Above Photo: A Block at Alcatraz Prison, 2008. Nonie / Wikimedia Commons. The head of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons was forced to step down last week as scandals swept through the vast U.S. prison system. Michael Carvajal, director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons (BOP), resigned in disgrace last week after being overwhelmed by scandals, none of which were necessarily of his doing so much as they were a result of his unwillingness or inability to make changes to the Justice Department’s largest and best-funded bureau. The scandals—and his resignation—reinforce the conventional wisdom that the BOP is broken and must be […]
Prisons
17 posts
Above Photo: An inmate reads a book while in the infirmary at Las Colinas Women’s Detention Facility in Santee, California, on April 22, 2020. (Sandy Huffaker / AFP / Getty Images. ) As one of the many calculated cruelties that define the US prison-industrial complex, the long assault on prisoners’ ability to read books while incarcerated is sinister, inhumane, and must be stopped. In a recent piece for Protean magazine entitled “The American Prison System’s War on Reading,” Alex Skopic writes, “Across the United States, the agencies responsible for mass imprisonment are trying to severely limit incarcerated people’s access to the written […]
On a cold morning in February 2013, I led a group of American policymakers and criminal justice practitioners — judges, public defenders, legislators, corrections officials, law professors — on a visit to a juvenile prison in eastern Germany. We met with a group of young men, largely between the ages 18 and 21, who were serving between two to five years at the facility; most had been convicted of a violent offense. Although these young men certainly looked like teenagers or very young adults — dressed in jeans, cargo pants, colorful T-shirts, sweatshirts, and baseball caps — they would certainly not be considered […]
The health and financial impacts of the covid pandemic have been enormous. More than 42 million people have been infected and 679,000 have died in this country. Individuals, businesses and every level of government have suffered as they lost income and revenue. Many workers are unemployed and certain sectors of the economy still suffer disproportionately. There is an easy case to make in favor of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) which was passed in order to relieve these many crises. The argument is harder to make when those funds are being used for police and prisons, and which is […]
Over 100 Rebellions In Jails And Prisons Over COVID19 Conditions By Ella Fassler, Truthout. November 21, 2020 Over 100 Rebellions In Jails And Prisons Over COVID19 Conditions2020-11-212020-11-21https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/11/covidprison.png200px200px Above image: Lauren Walker, Truthout. U.S jails and prisons, already death traps, have been completely ravaged by COVID-19. Crowded quarters, a lack of PPE, inadequate medical care, an aging population, and unsanitary conditions have contributed to an infection rate 5.5 times higher than the already ballooned average in the U.S. As of this writing, over 252,000 people in jails and prisons have been infected and at least 1,450 incarcerated people and officers have died from the novel coronavirus. Evidence suggests […]
For Some, Homes And Neighborhoods Are Now Digital Prisons By Eddie Conway, The Real News. September 7, 2020 For Some, Homes And Neighborhoods Are Now Digital Prisons2020-09-072020-09-07https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/09/maxresdefault-e1599488840442.jpg200px200px Authors Maya Schenwar and Vikki Law argue that many alternatives to incarceration follow the same model of oppression as physical prisons. Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. I’m Eddie Conway, your host, coming to you from Baltimore. Recently, there has been a new book out by two authors that has done extensive work in the prison system. The book is, Prisons By Any Other Name, and it was written […]
Is Burning Prisons The New Knocking Down Confederate Statues? By Branden Janese, The North Star. July 30, 2020 Is Burning Prisons The New Knocking Down Confederate Statues?2020-07-302020-07-30https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/07/ap_20207849435637-e1596131135716.jpg200px200px Saturday afternoon in Seattle, Washington, a construction site where a youth detention center was being built burned to the ground. The King County juvenile detention facility is assumed to have been set ablaze by some of the thousands of Seattle demonstrators who marched in protest to both the federal government terrorizing it’s neighboring city of Portland, Oregon, as well as policemen murdering innocent and unarmed Black Americans. The timing of the fire set to the […]
What could the Democrats possibly be thinking? Their new policy for social justice is to slander the police, defund the police, close prisons and set criminals free. What could possibly go wrong? On July 8th we reported that radical leftists have pushed through a proposal to shut down one of two St. Louis City jails labeled ‘The Workhouse’. They claimed this will save money but these radical liberal socialists never care about taxpayers’ money nor do they care about the safety of local citizens. This appears to be a trend and a priority for Democrats today. They want to slander the […]
Federal Prisons Locked Down To Quash Black Lives Matter Protests By Carter Deane, Solitary Watch. July 25, 2020 Federal Prisons Locked Down To Quash Black Lives Matter Protests2020-07-252020-07-25https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/07/cops.png200px200px Above photo: Members of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and other law enforcement agencies block a street near the White House as protests over the death of George Floyd continue, June 3, 2020, in Washington, D.C. On June 2, for the first time in 25 years, the Bureau of Prisons directed all federal jails and prisons to implement a full lockdown, confining nearly 160,000 people to their cells and severely limiting contact with the […]
Poultry And Prisons: Toward A General Strike For Abolition By Carrie Freshour, Black Agenda Report. July 24, 2020 Poultry And Prisons: Toward A General Strike For Abolition2020-07-242020-07-24https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/07/freshour_845x400.jpeg200px200px Poultry-processing plants are critical sites of racial capitalist accumulation produced through an unequal valuation of people and places. “People cannot be released from prisons only to be put on the streets or to premature disability at the poultry.” On April 28, 2020, Donald Trump utilized the Defense Production Act to keep meat-processing plants open. As of this writing, twenty-two plants have closed, if only temporarily, after large numbers of workers tested positive for COVID-19.1 Yet, […]
Norway’s Halden Prison is a model for a different way to approach incarceration, says psychiatrist Christine Montross. “The living quarters essentially look like a new and clean youth hostel,” she says. Heiko Junge/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Heiko Junge/AFP via Getty Images Norway’s Halden Prison is a model for a different way to approach incarceration, says psychiatrist Christine Montross. “The living quarters essentially look like a new and clean youth hostel,” she says. Heiko Junge/AFP via Getty Images Psychiatrist Christine Montross has spent years treating people with serious mental illnesses — sometimes in hospitals, other times in jails […]
Why Did The Bureau Of Prisons Impose A National Lockdown? By Natalia Schuurman, AFGJ.org. July 8, 2020 Why Did The Bureau Of Prisons Impose A National Lockdown?2020-07-082020-07-08https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/07/protest_1200_daisugano-e1594233976525.jpg200px200px Above photo: Dai Sugano/The Mercury News/East Bay Times. It started days after the murder of George Floyd. Following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, a nationwide uprising of unprecedented proportions has swept the U.S. in thousands of cities and towns, large and small, across all 50 states. This surge of mass resistance around issues of racial injustice, occurring against the backdrop of a major public health crisis and increasingly deteriorating economic […]
Tents are visible behind wire fences last month near buildings of the Federal Medical Center prison in Fort Worth, Texas. Hundreds of inmates inside the facility reportedly have tested positive for the coronavirus, and several have died. LM Otero/AP hide caption toggle caption LM Otero/AP Tents are visible behind wire fences last month near buildings of the Federal Medical Center prison in Fort Worth, Texas. Hundreds of inmates inside the facility reportedly have tested positive for the coronavirus, and several have died. LM Otero/AP Prisons across the country have placed prisoners on lockdown — they’re kept in their cells mostly around-the-clock […]
US Attorney General William Barr US Attorney General Bill Barr on Monday directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule executions for four federal death-row inmates convicted of murdering children. In two of the cases, the inmates raped the children they murdered. In July of 2019, AG Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to revise the Federal Execution Protocol to provide for the use of a single-drug, pentobarbital — similar to protocols used in hundreds of state executions and repeatedly upheld by federal courts, including the Supreme Court, as consistent with the Eighth Amendment, the DOJ announced. Last year the US […]
by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor, …with PressTV, Tehran [ Editor’s Note: This Covid prison story came as no surprise. In both the pandemic preparation and the scramble for protection equipment and testing, the prisons and jails were at the end of the competition line. The rationale for the would be that front line health care workers were more valuable due to the pending risk of the hospitals being over flooded, which some were, and their staff going down with Covid, adding to the medical and ensuing political risk of a botched response. The US was hijacking en route protection equipment […]
Inmates in the Los Angeles County prison system are deliberately trying to contract the coronavirus so that they will be released, according to Sheriff Alex Villanueva. During a press conference on Monday, Sheriff Villanueva said that some inmates believed that if more inmates caught the virus, it would force the county to begin releasing more inmates. “There was some mistaken belief among the inmate population that if they tested positive, there was a way to force our hand and somehow release more inmates out of our jail environment, and that’s not gonna happen,” he said. The prison system has seen a […]
The Intercept: FOR THE PAST several decades, rural America’s economic lifeline has been the construction and operation of prisons and immigrant detention centers, both public and for-profit. The 1980s saw the collapse of American manufacturing and a farm crisis that ripped through the countryside. Mass incarceration was well-timed to fill the gap, producing jobs where they were needed. But those lifelines have transformed into vectors for coronavirus, putting rural communities at risk of outbreaks. For many Americans, the plight of prisoners produces little sympathy. But in a twist on JFK — “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are […]