by TChris

Every few months, it's worth remembering that your tax dollars are being spent to incarcerate Tommy Chong so that the Justice Department could send a message about pot pipes and bhongs.

Chong’s home was raided in February 2003 as part of the Justice Department’s nationwide crackdown against 55 companies and individuals who, according to a rarely enforced federal law, were illegally selling drug paraphernalia over the Internet. In May 2003, Chong pleaded guilty to the charge of conspiracy to distribute paraphernalia, and on October 8, 2003, he started serving a nine-month sentence at Taft Correctional Institution, a privately run federal prison in central California.

The linked article leads to an internet petition demanding Chong's release, and to other sites that protest the decision to single out Chong for harsh treatment because of his symbolic value. Prior TalkLeft coverage of Chong's case is collected here.

by TChris

The Los Angeles County Sheriff blames a lack of resources for the violent chaos in the county jail, but it's difficult to believe that mismanagement isn't part of the problem.

In all there have been five killings inside the Los Angeles County Jail over the last seven months, more than the San Quentin penitentiary has had in eight years.

LA Couny's District Attorney is commissioning a panel to investigate the Sheriff's failure to protect inmates within the jail.

102 inmated died in a prison fire in Honduras yesterday. Authorities say the fire was caused by an electrical short. It's the second Honduran prison fire causing dozens of deaths in a year. Some are claiming foul play:

...family members of the dead were quick to accuse the government of foul play in its increasingly violent crackdown on the country's burgeoning gang culture. The fire broke out in the prison in San Pedro Sula, near the Guatemalan border, in the early hours. According to one survivor, the fire started at around 1.30am, a full two hours before uniformed officers arrived and began opening up cells to allow the inmates to escape the flames and smoke.

Most of the victims died of suffocation in their cells. Rescue workers found 101 corpses. A 102nd victim died on the way to hospital. ...It was the worst prison disaster in Honduran history but far from the only one. Just over a year ago, a riot and fire at El Porvenir prison in La Ceiba, also involving violent gang members, led to 68 deaths. On that occasion, one group of prisoners started a fire deliberately, which in turn provoked the authorities to storm in with guns blazing. An official report blamed most of those deaths on the government.

America. Prison Nation. That's what we have become. Don't miss this editorial in Monday's New York Times, The Dark Side of America. The abuses at home are at least as bad, and probably worse, than those abroad.

The nearly 12 million people who pass through the corrections system each year are often subject to violent attacks by other inmates, and prisoner-on-prisoner rape is endemic. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, easily transmitted in tight spaces, have become a common problem. Illegal drugs ferried in by prison employees — and used by inmates who share needles — have made prison a high-risk setting for H.I.V. infection and most recently the liver-destroying hepatitis C.

Some prisons have actually cut back on testing for disease, rather than risk being required to treat large numbers of infected inmates at bankrupting costs. That means, of course, that released inmates will unknowingly pass on diseases to others. By failing to confront public health problems in prison, the country could be setting itself up for new epidemics down the line.

by TChris

According to Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the thirty year effort to build and fill U.S. prisons has been great for the rural areas where prisons are generally located, but not so good for urban areas that lose representation in the census when urban dwellers are counted in the rural prisons that house them.

[B]ecause the Census Bureau counts prison inmates as residents of the legislative districts in which they're incarcerated, the relocation of inmates -- who are not allowed to vote in 48 states -- skews both the distribution of government funds and the apportionment of legislative representation.

The distortion in representation caused by enumeration of prisoners tends to favor rural residents, whites, and Republicans, at the expense of urban residents, blacks, and Democrats. ... [T]he presence of disenfranchised blacks in rural prisons increases the representation of white, rural, Republican voters both in the House and in state legislatures.

Politicians shouldn't be given an incentive to incarcerate more people for the sake of boosting populations in particular political districts. Stinebrickner-Kauffman makes a strong argument that the Census Bureau should correct this problem by counting inmates as living in their "homes of record."

We can't keep track of all the articles and commentary coming out about prisoner abuse in the U.S. since the Abu Ghraib photos . Here's one that caught our attention, about the Los Angeles County Jail:

I don't mean to diminish the suffering and humiliation of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but they're lucky they weren't locked up in L.A. County Jail. Five inmates have been murdered in downtown L.A. detention facilities since October. In one case, an accused murderer managed to leave his cell and wander around like he owned the place. I don't know if guards were watching "Survivor," making popcorn, or playing Parcheesi. But this inmate roamed the killing fields for hours until he eventually tracked down a witness against him — a witness who was supposed to be enjoying the benefits of protective custody.

This LA Times Editorial calls jail security an oxymoron:

Twenty-three-year-old Santiago Pineda allegedly was able to sneak out of his cell in the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail last month and strangle another inmate partly because, county officials said, he possessed the diabolical mind and skills of a Hannibal Lecter. However, Pineda's success in allegedly finding and killing Raul Tinajero — who testified last month that he saw Pineda drive his car over another man last year — illustrates profound problems in the county jail system, from lax rules and inadequate guard training to archaic inmate tracking systems.

A Sing Sing prison inmate who was slashed by another inmate and almost died after cooperating with prosecutors against a gang member has been awarded $7.65 million in damages.

A jury has awarded a former Sing Sing prison inmate a $7.65 million judgment against high-ranking corrections officials, saying they did not heed his pleas for protection after cooperating with prosecutors against a gang leader.
The ruling was handed down by a federal court jury in Manhattan that found the state Department of Corrections “conspired to violate” the inmate’s constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment by not segregating him from gang members. The inmate was slashed by another prisoner and nearly bled to death at Sing Sing in 1998, according to his lawyer.

The jury ordered state Corrections Commissioner Glenn Goord to pay $5 million in punitive damages and Sing Sing security chief William Connolly to pay $2.5 million. It ordered an additional $150,000 in compensatory damages. Although the court found the two men individually responsible, the state would pay if the verdict stands. The state has vowed to appeal. It’s believed to be the largest judgment against high-ranking corrections officials, according to the inmate’s lawyer, Paul Kerson.

Don't miss this commentary in the Los Angeles Times (free subscription required) by Los Angeles lawyer Robert L. Bastian Jr. on how prisons are the shame of America--and how the allegations in Iraq reflect the violent, abusive prisons that have arisen here. We're just exporting the shame.

Bastien reminds us that Winston Churchill once said, "treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of civilization of any country," and says, if Churchill is right, so, are America's critics.

President Bush says "That's not the way we do things in America" and what's going on at Abu Ghraib is "not the nature of the American people." He's wrong.

In 1971, for example, Stanford psychology professor Philip G. Zimbardo initiated an experiment in which participating Stanford students were designated either as prisoners or guards, with guards told to maintain order. After only a few days, the project had to be terminated prematurely because the guards were, with no apparent motivation other than fulfilling their roles, becoming uncomfortably abusive toward the prisoners. What does that say about our "nature"?

In another famous experiment, Yale psychology professor Stanley Milgram told subjects to give electric shocks to a victim in a learning experiment. As the victim — an actor in another room who was not actually being shocked — gave incorrect answers, the participants were asked to turn the voltage up, even to where the dial read "danger," a point at which the victim could be heard screaming. Although often reluctant, two-thirds of the subjects continued to follow orders to administer shocks.

TChris wrote last night about a new Justice Department report warns of infiltration by Al Qaeda in U.S. prisons:

Groups promoting extremist brands of Islam have gained a foothold in American prisons, and counterterrorism officials believe Al Qaeda are likely to try to use the prisons "to radicalize and recruit inmates," according to a Justice Department investigation.....the investigation found that the problem of "radicalized" prayer sessions was less a reflection of the chaplains than of unsupervised inmates who were allowed to lead their own worship meetings.

Muslim leaders are wary of the report.

Muslim leaders say they have been subjected to unfair scrutiny and criticism because of their religious beliefs. Several groups that have trained Muslim chaplains have vigorously denied charges of terrorist links, and Muslim leaders point out that charges linking a military chaplain at Guantánamo Bay to possible terrorism largely collapsed.

The report acknowledges the problem isn't widespread. The freedom to practice religion extends to inmates. We don't see how the feds can fairly and constitutionally place limits on Muslim inmates that they don't place on Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist inmates. The inmates must also be free to speak in their language of choice. Any limits on groups of prisoners associating with each other in prayer groups must apply across the board to prisoners of all denoninations or not at all. We think "not at all" is best.

And if faith-based prisons, which we oppose, here are some reasons, are to be tolerated, they must include programs for Muslims, not just Christians.

by TChris

Americans horrified by our treatment of prisoners in Iraq shouldn't forget the abuses that prisoners endure at home.

A guard involved in the alleged sexual assault of a Vermont inmate in his cell at a Kentucky prison has been fired, said an official for the privately operated prison.

Vermont Corrections Commissioner Stephen Gold said Monday that the inmate was inside a segregated detention unit at the Marion facility in St. Mary, Ky., when a video surveillance camera recorded a guard entering the man's cell and leaving 10 minutes later. ... Gold confirmed he was told the inmate might have been handcuffed at the time the sexual assault took place.

Louis Pepe was a federal prison guard at MCC Manhattan in 2000 when he was brutally attacked, stabbed in the eye, and more by two of the defendants in the case involving the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. One of the attackers, Mamdouh Mahmud Salimm, was reputed to be an associate of Osama bin Laden.

Salimn gets sentenced Monday and Pepe plans to be there. He is outraged that Salimn will only get 17 to 21 years for the assault, even though he is facing trial and a possible life sentence on conspiracy charges for the 1998 attack. We can't say we blame him, if you read the account of the attack, it sounds horrific.

But what's up with Pepe's claim that the U.S. Government has downplayed the attack and cast him in a role that suggests he was careless in allowing the attack to happen? This is one sad story, here's some of it.

In the interview Sunday with The Associated Press, Pepe sat in his wheelchair in a small room in the Queens house where he lives with his parents. Pepe said the government and Salim have combined to sanitize what happened on Nov. 1, 2000, portraying the assault as quick and almost entirely Salim's doing after the guard failed to handcuff the inmates.

Pepe said he will tell the judge how he properly handcuffed the inmates before they slipped free, blinded him with hot sauce, beat him repeatedly and even tried to rape him before stabbing him to get his keys in a bid to free other suspected terrorists. "Both of them did it, not just one," Pepe said excitedly, his right eye wide open and a piece of gauze resting in the socket where the left eye used to be....Pepe said the attack lasted an hour, rather than the 20 minutes that prison authorities maintain it took for help to arrive from less-isolated parts of Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center.

by TChris

TalkLeft has reported on the sad state of affairs at the California Youth Authority, including the practice of caging children and ignoring their mental health problems. Yesterday was a statewide day of protest concerning juvenile justice in California. Protestors in Watsonville, Santa Cruz, and other parts of the state held a candlelight vigil to call attention to the deplorable conditions for offenders detained in California Youth Authority jails.

In central California, protestors focused on another aspect of youth corrections: the disproportionate tendency to incarcerate Latino children.

In recent years, the state has incarcerated a remarkable percentage of Lindsay's young people, a fact that is little known outside the town's Latino migrant-family community, said vigil organizer Victor Cervantes.

The protest focused attention on the state's warped priorities.

In Central Valley communities it's perceived California is choosing to spend to build prisons and to lock up Latino youth instead of spending any money on much-needed social programs and job creation to assist families of immigrants.

Those attending a candlelight vigil in Lindsay agreed that California should stop using the prison industry as a job creation program, and should focus instead on root causes of crime, including poverty, discrimination, and a lack of resources for the mentally ill.