TYT - Profit Guaranteed By Quotas For Private Prisons

The Magic Penises

Trey Smith

A federal appeals court is allowing Guantanamo guards to resume searching detainees' genitals on their way to and from legal meetings while the Obama administration challenges a federal judge's ruling that the searches unfairly impede attorney-client meetings.

The order Wednesday by a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit capped 24 hours of legal wrangling: The Justice Department asked a New York lawyer to let guards search her client's privates, the lawyer refused and the Southern Command's top general joined the fray with a sworn declaration that a federal judge got it wrong.

Groin searches aren't intended to prevent legal meetings, said Southcom's Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, noting that his Guantanamo soldiers similarly search captives meeting with Red Cross delegates.

Past practice of shaking a captive's trousers to see if "nails, shanks, ragged scraps of metal" fall out "posed an unacceptable risk to the safety and security of detainees and guards," Kelly said.
~ from Federal Judges Reinstate Guantanamo Groin Searches Pending Appeal by Carol Rosenberg ~

Look, I already knew that Gitmo prisoners -- 86 of whom have been cleared for release -- are subject to dehumanizing treatment. Many are being force-fed in a way that can only be described as torturous. I didn't think I could be completely flabbergasted anymore, but it turns out that I was wrong!

These men are caged like animals. Why on earth would their attorneys try to sneak in nails, shanks or ragged scraps of metal? These laudable men and women are trying their damnedest to get these men released.

Besides, who in their right mind would try to hide a scrap of ragged metal inside their penis? That's a recipe for immense pain. Not only would it be agonizing to insert it, but I bet it would hurt twice as much to try to extract it.

For that matter, the urethra is a very narrow tube. Its opening at the head of the penis is little more than a dot. A male would be hard-pressed to fit anything larger than a toothpick in it and why any male would want to do such a thing is beyond me! The only thing that I can discern from this inane request is that the US military believes that Gitmo prisoners possess magic penises -- ones that can swallow up nails, shanks, scraps of ragged metal and, possibly, giraffes!

TYT - Mos Def Force-Fed Gitmo Detainee Style

To watch the full video Anna and Cenk reference, go here.

Really Hard Time

Trey Smith

On July 15th, 1995, in the quiet Southern California city of Whittier, a 33-year-old black man named Curtis Wilkerson got up from a booth at McDonald's, walked into a nearby mall and, within the space of two hours, turned himself into the unluckiest man on Earth. "I was supposed to be waiting there while my girlfriend was at the beauty salon," he says.

So he waited. And waited. After a while, he paged her. "She was like, 'I need another hour,'" he says. "So I was like, 'Baby, I'm going to the mall.'"

Having grown up with no father and a mother hooked on barbiturates, Wilkerson, who says he still boasts a Reggie Miller jumper, began to spend more time on the streets. After his mother died when he was 16, he fell in with a bad crowd, and in 1981 he served as a lookout in a series of robberies. He was quickly caught and sentenced to six years in prison. After he got out, he found work as a forklift operator, and distanced himself from his old life.

But that day in the mall, something came over him. He wandered from store to store, bought a few things, still shaking his head about his girlfriend's hair appointment. After a while, he drifted into a department store called Mervyn's. Your typical chain store, full of mannequins and dress racks; they're out of business today. Suddenly, a pair of socks caught his eye. He grabbed them and slipped them into a shopping bag.

What kind of socks were they, that they were worth taking the risk?

"They were million-dollar socks with gold on 'em," he says now, laughing almost uncontrollably, as he tells the story 18 years later, from a telephone in a correctional facility in Soledad, California.

Really, they were that special?

"No, they were ordinary white socks," he says, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. "Didn't even have any stripes."

Wilkerson never made it out of the store. At the exit, he was, shall we say, over­ enthusiastically apprehended by two security officers. They took him to the store security office, where the guards started to argue with each other over whether or not to call the police. One guard wanted to let him pay for the socks and go, but the other guard was more of a hardass and called the cops, having no idea he was about to write himself a part in one of the most absurd scripts to ever hit Southern California.

Thanks to a brand-new, get-tough-on-crime state law, Wilkerson would soon be sentenced to life in prison for stealing a pair of plain white tube socks worth $2.50.

"No, sir, I was not expecting that one," he says now, laughing darkly. Because Wilkerson had two prior convictions, both dating back to 1981, the shoplifting charge counted as a third strike against him. He was sentenced to 25 years to life, meaning that his first chance for a parole hearing would be in 25 years.

And given that around 80 percent of parole applications are rejected by parole boards, and governors override parole boards in about 50 percent of the instances where parole is granted, it was a near certainty that Wilkerson would never see the outside of a prison again.

The state also fined him $2,500 – restitution for the stolen socks. He works that off by putting in four to five hours a day in the prison cafeteria, for which he gets paid $20 a month, of which the state takes $11. At this rate, he will be in his nineties before he's paid the state off for that one pair of socks.
~ from Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws by Matt Taibbi ~

I touched on this overall issue previously when commenting on a column by Dave Lindorff. It's just maddening that corporate criminals can get away with almost A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G with little fear of imprisonment -- they generally receive no more than a slap on the wrists, IF that much -- while common folks receive extra long prison sentences for far less damning offenses. I mean, which is the more heinous crime? Running the world economy into the ground or stealing a pair of tube socks?

There are two main reasons WHY we have legislation like "Three Strikes and You're Out." The first is rather obvious. Pandering politicians win votes by being tough on crime. If you can convince law abiding voters that you support locking up the no goods, they will give you lots of moolah and votes.

The second reason has to do with economics. As prisons more and more are being turned over to for-profit corporations, these enterprises can only realize tremendous profits if there are prisoners to incarcerate. With crime rates going down across the board, this creates a real problem. Less inmates means less money, so you need to find a way to ramp up the prison population. And what better way to guarantee a steady flow of inmates than to advocate for and support -- behind the scenes, of course -- nailing people with long prison terms by fiat.

You see, the prison-industrial complex doesn't care if the system is unjust. In fact, they thrive on it. They don't care if we lock up people for life for stealing a pair of tube socks. All they see is the $ sign.

Yet another reason why privatization doesn't really benefit society!

Throw Away the Key

Trey Smith

Willie James Sauls is unlikely to see the outside of a prison. Last fall a court in the state of Texas sentenced this 37-year-old man to 45 years in jail. His crime: he snatched the purse from an old woman.

In Norway, meanwhile, a court sentenced Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing racist who slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers, and injured several hundred, to 21 years in prison, with an option for that detention to be extended by five-year increments if he is determined to be still dangerous. Otherwise, the 32-year-old, if considered rehabilitated, could be released at the age of 53.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Germany was rocked by killings committed by a radical left group called the Red Army Faction. Its members killed over 30 people, including the nation's attorney general and leading industrialists. Eventually its leaders were caught and convicted, but by 2007, almost a decade after the Red Army Faction had announced its own dissolution, those still in prison were pardoned by the country’s president.

It is beyond inconceivable to imagine a US president, governor or even a judge, releasing a prisoner from a US jail who had committed the kind of offenses committed by either Breivik or members of Germany’s Red Army Faction. It is, for that matter, hard to imagine any political leader in the US pardoning even purse-snatcher Willie James Sauls.

This is, after all, a country that just recently hounded a 26-year-old internet activist, Aaron Swartz, into committing suicide, after a federal prosecutor threatened him with 35 years in jail -- this for the heinous crime of stealing income from a company that was collecting revenue for making available academic papers for which the authors get not a penny (in a protest action he had publicly hacked an MIT server and downloaded hundreds of academic papers which the private contractor was charging for!). This is a country that routinely convicts the wrong people and locks them up for decades and doesn't even apologize if they manage to eventually prove their innocence and win release. It's a country that is holding people as "terrorists" at Guantanamo, without trial, for over a decade, knowing they never did anything wrong, simply because it doesn't have the courage to admit its errors.

Right-wing Americans love to call the US a “nanny state,” claiming that the federal government is always trying to pass laws regulating people’s lives. What the US really is, though, is a “puni-state” -- a nation that thrives on vengeance and retribution, and that rejects the whole notion of rehabilitation or character change (even while euphemistically calling its prisons "corrections" facilities).

How else to explain the prosecutorial passion for charging absurdly youthful offenders as adults?
~ from The United Police States of America by Dave Lindorff ~

While I have been encouraged by the growing numbers of Americans who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, there is no question in my mind that fundamentalist Christianity still has a strong grip on our society. Fundamentalists place a great deal of emphasis on the Old Testament (OT) and the OT reads like a blueprint for retribution and vengeance. The god of the OT isn't one to try to talk out problems; defy him and ZAP!

Of course, the emphasis on retributive justice cannot be laid solely at the feet of Christianity. Muslim nations often are just as severe, if not more so. It seems to be a problem of religion, in general. And it's not just religion in a sterile vacuum. It also goes hand-in-hand with economics.

As we certainly see in this nation, the explosion of prisons is big money. There is a small gaggle of corporations that are robbing public treasuries blind by encouraging lawmakers to lock up ever more people. So, it should not be surprising that the big wigs in the prison-industrial complex like to wrap their looting into the fabric of fundamentalist Christianity. They exhort the faithful to support retributive justice -- and the faithful lap it up like thirsty dogs -- while laughing all the way to the bank and back again.

Just Imagine

Trey Smith

Police in your local community announce they are increasing efforts to round up deadbeat dads, meth dealers, sex offenders or folks with unpaid parking tickets. You think nothing of it because, whoever they are trying to round up this week, you don't match the description at all. So, you are going about your routine business when, all of a sudden, you are surrounded by a gaggle of law enforcement officers. With guns drawn, you are ordered onto your knees. Once you comply, you are slammed face first to the ground, cuffed and hauled off to jail.

Time and time again, you ask a simple question, "What is this all about?" All you want to know is what you are suspected of doing. But no one will tell you.

Before you know it, you are whisked away to a prison far from your home. You have not been allowed to make as little as one phone call to let your family know you are still alive. Though you ask repeatedly, you are not allowed to speak to an attorney. Weeks turn into months and months turn into years. You still have no idea WHY you have been incarcerated. Even when you finally are assigned a lawyer -- years into the process -- you still learn very little EXCEPT that the government has never filed ANY charges against you. Not one.

At some point, your attorney learns that several years prior, you were cleared for release and yet, 11 years after being arrested, you continue to languish in prison. In essence, you are in legal limbo because you can't defend yourself against crimes you have never been charged with!

Don't you think that by this point your life would be one of abject misery and despair? Do you think you might simply give up on life and beg to be allowed to die?

This imagined scenario is not a fairytale. It describes the lives of hundreds of men housed at Guantánamo Bay.

Till Death Do Thee Part

Trey Smith

A detainee at Guantánamo was found dead in his cell on Saturday, according to camp officials. He is the ninth person to die at the camp since it was opened more than ten years ago. As former Gitmo guard Brandon Neely pointed out Monday, more detainees have died at the camp (nine) than have been convicted of wrongdoing by its military commissions (six). This is the fourth detainee who has died at the camp since Obama's inauguration.

Although the detainee's identity has not been disclosed, a camp spokesman acknowledged that he "had not been charged and had not been designated for prosecution". In other words, he has been kept by the US government in a cage for many years without any opportunity to contest the accusations against him, and had no hope of leaving the camp except by death.

Indeed, dying in due process-free captivity now appears to be the only way for many of these detainees to leave.
~ from Another Guantánamo Prisoner Death Highlights Democrats' Hypocrisy by Glenn Greenwald ~

I'll let Greenwald handle the hypocrisy angle. What I want to focus on is the personal angle.

Suppose your (or another) government has you arrested for a crime you didn't commit. You are told that there is strong evidence that you are guilty, but no charges are ever brought against you. You and your lawyer demand that you be released, but the government says you are too dangerous or, maybe, the government says nothing at all. No matter how you protest your imprisonment, it falls on deaf ears.

Imagine how you would feel separated from your loved ones -- spouse, partner, children, parents, friends, colleagues. Imagine being locked in a cage for year upon year upon year. Now imagine what it must be like to lose all hope in decency and justice.

In such a situation, you must know that death is your only means of escape.

The United States of America cannot call itself a moral nation until this heinous travesty is ended. Either charge these individuals with a crime and allow them to defend themselves or LET THEM GO!!

Dying for [In]Justice

Trey Smith

The US criminal justice system is a broken machine that wrongfully convicts innocent people, sentencing thousands of people to prison or to death for the crimes of others, as a new study reveals. The University of Michigan law school and Northwestern University have compiled a new National Registry of Exonerations – a database of over 2,000 prisoners exonerated between 1989 and the present day, when DNA evidence has been widely used to clear the names of innocent people convicted of rape and murder. Of these, 885 have profiles developed for the registry's website, exonerationregistry.org.

The details are shocking. Death row inmates were exonerated nine times more frequently than others convicted of murder. One-fourth of those exonerated of murder had received a death sentence, while half of those who had been wrongfully convicted of rape or murder faced death or a life behind bars. Ten of the inmates went to their grave before their names were cleared.

The leading causes of wrongful convictions include perjury, flawed eyewitness identification and prosecutorial misconduct. For those who have placed unequivocal faith in the US criminal justice system and believe that all condemned prisoners are guilty of the crime of which they were convicted, the data must make for a rude awakening.
~ from How America's Death Penalty Murders Innocents by David A. Love ~

Each time then-President Bush or current-President Obama promoted or issued new legislation and rules that chip away at our constitutional freedoms, I hear people say, "If you're not guilty of anything, why worry about it?" Just as this article points out, many people mistakenly believe that only the guilty have anything to fear!

Since human systems make grievous errors -- purposeful and innocent -- the state has no business executing people. From my perspective, it is far better to lock up convicted killers, pedophiles and rapists for life as a safeguard to insure that one innocent individual is not put to death erroneously.

When we execute people who are later shown to be innocent of the crime they were convicted of, you can't call for a do-over. You can't say, "Oops! Our bad. Sorry 'bout that." Sure, you can issue a heartfelt apology and, possibly, financially compensate the grieving family of the deceased, but there is nothing you can do for the individual whose life you have taken. It's gone into the ether.

Put yourself in the place of a wrongly condemned person. You KNOW you are innocent of the crime you've been convicted of, but few people believe you. Do you think it will make you feel better -- as they march you off to the gallows -- to know that one day your name, nothing else, will be exonerated? Would that provide you with peace of mind as the lethal drugs flow into your veins or high voltage electricity courses through your body?

Me thinks not!

All By Myself

Trey Smith

Because of the peculiarities of my personality, I spend the majority of my hours each day away from other human beings. On the days when my wife is off at work, I end up this way by default. She has our one vehicle and the bus stop is too far away for me to walk it. So, I putter around the house.

Even on the days my wife IS off work, I still stick to my general routine. If I were to guess, I probably spend no more than an average of 1 - 2 hours per day in the company of other humans. But I am not alone either. A good deal of this time is spent in the company of my three dogs and 1 cat plus there are two neighborhood dogs I visit with frequently.

I bring up my situation as a reference point to a news story I will share simply because my isolation is by choice. Despite the fact I am all by my lonesome most of the time, I still interact with other humans daily. I spend quality time with my loving wife. I go to the grocery store, post office, library and/or my friend Paul's mini mart almost every single day. I visit and laugh with people. I catch up on town gossip.

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox do not enjoy the same luxury of human interaction that I do. They are isolated from others by the choice of the State of Louisiana, not of their own volition.

"I can make about four steps forward before I touch the door," Herman Wallace says as he describes the cell in which he has lived for the past 40 years. "If I turn an about-face, I'm going to bump into something. I'm used to it, and that's one of the bad things about it."

On Tuesday, Wallace and his friend Albert Woodfox will mark one of the more unusual, and shameful, anniversaries in American penal history. Forty years ago to the day, they were put into solitary confinement in Louisiana's notorious Angola jail. They have been there ever since.

They have spent 23 hours of every one of the past 14,610 days locked in their single-occupancy 9ft-by-6ft cells. Each cell, Amnesty International records, has a toilet, a mattress, sheets, a blanket, pillow and a small bench attached to the wall. Their contact with the world outside the windowless room is limited to the occasional visit and telephone call, "exercise" three times a week in a caged concrete yard, and letters that are opened and read by prison guards.

A new documentary film takes us into that cell, providing rare insight into the personal psychological impact of such prolonged isolation. Herman's House tracks the experiences and thoughts of Wallace as he reflects on four decades banged away in a box.

I don't care what a person has been alleged or convicted of having done. If our constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment MEANS ANYTHING, these two fellows need to be released from the hole. In fact, it is downright immoral than they have been forced to languish away in solitary for this long to begin with!

What kind of civil society would condone such callous treatment of fellow human beings?

Keep 'Em Coming

Trey Smith

I realize that a lot of average folks have bought into the idea that privatization isn't such a bad idea. They have been convinced that private companies can manage public services at a savings (even though most studies show the exact opposite). What I don't think far too many of my fellow citizens realize is that private firms have different priorities than government and these different priorities change the nature of the services offered.

While government tries to be cost-effective, the private firm's overall objective is to generate a profit. When making a profit is the main goal, things like quality service, fairness, good wages, health and safety, and environmental stewardship take a back seat. If a private company runs afoul of any of these things, their first order of business is to try to shift these costs onto an unwilling public. If successful -- and they often are -- the company gets to reap the financial benefits, while being allowed to shirk the economic responsibility.

When making a profit, particularly a short-term profit, is your main objective, it changes your perspective on what constitutes good government policy and these changes frequently conflict with the public good. Take, for example, the private prison industry.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is the largest private prison corporation in this country. According to Common Dreams, the CCA has a plan to purchase state-run prisons in 48 states. If fully or partially successful, the CCA would soon have a major interest in keeping the prison population in these states as high as possible!

If your company wants to maintain or increase the number of incarcerated persons, then you will do everything in your power to see that this aim comes to fruition. You will lobby hard for stiffer sentencing laws and you will work with government officials to make more crimes subject to prison terms. You will also fight against alternative solutions to incarceration because fewer prisoners means less profit.

Will such advocacy make our communities safer? Probably not, but you aren't concerned with public safety -- your focus is on generating as much profit as possible. And so, while you will portray yourself in public as a disinterested bystander, in private, you will be working hard to undermine what is best for the people and the communities they live in.

By and large, this is why privatization is not such a wonderful idea. Once a private corporation has a pony in the race, they will do everything possible to insure that their horse wins. If it means shooting all the other horses, then so be it.