In the first story we have a tiny bit of truth that has emerged from the usual lies regarding the War on Drugs.  What is the purpose of this criminal justice system?  Take a look if you dare:

NYPD Detective Found Guilty Of Planting Evidence

Those Drugs They Came From The Police

Look at what the judge said on the case:

“I thought I was not naïve,” he said.  “But even this court was shocked, not only by the seeming pervasive scope of misconduct but even more distressingly by the seeming casualness by which such conduct is employed.”

You see what he said is real slick right?  ‘I thought I was not naive’!!  Meaning, ‘I already know how NYPD narcotics departments get down, what with the drug planting and screwing lives up shit.’  It don’t even mess with the judge at all that it’s going down like this, he’s just shocked that it’s so ‘pervasive’ and ‘casual,’ I guess if these dudes were a little more uptight when they planted drugs the judge would be a little less shocked.

But damn, it don’t stop there!  Article #2 is about the racial views of “New York’s Finest,” and what happens when some racists get caught out (everybody acts like it’s just a few of them).  This has to do with a racist Facebook group of police officers and their friends hating on the West Indian Day Parade:

NYPD Officers Have Fun With Racist Facebook Group

“I say have the [West Indian Day] parade one more year and when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them all out,” writes one commenter, Dan Rodney. The New York Times first broke the story and reached out to Rodney, who confirmed that he was a police officer and a user of Facebook but denied that he made that comment.

New York Police Department Investigating Racist Posts

In the postings, people participating in the September parade in Brooklyn were called “animals” and “savages, the New York Times reported.

Prison numbers in England and Wales hit fresh record

From the BBC:

The prison population in England and Wales has increased by almost 200 in a week, taking it to a new all-time high of 87,945.

Governors have 1,310 places available across jails to deal with further rises.

The rise in the population has been put down to the numbers being jailed or remanded following England’s riots.

The Ministry of Justice said it had contingency plans in place and capacity would soon increase further.

The Prison Service said that as of Friday the maximum operational capacity was 89,255 – the level judged to be the safest after taking into account the need to segregate some prisoners.

A spokesman said: “We have seen a significant rise in the prison population as a result of the public disorder in August.

“Managing the increase in the population is challenging but we have been continually developing contingencies to manage the additional population.

“We currently have enough prison places for those being remanded and sentenced to custody.”

The spokesman said capacity would rise in 2012 with the opening of two new prisons. HMP Thameside, in South-East London, will hold up to 900 inmates. HMP Featherstone 2, near Wolverhampton, will hold 1,600.

“We will continue to explore contingencies arrangements should further pressure be placed on the prison estate.”

The Ministry of Justice said that no inmates had been placed in police cells under the long-standing Operation Safeguard emergency plans. These plans were last activated in 2007 when spare capacity dropped to around 100 places.

Figures released last month suggested that the riots would contribute to the prison population growing by about 1,000 over the next year.

Family, friends of Twin Rivers shooting suspect seek answers

Evidence suggests that Tyrone Smith was murdered in custody by the police.

From News 10:

SACRAMENTO, CA – Family and friends of a man who died after being taken into police custody in the shooting of a Twin Rivers police officer want answers.

Tyrone Smith, 32, died Saturday night.  He was captured about seven hours after the 25-year-old officer was shot multiple times. About 2:25 that afternoon, the officer had pulled over Smith on a traffic stop near Grant Union High School in Del Paso Heights. Smith is alleged to have fled in his vehicle, initiating a police pursuit and then a foot chase during which police say he fired shots at the officer.

Witnesses say Smith was walking and breathing normally when he went into the patrol car. Police reported Sunday that Smith died about 20 minutes later while still in the police unit.

“What happened?” said Smith’s sister Latara Brown. “We have a right to know. He was a suspect and he deserved a trial.”

A rally was held at Grant Union High School Monday with community members and witnesses wanting an explanation as well. About 150 people marched two blocks from a memorial shrine put up for Smith on a street corner to the front of Grant High School.

” I saw him. He walked and was cooperating with police. I was shocked when I heard he died,” said De Washington, referring to the moments when Smith was taken into custody.

Brown said she does have faith that multiple investigations will learn what happened to her brother.

“I’m glad that everybody came together and we’re gonna get through this and I just want some answers, that’s all,” Brown said.

The family of Smith says they met with police at the Sacramento Urban League on Monday.

The officer shot has been moved from ICU and is recovering. His condition was upgraded from critical to stable condition on Monday and he is reportedly in pain but expected by his surgeon to make a full recovery.

California must cut prison population by 30,000

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/24/MNGK1JJQRJ.DTL

(05-23) 17:20 PDT WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court ordered California on Monday to reduce the population of its jammed prisons by more than 30,000 in two years to repair a health care system that lower courts found was defying constitutional standards and endangering guards as well as inmates.

Federal judges rightly found that overcrowding in a prison system that has held nearly twice its designed capacity for more than a decade was the main cause of “grossly inadequate provision of medical and mental health care,” the court said in a 5-4 ruling.

“Needless suffering and death have been the well-documented result,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said in the majority opinion.

He cited evidence from two decades of litigation: mentally ill prisoners waiting up to a year for treatment, suicidal inmates held for 24 hours in phone booth-size cages without toilets, waiting lists of 700 inmates for a single doctor, and gyms converted into triple-bunked living quarters that breed disease, and violence victimizing guards and inmates alike.

Death toll

A federal judge found in 2006 that shoddy prison health care in California was responsible for the death of one inmate a week, Kennedy noted.

“The medical and mental health care provided by California’s prisons falls below the standard of decency that inheres in the Eighth Amendment,” which bans cruel and unusual punishment, said Kennedy, joined by the court’s more liberal justices.

Under the ruling, California’s prison population of 143,000 must be reduced to 110,000 by mid-2013. Critics both on and off the bench forecast a wave of dangerous felons on the streets.

Justice Samuel Alito, in a dissent joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, said the majority was loosing “the equivalent of three Army divisions” of criminals and was “gambling with the safety of the people of California.”

Assembly Republican leader Connie Conway of Tulare said Californians “could be at serious risk of becoming victims of crime … as a result of this reckless and irresponsible decision.”

One alternative

But Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, while critical of the ruling, said the state could comply without releasing any dangerous criminals – if Republicans approve Brown’s budget proposal to shift thousands of low-level offenders and parole violators from state prisons to county jails.

“If realignment is done quickly and fully as the governor proposed, it will solve this problem,” said Matthew Cate, Brown’s prison director. “Our goal is to not release inmates at all.”

The California State Sheriffs Association chimed in, saying Brown’s plan – as long as it is accompanied by more state funding for counties – is “a way to ensure this is not a massive release of prisoners.”

But Republicans have opposed Brown’s plan on two grounds: The governor wants to extend tax increases to pay for it, and it would arguably reduce punishment by allowing some felons to avoid state prison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/us/25inmates.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Enlisting Prison Labor to Close Budget Gaps

JAY, Fla. — Before he went to jail, Danny Ivey had barely seen a backyard garden.

But here he was, two years left on his sentence for grand theft, bent over in a field, snapping wide, green collard leaves from their stems. For the rest of the week, Mr. Ivey and his fellow inmates would be eating the greens he picked, and the State of Florida would be saving most of the $2.29 a day it allots for their meals.

Prison labor — making license plates, picking up litter — is nothing new, and nearly all states have such programs. But these days, officials are expanding the practice to combat cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue, using prisoners to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees.

In New Jersey, inmates on roadkill patrol clean deer carcasses from highways. Georgia inmates tend municipal graveyards. In Ohio, they paint their own cells. In California, prison officials hope to expand existing programs, including one in which wet-suit-clad inmates repair leaky public water tanks. There are no figures on how many prisoners have been enrolled in new or expanded programs nationwide, but experts in criminal justice have taken note of the increase.

“There’s special urgency in prisons these days,” said Martin F. Horn, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction. “As state budgets get constricted, the public is looking for ways to offset the cost of imprisonment.”

Although inmate labor is helping budgets in many corners of state government, the savings are the largest in corrections departments themselves, which have cut billions of dollars in recent years and are under constant pressure to reduce the roughly $29,000 a year that it costs to incarcerate the average inmate in the United States.

Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, introduced a bill last month to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. Creating a national prison labor force has been a goal since he went to Congress in 1995, but it makes even more sense in this economy, he said.

“Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone,” Mr. Ensign said. “Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill?”

Financial experts agree.

“These are nickel-and-dime attempts to cut budgets, but they add up,” said Alan Essig, an expert on state budgets at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. “You save a dollar here, a dollar there, and you keep your government’s functions.”

Technology has made it easier to coordinate. In Hunterdon County, N.J., nonprofit organizations and government agencies can view prisoners’ work schedules online and reserve them for a specific task on a free day. (Coming tasks include cleaning up after a Fire Department fish fry and maintaining a public park.)

“Using inmate labor has created unusual alliances: liberal humanitarian groups that advocate more education and exercise in prisons find themselves supporting proposals from conservative budget hawks to get inmates jobs, often outdoors, where they can learn new skills. Having a job in prison has been linked in studies to decreased violence, improved morale and lowered recidivism — but most effectively, experts say, when the task is purposeful.

“The days of just breaking rocks with sledgehammers” are over, said Michael P. Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a research group in New York. “At the grossest financial level, it’s just savings. You can cut the government worker, save the salary and still maintain the service, and you’re providing a skill for when they leave.”

There are, of course, concerns about public safety and competition with government or private workers. Professor Horn estimates that only 20 percent of inmates present a low enough security threat to work in public. And in some places, even financially struggling governments are not willing to take the risk of employing prisoners.

By CLAY WADENA

Thousands of prisoners in Georgia made history on Dec. 9 when they carried out what has been hailed as the largest prisoner strike in American history—refusing to work or leave their cells in 11 of the state’s prisons.

The prisoners issued nine demands that began with a call for a living wage for the work they perform and included demands for better educational and vocational opportunities, better health care, better food and living conditions, better access to their families, ending all cruel and inhumane punishments, and a more just parole process.

The strike lasted a week in most prisons, with isolated pockets of resistance still being reported later, and was an outstanding achievement for the prisoners’ rights movement even if their demands were not immediately met.

Prisoners in Georgia are standing up to a mighty force when they confront their state machinery, as Georgia leads the nation with the highest rate of adults that are under state control or supervision.  According to the Pew Center on the States, one out of 13 adults in Georgia is in a prison or jail, or on parole or probation—higher than any other state.

Georgia nearly tripled its prison population between 1988 and 2009, and this included a disproportionate amount of African American inmates, who now make up 63% of Georgia’s prisoners but are only 30% of the state population.  Of the Georgia inmates who make it out, two-thirds will be rearrested within three years of their release (such a high recidivism rate that even conservative Newt Gingrich was prompted to write an editorial calling for Georgia to focus on lowering it). Additionally, Georgia spends only $49 a day per prisoner, compared to a national average of $79.

On top of it all, Georgia is one of only a few states where the inmates are paid absolutely nothing for their labor (unless they have one of a handful of exclusive jobs that are not readily accessible to the general inmate population). Inmates perform road cleanup for states and local governments and they provide labor to prison-run businesses that make furniture, garments, and signs—but they receive nothing for it. Most inmates across the country work for pennies an hour doing the same thing, a pittance that can’t be considered fair in any way, but in places like Georgia, Texas, and Arkansas they don’t even get that chance.

Georgia politicians seemingly wouldn’t have it any other way, and displayed their disgust for the prisoners’ demands when interviewed by the press during and after the strike. Republican state senator Johnny Grant said, “If they want to get paid, they shouldn’t commit crimes. … If we started paying inmates, we’d also start charging them for room and board, as well. They ought to be careful what they ask for.”

Democratic state representative Barbara Massey Reece agreed: “After all, they are behind those prison walls for a reason. They are there to make restitution to society for whatever their crime was. … I can’t see paying inmates anything. I would much rather take that money and put 25 more state troopers on the highway. … Most of the men that I have encountered on [unpaid] work details take real pride in their work and are appreciative of the chance to work. If they weren’t out working, they’d just be sitting behind the fence.”

Don’t be fooled by Ms. Reece’s claims; by issuing their own demands the prisoners have made sure that no politician can claim to speak for them and paint a rosy picture of modern-day slavery.  And contrary to her view that prisoners “appreciated” working for free, the prisoners made it very clear that this issue was the biggest driving force of the entire strike.

It is important to note the desperate economic position these inmates are placed in by the system. They are not provided enough food and amenities to squeak out even a minimally sufficient life, and often come from families who can’t afford to keep money in their commissary account. Even for those inmates who can get money wired in, the monopoly on money transfers held by private company J-Pay takes a 10% commission and the commissary prices are high. If inmates would like to talk to their family members legally, it costs $55 a month for once weekly 15-minute phone conversations.

Normally, the meager conditions of prison life and the astronomical prices they pay for basic necessities are offset, very slightly, by the ability of inmates to earn a tiny amount of money doing work in or for the prison. In Georgia, however, inmates are not even able to provide for themselves in this hyper-exploited manner, despite the work they do.

With deplorable conditions and practically no institutional route of addressing them, the prisoners took it upon themselves to be heard, and put in a momentous amount of work to pull the strike off and bring their message to the public. This cannot be overstated. It is worth noting the different roadblocks these men faced and overcame, so what they have accomplished can be truly appreciated.

First, these prisoners had to overcome the divisions that normally prevent any type of unified inmate action. Prison administrations count on all forms of racial, sexual, economic, and street-organization violence to sow deep division among the prisoners and make them easier to control. In a testament to the organizers of this action, inmates in Georgia were able to overcome these divisions, which normally wreak havoc.

“It’s a universal, unified effort on the part of men who have been treated like slaves, whether Black, white, or Latino,” said Elaine Brown, spokesperson for the prisoners and former leader of the Black Panther Party.

Additionally, the prisoners had to coordinate both the protest action (in multiple prisons) and the media outreach from inside prisons, where all normal correspondence can be monitored. To accomplish this, they used contraband cell-phones, bought from prison guards anxious to cash in on the lucrative prison illicit market (where a $20 cell-phone can easily go for $350).

In the articles that were eventually written about the strike, much has been made of these cell-phones, both about the ingenuity of the prisoners and the illegal and high-priced nature of the phones themselves. It is worth noting, primarily, that these prisoners acquired and effectively used these phones under great physical and legal danger; being caught with one is a felony charge and might be accompanied by a ruthless beating from corrections officers.

Coordinating the protest action was done on cell-phones and by word of mouth. But without the cell-phones it would have been nearly impossible to overcome the initial media blackout of their protest action. After a couple days a few major outlets finally covered the prisoner strike, but this was only after the Georgia Dept. of Corrections (DOC) had declared that they had instituted a “lockdown,” and the story was generally reported as such (as opposed to a self-imposed work strike).

It was largely left to the alternative media (notably Black Agenda Report and “Democracy Now”), prisoners’ advocates like the Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners’ Rights (CCRPR), and the prisoners themselves to get the story out. The New York Times did not run a story on the strike until after the prisoners had contacted the paper themselves. But the prisoners took responsibility for advancing their message against all odds and had a fair amount of success given the initial blackout.

“The mere fact that this got the attention of the nation, that in itself is a lot, because once it got the attention of the nation, people began looking, people began inquiring. …  It was powerful,” said Robert King, author and Black Panther Party member who organized in Louisiana prisons in the 1970s and spent decades in prison when he was framed by prison officials as a result.

The capitalist media’s hesitation to report on the strike prompted accusations from prison activists that they were purposely withholding the story to prevent the strike from spreading. And while the prisoners struggled to find a hearing for their voice outside of the prison walls, they also faced severe repression inside the walls.

In a statement released New Year’s Eve, the CCRPR detailed a severe reprisal beating administered on accused striker Terrance Bryant Dean at Macon State Prison by prison guards.  On Dec. 16, the seventh day of the strike, Dean was reportedly carried from his cell cuffed at his hands and ankles, and beaten unconscious. He was then subsequently hospitalized. Reports of beatings aimed at breaking the strike were reaching activists in the CCRPR at this time, who then demanded that the DOC allow them to tour the affected prisons and talk to prisoners.

Even as the DOC allowed the CCRPR to tour the prisons they did not admit that at least one prisoner was hospitalized from a guard-administered beating. In addition to the plight of Terrance Dean and the strikers at large, the CCRPR has also stated concern for the 37 men that the DOC has identified as strike “conspirators,” who are likely being targeted for violence by the DOC. The CCRPR intends to release a full report on its investigations and the prison visits it has conducted.

Mainstream analysts believe that Georgia is currently facing $2 billion in budget cuts, and that the state is poised to cut services and funding to prisoners even further, rather than grant prisoners’ wishes. Refusing to negotiate with the prisoners on these issues—while raining terror and brutality upon them—could have tragic results, as prisoners have been quoted in the press to the effect that cooler heads prevailed this time as prisoners decided what course of action to take; but that without any change the next action may be guided by those who favor violent protest.

These prisoners need allies on the outside of the prison walls who will assist them in building a mass movement dedicated to overthrowing this system of modern-day slavery, these warehouses of human beings. If the DOC sparks a violent confrontation it could turn into a bloodbath, which would generally serve the interests of the oppressors at great cost of human life for the prisoners. The real conditions of these gulags must be exposed, and this unjust system must be torn down as the French once tore down that old symbol of their own imprisonment—the Bastille. Please join with activists as we educate, agitate, and organize to end this oppression!

To see the full press release from CCRPR:

http://www.ushrnetwork.org/content/pressrelease/georgia-prison-striker-severely-beaten-department-corrections-cover

http://voiceofdetroit.net/?p=3134