Tag: prison

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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Florida’s Bloated Prison System Will Cost Billions To Maintain

Florida’s crumbling prison system and aging prison population will cost the state billions to maintain, according to a newly released report commissioned by the state.

A report presented to Florida state lawmakers on Wednesday by the firm KPMG says that Florida will have to pay somewhere between $6 billion and $12 billion over the next 20 years to keep its troubled Department of Corrections (DOC) afloat.

KPMG presented lawmakers with three different options, from most-expensive to least-expensive, to “modernize,” “manage,” or “mitigate” its prison system. According to the report, the Florida prison population is projected to swell from nearly 89,000 people to at least 107,000 by 2042. As it stands, KPMG found that 25 DOC facilities were in “poor” condition, and 16 were in “critical” condition.

Regardless of which option legislators choose, the price tag includes over $580 million for new air conditioning systems (75 percent of Florida state prisons do not have air conditioning), $2.2 billion for immediate repairs, and $200 million to $700 million a year to increase staffing. All three of the proposals include building at least one new prison and two new prison hospitals.

“The findings in the report confirm what lawmakers in both parties and Department of Corrections leadership have been saying for years, which is that the state prison system is in crisis and unsustainable,” says Greg Newburn, the director of criminal justice at the Niskanen Center, says.

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Daniel Williams, 22, dies after being ‘tied up, beaten and sexually assaulted for two days’ by prison gang – two weeks before he was due to be released from Alabama facility after a 12-month sentence for theft

An Alabama inmate has died after days of being tortured, beaten and sexually assaulted by a prison gang – just two weeks before he was due to be released, his family claim.

Daniel Williams, 22, was serving a 12-month sentence for second-degree theft at Staton Correctional Facility in Elmore, Alabama when a warden found him unresponsive in his dorm on October 22.

The father-of-two was declared brain dead upon his arrival at the hospital and provided palliative care, his family said in a GoFundMe campaign. He was taken off life support on November 5 and died four days later.

The warden allegedly told his family that Williams suffered a ‘drug overdose’, but insiders at the prison told the Alabama Political Reporter that he had been ‘kidnapped, bound, assaulted and sold out’ by another inmate for ‘two or three days’.

At least 12 prison cops at Staton Correctional Facility – along with adjoining Elmore and Draper prisons – have been arrested for assaulting inmates in the last two years. 

Federal investigators have also been probing the state of Alabama and its prisons since a scathing lawsuit was lodged by the Department of Justice in 2019. 

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PRISON TELECOM GIANT DELETES MONTHS OF INCARCERATED WRITERS’ WORK

I sat there, staring at an inbox that now read zero. Just hours ago, it had the number nine, all drafts of pieces I had crafted, refined, and stored on an e-messaging service provided to me and other people incarcerated in the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC). Now, all of my work—easily over a hundred hours spent on stories that I planned to send off to editors in hopes of getting published—was just gone.

Last week, people in prisons across Washington awoke to find that Securus, the controversial prison telecoms giant, had deleted all draft messages from our email inboxes without warning. This was the third time this had happened to us in a year. It was a crushing realization for many, but perhaps especially for writers like me, who have no choice but to use that drafts inbox as a repository for our work. Unlike most computers or smartphones, the Securus tablets DOC provides do not allow users to save text files outside of the e-messaging app. The drafts folder is our hard drive, the only place we can save articles, essays, poems, novels, and other writing we may one day hope to share with the world.

The pain of losing entire drafts and having to start all over again is bad enough. But for those of us in prison who have turned to writing as both a career and a form of therapy, the loss is only compounded.

“I feel devastated, and it makes it hard to continue writing,” Darrell Jackson, one of my fellow writers, told me last week. “Here I am writing deep pieces about trauma and structural racism, and my work just keeps disappearing, only for me to have to rewrite the piece and process all that trauma again and again.”

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He’s Going to Prison for Twitter Trolling. That’s Not Justice.

It took an FBI investigation, a three-week trial, and lots of taxpayer dollars, but the government finally got what it wanted this week: A Florida man is heading to federal prison for disseminating trollish memes during the 2016 election season that prosecutors alleged “deprive[d] people of their constitutional right to vote.”

In the months leading up to Election Day, Douglass Mackey, an erstwhile far-right social media influencer, posted a series of photos on his Twitter profile—which had about 58,000 followers under the name “Ricky Vaughn”—encouraging Hillary Clinton–supporters to cast their votes by phone. That obviously didn’t go so well for the people who fell for it. But however you feel about Mackey’s obnoxious brand of politics and feeble attempt at comedy, the case became about a lot more than him, raising questions about protected speech, overcriminalization, and a politicized Department of Justice.

To prosecute Mackey, the government leveraged a law from 1870, a century and change before Twitter trolling would become a sport. That legislation was passed to deter the Ku Klux Klan from trying to prevent black people from voting, as they were known to do. According to the indictment, the DOJ alleged Mackey conspired to “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States, to wit: the right to vote.”

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My dad was killed by an insane satanist ‘phrogger’ who secretly lived in stranger’s home – I want justice

A US Navy veteran slammed Hawaii‘s lax prison policies for placing his father in a cell with a Satanic ‘phrogger’, who beat him to death while hapless guards failed to open the door due to allegedly faulty locks. 

Nelson Coburn condemned a string of failings that allowed mentally-ill Satanist Ezequiel Zayas to be placed in a cell with his father Vance Grace, 62, who was just weeks away from freedom after spending 34 years behind bars for theft and drug offenses. 

With dreams of starting a Koy Pond business in Hawaii and reconnecting with his family, Grace was placed in a cell with Zayas, then-29, who captured headlines the year prior in 2019 when he was caught secretly living in a Honolulu family’s home. The crime known as ‘phrogging’ and is named after the practice of leap-frogging someone into their home. 

After Zayas was discovered, the family later realized he planned to perform nightmarish surgeries on them. Despite his clear mental illness, he ended up in a cell with Grace, leading his son to speak out over the short-sighted policies that resulted in his father’s grisly death. 

‘The problem is no one speaks up, and you think ‘it’s just another inmate that got killed in prison, oh well he’s a criminal” Coburn told DailyMail.com. ‘My dad did his time and he was working to improve his life.’ 

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Why should I be at risk of jail for saying a trans woman is not a real woman?

This is what it has come to. J. K. Rowling says that she will stand up for women’s rights even if it means being sent to prison.

And if the Labour Party comes into power, the Harry Potter author might very well end up behind bars quicker than you can say Avada Kedavra!

Because Labour, in all its wizarding woke wisdom, has promised to make attacks motivated by hatred of a victim’s gender identity into what the courts call an ‘aggravated offence’.

This move would bring ‘transphobic abuse’ into line with assault and harassment motivated by hatred on the grounds of race or religion, which are punishable by up to two years in prison.

But it is all relative, isn’t it?

It all depends on who you are and what you believe in, rather than what you actually do and say. Under these laws, the pro-Palestinian supporters who were tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children in London this week should be jailed.

Yet somehow — call it crazy intuition — we all know that these people are not going be jailed, don’t we? However, in the brave new world of Prime Minister Starmer — Expelliarmus! — the person who would be jailed would be J. K. Rowling.

Under a Labour government, expressing the belief that a person’s sex is immutable and that a trans woman is not a woman would be a crime.

Yet how can holding this view be against the law or deemed to be motivated by hatred, when it is merely propelled by common sense, biology and what the vast majority of us believe to be true? Yet here we are, swirling in this perilous dogma, fighting for women-only spaces and sex-based rights, heading into a future that might criminalise us for doing so.

Under the carapace of progressive thinking, Lisa Nandy and all the headbangers in the Shadow Cabinet who support this nonsense are only making matters worse.

For instead of encouraging a middle ground, where transgender people can live happy and confident lives in society, all it does is polarise opinion and encourage extremism.

Replying to a post on Twitter/X, Rowling said: ‘I’ll happily do two years if the alternative is compelled speech and forced denial of the reality and importance of sex. Bring on the court case, I say. It’ll be more fun than I’ve ever had on a red carpet.’

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