Tag: carceral state

Wall Street Is Finding New Ways to Milk the Prison System

As part of a growing effort to stop prison telecom monopolies from charging exorbitant fees for calls between prisoners and their families, last year Minnesota became one of the first states to make all phone calls free for prisoners. And to eliminate the kickback system perpetuating the scheme, the state barred its agencies from collecting commissions on prison phone services, as well as on video calling and e-messaging.

But records obtained by us show Minnesota’s Department of Corrections still collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks last year from commissions on other prison services private telecom companies controlled — including money transfers, music access, and other entertainment behind bars. All in all, the records suggest the telecom firms brought in nearly $3 million in revenue from an ever-increasing array of nonphone prison services in the state.

Minnesota, which was the fourth state in the country to make the government, not prisoners, pay for phone calls, is a case study in how prison communication companies and their private equity owners have managed to preserve their symbiotic relationship with state corrections agencies despite reforms — at the major expense of incarcerated people and their families.

According to a Minnesota state watchdog agency, under a current prison contract, people in state prisons must pay between $1.06 and $1.99 to listen to a single song on state-issued devices. Under a new contract with another telecom vendor, the cost will increase to up to $2.36 per song — and the state will pocket a bigger cut of the revenue.

“For-profit telecom companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars from incarcerated people and their families, while Minnesota families are going into debt to stay connected with their loved ones through phone calls and video calls,” said Margaret Zadra, Minnesota’s ombudsperson of corrections. “For-profit companies should not be allowed to erode that connection to line their own pockets.”

As digital tablets become increasingly ubiquitous behind bars, criminal justice reform advocates say Wall Street is poised to control and monetize an ever larger share of the daily lives of this captive audience.

“The ideal world for the private equity owners of these companies is every prisoner has one of their tablets, and every one of those tablets is hooked up to the bank account of someone outside of prison that they can just drain,” said Paul Wright, the executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights Defense Center, which for years has led a campaign to lower prison telecom costs.

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‘Cruel and unusual’: Daughter of inmate with bipolar disorder who killed self sues prison for failing to provide adequate mental health care

An inmate classified as among the most severely mentally ill killed himself in solitary confinement at a Wisconsin state prison after officials failed to provide adequate mental health care and medications, the man’s daughter alleges in a federal lawsuit filed this week.

Dean Henry Hoffmann, 60, died in June at Waupun Correctional Institution (WCI), a beleaguered facility with chronic inadequate staffing and inmate overcrowding, more than an hour northwest of Milwaukee.

“Every day I fight for some type of change within the system, and I’m hoping that this really drives that home, and something like this — holding them accountable — will lead to change,” Megan Hoffmann Kolb told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Prison officials declined to comment, citing a policy against commenting on pending litigation, the newspaper reported.

Court documents obtained by Law&Crime outline the events leading up to Hoffmann’s suicide after he was sentenced last February to 28 years in prison after his conviction for assaulting his ex-girlfriend.

Hoffmann had a history of mental illness that included bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, hypothyroidism, diabetes, and anti-social personality disorder, court documents said.

Before his trial, he had been deemed by mental health professionals and the court as being mentally ill but competent to stand trial, even though there was strenuous disagreement, the lawsuit said. In custody, he was categorized as “MH-2A,” the most severe category of mental illness, court documents said.

On April 10, Hoffmann was transferred to WCI with about 30 days of medication. When he went in, the facility had been locked down for safety reasons after some inmates had broken prison rules, court documents said. Because of lockdown restrictions, Hoffmann was never given a psychological exam and had received only some of his prescribed medications, the lawsuit alleges. He had only been able to use the phone twice in the first weeks. Guards unplugged the phone on him mid-conversation in one call.

He asked for medical treatment and showed serious symptoms of mental illness, including severe anxiety, paranoia, pressured speech, poor judgment, poor insight, loss of appetite, weight loss and insomnia, court documents said.

His frustrations mounted on June 20, when he refused to return to his cell after showering, citing “fear of his safety because of threats his cellmate made to him,” the lawsuit said.

When guards ordered him into his cell, he refused. He was handcuffed and escorted into the prison’s Restricted Housing Unit for “a minor incident despite Mr. Hoffmann expressing concerns for his safety.”

While in solitary, Hoffmann began to rapidly deteriorate mentally and physically.

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Mom’s Manslaughter Conviction for Her Son’s School Shooting Sets a Dangerous Precedent

A jury on Tuesday convicted a Michigan woman on four counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the mass shooting her son executed at Oxford High School in November 2021. But while the defendant, Jennifer Crumbley, and her husband, James Crumbley, have been the subject of widespread scorn, her novel prosecution and his upcoming trial have raised questions about how far the state can reach to hold parents accountable for the actions of their children and what kind of precedent that sets.

Here, the prosecution posited the Crumbleys bore criminal responsibility for the murders committed by their son, Ethan, because they allegedly disregarded signs he was depressed and gifted him a gun for Christmas. But the evidence presented at trial painted a more complicated narrative. In some sense, the overall case seemed to hinge on what prosecutors wished the law said, not on what it actually says.

James Crumbley’s trial is set for March; Jennifer Crumbley’s sentencing will take place in April. They both face up to 60 years in prison.

Core to the state’s case during Jennifer Crumbley’s proceeding was the notion that Ethan had shown himself to be emotionally disturbed, and, instead of intervening, she left him to his own devices. Much was made of her extramarital affair and her devotion to her equestrian hobby; prosecutors wanted the jury to believe, one assumes, that she was more interested in riding horses and having sex with a man who wasn’t her husband than she was in parenting her child.

But while she very well may have been a flawed parent—few serious people would argue adultery is a stand-up choice—testimony at trial made it far from clear that her son’s murderous streak was predictable, much less that she “willfully disregard[ed]” it and could have prevented it via “ordinary care,” the standard required by Michigan statute. 

The state said Ethan told his mom via text that their house might be haunted; she testified he thought he was joking. More damning was a journal entry furnished by prosecutors where Ethan drew pictures of guns and wrote that “my parents won’t listen to me about help or a therapist.” Jennifer Crumbley, however, countered she was surprised to hear that, as she claims Ethan had not told her about a desire for therapy, and that she did not read his diary entries.

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NEVER FORGET… Kamala Harris Kept Black Men in Prison Past Their Release Date for Cheap State Labor in California

Kamala Harris kept hundreds of black men in prison past their release date so she could use these men for $2 a day for cheap California state labor.

That alone should have disqualified Kamala Harris from public office.
Extending prison sentences for cheap labor sounds like criminal activity.

Back in February 2019 Jackie Kucinich at The Daily Beast wrote about Kamala Harris’s Attorney General office keeping inmates locked up so the state could use them for cheap labor.

Just like slavers.

Kamala also locked up 1,500 people for marijuana violations.

The Daily Beast reported:

Ordered to reduce the population of California’s overcrowded prisons, lawyers from then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office made the case that some non-violent offenders needed to stay incarcerated or else the prison system would lose a source of cheap labor.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that California’s prisons were so overcrowded that they violated the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Three years later, in early 2014, the state was ordered to allow non-violent, second time offenders who have served half of their sentence to be eligible for parole.

By September 2014, plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit were back in court, accusing California of slow-walking the process, which lawyers for Harris’ office denied.

According to court filings, lawyers for the state said California met benchmarks, and argued that if certain potential parolees were given a faster track out of prison, it would negatively affect the prison’s labor programs, including one that allowed certain inmates to fight California’s wildfires for about $2 a day.

“Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation—a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought,” lawyers for Harris wrote in the filing, noting that the fire camp program required physical fitness in addition to a level of clearance that allowed the felon to be offsite.

Not only that, they noted, draining the prisons of “minimum custody inmates” would deplete the labor force both internally and in local communities where low-level, non-violent offenders worked for pennies on the dollar collecting trash and tending to city parks. A federal three-judge panel ordered both sides to confer about the plaintiffs’ demands, and the state agreed to extend the 2-for-1 credits to all eligible minimum security prisoners.

This is the Democrat Party’s nominee for VP.

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Sharing deepfake porn could lead to lengthy prison time under proposed law

The US seems to be getting serious about criminalizing deepfake pornography after teen boys at a New Jersey high school used AI image generators to create and share non-consensual fake nude images of female classmates last October.

On Tuesday, Rep. Joseph Morelle (D-NY) announced that he has re-introduced the “Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act,” which seeks to “prohibit the non-consensual disclosure of digitally altered intimate images.” Under the proposed law, anyone sharing deepfake pornography without an individual’s consent risks damages that could go as high as $150,000 and imprisonment of up to 10 years if sharing the images facilitates violence or impacts the proceedings of a government agency.

The hope is that steep penalties will deter companies and individuals from allowing the disturbing images to be spread. It creates a criminal offense for sharing deepfake pornography “with the intent to harass, annoy, threaten, alarm, or cause substantial harm to the finances or reputation of the depicted individual” or with “reckless disregard” or “actual knowledge” that images will harm the individual depicted. It also provides a path for victims to sue offenders in civil court.

Rep. Tom Kean (R-NJ), who co-sponsored the bill, said that “proper guardrails and transparency are essential for fostering a sense of responsibility among AI companies and individuals using AI.”

“Try to imagine the horror of receiving intimate images looking exactly like you—or your daughter, or your wife, or your sister—and you can’t prove it’s not,” Morelle said. “Deepfake pornography is sexual exploitation, it’s abusive, and I’m astounded it is not already a federal crime.”

Joining Morelle in pushing to criminalize deepfake pornography was Dorota and Francesca Mani, who have spent the past two months meeting with lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. The mother and daughter experienced the horror Morelle described firsthand when the New Jersey high school confirmed that 14-year-old Francesca was among the students targeted last year.

“What happened to me and my classmates was not cool, and there’s no way I’m just going to shrug and let it slide,” Francesca said. “I’m here, standing up and shouting for change, fighting for laws, so no one else has to feel as lost and powerless as I did on October 20th.”

Morelle’s office told Ars that “advocacy from partners like the Mani family” is “critical to bringing attention to this issue” and getting the proposed law “to the floor for a vote.”

Morelle introduced the law in December 2022, but it failed to pass that year or in 2023. He’s re-introducing the law in 2024 after seemingly gaining more support during a House Oversight subcommittee hearing on “Advances in Deepfake Technology” last November.

At that hearing, many lawmakers warned of the dangers of AI-generated deepfakes, citing a study from the Dutch AI company Sensity, which found that 96 percent of deepfakes online are deepfake porn—the majority of which targets women.

But lawmakers also made clear that it’s currently hard to detect AI-generated images and distinguish them from real images.

According to a hearing transcript posted by the nonprofit news organization Tech Policy Press, David Doermann—currently interim chair of the University at Buffalo’s computer science and engineering department and former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—told lawmakers that DARPA was already working on advanced deepfake detection tools but still had more work to do.

To support laws like Morelle’s, lawmakers have called for more funding for DARPA and the National Science Foundation to aid in ongoing efforts to create effective detection tools. At the same time, President Joe Biden—through a sweeping AI executive order—has pushed for solutions like watermarking deepfakes. Biden’s executive order also instructed the Department of Commerce to establish “standards and best practices for detecting AI-generated content and authenticating official content.”

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Parole denied for 68-year-old in Alabama: ‘A life sentence for growing marijuana’

Leon Hotchkiss, now 68, remains behind bars in Alabama, spending decades imprisoned for growing pot.

Authorities seized about five and half pounds of the plant on his property in Baldwin County, allowing authorities to charge him under the state’s marijuana trafficking law.

In 2013, Hotchkiss was sentenced to spend the next 40 years in prison.

And when he came up for parole in February, after serving a decade, the three-member Alabama parole board voted to keep him there.

The board set his next hearing in 2028 – the furthest they could push it back. He’ll be 73.

Today, Hotchkiss is incarcerated at the Loxley Community Work Center, although he spends most days outside the lockup. Each morning, he is dropped off at his job at a Fairhope boat dealership.

Jody Cullifer recently retired from the dealership, but he’s the person who secured the job for Hotchkiss. He said he had trouble finding a person to wash the boats, so he called the prison and asked if they had anyone who could do the job and provide general maintenance. They sent Hotchkiss.

On Hotchkiss’s first day, Cullifer explained the job. “He picked up really quick… and did a phenomenal job,” he said.

Cullifer called Hotchkiss a good worker and a trustworthy employee, and said the bosses gave him his own key to the dealership. That way, Hotchkiss could let himself inside in case the prison van dropped him off too early in the morning.

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Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

An 18-year-old hacker who leaked clips of a forthcoming Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order.

Arion Kurtaj from Oxford, who is autistic, was a key member of international gang Lapsus$.

The gang’s attacks on tech giants including Uber, Nvidia and Rockstar Games cost the firms nearly $10m.

The judge said Kurtaj’s skills and desire to commit cyber-crime meant he remained a high risk to the public.

He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger.

The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage.

Doctors deemed Kurtaj unfit to stand trial due to his severe autism so the jury was asked to determine whether or not he committed the alleged acts – not if he did so with criminal intent.

A mental health assessment used as part of the sentencing hearing said he “continued to express the intent to return to cyber-crime as soon as possible. He is highly motivated.”

The jury was told that while he was on bail for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE and in police protection at a Travelodge hotel, he continued hacking and carried out his most infamous hack.

Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.

Kurtaj stole 90 clips of the unreleased and hugely anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6.

He broke into the company’s internal Slack messaging system to declare “if Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code”.

He then posted the clips and source code on a forum under the username TeaPotUberHacker.

He was rearrested and detained until his trial.

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People With Past Convictions Shouldn’t Be Blocked From Marijuana Industry Work, Massachusetts Regulators Say

This fall, the Cannabis Control Commission’s regulations to implement Massachusetts’s equity reform law became official, representing the most wide-ranging changes to the Commonwealth’s regulated marijuana marketplace in six years and a historic accomplishment for advocates, operators, regulators and the legislature. As a result, our agency is now entrusted with oversight of local contracts between host communities and licensees, as well as efforts at the municipal level to increase inclusivity in the industry. However, a single legislative update may provide the greatest opportunity for individuals directly impacted by the war on drugs.

The marijuana employment amendment—passed unanimously by the state Senate before being adopted in the House and then signed into law by Gov. Charlie Baker (R) in August 2022—now bans all prior criminal convictions, including marijuana offense-related dispositions, from automatically disqualifying individuals from working for most cannabis licensees unless the offense involved distribution of a controlled substance to a minor. In doing so, the Commonwealth has cleared the way for gainful employment in the legal industry by the communities most impacted by drug policies that disproportionately incarcerated people of color, and eliminated a blanket regulatory ban that previously prevented employers from even considering their hire.

Legalization brought a sense of hope, belonging and inspiration for those most impacted by marijuana prohibition; many believed it would address historical injustices, make products safer and bring economic gains to those harmed by previous policies. Fortunately, much of that vision has come to fruition.

Today, Massachusetts’s adult-use cannabis industry has generated more than $5 billion in sales, or roughly $1 billion in tax revenue, and millions more in non-tax revenue through licensing and application fees. More than 570 licensed marijuana establishments have commenced operations, 102 medical marijuana treatment centers are open and nearly 100,000 residents are now registered medical patients. Hundreds of entrepreneurs, and more than 20,0000 employees, benefit from growing, manufacturing and selling the biggest cash crop in our state.

However, over that time, only 67 participants in the commission’s programming to include communities harmed by the war on drugs have opened businesses (158 more are in the licensing pipeline), while less than 15 percent of the current workforce identifies as Black or Latino.

Despite our best efforts, equity is coming slowly. The high cost of compliance, combined with limited access to capital, have kept barriers to entry high. The state’s new cannabis equity law has mandated solutions to many of these problems, including the creation of the Cannabis Social Equity Trust Fund administered by the Executive Office of Economic Development.

But to truly eliminate all collateral consequences of the drug war, it was also important to remove unnecessary blanket prohibitions that prevented people with criminal records from obtaining jobs like the ones they did before legalization. Employment has proven to be one of the most effective tools for reintegration and reducing recidivism.

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Living Everywhere in a Carceral Surveillance State

If you live in a Chinese city, or even in London, you are probably so used to surveillance cameras all around you – on lamp posts, the corners of buildings, and so on – that you would hardly bat an eyelid. Yet what contemporary city-denizens take for granted was not always the case, and most people would be surprised to know that surveillance has a long history, and was linked to modes of punishment from early on.

The thinker who brought us the history of punishment, linked with surveillance, was Michel Foucault, who died prematurely in 1984, and whose thesis of ‘panopticism’ I referred to in an earlier post. His work is an inexhaustible source of insight regarding the way in which one enters into a relationship with history – something that is not self-evident, but requires careful consideration of the contingent, usually unpredictable factors which have contributed to the present state of affairs. This insight also opens the way for a critique of current social practices, which may otherwise seem self-justifying and necessary. 

Foucault’s writings on enlightenment suggest that there is a fundamental difference between ‘enlightenment’ in the Kantian sense, which emphasised the universal moment of scientific and philosophical knowledge, and ‘enlightenment’ in the sense of a philosophy of the contemporary present, which would do justice to both the (Kantian) universal as well as what is contingent and particular, which is not subject to historical laws, deterministically conceived.

In his essay, What is enlightenment? (in The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, P., New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 32-50), Foucault argues that Kant’s emphasis on the universal should be amplified by Baudelaire’s characterisation of the modern in terms of a tension between being and becoming (or the universal and the particular), in this way finding the ‘eternal’ (or enduringly valuable) in the transitory, historically contingent moment. For Baudelaire, this amounts to a species of self-invention.

Foucault, however, maintains that such self-invention would enable one to turn Kant’s critique into one that is pertinent for the present time, by inquiring what there is, in what we have been taught to accept as being necessary and universal, which we no longer are, or want to be, thus practising a kind of ‘transgressive’ enlightenment. This, I would like to show, is highly germane to the time in which we find ourselves, and by scrutinising the history that has brought us to our fraught present, we should be in a better position to identify what it is that we no longer want to be.

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WHY WOMEN’S WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS ARE SO DIFFICULT TO OVERCOME

When Cynthia Sommer’s husband, Todd, died in 2002, the medical examiner said a cardiac arrhythmia was responsible. But prosecutors charged Sommer with murder on the theory she had poisoned her husband, pointing at her trial to the fact that Sommer underwent a breast augmentation, once participated in a wet T-shirt contest, and pursued sexual partners after her husband’s death. The implication was Sommer was not a grieving widow but reveling in her newfound sexual freedom. She was convicted but subsequently won a new trial, after which the charges were dismissed.

Sommer is just one of many innocent people who have been wrongfully convicted of a crime. Experts believe only a small percentage will ever be exonerated. But women like Sommer are rarely the face of this issue. Because of this, the specific contours of women’s wrongful convictions can go unnoticed, obscuring the fact that, while exonerations are already difficult to achieve, exonerating women presents its unique challenges.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, only 285 women have managed to be exonerated since 1989, compared with more than 3,000 men. But experts say that isn’t indicative of the true number of wrongful convictions.

There is “no question” it’s harder for women to achieve exonerations compared with men, according to Marissa Boyers Bluestine, assistant director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the former executive director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. Regarding how many wrongfully convicted women have yet to achieve exonerations, “It’s not even a tip of an iceberg, it’s a tip of a tip of an iceberg,” Bluestone said.

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