Tag: prison

Correcting The Record On Marijuana Prisoners Left Behind By Biden’s Pardons

On October 6, 2022, President Joe Biden issued a historic general pardon for all previous crimes of simple marijuana possession in violation of federal law and the D.C. Code, both of which are misdemeanors. A few weeks ago, the president extended the general pardon to cover offenses for marijuana use and attempted simple possession, which are also misdemeanors.

In all likelihood, the most important part of the president’s October 2022 action wasn’t the general pardon, but instead his ordering an administrative review of marijuana’s treatment under the federal government’s master drug scheme, the Controlled Substances Act. As just confirmed last week, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s scientific evaluation supports rescheduling marijuana—from a federal regime of absolute prohibition (Schedule I) to one of medical prescription pursuant to federal regulations (Schedule III)—which is now under final review by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Over the course of more than a year, President Biden has touted his general pardon as an example of “keeping my promise” on campaign pledges to decriminalize marijuana, to free incarcerated marijuana offenders and to expunge marijuana convictions. “My Administration has taken action,” a 2023 executive order claimed, to “correct our country’s failed approach to marijuana.”

Certainly, President Biden has made a bolder statement on marijuana reform than any voiced by his predecessors—save perhaps President Jimmy Carter, whose 1979 call for marijuana decriminalization went unheeded. The Biden administration deserves a lot of credit for the general pardon, the prospect of administrative rescheduling and other steps in support of reform. Indeed, just describing prohibition as “America’s failed approach to marijuana” is historically meaningful.

But let’s be clear: None of the administration’s actions has released a single marijuana offender from prison.

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‘Nothing short of grave robbery’: 2 families allege bodies of Alabama prison inmates were returned missing organs

Two families have claimed that when the Alabama Department of Corrections returned the bodies of their loved ones who died in prison, they were found to be missing one or more internal organs, court documents show.

When Charles Edward Singleton died at age 74, he was incarcerated at the Hamilton Aged and Infirmed Center in Hamilton, about 90 miles northwest of Birmingham.

The chaplain of the prison told his family the corrections department would take care of funeral arrangements, according to an affidavit signed January 3 by Singleton’s daughter, Charlene Drake.

Drake said she told the chaplain the family wanted to make the arrangements and asked that the body be transported to a funeral home. But when Singleton’s body arrived, the funeral director informed her “it would be difficult to prepare his body for viewing, as his body was already in a noticeable state of decomposition” and his internal organs, including his brain, were missing, the affidavit said.

The funeral director said the organs are normally placed in a bag and put back in the body after an autopsy, but not in Singleton’s case, according to the affidavit.

The Alabama Department of Corrections told CNN it does not comment on pending litigation, nor does it authorize or perform autopsies.

“Once an inmate dies, the body is transported to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences or (the University of Alabama at Birmingham) for autopsy, depending on several factors, including but not limited to region and whether the death is unlawful, suspicious, or unnatural,” the department said in a statement.

Drake’s affidavit was filed in support of a federal lawsuit filed by the family of Brandon Clay Dotson, who was found dead at age 43 in Ventress Correctional Facility in Clayton on November 16, 2023.

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New Scottish trans prison rules accused of being grounded in ‘institutional sexism’ and worse than before by women’s rights campaigners who say they make it even easier for dangerous men to exploit the system

New Scottish transgender prison rules are grounded in ‘institutional sexism’ and worse than before, women’s rights activists have claimed.

Campaigners, who are calling on Scottish MSPs to block new guidelines that were set up after a trans rapist was sent to a women’s prison, say that the rules make it even easier for dangerous men to exploit the system, The Telegraph reports.

The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) plans to allow criminals with a history of violence against women and girls to serve their sentences in female jails.

The policy, set to be put in place from February, will apply to transgender inmates who are considered not to pose ‘an unacceptable risk of harm’. 

The guidance was issued in the wake of the row over Isla Bryson, a transgender rapist who was initially sent to an all-female prison following conviction.

Bryson – who was previously known as Adam Graham – was subsequently removed to a male wing of a prison after widespread criticism.

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PRISONS ACROSS THE U.S. ARE QUIETLY BUILDING DATABASES OF INCARCERATED PEOPLE’S VOICE PRINTS

Roughly six months ago at New York’s Sing Sing prison, John Dukes says he was brought out with cellmates to meet a corrections counselor. He recalls her giving him a paper with some phrases, and offering him a strange choice: He could go up to the phone and utter the phrases that an automated voice would ask him to read, or he could choose not to and lose his phone access altogether.

Dukes did not know why he was being asked to make this decision, but he felt troubled as he heard other men ahead of him speaking into the phone and repeating certain phrases from the sheets the counselors had given them.

“I was contemplating, ‘Should I do it? I don’t want my voice to be on this machine,’” he recalls. “But I still had to contact my family, even though I only had a few months left.”

So, when it was his turn, he walked up to the phone, picked up the receiver, and followed a series of automated instructions. “It said, ‘Say this phrase, blah, blah, blah,’ and if you didn’t say it clearly, they would say, ‘Say this phrase again,’ like ‘Cat’ or ‘I’m a citizen of the United States of America.’” Dukes said he repeated such phrases for a minute or two. The voice then told him the process was complete.

“Here’s another part of myself that I had to give away again in this prison system,” he remembers thinking as he walked back to the cell.

Dukes, who was released in October, says he was never told about what that procedure was meant to do. But contracting documents for New York’s new prison phone system, obtained by The Appeal in partnership with The Intercept, and follow-up interviews with prison authorities, indicate that Dukes was right to be suspicious: His audio sample was being “enrolled” into a new voice surveillance system.

In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call, and to search for other calls where the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly.

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Oregon man who dismembered handymen, fed them to pigs, serving 50-year sentence in women’s prison after identifying as trans

A trans-identified male convicted of murdering and dismembering two handymen and then feeding them to his pigs has been serving his 50-year sentence in a women’s correctional facility in Oregon.

Susan Monica, born Steven Buchanan, was sentenced to serve at least 50 years in prison in 2015 after being found guilty of murder and abusing the corpses of two handymen, 59-year-old Stephen Delicino in 2012 and 56-year-old Robert Haney in 2013, according to an Oregon Live report from that time.

According to the Willamette Week, Monica is serving the sentence out at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, located around 16 miles south of Portland, Ore. The facility accommodates all State of Oregon female adults in custody.

The Oregon Department of Corrections lists Monica under the female name, and he is described as being “female” in official documents, according to the Daily Mail.

Monica, who previously served in the Vietnam war and is a US Navy veteran, bought the 20-acre farm in Oregon where the gruesome murders took place in 1991.

Delicino was hired by Monica to work on the farm in 2012. There was allegedly a confrontation between the two after the handyman was said to have been found with Monica’s gun.

Monica claimed that during the altercation, the gun misfired and hit Delicino in the back of the head, killing him. Monica also claimed that he shot Delicino in self defense, with senior assistant deputy district attorney Allan Smith telling the jury in closing arguments that Monica’s changing stories never matched the forensic evidence.

Monica told investigators that Delicino was eaten by his pigs before being buried on the farm.

Just one year later, Monica hired Haney to work as a handyman on the farm. The man’s children became worried when they hadn’t heard from their father in over two months and filed a missing persons report with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.

Haney’s son, Jesse, visited Monica’s farm on January 1, 2014 to ask for his father’s items back and ask where he was.

“We hadn’t seen or heard from my dad for two months. We just all started to panic,” Jesse said in a documentary about the murders.

“His leather jacket was there. His dog was still running around and all his tools were there… It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” Jesse said.

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Alabama is sued by inmates who claim state made a staggering $450M by ‘convict leasing’ – and forcing them to work in fast food joints like McDonald’s and Burger King ‘for next to nothing’ in move ‘similar to cotton-picking’

A group of current and former prisoners are suing Alabama state alleging they made $450million by forcing them to work in fast food chains for ‘next to nothing’. 

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday at the Middle District Court, claims the prisoners were forced into a ‘modern-day form of slavery’ by the state. 

It says they were ‘entrapped in a system of ‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, often for little or no money’ while the state kept the profits of their labor. 

The plaintiffs said they are regularly forced to work at McDonald’s, KFC, Wendy’s, and Burger King franchises, Anheuser-Busch distributors, and meat processors. 

According to the complaint, inmates, ‘live in a constant danger of being murdered, stabbed, or raped… and if they refuse to work, the State punishes them even more.’

The lawsuit accuses government agencies – including the Alabama Department of Corrections – and over two dozen state officials, including Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall, of violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Alabama makes $450 million a year from forced labor, according to the complaint, which says since 2018, 575 private employers and over 100 public employers have ‘leased’ labor from Alabama prisons.

It says the inmates work against their will in ‘unsafe work conditions’ and the ADOC takes 40 percent of gross earnings claiming it is ‘to assist in defraying the cost of his/her incarceration’.

In September 2023, the complaint says 1,374 incarcerated people were enrolled in the work program. 

One of the individuals involved in the complaint, Lakiera Walker, was imprisoned from 2007 to 2023. 

She said she was forced to perform long hours of uncompensated work ‘upon threat of discipline’.

Her jobs included housekeeping, stripping floors, providing care for mentally disabled or other ill incarcerated people, unloading chemical trucks, working inside freezers, and at Burger King. 

She said she was paid just $2 per day and was subjected to sexual harassment by a supervising officer.

When she was so ill she could not work, she said a supervisor told her to ‘get up and go make us our 40 percent’. 

She told Law&Crime: ‘Those women need help. They really need a voice. I knew I had to do something. I want justice for this forced labor.’ 

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Can US prisons take a page from Norway? Five questions.

Earlier this year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a new vision for the San Quentin State Penitentiary, centered on rehabilitation and job training, inspired by another prison system that has halved its recidivism rate – in Norway.

The re-imagining of California’s most notorious prison, infamous for housing the nation’s largest death row population, could prove pivotal in how the United States rethinks rehabilitation and staff wellness within prisons. 

About 2 out of 3 Americans released from jails and prisons per year are arrested again, and 50% are re-incarcerated, according to the Harvard Political Review. In Norway, that rate is as low as 20%. 

As more U.S. states seek to improve their correctional systems, the Norwegian model could prove key. It aims to create a less hostile environment, both for people serving time and for prison staff, with the goal of more successfully helping incarcerated people reintegrate into society.

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Bill to ‘end solitary confinement’ under federal government introduced in Senate

Democratic-aligned senators introduced legislation Tuesday that would largely ban the use of solitary confinement in federal institutions and give states and local jurisdictions incentives to do the same.

The End Solitary Confinement Act, a companion to a bill that over a dozen House Democrats introduced in July, would also prevent inmates and detainees from being segregated alone for more than four hours to de-escalate emergency situations and, even then, require staff members to meet with them at least once an hour.

And, similar to the House bill, incarcerated people would also be entitled to at least 14 hours of daily time out of their cells, including access to seven hours of programming meant to address topics such as mental health, substance abuse and violence prevention.

The Senate legislation is being introduced by Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, both D-Mass.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and Peter Welch, D-Vt.

“Being forced into a small, concrete cell without windows for hours, days, weeks, and even months on end isn’t rehabilitation, it’s cruelty,” Markey said in a statement. “Solitary confinement is unjust and inhumane torture that disproportionately targets our nation’s most vulnerable groups.”

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Inmate Who Shanked Derek Chauvin 22 Times Is Former FBI Informant Who Led Mexican Mafia Faction

A 52-year-old man who stabbed former police officer Derek Chauvin with an “improvised knife” is a former FBI informant, according to court documents filed on Dec. 1.

John Turscak stabbed Chauvin 22 times before being subdued by responding corrections officers. He later told them that he would have killed the man convicted for the murder of George Floyd (who had an elephant dose of fentanyl in his system and died ‘with’ Covid).

The stabbing occurred on Nov. 24 around 12:30 p.m., the day after Thanksgiving known commonly as Black Friday. Turscak waived his Miranda rights and told FBI agents that he ‘did not want to kill Chauvin, but had been thinking about attacking him for a month,’ taking the opportunity when both of them were in the law library at the Federal Correctional Institution Tucson.

“Turscak stated that his attack of [Mr. Chauvin] on Black Friday was symbolic with the Black Lives Matter Movement and the ‘black hand’ symbol associated with the Mexican Mafia criminal organization,” said prosecutors.

As the Epoch Times notes, Turscak was charged with four counts, including assault with a dangerous weapon and assault with intent to commit murder. He was moved after the stabbing to an adjacent federal penitentiary in Tucson, where he remained in custody Friday, inmate records show.

Mr. Turscak did not have a lawyer listed on the court docket.

A lawyer for Mr. Chauvin did not return an inquiry about the charges.

Federal officials have said an inmate at the Tuscon facility was stabbed on Nov. 24 and that the inmate was rushed to a hospital. They said they would not identify the inmate.

“For privacy and safety reasons, we are not providing the name of the victim or their medical status,” a Bureau of Prisons (BOP) spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

Minnesota officials had said that Mr. Chauvin was the inmate and that he was expected to survive.

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