This story was originally published by Prism. “America is revealing a visage stark with harshness. Nowhere is that face more contorted than in the dark netherworld of prison, where humans are transformed into nonpersons, numbered beings cribbed into boxes of unlife, where the very soul is under destructive onslaught.”–Mumia Abu-Jamal Whatever we allow to happen to people incarcerated in prisons…
Archive for category: #prisonindustrialcomplex
Texas officials claimed that no prisoners have been killed by heat. A new report shows they’re wrong
Four states voted to ban slavery on Election Day, closing a loophole in the 13th Amendment that allows for draconian prison labor practices.
The 13th Amendment of the Constitution bans slavery or involuntary servitude, except when used as punishment for a crime. About 800,000 prisoners across the U.S. are forced to work, often in cruel conditions and for little or no pay.
Tennessee, Vermont, and Oregon all passed amendments to their state constitutions Tuesday eliminating language that allows slavery as punishment in prisons, by 79.7 percent, 89.2 percent, and 54.3 percent of the vote in each state, respectively, according to The New York Times.
In Alabama, 76.6 percent of residents voted to recompile the state constitution, which will remove racist language and legally irrelevant provisions, including prison labor. The referendums do not automatically change the state of prison labor, but they do make it easier for legal challenges over the treatment of prisoners.
Unfortunately, in Louisiana, 60.9 percent of state residents voted to keep the language allowing slavery as punishment for inmates.
The U.S. prison system has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and Black people are disproportionately imprisoned, according to the ACLU.
Prison workers produce about $2 billion worth of goods per year, and more than $9 billion in services annually, the ACLU found in a report. California has long used inmates as firefighters, some of whom are sent out with insufficient equipment.
These workers are paid an average of 52 cents per hour nationally—seven states pay them nothing at all—but they don’t get to keep all of the money they do make.
They end up pocketing less than half of what they earn after deductions are made for taxes, room and board fees for the prison where they are locked up, and other costs.
Any inmates who refuse to work are often punished, UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovitch and Stony Brook University associate history professor Robert Chase told The Washington Post, such as with solitary confinement or the removal of sentence reductions for good behavior.
Colorado was the first state to close the loophole in 2018, followed by Nebraska and Utah in 2020.
In 2020, San Quentin State Prison in California had some of the worst rates of COVID-19 infection in the nation. At least 23 people died from COVID-19 after contracting it at the prison. Prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US proved similarly vulnerable to the pandemic, which easily spread among incarcerated populations and into surrounding communities due to the already abhorrent health, sanitation, and human rights conditions of such facilities. Two years later, COVID-19 remains a challenge for San Quentin and California officials. While prisoners are tested regularly multiple times a week, guards and other prison staff are exempted from testing. Sanitation within the overcrowded prison remains atrocious, and prisoners who are exposed to COVID-19 are often quarantined in solitary confinement units. Although California has a more rigorous COVID-19 policy than much of the nation, the state’s inability to protect prisoners is a reflection of the fundamental violence of the mass incarceration system. Incarcerated journalist Juan Moreno Haines calls in to Rattling the Bars from San Quentin prison with his colleague, journalist Katie Rose Quandt, to discuss COVID-19 policies at the prison, how the ongoing pandemic has made life considerably worse for prisoners, and why freeing people could be a better solution than the band-aid solutions California has attempted thus far.
Juan Moreno Haines is an award-winning incarcerated journalist and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the editor of the San Quentin News.
Katie Rose Quandt is a freelance journalist who writes about criminal justice, incarceration, and inequality. She is a senior editor at the Prison Policy Initiative, and a writer and editor at Solitary Watch.
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.
A fence stands at Elmore Correctional Facility in Elmore, Ala., June 18, 2015
AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File
- Slavery is still legal in the US if it is used as a form of punishment in some prisons.
- Voters in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, and Vermont will be voting on changing this legislation.
- The very amendment that freed the slaves has a clause to re-enslave them, said a historian.
Voters in the November midterms in five states will be balloted on outlawing slavery, more than 150 years after it was abolished after the Civil War.
The landmark 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified on December 6, 1865, officially abolished slavery but allowed it to continue as a punishment in prisons against convicted felons.
Nearly 20 states have constitutions that include language permitting slavery and involuntary servitude as criminal punishments, and voters in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, and Vermont will be asked to change the loophole as part of a national push for prison reform, AP reports.
For states in the former Confederacy, the loophole was a tool to maintain the dynamics of slavery, post-abolition, said AP.
More than 80,000 inmates perform prison labor in the US, with the average wage for inmates working for the state prison industry being just 52 cents per hour, according to the ACLU, which says that prisoners produced roughly $2 billion worth of goods and services in 2021.
But in some states, including Alabama, inmates get paid nothing for their work.
Prisoners in Alabama recently went on strike to protest cruel labor conditions. Swift Justice, an inmate at the Fountain Correctional Facility in Atmore, a small town bordering Florida, told Insider’s Taiyler Simone Mitchell, “I’m just a slave. I’m inside the prison system.”
Convicts at the Limestone Correctional facility are placed back onto the chain gang when they leave the prison grounds for their daily labor as road crews in July of 1995 outside of Huntsville, Alabama. The state of Alabama brought back the chain gang to demonstrate to the media and the public that they were tough on crime, even though it is an impractical relic of the past for prison work crews
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Raumesh Akbari, a member of the Tennessee Senate, told AP that she was shocked to find out that slavery was legal as a form of punishment.
“When I found out that this exception existed, I thought, ‘We have got to fix this and we’ve got to fix this right away.’ Our constitution should reflect the values and the beliefs of our state,” she said.
Talking to the Washington Post, Robert Chase, an associate professor at Stony Brook University and the director of Historians Against Slavery said the amendment that freed the slaves has a clause to re-enslave them.
“For an entire generation, it put Black men and women back into slavery by incarcerating them and selling their labor to private corporations,” said Chase.
Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a criminal justice group working to remove the loophole, told the Post that “The idea that you could ever finish the sentence ‘slavery’s okay when … ‘ has to rip out your soul, and I think it’s what makes this a fight that ignores political lines and brings us together.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
“Despite earning tens of billions of dollars each year, the public knows little about the prison industry and those that profit from it.”
“The DOJ’s intervention has done nothing to shift conditions inside Alabama prisons,” said one supporter. “They remain incredibly unsafe, inhumane, and exploitative.”
This story was published in partnership with Capital B News.
Nestled in Cleveland’s Industrial Valley, the intersection of Transport Road and Rockefeller Avenue holds the story of the city’s toxic past — and potentially poisonous future. Once the home of a massive oil refinery, the plot is now the potential new home of a $700 million jail in the heart of Cleveland’s industrial corridor.
County officials say the new jail is needed to provide a safer and better-resourced facility after more than one dozen detainees died in county custody in recent years. But the plan has ignited a movement to block construction of the jail on a site that the Ohio government once deemed too toxic for a state prison.
“It’s a slap in the face,” said Yvonka Hall, a member of the coalition to stop the Cuyahoga County Jail.
The potential Cleveland facility underscores a trend across the Midwest, which has seen a boom in jail construction in recent years. At least 23 jails — totaling $3.6 billion — have been either proposed or constructed on toxic and contaminated lands since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Capital B analysis of local news reporting and federal data from the National Institute of Corrections. All but three of these facilities also were located in their state’s toxic air corridors, where the most harmful health risks from air pollution, including COVID-19 and cancer, are found.
The trend has unique implications for Black folks. In states where the 23 projects are located — Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin — Black people are nearly six times more likely than other racial groups to be incarcerated, making up more than 40 percent of those locked in jails and prisons.
The construction of detention facilities on contaminated lands reinforces an often forgotten form of environmental racism, said David Pellow, director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“It’s literally putting these folks in double jeopardy, putting them in an inherently unsafe place that causes health and mental health problems by design. Then you’re going to layer environmental, chemical toxicity on top of that,” Pellow said.
“This practice is an amplified case of environmental racism,” he added. “Because incarcerated folks are completely powerless, most people in society embrace this disenfranchisement and environmental violence.”
Jail Construction Booms
Those environmental health harms, ironically, have been partially funded by billions of dollars of federal COVID relief made available since 2020. At least nine of the counties found in Capital B’s analysis have either used or planned to use federal pandemic funds to build the detention facilities. Meanwhile, jails drove millions of COVID-19 infections during the first year of the pandemic, according to a 2021 study.
Across the country, counties in at least 18 states have used or want to use COVID funds to build new jails, a recent investigation by The Nation found.
In the U.S., jail spending is higher than ever, with the country spending more than $25 billion annually on county detention facilities, according to the latest nationally available data in 2017 — a 13 percent increase in spending over the previous decade.
Since 1970, America’s jail capacity has grown from 243,000 beds to roughly 1 million. An outsized amount of this growth has occurred in Midwestern states, according to a University of Nebraska study.
While municipalities have a documented history of building detention centers in heavily polluted areas from Los Angeles to New York, the Midwest has become a hub for the practice as industrial cities have moved through urban revitalization. With formerly industrial sites sitting empty for years and cash-strapped counties needing new sources of revenue, these locations have been rezoned for businesses, homes, and jails.
In Wayne County, Michigan, a new $600 million jail is sandwiched between a waste incinerator, a hazardous waste treatment plant, and the former site of an incinerator frequently cited for exceeding emissions standards. The practice is found in rural areas, as well. In Ohio’s Appalachian region, Coshocton County officials have proposed a $30 million, 120-bed jail on top of a former steel plant.
The construction of new jail facilities has grown in conjunction with poverty levels in formerly industrial communities. In Indiana, where poverty has increased by 30 percent since 2005 as more than 50,000 industrial jobs have disappeared, a recent investigation by the Vera Institute found that 40 percent of the state’s 92 counties are building jails or planning jail construction.
Building in these areas has come with significant environmental risks, particularly for Black Americans. In urban Dane County, Wisconsin, a new 1,000-bed, $175 million jail is being built in an area with the worst health risks from air pollution in the state. As of August 11, 53 percent of the county jail’s population was Black, despite the county being less than 6 percent Black.
Just 150 miles south of Cleveland, Franklin County, Ohio’s new 1,300-bed, $360 million jail — which the county wants to fund through COVID relief money partially — is built in an area where residents have a higher cancer risk from air pollution than 99 percent of the state and a lower life expectancy than 98 percent of the country.
With this trend, the connections between incarceration and environmental justice have been pushed to the forefront of a social movement. In Wayne County, Michigan, and Vigo County, Indiana, for instance, activists have attempted to use environmental laws to block the construction of new jails.
Cleveland’s Industrial Valley
Cleveland’s toxic past is hard to escape. With the Civil War raging on, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller purchased his first oil refinery in 1863, located at what is now known as 2700 Transport Road. Operating for four decades before the country had uniform pollution standards, this refinery, one of Rockefeller’s 21 oil refineries in Cleveland, was his company’s flagship.
Fast forward nearly a century to the early 2000s, the site, now an industrial waste recycling plant, was once again one of the city’s most environmentally toxic. For years, the industrial plant violated federal clean-air standards and racked up tens of thousands of dollars of fines before abandoning the operation altogether. After a high-octane gasoline tank explosion at the plant injured six workers, the plant’s operators, General Environmental Management, decided to close rather than pay $1.2 million to bring the site up to environmental, health, and safety standards.
Today, the site is home to a shipping container storage yard and elevated levels of diesel pollution. Given its current industrial use, it’s not surprising that, despite multiple rounds of environmental remediation, it is still home to levels of the cancerous chemical benzene and the climate change-causing methane gas at levels well above standards.
Hall, the activist involved in trying to stop the county jail, questions how placing the facility on a toxic site will solve the issue of inhumane conditions that county officials often highlight.
“You force people into areas with contaminated soil and high levels of particulate matter where they’re going to get sick, but won’t get the medical attention they need or the food they need,” said Hall, director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition. “What does this do except set them up for a lifelong engagement in the justice system?”
Earlier this year, a county consultant claimed despite this site’s toxic past, it would not be viable to look for other sites and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per site on testing. It’s not a “scary property,” the consultant said, adding that placing a jail on the site would be an example of “normal urban redevelopment.”
The rhetoric, one that argues that most potential sites in urban areas will have some elements of environmental contamination, is dangerous, Pellow says. “If it is so hard to keep people safe and find land that is not toxic, then maybe we need to start looking beyond incarceration,” he said.
The state’s Environmental Protection Agency is expected to give its ruling on the potential site soon.
Cleveland’s environmental health impacts are wide-reaching. Although millions of dollars have been allocated to address lead exposure, children living in Cuyahoga County continue to have the country’s highest risk. In 2016, about 10 percent of kids in Cuyahoga County were exposed to lead at or above the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s standards. Within Cleveland city limits, children have lead poisoning rates nearly four times the national average.
This public health catastrophe, which is twice as widespread as the lead poisoning emergency caused by the Flint Water Crisis, is caused by soil contamination through the city’s industrial past and aging housing stock. In Cuyahoga County, 80 percent of the housing stock contains lead; in Cleveland, it is nearly 90 percent.
“We need to talk about the cyclical impact this has on our communities,” Hall said. “We’re poisoned starting as children, we find lead in our blood and bones. Then, it stops our ability to fully develop cognitively, causing poor decision-making.”
“Then, you add the fact that many of our communities are poor. They’ve created a jail and prison pipeline.”
Incarcerations, brutality, and torture are common in the U.S. Activists claim that this amounts to a war waged against racially marginalized, poor, and working-class people.
The very laws and government agencies created to protect the people in the United States are increasingly being weaponized against those who are often marginalized in society: people of color, the poor, and the working class. In just the last few months, there have been many incidents of this kind of violent abuse of power.
This article was produced in partnership by Peoples Dispatch and Globetrotter.
On July 28, the state of Alabama performed a “botched” execution on Joe Nathan James Jr., who journalists believe may have suffered medical malpractice akin to “torture” for hours before his death. On August 12, around midnight, a police officer threatened to kill a Black pregnant woman during a traffic stop in Florida. On August 18, far-right-wing Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis announced that 20 formerly incarcerated people would be arrested for the crime of voting, as the U.S. severely restricts the right to vote for the tens of millions of former prisoners. Within the same week, three police officers were captured on video brutally beating a homeless man in Arkansas on August 21.
“We’re in a state of genocidal war,” said former political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim to Peoples Dispatch. Muntaqim was and still is a fighter for Black liberation who spent 49 years in prison, which activists claim was due to his political work as a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. Alongside the label of political prisoner, Muntaqim also identifies himself as a prisoner of war.
The belief shared by many that the U.S. is at war with a subset of its own people is not a fringe idea. “End the War on Black People” is a policy platform of the Movement for Black Lives, a major organization within the Black Lives Matter movement. “Stop the War on Black America” was a popular slogan in several uprisings against police brutality, from the killing of Michael Brown in 2014 to Amir Locke’s murder in 2022.
In recent months alone, there has been enough evidence to support this belief that the U.S. is waging a war against its people.
Who Polices the Police?
According to the data project Mapping Police Violence, police killed at least 1,144 people in the U.S. in 2021, which is approximately three people per day. Every few weeks there is a police murder that triggers mass outrage, such as the killing of Jayland Walker who was found with more than 60 bullet wounds on his body, or Amir Locke who was killed seconds after waking up, or 15-year-old Brett Rosenau who was burned alive during a botched SWAT-team raid.
Two cases of police brutality have generated outrage most recently. In Florida on August 12, police officer Jason DeSue was driving in his car when he told Ebony Washington, a Black mother who was four months pregnant and driving with her three children, to pull over for speeding. Instead of following instructions immediately, Washington waited until reaching a well-lit area to pull over. “It was dark [and I was] with my kids. I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be able to not have anyone else around,” she said afterward in an interview.
DeSue reacted drastically to Washington’s decision. Body camera footage shows DeSue telling her over loudspeakers, “Pull the vehicle over, or I’ll put you into the ground.” Once Washington did finally pull over, DeSue pulled out his gun. He then handcuffed her roughly despite her pregnancy. DeSue eventually released Washington after giving her a ticket for speeding.
Nino Brown, a longtime activist against police brutality and a fighter for the freedom of political prisoners, said, “That this police officer came at her [Washington] ‘guns blazing’ with his weapon already drawn tells us everything you need to know about how the police treat African Americans in this country: the police operate as a Gestapo force in our communities—they shoot first and ask questions never.”
A video of three Arkansas police officers brutally beating Randall Worcester, taken on August 21, went viral. Despite being the victim of a brutal assault, Worcester was the one charged with “second-degree battery, resisting arrest, refusal to submit, possessing an instrument of crime, criminal trespass, criminal mischief, terroristic threatening and second-degree assault,” according to KARK.
DeSue resigned after drawing scorn for pulling a gun on Washington, and the three officers in Arkansas—Thell Riddle, Levi White, and Zack King—have now been suspended. This is the extent of their accountability thus far, even though some people are demanding criminal charges against the three police officers.
The fact that these officers are facing any punishment at all may be related to the existence of video evidence, which in past cases of police violence, such as in George Floyd’s murder, generated enough outrage to result in police accountability. Without video evidence, police often take charge of the narrative, labeling brutality with insidious neutral terms such as “officer-involved shooting” rather than “police killing.” Before the video of Floyd’s murder was released to the world, the Minneapolis Police Department press release of May 26, 2020 read, “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.”
Persecution of Prisoners Follows Them to the Grave
There is an untenable double standard of justice for police officers who act with legalized impunity and those they ostensibly protect and serve. Although police rarely face criminal charges for brutality, people who are convicted of a crime, many of whom are racially marginalized and are in deep poverty, are punished mercilessly by the state.
Such is the case for prisoners who face the death penalty, which in the U.S. is most commonly carried out by administering a lethal injection. Although this method appears to be humane, death by lethal injection has been increasingly proven to be a torturous process. As the death penalty comes under more scrutiny, major pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer are banning the use of their drugs in lethal injections. As a result, states such as Alabama are turning to lower-quality medications, like midazolam, which according to Robert Dunham, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, “is not an inappropriate drug to be used for execution purposes.” As Dunham told the Independent, “Studies now show this three-drug process [of lethal injection] is the equivalent to waterboarding, suffocation and being chemically burned at the stake.”
Even beyond the pain and suffering caused by the contents of the lethal injection, corrections departments have botched executions. Journalist Elizabeth Bruenig wrote in the Atlantic about how after prisoner Joe Nathan James Jr. was executed using lethal injection, an autopsy revealed that the Alabama Department of Corrections took hours to find an entry point for the injection, torturing James in the process. “My initial impression of James was of someone whose hands and wrists had been burst by needles, in every place one can bend or flex,” Bruenig wrote.
Meanwhile, many of those who were incarcerated at one point may find that their state-sanctioned punishments are not over yet. This was the case for the 20 people, all formerly incarcerated, who were recently arrested in Florida for so-called voter fraud. As NPR reported, however, “According to court documents, though, some of the 20 individuals told law enforcement officials that they thought they were able to vote when they cast ballots.” (In Florida, voting rights were recently restored to felons except those convicted of murder or a sexual offense cannot vote—the latter point cited by Governor DeSantis in response to criticism of the recent disenfranchisement crackdown.) Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told Democracy Now that Floridians “are now being dragged from their homes in handcuffs because all they ever wanted to do was participate in democracy.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bragged about the arrests, stating, “Today’s [August 18] actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting. If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
A Cruel Double Standard
DeSantis’ words are telling. The so-called “elections crimes” will be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and yet there is still no word about criminal charges against officers Jason DeSue, Thell Riddle, Levi White and Zack King for the violent crimes of assault and battery they committed. Meanwhile, despite “cruel and unusual punishment” being prohibited as per the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prisoners are enduring torturous executions.
Some argue that torture, execution, imprisonment, and brutality against racially marginalized, poor, and working-class people amounts to war. Some, like Muntaqim, have worked to hold the entire U.S. state accountable for genocide, and have sought to question the legitimacy of the laws and agencies governing the people in the United States. Muntaqim said, “It’s important for us to recognize that we, Black people in this country, must seek out other means of survival. Other means of prosperity. Other means from which we can govern ourselves.”
Author Bio: Natalia Marques is a writer at Peoples Dispatch, an organizer, and a graphic designer based in New York City.
Study says between 41,000 and 48,000 prisoners subjected to ‘restrictive housing’, which UN considers a form of torture
Almost 50,000 men and women are being held in prolonged solitary confinement in US prisons, in breach of minimum standards laid down by the United Nations which considers such isolation a form of torture.
In a new report spearheaded by Yale Law School, the number of prisoners subjected to “restrictive housing”, as solitary is officially known, stood at between 41,000 and 48,000 in the summer of 2021. They were being held alone in cells the size of parking spaces, for 22 hours a day on average and for at least 15 days.