted from arrest, they are visited by a social worker and followed up with voluntary community-based services such as mentoring, academic support or victim-offender conferencing. Throughout this process, diverted youth and the services recommended to them are tracked and documented by the Philadelphia Police Department, widening the scope of information these officers have of the youths.
While this appears to be an effective and promising reform, its involvement with police draws major concerns which have been voiced by the community. For instance, one Philadelphia student, Alison Fortenberry, voiced that these police officers view her and other youths not as students, but as criminals, thus purporting the narrative of criminality. Alison is not alone here. Her concern joins the chorus of several other students organizing within the Philly Student Union, a youth-centered organization focused on demanding high quality education, who have been pushing for schools to disband police entirely.
The reality of this program is that it is predicated on the notion that police can be repackaged with a “softer” approach to school safety. It relies on rebranding Philadelphia police as “safety officers” who opt to wear more casual clothes with no badge, but as we should expect, still police. It negates the important details that police are traumatic, and increases the likelihood that Black and Brown youth are criminalized.
Sure, fewer youths are arrested and more are provided with community-based services through the program, but the stigma of criminalization that follows them and the strengthening of the prison-industrial complex does not go away — police reinforce that. It goes away by removing police from the equation altogether.
We cannot allow ourselves to be duped by police-led youth diversion programs, believing their effectiveness on the premise of being reforms to combat youth arrests and incarceration. These reforms inevitably fall short for real long-term change and further construct an illusion that police should be present in our everyday lives, such as the schools youths occupy. Even if these are what appear to be promising efforts of diversionary reform, policing has one goal: to police.
To understand why police-led youth diversion programs should be avoided, we must turn to policing and its impact inside the schoolhouse gate.
Firstly, there are a few things to know about police: They lie; incite racist, sexist, transphobic, heterosexist and ableist violence and harm; and often make situations much worse. The institution of policing and police themselves are inherently violent and racist entities — history informs us of that. But how has this taken shape in schools?
Think about some of the headlines that have taken space on the news and newspapers recently, sparking debates in the U.S. about police overreach and the harm caused by them in schools. From 17-year-old Anthony Thompson Jr., who was shot and killed by police inside a school bathroom stall, to a 4-year-old girl in Virginia with ADHD who allegedly threw a block at another student and was later handcuffed, transported to a squad car and taken to the sheriff’s office, police officers have had a substantial role in school violence and punishment towards youths.
These are but a couple of many examples occurring against the backdrop of how police presence in schools has changed the educational landscape for the worse. Instead of protecting youth, police in schools appear more often to be guarding the school like a prison. Entrances to the school that were once welcoming and inviting instead have metal detectors and are monitored by stationed patrol cars.
Taken altogether, police presence in schools does not make the experiences of youths better and leads to worse outcomes for them, particularly Black and Brown youth.
What does this mean for police-led youth diversion programs? On the surface, they may appear to be a strategy to combat youth arrests and incarceration. However, the effect of keeping police in schools and positioning them to lead diversionary programs is that they have exacerbated the violence of policing and harm against marginalized communities. Moreover, police-led youth diversion programs do not help combat the prison-industrial complex.
Police-led youth diversion programs strengthen the building of carceral capacity — what political scientist Heather Schoenfeld describes as the dramatic increase in the state capacity to punish through new bureaucratic structures, new frontline and administrative positions, new staff training and new protocols across the criminal legal system.
By strengthening police power — allowing them to be the first responders to school incidents and determining who is diverted — reformers for police-led youth diversion programs inevitably build capacity for the prison-industrial complex.
Supporters of these diversion programs might argue that things have gotten better while working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Children get to stay in school and they avoiding an arrest and incarceration. But given what we know about the impact of policing and police presence in schools, do these programs constitute progress?
Progress is recognizing the harm that police have done throughout history. It is making a conscious choice to position other entities, such as counselors in youth diversionary reform. It is also making a proactive shift to providing communities with what they need — housing, health care, quality education — so instances that would have otherwise involved police are not needed.
Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law remind us that innovation in itself is no guarantee of progress. If we are to consider how we make progress in ending mass incarceration among youth and adults, we must critically think about how we stop creating new diversionary policies out of mechanisms of the prison-industrial complex.
While the focus here has been on police-led youth diversion programs, in any measure of reform — be it youth-diversion reform or reform to combat drug addiction among adults — we must ask ourselves whether the proposed diversion program will divest power from carceral institutions. Ask yourself if the diversion program is aligned with doing away with carceral capacity rather than expanding it. A police-led diversion program, be it for youth or adults, is not the answer.
We cannot settle for simply the appearance of slight improvements, some of which may actually expand the realm of policing and the prison-industrial complex. Instead, we must aim for progress — for fundamental transformation.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The holiday season is a particularly difficult time for many people. For those who are facing eviction, are isolated from loved ones, or are unable to afford gifts, there might not seem like a whole lot to toast to. And when you throw in the fact that we’re still wholly in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic, it’s clear that a lot people are experiencing feelings of despair and hopelessness this time of the year.
With this in mind, it’s especially heartening to know that organizers across the country are working to bring a little holiday cheer to those who might need it the most. Holiday-themed mutual aid efforts are popping up in cities and towns all across the United States to help fill in some of the gaps of the official pandemic response and to spread some joy and warmth at the end a particularly tragic year.
The Winter Warmth Fundraiser in Des Moines, Iowa, is just one of many efforts across the country focused on providing warmth — literally to those who need it. The goal of the fundraiser is to raise $20,000 which will help housed residents pay their utility bills as well as provide propane to heat the tents of unhoused residents in the city.
The fundraiser is being organized by Des Moines Black Liberation Movement Rent Relief Fund and Des Moines Mutual Aid, which is part of the broader Iowa Mutual Aid Network.
Similar mutual aid networks have sprung up across the country, multiplying and growing during the pandemic. For example, the Queens Mutual Aid Network in New York City is raising funds to provide rent relief to undocumented Queens residents who have received little or no financial help during the pandemic.
Other efforts are focused on providing warm clothes for people experiencing houselessness or who are otherwise experiencing housing insecurity. The #Warm4Holidays campaign, which is put together by abolitionist organizer and educator Mariame Kaba, encourages people to knit or crochet winter clothing items, such as hats, scarves, socks or mittens, which will then be donated to groups that work with unhoused people.
Another organization working to spread some holiday spirit is Neighbors Helping Neighbors, based in San Mateo, California. The project originated at the start of the pandemic as a form of mutual aid specifically aimed toward grocery deliveries to seniors and immunocompromised people. Now, Neighbors Helping Neighbors is in the middle of its “Buy a Tree, Gift a Tree” program, where individuals or families buying a Christmas tree for themselves are given the opportunity to buy a second tree to donate to someone who can’t afford to buy one.
“We started the program because, personally, I love Christmas, and I love Christmas trees. I collect ornaments. And so I was like, it would really be a drag if you can’t have a tree, especially if you have little kids,” said Neighbors Helping Neighbors Founder Sandy Kraft in an interview with Truthout. “I think it just appeals to certain people because it’s a magical thing, right? I mean, having a tree, being with your family — kids get excited by having the presents underneath.”
For the program, Neighbors Helping Neighbors partnered with a local, family-owned business called Honey Bear Trees which has agreed to support Buy a Tree, Gift a Tree by spreading the word on social media and putting up flyers at its tree lot. Through this partnership Neighbors Helping Neighbors has been able to reach a lot of people who it might not have otherwise.
“There’s all kinds of stories,” Kraft said. “One family reached out to us who were actually living in a family shelter in San Mateo. They had a 9-year-old daughter whose grandfather had died recently from COVID. They asked us for a tree because they didn’t have money for the holidays, and their daughter was really upset. So we got them a tree.”
Although many holiday mutual aid efforts are aimed toward people experiencing houselessness or housing insecurity, there are also a number of mutual aid efforts across the country specifically focusing on bringing some holiday cheer to other communities in need, such as people who are incarcerated.
Moms United Against Violence is an abolitionist organization based in Chicago, Illinois, that has been putting together mutual support drives since 2014. The organization has compiled an online registry where people can purchase toys which are donated to incarcerated mothers to give to their children when they visit them in prison.
“We didn’t want to do a toy drive that was focused exclusively on the children,” Moms United Against Violence co-founder Holly Krig told Truthout. “We wanted it to be an opportunity for people to think about the incarceration of mothers, the relationship of mothers to their children, and not only how deeply it affects children to have their mothers incarcerated, but how much that harms their mothers and harms their relationships and how that reverberates throughout families and communities.”
What distinguishes mutual aid or mutual support efforts from more traditional forms of charity is that mutual aid puts an emphasis on empowering and uplifting the communities being supported, and building solidarity. They do this through projects like toy drives and rent relief, but also through focusing their efforts on organizing communities and raising awareness around specific struggles. Moms United Against Violence, for instance, often invites people who have donated gifts to join them at teach-ins and letter-writing events, which can in some cases build up to court support and participation in freedom campaigns for people who are incarcerated.
“Mutual support is really about us coming together to support each other, to survive these violent systems so that we can resist and organize against them — as opposed to figuring out a way to survive them individually,” Krig tells Truthout. “The support drives have been an opportunity to invite people to think more critically about the carceral system — to draw people into a deeper conversation.”
In a typical year, Mom’s United Against Violence usually generates about 1,400 individual gift donations, and it usually raises around $5,000 during the holiday season to send to incarcerated mothers to put on commissary. These types of donations are incredibly important in and of themselves, but each donation is also an opportunity to draw in new organizers into the abolition movement.
“We’re trying to reclaim a sense of solidarity with one another, and to build that out in concrete ways, first and foremost, by meeting needs and inviting people who have experienced those systems to really take on roles in this work and to be able to contribute and support in a way that feels empowering to them,” Krig said.
Moms United Against Violence is one of a number of mutual aid groups focused on abolition. For example, the Survived and Punished NY Mutual Aid Group is part of Survived and Punished NY — a grassroots prison abolition organization that aims to end the criminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence. The group is currently working to raise $40,000 to provide commissary, packages and other material support to help criminalized survivors stay warm with winter clothing.
Mutual aid efforts led by the organizers at Survived and Punished NY and Moms United Against Violence are driven by an understanding that only through working with communities in mutualistic, solidaristic and nonhierarchical ways will they bring about the better world they know is possible.
“Ultimately, our mutual support drives are really about a political understanding of our circumstances and learning together what we need to know and develop tactics and strategies,” Krig said. “As the wonderful Mariame Kaba always says, ‘You have to prefigure the world that you want to live in.’ And in some ways, I think we’re putting glimpses of that out into the world as we do these drives and show each other what’s possible when we’re in solidarity with one another.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Chesa Boudin has been serving San Franciscans as their district attorney for nearly two years. He is a leading progressive in what has been called the progressive prosecutors’ movement. Other progressive district attorneys in that small cohort are George Gascon in Los Angeles and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia.
In Berger v. United States https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/295/78/, the Supreme Court said that the duty of a prosecutor “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” Yet all too many prosecutors are more concerned with winning cases than with doing justice, which includes the protection of constitutional rights.
Boudin campaigned by proposing solutions to the disaster of mass incarceration, one of the leading civil rights issues of our time.
The post The Effort To Recall Progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.