NPR: Murder, They Messaged
Kim Proctor was no different than your ordinary teenage girl. Easily hurt by insults and just as easily swayed by compliments, she dwelled in an angsty purgatory familiar to most adolescents. But when Kim went from average kid to missing girl, her storyline took a tragic…
Police pen up and mace female “Occupy Wall Street” protesters
In a disturbing scene from today’s “Occupy Wall Street” protests, a group of peaceful female protesters were rounded up in an orange-colored mesh pen by police and subsequently sprayed with mace without any provocation.
In spite of multiple reported incidents of possible police violence, major media outlets seem to be content to let the protests go by completely unreported, following the same “who-cares” attitude they have taken toward recent revelations that the NYPD has violated the Constitutional rights of American citizens by spying on them as possible terrorists and enemies of the state despite a complete absence of evidence of any crimes.
This is absolutely disturbing. Penning people up to mace them is police brutality. Period. What will it take to get the mainstream media to pay attention? If you follow the #OccupyWallStreet, you’ll find out that at least 80 were arrested today. AP and Wall Street Journal mentioned the arrests briefly today.
(via soupsoup)
A young man of color arrested in Union Square earlier today doing literally nothing but crossing the street.
I am fucking shaking with anger. This video shows Union Square earlier today. Clearly there is a protest but the area immediately surrounding the guy with the camera is just observers and people milling around. Watch the guy in the red shirt. From the vimeo link:
As you can see at around 0:30, a young man in a red shirt, Glenn Daniels Jr, is walking near the sidewalk with hundreds of other protestors. The crowd was attempting to cross the street to continue the march south down Broadway from Union Square. Daniels is peacefully walking with a water bottle, not committing any crime. At 0:35 he is approached by an NYPD officer and pushed towards the sidewalk. At 0:38 a senior police officer in a white shirt quickly approaches and grabs Daniels and another young man with a beard and backpack. The lighter skinned man is let go, but Daniels is arrested. The remainder of the video shows NYPD officers cuffing and detaining Daniels.
Unbefuckinglievable. He’s doing fucking nothing.
(Source: lau-ra-sau-rus, via soupsoup)
Prison Beauty Pagent
Reuters has 16 images from the recent ‘Miss Penitentiary Contest’ at the Women’s Prison of Brasilia in Brazil, August 9, 2011.
I’ve seen these events at Columbian and Russian women’s prisons before.
Photo Credit: Ueslei Marcelino
The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor
The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”
Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.
Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin’s truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.
(Source: azspot)
Drivers on the Vine Street Expressway (I-676) were treated to something a little outside of the norm today. The banners dropped from the overpasses served the purpose of showing solidarity and support for the 6600-plus prisoners in California who are currently on a hunger strike to protest conditions in California prisons. According to the Philly Independent Media Center, the banners are done to particularly protest the conditions in solitary confinement that include:
- • 23-hour lockdown behind a solid steel door
- • isolation from human interaction
- • frequent threat and occurrence of physical torture via prolonged placement in punitive restraint devices
- • assault, often with chemical weapons
- • mental torture via sensory deprivation and disorienting temperature and light fluctuations, along with rampant psychological neglect
- • sexual intimidation and assault.
Do prisons serve a useful purpose in helping reform criminals and provide punishment for their crimes, or are they a place where criminals simply get tortured and learn how to become better criminals? Where do you stand on the issue? Do you support the idea of Philadelphia showing solidarity with the striking CA prisoners?
Laws named after crime victims and dead people are usually a bad idea. They play more to emotion than reason. But they’re disturbingly predictable, especially when they come after the death of a child. So it’s really no surprise that activist Michelle Crowder is now pushing “Caylee’s Law,” a proposed federal bill that would charge parents with a felony if they fail to report a missing child within 24 hours, or if they fail to report the death of a child within an hour. What’s surprising is just how quickly the Change.org petition for Caylee’s Law has gone viral. As of this writing it has more than 700,000 signatures, and is now the most successful campaign in the site’s history. For reasons of constitutionality and practicality, it seems unlikely that Caylee’s Law will ever be realized at the federal level. But according to the AP, at least sixteen state legislatures are now considering some version of the law. That’s troubling.
Top Ten Legal Drugs Linked to Violence
Keeping in mind, correlation does not imply causation. It’s like saying since there is a cop at every accident, they must cause them. What is interesting is the common conditions or behaviors the meds are for.
10. Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq) An antidepressant.
9. Venlafaxine (Effexor) A drug related to Pristiq in the same class of antidepressants, both are also used to treat anxiety disorders.
8. Fluvoxamine (Luvox) An antidepressant that affects serotonin.
7. Triazolam (Halcion) A benzodiazepine which can be addictive, used to treat insomnia.
6) Atomoxetine (Strattera) Used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
5) Mefoquine (Lariam) A treatment for malaria.
4) Amphetamines: (Various) Amphetamines are used to treat ADHD.
3) Paroxetine (Paxil) An SSRI antidepressant.
2) Fluoxetine (Prozac) The first well-known SSRI antidepressant.
1) Varenicline (Chantix) The anti-smoking medication. via
Cornelius Dupree Jr., center, celebrated the overturn of his conviction in Dallas Tuesday. He served 30 years for rape and robbery before DNA evidence helped clear him. Mr. Dupree could have been paroled, but he refused to admit guilt, a necessary step. (Photo: Mike Fuentes / AP via the Wall St. Journal)
“Cornelius Dupree spent the prime of his life behind bars because of mistaken identification that probably would have been avoided if the best practices now used in Dallas had been employed,” said Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law. “Yet most counties in Texas do not have these best practices in place. This must be remedied in the next legislative session by the adoption of an eyewitness identification reform bill that had the votes needed for passage last session but not enough time to get enacted. Let us never forget that, as in the heartbreaking case of Cornelius Dupree, a staggering 75% of wrongful convictions of people later cleared by DNA evidence resulted from misidentifications.” via the Innocence Project. Bold mine.
There is enormous amounts of research surrounding the unreliability of eye witnesses. Outrageous that with a stat that high, this is an issue.
Is long-term solitary confinement torture?
One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation.
The real question is how is it not torture and how is it not a violation of the 8th Amendment? Ignoring the psychological effects (which the DOP does professionally) of 30% developing psychosis and the very real neurological atrophy/brain damage, that follows, it’s another example of providing an answer that doesn’t solve the problem at all and usually makes it worse. It’s cheap and easy, that’s why they do it.
So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don’t recognize this are dangerously naïve.Advocates of long-term SC have are severely ignorant of the science, research and statistics behind this treatment (the effects, ramifications, costs and comparable alternatives). Where are all those squeaky wheels that get fussy because inmates have to wear pink underwear with no cable tv, when real human rights are being violated?
Generally speaking, jurors with above-average or high IQs are potentially more beneficial to defendants. This is not due to the inherent merit of one side’s case over the other; rather, it is reflective of the impact of cognitive deficiencies on decision-making skills. Also, low IQ jurors are more likely to rely on their emotions as opposed to trying to analyze a complicated or confusing fact pattern, thus arguments that generate strong negative emotions, such as fear or anger, are more likely to persuade them. Finally, low IQ jurors with a critical thinking skill deficit may depend more on first impressions to make decisions than their tenuous analytical skills, so they are less likely to carefully consider both sides and more likely to be persuaded by the first arguments they hear.
(Source: psydoctor8)
Portuguese drug decriminalization
The issue of decriminalizing illicit drugs is hotly debated, but is rarely subject to evidence-based analysis. This paper examines the case of Portugal, a nation that decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs on 1 July 2001. Drawing upon independent evaluations and interviews conducted with 13 key stakeholders in 2007 and 2009, it critically analyses the criminal justice and health impacts against trends from neighbouring Spain and Italy. It concludes that contrary to predictions, the Portuguese decriminalization did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding. The article discusses these developments in the context of drug law debates and criminological discussions on late modern governance.
(Source: azspot)
NPR investigation: Private prison industry helped drive Arizona to adopt controversial immigration law
Members of the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America — the largest private prison company in the country — were among the many insiders who attended a meeting in Washington D.C. where Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce first proposed SB1070, the controversial immigration bill that requires police to lock up people they stop who cannot show proof they entered the country legally.
According to Corrections Corporation of America reports reviewed by NPR during a months-long investigation, executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market. Last year, they wrote that they expect to bring in “a significant portion of our revenues” from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that detains illegal immigrants.
Study Shows How the Innocent Confess to Crimes
More than 40 people have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people — including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led — are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Mr. Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by persistent interrogators.
New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime. An article by Professor Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions — by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.
(via robot-heart-politics)
