CT prisoner Bill Coleman being Forcefed since 2008

Guards from Camp 5 at Joint Task Force Guantanamo escort a detainee from his cell to a recreational facility within the camp. (Flickr/Kilho Park)

By Ann Neumann

I know a hunger-striking prisoner who hasn’t eaten solid food in more than five years. He is being force-fed by the medical staff where he’s incarcerated. Starving himself, he told me during one of our biweekly phone calls last year, is the only way he has to exercise his first amendment rights and to protest his conviction. Not eating is his only available free speech act.

The prisoner has lost half his body weight and four teeth to malnutrition. He and his lawyer have gone to court to stop the force-feedings, but a judge ruled against him in March. If I asked you to guess where Coleman is being held, you’d likely say Guantánamo — “America’s offshore war-on-terror camp” — where a mass hunger strike of 100 prisoners has brought the ethics of force-feeding to American newspapers, if not American consciences. Twenty-five of those prisoners are now being manually fed with tubes.

But William Coleman is not at Guantánamo. He’s in Connecticut. The prison medical staff force-feeding him are on contract from the University of Connecticut, not the U.S. Navy. Guantánamo is not an anomaly. Prisoners — who are on U.S. soil and not an inaccessible island military base — are routinely and systematically force-fed every day.

The accounts of force-feeding coming out of Guantánamo, including Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel’s “Gitmo is Killing Me” in The New York Times two weeks ago, are consistent with how Coleman has described the process to me — and to the Supreme Court of Connecticut.

On Oct. 23, 2008, medical staff and corrections officers first strapped Coleman at four points to a vinyl medical table and snaked a rubber tube up his nose, down his throat and into his stomach. When the tube kinked, they thought his reaction to the pain was resistance and tied him across the chest with mesh straps. They reinserted the tube and Coleman gagged as they drained Ensure, a nutrient drink, into it. He continued to gag. He bled. He vomited. He felt violated, not medically treated. Coleman is still being force-fed; sometimes the staff put a semi-permanent tube up his nose, sometimes they don’t. They no longer strap him down. He knows the staff. They are, he says, following orders.

Continue Reading @ Waging NonViolence

Related articles

• Guantánamo is not an anomaly – prisoners in the US are force-fed every day – Waging Nonviolence (aboriginalpress.wordpress.com)
• Gitmo is not an anomaly (salon.com)
• Guantánamo Is Not an Anomaly – Prisoners in the US Are Force-Fed Every Day by Ann Neumann (zcommunications.org)

The Casualties of Justice

By Max Eternity, Truthout

Christopher Graham, who said police hit his head against the wall while frisking him, in the neighborhood near the 46th Precinct in New York, August 5, 2012. (Photo: Victor J. Blue / The New York Times)

The death of Jim Crow laws in 1965 was supposed to mean the end of government persecution of African-Americans, while a scathing new report and data from a growing chorus of experts say otherwise.

 

 

International terrorism always gets headlines. Getting much less attention is the ongoing government-sanctioned terror against blacks in America.

This is not hyperbole. The problem is real, and systemic, and a new report out this month confirms it.

Terror is terror, and it often ends in incarcerating the innocent – or worse.

Domestic terror against blacks includes a death count at the hands of “police, security guards and vigilantes,” resulting in the fatality of an African-American every 28 hours.

That calculation comes from new research by Kali Akuno of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a nonprofit that has chapters in Atlanta, Oakland, New Orleans, Detroit and elsewhere.

Entitled “Operation Ghetto Storm,” MXGM’s report is detailed and extensive in its findings and includes abundant annotations for the 313 wrongful deaths that they cite. “The practice of executing Black people without pretense of a trial, jury or judge is an integral part of the government’s current overall strategy of containing the Black community in a state of perpetual colonial subjugation and exploitation,” reads part of its preface, and one of the most horrifying aspects revealed by the report is that 66 percent of the “extrajudicial killings” were of individuals between the ages of 2 and 31.

Continue Reading @ TruthOut

 

Related articles

• Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report On The Extrajudicial Killing Of 313 Black People (tallahasseeo.com)
• “Operation Ghetto Storm”: The New Face of U.S. Fascism (dissidentvoice.org)
• The Greatest Problem facing Black America Today (blessedaaron08.wordpress.com)

One injustice follows another

Marlene Martin tells the story of Santos Reyes, who was a victim of California’s unjust three strikes law. When he was finally released from prison, ICE agents were waiting to deport him. His story shows the relentless brutality of the criminal INjustice system.

Protesters in Boston oppose the new three strikes law

THE STATISTICS don’t lie: Barack Obama has become the deportation president.

The number of people thrown out of the U.S. for lacking proper immigration documentation started growing from the late 1990s through the 2000s, but it hit a peak during the Obama years. As the New York Times reported:

In four years, Mr. Obama’s administration has deported as many illegal immigrants as the administration of George W. Bush did in his two terms, largely by embracing, expanding and refining Bush-era programs to find people and send them home. By the end of this year, deportations under Mr. Obama are on track to reach two million, or nearly the same number of deportations in the United States from 1892 to 1997.

The Obama White House defends its record, claiming that rather than a general crackdown, the Department of Homeland Security under Obama has just been highly successful in making “[deportation] of criminal aliens the top priority,” according to the Times. The message is that the federal government is focused on getting rid of the “bad guys.”

In fact, immigrant rights activists point to studies showing that the government is still deporting huge numbers of people whose only “crime” was to enter the country without documentation. Even among deportees with a criminal record, the offense was minor in many cases. In a report last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency admitted that over one-quarter of “criminal immigrants” deported from the U.S. in fiscal year 2011 had been convicted of traffic violations.

But the case of Santos Reyes shows why the Obama’s administration deportation injustices extend even to immigrants with felony convictions.

Santos was finally freed from prison this year after spending 15 years behind bars as a victim of California’s draconian “three strikes and you’re out” law. He was convicted of a minor and completely nonviolent offense–taking a California drivers’ license test in the name of his cousin to help him get a license–but because he already had two felony convictions, he got a 26-years-to-life sentence.

This year, Santos finally won his long struggle against the cruel three-strikes sentencing law and was ordered released. But he then suffered another injustice–on March 28, ICE agents were waiting for him at the prison when he was released, to deport him to Mexico immediately because he was undocumented.

This society owes Santos the many years he spent unjustly imprisoned. Instead, the federal government is kicking him out of the country.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

SANTOS WAS sent to prison in 1998 after being convicted and sentenced under California’s three-strikes law, passed by voter referendum in 1994, which requires that anyone convicted of a third felony to be given a 25-year-to-life term, even if the third felony was nonviolent in nature. No plea bargains are allowed under the law, and the first chance at a parole is after 25 years are served. Even after that long, 80 percent of all parole requests are denied.

Santos had been working as a roofer steadily for the previous decade. He was married with two children, aged one and three. Little did he know his life was about to be turned upside down when he offered to help out a cousin who had failed the written part of a state drivers’ license test because he couldn’t read English well. When Santos sat in for his cousin and took the test, he got caught.

This “crime” should have been classified as a misdemeanor under California law. But the prosecutor decided to charge Santos with perjury, which is a felony. He had two prior felony convictions. In 1981, as a juvenile, he was found guilty of stealing a radio from the home of someone he knew, and in 1987, when he was 22, he was convicted of armed robbery. In neither case was anyone harmed.

So in 1998, Santos went to prison for what could have been the rest of his life–for nothing more than helping out his cousin.

The sentencing had a devastating effect on Santos’ family. He lost touch with his wife and never saw his children–he only recently started to correspond with them by letters. As he said in an interview with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty’s New Abolitionist in 2010:

At this time, I’ve been literally left behind, and my wife and children have moved on with their lives. It breaks my heart, but I also know that this is my experience, and to some degree, it is best that they don’t suffer with me. I yearn to someday some how see my children and, like any father, know how they are doing in school, give them sound advice, and ultimately love and encourage them.

I have not seen my children for over 13 years–the length of my incarceration. All I’m left with are the memories of them as little boys. I know that I’ve made mistakes in the past, and those growing pains/errors were used to bury me, but this injustice has affected every person in my family.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

CALIFORNIA STARTED a three-strikes avalanche in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, 24 states and the federal government had some form of the mandatory sentencing law–though California’s was considered the harshest because it didn’t matter if the third offense was nonviolent and minor, as long as it was classified as a felony.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone chronicled some of the “crimes” that have landed people in jail for at least 25 years under “three strikes”: stealing a slice of pizza, three golf clubs baby shoes or five children’s videos, not to mention possession of small quantities of drugs.

Curtis Wilkerson has already done 18 years at California’s Soledad prison for the crime of stealing a pair of tube socks worth $2.50. On top of that, the judge imposed a $2,500 fine, which he is still working to pay off at his prison job, in the cafeteria. Wilkerson is paid $20 a day–and the state takes $11 of it. According to Taibbi, “Curtis will be in his 90s before he’s paid the state off for that one pair of socks.”

Wilkerson is Black, which is no surprise, since racism pervades every aspect of three strikes. A disproportionate number of African Americans are sentenced under the law. Why? Because district attorneys typically get to make a choice on how to prosecute each case, which determines whether three-strikes laws apply.

“After the police arrest someone, the prosecutor is in charge,” wrote Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. “Few rules constrain the exercise of his or her discretion. The prosecutor is free to dismiss a case for any reason or no reason at all. The prosecutor is also free to file more charges against a defendant that can realistically be proven in court, so long as probable cause arguably exists–a practice known as overcharging.”

Alexander writes that prosecutors are well aware that racial bias, as long as it is not overt, will be tolerated–so they have free reign.

So is it any wonder, under a system where the vast majority of prosecutors are white, that Blacks, who make up only 7 of the California population, are 28 percent of the prison population and 45 percent of those subject to the three-strikes sentencing laws?

After a long battle, the three-strikes law in California was finally amended in November 2012 with passage of Proposition 36, which requires that a defendant’s offense be serious or violent enough to justify a 25-years-to-life sentence.

This gave prisoners like Santos a chance to be free.

The change in California’s three-strikes law was years in the making. Groups like Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes held protests and press conferences to push for the change. A previous ballot measure challenging three-strikes was narrowly defeated in 2004 after a last-minute influx of big money to pay for ads to scare people into voting against it.

Thus, Santos Reyes remained behind bars, despite the efforts of his energetic defense committee that worked to bring his case into the public light. The late socialist activist Peter Camejo, the 2004 vice presidential candidate on Ralph Nader’s independent ticket and three-time Green Party candidate for California governor, took up Reyes case during his statewide campaigns. He spoke from the podium often about the injustice Santos was enduring.

Now, after the passage of Prop 36, more than 150 people have already been freed, and many more will likely follow. But there is still work to be done–to get rid of the punitive three-strikes law altogether.

For Santos, he won his freedom, but at a cost. Because he was an undocumented, he could no longer live in the U.S. after his release. So on March 28, when Santos was finally released from prison, ICE agents were there to transport him to Mexico. There, Santos reunited with his elderly mother. Fortunately, reports David Warren of the Sntos Reyes Defense Committee, “we were able to raise around $4,000 to help him restart his life.”

Despite the injustices he has faced, a letter from Santos on April 12 strikes a note of optimism: “I am so happy. I am at my mother’s house now. I made it at the border without an ID, and I crossed about five checkpoints. So pretty much I did it. Now I’m going to my birthplace to get my birth certificate so I can start my new life here at Guadalajara.”

Via The Socialist Worker

Related articles

• A Mother’s Fight Against 3 Strikes Law ‘A Way of Life’ (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)
• Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses – We Have Private Prisons to Fill (texasobserver.org)
• FOCUS | Cruel and Unusual Punishment (readersupportednews.org)

California objects to moving 3,000-plus inmates due to valley fever, says more study needed

It is premature to move more than 3,000 inmates out of two state prisons until more is known about an airborne fungus that is being blamed for nearly three-dozen inmate deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations, Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration said in a court filing Monday night.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the affiliated National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health agreed last week to study problems with valley fever at Avenal and Pleasant Valley state prisons.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco should wait for the centers’ recommendations before enforcing an order last week by the federal official who controls prison medical care, the administration said.

J. Clark Kelso, the federal receiver, says more black, Filipino and medically risky inmates have contracted the illness, leading to his order that the state exclude them from the prisons.

That would mean moving about 40 percent of the 8,200 inmates at the two prisons just as the state faces a federal court order to reduce prison crowding statewide to improve conditions for sick and mentally ill inmates.

The state is preparing to move about 600 medically high risk inmates out of the two prisons by August, but the complexity of swapping thousands of vulnerable inmates with other inmates who are less susceptible to valley fever makes it difficult to comply with Kelso’s larger order, the state argued. It also says Kelso’s order is confusing about which inmates could stay and which would have to go.

Via The Republic

 

Related articles

• Calif. objects to moving inmates because of fungus (sfgate.com)
• Calif. Objects to Moving Inmates Because of Fungus (abcnews.go.com)

Willie Manning deserves DNA testing before May 7 execution

by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld

Last week the Mississippi Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision denied Willie Manning the opportunity to do DNA testing that could prove he is innocent of the crime that landed him on death row. Tragically, Manning is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday and may never get the opportunity to do the testing that could prove whether he is innocent as he has always maintained.

We urge Gov. Phil Bryant to issue a stay so the testing can be done. While people can differ on whether the death penalty is an appropriate form of punishment, nearly everyone would agree that it should be used only in those cases where we are certain of guilt. DNA testing could provide that certainty or prove, as Manning insists, that he is innocent. It could also, as the Mississippi Supreme Court judges noted in their dissent, provide the identity of alleged second perpetrator who has never been caught.

Eighteen people who served time on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence since it became available two decades ago. One of those men, Kennedy Brewer, was convicted in Mississippi. Like Manning, Brewer was convicted based on circumstantial evidence and unvalidated forensic science. In Brewer’s case, the prosecution relied on widely discredited bite mark testimony, and in Manning’s case the prosecution presented hair microscopy, which because of its unreliability will be subject to a recently announced FBI nationwide review. The DNA evidence in Brewer’s case proved his innocence and identified the real perpetrator who confessed to the crime and another murder for which someone had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to life. Fortunately, that man, Levon Brooks, was also exonerated.

We don’t know what the DNA evidence will ultimately prove in Manning’s case, but there is a good chance that it will be highly probative — and much more reliable than the kind of evidence that was used to convict him of the 1992 murders of Pamela Tiffany Miller and Jon Stephan Steckler. The two students were kidnapped after leaving a party at Mississippi State University and were driven to a remote location and both were shot to death. At trial, there was no physical evidence linking Manning to the crime. The prosecution relied on circumstantial evidence. At one point the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned his conviction because Manning’s lawyers weren’t allowed to fully cross-examine the informant, but the court later reconsidered its decision and let the conviction stand.

Since 1994, Manning has been seeking DNA testing of the rape kit, fingernail scrapings that were recovered from both victims and hairs recovered from the scene. Rape kits and fingernail scrapings are routinely tested today because the testing can prove with near certainty who committed the crime. Before DNA evidence, prosecutors would often rely on hair microscopy to place a defendant at the scene even though the practice was never scientifically validated. After DNA evidence exonerated three people who had been wrongly convicted in part based on this type of evidence, the FBI announced this year that it would undertake a massive review of all cases in which one of its analysts testified about this type of evidence. Given that the FBI performed the hair microscopy in this case, it would seem that Manning’s case should be subject to this review — if he isn’t put to death first.

As the dissenters noted, given that it is alleged that two perpetrators committed the crime, it’s puzzling that the district attorney is so resistant to testing.

The Mississippi Supreme Court has said that the DNA testing is unnecessary because there is other overwhelming evidence of guilt. But appeals courts were also wrong in the cases of all 306 DNA exonerations, including the 18 who served time on death row. DNA testing has the potential to tell us once and for all who committed these two tragic murders, and that’s something we all should want.

- – - – -

Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld are co-founders and co-directors of the Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongly convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent injustice.

Related articles

• Mississippi to Execute Man Without DNA Testing Crucial Evidence (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)
• Death Row Inmate To Die Tuesday After DNA Testing Denied (medicaldaily.com)
• A Stunning Error in Mississippi (takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Mississippi Denies Inmate DNA Test, Set to Execute Him on Tuesday (gawker.com)
• Willie Manning Will Die in Mississippi Unless YOU Ask for His DNA Test TODAY (badgals-radio.com)

From Oct22 Bay Area….Join us!

Tens of thousands of people imprisoned in the US are being subjected to torturous, inhumane conditions. 

 Many are:

 ·       Held in long term solitary confinement; locked in tiny, windowless, sometimes sound proof, cells; cut off from fresh air and sunlight for 22-24 hours every day and given small portions of food that lacks basic nutritional requirements. 

·       Denied human contact and violently taken from their cells for petty violations.

·       Put in solitary arbitrarily, often because of accusations of being members of prison gangs based on dubious evidence, and have no way to challenge the decisions of prison authorities to place them in solitary.

 

Many are forced to endure these conditions for months, years and even decades!  Mental anguish and trauma often results from being confined under these conditions.  Locking people down like this amounts to trying to strip them of their humanity.

 

These conditions fit the international definition of torture!  This is unjust, illegitimate and profoundly immoral.  WE MUST JOIN IN AN EFFORT TO STOP IT, NOW!

 

People imprisoned at Pelican Bay State Prison in California have called For a Nation-wide Hunger Strike to begin on July 8, 2013. They have also issued a call for unity among people from different racial groups, inside and outside the prisons.  People who are locked down in segregation units of this society’s prisons, condemned as the “worst of the worst,” are standing up against injustice, asserting their humanity in the process.  We must have the humanity to hear their call, and answer it with powerful support!

 

A Nation-wide and World-wide Struggle Needs to Be launched NOW to bring an End to this widespread Torture Before those in the Prisons Are Forced to Take the Desperate step of going on hunger strikes and putting their lives on the line!

                                                                                               

To the Government: We Demand an Immediate End to the Torture and Inhumanity of Prison House America – Immediately Disband All Torture Chambers.  Meet the demands of those you have locked down in your prisons!

 

To People in this Country and Around the World: We Cannot Accept, and We Should Not Tolerate This Torture.  Join The Struggle to End Torture in Prisons Now!

 

To Those Standing Up in Resistance Inside The Prisons: WE SUPPORT YOUR CALL FOR UNITY IN THIS FIGHT, AND WE WILL HAVE YOUR BACKS!

 

June 21, 22 and 23 Will Be Days of Solidarity With the Struggle to End Prison Torture!  There will be protests, cultural events, Evenings of Conscience, sermons in religious services, saturation of social media – all aimed at laying bare the ugly reality of wide spread torture in US prisons and challenging everyone to join in fighting to STOP it.

 

Send Your endorsements (name . and if you wish, organization and/or title,  to:

StopMassIncarcerationBayArea@gmail.com

 

 

For more information and to join in this struggle contact the Stop Mass Incarceration Network at:

http://www.stopmassincarceration.org/support-california-prison-hunger-strikers.html

 

Related articles

• The Horrifying Existence Of Solitary Confinement (asolitarytorture.wordpress.com)
• 9 Petitions Fighting Solitary Confinement (lockupreform.com)
• Support Pelican Bay SHU Prisoners’ Five Core Demands (hunger strike) (stopsolitary.wordpress.com)

California Prisons in the News

While Governor Brown protests ( read…cries) over the mandate handed down by the three Judge panel, one thing is certain- all 33 prisons in California remain critically over crowded. Brown and CDCr will make the best choice for public safety in releasing prisoners, which should be- releasing the lifer prisoners who sentenced indeterminate sentences. Meaning those that have done their time, plus many, many more YEARS, non violent drug offenders ( who should never have been sent to prison in the first place) and those who pose no danger to the public -the medically incapacitated.

FILE — In this Aug. 3, 2006 file photo, inmates are housed in three-tier bunks, in what was once a multi-purpose recreation room, at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, Calif. Crowding in state prisons has been reduced under a two-year-old state law that is sending less serious offenders to county jails instead of state prisons. Gov. Jerry Brown faces a midnight deadline of May 2, to say how the state will further reduce its inmate population. Photo: Rich Pedroncelli

Brown and CDCr together will releases prisoners who will go on to re-offend, then scream “you see! this is what happens when you release prisoners early!!” The bottom line here is they want prisoner release to fail. It all comes down to the money… do not be fooled into thinking its about safety. They have viable choices and clearly it is not about public safety.  62 prisoners have died needless and preventable deaths from Valley Fever since 2005. Those are the ones we KNOW about. Suddenly its a public emergency and isbeing addressed. When Prison Reform Movement wrote to then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Human Rights Watch ( back in 05) it was a public health emergency then too. And NOW they want to take some action? How ridiculous is this? How do we explain to the families who have lost their loved ones? Inadequate medical care is no excuse.

Pleasant Valley Prison in Coalinga was built on a former dump site. The hospital directly behind that prison is also built on that same contaminated soil. The state has known about this for years…and done nothing. Not only are prisoners at risk, the staff at both facilities, as well as visitors.  On a positive note, the prisoners being kept in Solitary at Pelican Bay filing a class action law suit. IMO, all prisoners locked up in California should take part in a HUGE class action lawsuit against CDCr, the state and the receiver. Sue them all, force them to finally clean things up, once and for all.

California corrections officials say they are still trying to develop a plan to cope with outbreaks of soil-borne valley fever at two prisons, including Avenal. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation / April 29, 2013) Via LA TIMES

 

 

Here is a round up of articles detailing the incidents of this past week. I ask you all, where is the outrage?

Solitary confinement inmates seek class-action status

 

California details plans to reduce prison crowding

 

California ordered to move prisoners at risk of valley fever

 

Advocates for CA inmate rights blast Jerry Brown’s prison plan

Related articles

• Valley fever cases spur call to close Avenal prison (fresnobee.com)
• California details plans to reduce prison crowding (sfgate.com)
• Valley Fever Threatens Thousands of California Inmates (medicaldaily.com)
• Are California Prisons Punishing Inmates Based On Race? (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)
• California Prison Conditions Driving Prisoners to Suicide (moorbey.wordpress.com)
• CDC probing valley fever outbreaks in two California prisons (latimes.com)
• Motion denied, Governor: Medical neglect is still killing prisoners (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)

The Ten Worst Prisons in America

Via Solitary Watch -also published in Mother Jones….this is so good, no GREAT I had to share with you all.  Make sure to read it through…filled with FACTS and STATS, very on point. Dont  miss it!

By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

“The Ten Worst Prisons in America,” our eleven-part article, premiered yesterday over at MotherJones.com with the notorious ADX Florence federal supermax. A new worst prison will be published each weekday (with some dishonorable mentions at the end), so please check in from time to time for new postings. What follows is the introduction to the series.

“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” So goes the old saying. Yet conditions in some American facilities are so obscene that they amount to a form of extrajudicial punishment.

Doing time is not supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These, however, are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.

The United States boasts the world’s highest incarceration rate, with close to 2.3 million people locked away in some 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Most are nasty places by design, aimed at punishment and exclusion rather than rehabilitation; while reliable numbers are hard to come by, at last count 81,622 prisoners were being held in some form of isolation in state and federal prisons.

Thousands more are being held in solitary at jails, deportation facilities, and juvenile-detention centers. Nearly 1 in 10 prisoners is sexually victimized, by prison employees about half of the time—more than 200,000 such assaults take place in American penal facilities every year (PDF), according to estimates compiled under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. Suicides, meanwhile, account for almost a third of prisoner deaths, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while an unknown number of fatalities result from substandard nutrition and medical care.

While there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of these problems, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We’ve compiled this subjective list of America’s 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy. We will be rolling out profiles of the contenders over the next 10 days, complete with photos and video.

Read the rest at MotherJones.com.

Mississippi to Execute Man Without DNA Testing Crucial Evidence

In 5-4 decision, Mississippi Supreme Court denies DNA testing for Willie Manning

Willie Manning is on death row in Mississippi, awaiting execution for the abduction and murder of two college students in 1992. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence, including the testimony of a jailhouse informant who had previously given a statement implicating another person. No physical evidence has ever linked Willie to the crime, and he has always maintained his innocence. He has been seeking DNA testing of crime scene evidence for years.

Incredibly, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that there is “overwhelming evidence of guilt,” so no DNA testing is needed. His execution has been set for May 7th. Eighteen men have been exonerated by DNA testing after being sentenced to death, including Kennedy Brewer of Mississippi. We are asking the Governor to stay the execution and order the DNA testing that will definitively prove Willie Manning’s guilt or innocence.

Join us in calling on Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant to stay Willie’s execution and order DNA testing!

Click  >>here to take action NOW <<

Why Does Wisconsin Lock Up More Black Men Than Any Other State?

What is going on in Wisconsin?

by Gene Demby

 

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that looked at the prison population there found that the state has the highest percentage of incarcerated black men in the country. About 1 in 8 black men of working age (13 percent) are in state prisons or jails. The national average is 6.7 percent.

According to census figures, African-Americans make up 6.5 percent of the state’s population.

Wisconsin also leads the nation in the percentage of Native men behind bars; 1 in 13 Indian men are incarcerated there.

Wisconsin, though? Really?

Rates Of Black Male Incarceration By State, 2012

Source: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

 

And Wisconsin’s lead on this count is pretty big: It beats the state with the next-highest rate of imprisoned black men by nearly 3 percentage points — a gap bigger than the total distance between the second- and 10th-place states.

A big chunk of the state’s black male prison population comes from Milwaukee, Wisconsin‘s biggest city. According to the researchers, more than half of all black men in their 30s and 40s had been incarcerated at some point. That means there’s a large population of men in the state’s biggest city who are essentially unemployable, which puts a huge drag on the economy — and a big reason Milwaukee is . (Milwaukee’s metro area also boasts one of the biggest gaps in incomes between blacks and whites.)

And Milwaukee’s poor felons are concentrated in the same neighborhoods: The study also found that almost two-thirds of Milwaukee County’s incarcerated black men come from the city’s six poorest ZIP codes.

Continue Reading @ NPR

 

 

Related articles

• Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)
• Race And America’s Prisons: It’s Complicated : Code Switch : NPR (aboriginalpress.wordpress.com)