Tag: u s prison system
Massachusetts Sheriff Offers Prison Inmates To Build Trump’s Wall

Massachusetts Sheriff Offers Prison Inmates To Build Trump’s Wall

BOSTON (Reuters) – A Massachusetts county sheriff has proposed sending prison inmates from around the United States to build the proposed wall along the Mexican border that is one of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s most prominent campaign promises.

“I can think of no other project that would have such a positive impact on our inmates and our country than building this wall,” Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson said at his swearing-in ceremony for a fourth term in office late Wednesday.

“Aside from learning and perfecting construction skills, the symbolism of these inmates building a wall to prevent crime in communities around the country, and to preserve jobs and work opportunities for them and other Americans upon release, can be very powerful,” he said.

Hodgson, who like Trump is a Republican, said inmates from around the country could build the proposed wall, described by Trump as a powerful deterrent to illegal immigration.

Trump, who will be sworn in on Jan. 20, insisted during his campaign that he would convince the Mexican government to pay for the wall, though Mexican officials have repeatedly said they would not do so.

Officials in the Trump transition office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The United States has a long history of prison labor, with advocates of the idea saying that putting inmates to work can help them learn skills that prepare them for their return to society after completing their sentences. Opponents contend that inmates are not fairly compensated.

The federal prisons system operates some 53 factories around the United States that produced about $500 million worth of clothing, electronics, furniture and other goods in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, according to its financial statements.

Still, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts said Hodgson’s proposal could violate prisoners’ rights.

“The proposal is perverse, it’s inhumane and very likely unconstitutional,” ACLU staff counsel Laura Rotolo said in a phone interview. “It certainly has nothing to do with helping prisoners in Massachusetts or their families. It’s about politics.”

In response to a request by the Trump transition office, the Department of Homeland Security last month identified more than 400 miles (644 km) along the U.S.-Mexico border where new fencing could be erected, according to a document seen by Reuters.

The document contained an estimate that building that section of fence would cost more than $11 billion.

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

IMAGE: A general view shows a newly built section of the U.S.-Mexico border wall at Sunland Park, U.S. opposite the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, November 9, 2016. Picture taken from the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez/File Photo

‘13th’ Offers Searing Exposé Of Mass Incarceration Of Black Men

‘13th’ Offers Searing Exposé Of Mass Incarceration Of Black Men

“Not whips and chains — all subliminal; instead of nigger, they use the word criminal” — Common from “Letter to the Free”

In the end, she gives us grace. And by then, you really need it.

The end credits roll over pictures celebrating everyday joys of African-American life. A beaming girl rides a pony. Boys flex. Fathers cuddle daughters.

The anger and pain that have sat heavily in your chest for over 90 minutes begin to lift ever so slightly at these reminders of black life still stubbornly managing to be lived even in the midst of state-sponsored oppression. Otherwise called, without irony, the U.S. justice system.

In “13th,” the troubling new documentary from director Ava DuVernay now streaming on Netflix, the American prison industrial complex is laid bare as a machine designed for the suppression of an inconvenient populace. Meaning black men — the nation’s boogeymen for two centuries and counting. Like “The New Jim Crow,” the game-changing 2012 book by Michelle Alexander, “13th” doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know if you’ve been paying attention. Its triumph is to fit the pieces together, to make visible the pattern that was there all along.

Namely, that much of what we call justice is a 150-year effort to win back what was lost at Appomattox. Yet somehow, we never quite see.

Six point five percent of the country accounts for over 40 percent of its prisoners. The liberal looks at this and says, isn’t it a shame what poverty does to them? The conservative looks at it and says, isn’t it a shame they embrace thug culture? The overt racist looks at it and says, isn’t it a shame they’re naturally criminal?

Hardly anyone looks at it and says, the system is working as designed. Hardly anyone says, this is not about criminality, but control.

DuVernay says it forcefully, explicitly and convincingly. In “13th” — the title comes from the constitutional amendment that ended slavery — the director of “Selma” draws a line from Appomattox through convict leasing, through lynch law, through the Southern strategy, through mass incarceration, through the commodification of black bodies and black misery by private prison entrepreneurs. All the way up to now.

Cue Donald Trump. On screen, a black man is being spat upon at one of his rallies. A black woman is being shoved. A black man is being sucker punched. And Trump is loving it.

“Knock the crap out of ’em would you? Get ’em out of here. In the good old days, this doesn’t happen, because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, they would not do it again so easily. Like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.”

As he speaks, the images change. It’s 1965 and Rev. C.T. Vivian is being knocked down the courthouse steps. It’s 1960 and protesters are being hauled off lunch counter stools. It’s 1957 and reporter L. Alex Wilson is being kicked and pummeled down the streets by the good people of Little Rock.

All as Trump is reminiscing about the good old days. And a chill skitters your spine.

We like to think we have distance from the past, don’t we? We profess to be mystified by it. How could people have done such things? If I had lived at that time, a man will assure you, I’d have never tolerated it. But, as attorney and author Bryan Stevenson reminds DuVernay’s camera, “the truth is, we are living at this time — and we are tolerating it.”

It is an unanswerable truth, a truth that leaves conscience maimed. The credits roll just then.

And yes, you are thankful for that small bit of grace.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail atlpitts@miamiherald.com.

Photo: via Wikimedia commons

Youths At New York Prison Subjected To Abuse: Officials

Youths At New York Prison Subjected To Abuse: Officials

New York (AFP) — Young detainees are subject to systemic violence and violation of their constitutional rights at Rikers Island prison in New York City, a study released Monday found.

“The investigation, which focused on use of force by staff, inmate-on-inmate violence, and use of punitive segregation during the period 2011-2013, concluded that there is a pattern and practice of conduct at Rikers Island that violates the rights of adolescents protected by the Eighth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution,” a Justice Department statement said.

Attorney General Eric Holder, and Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, briefed reporters on the troubling results.

“The extremely high rates of violence and excessive use of solitary confinement for adolescent males uncovered by this investigation are inappropriate and unacceptable,” Holder said.

Bharara said that “as our investigation has shown, for adolescents, Rikers Island is a broken institution. It is a place where brute force is the first impulse rather than the last resort.”

The investigation found that adolescent inmates are not adequately protected from physical harm due to the rampant use of unnecessary and excessive force by New York City Department of Correction staff and violence inflicted by other inmates.”

The data showed for example that in 2013, there were 565 incidents of use of force, against an average of 683 underaged detainees.

In 2012, there were 517 incidents and an average 791 underaged detainees.

Rikers Island — a prison complex in the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx — has about 12,300 inmates.

AFP Photo/Don Emmert

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Judge Tosses Convictions Of 2 Men Who Spent 15 Years In Prison

Judge Tosses Convictions Of 2 Men Who Spent 15 Years In Prison

By Steve Mills, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — A Cook County judge on Tuesday threw out the convictions of two men who spent close to 15 years in state prison for their alleged roles as lookouts in a double murder, bringing to a close a controversial case that hinged on a series of confessions that turned out to be false.

Lewis Gardner and Paul Phillips were the last of four men to have their murder convictions thrown out in connection with the November 1992 murders of two people in an apartment near Clarendon Park. Though they had served their time, they continued to fight to prove their innocence, an effort that gained hope after Cook County prosecutors dropped the case against one of their co-defendants, Daniel Taylor, last summer.

Taylor had been in a police lock-up when the crime occurred but nevertheless confessed to the murders. Taylor’s release paved the way for the release earlier this year of another co-defendant, Deon Patrick, and ultimately for Gardner’s and Phillips’ exonerations.

“I can’t cry because I’m at work,” Gardner, now 36, said from a Pizza Hut restaurant in Lake County where he works as a cook. “But the next step is to enjoy my life. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. It’s like a big burden has finally been lifted off my shoulders.”

Phillips, 38, was at home when prosecutors asked Cook County Circuit Court Judge Jorge Alonso to vacate the murder convictions. He said he was in tears when his attorney, Flint Taylor, called him with the news.

Phillips said he had struggled to find a job with a criminal record. “I’ve got tears in my eyes. It’s been a long, long wait. A long time,” said Phillips. “I won’t have to put felony on my jobs applications anymore.”

In all, Chicago police charged eight young men with the shooting deaths of Jeffrey Lassiter and Sharon Haugabook. Two had their cases thrown out before trial, and one went to trial and was acquitted. The eighth, Dennis Mixon, has acknowledged being involved and has said repeatedly the seven others were innocent.

The case suggests that Chicago police and Cook County prosecutors obtained seven false confessions — the most ever in one case.

Yet in spite of the evidence that Taylor was in the lock-up at the old Town Hall police station at Halsted and Addison streets — evidence the police and prosecutors had before trial — the administrations of former State’s Attorney Dick Devine and current State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez fought the case for years.

The Chicago Tribune investigated the case in 2001 as part of its series “Cops and Confessions” and found additional evidence that Taylor was in the lock-up when the murders occurred.

Since then, the newspaper has continued to investigate the case and has shown how what at first appeared to be the case’s strength — eight confessions in which each suspect implicated each of the others — in fact undermined it.

Photo: x1klima via Flickr

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