Tag: carceral state

US Prison Allegedly Tortured Prisoners In Retaliation

A new report documents civil rights abuses, including torture, that allegedly occurred at a United States prison in Illinois. It contains several examples of retaliation against prisoners who challenged their abusive treatment and confinement conditions.

Prison staff are accused of creating a “culture of fear and intimidation that systematically suppressed the use of the grievance process,” which effectively emboldens and shields the people who are supposed to be held accountable.

“This report is dedicated to the brave individuals who, despite facing retaliation, physical danger, and psychological trauma, spoke out about the conditions in the Special Management Unit [SMU] at the United States Penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois,” the first page declares.

The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs, Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago, and Levy Firestone Muse LLP in Washington, D.C. conducted “at least 100 interviews and legal calls, and reviewed over a thousand pages of correspondence and institutional records.”

“We uncovered a widespread culture of abuse involving officials up and down the chain of command,” the report states [PDF]. “Thomson staff assaulted people in the SMU almost daily—for personal reasons, retaliation for grieving prior abuses, and sometimes for no reason at all.”

“Five individuals imprisoned at USP Thomson died unnatural deaths between 2019 and 2022, the most of any BOP [Bureau of Prisons] facility. Countless other individuals suffered serious injuries and unquantifiable psychological trauma, and many risked grave retaliations just to stand up for their rights.”

As the report makes clear, prisoners who challenge their treatment by filing grievance forms do so at great risk.

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Why prosecutors in WA are recharging a man police nearly beat to death

Moses Lake police nearly beat Joseph Zamora to death. Then he was charged with and convicted of assaulting an officer. He served a full prison term. Then Grant County prosecutors asked for the case to be dismissed. Then the state Supreme Court threw out Zamora’s convictions, because the prosecutor used racial bias during the trial.

It’s been more than six years since the beating that left Zamora in a medically induced coma in the ICU for a month, but Grant County prosecutors are reprosecuting him for the same alleged crimes. Even though Zamora already served a full prison sentence. Even though the same prosecutors previously asked to have the case dismissed.

The lingering question: Why? Why recharge a man when even if he is convicted, he wouldn’t serve any more time? Why recharge a man when the prosecutor previously wrote, “it is no longer in the interests of justice for the State to pursue this case?”

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New York’s Heavy Hand Keeps Illegal Marijuana and Tobacco Dealers in Business

While I have fond memories of life in New York, many of them involve defying some stupid rule or regulation. It’s a pleasure to now live in Arizona where government, while still idiotic, generally has a lighter touch. Unfortunately for friends and family I left behind, Empire State officialdom still hasn’t learned its lessons, as evidenced by the heavy regulatory hand stifling sort-of-legalized marijuana, and proposals to similarly reinforce the black market with an outright ban on cigarette sales.

“Governor Kathy Hochul today signed new legislation to increase civil and tax penalties for the unlicensed and illicit sale of cannabis in New York as part of the FY 2024 Budget,” the New York governor’s office announced this week. “The legislation, first proposed by the Governor in March, provides additional enforcement power to the Office of Cannabis Management and the Department of Taxation and Finance to enforce the new regulatory requirements and close stores engaged in the illegal sale of cannabis.”

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HOW THE PRISON LITIGATION REFORM ACT BLOCKS JUSTICE FOR PRISONERS

In 2014, Abu Huraira, 45, was transferred to Georgia State Prison after 16 years in the custody of the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC). On his arrival, prison officials failed to give him an initial medical screening, violating GDC policy. Because of that, Huraira went weeks without receiving medication for his chronic pain or dental care for a decaying tooth, despite submitting multiple requests to medical staff at the prison. Additionally, prison officials forced Huraira, a Muslim, to shave his beard using unsanitized clippers, exposing him to the risk of bloodborne diseases, and denied him access to Islamic prayer services, according to a lawsuit he later filed in federal court.

When Huraira sued GDC for violating his rights to medical care and religious liberty, GDC attorneys didn’t dispute the substance of his allegations. Instead, they argued that he had no right to sue at all because he had not filed a formal grievance with prison authorities. Even though Huraira told the court that corrections officers had refused to allow him to file a grievance, a federal judge ruled in GDC’s favor and dismissed Huraira’s lawsuit on the grounds that he had “failed to exhaust administrative remedies.”

All of this was possible thanks to a little-known federal law called the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). Signed into law in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, the PLRA sought to tamp down on “frivolous” lawsuits filed by prisoners by making it easier for courts to dismiss cases before they ever went to trial. The law also capped the amount of damages prisoners could collect from prison officials who violated their constitutional rights, discouraging professional attorneys from taking on prisoners’ cases.

As a result, the PLRA has made it virtually impossible for prisoners to hold corrections officials accountable for civil rights violations like excessive force or inadequate medical care. Without judicial oversight, corrections officials act with impunity because they rarely face consequences for violating prisoners’ rights.

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PRISON LABOR: WHERE ‘DEAD-END’ JOBS MEET 21ST CENTURY SLAVERY

For more than 150 years, the U.S. Constitution has relegated prisoners to a distinct underclass that allows us to be exploited for our cheap, and in many cases unpaid, labor. Although the 13th Amendment was intended to protect citizens from being abused through slavery, it included a carveout stating that this right to protection did not apply to those convicted of crimes. Inside the towering walls and razor wire fences of U.S. prisons, slavery remains legal—and it is carried out with little oversight, often under horrific conditions.

As a society, we’re constantly told that people behind bars belong there and that they owe us a debt. It’s true that those of us who are incarcerated have a responsibility to do everything in our power to repair the harm we’ve caused. But forcing us to submit to exploitation and abuse for the benefit of corporations does not help victims of crime or make society safer.

A 2022 ACLU and Global Human Rights Clinic report found that people incarcerated in state and federal prisons produce approximately $11 billion in goods and services for the U.S. economy while being paid pennies for their labor. Often, this leaves prisoners unable to afford basic hygiene items or even phone calls or stationery to help us remain in contact with the outside world.

Unlike workers in the outside world, incarcerated workers “are under the complete control of their employers … stripped of even the most minimal protections against labor exploitation and abuse,” the report concluded.

Incarcerated workers in every state earn far less than minimum wage. The average minimum hourly wage for prisoners in non-industry jobs across the U.S. is 13 cents an hour, the ACLU and GHRC found. The average maximum hourly wage is 52 cents an hour. In seven states, incarcerated workers receive no compensation for most work assignments. Industry jobs, in which prisoners produce goods and services for private companies, pay only slightly better, but still ensure that the employer nets a huge profit.

Some states allow for the garnishing of these meager prison wages to pay for child support, court fees, restitution, institutional debt—incurred when prisoners cannot afford hygiene items or medical copays—and even room and board costs.

And while our wages are just a fraction of even the lowest-paying jobs on the outside, we are forced to pay highly inflated prices for basic necessities. At the prison in Washington State where I am incarcerated, many jobs pay only 42 cents an hour. A local 20-minute phone call costs $1.43, meaning a prisoner must work 3.5 hours to cover the cost of that call. A 3-ounce bag of freeze-dried coffee is $3.34, or 8 hours of work. A tube of Colgate Sensitive toothpaste is $6.10—more than 14.5 hours of work. The list goes on.

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Macron Gives ‘Le Doigt’ To Free Speech: Protesters To Be Prosecuted For Flipping-Off French President

Five years ago, I wrote a column criticizing Democratic and Republican members of Congress who joined the media in gushing over an address from French President Emmanuel Macron as he called for European style censorship. Free speech has been in a virtual free fall in France for decades and Macron is a major voice in that movement.

This week, the French added another outrage to Macron’s legacy by promising to prosecute three citizens who protested the President by flipping him off at an event. The use of “Le Doigt” could now land them in “La Prison.”

The three will be prosecuted under France’s abusive criminal code that allows for the arrest of those who engage in speech that “affect the personal dignity or the respect owed to a public official.” It is a breathtaking denial of political speech and invites selective prosecution.

If convicted, they could face a fine of 15,000 euros and potentially up to one year in prison, according to La Chaîne Info. 

Macron has hit a record low in polling, but his government will now enforce respect for him through threats of incarceration.

France has been a leader in the rollback on free speech in the West with ever widening laws curtailing free speech. These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.

In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French mother was prosecuted because her son went to school with a shirt reading “I am a bomb.”

A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”

Yet, our leaders (and many in the media) were ecstatic when Macron came to the Congress and called for a joint war against “fake news,” declaring, “Democracy is about true choices and rational decisions. The corruption of information is an attempt to corrode the very spirit of our democracies.”

Nothing says Democracy like jailing those who do not show you respect.

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Democrats Threaten Matt Taibbi With Jail Time Over Twitter Files Testimony

Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat, is the delegate from the Virgin Islands to the U.S. Congress. Last month, when independent writers Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, she described them as “so-called journalists” and sought to undermine their testimony about government pressure to restrict speech on Twitter.

She has now gone much further.

Plaskett recently sent a letter to Taibbi accusing him of perjury and suggesting that he could face up to five years in jail. The letter was obtained by Lee Fang, a writer who works with Taibbi and publishes on Substack. In it, Plaskett notes that providing false testimony to Congress “is punishable by up to five years imprisonment.”

The congresswoman’s basis for accusing Taibbi of perjury is a handful of errors that he made during the publication of the Twitter Files. These mistakes caught the attention of MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, who skewered Taibbi in an interview and suggested the entire Twitter Files project rested upon a house of cards.

It is true that Taibbi made some errors: In one of his tweets about the web of organizations engaged in identifying so-called misinformation on Twitter, he confused CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—an organ of the federal government—with CIS, the Center for Internet Security—a nonprofit. Hasan has never sufficiently explained why this mistake would render the Twitter Files obsolete; in fact, both organizations participated in the Election Integrity Partnership, a Stanford University project that sought to monitor the election-related discourse on social media. Taibbi pointed out this fact in a tweet admitting to the mistake.

Regardless, it is obviously not the case that Taibbi committed perjury. Plaskett’s letter describes the CISA/CIS mistake as an “intentional” one; this is simply false. Taibbi did not willfully mischaracterize the two organizations; when he rewrote “CIS” as “CISA,” he honestly thought the tweet in question had referred to the government agency rather than the nonprofit.

Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), described Plaskett’s letter as shocking.

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NEW YORK’S IMPRISONED WOMEN BRAVE RISKS TO SUE SEXUAL ABUSERS UNDER NEW LAW

Kim Brown says she met a lieutenant at New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in 1996 or 1997 when she was sent to his office for disciplinary reasons. But the officer seemed unusually interested in her.

“He started calling me down, and I didn’t understand why,” she told The Appeal. I didn’t do anything.” Their initial meetings were “under the guise of interviewing me about things that were going on in the facility,” she said. “And then it became light. He would offer me a drink.”

Brown eventually relented to the pressure from a man with near-total control over her life inside the prison—a situation she now sees as sexual abuse. Today, Brown feels she finally has one way to fight back: She is among nearly 1,000 women filing claims so far this year as part of New York’s Adult Survivors Act (ASA), which briefly waives New York’s statute of limitations requirements to file sexual abuse lawsuits.

But while the new law is intended to address past harm, Brown is one of only a small number of women likely to be doing so from prison. For incarcerated people like Brown, filing a claim—or even talking about what happened to them—carries unique risks. Among numerous claims, currently or formerly incarcerated people have alleged that guards have coerced women into performing oral sex in plain view of others, refused to allow imprisoned people to file complaints under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, forced women to perform sex acts by threatening discipline; locked people in prison facilities and assaulted them; and a host of other serious incidents.

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BACKGROUND CHECK INDUSTRY PROFITS OFF ‘DIGITAL PUNISHMENT,’ DESPITE FLAWED DATA

Tony Taylor was not anticipating becoming the center of a class action lawsuit when he attempted to rent an apartment through Airbnb in 2020. But when a standard background check by a third-party provider turned up a violent felony on Taylor’s record, the short-term rental company informed him that it had permanently banned him from using their services.

Taylor was perplexed. He’d been through countless background and credit checks before. And he thought the crime in question was well behind him: In 2014, Taylor—who spent years working in the security and personal protection field—carried his Glock handgun into Minneapolis City Hall. Unbeknownst to Taylor, he was bringing a firearm into a building with a courthouse in it. And, as such, he was accidentally committing a felony under Minnesota law, even though he says he never removed his licensed weapon from its locked holster.

Minneapolis police arrested Taylor and charged him with “dangerous weapon possession in a courthouse.” His wife, Sarah, was also arrested during the incident.

Rather than take on the costs associated with a criminal trial, Taylor decided to plead guilty. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail. As part of the plea, his crime would be reduced to a misdemeanor if he completed three years of probation.

Six years later, Taylor assumed the consequences of his run-in with the criminal legal system had been laid to rest. He had completed his probation and maintained good legal standing since the arrest.

However, Inflection Risk Solutions, a private company that provides background checks for employers and services like Airbnb, had erroneously reported that Taylor was a violent criminal. After seeing errors on his background check, Taylor requested a report for his wife, who was convicted of the same charge, to ensure any mistakes could be corrected. Her records contained the same error, and Inflection Risk had even duplicated her charges, listing her as having two violent felonies.

“At this point, I’m pissed,” Taylor said in an interview with The Appeal. “How dare you call me a violent felon. The reason why I was in security was to keep people safe, not to hurt people.”

Neither Inflection Risk nor Airbnb responded to a request for comment.

As the Taylors fought to correct the record, they would soon discover that they were far from the only ones whom private background check companies like Inflection Risk had harmed.

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Man found guilty of spitting at police gets 70 years in prison

A Texas man was sentenced to 70 years in prison Wednesday after he was found guilty of harassing a public servant for spitting at Lubbock police officers.

Larry Pearson, 36, was arrested in May 2022 for domestic violence after a victim flagged down an officer in northeast Lubbock, prosecutor Jessica Gorman said.

The victim told police that Pearson had hit her several times and that he had a gun. Gorman said that firearm turned out to be an airsoft gun.

A police report at the time stated the victim had “multiple visible injuries” on her face. Gorman said after Pearson was taken into custody, he was upset the victim was not arrested instead.

That’s when he started kicking at the doors in the officer’s vehicle. When the officers opened the door to tell him to stop, Gorman said he spit at both officers.

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