Police, prison and abolition

[blindpig]

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Assange & the Sickness of US Prisons
March 13, 2024

Speaking from his own experience as an imprisoned whistleblower, Kiriakou reflects on the grim medical outlook for the WikiLeaks publisher if he gets extradited.


Assange supporters outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London during his appeal hearing in late February. (Joe Lauria)

By John Kiriakou

Special to Consortium News

Many of us nervously await news from the High Court of England and Wales on the fate of Julian Assange, hoping against hope that he won’t be extradited to the United States. At the same time, we’re preparing for the worst.

Julian has well-documented medical problems, including a small stroke while incarcerated two years ago. He has consistently received subpar medical care at Belmarsh Prison in the U.K. If anything, that will worsen once he arrives in the United States.

I’ve written recently and extensively about prison medical care in the U.S. It’s terrible. But it bears repeating, especially in light of Julian’s pending extradition. The prison medical system in the United States is utterly broken. People die preventable deaths literally every day and nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it.

A report last year from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs exposed abuses suffered by prisoners at the hands of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the same entity that would be in charge of Julian’s health.

Forty lawyers and staff members collected evidence of “extreme physical and psychological abuse” in federal prisons. That’s in addition to well-documented failed medical care.

I watched the failure of the prison medical system unfold in real time when I was incarcerated for blowing the whistle on the C.I.A.’s torture program.

I was friendly with a prisoner I’ll call Bill. Bill was 68 years old and doing 30 years for a non-violent organized crime conviction. He’d served more than half his sentence.

I saw him in the hall one day, doubled over in pain. He told me that he’d never before experienced back pain like this. I suggested that he go to sick call in the morning and ask for Tylenol, the go-to painkiller in U.S. prisons.

He did, but he got no relief.

A couple of weeks later, Bill was walking with a cane and in obvious distress. He told me again that his back pain was excruciating. He’d asked the medical unit for an X-ray, and he’d been denied. The physician’s assistant had just given him more Tylenol.

Two weeks later, Bill was in a wheelchair. I went to the chaplain and said that Bill was being denied medical care. He agreed to intervene. Bill was finally sent to an outside hospital for an MRI, which found stage 4 cancer of the spine.

Bill applied for compassionate release so he could die at home, surrounded by his family. The warden went to see him in his cell. Would Bill agree to sign a paper agreeing not to hold the prison responsible for failing to diagnose and treat his cancer? He refused.

Two weeks later, Bill died in his bunk in prison, alone.

The federal courts are involved, of course, as they always seem to be. But the situation never improves.

In a precedential decision last August, the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that a federal prisoner could file a medical malpractice suit against the BOP after he told prison medical officials that he had a lump on his testicle in 2017.

A prison medical staff member told him it was “probably cancer,” but then did nothing about it. In 2018, he was finally allowed to see a urologist, who confirmed that the prisoner had cancer, and surgically removed his testicle.

The cancer, of course, could have been treated non-surgically if acted upon when the prisoner first brought it to the staff’s attention. But nobody cared enough to do anything.

Private Contractors

A big part of the problem is what Willamette University Law Professor Laura Applebaum calls Big Capital and its involvement in the prison medical care.

She notes that a 2020 Reuters investigation found that jails and prisons using contracted medical providers had mortality rates as much as 58 percent higher than prisons and jails that did not. Private companies like GEO Group, CoreCivic and Centurion Health make money by providing less medical care. They make a profit by spending less on medication.

The issue is a complicated one. And it’s complicated further by the fact that nobody in a position of authority wants to do anything about it — not the Justice Department, in which the BOP is the largest and best-funded agency, not the oversight committees on Capitol Hill, nor even much of the media. There are no current prospects for improvement.

This is the system that Julian Assange would find himself in if, God forbid, he gets extradited. It’s a wakeup call about the need to do more for the health and well-being of every U.S. prisoner.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/13/j ... s-prisons/

[blindpig]

Inmates Challenge Motion to Dismiss in Alabama Forced Labor Federal Lawsuit
Alander Rocha 12 Jun 2024


An inmate in the custody of the Department of Corrections. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)

The lawsuit against Alabama state officials, agencies, local governments, and private companies for their involvement in the prison labor program continues. Prisoners now must fight a wave of motions to dismiss.

Originally published in Alabama Reflector .

Incarcerated individuals in Alabama have filed a 214-page response opposing a motion to dismiss their lawsuit accusing state prisons of using slave labor.

The case involves multiple claims against state officials, private employers and local governments alleging Alabama’s prison labor program system is a form of modern-day slavery. Each defendant filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that counsel for plaintiffs did not state a legal claim in the lawsuit.

“Despite Defendants’ strenuous efforts to dispute Plaintiffs’ well-founded allegations—a strategy that cannot justify dismissal of Plaintiffs’ claims at this juncture—and to preclude the Court from evaluating the sufficiency of Plaintiffs’ claims on the merits, Plaintiffs have stated viable claims against all Defendants, and the motions to dismiss should be denied,” counsel for the plaintiff wrote in the response to defendants’ motions to dismiss.

Defendants argued in their motion to dismiss that plaintiffs failed to “exhaust administrative remedies” under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), meaning inmates must try to resolve their complaint through the prison’s grievances procedures.

Plaintiffs argue that the PLRA does not bar their claims under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), and the First Amendment because their claims, rooted in federal law, fall outside the limits of the PLRA, which limits federal court authority over state law compliance.

The inmates claim they were coerced into labor through threats and physical restraint, arguing that state officials and employers benefited from this forced labor in violation of the TVPA. They refute arguments that the TVPA does not apply to state actors and maintain their right to bring these claims.

“The TVPA is written broadly to address trafficking wherever and by whomever it may occur, making clear that Congress did not intend to offer a safe harbor to those who engage in trafficking,” lawyers for plaintiffs stated in the filing.

The plaintiffs also allege a pattern of racketeering activity under RICO, involving forced labor practices. They provide detailed allegations against each defendant “by forming and maintaining a labor-trafficking enterprise for the purpose of benefiting from the unlawful forced labor of Coerced Labor Individual Plaintiffs and other incarcerated workers.”

State constitutional claims are also made, with plaintiffs seeking injunctive relief against local governments and private employers. They argue that parole policies violate the Ex Post Facto Clause by retroactively increasing punishment.

Racial discrimination claims under the Equal Protection Clause are also included, alleging that Black parole candidates were treated less favorably than white counterparts.

Substantive due process rights, the KKK Act, and First Amendment violations are also included in the filing. Plaintiffs claimed that state officials used arbitrary power and retaliated against inmates for speaking out against prison conditions. They also claim some defendants financially benefited from illegal labor practices without fair compensation to the workers.

Defendants have until July 31 to respond, after which time the judge will decide if the case gets dismissed.

https://blackagendareport.com/inmates-c ... al-lawsuit

[blindpig]

Mumia Abu-Jamal (Photo: Prison Radio)

Death by incarceration: The U.S. prison system is slowly killing its political prisoners
Originally published: Peoples Dispatch on August 14, 2024 by Natalia Marques (more by Peoples Dispatch) | (Posted Aug 16, 2024)

Each year on Black August, socialists, revolutionaries, and those familiar with the Black radical tradition mark the month to “study, fast, train, fight” in honor of the many freedom fighters who were killed or languish behind bars in service to the Black liberation movement. Black August marks a number of key dates within the Black liberation movement, including when the first enslaved Africans landed in what is now the United States in 1619, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831, as well as more modern events such as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963 and the Watts Rebellion on 1965.

Human rights organizations have often argued that the U.S. prison system is condemning people to death through lengthy prison sentences, including life without the possibility of parole. This becomes even more apparent when looking at how the U.S. prison system treats its political prisoners, imposing systematic medical neglect and decades of prison time.

Ruchell Magee was released in August of 2023 and at the time was the longest held political prisoner in the United States. He died only 81 days after his release, after spending most of his life behind bars. Magee was the only survivor among those involved in the Marin County Courthouse Rebellion of 1970, described as a “slave rebellion” by other prisoners and a key episode in the history of revolutionary politics in the United States.

Leonard Peltier, now the longest held political prisoner currently in the United States, had his bid for parole denied earlier this summer, despite suffering from multiple health issues due to his long term confinement.

“Leonard is going to be 80 years old on September 12 this year, and has been in prison for almost 50 years,” Gloria La Riva, longtime activist for the freedom of U.S. political prisoners, told Peoples Dispatch in an interview.

Prison always has elements that for any average person would be extremely detrimental. Leonard is confined in a small cell, most of the time being on lockdown, where he can’t even walk properly and have circulation and sunshine and proper food.

Political prisoner Mutulu Shakur passed away on July 6 of last year, shortly following his compassionate release after spending 37 years in prison. Shakur was lauded within the Black liberation movement for his involvement in organizations such as the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and the Republic of New Afrika, and his work as an acupuncturist who dedicated his life to holistically treating and transforming the lives of working class people addicted to drugs in the radical Lincoln Detox Center in New York City. The state only agreed to release him after doctors determined that he had months to live due to terminal bone cancer.

Sekou Odinga, a former United States political prisoner for 33 years stemming from his involvement in the Black liberation movement, passed away on January 12, only able to live ten years of freedom following his 33-year-long imprisonment. Odinga was a part of several of the most impactful organizations in U.S. Black liberation history, including Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army. Odinga is also known for his role in the escape of fellow political prisoner Assata Shakur, who lives free in Cuba to this day.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, one of the most high profile prisoners in the world, let alone the United States, is surrounded by a powerful, multi-generational movement for his release. Abu-Jamal, like other political prisoners in the U.S., was jailed for his activism in the Black liberation movement. Abu-Jamal, however, continues to lend a hand to a variety of different struggles from behind prison walls, sending messages of solidarity to various Gaza solidarity encampments this year.

“I urge you to speak out against the terrorism that is afflicted upon Gaza with all of your might, all of your will and all of your strength. Do not bow to those who want you to be silent,” Abu-Jamal told students at the Gaza solidarity encampment at the City University of New York.

Abu-Jamal’s health continues to deteriorate behind bars, and yet his numerous appeals for release continue to be denied. Abu-Jamal’s struggles for adequate healthcare are not merely individually based struggles. Through his successful struggle for Hepatitis-C treatment, he set a precedent in improving treatment for the disease for other prisoners.

Abu-Jamal’s case has been described as “death by incarceration,” as he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The systems of prisons and policing in the United States have in fact expressed explicit intentions of killing him since even before putting him behind bars. Abu-Jamal successfully fought off a death penalty charge, but that has not staunched the state’s determination to sentence him to a slow death of medical neglect behind bars, like so many other political prisoners past and present within the country.

This year, as Palestinians in Gaza endure genocide and the resistance continues to negotiate the exchange of Israeli hostages for prisoners, many across the world are hearing for the first time about the horrors committed by Israel against Palestinian political prisoners—including torture, starvation, and sexual violence.

“The Palestinian Freedom Movement is in many ways similar to the Black Freedom Movement in the U.S. in that prison is an inescapable part of the struggle,” said Abu-Jamal. This year, following ten months of genocide in Gaza, it is worth reiterating the many struggles of political prisoners within the belly of the beast.

https://mronline.org/2024/08/16/death-by-incarceration/

[blindpig]

REPORT: “The People Who Were Left to Die:” Horrors Suffered by Orleans Parish Prisoners in Wake of Katrina, ACLU, 2006
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 28 Aug 2024


Remembering the terrible plight of the incarcerated during Hurricane Katrina.

On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, Louisiana. In its aftermath, a storm surge breached the city’s levees and drainage canals flooding 70% of the city, and exposing the abhorrent, third-class status of Black people in the United States. Among the hardest hit were the least visible: African American prisoners, especially those incarcerated with the Orleans Parish Prison, part of a prison system whose earliest buildings were used to imprison and torture rebellious enslaved Africans.

Over the years, the buildings may have changed, but conditions remained the same; by the time of Katrina the Orleans Parish Prison was known as one of the worst institutions in the US and its social function remained one of terrorizing Black folk. The prison complex was the ninth largest local jail in the US, despite New Orleans being only the 35th most populous city in the country. This statistic could only make sense because New Orleans had the highest incarceration rate of any large city in the U.S.: 90% of the prison population was Black, in a city that was 66% Black. Orleans Parish Prison also had two juvenile detention centers with children as young as 10 years old incarcerated. At the time Katrina hit, most of the 6000+ “prisoners” were pre-trial detainees, not yet having been convicted of any crime. Many of those people were there for not having paid fines. But the local and federal response – or delayed response – to the disaster should have made clear, once and for all, that, to paraphrase a Kanye West of a different era, the US “don’t care about Black people.”

The obscene and racist treatment of New Orleans’s incarcerated people revealed this in sickening fashion—or, one should state, the hard work of lawyers, journalists, local activists, and the incarcerated themselves exposed to the world not only the brutality of conditions in the prison, but the unbridled hatred for Black people in the US.

In August 2006, the American Civil Liberty Union’s National Prison Project released Abandoned & Abused: Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina. It is a powerful, shocking document that serves as a reminder, during Black August, of the plight of the incarcerated. But, in an age where Black elite celebrity culture has happily conjoined with a fascist, imperial state, it is also a reminder that it is, and will be, the Black working classes, the Black poor, the Black unemployed — in the US and globally — that will continue to bear the brunt of the United States’ genocidal violence.

The ACLU’s report can be found here . Below, we reproduce a summary of the report printed by the San Francisco Bay View .

‘The people who were left to die’: ACLU report details horrors suffered by Orleans Parish prisoners in wake of Katrina
American Civil Liberties Union: National Prison Project, August 29, 2006

New Orleans –As the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project released on Thursday “Abandoned & Abused: Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina.”The report documents the experiences of thousands of men, women and children who were abandoned at Orleans Parish Prison in the days after the storm.

“The prisoners inside the Orleans Parish Prison suffered some of the worst horrors of Hurricane Katrina,”said Eric Balaban, a staff attorney for the National Prison Project. “Because society views prisoners as second-class citizens, their stories have largely gone unnoticed and therefore untold.”

In conjunction with the report’s release, the National Prison Project urged the president to direct the Department of Justice to evaluate current evacuation plans for Orleans Parish Prison in an effort to determine whether any meaningful improvements have been made over the past year. The ACLU also asked Congress to audit the jail’s emergency preparedness plans. The ACLU is calling for a full and immediate investigation into abuses at Louisiana correctional facilities during and after the storm and is also urging the DOJ to make the findings from such an investigation public and accessible to state and federal prosecutors.

The ACLU report describes a history of neglect at Orleans Parish Prison, one of the most dangerous and mismanaged jails in the country. This culture of neglect was evident in the days before Katrina, when the sheriff declared that the prisoners would remain “where they belong,”despite the mayor’s decision to declare the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation. OPP even accepted prisoners, including juveniles as young as 10, from other facilities to ride out the storm.

As floodwaters rose in the OPP buildings, power was lost, and entire buildings were plunged into darkness. Deputies left their posts wholesale, leaving behind prisoners in locked cells, some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their necks.

“The sheriff’s office was completely unprepared for the storm,”said Tom Jawetz, litigation fellow for the National Prison Project. “The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did more for its 263 stray pets than the sheriff did for the more than 6,500 men, women and children left in his care.”

Among the testimonies of the people profiled in the ACLU report are these:

Ashley George, one of the 300 children transferred to OPP shortly before the storm from the city’s Youth Study Center, said: “When the storm started, water broke through the gate and started rising. The day after the storm, water came into the place, and I was in water up to my neck for a couple of days. We got no food, no water. I felt like I was going to die. The guards didn’t do anything to help us.

“We weren’t going to get out, but the adult prisoners escaped and got help for us. Military people told us that if we had stayed in there another day we would have drowned. Adults took a mattress and floated some girls out to the boat. I took another boat and went to the bridge, where I got chips and water. ... There were pregnant girls with us also, but they did not get any special attention.”

Ashley’s grandmother, Ruby Ann George, said: “After the storm I was going crazy. I kept calling and calling and calling and calling. ... They ain’t nothing but children. I kept calling all over, but I didn’t find out where she was for about a month. ... It’s horrible. Nobody should have gone through that — adults or children. They should have gotten them out of there. I was mad. ... If it wasn’t for the prisoners, they would have drowned.”

Joyce Gilson also told of prisoners helping each other: “The women in our unit stayed in open dorms with triple-stacked bunk beds. At the time of the storm, some women were even sleeping on the floor because there wasn’t enough bed space…

“Water backed up from the commodes, and sewer water from the flood came under the doors and filled up our unit to the second bunk. We didn’t know what was going on, and it was hard to even know what day it was. In our unit there were elderly women who had trouble getting onto the top of the third bunk to avoid the water, and there was at least one pregnant lady who also had trouble. We tried to help those women as best we could.

“My friend Iris Hardeman was really sick, and we were worried about her. We were all trying to stick together, praying, singing, trying to be strong through it all because we didn’t know what was going to happen. We had no food to eat, except the little bit that people had bought from commissary, but we’d eaten all of that long before they finally moved us.

“When it was time to move us, deputies ... told us to get all of the stuff that we could and bring it with us. With no light, we couldn’t find anything, so we just carried out our own bodies, and we held people who couldn’t hold themselves up. ... The water was up to my chest. ...

“They came up to take us out of the building and took us to Central Lock-Up, which was filled with water. ... In Central Lock-Up there were men as well as women. The women were still being pretty supportive of each other, but some men were trying to escape any way they could, and there was shooting around us.

“There were big double doors where the boats were picking people up and we could see outside. We stood up on a truck to get into the boat. They took us to the Overpass and told us to sit down. We were on one side of the bridge and the men were on the other side. There were dogs and other officers there. The officers used plastic cuffs to cuff each woman to the woman next to her. Then they told us to sit down back-to-back with other women.

“There were ice chests full of bottled water on the bridge, and we were asking for the water. We were so thirsty and it was really only then that we started to get wild, really trying to get to the ice chests. They could have given us a piece of ice or something. Some women reached in and that was when they maced us and put the dogs on us. I didn’t get to touch any of the ice.

“Some civilians on the bridge were trying to give us water too, but the officers wouldn’t allow them to get close. Some of them threw bottles to us, and we just tried to get a few sips. They took off the plastic cuffs so I could get into a boat to go to the interstate. On the interstate they put the cuffs back on and told us to sit down again. They threw bottles of water to us, but still no food.

“I was tired and very weak. They had people passing out at that point. I lost sight of my friend Iris at that point and didn’t see her again until we got to Angola and they were deciding where to put us. She died a little while after we got to Angola, but I didn’t see her die because they placed me in a different part of the building.

“I can’t remember how long it was before I found out where my family was — maybe two or three weeks. ... I thank God today that I am alive. With all that we went through, I thought they would really leave us for dead. ... I don’t conversate about it because I’m trying to forget it. If I could talk to the Sheriff, it wouldn’t be nothing nice.”

Quantonio Williams said: “On Saturday, August 27, 2005, I was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana. I was taken to the Orleans Parish Prison.

“After I had been there a couple of days, the water started rising in the building. When it reached approximately 2 1/2 feet, the detainees were locked down and the corrections officers left. After the staff left, one detainee was able to open his cell door because he had fixed his door so that it would not lock. He got through a broken window to the control area and used the controls to open all the cells in the unit.

“Because the cell doors were now unlocked, everyone was able to go to the second level of the tier, out of the water. The detainees went to a second area in OPP and tried to help other detainees get out of their cells. They were able to get some of the cell doors open so that these detainees could move to the second tier in that area, but they were not able to open the doors for all of the other detainees.

“Then the correctional officers came back and moved us to Templeman III. We were put into a basketball court. There was no plumbing, electricity or air circulation available at this location. When we were first in the basketball court, on the second floor, we had no access to water. The staff all left again.

“After about a day and a half, someone broke glass to get access to a water fountain. We had no food during this entire period and everyone was hungry. People wrote signs and put them in the windows asking for help.

“Eventually someone suggested using the rim of the basketball hoop as a tool to get out of building to try to be able to breathe and get food and water. It took about 12 hours of various detainees working to try to make a hole out of the building. Eventually the detainees managed to create a hole that was barely large enough for some of the smaller prisoners to wiggle through.

“Some of the detainees started to escape. About 30 minutes after people started to escape, I heard a shot. Other detainees told me that a detainee had been shot, but I did not see it.

“Detainees told the staff that we couldn’t breathe and that we needed food and water. The staff went away. Some people tried to escape again. After people would start to escape again, the staff would come back outside. At first, staff tried to keep people from using the hole, but eventually staff told us that if we could get out the hole we could do so, and then they would take custody of us.

“People tied sheets together to go down the wall. Eventually the sheets broke. I believe that some people who got out this way got away, and some were arrested. All told, I was on the basketball court for two days without food, and most of the time without water.

“Eventually the corrections officers said that they were coming in to get us. When we were told that the correctional officers were coming in to take custody of us, we were afraid because we expected them to beat us, based on the reputation of the OPP corrections officers. We lay down on the floor on our stomachs to try to give them no excuse to beat us. There was a lot a staff from other jails, and as it turned out, we did not get beaten.

“We were then escorted to the first floor, where we spent about an hour. The floodwater on the first floor was almost up to my neck. Around 7:00 a.m. I was taken out of Templeman III to an overpass. On the overpass we were put in rows. The rows in front had floodwater coming up to them. The staff who took us told us that we would be given food and water. Although we saw lots of food and bottled water around, we were not given any. We saw the correctional officers drinking the water.

“The sun was bearing down on us, and it was extremely hot. Three boats were taking ten men at a time from the overpass. They took people from the front row. It took a long time to get to the front row, and lots of people were passing out in the sun. ... All the people who had passed out were just left out in the sun to the side, and not transported. One man in this section started acting out, and the correctional officer just sprayed all the people in the area (with mace), including me. ...

“At 5:00 p.m. the boats stopped coming. We were told that we would have to go down from the overpass and climb down scaffolding to the Interstate. We were told that once we got to the Interstate we would get some food and water. We climbed down the scaffolding around 3:00 a.m. When we got down to Interstate 10, we were handcuffed in pairs and we were each given one small paper cup of water but no food. I saw cases and cases of water and boxes of food there. ...

“The guy I was cuffed to and I asked a corrections officer if we could eat an apple we found on the ground and he gave us permission. We each ate half. We asked for more water. The officer said that he would check. He later told us that he was not allowed to give us water. We were eventually put on buses and I fell asleep.

“We were taken to Hunt Correctional Center. When we get there the warden greeted us by saying. ‘So you are the people who were left to die.’...

“Eventually we were allowed to stand in line for one two-minute call after 10:00 p.m. I was very fortunate because I was able to reach my wife. After a couple of days, she was able to get through the procedure to get me released on a $500 bond. I was released on Sept. 22, 2005.”

“These are the untold horrors of Hurricane Katrina,”said ACLU attorney Eric Balaban. “We must preserve these stories to create a record of the tragedy and to ensure that the mistakes detailed in this report are never repeated.”

The report, along with several multimedia features, including a slide show, video footage and maps, is online.

https://blackagendareport.com/report-pe ... -aclu-2006

[blindpig]

Grants Pass and the Carceral conjuncture

Originally published: Its Going Down (anonymous) on September 10, 2024 by Neil B. (more by Its Going Down (anonymous)) (Posted Sep 11, 2024)

In the last several years, the total rate of those lacking safe, clean, and stable shelter in the United States has increased by double-digit percentages year-over-year. This ‘crisis’, as it is often called, is an increasingly extreme manifestation of the degradations built-in to the structures of a capitalist housing market maintained and protected by the state.

The state has shown itself unable and unwilling to muster the resources necessary to confront the growing scale of human degradation and misery on the housing front. Instead, at the behest of the real estate, land owning, and landlord interests it is ultimately beholden to, the state is mobilizing its punitive and carceral capacities to ‘deal’ with this issue.

As Neil B. argues in this analysis of one area in the housing conjuncture, anything resembling a humane social response to this crisis will require fighting social movements to wrench concessions from the state. Without independent combative movements applying pressure through direct action, the state and the various fractions of the capitalist class that hold sway over it will reach first for police, violence, and prisons to ‘solve’ social problems.

For those of us who have been working and organizing with unhoused communities for a long time, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson came as little surprise. The much anticipated decision ruled that, contrary to the findings in a 2018 ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, fining and criminalizing sleeping in public is not a violation of the 8th Amendment’s clause against cruel and unusual punishment. While cities and states across the country have been finding ways to criminalize poverty anyway, this ruling effectively gave them a green light to open the floodgates.

The 2018 ruling by the 9th Circuit did not start the housing crisis, nor did it really stop cities from punishing unhoused people. What it did do was give them a perfect scapegoat. Los Angeles City Council, for instance, passed 41.18, its flagship ordinance that bans sitting, lying and sleeping in August of 2022. This ordinance had not just been declared unconstitutional twice before, it had been declared unconstitutional by the 2018 9th Circuit ruling. In short, the city of LA was making sleeping outside illegal just after the worst peak of deaths in the COVID pandemic, and at the same time blaming the increase in visible homelessness on the 9th Circuit and blatantly flouting their decision. Rather than encouraging cities to declare housing a human right and create socialized housing for everyone, municipal lawmakers simply chose to get creative about the ways they punished unhoused people.

Still, as is obvious to everyone, the crisis has only gotten worse.

In addition to blaming the 9th Circuit, people blamed the “soft on crime” policies of Democrats, others pointed to addiction, bad choices and mental health issues as the reason why people wind up on the street. However, housed people have addiction issues, make bad choices, and suffer from debilitating mental illnesses yet often don’t wind up on the street, and oftentimes people develop both mental health issues and addiction problems because they are on the street.

The reality is this situation is getting worse because the overwhelming crises of capitalism have made life precarious and untenable for many, many people. Landlords need to charge more and more to pay mortgages or keep up with insurance costs, and bosses need to pay less and less or risk going out of business. It’s a vice grip, squeezing many beyond their breaking point. The gap between rhetoric and reality, whether the willful misrepresentation on the part of frustrated government officials who are sick and tired of getting phone calls from angry ‘not in my back yard’ (NIMBY) groups or the sincere ignorance of people too burdened by their own troubles to think critically about the origins of poverty under capitalist exploitation, will have troubling potential consequences in the wake of this ruling: if people are under the impression that the current problem is primarily due to a lack of law enforcement options, they are going to push for increased carceral solutions.

We have already seen this in anticipation of the ruling. In California, since the CARE (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment) Act went into effect on January 1st, 2024, the government has been building an infrastructure of CARE courts. These courts, under the guise of the insidious euphemism of “care,” exist as a tool to force “service-resistant” unhoused people into mental health treatment, which can strip them of their autonomy and force them to take “stabilization medications” against their will. If a person doesn’t comply, the court can force them into conservatorship. We all saw how difficult it was for Britney Spears to get out of her conservatorship–and she’s a wealthy, internationally famous blonde white woman. What do we think is going to happen to people who are already stigmatized and despised by most people just on the basis that they are poor in public?

The most bewildering aspect of this deepening crisis is that Californians and Angelenos in particular have voted in favor of taxes to pay for low-income housing. The problem is, 50+ years ago Californians, and Angelenos in particular panicked in response to the Fair Housing Act, and in a racist effort to stave off what they feared would be a rapid influx Latinx families, worked to change city codes to make multi-family low-income housing extremely difficult to build. Still, given the general logic and structure of capitalism the idea that building more housing will somehow bring rents down runs counter to reality. Banks, which often finance development and hold mortgages on other properties, aren’t going to finance at a rate that would threaten lowering property values enough to make rent relief through increased supply truly possible. Landlords aren’t going to lower your rent. Put more simply, no matter how much we build, rent goes up, not down.

Even well-meaning politicians are usually powerless to change this dynamic. Without a huge mass of people knocking down their doors and threatening or carrying out disruptive escalation, any effort to impose a serious rent decrease through city ordinance or law, would meet a swift and massive backlash from landlords, developers, and banks. As Black Rose/Rosa Negra states in our Program, the state is the administrative arm of the capitalist class. It is a tool designed to work in one direction. As such, their true function is to participate in the constant cycle of gentrification as the enforcers and janitors- sweeping up the mess. The state is a hammer constantly in search of a nail, and over and over again the nails it strikes are “undesirable” communities: poor, Black, urban, trans, queer, immigrant, brown, Indigenous, unhoused—whoever the undesirable community they target is, they have one tool: identify an activity, make it illegal, throw them in jail.

And why would they stop? Prisons are a big business in the United States. We have more prisoners than any other country on Earth. Prison labor, i.e. slave labor, keeps many household-name American companies profitable. Prisons are one strategy American lawmakers use to revitalize the economy of communities where their core industry–be it coal, gas, mining, manufacturing, or something else–has collapsed for any number of reasons, be it offshoring labor to “developing” countries that are more easily exploitable, or “greenwashing” industry, or simply resource depletion. Since prisons are an economic revitalization strategy, then the administrative class has to find ways to provide a steady supply of bodies to keep the prison running. Never mind the fact that, in the case of unhoused people, it would be far cheaper to pay a person’s rent in an apartment than it is to imprison them or force them into managed “care” via a CARE court. That’s because housing people isn’t the point: perpetuating the status quo is. Without a stick to threaten would-be revolutionaries or troublemakers, it would be much harder for the state to maintain a steady labor supply for the capitalist class.

Moreover, lucrative cottage industries within the nonprofit industrial complex have developed to manage the so-called “homelessness crisis.” There are non-profits who specialize in street medicine that accompany the sanitation department to sweeps; city departments, like the LA sanitation department, and others have teams of people trained to clean and manage encampments; there are Homeless Outreach workers, and caseworkers, mental health care workers; and city council districts have homelessness teams. Teams of experts get lucrative consulting fees giving this opinion or that on how to fix the problem. If we were to house everyone through a robust socialized housing program, all of these people would lose their jobs. It is a cruel irony that the organizations established to help unhoused people need the crisis to survive.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, circumstances in LA are a powder keg. Despite the fact that LA’s mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness, in February the city council ended its COVID eviction moratorium. In anticipation of this, LA landlords filed more than 70,000 evictions in 2023. The hypocrisy of calling homelessness a crisis while processing over 70,000 evictions to go through is mind boggling. Meanwhile, through the use of 41.18 special enforcement zones, the city has created a swiss cheese of areas where it is possible for unhoused people to put their tents. Unfortunately, most of those are near residential areas where people are particularly hostile to encampments. Residents call the police and their council people who then turn around and order sweeps of the encampments. LA city council is pitting housed and unhoused Angelenos against one another, while blaming the problem on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Even when people mean well, their reliance on the existing infrastructure corrupts their intention.

Case in point: the mayor of Los Angeles’s core campaign issue was addressing houselessness. A week after declaring the aforementioned state of emergency she launched her flagship Inside Safe program; “building the plane while flying,” as she said. Surely, a plane that is being built while flying is destined to crash, and Inside Safe has been a monumentally expensive wreck.

In short, Inside Safe uses the city’s 41.18 ordinance (colloquially called the “no sit, sleep, or lie” law) to target particularly unpopular encampments for removal. They tell participants that entering Inside Safe is voluntary, but if they don’t join they have to move somewhere else or they will be ticketed daily. If participants agree to go in they have to give up their tent and all of their belongings beyond what fits in two duffel bags. They are not told where they are going or for how long they can expect to be there. They are told they will receive services like mental health treatment, ID vouchers, help finding employment, etc. They are also promised entry into permanent housing within ninety days of entering. Then, they are taken to one of about a dozen or so roach motels around the city, sometimes within the vicinity of where they were staying, sometimes not, and left to their own devices.

Don’t get me wrong; many people are excited to enter Inside Safe because they believe the mayor’s promises. For the vast majority of the people, though, nothing materializes except prison-like conditions of boredom, isolation, and increasing hopelessness.

According to a report written by Los Angeles’ Abolition Coalition, of which I am a member through LA Street Care, the Inside Safe program has spent $341 Million dollars on 1,265 participants across 16 locations since it began 18 months ago. It has “permanently housed” 539 people, 236 of whom are back on the streets because they could not afford the $2,200/mo market-rate housing they were assigned after their temporary subsidies ran out. It has also kicked 842 people out and had 44 participants die with some from overdoses and at least one was murdered.

That is a cost of approximately $126,765.80 per person. If the city would have just housed them in market rate apartments for those 18 months, they could have paid $7,042.54 per month in rent for each of the participants for 18 months. More crucially, the city could have taken that $341 Million dollars and built socialized housing instead. It feels more and more like housing people is not the point.

In late July, the Rand Corporation published a report that came to the same basic conclusions our report did: sweeps of encampments do absolutely nothing to change the number of people sleeping on the street. They are little more than a cruel game of whack-a-mole. And yet, the housed NIMBYs keep demanding them, the politicians keep scheduling them, and the vicious cycle continues.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision Mayor Bass issued a statement condemning it and saying that the city of LA was going to continue approaching the problem with compassion. To anyone with their eyes open the knee-jerk response was “what compassion?” Seven City Council members and the LA County Board of Supervisors ordered a review of their legal options in the wake of the ruling. Not to be outdone by the Supreme Court, Governor Newsom on July 25th ordered the removal of all encampments in the state of California, though he bewilderingly claimed it was optional for municipalities to participate.

So long as we continue to rely on the structures of capitalism and the state for solutions to this and other crises we will remain trapped in an escalating cycle of management, or better yet, mis-management. As people continue to push “solutions” and those solutions fail an increasingly frustrated public is going to demand that the government find real solutions, and those solutions will lead to more and more use of force. That is what the Supreme Court gave the green light to.

Things are not all doom and gloom, however. There are reasons for optimism. In Los Angeles, a network of autonomous organizations have assembled the Abolition Coalition. Our work uses outreach as a foundation for community building, but our aims is to fight the city and politicians head on. Under the banner “Inside Starving,” many of these groups wrote the scathing report on Inside Safe cited above that centers the experiences of the people impacted by the program. This is part of a deliberate strategy to pressure the city to come up with real solutions by getting real, reliable information directly from the people who are most impacted. And we have seen some early results. We managed to get a meeting with the Mayor wherein we made a simple request: put in writing what services the participants can expect, and where they are going. Though she refused, our resolve only deepened.

One of the encampments we worked very closely with, the Juanita encampment, was brought into an Inside Safe location. While there they organized themselves as Housing for Juanita. They held a press conference and demanded the dignified treatment they deserved. The city retaliated by making it impossible for anyone from the broader community to enter the location.

Another group associated with the Abolition Coalition, Aetna Street Solidarity, was a long-standing, highly organized encampment that created a thriving community. It partnered with the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs to create various educational and practical projects aimed at reframing public space and life in a way that includes unhoused people in the broader concept of “community.” Though they were targeted for removal and swept, the community has remained strong and continues to fight the city’s cruel and repressive policies.

During the pandemic, several people moved into homes that the California Department of Transportation bought through eminent domain decades ago when they proposed an expansion of the 710 freeway. After the proposal was defeated by the community, the houses sat empty. When faced with losing their homes, these folks decided to take matters into their own hands and moved into the abandoned houses. They call themselves the Reclaimers, and they have been fighting the city and state to stay in these homes for years. So far, they have raised the money they need to buy the homes, and have so far staved off eviction as their cases wind their ways through the courts.

Over the last 15 years we have repeatedly seen the rise of mass protests mobilized over pressing problems like Wall Street corruption, racist police violence, and bodily autonomy, growing larger and more frequent over time. The overlapping crises the United States finds itself in are beginning to tear apart the seams of what has been one of the most disastrous empires in human history. This is not to say that we are as organized as we need to be—we are not—but we have ample opportunity to continue to push against institutional weak points, growing the capacity to initiate a social revolution to produce a reorganized society that actually centers human needs, and the needs of all life on the planet. The Grants Pass ruling offers plenty of opportunities to connect struggles–over pay, cost of living, policing, and more. This is an issue for housed people as well, after all. History teaches us that the violence the state imposes on the most marginalized will eventually be imposed on us all–unless we organize and fight to stop them.

For a first hand account of what the reality on the ground will be in the wake of the Grant’s Pass, check out Birdie, an unhoused Angeleno, telling his story here. https://x.com/lastreetcare/status/1820845914329882812

https://mronline.org/2024/09/11/grants- ... njuncture/

[blindpig]

JOHN KIRIAKOU: US Prisons Still a Disaster Zone
October 17, 2024

The BOP had long been one of the biggest embarrassments in the federal government and Joe Biden’s administration hasn’t changed that.


President Joe Biden with Attorney General Merrick Garland at the White House in May 2023. (White House, Hannah Foslien)

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

When Joe Biden took office nearly four years ago, he promised an overhaul of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the largest and best-funded entity within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The BOP had long been one of the biggest embarrassments in the federal government with a parade of incompetent directors from both inside and outside DOJ.

Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland probably had good intentions at the start of their term. They probably really did want to clean up the mess in the federal prison system that has dragged on for decades. But they failed.

To begin with, Biden inherited Michael Carvajal as BOP director from Donald Trump. Carvajal had been named to the job just a couple months before Biden assumed the presidency. Carvajal was a BOP lifer. He began as an entry-level prison guard, worked his way up into administration, became a warden, and finally made his way to BOP headquarters before finally being named as director.

But Carvajal was a failure. Even if the BOP’s deep-seated problems were not necessarily his doing, he was either powerless or too incompetent to do anything about them.

Carvajal resigned in 2022 after more than 100 BOP officers were arrested for, or convicted of, serious crimes during his short tenure, including smuggling drugs and cell phones into prisons to sell to prisoners, theft from prison commissaries, committing violence against prisoners, and even one warden running a “rape club,” where he and other officials, including the prison chaplain, raped female prisoners at will.

Carvajal finally resigned after Congress learned of the “rape club” and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, demanded that he leave.


Carvajal testifying on a range of issues in the federal system before the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 15, 2021. (C-Span still)

Carvajal’s problem was obvious from the beginning. He brought literally no outside expertise to the job. He had never worked anywhere in his adult life other than the BOP. There would be no bold, new programs, no new ideas for reducing recidivism, no move to train prisoners to lead productive lives outside of prison. There was nothing.

The Biden administration thought they could change all that with the appointment of an outsider who had succeeded in turning around a troubled state prison system. Colette Peters was the former head of the Oregon Department of Corrections, where she spent 10 years and managed a budget of $2 billion.

With her documented success at turning the Oregon system around, certainly she could do the same with the BOP’s 122 prisons. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t her fault, of course. It was all the fault of “understaffing.” If she could just hire the people she needed, the job would get done. At least, that’s what she told Forbes Magazine earlier this year.

What Peters didn’t mention in that interview was that, according to Peter Mosques, a criminal justice professor of John Jay College, the BOP is little more than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable white men with no education and no outside job experience, many of whom washed out of the military or the local police academy.

Most of the BOP’s facilities are in tiny towns, the mountains, or farming communities, where the labor pool is very limited. And the only people who are left there and are still looking for a job end up, well, at the BOP. The starting pay is $21 an hour, only slightly better than they might get at WalMart.

Forbes’ interview with Peters was notable not for the things she said — the article noted that she talked about her “accomplishments” over the course of her two-year tenure — but for what she didn’t say. She skipped the facts that:

The DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a damning report earlier this year criticizing the BOP for an inordinate number of preventable prisoner deaths. In 2023, there were 187 suicides, 89 murders, 56 accidental deaths and 12 attributed to “unknown factors” in BOP prisons. The OIG report attributed most of these deaths to “recurring policy violations and operational failures.”
A federal judge in New York refused to send a convicted fraudster to the BOP’s Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, because the prison is “notoriously and, in some cases egregiously slow in providing medical and mental health treatment to prisoners” … lockdowns there are “tantamount to solitary confinement, which is increasingly viewed as inhumane” … and the prison’s “dreadful and grim conditions of confinement include contaminated drinking water, mold, vermin, and insects.”


Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn, New York. (Prison Insight/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The DOJ Office of Inspector general complained that two unannounced “on-site inspections” of a BOP women’s prison in Tallahassee, Florida found “alarming conditions,” including outdated and rotten food being served to prisoners; rodents, insects, and their droppings being pervasive throughout the food preparation areas; cracked walls and ceilings conducive to rodent movement throughout the facility; and unhygienic bathroom facilities.
A federal judge in the Northern District of California berated the BOP for its “botched and ill-conceived plan” to close the federal women’s prison at Dublin, California, the site of the so-called rape club. The judge called the previously unannounced closure plan “hasty and ill-timed” and allowed a class-action suit by prisoners to go forward. The judge also called the BOP “a dysfunctional mess.”
A federal judge in Virginia sentenced a BOP lieutenant to three years in prison for failing to intervene in a prisoner’s preventable death. A BOP guard reported to the lieutenant twice that the prisoner was in medical distress. But the lieutenant denied two requests for emergency assistance, instead allowing the man to spend the last 100 minutes of his life on the floor of his cell. The DOJ inspector general called the lieutenant’s actions “appalling indifference leading to a needless loss of life.”
Yet another Office of Inspector General report found that the BOP was engaging in “sham accreditations,” where the country’s primary prison accreditation organization, the American Correctional Association, was simply publishing the BOP’s own self-serving internal findings as their own reports, rather than actually conducting accreditation investigation. And then they charged the BOP $2.75 million for their trouble. That contract was not renewed.
It’s generally not my nature to be a complainer. But the BOP is a disaster. And that’s not just me saying it. That the Justice Department’s own inspector general, a bevy of federal judges, senior members of Congress, and outside human rights and prisoners’ rights groups.

It doesn’t matter if the BOP director happens to be a formerly successful outsider or a failed insider (or during the Trump administration, the former director of Guantanamo). They’re all bad. They all fail.

Maybe it’s time for our elected leaders to take a lesson from our European friends and allies who tend to emphasis rehabilitation over punishment and don’t have the same kind of criminal justice problems. We just simply can’t fix this on our own.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/17/j ... ster-zone/

Sounds like the prisons and jails in South Carolina...

[blindpig]

Draconian Sentencing Guidelines Result in Prison Overcrowding
By John Kiriakou - October 18, 2024 0


[Source: ar.inspiredpencil.com]

https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine. ... =592&ssl=1

Like many Americans, I follow criminal justice developments closely. The arrest and coming prosecution of Sean Combs, also known as P. Diddy, among other things, will likely remain in the headlines for months, and perhaps years, and promises to be fascinating. Prosecutions related to the January 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol remain ongoing. And the Justice Department has been making good use of the previously largely ignored Foreign Agents Registration Act to pick low-hanging fruit criminal cases against people whose politics they don’t like, such as journalist, whistleblower and former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

It also occurred to me that most Americans have no idea how federal sentences are determined. The methods of determining them are myriad. First, most judges do not have much say in the length of sentences. There are “sentencing guidelines,” which give judges a limited range in which to issue a sentence after receipt of a “sentencing recommendation” from an investigator with the U.S. Marshals Service, there are “mandatory minimums,” and there are “statutory maximums.” More ominously, and little understood by the public, there are “sentencing enhancements.” These are triggers that can make sentences longer, even if it is simply for declaring one’s innocence. And, as with just about everything, there are exceptions. Let me explain.

First, take a look at the sentencing guidelines. The chart has “Offense Levels,” under which every crime falls, listed from 1 to 43. Level 1 is something akin to jaywalking on federal property. The recommended sentence is 0-6 months in jail. Level 43 is something akin to carrying out the September 11 attacks. That can result in either life in prison or the federal death penalty. The sentencing guideline chart also has something called “criminal history categories I through VI.” If you have never committed a crime before, or if you have committed one minor crime, you would be a Category 1. On the other side, if you are a career criminal with many felony convictions, you would be a Category VI. You will see in a moment how this can impact an eventual sentence.

As an example, let’s say that John Doe has been convicted in a federal court under 21 U.S.C. 841 (b)(1)(A). That is the crime of “Unlawful manufacturing, importing, exporting, or trafficking of drugs.” Furthermore, a person to whom John Doe sold the drugs died of an overdose. The sentencing guidelines call for an offense level of 26. That means, with no previous convictions, a sentence of between 63-78 months. (All federal sentences are denoted in months.) If John Doe had committed crimes in the past, the sentence could be anywhere from 70 to 137 months. And if John Doe were a career criminal, the same crime could be as long as 150 months.

All of that is before “enhancements,” however, and there are a lot of them. If John Doe had a gun (even if he had not used it during the commission of the crime), that would be an enhancement of two levels, bringing that 63-78 month recommendation to 78-97 months. If the drug confiscated during the arrest was methamphetamine, that would be another two-level enhancement, bringing the recommended sentence to 97-121 months. And if John Doe used a computer to sell his drugs, that is yet another two-level enhancement, bringing the recommended sentence to 121-151 months. And if John Doe were to—gasp—take advantage of his constitutional right to request a jury trial, that is, unbelievably, another two-level enhancement, something that the Justice Department calls “failure to accept responsibility.” That makes the sentence 151-188 months. That is quite a difference from 63-78 months. It’s no wonder that the prisons are full to bursting.


Prisons are full to bursting because of draconian sentencing guidelines. [Source: toptenz.net]

I mentioned earlier that everything is open to negotiation. And that is why, according to ProPublica, the government wins 98.2% of its cases, almost all as a result of plea bargains. Who would want to face years, or even decades, in prison, when you can negotiate a deal and get a significantly shorter sentence?

And ask yourself this: How many innocent people plead guilty because they do not want to roll the dice in front of a jury and risk those decades in prison? After all, it is no secret that virtually every prosecutor sees himself or herself one day running for Congress or for governor, becoming the U.S. Attorney, or getting a corner office in an A-list law firm. They will not get promoted or be considered for those positions by not prosecuting you. They do not get ahead in life by offering you a shorter sentence.

With the largest incarceration rate in the world, we Americans have given ourselves a draconian and heavy-handed sentencing regime. It is not something to be proud of. It screams out for reform. But who has the guts? How many House or Senate candidates will go out on the campaign trail and say, “I want to make prison sentences shorter!” I can’t think of any.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... rcrowding/

A lot of the wrong people are in prison. The people that ought to be there control our society.

"Prosecutors don’t get promoted by offering shorter sentences", Yeah, like Kamala Harris...

[blindpig]

Children Are Suffering Sexual Abuse, Disabled People Are Being Waterboarded, and Prisoners Being Put in Cages—But Where? Oklahoma, USA
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - October 26, 2024 0

New lawsuit claims rampant abuse and oversight failures at Tulsa juvenile center


Tulsa Juvenile corrections center where staff abused youth inmates and created an envionment akin to “Lord of the Flies.” [Source: msn.com]

[This article is part of CovertAction Magazine (CAM)’s series on abuses within the U.S. criminal justice system. It also spotlights the plight of whistleblowers. CAM managing editor Jeremy Kuzmarov lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma and has covered criminal justice issues in the state for the last decade as a freelancer.—Editors]

Oklahoma’s Bible-quoting Governor Kevin Stitt seems to think there’s nothing wrong with what is going on, and uses every bit of his duly constituted governmental power to see that abuses continue

The son of a pastor, Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt quotes from biblical verses in his speeches and presents himself to the public as a pious Christian.

But his behavior as Governor has been anything but Christian.

He has helped to cover up for human horrors in state run institutions that would have been shameful even in the Middle Ages.

These horrors include:

Waterboarding disabled people
Confining inmates to cages with no access to a bathroom
Leaving a prisoner in his cell for three days without food
Snatching children from their mothers and placing them in the care of known pedophiles.

One lone fighter is doing battle against a corrupt system.

Justin J. Humphrey is a Republican state representative from Lane and chairman of the criminal justice and corrections committee who has worked diligently throughout Stitt’s tenure to expose corruption in government agencies and to try and prompt high-level investigations by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) that could put an end to major human rights abuses being carried out.


State Representative Justin J. Humphrey—a lone David valiantly battling what may be the most depraved and endemically corrupt state government in America. [Source: oklahoman.com]

Unfortunately, Humphrey has been given the cold shoulder by Stitt, branded the “#1 trouble maker,” at the State Capitol, and been stonewalled at every turn, ensuring that the horrific abuses continue.

In an interview on September 27, Humphrey told me that he feels like he is not just fighting for the reform of state agencies, but that he is “fighting the Capitol…Government officials are supposed to protect the welfare and safety of the state’s population and ensure that state agencies are run professionally, but instead they are covering up abuses, failing to launch investigations or carrying out sham investigations, and trying to silence me.”

Humphrey’s silencing is especially disturbing in light of the fact that he is trying to “protect children from being molested and people from being tortured,” as he puts it.

Humphrey was first elected to the State House in 2016 after a twenty-year career in the Department of Corrections (DOC). He says he has received credible reports from whistleblowers and is thorough in trying to corroborate allegations made by victimized parties that come to him.

Humphrey believes that criminals should be held accountable for their crimes, but that prisoners are human beings who have certain rights and that efforts should be made to rehabilitate them in prison and help them reintegrate back into society, which is not what is occurring right now.

Humphrey said that he has received information indicating prisoners are being placed in cages and in a two-by-two and three-by-three foot feces-laden shower cell at the correctional facility in Hinton for as long as nine days with no means to relieve themselves, causing at least one inmate to attempt suicide.[1]

In Cleveland County, correctional officers mocked a thirty-eight-year old mother undergoing a mental health crisis who had been left to wallow in her own excrement in a cell lacking a bed and was severely dehydrated after being deprived water, leaving her to die.[2]

Prison guards, according to Humphrey, are routinely getting away with beating, extorting, shooting pepper balls at, and raping inmates.[3] A prison riot in Lawton ended with two inmates dead.

Humphrey said that in the case where rapes are reported and confessions are elicited, correctional officers are being allowed to resign instead of facing any criminal charges, which is illegal under the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act.

In many cases of wrongdoing by law enforcement officials, prosecution is difficult because records are being destroyed—with impunity. Prison officials who report sexual misconduct face unwelcome reassignments, dismissal and other forms of retaliation and have had their lives turned into a “living hell.”

Whitney Louis, a psychologist with 17 years experience working in prisons, lost her job when she applied for whistleblower status after reporting being assaulted by a lieutenant at the Eddie Warrior Correctional Center in Taft and reporting on 8 rapes by correctional guards of female inmates at the facility there along with the fact that the prison warden arrived at work drunk.[4]


Whistleblower Whitney Louis. [Source: oklahoman.com]

Rather than trying to uphold the rule of law, Oklahoma’s Attorney General Gentner Drummond is using his authority to provide cover for the DOC. He defended it in an inmate lawsuit over the shower cells that calls out prison officials for engaging in “cruel and unusual punishment.”


Gentner Drummond [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

Drummond further expressed satisfication that the DOC had properly investigated the prison rape allegations put forward by Louis, though when Drummond received a letter from Humphrey detailing the allegations and requesting an investigation, Humphrey was rebuffed, and the names of the victims that Louis provided the office of the Inspector General were never contacted.

A key problem with Oklahoma’s prisons is that there is not enough staff to properly police the inmates, Humphrey said. He noted that recently there were multiple stabbings at the Great Plains Correctional facillity in Hinton, a murder at McAlester prison, and man found with slashed wrists at the Allen Gamble correctional center in Holdenville, which is notoriously violent.

Humphrey said that he gets so many calls about wrongdoing that he can’t keep up with all the cases. In some prisons, the showers are so old they don’t properly work. The DOC brags about lowering the rate of escapes because of a play on words by which inmates who escape are said to have merely gone “out of bounds.”


[Source: fox23.com]


Myron Martin [Source: butler-stumpff.com]

In November 2022, Myron Martin, 40, died while in solitary confinement at the prison in Springtown. He was found brutally beaten and had been pepper sprayed. Prison authorities claim that Martin died of a methamphetamine overdose. Yet it is unclear how somebody in solitary confinement could get methamphetamines.

Humphrey traces the deterioration of Oklahoma’s prison conditions to Stitt’s appointment of Steven Harpe as head of Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections.

Harpe had no previous experience with corrections, and as director of the Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES), helped to cover up a scandal by which his office granted a contract to a restaurant vendor, Swedley Bar-B-Q, which misspent millions in state dollars.[5]


Steven Harpe [Source: content.golddelivery.com]

Humphrey says that once he became head of the Department of Corrections, Harpe, the former chief information officer of Gateway Mortgage Group, a company founded by Stitt, raised his salary by $90,000 when it was already $185,000. It is not clear if Governor Stitt ever approved the raise, making it potentially illegal.

Humphrey’s efforts to get an investigation into all of this so far have been in vain—much like with abuses occurring at Oklahoma’s Department of Health Services (DHS).

This past year, the Tulsa juvenile corrections facility became the target of a federal investigation, which corroborated allegations that juvenile offenders placed at the DHS facility were sexually molested by guards; two guards have been subsequently charged with sex crimes.

Thirty people at the center accused staffers of beating juvenile detainees, bribing them to fight each other after creating a “fight club,” and giving out pills containing methamphetamines.

A community group, Appleseed, wrote a report ignored by Stitt’s administration confirming that state agencies—DHS, Oklahoma Juvenile Affairs (OJA) and the Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth—were aware that children at the Tulsa Juvenile Correction Center were being physically and sexually abused but failed to take appropriate action to stop the abuse.

The House Committee on Criminal Justice and Corrections that Humphrey chairs heard from three additional witnesses who provided first hand knowledge of criminal conduct within the state’s child welfare services and DHS that was never followed up.

At the Robert M. Greer mental health facility in Enid, run by DHS, Humphrey says that he was shown pictures indicating that people with disabilities were being waterboarded, a form of torture used on terrorist suspects and in overseas wars where water is poured down a person’s throat to simulate drowning.

Humphrey told me that what is going on there “looks like 1930s stuff” that is “unheard of.”


The Robert M. Greer Center in Enid, Oklahoma where horrific abuses have taken place—what Humphrey calls “1930s stuff.” [Source: readfrontier.org]

The photos Humphrey saw showed patients—some children—with huge bruises on their stomachs from being beaten by caretakers who bribed patients to carry out beatings.

The caretakers kicked patients in the face, had sex with them, and choked them until they were left unconscious, according to a Fox News report.[6] One of the victims was “said to have the mentality of a four-year old.”

RoseAnn Duplan, a policy specialist with the Oklahoma Disability Law Center told The Oklahoman that the horrific abuse that was allowed to run rampant in the Greer facility was a “direct result of the agencies charged with oversight not following the policies that were put in place to protect the residents.”

In August, the Garfield County District Attorney dropped charges against seven of eight former staffers who were facing felony charges, claiming they “could not locate a necessary witness.” This exemplifies how nobody has been held accountable for the horrors that went on—not the least the owners of the private company that ran the facility for over 20 years, Liberty of Oklahoma Corporation, or DHS officials.[7]

Humphrey is currently seeking more information from the Enid police about the murder of a patient at Greer in May—after abuse at the facility had already been reported.

Humphrey is also in contact with numerous mothers whose kids have been taken away from them in custody disputes on spurious grounds, and who were put in homes where the kids were or are being molested and/or abused.

One of the cases involves a couple who were falsely accused of a crime and exonerated in court but are still being deprived of custody of their grandson, and another involves a man who gained an admission on video of his kids being abused, which DHS refused to acknowledge.

Still another involves a Mexican national, Rosario Chico, who is being charged with a felony crime for taking her kids to a battered woman’s shelter across state lines while trying to flee from an abusive husband. Tulsa District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler received campaign donations from the Guardian ad Litem in the case who granted the abusive husband’s mother custody of Chico’s kids (her attorney worked in the DA’s office).[8]

Jeremy Kuzmarov, Gary Lee, M. David Goodwin, James Goodwin, Ross Johnson, Sam Levrault, Kimberly Marsh, African American News, Black News, African American Newspaper, Black Owned Newspaper, The Oklahoma Eagle, The Eagle, Black Wall Street, Tulsa Race Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre


Rosario Chico speaks at rally outside Tulsa County courthouse on July 17, 2023. [Source: Photo by Jeremy Kuzmarov]

In December 2023, Humphrey drafted a letter directed at Stitt, Gentner Drummond, and the FBI seeking a meeting to discuss the questionable prosecution of Ms. Chico.

The letter highlighted Humphrey’s concerns about improper judicial and prosecutorial conduct in the case, an overzealous Guardian ad Litem who is under investigation for forging signatures, and a conspiracy to try and get the DHS to change its finding that Chico’s children had been abused.

Predictably, Humphrey’s letter went ignored, the meeting never took place, and Chico is still facing criminal charges while being denied custody of her children.[9]

In late August, in an attempt to save some political face, Stitt fired DHS Director Deborah Shropshire, though her replacement, Jeffrey Cartmel, inspires little confidence as he helped cover up the sexual abuse that was occurring at the Tulsa Detention Center when he was Director of the Office of Juvenile Affairs (OJA).


Deborah Shropshire [Source: oklahoman.com]


Jeffrey Cartmel [Source: oklahoma.gov]

One thing that Humphrey is concerned about is the increase in Oklahoma’s prison population by around five thousand in the last five years.

Humphrey attributes the increase in part to the breakdown of a District Attorney supervision system, which helped lower recidivism rates.

Ironically, a bill was passed in the state legislature in 2013 establishing a higher supervision fee—after which District Attorney offices stopped supervising parolees.

According to Humphrey, Kevin Stitt refuses to listen to his pleas for an investigation about this and is protecting what amounts to the perpetuation of a fraud—along with other major abuses around the state.

The ultimate victims, according to Humphrey, are not just the kids who have been harmed and inmates who have been tortured, but the people living in Oklahoma today.

It is they who have to live among damaged people who were abandoned by a phony Christian, Governor Stitt, and other elected representatives who have failed to perform their legal and moral duties.



1.At one point some corrections staff were reprimanded for giving blankets and cups of water to inmates locked in the shower cells. The inmates had been placed there because they complained about unsanitary and dangerous conditions in eight man cells. According to a lawsuit, management at the Department of Corrections sought to intimidate honest correctional officials who refused to participate in sadistic measures. Former Oklahoma Corrections Department officer Kenneth Buck stated “if you wanted to stay in good graces with management, you kept your mouth shut and went with the flow.” ↑



2.The woman, Shannon Hanchett, had been owner of a popular bakery in the college town of Norman, Oklahoma. She had been arrested for the minor offense of misusing the 911 phone line that seems to have bene precipitated by her mental health breakdown. ↑



3.Prison psychologist Whitney Louis testified before Humphrey’s committee in July 2023 that Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections was not properly investigating rape allegations involving guards at Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a women’s prison in Taft. Several other witnesses provided further evidence of similar complaints during the same hearing that Louis testified at. Humphrey stated: “I’ve got inmates coming out and saying it, I’ve got former employees coming out and saying it, (and) I have employees who say they’re scared to come forward saying it, so it’s multiple, multiple people. It’s not one.” ↑



4.Louis’ allegations are documented in emails to the Office of Inspector General, which investigates crimes within the Department of Corrections. The emails included names of victims to be contacted. Besides the rapes, guards at the prison were watching women shower and filming them naked. Humphrey gave a copy of the whistleblower rape allegation book to the state attorney general’s office but received not answer. ↑



5.COVID-19 money was also determined to be missing during Harpe’s tenure as director of OMES, according to Humphrey. Harpe brought a corporate ethos to the DOC and was focused on bringing technological upgrades to the DOC and establishing a new correctional officer training facility and getting more job training programs in prisons. He claims to be looking to improve the prison experience for inmates, in part by hiring a chief of offender advocacy official regularly meets with inmates to find ways to improve their safety and health. When a local Fox News affiliate reached out to Harpe to get his assessment of the shower cell lawsuit, Harpe claimed that no human rights violations had taken place. Harpe told The Oklahoman that people were “drumming up stuff to beat up on corrections … to get attention.” For his part, Kevin Stitt said that he was pleased with Harpe’s work so far, calling him an “asset” at the Corrections Department. Stitt told The Oklahoman that “H[arpe] is making the department more streamlined, and his efforts have contributed to our goal of making Oklahoma a top 10 state by achieving the second lowest recidivism rate in the nation.” ↑



6.At least eight former Greer Center staff have been criminally charged with caretaker abuse. DHS Director Deborah Shropshire who has since been fired gave a statement to the media stating that “the details emerging about the allegations are truly horrific to hear and absolutely unacceptable.” ↑



7.Liberty Healthcare is currently facing civil lawsuits from the families of victims. DHS at one point carried out their own investigation which determined that there was no imminent safety risk to patients at Greer, which was clearly not the case. A whistleblower who had tried to report on the abuses at the Robert M. Greer Center was retaliated against. A flyer was distributed with her photo and phone numbers suggesting she was available for sexual encounters. ↑



8.Kunzweiler’s office has engaged in other dubious prosecutions, including of a computer programmer falesly accused of rape by the Assistant District Attorney, Ashley Nix, who was given an award after she was found to have falsely accused the programmer of rape. ↑



9.Three years ago, Humphrey requested an investigation into DHS after receiving dossiers on dozens of cases where children were taken from their mothers unjustly and in some cases was placing them in homes where they were vulnerable to abuse. Governor Stitt did set up a task force to investigate DHS, however, it was staffed with DHS employees and loyalists and did nothing to stop the abuses. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... ahoma-usa/

[blindpig]

Surveilled and Controlled: The High-Tech War on Working Class Black Atlantans
Tunde Osazua 20 Nov 2024



Under the shield of public safety, Atlanta's police and political leaders have turned it into the most surveilled city in the country, where Black and Brown people working-class people are under a militarized microscope.

Modern technologies like facial recognition, predictive policing, and expansive surveillance networks are not mere tools of public safety; they are instruments of militarization, deeply embedded in the war against Black communities in Atlanta, the most surveilled city in the U.S. These technologies target Black poor and working class neighborhoods disproportionately, enforcing capitalist exploitation and reinforcing racial hierarchies.

Surveillance in Atlanta operates as a militarized extension of policing, transforming Black neighborhoods into domestic battlefields. Programs like Operation Shield , with over 16,000 integrated public and private cameras, exemplify this approach. Managed by the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), this program feeds live footage into the Video Integration Center (VIC) , where “predictive” analytics enable real-time tracking of Black communities, treated as "high-risk zones." The program’s use of AI-powered analytics and license plate readers mimics military strategies designed for occupied territories, criminalizing mundane activities and embedding hyper-policing into daily life.

The militarized nature of Atlanta’s surveillance infrastructure is evident in the layers of control it imposes. License plate readers scan over 300,000 plates daily , flagging “hits” for police action, while programs like the Fusus-Talitrix integration propose 24/7 GPS monitoring of individuals on pretrial release, primarily targeting Black residents. This technology mirrors digital incarceration, expanding surveillance into public spaces and turning the city into an open-air prison.

Technologies such as facial recognition, predictive policing algorithms, and geofencing draw from military-grade applications designed to identify and neutralize threats in real-time. In Atlanta, these tools are wielded disproportionately against Black communities, criminalizing mundane activities while embedding a state of hyper-policing in everyday life.

Despite claims of transparency, a 2020 audit revealed that many cameras were non-operational due to poor maintenance coordination among the APF, Atlanta Police Department, and city government. These failures undermine public safety claims but do not impede the program’s expansion, prioritizing the surveillance infrastructure necessary to wage this war.

Such militarization is not accidental. It is deeply tied to counterinsurgency tactics historically used in colonial and occupied territories. The U.S. government’s domestic adaptation of these tactics began with programs like COINTELPRO, which targeted Black liberation movements through infiltration, surveillance, and disruption. Today, Atlanta’s partnership with the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) underscores this militarized approach. By adopting strategies from militarized police forces in Israel and other countries, the Atlanta Police Department has institutionalized practices designed for control, not community safety. In fact, the Atlanta Police Department admitted that the Video Integration C enter is modeled after the command and control center in the Old City of Jerusalem and mimics Israeli methods to proactively monitor crime.

Surveillance technologies in Atlanta are deeply intertwined with gentrification and settler colonialism, functioning as tools to criminalize and control Black residents while facilitating their displacement. Programs like the Westside Security Plan and Secure Neighborhoods initiative explicitly use surveillance to enforce capitalist exploitation, protecting real estate investments while marginalizing and displacing long-time Black communities. By mapping and targeting Black neighborhoods, these systems marginalize long-time residents and clear the way for the extraction of land and resources.

The $5 million Westside Security Plan, for example, targets Vine City and English Avenue, combining surveillance infrastructure with increased police presence. This initiative includes deploying 131 cameras in English Avenue and 34 in Ashview Heights and establishing the Westside Blue Unit , a specialized patrol team. These efforts create a hostile environment for Black residents, reinforcing racial and economic disparities.

During community events like Vine City Day , police selectively enforce minor infractions, using license plate readers to tow vehicles and disrupt festivities. These actions send a clear message to Black residents that their presence is unwelcome, accelerating displacement. Similarly, the Secure Neighborhoods program, which subsidizes housing for police officers in “transitional neighborhoods,” embeds law enforcement in Black neighborhoods. This initiative increases property values, further displacing low-income residents under the guise of enhancing public safety.

The Atlanta Police Foundation has been at the forefront of militarized policing initiatives since its establishment in 2003. With the largest budget, staff, and private sector board of any police foundation in the United States, the APF directly operates programs like Operation Shield, officer housing subsidies, and experimental surveillance technologies. It is also the main force behind Atlanta’s Cop City. In 2015, Atlanta was recognized as a model city by President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing — one of only 15 jurisdictions to receive this distinction. However, these accolades obscure the APF’s role in disproportionately targeting Black communities.

The roots of Atlanta’s surveillance infrastructure can be traced to the 1996 Summer Olympics . The event necessitated unprecedented coordination and resources, leading to the construction of the Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC) and the deployment of advanced surveillance technologies. ACDC was the subject of a scathing report written by the U.S. DOJ after a civil rights investigation. These developments set a precedent for the city’s current investments in surveillance and militarized policing, which have only expanded as Atlanta prepares to host the FIFA World Cup.

In 2023, the APF pushed an unprecedented plan to integrate invasive electronic monitoring technology from Talitrix into Atlanta's surveillance network. Talitrix’s GPS-enabled “digital shackles” and biometric monitoring were slated to be integrated with Fusus’s AI-powered video surveillance, subjecting up to 900 individuals—primarily Black residents labeled as “repeat offenders”—to constant monitoring. Critics have called this plan a blatant violation of constitutional rights, likening it to turning Atlanta into an “open-air prison.”

Testing such unvetted technology on Black communities aligns with a broader historical pattern of using marginalized populations as unwitting research subjects. Over 93 percent of individuals targeted as “repeat offenders” are Black, with most cases involving non-violent offenses like drug possession. These initiatives are less about public safety and more about controlling and criminalizing Black existence.

It must be noted that surveillance technologies are deeply rooted in the legacies of slave patrols, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws – all designed to monitor and control Black people. This history reveals that surveillance is not about public safety — it is a mechanism to maintain racial and economic hierarchies.

In Atlanta, surveillance practices have evolved into a cornerstone of militarized policing, treating Black neighborhoods as occupied zones. The pervasive monitoring creates an atmosphere of fear and compliance, forcing residents to self-regulate under the threat of police intervention. This mirrors the psychological impacts of military occupation, where surveillance suppresses dissent and resistance. The militarized nature of surveillance is evident in the way it is deployed. License plate readers, biometric tracking devices, and AI-powered analytics mimic battlefield strategies, where tracking and targeting individuals are key to maintaining control.

This is part of a broader trend in policing that includes the acquisition of military-grade equipment, such as armored vehicles and tactical gear through the 1033 Program , the construction of cop cities, and the adoption of other war-like strategies. Surveillance amplifies these tactics, providing the intelligence backbone that makes aggressive policing and mass arrests more efficient. In Atlanta, this is exemplified by the integration of technologies like Microsoft’s Operation Aware , which combines surveillance feeds, criminal databases, and facial recognition to create a seamless system of control.

Understanding surveillance as militarization reframes it as a weapon of systemic control rather than a public safety measure. It is not simply about watching people — it is about enforcing racial hierarchies, criminalizing resistance, and facilitating displacement. This framing demands a shift in focus from individual privacy violations to collective impacts on Black communities.

The pervasive surveillance infrastructure in Atlanta is not a tool for public safety—it is a weapon of war against Black and working-class communities. Framing surveillance as militarization highlights its role in a broader strategy of domination, where the logic of war is embedded into local policing practices. Black neighborhoods are domestic battlefields, perpetuating cycles of criminalization and displacement while protecting capitalist interests.

https://blackagendareport.com/surveille ... -atlantans

[blindpig]

Conditions So Bad That Prisoners Set Themselves on Fire: Crisis and Cover-Up at Red Onion Super-Max Prison
November 26, 2024


Artwork depicting prison leaders. Photo: Kevin Rashid Johnson.

By Phil Wilayto – Nov 20, 2024

Can you recognize these faces? All these leaders made profound sacrifices for their people, and the artist who created this powerful drawing must be considered one of them. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, who is extensively quoted in this shocking article, is one of them, one of the men being tortured 24/7 at Red Onion State Prison. Next to Mumia Abu Jamal, Rashid is the most read and respected prisoner in the US. Red Onion is a super-maximum security prison designed and built to be torturous in every way, just like Pelican Bay State Prison in California, where prisoners surmounted impossible odds in 2011-2013 to stage a series of three mass hunger strikes joined by 30,000 prisoners at their peak. To offer your help and support to the prisoners at Red Onion, use the contact information at the end of this article. Photo: Kevin “Rashid” Johnson.
Can you recognize these faces? All these leaders made profound sacrifices for their people, and the artist who created this powerful drawing must be considered one of them. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, who is extensively quoted in this shocking article, is one of them, one of the men being tortured 24/7 at Red Onion State Prison. Next to Mumia Abu Jamal, Rashid is the most read and respected prisoner in the US. Red Onion is a super-maximum security prison designed and built to be torturous in every way, just like Pelican Bay State Prison in California, where prisoners surmounted impossible odds in 2011-2013 to stage a series of three mass hunger strikes joined by 30,000 prisoners at their peak. To offer your help and support to the prisoners at Red Onion, use the contact information at the end of this article. Photo: Kevin “Rashid” Johnson.

Just how bad are things at Virginia’s Red Onion supermax prison?

On May 24, 2023, DeAndre Gordon deliberately started a fire in his cell that caused a third-degree burn on his leg. Gordon, who is Black, said he had been badly beaten by guards at the prison and feared for his life.

“I didn’t know any other way that I could get out of their custody besides to set myself on fire,” Gordon told a reporter with Radio IQ. “Because they don’t have a burn center in Southwest Virginia, I knew that I would be going to Richmond.”

According to the American Burn Association, Virginia has just three facilities capable of dealing with severe burns. Two are in Richmond: the Evans-Haynes Burn Center at VCU Health, a state institution, and the Wound Healing Center at Doctors Hospital, a private hospital. The third is at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk.

Red Onion, in Wise County, is about 375 miles west of Richmond.

On Aug 23 of this year, Demetrius Wallace, 27, also Black, says he set fire to his leg to force a transfer out of Red Onion.

The Defender spoke with Wallace on Nov 1.

“I did actually set my foot on fire,” Wallace said. “I got the charge that shows it. They came to my cell door and saw the flames on the side of my leg. They took me to medical, they assessed me right there that night, told me they don’t deal with burns, they would have to talk with the nurse practitioner, and that I would have to be taken off the mountain.”

“That was Friday, Aug 23… so Monday, around 2 in the afternoon, they drove me seven hours away to the VCU burn unit. As soon as the doctor sees me, he said, ‘When did this happen?’ I said, ‘Friday.’ He said, ‘Why haven’t you been here?’ I said, ‘I’m not trying to be funny, but I can’t drive myself from the prison.’

“He said to the COs [correction officers], ‘You see this foot? You tell your major I can’t treat him immediately, I have to put him on antibiotics to treat the infection.

“I stayed in the hospital for 14 days. They had to do an allograft [a temporary graft, using skin from a skin bank] and a skin graft. After 14 days, I was sent back to Red Onion State Prison. Harassed me, everything is still the same, stuck me in the hole, still being denied access to my JPay [a commercial email service for prisoners] or my actual phone.”

Asked why he had set himself on fire, Wallace said, “I got a lawsuit in because I was assaulted and sprayed by the COs twice while I was handcuffed. So as soon as I filed the lawsuit, they started retaliation. They denied my fiancé access to the prison, for no reason; you had COs and a lieutenant looking at her Facebook; they messaged her… she has screenshots.”

Wallace also said he wasn’t the only prisoner who has recently set himself on fire.

“I was in medical, and I witnessed five other offenders who came back there. They had burned their legs or arms. There are still two or three there now.”

On or about Sept 15, Ekong Eshiet, a 28-year-old African-born prisoner at Red Onion, says he also set fire to his leg.

On Oct 25, he gave an interview to Prison Riot Radio, a Philadelphia-based online program that provides a platform for prisoners to speak out about prison conditions and other issues.

In the interview, Eshiet said that, two days before, on Oct 23, he had begun a hunger strike.

“I’m trying to get off of here. I’m doing my best, I’m going about this the right way, I guess, with the hunger strike way. But if I have to, I don’t mind setting myself on fire again, and this time I’ll set my whole body on fire.

“Before I have to stay up here and do the rest of my time up here, I would rather die before I stay up here, because every day I’m dealing with discrimination, whether it’s behind my race, my last name or my religion.”

The Defender has been in touch with Kevin Rashid Johnson, a longtime prisoner activist and author who, last December, went on a 71-day hunger strike, demanding to be transferred from Red Onion because he said there were no medical facilities in that area equipped to deal with his several severe medical issues. He eventually was sent to VCU Health, then transferred to Greensville Correctional Center, and is now back at Red Onion.

Rashid wrote the Defender that he was in the medical unit at the prison when Eshiet was brought in for treatment, and Rashid said he saw for himself the severe burns on the man’s leg.

“He had been placed in a cell next to me in the prison’s medical department, where I overheard him talking with others about a series of prisoners, including himself, setting fire to themselves. I could not help asking him what was going on.

“He told me simply that the racism, the horrid and inhumane conditions at the prison, were so intolerable that he and others were setting themselves on fire in desperate attempts to get transferred. These were not protests, he made clear, but acts of desperation hoping to get out of an insufferable situation.”

Rashid, at great risk to himself, wrote a report that he sent to outside news media and support groups. The report was picked up by Prison Riot Radio, the Arlington-based Interfaith Action for Human Rights and The Virginia Defender, among others.

On Oct 25, this reporter called Red Onion and spoke with the warden, David Anderson. I explained that we had received a report that as many as a dozen prisoners at Red Onion had recently set themselves on fire, and asked if the report was correct.

“No, it’s not true,” Anderson said.

After a pause, he added, “I really shouldn’t be commenting on this.”

“So you’re saying that no one has set themselves on fire?” I asked.

“I can’t speak any further about that,” Anderson answered.

I told Anderson I would send him an email, with further questions. He said he would forward the email to the proper department for a response.

These are the questions sent on Oct 25:

* Over the last two months, did one or more prisoners at Red Onion set themselves on fire, as claimed by the letter writer?

* If so, what are the names and prison ID numbers of the men?

* What is now the location of each of the men?

* What is the medical condition of each of the men?

* Have any of the men been charged with institutional or criminal offenses as a result of these alleged actions?

As of this writing, on Nov 4, there has been no response.

Meanwhile, we have been trying to find corroboration on the reports.

In addition to speaking directly with Demetrius Wallace, the Defender called Marsha Prichett, Eshiet’s mother, on Oct 25. She said her son has had a very hard time since being sent to Red Onion in June.

“There’s been name calling, they call him Eat-Shit, they spit in his food. After he hurt himself, they treated him for minor burn wounds. “Then the hospital called us to let us know Ekong was in the hospital, but they said we couldn’t visit with him or talk to him because the warden said he was a danger to himself or others. So we couldn’t visit because of what the warden said.”

On Nov 1, a Friday, the Defender reached out to VCU Health to ask if any Red Onion prisoners had been treated there recently for severe burns. At first we were told the hospital was not allowed to give us that information because of the issue of patient privacy. We hadn’t asked about any particular patient.

On Nov 4, a Monday, we received a call from Danielle Pierce with VCU Public Relations. We asked if, from Aug 1 until the present, any Red Onion prisoners had been brought to VCU Health for treatment for severe burns.

“I’m happy to look into it for you,” Pierce said.

Since the Defender’s press deadline was the next morning, no answer was expected in time for this story, but any response will be posted here. [Post-publishing update: As of Monday, Nov 25, there has been no response.]

On Nov 1, the Defender also called and left messages at the offices of Virginia General Assembly Delegate Don Scott, a former prisoner who is now Speaker of the House. The Defender will report any response on the website.

The Defender has also have been trying to get various Virginia media to cover this story.

What is Red Onion?


This Google Earth map gives some idea of how isolated the Red Onion super-max prison is, situated on top of Red Onion Mountain in rural Wise County, far from the famiies of most of the men confined there.

The Justice Policy Center of the Urban Institute describes a supermaximum prison, or “super-max,” as “designed to hold the putatively most violent and disruptive inmates in single cell confinement for 23 hours per day, often for an indefinite period of time.”

Red Onion is a super-max prison. It opened in 1998 in the midst of a big right-wing and media scare about a new crime wave that supposedly was coming, but somehow never did.

Red Onion was supposed to house around 800 of “the worst of the worst” Virginia prisoners. As it turned out, there weren’t enough “worst” prisoners to fill the cells, so Virginia began taking in prisoners from other states—for a price. Further, many of the Virginia prisoners who wound up there were transferred from lower-level security prisons simply for breaking rules, not for committing violent crimes.

Red Onion quickly gained a reputation for extreme repression, cruelty and racism.

A 1999 report by Human Rights Watch stated that the “Virginia Department of Corrections has failed to embrace basic tenets of sound correctional practice and laws protecting inmates from abusive, degrading or cruel treatment” and claimed that “racism, excessive violence, and inhumane conditions reign inside.”

In 2001, Amnesty International released a report citing human rights violations at the prison.

The 2016 HBO documentary film “Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison” focused on the use and effects of solitary confinement.

In one particularly notorious case, Nicolas Reyes, a Salvadoran immigrant, was kept in solitary confinement for 13 years because he couldn’t complete the mostly English-language Step-Down Program required to be released.

Reyes only spoke Spanish and couldn’t read or write in any language.

With support from the ACLU and other organizations, Reyes was finally released and received a monetary award of $115,000 – which works out to about a dollar for every day he suffered in extreme physical, social, cultural and linguistic isolation.

This is what Rashid has recently written about the prison:

“Red Onion and its sister supermax Wallens Ridge State Prison, are both located in the mountains of the far southwestern corner of Virginia in rural, segregated white communities, while their prisoner populations are near totally Brown and Black.

“Since opening in 1998 and 1999, respectively, both prisons have operated without oversight in regions where the local populations are culturally conditioned to secrecy and hostility to outside scrutiny. Which makes for prisons shielded by a curtain of secrecy, inhumane abuse and racism.

“And while Virginia has been closing down many of its predominantly Black staffed prisons across the state, it has shifted resources and focused new prison construction projects in favor of opening and operating prisons in remote, racially segregated regions of the state like where Red Onion and Wallens Ridge are located.

“The strongest public exposure and protest needs to be directed at these expensive, inhumane and unneeded human warehouses. They must be opened up to broad public scrutiny and accountability, and closed down.

“This exposure and protest should be continually directed against the Virginia governor, Virginia Department of Corrections Director Chadwick Dotson and the state’s general assembly.

“Every effort must be made to share this information and increase public awareness about these places, their inhumane conditions and the desperate extremes they are driving fellow humans to in their pleas for relief.

“Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

“All Power to the People!”

Interfaith Action for Human Rights has started an online petition urging change at Red Onion. To sign, follow this change.org link.

As this goes to press, Kevin Rashid Johnson, Ekong Eshiet and Demetrius Wallace are all being held in solitary confinement—what the prison calls “restrictive housing.” All three men have reason to fear for their lives.

Rashid, who has been targeted because of his outspoken condemnation of the whole Virginia prison system, has outside attorneys working to try to get him transferred out of Red Onion.

Note: Both Rashid and Demetrius Wallace have given the Defender permission to quote them for this story. The Defender hasn’t spoken directly with Ekong Eshiet.

Conclusion
At this point, the Defender is confident in reporting that at least two men held at the Red Onion State Prison—Demetrius Wallace and Ekong Eshiet, and possibly others, have taken the desperate step of setting themselves on fire to try to force the prison officials to transfer them out of that notorious hellhole.

And the prison system is not only denying that these events ever happened, but have taken steps to isolate the men involved in order to keep the public from knowing about it.

The Virginia Defenders are calling for an immediate, independent, impartial, outside investigation of the conditions of these three men, as well as the general conditions at Red Onion. Copies of this story will be sent to Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, all members of the Virginia General Assembly, U.S. Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, Virginia Department of Corrections Director Chadwick Dotson and all the Defender’s contacts in the Virginia media.

And to the readers: if you want to get involved in the struggle for Prison Justice, email the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality at DefendersFJE@hotmail.com; call or text 804-644-5834 or write to: Defenders, PO Box 23202, Richmond, VA 23223.

https://orinocotribune.com/conditions-s ... ax-prison/