Time on Ice: Florida Officials Torture Prisoners With Freezing Strip Cells (2018)
By Kevin Rashid Johnson
When I first arrived in the Florida prison system on June 22, 2017, and was thrown in solitary confinement in the latest of numerous retaliatory interstate transfers for publicizing and resisting prison abuses, I questioned and discussed with numerous other prisoners our being forced to live in sweltering cells without air-conditioning, or fans, or any other protections against the severe Florida heat.
Many responded that in Florida Department of corruption (FDOC), officials deliberately use extreme temperatures to torture prisoners, especially targeting those of color and the mentally ill, and that many have died as a result. And it wasn’t just with the heat.
They forecasted that as soon as outside temperatures began to drop, I’d witness—and likely also experience, on account of my propensity to challenge abuses—the constant abuse of strip cells (namely the removal of all property with which they might keep warm from prisoners’ cells for 72 hours) in order to torture them in extremely cold cells.
When It’s Cold Outside…
Those predictions proved prescient…
As October arrived and outside temperatures dipped into the 50 to 60° range, I witnessed a sudden spike in the abuse of strip cells, and it’s been almost exclusively targeted at mentally ill prisoners and prisoners of color.
To speciously justify these abuses guards routinely lie, usually claiming falsely that the prisoner misused property items inside his cell in a manner that threatened prison safety or security. Often the claimed ‘threat’ is so patently absurd as to be laughable even if it were true—such as claiming the prisoner’s bed wasn’t properly made.
Sometimes they also fabricate a disciplinary report (DR) to create a record to make the strip cell appear justified. But the abuse occurs with such impunity and regularity that most times they don’t bother writing a DR, making evident that the prisoner did nothing wrong.
Not writing the DR is also portrayed by guards as a trade-off, to manipulate prisoners to not grieve (1) or otherwise challenge the abuse. Since, receiving a DR (of which prisoners are almost never acquitted) typically means an automatic additional six months in solitary confinement (euphemistically called Close Management in the FDOC).
Guards lie to put prisoners on strip cell upon their slightest whims—including obvious racial prejudice and intolerance of the mentally ill, out of spite for prisoners talking cell to cell, based on the guard’s grudge or foul mood, for a prisoner’s requesting emergency medical or mental health care, or for no discernible reason at all.
In only three months—October 2017 to January 2018—I witnessed and documented so many instances of this abuse that it would be unfeasible to list them all here. Therefore I will give just a random sampling.
… It Gets Cold Inside
Before setting out specific incidents of abuses of strip cell, I should explain why the cells here at Florida State Prison (FSP) for example become and remain extremely cold during cold weather, although the prison does have an internal heating system.
Each FSP cell has a large shuttered back window measuring approximately 2 1/2 feet by 3 feet, which opens to the outside. Because FSP is old and poorly maintained, most of the cell windows don’t close at all or all the way, or they have drafts.
Also, atop each cellblock are large exhaust fans that remain on at all times. These exhausts suck air into the cells through the open or drafty windows overpowering any potential in-cell heat with cold outside air, much like driving a car in the cold with the windows open. The cell temperatures therefore remain as cold or nearly as cold as the temperatures out-of-doors.
The cellblocks typically get so cold when the temperatures drop outside, that guards working them remain bundled up in their coats and hats, especially at night. Only when it becomes unbearably cold to them will they turn off the exhaust fan to allow their work areas outside the cells to warm up. This allows the cells to warm up also. I now come to specific instances of abuse of strip cells.
Group Freeze
On October 23, 2017, I was moved onto the third floor of one of FSP’s disciplinary cellblocks (B-wing), to serve a disciplinary sentence imposed for a DR falsified against me by a sergeant Alvin Cazee, in retaliation for my naming and quoting him in a recent article boasting about FSP officials having killed numerous prisoners and covered those killings up (2).
At that time outside temperatures were dipping into the 40s—50°s. Throughout my time on B wing the heating system was turned off as guards claimed the wing’s boiler was broken, but as already noted, even when on the heating system does not keep the cells warm.
On B- wing’s third floor there are 34 cells. On the day I was moved on to the wing there were eight prisoners on just that floor on strip cell, (all of them Black and Latino), including Steven Harris, #R53631; Eduardo Vargas, # AL61184; Thomas Valentine, #T62025; Thomas Partlow #J42484; Christopher McGrady, # B09103; and others.
That following night when they were on strip cell it was so cold that even those of us who had bedding, clothing, mattresses and even thermal underwear were cold. Many of us spoke up telling the wing sergeant to turn off the exhaust fan, specifically because of those on strip cell—to no avail.
Gregory Ashley
Gregory Ashley #W78952, one of the many men who forewarned me about the cold weather strip cell abuses, was himself a victim numerous times, simply because of being outspoken.
On December 24, 2016 he was ordered by a sergeant Warner to stop talking out of his back window to a prisoner in another cell. Ashley replied that if he was doing something wrong to write him a DR, but he was going to keep talking.
Incensed by Ashley’s defiant response, Warner left and returned with a captain William Hall and lieutenant Stephen Thompson who told him he was going on strip cell for allegedly covering his cell window. Ashley protested that he never had any covering over his window and had done nothing to go on strip cell. In turn he was repeatedly gassed and put on strip cell for three days.
As soon as his property was returned, Ashley filed grievances on the abuse, including informal grievance #1701-205-080.
In retaliation for his filing grievances against them, Hall, Thompson and Warner returned on December 29, 2016 and repeatedly gassed Ashley again and put him on strip cell for another three days.
Ashley received no DR for any claimed wrongdoing on either occasion. The responses he received to his grievances stated that his complaints were referred to the FDOC’s Inspector General’s office, which Office has been repeatedly exposed in the media and is notorious for ignoring and covering up abuses and killings of prisoners by FDOC officials. (3) Predictably, Ashley never heard anything from that office.
Corinthian Johnson
On October 18, 2017, Corinthian Johnson #B08931 was randomly targeted for strip cell for no reason. Upon protesting that he’d done nothing to be put on strip cell, he was repeatedly gassed and thereupon put on strip cell for three days.
To justify this abuse, a guard Lucas Karr fabricated a ridiculous DR against Johnson claiming that during the security round he observed Johnson wasn’t fully dressed in pants and shirt and his bed wasn’t properly made (DR number 205—172390—a copy of that DR is posted with this article). The DR falsely claimed that Johnson refused to obey Karr’s instructions to be fully dressed and to make his bed properly, which never happened, but even had it, there was obviously nothing done, or not done, that justified taking his property or gassing him.
Derald Young
Derald Young #A132676 is a chronic asthmatic who receives chronic medical care for his condition and often requires breathing treatment. On October 17, 2017 he needed his breathing treatment and told guards he was having a medical emergency. They refused to contact medical staff so Young tried to speak to the wing lieutenant Stephen Thompson about his situation.
Instead of contacting the medical department, Thompson maliciously put Young on strip cell, with no DR written. Young later wrote a grievance on this abuse.
On October 31, 2017 Young attempted again to address Thompson, this time about needing some missing legal property of his. Again, instead of addressing his issue Thompson told Young he was going on strip cell, stating his bed wasn’t made up properly, although it was. Young relinquished all of his bedding and clothing, except what he was wearing, because he couldn’t sleep the entire 3 days when last put on strip cell by Thompson due to the cold; also because cold aggravates and triggers his asthma.
In turn Thompson and a captain S. Lola had Young cell extracted. The ‘cell extraction’ team of 5 body armored guards beat Young at length (as is the common practice during cell extractions at FSP), including repeatedly punching him in the face and head using handcuffs as brass knuckles. (4)
Young consequently suffered a lacerated lip and brow, hemorrhages across the white of his right eye, and knots and contusions across his head and face. He received no medical care except you have a nurse wipe away the blood that covered his face, as the guards who’d beaten him cursed the guard who was operating a portable audio-video camera during the cell extraction, because he’d recorded part of the assault on Young. Young was then put on strip cell for 3 days. He received no DRs for any claimed misconduct neither on October 17 nor 31st.
Robert Griffin
On December 7, 2017 Robert Griffin #S12986, went to the FSP medical department and returned to his assigned cellblock—J-wing. Upon entering J-wing, the guard who was ‘escorting’ Griffin, named Chism, whispered something to the wing sergeant D. Tollefsrud, who then told Chism to lock Griffin inside the wing’s shower.
Several guards then went into and searched Griffin’s cell, and came out with nothing. Tollefsrud sent them back into the cell, and this time they took all of Griffin’s clothes out of his cell.
As they escorted him back to the cell he asked why his clothes were taken and was told, for his allegedly “altering state property.” He protested that they were obviously lying and playing games to set him up. Upon being locked inside his cell he was told to give them the clothes he was wearing, which he protested and refused to do.
In turn the guards called lieutenant Stephen Thompson and captain S. Lola to the wing. They then had Griffin gassed repeatedly, cell extracted and put on 3 days strip cell in a cell with a back window that doesn’t close, while outside temperatures were in the 40s.
The extraction team kicked, kneed and beat Griffin at length, including using handcuffs as brass knuckles. When he was brought out of the cell afterward, I observed Griffin’s resultant injuries, including a lacerated left eyebrow, swollen nose (which he believes is fractured), blackened bruises to his right eye which was swollen shut, multiple contusions, swelling and knots across his face. Griffin received no DR.
Rickie Watson
On December 29, 2017 Ricky Watson #B11163, was standing at his cell door listening to a radio through headphones. A guard with a black eye who was working the wing began yelling and cursing at an unidentified prisoner to stop talking, which brought a taunting response, “That’s why you got a black eye now!”
The guard came to Watson’s cell, apparently because he happened to be standing at the door, and held up his pen at Watson, who asked what he meant by that gesture. The guard responded, “You already know,” and walked off. A few minutes later Watson was put on strip cell.
A DR was fabricated against Watson, to create a pretext for the strip cell. A guard R. McDade lied on the DR claiming falsely that he’d observed Watson with the state issued shirt tied around his head, his mattress on the cell floor instead of on the bunk and a blanket covering his cell’s back window. McDade claimed he ordered Watson to remove the shirt and blanket and to place the mattress on the bunk and Watson refused. Which didn’t happen. (DR # 205—172952).
McDade crafted the DR so to justify targeting Watson’s bedding, mattress and clothes. Watson’s personal clothes were also confiscated with no explanation, including his thermal underwear and sweatshirt. This was all done so he’d suffer on three days strip cell with nothing in the cell to keep warm with while it was extremely cold in the cells.
Elijah Bowden
During late autumn and winter FSP officials are required to provide prisoners extra blankets specifically because the cells become extremely cold. FSP officials have a set of housing rules in solitary confinement that require prisoners to have their beds made and to remain fully dressed in pants and shirt from 7am to 4pm while in their cells. A prisoner may lay on his bed so long as it remains made up.
On November 29th 2017 at around 7:10 am Elijah Bowden #T00793 was lying on top of his made up bed, but lying under his extra blanket because the cell was extremely cold.
Because he was lying under his extra blanket, a guard Econom had Bowden and put on strip cell. To bolster the pretext for this, Econom lied claiming Bowden was not fully dressed and his bed wasn’t made, and he refused to obey orders to dress and make his bed. A DR was written to this effect. (DR number 205—172693). Clearly the accusations against Bowden presented no threat, yet captain William Hall and lieutenant Stephen Thompson put him on strip cell in an extremely cold cell with nothing except his boxer shorts.
Bowden was so cold that he could not sleep the entire three days and sat by the cell door on a steel locker shivering violently.
On December 27 he filed a formal grievance complaining in part that, “the property restriction was completely unauthorized by [Florida Administrative Code] rule 33—601.800 (10)(a), (b) and (c) … because I was not doing anything remotely close to deserving or warranting the action. Nevertheless I almost froze to death for 3 days in the middle of winter in this cell in violation of the rule while I had been lied on by Officer Econom….”
In response to this grievance assistant warden (as acting warden) Jeffrey McClelland admitted the strip cell torture was imposed for Brown’s alleged disobedience as a “management tool.” (Grievance #1801—205—002).
Diaunte Byrd
Just as I began writing this article on January 8, 2018 I witnessed yet another prisoner fall victim to strip cell upon guards lying on him. I listened as Diante Byrd #T53983 complained to a guard C. Collins that he had a medical emergency and needed to see medical staff. Collins told him to shut up or he was going on strip cell.
Byrd persisted that he had a pressing medical problem and announced for the audio surveillance system in the cellblock that he had a medical emergency, and staff were unresponsive. In turn Collins yelled to Byrd to pack up his property because he was going on strip cell.
Collins and sergeant D. Tollefsrud called lieutenant Stephen Thompson to the wing, who told Byrd he wasn’t interested in anything he had to say, and to submit to a strip search and being handcuffed to go on strip cell, or he’d be gassed. And so it went. Byrd complied and was put on three days strip cell.
I listened as the guards concocted a lie that Byrd had his cell door window covered and refused orders to uncover it as a typical pretext for the strip cell. He was then written a bogus DR.
They Got Me Too
On November 21, 2017 a white guard Modi Tovaas had me put on strip cell after trying unsuccessfully the prior night to do the same, by claiming falsely that I had a sheet covering my back window, after referring to me as “one of these smart niggers,” and stating that I had crossed “the brotherhood.”
He fabricated a DR claiming I’d defied his orders to uncover the window. (DR # 205—172648).
A Culture of Lies and Abuse
It turns out that guards fabricating DRs is an entrenched cultural practice in the FDOC, whether to have prisoners punished, to extend their imprisonment, or to justify assaulting them. And it is widespread because guards aretaught to do it. As the Miami Herald learned from guards, this is part of a “code” taught by ranking officials. As one former guard reported:
” ‘First, they teach you how to write a false DR [disciplinary report] against an inmate. They tell you how to write it to ‘Make it stick,’ to use certain language. “Disciplinary reports result in loss of privileges and can also lead to delays in an inmates release.
“ ‘Sometimes they will even write it for you—all filled with lies so that they can say they beat or gassed someone because they deserved it’, he said.“Sometimes those reports written by corrections officers have a familiar cadence and wording.” (4)
As that guard reported,”he knew the [FDOC] was corrupt, but he was unprepared for how things really were.” (5).
And not only is the strip cell torture something that has been going on in the FDOC for a long time, but it was supposedly ordered stopped upon being exposed as one of many abuse tactics employed by former Warden Samuel Culpepper, at the notoriously abusive Northwest Florida Reception Center, where, as the Herald exposed, prisoners:
“Were stripped naked or down to their boxers at the whim of guards and had all their belongings and their mattresses taken away, then left around the clock on a cold metal bunk for 72 hours or more, with nothing to hold, not even a Bible….
“ Inmates complained that they would shiver, cold and petrified… .”(6).
Cullpepper was promoted to a regional director despite the torture and murderous abuse he orchestrated as a warden. But the
“DOC did, however, order Culpeper to ‘amend’ the manner in which he placed inmates on property restriction.
“In an email to NWFRC officers in July 2009, Culpepper said, ‘I’ve been called down on my interpretation of the rule and instructed to immediately cease utilizing property restriction as a discipline tool.”
“In the future, he told subordinates, inmates who fail to make their beds or keep their cell clean will be written up in disciplinary reportsbut not have their belongings taken away.” (7).
So the cold strip cell torture in the FDOC has been previously exposed and ordered discontinued, yet it persists.
And not just this, but to deprive prisoners of protection from extreme cold is to deny their fundamental right to shelter and is it illegal cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s 8th amendment. (8). Which is not just a human and civil rights violation but a federal crime. (9)
As already noted, this abuse is going on with the FSP warden’s express knowledge and approval as a “management tool.” In fact, prisoners suffering this torture are directly observed by all FSP administrative officials, who make inspections in the cellblocks at least weekly and look in on each prisoner, as do mental health staff. Medical staff made daily rounds. And administrators from FDOC headquarters and regional offices tour the cellblocks, sometimes multiple times per month.
As Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, to understand society one need only look inside its prisons. I would add, to understand the nature of a society’s government one need only look at those who run its prisons. America is clearly ruled by a criminal fascist dictatorship shrouded in lies and democratic hypocrisy.
Dared to struggle there to win!
All power to the people!
____________
Notes:
By prisoners not grieving such abuses, there is no record of such patterns of abuse which prove valuable in the instance of outside investigations or litigation.
See, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Lynching Culture: Florida Officials Are Experts at Killing Prisoners by Natural Causes,” (2017) http://rashidmod.com/?p=2471
Mary Ellen Klas, “Florida Prison Inspectors Detail Alleged Interference in their Investigations,” Miami Herald, June 1, 2016; Paula Dockery, “Inspector General Fiasco Adds to Prison Woes, Florida Today, May 9, 2015; http://On.flatoday.com/1b EXGrT; Julie K. Brown, “Top Cop Accused of Thwarting Investigations Quits Florida Prison System,” Miami Herald, December 21, 2016.
Julie K Brown, “For Allegedly Brutal Prison Guard, Day of Reckoning Arrives,” Miami Herald, September 20, 2014.
Ibid
Julie K. Brown, “Culture of Brutality Reigned at State Prison in Florida Panhandle,” Miami Herald, March 21, 2014
Ibid
Federal court rulings on this point are legion. See, e.g. Chandler v Baird, 926 F. 2d 1057 (11th Cir. 1991); Antonelli v Sheahan, 81 F. 3d 1422, 1433 (7th Cir. 1996) (no blankets to combat cold); Murphy v Walker, 51 F. 3d 714, 720-21 (7th Cir. 1995) (no clothes, bed or bed clothing in mid-November); etc.
Violation of one’s federal civil rights is a crime under 18 U.S. Code Sections 242 and 243.
https://fighttoxicprisons.wordpress.com ... practices/
Police, prison and abolition
Re: Police, prison and abolition
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Police, prison and abolition
(twitter screen shots)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Police, prison and abolition
Make no mistake, black activists are being assassinated, this has gone way, way beyond coincidence. COINTELPRO, or something very much like it, is alive and well...
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Who was Muhiyidin d’Baha, Black Lives Matter activist gunned down in New Orleans?
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/201 ... ncart_push
Updated February 7, 2018 at 9:07 AM; Posted February 7, 2018 at 12:12 AM
Meet Muhiyidin d'Baha, the man who grabbed the Confederate flag on live TV | CBC
By Diana Samuels
dsamuels@nola.com,
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
Muhiyidin d'Baha, identified by the New Orleans Police Department as the 32-year-old man who died after being shot on Bienville Street early Tuesday (Feb. 6), was a Black Lives Matter activist from Charleston, S.C.
d'Baha, whose legal name is Muhiyidin Elamin Moye, made national headlines in February 2017 when he took a flying leap to wrestle a large Confederate battle flag from a protester in South Carolina, and the event was captured on video.
That incident occurred at an event at the College of Charleston, where activist Bree Newsome - known herself for climbing a flagpole to remove a Confederate flag at the statehouse in Columbia, S.C. - was speaking.
d'Baha was at the event, and told the Washington Post he was talking to elders in his group when he saw someone holding the flag.
"And I looked at our elders and I saw, like, fear in their eyes," he said. "And I saw them back up, almost. That was the moment for me. We're not going to pass this on another generation. Not another generation of people are going to be intimidated by this flag."
He leapt across caution tape and tried to grab the flag away to "help them understand what it is to meet a real resistance, to meet people that aren't scared," he told the Post.
He was charged with disorderly conduct and malicious injury to real property, according to The Post and Courier in Charleston. The sequence of events was caught on video, as well as on a live TV broadcast, and the footage rapidly spread online.
Muhiyidin d'Baha grabs Confederate flag at protest.
d'Baha is originally from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and moved with his family to South Carolina when he was 13, according to an interview in the New Yorker.
"As a kid, he got in trouble for stealing cars, but then he straightened himself out and went to a good magnet school; in college, he studied psychology and played football," the New Yorker article said.
In that interview, he spoke of the conflict he saw in "respectability politics," referring to what the article described as "voices of forgiveness" from the black church community in court proceedings for Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a black Charleston church.
"That was accommodating white feelings and white superiority. It was 'Yes, Massa, can I have another?'," he said in the interview. "But, at the same time, it was spiritual fortitude forged in a crucible of terrorism. It speaks of a spiritual level that I haven't attained... There has been an arrangement here, created over generations, to be able to endure terrorism. At this point, this is the way it is. We endure. We don't ask for more."
A candidate for mayor of North Charleston in 2019, Thomas Dixon, who leads an activist group there call The Coalition, told the Charleston City Paper that d'Baha was "a consummate social justice activist."
While the two disagreed on some matters, Dixon told the outlet, "we both understood that the mission and the message superseded differences, so we were always friends no matter what."
Dixon wrote in his activist group's Facebook page on Tuesday to meet that evening with flowers outside City Hall to remember d'Baha.
"My brother, I am eternally grateful to you and for you ... for your spirit that refused to accept injustice, your courage that showed the world that fear in the face of wrong was not an option, and your strength that kept you on the battlefield, even when no one else was there," Dixon wrote of d'Baha on the Coalition's Facebook page.
Brandon Fish, who described d'Baha as his "dear friend" in a social media post, wrote of the loss on Facebook. "We all have lost so much, so very much, whether you know it or not. This world was a better place because he walked around in it," Fish wrote, asking for respect for the family as more information is made available.
Damon Fordham, historian and author of a 2008 book, True Stories of Black South Carolina, wrote in a Facebook post he saw d'Baha last summer, before d'Baha "left for Louisiana, where he passed." Fordham said in the post d'Baha reached out to him for historical information to guide him, and referred to Fordham and his nephew as "big brothers."
"To those who complained of the apathy of the millennial generation, he was proof of the error of that thinking," Fordham wrote.
********************************************************
Who was Muhiyidin d’Baha, Black Lives Matter activist gunned down in New Orleans?
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/201 ... ncart_push
Updated February 7, 2018 at 9:07 AM; Posted February 7, 2018 at 12:12 AM
Meet Muhiyidin d'Baha, the man who grabbed the Confederate flag on live TV | CBC
By Diana Samuels
dsamuels@nola.com,
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
Muhiyidin d'Baha, identified by the New Orleans Police Department as the 32-year-old man who died after being shot on Bienville Street early Tuesday (Feb. 6), was a Black Lives Matter activist from Charleston, S.C.
d'Baha, whose legal name is Muhiyidin Elamin Moye, made national headlines in February 2017 when he took a flying leap to wrestle a large Confederate battle flag from a protester in South Carolina, and the event was captured on video.
That incident occurred at an event at the College of Charleston, where activist Bree Newsome - known herself for climbing a flagpole to remove a Confederate flag at the statehouse in Columbia, S.C. - was speaking.
d'Baha was at the event, and told the Washington Post he was talking to elders in his group when he saw someone holding the flag.
"And I looked at our elders and I saw, like, fear in their eyes," he said. "And I saw them back up, almost. That was the moment for me. We're not going to pass this on another generation. Not another generation of people are going to be intimidated by this flag."
He leapt across caution tape and tried to grab the flag away to "help them understand what it is to meet a real resistance, to meet people that aren't scared," he told the Post.
He was charged with disorderly conduct and malicious injury to real property, according to The Post and Courier in Charleston. The sequence of events was caught on video, as well as on a live TV broadcast, and the footage rapidly spread online.
Muhiyidin d'Baha grabs Confederate flag at protest.
d'Baha is originally from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and moved with his family to South Carolina when he was 13, according to an interview in the New Yorker.
"As a kid, he got in trouble for stealing cars, but then he straightened himself out and went to a good magnet school; in college, he studied psychology and played football," the New Yorker article said.
In that interview, he spoke of the conflict he saw in "respectability politics," referring to what the article described as "voices of forgiveness" from the black church community in court proceedings for Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a black Charleston church.
"That was accommodating white feelings and white superiority. It was 'Yes, Massa, can I have another?'," he said in the interview. "But, at the same time, it was spiritual fortitude forged in a crucible of terrorism. It speaks of a spiritual level that I haven't attained... There has been an arrangement here, created over generations, to be able to endure terrorism. At this point, this is the way it is. We endure. We don't ask for more."
A candidate for mayor of North Charleston in 2019, Thomas Dixon, who leads an activist group there call The Coalition, told the Charleston City Paper that d'Baha was "a consummate social justice activist."
While the two disagreed on some matters, Dixon told the outlet, "we both understood that the mission and the message superseded differences, so we were always friends no matter what."
Dixon wrote in his activist group's Facebook page on Tuesday to meet that evening with flowers outside City Hall to remember d'Baha.
"My brother, I am eternally grateful to you and for you ... for your spirit that refused to accept injustice, your courage that showed the world that fear in the face of wrong was not an option, and your strength that kept you on the battlefield, even when no one else was there," Dixon wrote of d'Baha on the Coalition's Facebook page.
Brandon Fish, who described d'Baha as his "dear friend" in a social media post, wrote of the loss on Facebook. "We all have lost so much, so very much, whether you know it or not. This world was a better place because he walked around in it," Fish wrote, asking for respect for the family as more information is made available.
Damon Fordham, historian and author of a 2008 book, True Stories of Black South Carolina, wrote in a Facebook post he saw d'Baha last summer, before d'Baha "left for Louisiana, where he passed." Fordham said in the post d'Baha reached out to him for historical information to guide him, and referred to Fordham and his nephew as "big brothers."
"To those who complained of the apathy of the millennial generation, he was proof of the error of that thinking," Fordham wrote.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Police, prison and abolition
Justice Poker
Sometimes capital punishment is just the luck of the draw.
By ANDREW COHEN
It’s hard to fathom a life more miserable than the life Renard Marcel Daniel has lived. Born into a world of chaos and violence, sexually abused as a child, laboring through his early teenage years in and out of school with significant intellectual disabilities, Daniel today sits in an Alabama prison for a double-murder he committed in September 2001. Convicted in 2003, he spent more than a decade on the state’s death row until, in 2016, he caught a break .
A random draw of federal appeals court judges on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals spun out three jurists, all of them appointed by Democratic presidents, who found in Daniel’s appeals merit the state courts of Alabama had not found. The panel unanimously concluded in May 2016 that Daniel’s lawyers likely had failed to provide him with competent representation during the penalty phase of his trial. And so the 11th Circuit returned the case to the lower federal courts for an evidentiary hearing.For years before this appeals court ruling, Daniel’s new lawyers had urged state attorneys to acknowledge their client’s obvious cognitive deficiencies. For years Daniel’s appellate attorneys had asked state judges to allow them to conduct discovery to highlight the ways in which trial attorneys had failed to present a reasonable defense for Daniel during the penalty phase of his case. And for years Alabama prosecutors and judges had refused. Didn’t just refuse on the merits of what Daniel’s attorneys were arguing but refused even to hold an evidentiary hearing to allow him to substantiate his claims.In preparation for the hearing the 11th Circuit ordered, state attorneys at last sent their own expert witness, a doctor, to test Daniel for intellectual disability. The result was a finding of an IQ of 48, far below the standard the U.S. Supreme Court has set as a minimum for the execution of the intellectually disabled. Faced with this medical reality, and strong allegations that Daniel’s trial attorneys really had let him down, state attorneys finally conceded. Early this month, Alabama agreed to vacate Daniel’s death sentence and turn it into a life sentence without parole. A court is expected to finalize the deal in the coming weeks. The prime lesson of the Daniel case isn’t that the state kept on death row for a decade a man who probably should not have been there. That happens often enough, in Alabama and other jurisdictions. The lesson here is that by sheer luck — a panel assignment under the 11th Circuit’s administrative rules — Daniel drew three federal judges into his case who were willing to act on his behalf. There are other judges on the 11th Circuit who might have been assigned to this case who likely would have rejected Daniel’s appeal and then justified the decision to do so with the same arguments Alabama’s judges used for so long. Maybe the U.S. Supreme Court, as Daniel’s execution grew near at some point, would have rescued him. Or maybe not. The truth is, with that 11th Circuit panel, Renard Marcel Daniel for once got lucky, if you consider a life sentence without chance of parole better than the death penalty. When Renard Daniel was three years old his mother killed his father with a shotgun. The little boy was in the house at the time. When Daniel was seven his mother remarried a man — a Vietnam veteran who reportedly suffered psychological damage from his duty — who she says came to terrorize the whole family for the next four years. Daniel’s stepfather, a man with a violent and uncontrollable temper, allegedly walked around the house brandishing a gun and a sash of bullets and “regularly beat” Daniel’s mother “and threatened her with various forms of torture.” This man also regularly beat Daniel. Once the beating was so severe Daniel’s kidney ruptured and he had to be hospitalized and taken from the family home. Why the boy was returned there, and what might have happened had he been placed more permanently in the care of the state, remains a tragic mystery. Soon enough, Daniel was back in that dangerous home. At age ten, and for years afterward, he was sexually abused by his stepfather and forced to engage in sex with his siblings while his stepfather watched. He was soon placed in special education classes in school after he was discovered to have trouble both learning and following directions. When he was 13 years old, school records revealed, he was reading at a second-grade level. His math skills also were considered “severely deficient.” Here was an intellectually disabled young black man — “experiencing nonverbal and verbal comprehension difficulties,” is how the Birmingham Public Schools Guidance Department put it — whose life story screamed out for the sort of institutional help that never came or, more accurately, came way too late.The story fast forwards now to 2001. And Daniel now is an adult and living in an apartment building in Birmingham. On the night of September 26, 2001, Daniel had a few beers and smoked a joint with a friend, George Jackson, and then went next door to play cards with a white couple, John Broadie and Loretta McCulloch, who by that time were very drunk. They played and then Broadie called Daniel his “Brother Nigger.” That set Daniel off, Jackson later told the police. Daniel argued with Broadie, Jackson testified, and then pulled out a pistol. Jackson says Daniel then shot the two victims, execution-style.
It didn’t take long for the police to come for Daniel. Jackson’s testimony incriminated his friend, and detectives found physical evidence linking Daniel to the crime. At trial, Daniel testified in his own defense and told jurors that it was Jackson who had fired the fatal shots. Jurors didn’t believe him. A panel of seven white jurors and five black ones convicted him quickly. Then something extraordinary happened. Five minutes after jurors returned their guilty verdict the trial judge tried to start the sentencing phase of the case. Daniel’s attorneys asked for an adjournment, until the next morning, to collect themselves. The judge gave them 30 minutes instead. Prosecutors presented no witnesses during this phase. Daniel’s trial attorneys brought to the stand his mother, who testified briefly about her son’s troubled upbringing. She identified only one specific instance of the abuse Daniel had endured at the hands of his stepfather. And then her testimony ended. Just two hours and twenty minutes after the penalty phase begin it ended with another jury verdict; this time a 10-2 verdict in favor of death. Because Alabama still allows non-unanimous jury verdicts in capital cases Daniel was sent to death row to await his appeals and, ultimately, an execution date. Daniel’s trial lawyers, private practitioners appointed by the court, did not stick around after the imposition of their client’s death sentence. The 11th Circuit tells us that “immediately after imposing the sentence the trial court granted trial counsel’s request to be relieved of any further responsibility in Mr. Daniel’s case.” Next came the appeals, with new lawyers representing Daniel, and a series of rulings by state and federal courts rejecting those appeals. Daniel had not sufficiently laid out his proof that his trial lawyers were incompetent, state attorneys argued and judges agreed, and the defense could not overcome the hurdles imposed on these sorts of cases by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the federal statute designed to expedite appeals. But Daniel did have a strong “ineffective assistance of counsel” case. In fact, he had a compelling one. Daniel could not afford an attorney, so his trial judge appointed two to represent him in the capital case. The first lawyer assigned to Daniel was Katheree Hughes. The second was Danita Haskins. Both had some experience with capital trials around that time. Neither returned my phone calls seeking their comment on how they handled the Daniel’s case and what they thought of the 11th Circuit ruling that is so critical of their work.What does “ineffective assistance of counsel” look like? Here’s what Daniel’s current attorneys alleged, what they told the 11th Circuit they would be able to prove at that evidentiary hearing that has been canceled as a result of the settlement in the case. Remember as you read this account that state attorneys were aware of these allegations for years and fought to defend the capital sentence despite those allegations. Remember, too, that some of these allegations may have fallen away by conflicting testimony during the hearing.Daniel says he first met his trial attorneys at the preliminary hearing in his case in October 2001, about three weeks after the murders, and then never spoke to them again for 16 months, until three days before the start of his death penalty trial. That gap alone raises questions about the commitment Daniel’s defense team brought to the case. Over and over again during those 16 months Daniel and one of his fellow inmates wrote to Daniel’s attorneys seeking a meeting between them and Daniel. Over and over again the attorneys allegedly ignored his requests.Things got so bad, in fact, that Daniel was able to get a complaint through to the Alabama Bar Association about the lack of representation he was receiving in the run-up to his trial. When his lawyers finally did meet with him, he says, they were more interested in talking about his bar complaint than they were in discussing the case with him. Daniel alleges that his family fared no better in getting through to his trial attorneys. His mother tried repeatedly to talk to lead counsel, Hughes, but say they got only a 20-minute phone call with him in which he “expressed no interest in meeting” Daniel’s mother “or having further discussions.” Daniel’s sister also claims she tried to call Hughes but could not get through. She says she even drove from Atlanta to Birmingham to see the lawyer but that he was “unavailable.”In these circumstances it is not hard to understand why jurors heard so little about Daniel’s upbringing during the mitigation portion of the penalty phase of his trial. None of the details of Daniel’s life until the moment of the murder would likely have spared him a conviction. This is not a case with an innocence claim at its core. But any one of these details of abuse and intellectual disability might have spared him from a death sentence. His trial lawyers did not make a “tactical” or “strategic” choice not to share this information with jurors. If you believe the Daniel family, his trial attorneys didn’t present this evidence because they did not take the time to discover it.
ORIGINALLY FILED Monday, January 29, 2018 at 10:00 p.m. ET
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018 ... tice-poker
Sometimes capital punishment is just the luck of the draw.
By ANDREW COHEN
It’s hard to fathom a life more miserable than the life Renard Marcel Daniel has lived. Born into a world of chaos and violence, sexually abused as a child, laboring through his early teenage years in and out of school with significant intellectual disabilities, Daniel today sits in an Alabama prison for a double-murder he committed in September 2001. Convicted in 2003, he spent more than a decade on the state’s death row until, in 2016, he caught a break .
A random draw of federal appeals court judges on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals spun out three jurists, all of them appointed by Democratic presidents, who found in Daniel’s appeals merit the state courts of Alabama had not found. The panel unanimously concluded in May 2016 that Daniel’s lawyers likely had failed to provide him with competent representation during the penalty phase of his trial. And so the 11th Circuit returned the case to the lower federal courts for an evidentiary hearing.For years before this appeals court ruling, Daniel’s new lawyers had urged state attorneys to acknowledge their client’s obvious cognitive deficiencies. For years Daniel’s appellate attorneys had asked state judges to allow them to conduct discovery to highlight the ways in which trial attorneys had failed to present a reasonable defense for Daniel during the penalty phase of his case. And for years Alabama prosecutors and judges had refused. Didn’t just refuse on the merits of what Daniel’s attorneys were arguing but refused even to hold an evidentiary hearing to allow him to substantiate his claims.In preparation for the hearing the 11th Circuit ordered, state attorneys at last sent their own expert witness, a doctor, to test Daniel for intellectual disability. The result was a finding of an IQ of 48, far below the standard the U.S. Supreme Court has set as a minimum for the execution of the intellectually disabled. Faced with this medical reality, and strong allegations that Daniel’s trial attorneys really had let him down, state attorneys finally conceded. Early this month, Alabama agreed to vacate Daniel’s death sentence and turn it into a life sentence without parole. A court is expected to finalize the deal in the coming weeks. The prime lesson of the Daniel case isn’t that the state kept on death row for a decade a man who probably should not have been there. That happens often enough, in Alabama and other jurisdictions. The lesson here is that by sheer luck — a panel assignment under the 11th Circuit’s administrative rules — Daniel drew three federal judges into his case who were willing to act on his behalf. There are other judges on the 11th Circuit who might have been assigned to this case who likely would have rejected Daniel’s appeal and then justified the decision to do so with the same arguments Alabama’s judges used for so long. Maybe the U.S. Supreme Court, as Daniel’s execution grew near at some point, would have rescued him. Or maybe not. The truth is, with that 11th Circuit panel, Renard Marcel Daniel for once got lucky, if you consider a life sentence without chance of parole better than the death penalty. When Renard Daniel was three years old his mother killed his father with a shotgun. The little boy was in the house at the time. When Daniel was seven his mother remarried a man — a Vietnam veteran who reportedly suffered psychological damage from his duty — who she says came to terrorize the whole family for the next four years. Daniel’s stepfather, a man with a violent and uncontrollable temper, allegedly walked around the house brandishing a gun and a sash of bullets and “regularly beat” Daniel’s mother “and threatened her with various forms of torture.” This man also regularly beat Daniel. Once the beating was so severe Daniel’s kidney ruptured and he had to be hospitalized and taken from the family home. Why the boy was returned there, and what might have happened had he been placed more permanently in the care of the state, remains a tragic mystery. Soon enough, Daniel was back in that dangerous home. At age ten, and for years afterward, he was sexually abused by his stepfather and forced to engage in sex with his siblings while his stepfather watched. He was soon placed in special education classes in school after he was discovered to have trouble both learning and following directions. When he was 13 years old, school records revealed, he was reading at a second-grade level. His math skills also were considered “severely deficient.” Here was an intellectually disabled young black man — “experiencing nonverbal and verbal comprehension difficulties,” is how the Birmingham Public Schools Guidance Department put it — whose life story screamed out for the sort of institutional help that never came or, more accurately, came way too late.The story fast forwards now to 2001. And Daniel now is an adult and living in an apartment building in Birmingham. On the night of September 26, 2001, Daniel had a few beers and smoked a joint with a friend, George Jackson, and then went next door to play cards with a white couple, John Broadie and Loretta McCulloch, who by that time were very drunk. They played and then Broadie called Daniel his “Brother Nigger.” That set Daniel off, Jackson later told the police. Daniel argued with Broadie, Jackson testified, and then pulled out a pistol. Jackson says Daniel then shot the two victims, execution-style.
It didn’t take long for the police to come for Daniel. Jackson’s testimony incriminated his friend, and detectives found physical evidence linking Daniel to the crime. At trial, Daniel testified in his own defense and told jurors that it was Jackson who had fired the fatal shots. Jurors didn’t believe him. A panel of seven white jurors and five black ones convicted him quickly. Then something extraordinary happened. Five minutes after jurors returned their guilty verdict the trial judge tried to start the sentencing phase of the case. Daniel’s attorneys asked for an adjournment, until the next morning, to collect themselves. The judge gave them 30 minutes instead. Prosecutors presented no witnesses during this phase. Daniel’s trial attorneys brought to the stand his mother, who testified briefly about her son’s troubled upbringing. She identified only one specific instance of the abuse Daniel had endured at the hands of his stepfather. And then her testimony ended. Just two hours and twenty minutes after the penalty phase begin it ended with another jury verdict; this time a 10-2 verdict in favor of death. Because Alabama still allows non-unanimous jury verdicts in capital cases Daniel was sent to death row to await his appeals and, ultimately, an execution date. Daniel’s trial lawyers, private practitioners appointed by the court, did not stick around after the imposition of their client’s death sentence. The 11th Circuit tells us that “immediately after imposing the sentence the trial court granted trial counsel’s request to be relieved of any further responsibility in Mr. Daniel’s case.” Next came the appeals, with new lawyers representing Daniel, and a series of rulings by state and federal courts rejecting those appeals. Daniel had not sufficiently laid out his proof that his trial lawyers were incompetent, state attorneys argued and judges agreed, and the defense could not overcome the hurdles imposed on these sorts of cases by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the federal statute designed to expedite appeals. But Daniel did have a strong “ineffective assistance of counsel” case. In fact, he had a compelling one. Daniel could not afford an attorney, so his trial judge appointed two to represent him in the capital case. The first lawyer assigned to Daniel was Katheree Hughes. The second was Danita Haskins. Both had some experience with capital trials around that time. Neither returned my phone calls seeking their comment on how they handled the Daniel’s case and what they thought of the 11th Circuit ruling that is so critical of their work.What does “ineffective assistance of counsel” look like? Here’s what Daniel’s current attorneys alleged, what they told the 11th Circuit they would be able to prove at that evidentiary hearing that has been canceled as a result of the settlement in the case. Remember as you read this account that state attorneys were aware of these allegations for years and fought to defend the capital sentence despite those allegations. Remember, too, that some of these allegations may have fallen away by conflicting testimony during the hearing.Daniel says he first met his trial attorneys at the preliminary hearing in his case in October 2001, about three weeks after the murders, and then never spoke to them again for 16 months, until three days before the start of his death penalty trial. That gap alone raises questions about the commitment Daniel’s defense team brought to the case. Over and over again during those 16 months Daniel and one of his fellow inmates wrote to Daniel’s attorneys seeking a meeting between them and Daniel. Over and over again the attorneys allegedly ignored his requests.Things got so bad, in fact, that Daniel was able to get a complaint through to the Alabama Bar Association about the lack of representation he was receiving in the run-up to his trial. When his lawyers finally did meet with him, he says, they were more interested in talking about his bar complaint than they were in discussing the case with him. Daniel alleges that his family fared no better in getting through to his trial attorneys. His mother tried repeatedly to talk to lead counsel, Hughes, but say they got only a 20-minute phone call with him in which he “expressed no interest in meeting” Daniel’s mother “or having further discussions.” Daniel’s sister also claims she tried to call Hughes but could not get through. She says she even drove from Atlanta to Birmingham to see the lawyer but that he was “unavailable.”In these circumstances it is not hard to understand why jurors heard so little about Daniel’s upbringing during the mitigation portion of the penalty phase of his trial. None of the details of Daniel’s life until the moment of the murder would likely have spared him a conviction. This is not a case with an innocence claim at its core. But any one of these details of abuse and intellectual disability might have spared him from a death sentence. His trial lawyers did not make a “tactical” or “strategic” choice not to share this information with jurors. If you believe the Daniel family, his trial attorneys didn’t present this evidence because they did not take the time to discover it.
ORIGINALLY FILED Monday, January 29, 2018 at 10:00 p.m. ET
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018 ... tice-poker
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Police, prison and abolition
Action needed! Pennsylvania DOC prison system threatens to ban Workers World newspaper for reporting on Florida prison strike
By Joseph Piette posted on February 7, 2018
Kamau Becktemba and Razakhan Shaheed at a protest at the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections headquarters in Mechanicsburg in 2014. The protest was for healthcare for political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is threatening to censor Workers World newspaper from being read by over 300 prisoners in the state system.
The immediate reason given in the DOC’s Jan. 29 letter is that “information contained on pages 1 and 6 calls for action that may advocate criminal activity within the correctional facility.” The title of the offending article by J. White in the Jan. 18 Workers World issue was “Fla. prisoners launch strike against slave labor.” (tinyurl.com/y8f4ntw8)
The DOC letter states that the Jan. 18 WW issue is being denied to inmate Julio Ortiz (FC8863) at State Correctional Institution Coal Township, near Shamokin, Pa.
State officials are giving Workers World 15 working days to appeal the denial. If the denial is not overturned, the Jan. 18 issue will not only be refused to Ortiz and other prisoners, but also Workers World will be placed “on the statewide reviewed publication list as ‘denied’ and it will be banned from all inmates in the Department of Corrections.”
Campaign to stop DOC censorship
Four issues of WW were denied to Pennsylvania prisoners in 2017. This time, the DOC is escalating its threat by planning to ban all issues of Workers World to all prisoners.
The DOC was forced to overturn its decision to ban the Aug. 31, 2017, issue of WW after a social media and press campaign urged readers to send letters and make phone calls to the DOC. (tinyurl.com/yb8br2xs)
As a result of the social media campaign, the DOC uncensored that specific issue. But it denied Workers World’s demand that each prisoner be awarded $50 for being refused the time-sensitive publication.
Florida prisoners demands
The DOC complaint charges that Workers World “advocates and lists demands for prison strike.” As is this newspaper’s right under the First Amendment, the Jan. 18 WW article does indeed list the demands of the heroic prisoners on strike that week in at least 17 Florida DOC locations. These demands were:
“1. Payment for our labor, rather than our current slave arrangement
“2. Ending outrageous canteen prices
“3. Reintroducing parole incentives to lifers and those with ‘Buck Rogers’ dates. (fighttoxicprisons.org)
“Along with these primary demands, we are also expressing our support for the following goals: 1) Stop the overcrowding and acts of brutality committed by officers through the FDOC. 2) Expose the environmental conditions we face, including extreme temperatures, mold, contaminated water and being placed next to toxic sites. 3) Honor the moratorium on state executions. 4) Restore voting rights as a basic human right to all.”
The Florida prisoners’ strike and their demands were reported in newspapers all over the world. Workers World articles on that event have as much right to be read by prisoners as any other newspaper or magazine, and especially so because its articles are written by activists in that people’s movement.
WW urges all readers, activists, writers and reporters to send complaints to Department of Corrections, 1920 Technology Parkway, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050, as well as 717-728-2573 and ra-crpadocsecretary@pa.gov.
(WW photo: Joseph Piette)
https://www.workers.org/2018/02/07/acti ... on-strike/
The 'authorities' are doing all in their power to isolate the incarcerated completely from the world outside. Denial of 'in person' visits, outrageous charges for prison phone use, the bitter war against clandestine phones all part of it. They got a really big school for revolution and don't know what to do with it.
By Joseph Piette posted on February 7, 2018
Kamau Becktemba and Razakhan Shaheed at a protest at the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections headquarters in Mechanicsburg in 2014. The protest was for healthcare for political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is threatening to censor Workers World newspaper from being read by over 300 prisoners in the state system.
The immediate reason given in the DOC’s Jan. 29 letter is that “information contained on pages 1 and 6 calls for action that may advocate criminal activity within the correctional facility.” The title of the offending article by J. White in the Jan. 18 Workers World issue was “Fla. prisoners launch strike against slave labor.” (tinyurl.com/y8f4ntw8)
The DOC letter states that the Jan. 18 WW issue is being denied to inmate Julio Ortiz (FC8863) at State Correctional Institution Coal Township, near Shamokin, Pa.
State officials are giving Workers World 15 working days to appeal the denial. If the denial is not overturned, the Jan. 18 issue will not only be refused to Ortiz and other prisoners, but also Workers World will be placed “on the statewide reviewed publication list as ‘denied’ and it will be banned from all inmates in the Department of Corrections.”
Campaign to stop DOC censorship
Four issues of WW were denied to Pennsylvania prisoners in 2017. This time, the DOC is escalating its threat by planning to ban all issues of Workers World to all prisoners.
The DOC was forced to overturn its decision to ban the Aug. 31, 2017, issue of WW after a social media and press campaign urged readers to send letters and make phone calls to the DOC. (tinyurl.com/yb8br2xs)
As a result of the social media campaign, the DOC uncensored that specific issue. But it denied Workers World’s demand that each prisoner be awarded $50 for being refused the time-sensitive publication.
Florida prisoners demands
The DOC complaint charges that Workers World “advocates and lists demands for prison strike.” As is this newspaper’s right under the First Amendment, the Jan. 18 WW article does indeed list the demands of the heroic prisoners on strike that week in at least 17 Florida DOC locations. These demands were:
“1. Payment for our labor, rather than our current slave arrangement
“2. Ending outrageous canteen prices
“3. Reintroducing parole incentives to lifers and those with ‘Buck Rogers’ dates. (fighttoxicprisons.org)
“Along with these primary demands, we are also expressing our support for the following goals: 1) Stop the overcrowding and acts of brutality committed by officers through the FDOC. 2) Expose the environmental conditions we face, including extreme temperatures, mold, contaminated water and being placed next to toxic sites. 3) Honor the moratorium on state executions. 4) Restore voting rights as a basic human right to all.”
The Florida prisoners’ strike and their demands were reported in newspapers all over the world. Workers World articles on that event have as much right to be read by prisoners as any other newspaper or magazine, and especially so because its articles are written by activists in that people’s movement.
WW urges all readers, activists, writers and reporters to send complaints to Department of Corrections, 1920 Technology Parkway, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050, as well as 717-728-2573 and ra-crpadocsecretary@pa.gov.
(WW photo: Joseph Piette)
https://www.workers.org/2018/02/07/acti ... on-strike/
The 'authorities' are doing all in their power to isolate the incarcerated completely from the world outside. Denial of 'in person' visits, outrageous charges for prison phone use, the bitter war against clandestine phones all part of it. They got a really big school for revolution and don't know what to do with it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Police, prison and abolition
Soffiyah Elijah: Lessons from Cuba’s Incarceration Model
A conversation between Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York, Soffiyah Elijah, and filmmaker Hyatt Bass.
By Hyatt Bass
Last summer I traveled to Cuba for the first time, strangely enough to learn about its prisons. I say strangely because while my preconceived notions of Cuban prisons were based mostly on Reinaldo Arenas’s powerful memoir Before Night Falls and the film adaptation directed by Julian Schnabel, which both paint a very grim picture of Arenas’s experience of incarceration in Cuba’s famous El Morro prison during the mid-1970s, the purpose of my trip to Havana was to learn about potential solutions to our own very broken criminal justice system in the US.
I went with a group composed mostly of New Yorkers working in the field of criminal justice reform and led by Soffiyah Elijah, executive director of the Correctional Association (CA) of New York. The only private organization in the state with unrestricted access to prisons, the CA makes routine inspections throughout New York, reports its findings and recommendations to the public, and advocates for a more humane criminal justice system.
In Havana, our group met with Cuban lawyers, supreme court and provincial judges, social workers, educators, and government officials in order to learn about the Cuban policies and practices regarding criminal trials, treatment of incarcerated people, juvenile justice, rehabilitation, and re-integration into society. Recently, Soffiyah and I discussed what we’d learned on our trip and what she has learned from studying the Cuban system over the past three decades.
—Hyatt Bass for Guernica Daily
Guernica: How did you originally learn about the Cuban criminal justice system and decide it was something you wanted to study?
Soffiyah Elijah: Back in the late 1980s, I took a trip to Cuba with the National Lawyers Guild. I had never had an interest in going to Cuba. But on that first trip I had an opportunity to visit a men’s prison, and I was really struck by everything that was so very different from my experiences as a criminal defense lawyer in the United States visiting clients in prison.
When we drove up to the facility, I kept looking for what I was used to here: high stone walls, lots of barbed wire, guard towers, guards with assault weapons. And I didn’t see any of that. We pulled up to a building that looked similar to a large elementary school, and when we entered the building, there was no metal detector, which was something else I wasn’t used to. And no one was checking my bag to look for weapons or contraband, and there was no sign-in book; none of the things that I was used to experiencing when I entered a prison in the United States.
And then our guide announced that we would have, say, maybe two or three hours at the facility, and we could take a tour with him but we were not restricted to staying on the guided tour. So I wandered off with a couple of other people from the Guild, and we just went around the prison and sat in people’s rooms on their bunk beds and talked with them and literally went wherever we wanted, and that was totally different from any experience that I have had in the United States. Even as the executive director of the Correctional Association now, with legislative authority to monitor prison conditions and go inside the facilities in New York, we don’t take unguided tours of any facility. It’s very scripted where we go, and we are always accompanied by prison staff for the entire visit.
The following year, I went to a women’s prison in Cuba, and they put on a cabaret. I remember sitting in this huge auditorium with hundreds of people, and there were prison staff, people from the community, and people who were incarcerated all on the stage performing together in costumes. Nobody was in a uniform except the superintendent of the facility.
So what got my brain racing was that those two experiences—the physical layout of the prisons, the fact nobody was in uniform, the intersection between the people from the community, the staff, and the people who are doing time—spoke to what I ultimately learned was a completely different view about people who have been convicted of crimes. You don’t have this demonization and stereotyping that we have here, where incarcerated people are so ostracized they’re like the untouchables.
I’ll be the last one to say that the two Cuban prisons I went to speak for all the prisons in the country. I couldn’t possibly say that. But I can say very clearly what I did see and experience. And I’m not suggesting the US system could be shifted to something like what I saw in those two prisons. That just seems so farfetched. But it definitely created a completely different atmosphere than what I’m used to.
Guernica: What are some of the practices that impress you most about the Cuban system?
Soffiyah Elijah: The Cuban approach to youth justice is far more in keeping with an understanding of human brain development and the need to treat youth differently from adults. Youth are placed in a boarding school type setting there. Scientific research has proven that the section of the human brain that is responsible for impulse control is the frontal lobe. This is the last portion of the brain to fully develop and it does not do so until the mid to late twenties. Most criminal behavior is the result of impulsive actions. Therefore, a rational and enlightened approach to youth justice must take into account the reduced criminal responsibility that should be attributed to young people.
Also, people are given the option to work while they’re incarcerated and to be paid the same amount that they would be paid if they had that job in the free world. And when they are being released, there is an effort to place them in a job analogous to what they were doing when they were inside. There is a work release program, too, that can significantly shorten your sentence.
Another thing that struck me was furloughs. They didn’t have minimum, medium, and maximum-security prisons. The distinction of security level was manifested in how often you got a furlough to go home for the weekend. So, a minimum-security person might get three furloughs a month. A maximum-security person only gets one furlough a month. And that was something very, very different to what I was used to here. We have different facilities for different security levels, and furloughs are not common throughout the US prison system.
Guernica: I remember we were told that the incarcerated person could dress in civilian clothes and go home to visit his or her family with a guard also dressed in civilian clothing. Additionally, while someone is imprisoned, there is a social worker who regularly visits the family to make sure the spouse, parents, and/or children are doing okay in that person’s absence.
Soffiyah Elijah: A total support system. And in Cuba, no matter where your crime was committed, if you’re going to be incarcerated, you will be incarcerated in the province where you live to facilitate close family communication, which is something that’s totally foreign here.
Guernica: What do you think would be the big obstacles to doing some of these things in the US?
Soffiyah Elijah: In order to really understand why the system is just so fundamentally different, we have to take a giant step backwards to look at what is the funneling source. Prisons in the US are tied to a profit margin. And in Cuba, prisons are tied to, and the society is focused on, valuing the human being. So everything that they do, from the education to the fact that the healthcare system is free, to the entire approach of incarcerating someone, is tied to how do we make the most out of each individual, because the view is that the human is the most precious resource that their country has.
We don’t value humans in the same way in the United States. We’re willing to put people on a conveyor belt in criminal court, off to prison, off to reentry, back to recidivism, back inside, without thinking about the long-term damage that we’re doing, not only to that person but also to their family, to their community, an ultimately, to our society. Only now is the dialogue starting to shift a little bit to think about those things, and sadly, in the US, what’s driving people to start thinking differently about it is they’re focused on how much it costs financially. Now some might say, well, I mean, the Cubans are focused on that too. But they never went down that path of bankrupting the economy on locking people up. Their whole system is geared towards if someone’s going to be incarcerated, what’s the shortest amount of time necessary, and what are all the things that we need to package around that person to help that experience give them the stepping stones so that they never come back.
Guernica: When you talk about valuing the human being in Cuba, I felt that so strongly when I was there. But it’s hard to speak about when you return, because people just look at you like you’ve lost your mind. They say, “You really drank the Kool-Aid.”
Soffiyah Elijah: Yeah. Far too often, once I say that I’ve seen this work in Cuba, people turn off. And I can’t say that, so it’s almost like a taboo. But the whole society cannot be staged. Right? It’s a different culture, a different outlook on life. One of the things that I find really interesting in Cuba, no matter what part of the country you’re in, whether people are living very, very poorly, or a better level of existence, Sunday evening, on a hot evening, after dinner, you see loads and loads and loads of families walking, just taking a stroll—the children, the parents—peacefully, but that is an activity, and it’s just very loving and nurturing. And I don’t mean like the land of milk and honey. The people are struggling, but they’re enjoying each other’s company. And having a peaceful coexistence.
Guernica: I don’t want to imply that Cuba is a total paradise, and I think we all carried a healthy balance of skepticism and openness into all of our meetings in Cuba just as we would do in similar meetings here.
Soffiyah Elijah: The thing that is most important about Cuba is it gives an opportunity for people to just go and see for themselves. It’s not all right. It’s not all wrong. It’s not all left. It’s not all right. It’s a different society, and my hope is that the embargo will end and then the travel restrictions will be totally eliminated, so that Americans are free to go and see and learn and experience friendships like they could do anyplace else.
Guernica: Why do you think your request for our group to visit a prison in Cuba was denied?
Soffiyah Elijah: We were not an official delegation and we were not requesting an inspection. I never received a denial, although of course, we could claim that if we did not get a yes we were denied. That fails to recognize the sensitive nature of the request in the first place in light of the long historical allegations of human rights violations by the US against Cuba that escalated in the 1990s, a few years AFTER I’d visited Cuban prisons. My recent request to visit a Cuban prison came in the midst of historical political negotiations to normalize relations between Cuba and the US. This important contextual framework is imperative in understanding the full significance of our trip at this historical moment.
Guernica: Something that really made an impression on me while we were there was the contrast between what we were hearing in our meetings about the treatment of people in prison there and what I was hearing from you whenever we got back on the bus in terms of the horrible abuses you’ve witnessed in New York prisons. Could you talk about that?
Soffiyah Elijah: So many horrific things happen here. One stark contrast is the routine use of solitary confinement in our prisons. The use of solitary confinement in the US is so abusive that it shocks the conscience. In February 2016 Albert Woodfox was finally released from prison after serving forty-three years in solitary confinement! Contrast this with the fact that they don’t use solitary confinement at all in Cuba. Another contrast is that in Cuba, if you’re sentenced to the death penalty, you have an automatic right of appeal all the way up to the National Assembly to decide on whether or not that sentence is going to be imposed, and the last time it was imposed was in 2003. Also, in Cuba, if someone is charged with murder, the very first thing that happens is a complete psychosocial evaluation, because there is an assumption that if someone’s behavior is so aberrant that they engaged in murder, there must have been something psychologically wrong with them. As opposed to the assumptions that are made here. Nothing, nothing like that happens here.
Guernica: My understanding is that in New York you have an established network of formerly incarcerated people and currently incarcerated people who let you in on what’s really going on inside the prisons so that if you visit and they try to present things as better than they are, you know it.
Soffiyah Elijah: Correct. Some of those people work here at the Correctional Association, and then we have a network of coalition members and advisory board people.
Guernica: What about Cuba? How do you know what’s really going on inside those prisons?
Soffiyah Elijah: I ask my friends there who know people who have been incarcerated there, “So tell me, what do people say was their experience?”
“What’s the real deal?” “This is what I heard at this lecture.” “This is what I heard here.” You know? “What do you see the police doing?” “What are people describing happened to them when they were incarcerated?” And they’re not describing these human rights abuses that are being reported in the United States. Now, obviously I haven’t been to every prison in Cuba. I haven’t talked to every person who’s ever been incarcerated. But I know that Cuba’s crackdown on corruption and violation of their public trust is very serious. So, I think that contributes to why they don’t have a police brutality problem and they don’t have an abuse problem inside the prisons.
Guernica: The Correctional Association of New York’s role in inspecting New York prisons and publicly condemning the abuses you yourself have seen and heard about firsthand are crucial to making the American system more humane. How do you reconcile what you like about the Cuban criminal justice system with the fact that an NGO like the Correctional Association could not exist there?
Soffiyah Elijah: First, your question presumes that an NGO like the CA could not exist. I do not feel equipped to make that assertion. It also, more subtly, presumes that only a CA-like structure can accomplish its goals and pursue its mission in Cuba. In light of the fact that the political infrastructure is vastly different in Cuba and the United States, such a presumption may be flawed.
The Correctional Association was founded over 170 years ago by very wealthy people who wielded tremendous influence in New York politics. It was headed by a socially conscious judge, John Edmonds, who was troubled by the conditions the people he sentenced to prison were forced to endure. He was disturbed so much by these conditions that he rallied his friends to join him in doing something about it. Using their political influence, they succeeded in getting the New York legislature to bestow upon them the authority to inspect all prisons and jails and report their findings. They were not given funding by the lawmakers. However, due to their own wealth, they were able to operate without it.
There is only one other private independent organization similar to the CA in the United States, The Pennsylvania Prison Society. Unlike the CA, it uses its access to advocate on behalf of individuals and does not pursue systemic change. It was founded in 1787. Many activists in the prison reform movement across the country have noted that it would be impossible today to replicate the CA in other states due to political resistance by lawmakers and policy wonks.
So, would it be financially feasible to create and sustain a CA-like organization in Cuba? The CA is almost totally funded by private donors and foundations. Philanthropic organizations do not exist in Cuba. Cuba is a very poor country and its resources are focused on feeding, housing, educating and caring for the health of the people. Similarly, very wealthy individuals do not exist in Cuba. Yes, some people are enjoying a somewhat higher quality of life, but the vast amounts of wealth that we see in the US are not the norm in Cuba.
The political feasibility question is undoubtedly what most people will presume is answered with a resounding no. However, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution are designed to build in opportunities for popular input by the people on a block-by-block basis and thereby facilitate a participatory governance structure. Despite their many successes, the Committees are mechanisms of the State and therefore are at least potentially less objective than an NGO like the CA could be. It may be difficult to determine whether or not the committees are sufficient to address the sorts of concerns that the CA has struggled to expose in the US.
Guernica: One of the things you yourself have been really instrumental in putting an end to in New York state is the practice of shackling women during childbirth and pregnancy. But I understand from the Correctional Association’s recent report on reproductive health that the majority of pregnant women are still being shackled in violation of the law.
Soffiyah Elijah: It’s true. It’s true.
Guernica: In one of our meetings in Havana, we asked if they shackle women during childbirth, and they looked at us like we were accusing them of some kind of barbarism. We explained with embarrassment that we were only asking if they engaged in the same practice that we have here.
Soffiyah Elijah: That’s a good point. Yeah. They couldn’t fathom how any society could think of shackling a woman when she was giving birth. Just being able to be in a society and hear how bizarre it is to them that we would shackle a woman while she’s giving birth, or while she’s pregnant at all—so, that kind of supports and fuels your righteous indignation to push back and advocate even harder to say, “No, I’m not crazy. I know that this does not have to be the norm, and what’s being done here is barbaric.”
https://www.guernicamag.com/hyatt-bass- ... ion-model/
A conversation between Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York, Soffiyah Elijah, and filmmaker Hyatt Bass.
By Hyatt Bass
Last summer I traveled to Cuba for the first time, strangely enough to learn about its prisons. I say strangely because while my preconceived notions of Cuban prisons were based mostly on Reinaldo Arenas’s powerful memoir Before Night Falls and the film adaptation directed by Julian Schnabel, which both paint a very grim picture of Arenas’s experience of incarceration in Cuba’s famous El Morro prison during the mid-1970s, the purpose of my trip to Havana was to learn about potential solutions to our own very broken criminal justice system in the US.
I went with a group composed mostly of New Yorkers working in the field of criminal justice reform and led by Soffiyah Elijah, executive director of the Correctional Association (CA) of New York. The only private organization in the state with unrestricted access to prisons, the CA makes routine inspections throughout New York, reports its findings and recommendations to the public, and advocates for a more humane criminal justice system.
In Havana, our group met with Cuban lawyers, supreme court and provincial judges, social workers, educators, and government officials in order to learn about the Cuban policies and practices regarding criminal trials, treatment of incarcerated people, juvenile justice, rehabilitation, and re-integration into society. Recently, Soffiyah and I discussed what we’d learned on our trip and what she has learned from studying the Cuban system over the past three decades.
—Hyatt Bass for Guernica Daily
Guernica: How did you originally learn about the Cuban criminal justice system and decide it was something you wanted to study?
Soffiyah Elijah: Back in the late 1980s, I took a trip to Cuba with the National Lawyers Guild. I had never had an interest in going to Cuba. But on that first trip I had an opportunity to visit a men’s prison, and I was really struck by everything that was so very different from my experiences as a criminal defense lawyer in the United States visiting clients in prison.
When we drove up to the facility, I kept looking for what I was used to here: high stone walls, lots of barbed wire, guard towers, guards with assault weapons. And I didn’t see any of that. We pulled up to a building that looked similar to a large elementary school, and when we entered the building, there was no metal detector, which was something else I wasn’t used to. And no one was checking my bag to look for weapons or contraband, and there was no sign-in book; none of the things that I was used to experiencing when I entered a prison in the United States.
And then our guide announced that we would have, say, maybe two or three hours at the facility, and we could take a tour with him but we were not restricted to staying on the guided tour. So I wandered off with a couple of other people from the Guild, and we just went around the prison and sat in people’s rooms on their bunk beds and talked with them and literally went wherever we wanted, and that was totally different from any experience that I have had in the United States. Even as the executive director of the Correctional Association now, with legislative authority to monitor prison conditions and go inside the facilities in New York, we don’t take unguided tours of any facility. It’s very scripted where we go, and we are always accompanied by prison staff for the entire visit.
The following year, I went to a women’s prison in Cuba, and they put on a cabaret. I remember sitting in this huge auditorium with hundreds of people, and there were prison staff, people from the community, and people who were incarcerated all on the stage performing together in costumes. Nobody was in a uniform except the superintendent of the facility.
So what got my brain racing was that those two experiences—the physical layout of the prisons, the fact nobody was in uniform, the intersection between the people from the community, the staff, and the people who are doing time—spoke to what I ultimately learned was a completely different view about people who have been convicted of crimes. You don’t have this demonization and stereotyping that we have here, where incarcerated people are so ostracized they’re like the untouchables.
I’ll be the last one to say that the two Cuban prisons I went to speak for all the prisons in the country. I couldn’t possibly say that. But I can say very clearly what I did see and experience. And I’m not suggesting the US system could be shifted to something like what I saw in those two prisons. That just seems so farfetched. But it definitely created a completely different atmosphere than what I’m used to.
Guernica: What are some of the practices that impress you most about the Cuban system?
Soffiyah Elijah: The Cuban approach to youth justice is far more in keeping with an understanding of human brain development and the need to treat youth differently from adults. Youth are placed in a boarding school type setting there. Scientific research has proven that the section of the human brain that is responsible for impulse control is the frontal lobe. This is the last portion of the brain to fully develop and it does not do so until the mid to late twenties. Most criminal behavior is the result of impulsive actions. Therefore, a rational and enlightened approach to youth justice must take into account the reduced criminal responsibility that should be attributed to young people.
Also, people are given the option to work while they’re incarcerated and to be paid the same amount that they would be paid if they had that job in the free world. And when they are being released, there is an effort to place them in a job analogous to what they were doing when they were inside. There is a work release program, too, that can significantly shorten your sentence.
Another thing that struck me was furloughs. They didn’t have minimum, medium, and maximum-security prisons. The distinction of security level was manifested in how often you got a furlough to go home for the weekend. So, a minimum-security person might get three furloughs a month. A maximum-security person only gets one furlough a month. And that was something very, very different to what I was used to here. We have different facilities for different security levels, and furloughs are not common throughout the US prison system.
Guernica: I remember we were told that the incarcerated person could dress in civilian clothes and go home to visit his or her family with a guard also dressed in civilian clothing. Additionally, while someone is imprisoned, there is a social worker who regularly visits the family to make sure the spouse, parents, and/or children are doing okay in that person’s absence.
Soffiyah Elijah: A total support system. And in Cuba, no matter where your crime was committed, if you’re going to be incarcerated, you will be incarcerated in the province where you live to facilitate close family communication, which is something that’s totally foreign here.
Guernica: What do you think would be the big obstacles to doing some of these things in the US?
Soffiyah Elijah: In order to really understand why the system is just so fundamentally different, we have to take a giant step backwards to look at what is the funneling source. Prisons in the US are tied to a profit margin. And in Cuba, prisons are tied to, and the society is focused on, valuing the human being. So everything that they do, from the education to the fact that the healthcare system is free, to the entire approach of incarcerating someone, is tied to how do we make the most out of each individual, because the view is that the human is the most precious resource that their country has.
We don’t value humans in the same way in the United States. We’re willing to put people on a conveyor belt in criminal court, off to prison, off to reentry, back to recidivism, back inside, without thinking about the long-term damage that we’re doing, not only to that person but also to their family, to their community, an ultimately, to our society. Only now is the dialogue starting to shift a little bit to think about those things, and sadly, in the US, what’s driving people to start thinking differently about it is they’re focused on how much it costs financially. Now some might say, well, I mean, the Cubans are focused on that too. But they never went down that path of bankrupting the economy on locking people up. Their whole system is geared towards if someone’s going to be incarcerated, what’s the shortest amount of time necessary, and what are all the things that we need to package around that person to help that experience give them the stepping stones so that they never come back.
Guernica: When you talk about valuing the human being in Cuba, I felt that so strongly when I was there. But it’s hard to speak about when you return, because people just look at you like you’ve lost your mind. They say, “You really drank the Kool-Aid.”
Soffiyah Elijah: Yeah. Far too often, once I say that I’ve seen this work in Cuba, people turn off. And I can’t say that, so it’s almost like a taboo. But the whole society cannot be staged. Right? It’s a different culture, a different outlook on life. One of the things that I find really interesting in Cuba, no matter what part of the country you’re in, whether people are living very, very poorly, or a better level of existence, Sunday evening, on a hot evening, after dinner, you see loads and loads and loads of families walking, just taking a stroll—the children, the parents—peacefully, but that is an activity, and it’s just very loving and nurturing. And I don’t mean like the land of milk and honey. The people are struggling, but they’re enjoying each other’s company. And having a peaceful coexistence.
Guernica: I don’t want to imply that Cuba is a total paradise, and I think we all carried a healthy balance of skepticism and openness into all of our meetings in Cuba just as we would do in similar meetings here.
Soffiyah Elijah: The thing that is most important about Cuba is it gives an opportunity for people to just go and see for themselves. It’s not all right. It’s not all wrong. It’s not all left. It’s not all right. It’s a different society, and my hope is that the embargo will end and then the travel restrictions will be totally eliminated, so that Americans are free to go and see and learn and experience friendships like they could do anyplace else.
Guernica: Why do you think your request for our group to visit a prison in Cuba was denied?
Soffiyah Elijah: We were not an official delegation and we were not requesting an inspection. I never received a denial, although of course, we could claim that if we did not get a yes we were denied. That fails to recognize the sensitive nature of the request in the first place in light of the long historical allegations of human rights violations by the US against Cuba that escalated in the 1990s, a few years AFTER I’d visited Cuban prisons. My recent request to visit a Cuban prison came in the midst of historical political negotiations to normalize relations between Cuba and the US. This important contextual framework is imperative in understanding the full significance of our trip at this historical moment.
Guernica: Something that really made an impression on me while we were there was the contrast between what we were hearing in our meetings about the treatment of people in prison there and what I was hearing from you whenever we got back on the bus in terms of the horrible abuses you’ve witnessed in New York prisons. Could you talk about that?
Soffiyah Elijah: So many horrific things happen here. One stark contrast is the routine use of solitary confinement in our prisons. The use of solitary confinement in the US is so abusive that it shocks the conscience. In February 2016 Albert Woodfox was finally released from prison after serving forty-three years in solitary confinement! Contrast this with the fact that they don’t use solitary confinement at all in Cuba. Another contrast is that in Cuba, if you’re sentenced to the death penalty, you have an automatic right of appeal all the way up to the National Assembly to decide on whether or not that sentence is going to be imposed, and the last time it was imposed was in 2003. Also, in Cuba, if someone is charged with murder, the very first thing that happens is a complete psychosocial evaluation, because there is an assumption that if someone’s behavior is so aberrant that they engaged in murder, there must have been something psychologically wrong with them. As opposed to the assumptions that are made here. Nothing, nothing like that happens here.
Guernica: My understanding is that in New York you have an established network of formerly incarcerated people and currently incarcerated people who let you in on what’s really going on inside the prisons so that if you visit and they try to present things as better than they are, you know it.
Soffiyah Elijah: Correct. Some of those people work here at the Correctional Association, and then we have a network of coalition members and advisory board people.
Guernica: What about Cuba? How do you know what’s really going on inside those prisons?
Soffiyah Elijah: I ask my friends there who know people who have been incarcerated there, “So tell me, what do people say was their experience?”
“What’s the real deal?” “This is what I heard at this lecture.” “This is what I heard here.” You know? “What do you see the police doing?” “What are people describing happened to them when they were incarcerated?” And they’re not describing these human rights abuses that are being reported in the United States. Now, obviously I haven’t been to every prison in Cuba. I haven’t talked to every person who’s ever been incarcerated. But I know that Cuba’s crackdown on corruption and violation of their public trust is very serious. So, I think that contributes to why they don’t have a police brutality problem and they don’t have an abuse problem inside the prisons.
Guernica: The Correctional Association of New York’s role in inspecting New York prisons and publicly condemning the abuses you yourself have seen and heard about firsthand are crucial to making the American system more humane. How do you reconcile what you like about the Cuban criminal justice system with the fact that an NGO like the Correctional Association could not exist there?
Soffiyah Elijah: First, your question presumes that an NGO like the CA could not exist. I do not feel equipped to make that assertion. It also, more subtly, presumes that only a CA-like structure can accomplish its goals and pursue its mission in Cuba. In light of the fact that the political infrastructure is vastly different in Cuba and the United States, such a presumption may be flawed.
The Correctional Association was founded over 170 years ago by very wealthy people who wielded tremendous influence in New York politics. It was headed by a socially conscious judge, John Edmonds, who was troubled by the conditions the people he sentenced to prison were forced to endure. He was disturbed so much by these conditions that he rallied his friends to join him in doing something about it. Using their political influence, they succeeded in getting the New York legislature to bestow upon them the authority to inspect all prisons and jails and report their findings. They were not given funding by the lawmakers. However, due to their own wealth, they were able to operate without it.
There is only one other private independent organization similar to the CA in the United States, The Pennsylvania Prison Society. Unlike the CA, it uses its access to advocate on behalf of individuals and does not pursue systemic change. It was founded in 1787. Many activists in the prison reform movement across the country have noted that it would be impossible today to replicate the CA in other states due to political resistance by lawmakers and policy wonks.
So, would it be financially feasible to create and sustain a CA-like organization in Cuba? The CA is almost totally funded by private donors and foundations. Philanthropic organizations do not exist in Cuba. Cuba is a very poor country and its resources are focused on feeding, housing, educating and caring for the health of the people. Similarly, very wealthy individuals do not exist in Cuba. Yes, some people are enjoying a somewhat higher quality of life, but the vast amounts of wealth that we see in the US are not the norm in Cuba.
The political feasibility question is undoubtedly what most people will presume is answered with a resounding no. However, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution are designed to build in opportunities for popular input by the people on a block-by-block basis and thereby facilitate a participatory governance structure. Despite their many successes, the Committees are mechanisms of the State and therefore are at least potentially less objective than an NGO like the CA could be. It may be difficult to determine whether or not the committees are sufficient to address the sorts of concerns that the CA has struggled to expose in the US.
Guernica: One of the things you yourself have been really instrumental in putting an end to in New York state is the practice of shackling women during childbirth and pregnancy. But I understand from the Correctional Association’s recent report on reproductive health that the majority of pregnant women are still being shackled in violation of the law.
Soffiyah Elijah: It’s true. It’s true.
Guernica: In one of our meetings in Havana, we asked if they shackle women during childbirth, and they looked at us like we were accusing them of some kind of barbarism. We explained with embarrassment that we were only asking if they engaged in the same practice that we have here.
Soffiyah Elijah: That’s a good point. Yeah. They couldn’t fathom how any society could think of shackling a woman when she was giving birth. Just being able to be in a society and hear how bizarre it is to them that we would shackle a woman while she’s giving birth, or while she’s pregnant at all—so, that kind of supports and fuels your righteous indignation to push back and advocate even harder to say, “No, I’m not crazy. I know that this does not have to be the norm, and what’s being done here is barbaric.”
https://www.guernicamag.com/hyatt-bass- ... ion-model/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Police, prison and abolition
Mass Incarceration for Profit: The Dual Impact of the Thirteenth Amendment and the Unresolved Question of National Oppression in the United States
African Americans remain the targets of a system of institutional racism and super-exploitation
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Global Research, February 20, 2018
Note: This is a lecture which was delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit on Sunday February 18, 2018. Abayomi Azikiwe presented the sermon or message for the day on the history and contemporary significance of mass incarceration and its link to the enslavement and continued national oppression of the African American people.
***
I want to express my deep appreciation to the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit for extending another invitation to me to speak from this pulpit.
This institution remains as a vital source of inspiration for people in the city of Detroit from various backgrounds. Providing a platform for progressive ideas and social movements is critical during this time period.
As the United States faces profound challenges in the areas of race relations, class exploitation, the rights of immigrants, women and other marginalized groups, the threat of world war and other potential calamities, it is of utmost necessity that those concerned with advancing society towards a sustainable peace and social equilibrium have the opportunity to discuss these issues in a calm and reasonable fashion. Much of the discourse within the corporate and government-sponsored media does not lend itself to finding solutions to the monumental problems we are grappling with in contemporary times.
On a daily basis we are bombarded with images of displacement, dislocation, injuries, death and destruction. Although the U.S. is touted as a “peaceful” and “prosperous” country, “the wealthiest nation in the world”, there is much uncertainty, fear, trepidation and alienation.
The regularity of mass shootings, domestic violence, racial antagonism, misogyny and other forms of bigotry contradicts the official narrative which permeates the propaganda advanced by the mainstream press and the spokesperson for the administration in Washington, D.C. A cloud of routine avoidance of the real issues which concern humanity represents a dangerous phenomenon.
We have heard repeatedly from the oval office of President Donald Trump that the economy is booming, with unemployment being at its lowest levels in history accompanied by skyrocketing business confidence in regard to investment and job creation. Of course these claims are not accurate. Even if they were it would not automatically wipe away the tears of family members and friends of those killed recently in the school shooting in south Florida.
Such fabrications cannot provide food, clothing and shelter to the tens of millions of impoverished people in this country and the billions more around the world. These delusions of grandeur cannot cover-up the loss of life in the theaters of war which the Pentagon is involved in throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The millions who are suffering in our society from the rising tide of racism and all forms of oppression cannot gain solace from the continued enrichment of a small minority of the population which shows blatant disregard and even contempt for the conditions of the downtrodden and destitute. Even here in the city of Detroit, the conditions and concerns of the majority African American population goes unheeded. The elusive emphasis by the powers that be is placed on making Detroit whiter and wealthier.
When an assertion is made that African American unemployment is at its lowest level in history we must recognize this as another falsehood emanating from a distorted view of the origins and development of America as a nation-state. In fact Africans were the only people brought to the shores of the former British colony of Virginia and other such outposts during the 17th and 18th centuries with a fulltime job waiting for them on the tobacco, sugar and later cotton plantations of east coast and the south.
The Thirteenth Amendment and the Continuance of African Slavery
This year represents the 150th anniversary of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which was ratified by the required number of states by 1868. Ostensibly the Fourteenth Amendment provided citizenship to African people who had been subjected to enslavement for two-and-a-half centuries.
Nonetheless, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 passed by Congress was designed to essentially provide the same guarantees related to due process and non-discrimination, empowering the federal government and its three branches of the executive, legislative and judicial structures to enforce these measures and to take punitive action against any persons or institutions which sought to deny African people such inherent privileges.
Just three years prior to the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment into federal law, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed in January by Congress and ratified later in December of 1865. This measure was supposedly designed to legally free Africans from slavery. However, a careful reading of the Thirteenth Amendment illustrates its dubious character, language which both frees people from involuntary servitude yet making exceptions under the guise of criminal conviction and sentencing.
The Thirteenth Amendment reads in Section One:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, nor any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Then Section Two states:
“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Understanding this contradictory character of the Thirteenth Amendment sheds light on the utilization of the criminal justice system in the perpetuation of bondage for the purpose of institutional racism and class exploitation. Why was it necessary to include language which maintained involuntary servitude within the prison system?
Any answer to this question must begin with the explanation that slavery is an economic system. It is a mode and relationship of production which is designed for the maximization of profit for the few landholding gentry. It was the Triangular Trade and chattel slavery which provided the wealth that spawned the rise of industrial monopoly capitalism beginning in the 19th century.
Two African historians documented this transformative economic process during the 1930s and 1940s. These scholars and political actors were Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois of the U.S. and Dr. Eric Williams of the Caribbean island-nation of Trinidad and Tobago.
Du Bois in his pioneering work entitled “Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880”, published in 1935, said that: “Slowly but mightily these black worker were integrated into modern industry. On free and fertile land Americans raised, not simply sugar as a cheap sweetening, rice for food and tobacco as a new and tickling luxury; but they began to grow a fiber that clothed the masses of a ragged world. Cotton grew so swiftly that the 9,000 bales of cotton which the new nation scarcely noticed in 1791 became 79,000 in 1800; and with this increase, walked economic revolution in a dozen different lines. The cotton crop reached one half million bales in 1822, a million bales in 1831, two million in 1840, three million in 1852, and in the year of secession, stood at the then enormous total of five million bales. Such facts and others, coupled with the increase of the slaves to which they were related as both cause and effect, meant a new world; and all the more so because with increase in American cotton and Negro slaves, came both by chance and ingenuity new miracles for manufacturing, and particularly for the spinning and weaving of cloth.” (p. 10)This same study continues noting in regard to our subject today:
“As slavery grew to a system and the Cotton Kingdom began to expand into imperial white domination, a free Negro was a contradiction, a threat and a menace. As a thief and a vagabond, he threatened society; but as an educated property holder, a successful mechanic or even professional man, he more than threatened slavery. He contradicted and undermined it. He must not be. He must be suppressed, enslaved, colonized. And nothing so bad could be said about him that did not easily appear as true to slaveholders.” (pp. 12-13)
Nearly a decade after Du Bois penned Black Reconstruction Eric Williams published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. This study focused largely on Britain pointed to the direct trajectory of profit-making under the slave system and the rise of industry.
In chapter five of the book, Williams observes:
“Britain was accumulating great wealth from the triangular trade. The increase of consumption goods called forth by that trade inevitably drew in its train the development of the productive power of the country. This industrial expansion required finance. What man in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century was better able to afford the ready capital than a West Indian sugar planter or a Liverpool slave trader? We have already noticed the readiness with which absentee planters purchased land in England, where they were able to use their wealth to finance the great developments associated with the Agricultural Revolution. We must now trace the investment of profits from the triangular trade in British industry, where they supplied part of the huge outlay for the construction of the vast plants to meet the needs of the new productive process and the new markets.” (p. 98)
Williams goes on to chronicle the leading industries in Britain and their origins within African slavery. Banking, insurance, shipping and manufacturing were all fueled by the profits accrued from the super-exploitation of Africans.
Consequently, the economic system of slavery provided the necessary social ingredients to build a new mode and relationship of production, being capitalism. Through the new system mass production and international trade grew by leaps and bounds.
African slaves held in bondage and tortured in the United States
The transitional period from chattel slavery to industrial capitalism required regimentation and mechanisms to enforce conformity with the priorities of the social order. After the independence of the thirteen colonies from London, slavery continued. Alongside the system grew the correctional institutions which were designed to reinforce the status-quo. Some of the first prisons were established in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania.
However, as slavery expanded in the South, both law-enforcement and correctional facilities took on added significance. From the 1820s to the 1850s, Washington, D.C. itself was a major base for private prisons which held and later transported Africans to the slaveholding areas of the South.
Although President Thomas Jefferson signed into law provisions which prohibited the Atlantic Slave Trade in the U.S. in 1807, human bondage continued as a thriving enterprise. Inter-state trade in African people was rapidly expanding as cotton became the major industry of production and export.
A major institution designed to facilitate the domestic slave trade were private prisons. The opponents of this practice sought to have it regulated or outlawed during the 1820s to the 1850s. However, the private prisons continued operations well into the period leading up to the Civil War from 1861-1865.
There were many cases of free Africans being arrested and later sent into slavery. This was the fate of Gilbert Horton who was arrested in 1826 and held for a month on charges of being a runaway slave. A Congressman from Pennsylvania, Charles Minor, severely criticized the use of private prisons to service the slave system during the Horton matter. Horton was not released until he was able to provide references from Poughkeepsie which could substantiate that he was not a fugitive from bondage.
Many others were not so fortunate as to escape the clutches of the slave traders. One African woman in 1816 being held in a private prison in Washington, D.C. became so distraught that she attempted to take her own life. Anna as she is known through the records of the day, jumped from the third floor of a well-known slave prison. These events prompted Virginia Congressman John Randolph to speak out against the proliferation of such institutions.
Randolph called for the convening of a committee to investigate the circumstances prevailing in the private prisons in the nation’s capital. Randolph conveyed the plight of Anna stressing:
“A woman, confined among others, in the upper chamber of a three story private prison, used by the slave dealers in their traffic, was driven, by sorrow and despair at the idea of being separated from all that she held dear, to throw herself from the window upon the pavement.”
Evan Taparata in the 2016 article referenced above says of the period:
“Despite attention to private prisons in DC, substantive reform was elusive. In a renewed push to end the slave trade in 1848, Representative John Crowell of Ohio doubled down on the lack of oversight and visibility of private prisons. Crowell knew of a private prison near the Smithsonian Institute on the National Mall. The Smithsonian, Crowell noted, ‘was founded here for the diffusion of knowledge among men, and in full view of this Capitol, and the stripes and stars that float so proudly over it. But I fear, sir,’ Crowell continued, ‘we shall not be favored with the information’ about the injustices occurring in that prison.”
The Use of Private Prisons and State Correctional Facilities in the Aftermath of Slavery
Of course this practice of having private prisons as lucrative businesses at the service of chattel bondage did not end with the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Efforts to maintain African people as a principal source of free labor were maintained through a series of laws and social practices.
By 1877, the federal government under President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew any semblance of national support for Black Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist organizations were founded to restore the supremacy of the slaveholding class through intimidation, the denial of economic freedom and lynching.
African Americans continued to hold office in local and state structures within certain southern states such as Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina into the 1880s and 1890s. Overall however, there was very limited or no right held by African people that the white rulers were bound to respect.
Anna leaps off slave prison amid horrendous conditions in Washington, D.C.
The infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 ruled that segregation was perfectly legal under the U.S. Constitution. African Americans could be separated from whites on the basis that their facilities were equal to those of Europeans. This was clearly a false premise since enslavement, institutional racism and national oppression were mechanism devised by the ruling class to enable the ruthless denial of rights for the purpose of economic exploitation.
This remained the law of the land until 1954 when the Brown v. Topeka case related to segregated public schooling was deemed a violation of U.S. jurisprudence. Separate but equal was inherently unconstitutional said the Warren court. Subsequently though, almost nothing was done on the federal, state and local levels of government to breakdown Jim Crow.
It would take a persistent Civil Rights Movement which petitioned the courts for implementation of existing constitutional amendments and laws from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s along with mass protests, boycotts and urban rebellions which broke open the U.S. political and social system. Further legislation in 1957 (Civil Rights Act), 1964 (Civil Rights Act), 1965 (Voting Rights Act) and 1968 (Fair Housing Act) added additional measures re-emphasizing what had already been enacted from the Reconstruction era of 1865 to 1875.
Leading up to this period of the 1950s and 1960s, Taparata conveys as well:
“Yet private interests continued to play a major role in the prison industry. African Americans arrested in the Jim Crow South faced the prospect of convict leasing, a system of labor in which states leased out prisoners to private contractors who were more interested in boosting profit margins than ensuring safe working conditions and upholding the citizenship rights of African Americans.”
Many people were ensnarled in this process which specifically targeted African Americans through racial profiling. Charges of vagrancy, robbery, rape, assault, murder and other crimes became reasons to lock up African Americans forcing them into slave labor projects led by private businesses.
Untold numbers of people died on work crews which were composed of African Americans denied due process and the right to adequate legal representation. This same process continued openly well into the middle decades of the 20th century.
In some cases the private and state-sponsored prisons were former plantations where slaves were held and exploited for decades. Angola prison in Louisiana is one such example.
A widely-recognized book and PBS documentary by Douglas A. Blackmon documents the practice of forced slave labor during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Southern and Northern corporate magnates profited immensely from the continuation of slavery after the Civil War and subsequent constitutional amendments purportedly outlawing slavery and the systematic mistreatment of African Americans.
Blackmon paints a horrendous portrait of conditions facing the former enslaved Africans:
“Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible ‘debts,’ prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of ‘free’ black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.”
Mass Incarceration for Profit in the Post-Civil Rights Era
The passage of Civil Rights legislation, the emboldened African American political culture and the advent of a new stratum of public figures and social groups did not arise without institutional resistance. Concessions granted to African Americans were carried out under extreme pressure brought about through a series of inter-related actions and global circumstances.
Cold War attitudes linked the demand for equality and self-determination to world Socialism and Communism. After 1947, the administration of President Harry S. Truman oversaw the purging of trade unionists, artists, professionals and business people whose loyalty to U.S. capitalism and imperialism was questioned.
Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings where people were questioned vehemently about their possible beliefs in Communism. Such extreme displays of paranoia and persecution waned by the late 1950s although the underlying assumptions about the real objectives of creating a society based on equal rights and due process was still held up in suspicion.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) made no distinction between Civil Rights, Black Nationalism and Communism. Any effort aimed at elevating the status of African American was deemed to be automatically subversive.
Leaders and organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was investigated and destabilized right along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party (BPP). Systematic efforts were made through surveillance, the planting of slanderous material in the media and the framing of activists in concocted criminal plots were designed to both discredit and disrupt political activities.
Political assassination, long term prison sentences and forced exile were part and parcel of a program of social containment aimed at driving African Americans back into Jim Crow and slavery. With the assassination of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik Shabazz) in February 1965, Dr. King in April 1968 as well as the imprisonment and exile of other African American leaders while criminalizing their organizations, served to hamper the burgeoning struggle for genuine freedom and national liberation.
The advent of hundreds of urban rebellions and other acts of militant resistance during the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s were met with firm government repression. This state suppression of the rights of African Americans coincided with the re-structuring of the world capitalist system.
Municipalities such as Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Gary etc., lost millions of job held by African Americans. This was compounded by the outright defeat of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia by 1975. African liberation movements won significant victories in the late 1970s and early 1980s which weakened the grip of imperialism over the peoples of the planet.
Therefore, glancing back over these years it is not surprising that after 1980 there was a drastic increase in the rate of incarceration in the U.S. Over these 38 years, the prison population in the country has increased by 500 percent.
African Americans are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. A recent study by the Sentencing Project documents this racialized system of incarceration where African Americans and others are subjected to slave labor conditions and torture.
An article published in the Guardian reveals that:
“Black Americans were incarcerated in state prisons at an average rate of 5.1 times that of white Americans, the report said, and in some states that rate was 10 times or more. The US is 63.7 percent non-Hispanic white, 12.2 percent black, 8.7 percent Hispanic white and 0.4 percent Hispanic black, according to the most recent census. The research was conducted by Ashley Nellis, a senior research analyst with the Sentencing Project, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that promotes reforms in criminal justice policy and advocates for alternatives to incarceration. Nellis found that in five states, the disparity rate was more than double the average. New Jersey had the highest, with a ratio of 12.2 black people to one white person in its prison system, followed by Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and Vermont. Overall, Oklahoma had the highest rate of black people incarcerated with 2,625 black inmates per 100,000 residents. Oklahoma is 7.7 percent black. Among black men in 11 states, at least 1 in 20 were in a state prison.”
Overall the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) indicated that 35 percent of state prisoners are white, 38 percent are African American, and 21 percent are of Latin American descent. Combined Black and Brown people constitute nearly 60 percent of the incarcerated population in the U.S.
This process of mass incarceration serves several purposes. These men and women are forced to work under slave labor conditions therefore enhancing the profits for corporate interests which benefit both directly and indirectly from this set of circumstances.
Also the incarceration of oppressed peoples contains them socially and politically. These persons are withdrawn from the formal labor market allowing for the racially split workforce to remain dominant.
Large numbers of Black and Brown people funneled through the police stations, jails, prisons, and under judicial and law-enforcement supervision serves to reinforce stereotypes and pseudo-scientific notions of inferiority among the nationally oppressed. Whites are encouraged through this state of affairs to dismiss claims by African Americans and Latinos that they are actually victims of discrimination. These racist beliefs are reproduced through the jury selection process, verdicts, imprisonment and the treatment of former convicts within society.
The Sentencing Project provides data as well on the rise of private imprisonment over the last few decades. A report issued by them reveals:
“Private prisons in the United States incarcerated 126,272 people in 2015, representing 8 percent of the total state and federal prison population. Since 2000, the number of people housed in private prisons has increased 45 percent. States show significant variation in their use of private correctional facilities. For example, New Mexico and Montana incarcerate over 40 percent of their prison populations in private facilities, while states such as Illinois and New York do not employ for-profit prisons. Data compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) show that in 2015, 28 states and the federal government incarcerated people in private facilities run by corporations including GEO Group, Core Civic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), and Management and Training Corporation.”
This report continues emphasizing the numbers supplied by the Bureau of Justice Statistics which say:
“21 of the states with private prison contracts incarcerate more than 500 people in for-profit prisons. Texas, the first state to adopt private prisons in 1985, incarcerated the largest number of people under state jurisdiction, 14,293. Since 2000, the number of people in private prisons has increased 45 percent, compared to an overall rise in the prison population of 10 percent. In six states, the private prison population has increased 100 percent or more during this period. The federal prison system experienced a 125 percent increase in use of private prisons since 2000 reaching 34,934 people in private facilities in 2015.”
There has been a decline of 8 percent in the rate of incarceration in private prisons between 2012 and 2015. Nevertheless, with the coming to power of the Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed a policy of the previous President Barack Obama to decrease and phase out the use of private prisons for the housing of federal inmates.
The Trump administration has continued the persecution of undocumented and documented immigrant communities. Many of these inmates are housed in private prisons.
A former official of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has recently joined GEO, a major owner of private prisons as alluded to earlier. In late May 2017, Daniel Ragsdale, the former deputy commander at ICE, announced he would be resigning his position with the government to take up employment at GEO Group, which is the second largest private prison corporation in the U.S.
This career move by Ragsdale is surely aimed at strengthening the revenue-generating capacity of such private enterprises through the transferal of government funds. These policies go almost unnoticed by the general public which is whipped up into a false sense of insecurity through the xenophobic propaganda of a supposed threat from immigrants.
Conditions in these private correctional facilities which house immigrants are reportedly extremely dangerous. Inmates with health problems face imminent peril as in other publically-controlled institutions, medical treatment is routinely denied.
Long Term Implications of Mass Incarceration and the Privatization of Prisons
Placing people within correctional institutions for extended periods of time only benefits the racist capitalist system in the U.S. Although there may be an illusory sense of security through mass incarceration, deportations and the denigration of incarcerated persons, it is not in a real sense curbing crime and enhancing social stability.
Moreover, this system of criminalization of the nationally oppressed, the poor and immigrants is unsustainable. These conditions in existence within the U.S. further tarnish the image of the country by exposing America as a bastion of repression and national discrimination.
Slavery by any other name remains unjust. Involuntary servitude has no place within a democratic society. Methods of complete integration and the right to self-determination is the only solution to racial polarization and economic exploitation.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of activism within the prison population. Inmates have engaged in hunger strikes and work stoppages in protest against the dehumanizing conditions they are living in on a daily basis. From Georgia, to Florida and California, these prisoners are signaling to the broader society that change is inevitable.
Whether this change will be peaceful is largely up to the ruling class and their government allies who benefit from mass incarceration. Eventually the system will implode endangering the inmates and the elites who hold them captive.
Those of us concerned about eliminating racism and class exploitation must view the struggle of prisoners as an integral aspect of the movement to end injustice in the U.S. It is within our interest to tear down the existing system and create a society based on equitable security and mutual understanding among peoples.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/mass-inca ... es/5629726
African Americans remain the targets of a system of institutional racism and super-exploitation
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Global Research, February 20, 2018
Note: This is a lecture which was delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit on Sunday February 18, 2018. Abayomi Azikiwe presented the sermon or message for the day on the history and contemporary significance of mass incarceration and its link to the enslavement and continued national oppression of the African American people.
***
I want to express my deep appreciation to the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit for extending another invitation to me to speak from this pulpit.
This institution remains as a vital source of inspiration for people in the city of Detroit from various backgrounds. Providing a platform for progressive ideas and social movements is critical during this time period.
As the United States faces profound challenges in the areas of race relations, class exploitation, the rights of immigrants, women and other marginalized groups, the threat of world war and other potential calamities, it is of utmost necessity that those concerned with advancing society towards a sustainable peace and social equilibrium have the opportunity to discuss these issues in a calm and reasonable fashion. Much of the discourse within the corporate and government-sponsored media does not lend itself to finding solutions to the monumental problems we are grappling with in contemporary times.
On a daily basis we are bombarded with images of displacement, dislocation, injuries, death and destruction. Although the U.S. is touted as a “peaceful” and “prosperous” country, “the wealthiest nation in the world”, there is much uncertainty, fear, trepidation and alienation.
The regularity of mass shootings, domestic violence, racial antagonism, misogyny and other forms of bigotry contradicts the official narrative which permeates the propaganda advanced by the mainstream press and the spokesperson for the administration in Washington, D.C. A cloud of routine avoidance of the real issues which concern humanity represents a dangerous phenomenon.
We have heard repeatedly from the oval office of President Donald Trump that the economy is booming, with unemployment being at its lowest levels in history accompanied by skyrocketing business confidence in regard to investment and job creation. Of course these claims are not accurate. Even if they were it would not automatically wipe away the tears of family members and friends of those killed recently in the school shooting in south Florida.
Such fabrications cannot provide food, clothing and shelter to the tens of millions of impoverished people in this country and the billions more around the world. These delusions of grandeur cannot cover-up the loss of life in the theaters of war which the Pentagon is involved in throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The millions who are suffering in our society from the rising tide of racism and all forms of oppression cannot gain solace from the continued enrichment of a small minority of the population which shows blatant disregard and even contempt for the conditions of the downtrodden and destitute. Even here in the city of Detroit, the conditions and concerns of the majority African American population goes unheeded. The elusive emphasis by the powers that be is placed on making Detroit whiter and wealthier.
When an assertion is made that African American unemployment is at its lowest level in history we must recognize this as another falsehood emanating from a distorted view of the origins and development of America as a nation-state. In fact Africans were the only people brought to the shores of the former British colony of Virginia and other such outposts during the 17th and 18th centuries with a fulltime job waiting for them on the tobacco, sugar and later cotton plantations of east coast and the south.
The Thirteenth Amendment and the Continuance of African Slavery
This year represents the 150th anniversary of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which was ratified by the required number of states by 1868. Ostensibly the Fourteenth Amendment provided citizenship to African people who had been subjected to enslavement for two-and-a-half centuries.
Nonetheless, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 passed by Congress was designed to essentially provide the same guarantees related to due process and non-discrimination, empowering the federal government and its three branches of the executive, legislative and judicial structures to enforce these measures and to take punitive action against any persons or institutions which sought to deny African people such inherent privileges.
Just three years prior to the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment into federal law, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed in January by Congress and ratified later in December of 1865. This measure was supposedly designed to legally free Africans from slavery. However, a careful reading of the Thirteenth Amendment illustrates its dubious character, language which both frees people from involuntary servitude yet making exceptions under the guise of criminal conviction and sentencing.
The Thirteenth Amendment reads in Section One:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, nor any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Then Section Two states:
“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Understanding this contradictory character of the Thirteenth Amendment sheds light on the utilization of the criminal justice system in the perpetuation of bondage for the purpose of institutional racism and class exploitation. Why was it necessary to include language which maintained involuntary servitude within the prison system?
Any answer to this question must begin with the explanation that slavery is an economic system. It is a mode and relationship of production which is designed for the maximization of profit for the few landholding gentry. It was the Triangular Trade and chattel slavery which provided the wealth that spawned the rise of industrial monopoly capitalism beginning in the 19th century.
Two African historians documented this transformative economic process during the 1930s and 1940s. These scholars and political actors were Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois of the U.S. and Dr. Eric Williams of the Caribbean island-nation of Trinidad and Tobago.
Du Bois in his pioneering work entitled “Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880”, published in 1935, said that: “Slowly but mightily these black worker were integrated into modern industry. On free and fertile land Americans raised, not simply sugar as a cheap sweetening, rice for food and tobacco as a new and tickling luxury; but they began to grow a fiber that clothed the masses of a ragged world. Cotton grew so swiftly that the 9,000 bales of cotton which the new nation scarcely noticed in 1791 became 79,000 in 1800; and with this increase, walked economic revolution in a dozen different lines. The cotton crop reached one half million bales in 1822, a million bales in 1831, two million in 1840, three million in 1852, and in the year of secession, stood at the then enormous total of five million bales. Such facts and others, coupled with the increase of the slaves to which they were related as both cause and effect, meant a new world; and all the more so because with increase in American cotton and Negro slaves, came both by chance and ingenuity new miracles for manufacturing, and particularly for the spinning and weaving of cloth.” (p. 10)This same study continues noting in regard to our subject today:
“As slavery grew to a system and the Cotton Kingdom began to expand into imperial white domination, a free Negro was a contradiction, a threat and a menace. As a thief and a vagabond, he threatened society; but as an educated property holder, a successful mechanic or even professional man, he more than threatened slavery. He contradicted and undermined it. He must not be. He must be suppressed, enslaved, colonized. And nothing so bad could be said about him that did not easily appear as true to slaveholders.” (pp. 12-13)
Nearly a decade after Du Bois penned Black Reconstruction Eric Williams published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. This study focused largely on Britain pointed to the direct trajectory of profit-making under the slave system and the rise of industry.
In chapter five of the book, Williams observes:
“Britain was accumulating great wealth from the triangular trade. The increase of consumption goods called forth by that trade inevitably drew in its train the development of the productive power of the country. This industrial expansion required finance. What man in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century was better able to afford the ready capital than a West Indian sugar planter or a Liverpool slave trader? We have already noticed the readiness with which absentee planters purchased land in England, where they were able to use their wealth to finance the great developments associated with the Agricultural Revolution. We must now trace the investment of profits from the triangular trade in British industry, where they supplied part of the huge outlay for the construction of the vast plants to meet the needs of the new productive process and the new markets.” (p. 98)
Williams goes on to chronicle the leading industries in Britain and their origins within African slavery. Banking, insurance, shipping and manufacturing were all fueled by the profits accrued from the super-exploitation of Africans.
Consequently, the economic system of slavery provided the necessary social ingredients to build a new mode and relationship of production, being capitalism. Through the new system mass production and international trade grew by leaps and bounds.
African slaves held in bondage and tortured in the United States
The transitional period from chattel slavery to industrial capitalism required regimentation and mechanisms to enforce conformity with the priorities of the social order. After the independence of the thirteen colonies from London, slavery continued. Alongside the system grew the correctional institutions which were designed to reinforce the status-quo. Some of the first prisons were established in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania.
However, as slavery expanded in the South, both law-enforcement and correctional facilities took on added significance. From the 1820s to the 1850s, Washington, D.C. itself was a major base for private prisons which held and later transported Africans to the slaveholding areas of the South.
Although President Thomas Jefferson signed into law provisions which prohibited the Atlantic Slave Trade in the U.S. in 1807, human bondage continued as a thriving enterprise. Inter-state trade in African people was rapidly expanding as cotton became the major industry of production and export.
A major institution designed to facilitate the domestic slave trade were private prisons. The opponents of this practice sought to have it regulated or outlawed during the 1820s to the 1850s. However, the private prisons continued operations well into the period leading up to the Civil War from 1861-1865.
There were many cases of free Africans being arrested and later sent into slavery. This was the fate of Gilbert Horton who was arrested in 1826 and held for a month on charges of being a runaway slave. A Congressman from Pennsylvania, Charles Minor, severely criticized the use of private prisons to service the slave system during the Horton matter. Horton was not released until he was able to provide references from Poughkeepsie which could substantiate that he was not a fugitive from bondage.
Many others were not so fortunate as to escape the clutches of the slave traders. One African woman in 1816 being held in a private prison in Washington, D.C. became so distraught that she attempted to take her own life. Anna as she is known through the records of the day, jumped from the third floor of a well-known slave prison. These events prompted Virginia Congressman John Randolph to speak out against the proliferation of such institutions.
Randolph called for the convening of a committee to investigate the circumstances prevailing in the private prisons in the nation’s capital. Randolph conveyed the plight of Anna stressing:
“A woman, confined among others, in the upper chamber of a three story private prison, used by the slave dealers in their traffic, was driven, by sorrow and despair at the idea of being separated from all that she held dear, to throw herself from the window upon the pavement.”
Evan Taparata in the 2016 article referenced above says of the period:
“Despite attention to private prisons in DC, substantive reform was elusive. In a renewed push to end the slave trade in 1848, Representative John Crowell of Ohio doubled down on the lack of oversight and visibility of private prisons. Crowell knew of a private prison near the Smithsonian Institute on the National Mall. The Smithsonian, Crowell noted, ‘was founded here for the diffusion of knowledge among men, and in full view of this Capitol, and the stripes and stars that float so proudly over it. But I fear, sir,’ Crowell continued, ‘we shall not be favored with the information’ about the injustices occurring in that prison.”
The Use of Private Prisons and State Correctional Facilities in the Aftermath of Slavery
Of course this practice of having private prisons as lucrative businesses at the service of chattel bondage did not end with the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Efforts to maintain African people as a principal source of free labor were maintained through a series of laws and social practices.
By 1877, the federal government under President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew any semblance of national support for Black Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist organizations were founded to restore the supremacy of the slaveholding class through intimidation, the denial of economic freedom and lynching.
African Americans continued to hold office in local and state structures within certain southern states such as Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina into the 1880s and 1890s. Overall however, there was very limited or no right held by African people that the white rulers were bound to respect.
Anna leaps off slave prison amid horrendous conditions in Washington, D.C.
The infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 ruled that segregation was perfectly legal under the U.S. Constitution. African Americans could be separated from whites on the basis that their facilities were equal to those of Europeans. This was clearly a false premise since enslavement, institutional racism and national oppression were mechanism devised by the ruling class to enable the ruthless denial of rights for the purpose of economic exploitation.
This remained the law of the land until 1954 when the Brown v. Topeka case related to segregated public schooling was deemed a violation of U.S. jurisprudence. Separate but equal was inherently unconstitutional said the Warren court. Subsequently though, almost nothing was done on the federal, state and local levels of government to breakdown Jim Crow.
It would take a persistent Civil Rights Movement which petitioned the courts for implementation of existing constitutional amendments and laws from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s along with mass protests, boycotts and urban rebellions which broke open the U.S. political and social system. Further legislation in 1957 (Civil Rights Act), 1964 (Civil Rights Act), 1965 (Voting Rights Act) and 1968 (Fair Housing Act) added additional measures re-emphasizing what had already been enacted from the Reconstruction era of 1865 to 1875.
Leading up to this period of the 1950s and 1960s, Taparata conveys as well:
“Yet private interests continued to play a major role in the prison industry. African Americans arrested in the Jim Crow South faced the prospect of convict leasing, a system of labor in which states leased out prisoners to private contractors who were more interested in boosting profit margins than ensuring safe working conditions and upholding the citizenship rights of African Americans.”
Many people were ensnarled in this process which specifically targeted African Americans through racial profiling. Charges of vagrancy, robbery, rape, assault, murder and other crimes became reasons to lock up African Americans forcing them into slave labor projects led by private businesses.
Untold numbers of people died on work crews which were composed of African Americans denied due process and the right to adequate legal representation. This same process continued openly well into the middle decades of the 20th century.
In some cases the private and state-sponsored prisons were former plantations where slaves were held and exploited for decades. Angola prison in Louisiana is one such example.
A widely-recognized book and PBS documentary by Douglas A. Blackmon documents the practice of forced slave labor during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Southern and Northern corporate magnates profited immensely from the continuation of slavery after the Civil War and subsequent constitutional amendments purportedly outlawing slavery and the systematic mistreatment of African Americans.
Blackmon paints a horrendous portrait of conditions facing the former enslaved Africans:
“Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible ‘debts,’ prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of ‘free’ black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.”
Mass Incarceration for Profit in the Post-Civil Rights Era
The passage of Civil Rights legislation, the emboldened African American political culture and the advent of a new stratum of public figures and social groups did not arise without institutional resistance. Concessions granted to African Americans were carried out under extreme pressure brought about through a series of inter-related actions and global circumstances.
Cold War attitudes linked the demand for equality and self-determination to world Socialism and Communism. After 1947, the administration of President Harry S. Truman oversaw the purging of trade unionists, artists, professionals and business people whose loyalty to U.S. capitalism and imperialism was questioned.
Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings where people were questioned vehemently about their possible beliefs in Communism. Such extreme displays of paranoia and persecution waned by the late 1950s although the underlying assumptions about the real objectives of creating a society based on equal rights and due process was still held up in suspicion.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) made no distinction between Civil Rights, Black Nationalism and Communism. Any effort aimed at elevating the status of African American was deemed to be automatically subversive.
Leaders and organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was investigated and destabilized right along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party (BPP). Systematic efforts were made through surveillance, the planting of slanderous material in the media and the framing of activists in concocted criminal plots were designed to both discredit and disrupt political activities.
Political assassination, long term prison sentences and forced exile were part and parcel of a program of social containment aimed at driving African Americans back into Jim Crow and slavery. With the assassination of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik Shabazz) in February 1965, Dr. King in April 1968 as well as the imprisonment and exile of other African American leaders while criminalizing their organizations, served to hamper the burgeoning struggle for genuine freedom and national liberation.
The advent of hundreds of urban rebellions and other acts of militant resistance during the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s were met with firm government repression. This state suppression of the rights of African Americans coincided with the re-structuring of the world capitalist system.
Municipalities such as Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Gary etc., lost millions of job held by African Americans. This was compounded by the outright defeat of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia by 1975. African liberation movements won significant victories in the late 1970s and early 1980s which weakened the grip of imperialism over the peoples of the planet.
Therefore, glancing back over these years it is not surprising that after 1980 there was a drastic increase in the rate of incarceration in the U.S. Over these 38 years, the prison population in the country has increased by 500 percent.
African Americans are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. A recent study by the Sentencing Project documents this racialized system of incarceration where African Americans and others are subjected to slave labor conditions and torture.
An article published in the Guardian reveals that:
“Black Americans were incarcerated in state prisons at an average rate of 5.1 times that of white Americans, the report said, and in some states that rate was 10 times or more. The US is 63.7 percent non-Hispanic white, 12.2 percent black, 8.7 percent Hispanic white and 0.4 percent Hispanic black, according to the most recent census. The research was conducted by Ashley Nellis, a senior research analyst with the Sentencing Project, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that promotes reforms in criminal justice policy and advocates for alternatives to incarceration. Nellis found that in five states, the disparity rate was more than double the average. New Jersey had the highest, with a ratio of 12.2 black people to one white person in its prison system, followed by Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and Vermont. Overall, Oklahoma had the highest rate of black people incarcerated with 2,625 black inmates per 100,000 residents. Oklahoma is 7.7 percent black. Among black men in 11 states, at least 1 in 20 were in a state prison.”
Overall the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) indicated that 35 percent of state prisoners are white, 38 percent are African American, and 21 percent are of Latin American descent. Combined Black and Brown people constitute nearly 60 percent of the incarcerated population in the U.S.
This process of mass incarceration serves several purposes. These men and women are forced to work under slave labor conditions therefore enhancing the profits for corporate interests which benefit both directly and indirectly from this set of circumstances.
Also the incarceration of oppressed peoples contains them socially and politically. These persons are withdrawn from the formal labor market allowing for the racially split workforce to remain dominant.
Large numbers of Black and Brown people funneled through the police stations, jails, prisons, and under judicial and law-enforcement supervision serves to reinforce stereotypes and pseudo-scientific notions of inferiority among the nationally oppressed. Whites are encouraged through this state of affairs to dismiss claims by African Americans and Latinos that they are actually victims of discrimination. These racist beliefs are reproduced through the jury selection process, verdicts, imprisonment and the treatment of former convicts within society.
The Sentencing Project provides data as well on the rise of private imprisonment over the last few decades. A report issued by them reveals:
“Private prisons in the United States incarcerated 126,272 people in 2015, representing 8 percent of the total state and federal prison population. Since 2000, the number of people housed in private prisons has increased 45 percent. States show significant variation in their use of private correctional facilities. For example, New Mexico and Montana incarcerate over 40 percent of their prison populations in private facilities, while states such as Illinois and New York do not employ for-profit prisons. Data compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) show that in 2015, 28 states and the federal government incarcerated people in private facilities run by corporations including GEO Group, Core Civic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), and Management and Training Corporation.”
This report continues emphasizing the numbers supplied by the Bureau of Justice Statistics which say:
“21 of the states with private prison contracts incarcerate more than 500 people in for-profit prisons. Texas, the first state to adopt private prisons in 1985, incarcerated the largest number of people under state jurisdiction, 14,293. Since 2000, the number of people in private prisons has increased 45 percent, compared to an overall rise in the prison population of 10 percent. In six states, the private prison population has increased 100 percent or more during this period. The federal prison system experienced a 125 percent increase in use of private prisons since 2000 reaching 34,934 people in private facilities in 2015.”
There has been a decline of 8 percent in the rate of incarceration in private prisons between 2012 and 2015. Nevertheless, with the coming to power of the Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed a policy of the previous President Barack Obama to decrease and phase out the use of private prisons for the housing of federal inmates.
The Trump administration has continued the persecution of undocumented and documented immigrant communities. Many of these inmates are housed in private prisons.
A former official of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has recently joined GEO, a major owner of private prisons as alluded to earlier. In late May 2017, Daniel Ragsdale, the former deputy commander at ICE, announced he would be resigning his position with the government to take up employment at GEO Group, which is the second largest private prison corporation in the U.S.
This career move by Ragsdale is surely aimed at strengthening the revenue-generating capacity of such private enterprises through the transferal of government funds. These policies go almost unnoticed by the general public which is whipped up into a false sense of insecurity through the xenophobic propaganda of a supposed threat from immigrants.
Conditions in these private correctional facilities which house immigrants are reportedly extremely dangerous. Inmates with health problems face imminent peril as in other publically-controlled institutions, medical treatment is routinely denied.
Long Term Implications of Mass Incarceration and the Privatization of Prisons
Placing people within correctional institutions for extended periods of time only benefits the racist capitalist system in the U.S. Although there may be an illusory sense of security through mass incarceration, deportations and the denigration of incarcerated persons, it is not in a real sense curbing crime and enhancing social stability.
Moreover, this system of criminalization of the nationally oppressed, the poor and immigrants is unsustainable. These conditions in existence within the U.S. further tarnish the image of the country by exposing America as a bastion of repression and national discrimination.
Slavery by any other name remains unjust. Involuntary servitude has no place within a democratic society. Methods of complete integration and the right to self-determination is the only solution to racial polarization and economic exploitation.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of activism within the prison population. Inmates have engaged in hunger strikes and work stoppages in protest against the dehumanizing conditions they are living in on a daily basis. From Georgia, to Florida and California, these prisoners are signaling to the broader society that change is inevitable.
Whether this change will be peaceful is largely up to the ruling class and their government allies who benefit from mass incarceration. Eventually the system will implode endangering the inmates and the elites who hold them captive.
Those of us concerned about eliminating racism and class exploitation must view the struggle of prisoners as an integral aspect of the movement to end injustice in the U.S. It is within our interest to tear down the existing system and create a society based on equitable security and mutual understanding among peoples.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/mass-inca ... es/5629726
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Police, prison and abolition
Etowah sheriff pockets $750k in jail food funds, buys $740k beach house
Updated 8:02 AM; Posted 7:57 AM
Etowah sheriff pocketed over $750,000 in inmate-feeding funds
By Connor Sheets csheets@al.com
In September, Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin and his wife Karen purchased an orange four-bedroom house with an in-ground pool and canal access in an upscale section of Orange Beach for $740,000.
To finance the purchase, Entrekin got a $592,000 mortgage from Peoples Bank of Alabama, according to public real estate records. The home is one of several properties with a total assessed value of more than $1.7 million that the couple own together or separately in Etowah and Baldwin counties.
Some Etowah County residents question how a county sheriff making a five-figure annual salary can afford to own multiple houses, including one worth nearly three-quarters of a million dollars.
But ethics disclosure forms Entrekin filed with the state reveal that over the past three years he has received more than $750,000 worth of additional "compensation" from a source he identified as "Food Provisions."
Entrekin did not deny that he received the money when asked about it via email last week. Ethics forms he filed in previous years do not list any income from such a source.
Entrekin told AL.com last month that he has a personal account that he refers to as his "Food Provision" fund. And Etowah County resident Matthew Qualls said that in 2015 Entrekin paid him to mow his lawn via checks with the words "Sheriff Todd Entrekin Food Provision Account" printed in the upper-left corner. AL.com viewed a photograph of one such check.
The money in the account was allocated by federal, state and municipal governments to feed inmates in the Etowah County jail, but was not used for that purpose and was instead personally pocketed by Entrekin.
"In regards to feeding of inmates, we utilize a registered dietitian to ensure adequate meals are provided daily," Entrekin said Sunday via email. "As you should be aware, Alabama law is clear as to my personal financial responsibilities in the feeding of inmates. Regardless of one's opinion of this statute, until the legislature acts otherwise, the Sheriff must follow the current law."
Gallery: Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin's Orange Beach home, Marina Road
'More than $250,000'
Many Alabama sheriffs contend that the practice of keeping "excess" inmate-feeding funds for themselves is legal under a state law passed before World War II. Yet in a number of counties including Jefferson and Montgomery, any money allocated to sheriffs for feeding inmates that is not used for that purpose is instead turned over to the county government.
Entrekin reported on forms he filed with the Alabama Ethics Commission that he made "more than $250,000" each of the past three years via the inmate-feeding funds.
Tom Albritton, executive director of the ethics commission, said via email that the state does not require public officials to disclose exactly how much more income they received from a single source beyond the $250,000 threshold, which he said is "specifically set in the statute."
Meanwhile, Entrekin's annual salary as sheriff is $93,178.80, according to Jeff Little, human resources director for the Etowah County Commission.
Rainbow City Police Chief Jonathon Horton, who worked for the Etowah County Sheriff's Office under former sheriff James Hayes, is currently opposing Entrekin in this year's race for sheriff. One plank of Horton's campaign platform is a pledge to not keep any inmate-feeding funds.
"I believe the funds belong to the taxpayers and any excess funds should go toward things that benefit the taxpayer," he said in a March 1 phone interview. "There's been a tremendous amount of money left over that shouldn't be used as a bonus check."
Sheriff Todd Entrekin
http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index ... ver_7.html
Much more at link. This guy is so crooked that two deputies had to screw his pants on in the morning. And most of it 'legal', while inmates eat cat food. Corruption and racism, part & parcel of capitalism.
Updated 8:02 AM; Posted 7:57 AM
Etowah sheriff pocketed over $750,000 in inmate-feeding funds
By Connor Sheets csheets@al.com
In September, Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin and his wife Karen purchased an orange four-bedroom house with an in-ground pool and canal access in an upscale section of Orange Beach for $740,000.
To finance the purchase, Entrekin got a $592,000 mortgage from Peoples Bank of Alabama, according to public real estate records. The home is one of several properties with a total assessed value of more than $1.7 million that the couple own together or separately in Etowah and Baldwin counties.
Some Etowah County residents question how a county sheriff making a five-figure annual salary can afford to own multiple houses, including one worth nearly three-quarters of a million dollars.
But ethics disclosure forms Entrekin filed with the state reveal that over the past three years he has received more than $750,000 worth of additional "compensation" from a source he identified as "Food Provisions."
Entrekin did not deny that he received the money when asked about it via email last week. Ethics forms he filed in previous years do not list any income from such a source.
Entrekin told AL.com last month that he has a personal account that he refers to as his "Food Provision" fund. And Etowah County resident Matthew Qualls said that in 2015 Entrekin paid him to mow his lawn via checks with the words "Sheriff Todd Entrekin Food Provision Account" printed in the upper-left corner. AL.com viewed a photograph of one such check.
The money in the account was allocated by federal, state and municipal governments to feed inmates in the Etowah County jail, but was not used for that purpose and was instead personally pocketed by Entrekin.
"In regards to feeding of inmates, we utilize a registered dietitian to ensure adequate meals are provided daily," Entrekin said Sunday via email. "As you should be aware, Alabama law is clear as to my personal financial responsibilities in the feeding of inmates. Regardless of one's opinion of this statute, until the legislature acts otherwise, the Sheriff must follow the current law."
Gallery: Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin's Orange Beach home, Marina Road
'More than $250,000'
Many Alabama sheriffs contend that the practice of keeping "excess" inmate-feeding funds for themselves is legal under a state law passed before World War II. Yet in a number of counties including Jefferson and Montgomery, any money allocated to sheriffs for feeding inmates that is not used for that purpose is instead turned over to the county government.
Entrekin reported on forms he filed with the Alabama Ethics Commission that he made "more than $250,000" each of the past three years via the inmate-feeding funds.
Tom Albritton, executive director of the ethics commission, said via email that the state does not require public officials to disclose exactly how much more income they received from a single source beyond the $250,000 threshold, which he said is "specifically set in the statute."
Meanwhile, Entrekin's annual salary as sheriff is $93,178.80, according to Jeff Little, human resources director for the Etowah County Commission.
Rainbow City Police Chief Jonathon Horton, who worked for the Etowah County Sheriff's Office under former sheriff James Hayes, is currently opposing Entrekin in this year's race for sheriff. One plank of Horton's campaign platform is a pledge to not keep any inmate-feeding funds.
"I believe the funds belong to the taxpayers and any excess funds should go toward things that benefit the taxpayer," he said in a March 1 phone interview. "There's been a tremendous amount of money left over that shouldn't be used as a bonus check."
Sheriff Todd Entrekin
http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index ... ver_7.html
Much more at link. This guy is so crooked that two deputies had to screw his pants on in the morning. And most of it 'legal', while inmates eat cat food. Corruption and racism, part & parcel of capitalism.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Police, prison and abolition
United States: Protests Erupt After Video Shows Police Shooting Unarmed Black Man 20 Times
Demonstrators gather in front of Golden I Center sports arena in Sacramento, California to protest the police killing of unarmed Black man, Stephon Clark. | Photo: Reuters
Published 23 March 2018
A body camera audio recording revealed that the officers identified themselves after the 20 shots were fired.
Street protests have erupted in Sacramento, California after footage was released showing police officers fatally shooting a 22-year-old unarmed Black man 20 times. The demonstrators brought traffic to a halt for several hours.
The incident occurred after police officers were called to the neighborhood Sunday to respond to a report of someone "breaking into cars."
Stephen Clark, a father of two, was first spotted by officers in his grandmother's backyard. After chasing him a short distance, the officers opened fire hit him 20 times. In a body camera, audio recording the officers are only heard identifying themselves after firing on Clark, according to a report by the Washington Post. While the body camera footage worn by officers, reportedly showed the victim holding an unidentified object.
Minutes after the shooting, still not having rendered Clark any medical assistance, a female police officer is heard yelling at him, “We need to know if you're OK. We need to get you medics, but we can't go over to get you help unless we know you don't have your weapon.”
More than five minutes after the final shot was fired and Clark's motionless body lay on the ground, the same female officer says, “Let's have the next unit just bring a non-lethal in case he's pretending.”
Finally, police officers decide to approach his lifeless body, discovering that the object they saw in Clark's possession was his cellphone.
Black Lives Matters demonstrators march in downtown Sacramento before a game between the Sacramento Kings and Atlanta Hawks. Mandatory Credit: Kelley Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Hundreds of protestors gathered to denounce the killing. They marched onto Interstate 5 at rush hour peak, blocking southbound lanes, according to Reuters.
After blocking traffic on the highway for hours, the demonstrators marched onto the state capital building and Golden I Center sports arena, where a professional basketball game was scheduled to take place.
With the game postponed, the basketball club released a statement asking fans to return home and promising to refund their tickets.
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/ ... -0002.html
Police murder, mass murders, 'terrorism', ain't none of this going anywhere, it's the death throes of bourgeois democracy baby.
Demonstrators gather in front of Golden I Center sports arena in Sacramento, California to protest the police killing of unarmed Black man, Stephon Clark. | Photo: Reuters
Published 23 March 2018
A body camera audio recording revealed that the officers identified themselves after the 20 shots were fired.
Street protests have erupted in Sacramento, California after footage was released showing police officers fatally shooting a 22-year-old unarmed Black man 20 times. The demonstrators brought traffic to a halt for several hours.
The incident occurred after police officers were called to the neighborhood Sunday to respond to a report of someone "breaking into cars."
Stephen Clark, a father of two, was first spotted by officers in his grandmother's backyard. After chasing him a short distance, the officers opened fire hit him 20 times. In a body camera, audio recording the officers are only heard identifying themselves after firing on Clark, according to a report by the Washington Post. While the body camera footage worn by officers, reportedly showed the victim holding an unidentified object.
Minutes after the shooting, still not having rendered Clark any medical assistance, a female police officer is heard yelling at him, “We need to know if you're OK. We need to get you medics, but we can't go over to get you help unless we know you don't have your weapon.”
More than five minutes after the final shot was fired and Clark's motionless body lay on the ground, the same female officer says, “Let's have the next unit just bring a non-lethal in case he's pretending.”
Finally, police officers decide to approach his lifeless body, discovering that the object they saw in Clark's possession was his cellphone.
Black Lives Matters demonstrators march in downtown Sacramento before a game between the Sacramento Kings and Atlanta Hawks. Mandatory Credit: Kelley Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Hundreds of protestors gathered to denounce the killing. They marched onto Interstate 5 at rush hour peak, blocking southbound lanes, according to Reuters.
After blocking traffic on the highway for hours, the demonstrators marched onto the state capital building and Golden I Center sports arena, where a professional basketball game was scheduled to take place.
With the game postponed, the basketball club released a statement asking fans to return home and promising to refund their tickets.
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/ ... -0002.html
Police murder, mass murders, 'terrorism', ain't none of this going anywhere, it's the death throes of bourgeois democracy baby.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Police, prison and abolition
Activist Who Was Outspoken About Police Shooting Death of Philando Castile Is Shot Dead
By Kiersten Willis -April 7, 20180697
A Minneapolis activist who touched the lives of many was shot and killed steps from the front door of his mother’s home. Now, authorities are searching for the person who did it.
According to CBS Minnesota, few leads are available in the death of 33-year-old Tyrone Williams. He left his mother’s home at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 3 and was shot and killed on the porch. Cops are looking for a car seen speeding off following the shooting.
“He helped a lot of people as much as he could,” Rosemary Williams, the victim’s mother, tells the station of her son who was active in causes for human rights. “He was up at the reservation with the natives, fighting over the oil. I heard from their community, it’s just a blessing, the outpouring. I didn’t know he impacted so many people.”
The socially-conscious Williams was active in calls for justice in the police shooting deaths of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile, the former of whom also lived in Minneapolis.
Williams leaves behind four children to whom he passed on his passion for his community.
“He used to give me big hugs every time he walked in the door,” Tyrone’s 10-year-old son Talib Williams says.
“He did a lot of good stuff,” 9-year-old Ade Williams says. “He was brave, he was a hero.”
Talib added that he wants to make his dad “be proud of me, what I’m doing, helping people. That’s stuff that he wants me to do.”
Yet friends, who vow to keep up with the activist’s Black Coalition clothing line until his children are old enough to take over operations, said Williams’ death was not in vain. In fact, a new spirit had emerged to mend the brokenness of north Minneapolis.
“We need to embrace each other, we have to embrace these children, these young men that don’t have love and don’t know how to love, so they hurt themselves and others,” his mother says. “We are not going to allow them to destroy themselves or each other. It’s going to stop.”
http://atlantablackstar.com/2018/04/07/ ... shot-dead/
Betcha a nickel they can find the perp at one station roll call or another. These people who blame the community are delusional, the pattern is crystal clear.
By Kiersten Willis -April 7, 20180697
A Minneapolis activist who touched the lives of many was shot and killed steps from the front door of his mother’s home. Now, authorities are searching for the person who did it.
According to CBS Minnesota, few leads are available in the death of 33-year-old Tyrone Williams. He left his mother’s home at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 3 and was shot and killed on the porch. Cops are looking for a car seen speeding off following the shooting.
“He helped a lot of people as much as he could,” Rosemary Williams, the victim’s mother, tells the station of her son who was active in causes for human rights. “He was up at the reservation with the natives, fighting over the oil. I heard from their community, it’s just a blessing, the outpouring. I didn’t know he impacted so many people.”
The socially-conscious Williams was active in calls for justice in the police shooting deaths of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile, the former of whom also lived in Minneapolis.
Williams leaves behind four children to whom he passed on his passion for his community.
“He used to give me big hugs every time he walked in the door,” Tyrone’s 10-year-old son Talib Williams says.
“He did a lot of good stuff,” 9-year-old Ade Williams says. “He was brave, he was a hero.”
Talib added that he wants to make his dad “be proud of me, what I’m doing, helping people. That’s stuff that he wants me to do.”
Yet friends, who vow to keep up with the activist’s Black Coalition clothing line until his children are old enough to take over operations, said Williams’ death was not in vain. In fact, a new spirit had emerged to mend the brokenness of north Minneapolis.
“We need to embrace each other, we have to embrace these children, these young men that don’t have love and don’t know how to love, so they hurt themselves and others,” his mother says. “We are not going to allow them to destroy themselves or each other. It’s going to stop.”
http://atlantablackstar.com/2018/04/07/ ... shot-dead/
Betcha a nickel they can find the perp at one station roll call or another. These people who blame the community are delusional, the pattern is crystal clear.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."