| Prison Legal News, a monthly print publication that covers criminal justice issues, is a project of the Human Rights Defense Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. |
|
How The BOP Uses CMUs To Silence Prison Writers Counting the days takes on a whole new meaning when you're 22 years into a 25-year federal drug sentence. I was biding my time in a federal prison in Arkansas in 2013 when I was abruptly yanked from the compound and thrown into the Special Housing Unit. The reason? Writing articles critical of the federal Bureau of Prison's Residential Drug Abuse Program, prison authorities intimated. Having been a prison writer for 21 years, I was accustomed to a bit of harassment. But this time was different. More extreme. After sitting in "the hole" under investigation for 30 days, I was informed by prison officials that if I kept writing I'd get transferred to a Communications Management Unit (CMU), where I'd sit in a roughly 6- by 9-foot cell, with all my external communications restricted and monitored, making it almost impossible to practice journalism. If I stopped writing altogether, I'd get nine months chopped off my sentence. Needless to say, I quickly put away my pen. A post 9/11 creation, "Little Gitmos" - a term the press coined for CMUs - were opened in 2006, drawing a torrent of criticism. Called the "black ops unit" or "where they keep the terrorists" by prisoners, the BOP's program statement says "the purpose of the CMUs is to provide an environment that enables staff to more effectively monitor communication between inmates in CMUs and persons in the community." This, they claim, is necessary to ensure safety and to protect the public. CMUs are hardly a new idea. ADX Florence, the BOP's Supermax has been around since 1994 when control and isolation units started popping up all over the country to house high profile prisoners like the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and Chicago's Gangster Disciples boss, Larry Hoover. In 2013 Mother Jones named ADX one of America's worst prisons and reported that the facility was "pretty close to hell." Read More |
Welfare and Imprisonment: How "Get Tough" Politics Have Excluded People From Society Opponents of the US prison-industrial complex have long insisted that the problem is bigger than the unprecedented number of people this country locks up. The problem is how much the criminal legal system penetrates the lives of the most marginalized members of society -- and how much it pervades the logic of the country as a whole. For critics of this vast carceral power, the challenge remains not only in undoing decades of public policy, but also in supplanting even more deeply rooted political logics that justify putting people in cages or otherwise violating and abusing them. This tendency has often been summarized as "law and order," referencing the language that conservative politicians from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump have used in rallying for repression. Yet such phrasing misses a crucial component of what led this country to be so punitive: politicians did not just crack down on "crime" -- they cracked down on whole communities. Criminalization did not just send more people to prison; it resulted in a wholesale exclusion of working-class communities of color from claims to citizenship. In Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America, historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann examines the two foundational realms of this crackdown. The ethos of "getting tough" was an article of faith among the New Right at that time. The same impulse that led Nelson Rockefeller to implement the harshest drug laws in the country in 1971 New York -- including a proposal that all drug dealers get life sentences -- also prompted Ronald Reagan to criminalize welfare recipients through a combination of surveillance, prosecuting alleged fraud, and massive reductions to the number of people able to receive welfare. Both men used such presumed toughness as evidence of their credentials for the presidency. Reagan succeeded in that effort in 1980, and used his popularity to advance an era of excessive spending on security and punishment alongside steep cuts to the programs that keep people healthy, educated and safe. Kohler-Hausmann focuses on three case studies: the Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York, criminalization of welfare and attacks on "welfare fraud" in California and Illinois, and sentencing reform in California. Getting Tough is policy history, but it incorporates a keen awareness of how social movements and other grassroots responses influence elites -- and not always in ways that the activists themselves may want. One of the book's strengths is its attention to the letters Reagan, Rockefeller and other politicians received urging them to get tough: to get rid of drugs and drug dealers, to end "welfare fraud," to not go easy on "criminals." Kohler-Hausmann is careful to show that this kind of populist conservatism was cynically managed -- at times even curated -- by elites to pursue their own ends. The more Ronald Reagan railed against "welfare fraud," for instance, the more letters he received complaining about that very topic. He then used those letters as evidence of public support for his austerity programs. Read More |
Oklahoma: Private prison company buys, then shuts down two Tulsa prisoner reentry facilities One of the country's largest for-profit prison corporations has closed two of the three Oklahoma facilities it recently purchased in a deal allowing it to acquire its biggest competitor here for state-contracted prisoner reentry services, The Frontier has learned. The closure of two facilities in Tulsa - Center Point Tulsa women's facility and Center Point Osage men's facility - follows the purchase of halfway house facilities in Oklahoma owned by the California-based nonprofit Center Point Inc. by CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America. The third Center Point halfway house facility that was part of the purchase, located in Oklahoma City, remains open. Prisoner halfway house facilities contract with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections to help offenders who are nearing release find jobs, get drug or alcohol addiction treatment and gradually re-enter society rather than being released directly onto the street. Prisoners are allowed to leave the facility to work or seek work, but they must report back to the halfway house afterward and staff members are required to constantly monitor the prisoner's whereabouts. The closure of the two facilities reduces the total number of available state-contracted halfway house beds in the state from 1,527 to 1,420, or seven percent, according to Department of Corrections records. Read More |
Virginia: Innocent man fighting to get conviction off record after near decade in prison Michael McAlister spent nearly 30 years behind bars for an abduction and attempted rape he did not commit. "It's too good to be true," McAlister said after being released. Keith Harward served 33 years for a murder and rape he had nothing to do with. "That's the worst part about this is my parents, it killed them, it devastated them," Harward told reporters when he left prison. And Thomas Haynesworth completed 27 years in prison for rapes though he too was an innocent man. "The evidence never pointed to me," Haynesworth said. All three were ultimately exonerated, one after another man confessed and the other two based on new DNA evidence. Read More |
New Mexico inmate obtains restraining order to breastfeed baby in prison A New Mexico inmate who is suing the state prison system because she hasn't been allowed to breastfeed her baby has secured a restraining order allowing her to do so. The Albuquerque Journal reports Monique Hidalgo filed suit against the Department of Corrections, its officials and two guards on Thursday. Hidalgo has been in prison since September 2016 after multiple probation violations in a drug case. The lawsuit states orders from Hidalgo's doctor and her baby's physician team say she should breastfeed her daughter to help her recover from being born addicted to opioids. Read More |
| 
| 
| Click photo to subscribe now |
|
From the PLN in Print Archives States Wrestle with Prison Privatization In 2016, questions were raised in at least three states about the amount of taxpayer money flowing into the coffers of private, for-profit prison companies. Take Colorado, for example. When lawmakers were considering an almost $26 billion state budget last year, they noticed it included a curious last-minute addition: $3 million for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now known as CoreCivic). The Denver Post reported that the $3 million payment to CCA was drawn from money earmarked for the Department of Corrections that was set aside "in case the prison population increases faster than current forecasts." According to Colorado budget writers, the payment was needed to keep the CCA-operated Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington, Colorado from closing its doors. If the prison shut down, the state would need to relocate the 400 prisoners who were housed at the facility as of April 2016. While the Kit Carson prison has a capacity of about 1,450 beds, the fewer number of prisoners held at the facility meant it was not profitable for CCA. Yet even though the state Senate approved the $3 million payment to ensure the prison stayed open, CCA decided to close it anyway at the end of July 2016, resulting in 142 job losses. "It wasn't a total surprise," said Burlington economic development director Rol Hudler. "There is no question it was unprofitable for them. It had to be." The closure of Kit Carson had a major impact on the small town of Burlington, where the "prison paid $1.2 million in property taxes to fund schools, the city and county," according to the Denver Post. The superintendent of Burlington's School District noted "the quality of education will change," as local schools would lose $400,000 out of a $7 million budget, the local newspaper, the Burlington Record, reported in June 2016. Christie Donner, director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, lauded the closure of Kit Carson. "Prisons shouldn't be used as economic development," she said. "We cannot justify keeping people locked up so that a couple hundred people in Burlington can have a job. It's unethical. It's immoral to even think about that. We've got to have more sensible criminal justice policy than just mass incarceration." Read More |
| Click photo to subscribe now! |
|
NPAP CLE Seminar: Police Misconduct in the Age of Trump Register now for NPAP's 2017 edition of our annual CLE seminar at the National Lawyers Guild's #Law4thePeople Convention. Featuring Sarah Fech-Baughman, Jonathan Feinberg, Terry Gilbert, Paul W. Hughes, Javier Maldonado, Carl Messineo, David Milton, Carol Sobel, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, and Julia Yoo. More Info Here |
| HRDC Needs Your Help to Continue the Fight for Prison #PhoneJustice! Click the Banner to Donate Today! |
|
Tennessee: Clemmons Questions Metro Jail Contract with CoreCivic State Rep. John Ray Clemmons, a Nashville attorney and Democrat, is asking Mayor Megan Barry and the members of the Metro Nashville Council to reassess the city's contract with the city's contract with CCA, now known as CoreCivic, to manage the Metro-Davidson County Detention Facility in the wake of a massive scabies outbreak. The infestation of the rash-causing parasite at the prison has spread to dozens of inmates and at least 16 courthouse and Metro employees. Brian Todd of the Metro Public Health Department says 49 inmates have been "diagnosed with having a scabies-like rash," and although none of those cases have so far been confirmed to be scabies via laboratory test, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has consulted with Metro and "confirmed it is common to treat scabies without a lab confirmed diagnosis," per Todd. Although the health department was not notified of the outbreak until the middle of May, emails indicate it could have started as far back as January. Public Defender Dawn Deaner and General Sessions Judge Melissa Blackburn have harshly criticized how the outbreak was handled at a Council committee recently. Afterwards, Blackburn told The Tennessean that CoreCivic needed "to be held responsible for the deplorable health conditions" and showed "reckless disregard" for inmates, concluding, "I think the contract needs to be reviewed." Read More |
California jails won't be able to restrict face-to-face family visits for inmates under state budget deal California county jails will not be able to restrict face-to-face family visits for inmates under a budget plan approved Thursday by state lawmakers. The measure prohibits a local detention facility that offered in-person visitation as of Jan. 1, from converting to video-only visitation. Over the last five years, an increasing number of jails and prisons across California and nationwide have moved to offer Skype-like video visits through phone and computer screens. But some jails have used the video systems to replace on-site meetings that have traditionally occurred through a glass window. Under the budget bill approved Thursday, counties would not be allowed to charge for the first hour of video visitation or to charge at all when that video visitation takes place at the jail. Read More |
|
| |
|
|
