Texas Grand Jury Indicts VP Cheney
VP, Former Attorney General Indicted On Organized Crime Charges
By The Associated Press
November 18, 2008 "AP" -- - McALLEN, Texas -- A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on state charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County's federal detention centers.
The indictment, which had not yet been signed by the presiding judge, was one of seven released Tuesday in a county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles in recent years. Another of the indictments named a state senator on charges of profiting from his position.
Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra's tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.
Cheney's indictment on a charge of engaging in an organized criminal activity criticizes the vice president's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees because of his link to the prison companies.
Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on Tuesday, saying that the vice president had not yet received a copy of the indictment.
The indictment accuses Gonzales of using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately-run prisons.
Gonzalez's attorney, George Terwilliger III, said in a written statement, "This is obviously a bogus charge on its face, as any good prosecutor can recognize. Hopefully, competent Texas authorities will take steps to reign in this abuse of the criminal justice system."
Willacy County has become a prison hub with county, state and federal lockups. Guerra has gone after the prison-politician nexus before, extracting guilty pleas from three former Willacy and Webb county commissioners after investigating bribery related to federal prison contacts.
Another indictment released Tuesday accuses state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. of profiting from his public office by accepting honoraria from prison management companies. Guerra announced his intention to investigate Lucio's prison consulting early last year.
Lucio's attorney, Michael Cowen, released a scathing statement accusing Guerra of settling political scores in his final weeks in office.
"Senator Lucio is completely innocent and has done nothing wrong," Cowen said, adding that he would file a motion to quash the indictment this week.
Last month, a Willacy County grand jury indicted The GEO Group, a Florida private prison company, on a murder charge in the death of a prisoner days before his release. The three-count indictment alleged The GEO Group allowed other inmates to beat Gregorio de la Rosa Jr. to death with padlocks stuffed into socks. The death happened in 2001 at the Raymondville facility, just four days before de la Rosa's scheduled release.
The USA has over 5000 jails and prisons. That is the average of 100 per state. We do not have nearly that many institutions of higher learning in each state! Over 3 million citizens in Prison, not counting those on bail or parole nor the throngs of criminal illegal immigrants!! Over 7 million Americans are wards of the prison system -- i.e., on parole, on probation, in between or in the slammer! Well over 360,000 violent rapes are committed inside U.S. incarceration facilities annually. Some say our true number tied up in penal systems and facilities approaches 30 million ...
MONICA LEWINSKII'S PRISON NOTEBOOKS
UPDATE #1--Today, Mark McLellan, our cabinet level director of Medicare and Medicaid, appointed by GW Bush to the position, has now determined as the nation's top man overseeing FDA and Medicare, that nursing homes, many of them corrupt and fraudulent, and illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants, are entitled to easy access to immediate Medicare monies and support, whereas still, as has long been the case, the legal citizens here who are partially employed, part-time employed, unemployed, or homeless, and even the foster children who are sick, may not receive these SSI Medicare benefits ... can you say the word "lobby"??
The Dark Side of America, THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: May 17, 2004
The sickening pictures of American troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners have led inevitably to questions about the standards of treatment in the corrections system at home, which has grown tenfold over the last 30 years and now jails people at eight times the rate of France and six times the rate of Canada. Conditions vary widely from state to state and community to community. But as The Times's Fox Butterfield reported recently, some of the chilling pictures from Iraq — such as the ones of inmates being paraded around naked — could have been taken at some American prisons. And humiliation by prison guards is far from the first thing on most American inmates' list of worries.
The nearly 12 million people who pass through the corrections system each year are often subject to violent attacks by other inmates, and prisoner-on-prisoner rape is endemic. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, easily transmitted in tight spaces, have become a common problem. Illegal drugs ferried in by prison employees — and used by inmates who share needles — have made prison a high-risk setting for H.I.V. infection and most recently the liver-destroying hepatitis C.
Some prisons have actually cut back on testing for disease, rather than risk being required to treat large numbers of infected inmates at bankrupting costs. That means, of course, that released inmates will unknowingly pass on diseases to others. By failing to confront public health problems in prison, the country could be setting itself up for new epidemics down the line.
It is hard to quantify how many American prisoners are abused, or allowed to suffer from untreated illnesses, since the system operates largely in the shadows, outside public scrutiny. The maze of federal, state and local institutions defies easy assessment.
Things are more transparent in Europe, thanks to a powerful, independent prison commission, informally known as the Committee for Prevention of Torture. Established in 1987, The C.P.T. has unlimited access to places of detention, including prisons, juvenile centers, psychiatric hospitals and police station holding areas. Human rights violations — including medical problems — quickly become public. Such a system is long overdue in the United States.
The need for such a body was underscored last year, when Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, ordering the Justice Department to collect data on this serious problem and to create a mechanism for dealing with it. Prison officials predictably play down rape as a problem, but a harrowing report from Human Rights Watch suggested that prisoner-on-prisoner rape accompanied by savage violence was commonplace, and that officials often looked the other way.
Psychiatric care for psychotic inmates is poor to nonexistent. A recent study by the Correctional Association of New York found that nearly a quarter of inmates assigned to disciplinary lockdown — confined to small cells 23 hours a day — were mentally ill. Their symptoms worsened in isolation; nearly half had tried to commit suicide. Dissociated and sometimes violent, these people are dumped onto the streets when they finish their sentences.
The prison system can no longer be seen as the province of prison officials who cover up or mismanage problems that eventually come back to haunt the rest of the society. The country needs to formulate national prison standards and create an independent body that enforces them, if only by opening prisons to greater public scrutiny.
PRISONERS
Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
Published: May 8, 2004 in THE NEW YORK TIMES
Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.
In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation.
At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl.
The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.
The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.
The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.
Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.
In response to a request for an interview on Friday, Mr. McCotter said in a written statement that he had left Iraq last September, just after a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open Abu Ghraib.
"I was not involved in any aspect of the facility's operation after that time," he said.
Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state prison systems were under some form of court order, for brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of medical care, said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington that calls for alternatives to incarceration.
In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in Texas, "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions."
In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by other inmates, even after he appealed to guards for help, and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave, being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different parts of the prison. The inmate, Roderick Johnson, has filed suit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Mr. Johnson.
Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the problems in American prisons were not comparable to the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.
The corrections experts are careful to say they do not know to what extent the brutality and humiliation at Abu Ghraib were intended to break the prisoners for interrogation or were just random acts.
June 27, 2003
Chuck Colson, the #1 hatchet man
for Nixon during the Watergate breakins, now runs his Reston, Va. based organization and operates the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a rehabilitation program for inmates that is based on uncompromising fundamentalist Christianity. The program was begun under then Gov. George W. Bush in 1997 at a Texas prison, and now is also offered at prisons in Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota.
An advocacy group, the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, has filed suit against Iowa, contending state funding for the program is unconstitutional.
from the LONDON GUARDIAN
Watergate returns to the White House. Watergate ex-prisoner Chuck Colson is back in the White House, kissing up to an easy mark for his latest faith-based sideshow (Guardian):
Convicted Watergate figure Chuck Colson returned to the White House Wednesday for a meeting with President Bush on Colson's post-prison endeavor of ministering to inmates.
"I felt quite emotional coming back here after my experiences in this building - and leaving it,'' Colson told reporters gathered on the White House driveway after his 40-minute meeting inside. [...]
Colson praised Bush for allowing the program to start.
"At that time, I didn't believe he'd be willing to fight it through - the church-state issues and all that were involved in it,'' he said.
Colson was White House counsel for former President Nixon and spent seven months in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate scandal. In 1976, he founded Prison Fellowship Ministries. Now an author and radio commentator, Colson was part of a group invited to the White House to talk with Bush about helping former inmates find work and keeping them from returning to prison.
Participants live in a separate prison unit and follow a curriculum of religious study, other education and work for up to 18 months. After an inmate's release, the program continues for at least six months with guidance from a mentor and local church support.
Bush asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to work on ways that such efforts could be expanded to the federal prison system, said Jim Towey, head of the White House faith-based office. The plan, especially the appeal to Ashcroft, smells not only a bit too Christian, but too fundamentalist Christian. Even though we've studiously ignored the Saudi influence on September 11, 2001, aren't we all a little sick of government-sponsored fundamentalists yet?
Besides, shouldn't Buddhist or Shinto or Jewish or Islamic prisoners be entitled to the same availability of religious study? Colson's penal Christianity is all a ruse. He has much bigger ambitions beyond the superficial prison-prayer nonsense, and he's hoping President Gump will bite the bait.
What Colson really wants is $5 billion to preach abstinence to Africans, the amount he envisions as his portion of the vague $15 billion AIDS in Africa relief package Dubya proposed during the State of the Union address.
"MONICA SAYS 90 DAYS IN JAIL WILL MAKE HER LOOK LIKE ME!"
Prison Class: What Ma Barker Knew and Congress Didn't
By BRENT STAPLES, Nov. 25, 2002, The New York Times
The United States runs the largest and most expensive prison system in the world.
The rate of imprisonment in this country is five times the rate in Britain, eight times the rate in France and 14 times the rate in Japan. The cost of housing this country's inmates exceeds $20,000 per person per year — more than the price of in-state student enrollment at many of America's best public universities.
The inmate population has grown by nearly 80 percent over the last decade. One of the big problems is that so many of the people who leave prison can't manage to stay out. Indeed, more than 50 percent of inmates end up back inside for new crimes within three years of being released.
Law-and-order types tend to scoff when educators argue that the problem could be partly solved by educating inmates — and training them for jobs — instead of allowing them to sit idle during their sentences. But prison education programs were radically undermined during the 1990's, when Congress made convicted felons ineligible for Pell grants, the federal tuition aid program aimed primarily at the poor. The government also limited the flow of money to prisons for adult and special education — a move that turned out to be seriously self-destructive.
Researchers have discovered and rediscovered, over and over again, that inmates who attend vocational training or college classes are more likely to stay out of jail once they leave. Studies of inmates who take college classes at several prisons — including Bedford Hills in New York — have found recidivism rates in the single digits. College diplomas clearly help ex-offenders get and hold jobs.
But the value of prison education seems to extend well beyond the job search. Reading, writing and thinking allow many ex-offenders to reflect on their actions instead of living on impulse.
Prison education studies are often dismissed for being too small to be meaningful. But a large-scale study released last year by the Correctional Education Association seems more than big enough to be convincing. Financed by the United States Department of Education, this study charts the progress of more than 3,000 inmates across three states. The data shows that prisoners who receive vocational or academic training are more likely to remain out of jail, perhaps because they find it easier to get jobs.
This information comes at a time when the states have followed the federal government's lead and cut back severely on prison education. Institutions that still have programs are often afraid to discuss them, fearing that they will come under attack for coddling criminals. But Boston University, led by the cantankerous and aggressively independent John Silber, seems not just open about its program, but proud of it.
Boston University started its prison education program in 1972 and maintained the commitment even after the federal money began to dry up. After three decades, the Boston program this year has 125 students in three prisons.
Mr. Silber was introduced to the idea by the beloved Boston University professor Elizabeth Barker — affectionately nicknamed Ma Barker after the legendary gangster. Ms. Barker, who died last year at the age of 89, first hit upon the idea of starting the prison program when she took Boston University's G.E. College Bowl team to practice against the inmate team at a medium-security prison in Norfolk, Mass.
The Boston prison program is fairly rigorous. Regular admission is available only to students who have completed six college-level courses (including English composition) with a grade point average of 2.5 or above. Lately, it has admitted less-prepared probationary students, because the community colleges that were providing basic coursework retreated from the prisons after federal budget cuts.
Robert Cadigan, the director of the Boston University program, cites his prison enrollees as among the most dedicated and interesting students he has met in more than 20 years of teaching. In addition to preparing themselves for work after prison, the inmates appear to have better relations with their children, with whom they can speak about the value of education.
The Boston program has thus far granted degrees to 218 students. A formal study has yet to be undertaken. But some people believe that nearly all of the graduates who left prison never returned. When asked why the program works, Ma Barker once said: "This changes their heads. They want to help people not get into trouble they got in." Recent studies support her instincts. The decision to cut back prison education was clearly a mistake. The sooner we undo it, the better off we will be.
Monica's Adipose BULLETIN: Please don't believe the PHOTO of me by Marcel Thomas Images shown in a recent New York Daily News, purported to be me, Monica Lewinskii, in the gay Christopher Street district of Manhattan's West Village. That gal was way too fat!!
I was never near the film location shooting of "How to Lose a Man in 10 Days" starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey [who i think has a crush on me and my svelte body!]
My handbag designs are doing nicely, thank you, and that photo of the big fat tubby in tight girthy bluejeans was not me, it was a picture of Chelsea Clinton.
MELISSA BARTHELEMY, winner of the Essay Contest,
published in the August 2002 THE HUMANIST magazine, is a 24 year old grad of UC Santa Cruz, with a BA in History. The following are some summaries and excerpts of her essay:
"Our Prison-Industrial Complex"
* The US now imprisons more people than any other country in the world, perhaps a half million more than Communist China. This creates a bizarre situation.
* Many of these prisoners are women who are mothers who were busted for small drug possession charges.
* Approximately 80% of black men under the age of 35 have a criminal record.
* Most of them are not allowed to vote.
* The biggest development in our penal system has been the privitization of the prisons in the last 15 years.
* Companies contracting to employ prisoners are: AT&T; Bank of America; Boeing; Chevron; Costco; Dell Computers; Eddie Bauer; IBM; MicroSoft; Starbucks [and its Israeli "one hand helps the other" affiliations]. click here for Israeli ties to our prison profiteers!
* Instead of using sweatshops overseas, it is easier and less expensive for U.S. compaines to use prison labor domestically [prisoners are paid 45 cents/hour for 9 hour workdays].
* Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both documented physical abuse within our privately-run prisons.
We want to know why OUR AMERICAN PRISONS now have more inmates than the GULAGS of Russia which Solzhenitzen excoriated against so eloquently. Why are there dozens of investment opportunities in companies with names like CORRECTIONS CORP. OF AMERICA, that rent out prisons to state and federal governments?? Why are so many firefighters in dangerous firefights underpaid prisoners, trotted out for the flames for less than one buck and hour? Why doesn't the media cover Jesse Jackson's assessment of the deplorable fact that it is easier for a black brother to go to prison than to finish high school? Something like $20 worth of crack is enough for five years in prison if you're not white. Whereas, Caucasian undergrads smoke up hundreds of bucks of grass a week and get off with only a few sniffles to the judge??
"A federal judge granted preliminary approval yesterday to a $1.6 million settlement on behalf of D.C. inmates who claimed they were abused, denied adequate medical care and not properly separated from their dangerous counterparts at a PRIVATELY run PRISON in Youngstown, Ohio.
The proposed SETTLEMENT stems from a class-action lawsuit against CORRECTIONS CORP. of AMERICA, which runs the prison, and the District.
[...] More than 1,500 inmates have been transferred to the prison since it opened in May 1997.
[...] The family of at least one inmate killed last year has filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against CCA, former DC Corrections director Margaret A. Moore and the District.
[...] CCA did not return telephone calls seeking comment yesterday. The Ohio facility has had myriad problems since opening nearly two years ago. At least two DC inmates were killed by other prisoners ? more than 40 assaults have occurred, including 20 stabbings in the first 10 months of the prison's operation. Six inmates escaped last July.
The incidents prompted US Attorney General Janet Reno to order a review of the prison. The federal examination done by Corrections Trustee John Clark found a series of missteps by Nashville-based CCA and by Moore. They found a lack of policies and procedures, poor security and management, and inexperienced staff members."
"Study Finds Big Increase in Black Men as Inmates Since 1980"
By FOX BUTTERFIELD, The New Yorks Times, Sept. 1, 2002
The increase in the black male prison population coincides with the commercial prison
construction boom that began 1980. At that time, three times more black
men were enrolled in institutions of higher learning than behind bars,
the study said. Now they are sold as shares on Wall Street.
The number of black men in jail or prison has grown fivefold in the past
20 years, to the point where more black men are behind bars than are
enrolled in colleges or universities, according to a study released yesterday.
The increase in the black male prison population coincides with the prison
construction boom that began 1980. At that time, three times more black
men were enrolled in institutions of higher learning than behind bars,
the study said.
The report was prepared by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based
research and advocacy group that supports alternatives to incarceration.
The study found that in 2000 there were 791,600 black men in jail or
prison and 603,032 enrolled in colleges or universities. By contrast,
the study said that in 1980 there were 143,000 black men in jail or prison
but 463,700 enrolled in colleges or universities.
Some criminal justice experts said it was misleading to compare the two
categories because the number in jail and prison includes all adult black
men 17 years or older, while the number in institutions of higher learning
is confined to a narrower student-age population in their late teens
and early twenties.
But Todd Clear, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in
Manhattan, said the study's findings were still significant and "tell
us there has been a public policy far overemphasizing investment in criminal
justice instead of in education for this population."
"It tells you that the life chances of a black male going to prison is
greater today than the chances of a black male going to college, and
it wasn't always this way," Professor Clear said.
The study did not directly address why the number of black men in jail
and prison climbed so quickly. Some experts suggested as one explanation
a rise in the number of black men serving time for drug offenses. But
Justice Department figures show that from 1990 to 2000, 50 percent of
the growth in inmate populations at state prisons was for violent crimes,
and that only 20 percent was for drug crimes.
During the prison-building boom of the last two decades, the number of
Americans of all races in jail or prison quadrupled, to 2.1 million in
2000 from 502,000 in 1980, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
In that same period, the number of Americans of all races attending colleges
and universities rose to 14.8 million from 12.1 million, according to
the National Center for Education Statistics, an increase of 22 percent.
Hilary O. Shelton, the director of the Washington chapter of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said, "It is indeed
a sad statement about our nation that it appears to be easier for governments
to invest precious public dollars into the incarceration of African-American
men than it is for them to invest in higher education."
Vincent Schiraldi, the president of the Justice Policy Institute, noted
the report found that the number of black men in jail or prison grew
three times as fast from 1980 to 2000 as the rise in the number of black
men in colleges and universities.
"PRISONERS IN USA AS HOPELESS AS BREAKER MORANT"
... a newly revolutionary Monica Lewinskii takes on Prison and Nuclear Waste Reform issues, with assistance from some old retired Mossad contacts from her early education!!
First, the most important 3 men to email if you want to get rich on the commercial prisons stock market bull run before it quiets down like dot.com's:
John D. Rees, Vice-President, Corrections Corporation of America
Wayne Calabrese, President, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation
Marvin Wiebe, Vice President, Cornell Corrections
WACKENHUT CORRECTIONS CORP., our #1 Paramilitary Inc.
Mentally Disordered in U.S. Swing Between Jail, Hospital
May 14, 2002
Summarized from an article by Alan Elsner, National Correspondent
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (Reuters) - Project Link, a six-year-old program spearheaded by University of Rochester psychiatrists Steven Lamberti and Robert Weisman, aims to identify severely mentally ill patients like Collier and help them re-establish some semblance of a normal life. The benefits to society could be immense.
"Jails and prisons have become the final destination of the mentally ill in America. It's a huge problem. There are more mentally ill folk in state prisons than in state hospitals. The Los Angeles County Jail has become the nation's largest mental institution," said Lamberti.
"So many people are trapped in what I call a Bermuda Triangle of prison, hospital and the streets," he said.
Project Link takes severely mentally ill patients -- there are currently 45 enrolled -- and given each one a case worker, who makes sure they take their medications, keep in touch with medical and social service providers in the community.
Most private landlords are reluctant to rent rooms to mentally ill tenants. But without stable housing, they are almost impossible to treat.
COSTS DRASTICALLY CUT
The program also drastically cut the costs of caring for participants, from an estimated average of $62,500 per person to $14.500.
There is an estimated 5.6 million people with severe mental illness currently living in the United States.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the number of available beds in mental hospitals plummeted while the commercial prison population more than doubled to around 2 million, of whom around 15 percent are believed to be suffering from severe mental illness, according to various studies. That totals out at around 300,000 people.
In Rochester, a city of around 750,000 near the shores of Lake Ontario, a regional psychiatric hospital which once held over 3,000 inmates was cut to just 200 beds in the 1990s.
[summarized from a recent New York Times article, by Henri E. Cauvin]
The
Wackenhut Corrections Corp., (WAK)
based in Florida, has become the world leader in private prison construction and management. They are currently expanding into South Africa, after having made great strides in the USA [especially Austin, Texas], the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the Carribean islands. WCC is now building a 3,024 bed maximum security prison in South Africa, financed by a consortium of SOUTH AFRICAN BANKS.
It is hoped by the consortium that this is only the first step of a long and lucrative relationship that will rapidly expand.
" [...] Authorities in Texas reclaimed control of a
Wackenhut run prison
in Austin after a dozen former employees were indicted late last year on charges of sexually assaulting and harrassing inmates ... earlier this year, authorities in Louisiana transferred the ENTIRE POPULATION of a JUVENILE PRISON run by
Wackenhut
after federal investigations contended that inmates [JUVENILES] were beaten and deprived of adequate food and clothes."
--->>> check your Wall Street stocks and see which WACKENHUT prison shares are ahead of the pack this week!! It's one of the best deals in our "democracy" and "nuclear family" --- you can afford a pension and your own private health insurance if you invest in penal colonies and supernatant radioactive salts and RADIOACTIVE SALT CAKES!!!! <<<---
from the "SACRAMENTO BEE"
Q: Have you ever heard that the private prison industry is a
good investment? I heard that Wackenhut stock has soared
lately. What do you think?
-- M.E., Sacramento
A: Wackenhut Corp. (ticker symbol WAK) is an international
provider of security services that also manages privatized
correctional facilities.
For the 39 weeks ended Oct. 1, revenues rose 17 percent to
$1.85 billion, but net income fell 4 percent to $13.5 million.
Late last month, the security service company advised Wall
Street that it expects to post earnings[.]
The Leonard Peltier Family [in tranquility] with Mother Nature
Statement of Leonard Peltier:
Greetings, my friends,
I cannot express to you the anxiety and frustration I have been dealing
with, first with the sudden transfer, then with the surgery, and now as we
wait for a decision from the United States Parole Commission. I extend my
deepest gratitude to everyone who sent postal money orders, soft cover
books, cards and letters. Your generous and compassionate thoughts are
truly helping me to recover.
I am proud of everyone who took part in the February 6th Day of Action.
It was not easy to take time from work, and brave the cold winds blowing in
so many places. My heart goes out to everyone for that wonderful sacrifice.
It keeps me strong, knowing that on the outside, beyond these terrible
walls, stand so many good people. In prison, I often meet those whose faith
in humankind has been defeated, mutilated beyond recognition. I thank the
Creator every day that my support system is so strong, vibrant, courageous,
and caring.
We must reach out to those who are standing so alone, whether they be young
or old, regardless of race or religion. Here at the medical facility I see
sick and lonely men, desperate to hear from friends or family. I am sorry
for them. It makes me wonder about kids in foster care, and elders in
nursing homes.
It's so easy to make someone's day a little brighter. For example, on the
cover of this newsletter are several very happy children. They are happy
because kind-hearted people decided to sponsor them for Christmas. In all,
we had nearly fifty children in the Christmas program, which I am hoping to
start year-round. Why make these beautiful kids happy only one day a year?
For those interested in becoming a bigger part of childrens' lives, please
contact Lisa at the LPDC and she will place you on a list of individuals
interested in getting such a program started.
Remember, this is an election year, and while I am deeply and consistently
touched with this ceaseless call for my freedom, also use this opportunity
to voice our shared concerns about prison rights, judicial inequities, human
rights, and hardship for children and elders living on our reservations and
in our inner cities. These are the issues that should concern our
leadership; not whether a same-sex couple should marry! I am appalled by
some of the rhetoric and mudslinging.
Do they expect us to care about the private lives of individuals, where we
have no business, or about kids having kids and dropping out of school? Or
grandparents freezing in their apartments? Or babies born to single
mothers, their father's denying their responsibilities? Or the blatantly
disproportionate number of minorities in prisons?
Please, my friends, be loud, be heard!
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
Leonard Peltier
from a very recent NEW YORK TIMES article by William K. Rashbaum
[excerpted]
"CHINESE COMPANY USES FORCED PRISON LABOR TO MAKE LAWYERS BRIEF CLIPS FOR 80% of U.S.A. LEGAL MARKET"
"A manufacturer of widely used [law firm] metal clips for binding documents ... using forced prison labor ... pleaded guilty to the federal charge in New Jersey.
[...] The women [prisoners] were not paid, and worked so many hours that their fingers were sometimes bloodied, a federal official said.
[...] The [one third share of the U.S. legal clips market share] investigation has left AIMCO in a shambles. Customs agents seized and detroyed 24 million of the company's clips in Newark, Los Angeles, and other cities [unnamed], forcing the closing of the Aimco spring clip factory in Nanjing, believed to be the largest in the world.
[...] Aimco pleaded guilty to violating a 1932 law that was passed to prevent human rights abuses and protect American ... workers from unfair competition."
TODAY'S HEADLINES:
"Experts say it is the most lethal garbage in the world"
THE SAVANNAH RIVER, S.C. NUCLEAR WEAPONS DUMP PROJECT, S.C.
Summarized from an article by MATTHEW L. WALD, of the New York Times
"The Curse of Yucca Mountain and Benzene"
COLUMBIA, S.C. — For years the Energy Department has promised to clean nearly all the radioactivity out of bomb wastes here that are to be secured in giant concrete blocks. Now, faced with a cleaning technology that it has been unable to make work properly for more than a decade, department officials have reversed themselves.
A $2.4 billion factory at Savannah River, S.C., is processing the giant amounts of radioactive sludge ... mixing it with molten glass, and pouring the mixture into stainless steel canisters. The mixture cools into glass logs, and about 1,200 of them have been made since production began in 1996. The plan is to bury them deep underground [some of the cannisters will be 1000 feet underground], presumably at Yucca Mountain, Nev. [Yucca Mountain is near Las Vegas groundwater and exactly adjacent to the Nevada Nuclear Weapons Test Sites of the 1950s], where they are supposed to be secure for thousands of years.
The new proposal to mix a sizable portion of the waste with cement without cleaning it is adding to tensions between the federal government and Gov. Jim Hodges of South Carolina, who has threatened to use state troopers to block new shipments of plutonium into the site, the Savannah River nuclear reservation here.
[On Friday, a federal judge in South Carolina ordered the Energy Department to wait 30 days before beginning to ship weapons-grade plutonium from Colorado to Savannah River. The order, which means that no shipping can begin until June 15, came a week after Governor Hodges filed suit to stop the shipments, which he opposes because of uncertainties about the technology that would be involved in converting the former nuclear weapons to still toxic powerplant fuel.]
Stored in 51 giant tanks, the mix of radioactive sludge, liquid and salts is a legacy of the factories here that produced the United States' atomic arsenal. Experts say it is the most lethal garbage in the world.
The Energy Department [DOE], which designs, builds and maintains our nuclear weapons, has a powerful motive to simplify the cleanup. Any method that proves effective here will be duplicated at sites in Idaho [most radionuclide wastes from our U.S. Navy nuclear operations are currently stored at the Idaho National Environmental and Engineering Facility], and Hanford, Washington [The Hanford Nuclear Site is a 560-square-mile tract of semi-arid land located within the Columbia River Basin in southeastern Washington, about 50 miles north of the Oregon border. The Columbia River flows through the Hanford Site boundary. In early 1943, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers selected the Hanford Site as their main location for nuclear reactor and chemical processing facilities for the production, separation, and purification of plutonium].
[... The suggested method of disposal] is cleaning the radioactive salts by washing out radioactive cesium-137 and then mixing the salts with cement. But the washing process also produces a volatile compound, benzene, which makes the waste tanks vulnerable to fire or explosion.
The U.S. Dept. of Energy's record with cement is spotty. In the 1980's it tried to clean up a contaminated pond at the Rocky Flats plant, in the suburbs of Denver, by mixing radioactive material with cement to produce what officials called pondcrete. In months, the pondcrete crumbled. A solution here will be a model for Hanford, Wash., where there are more tanks, in worse condition, and where the department recently broke ground for another glass factory.
At the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, James Hardeman, manager of the Environmental Radiation Division, said, "They can call it mudpies, it's still high level waste." [regarding the nearby Savannah River Project]
"It should be buried at Yucca Mountain," Mr. Hardeman said.
Excerpts from a three part investigation by THE NEW YORK TIMES
by Jane Fritsch and David Rohde
"[...] Thirty-eight years after the United States Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that indigent defendants have a right to legal cousel, NYC offers representation to the poor that routinely falls short of even minimum standards recommended by legal experts.
In a 7-month analysis of thousands of city records and court cases in 2000, the NYT found that almost NO PART OF THE INDIGENT defense system functions as it was intended."
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who plays a central role in shaping the indigent defense system, declined to be interviewed.
[...] The LEGAL AID SOCIETY has been hobbled by budget cuts since its lawyers went ON STRIKE in 1994, angering Mayor Giuliani. The cuts came JUST as the mayor's crackdown on quality-of-life crimes FLOODED the courts with defendents in need of lawyers.
[...] "The system as it is makes bad lawyers even out of good lawyers."
[...] Only 36% of the lawyers [ever] made the trip to RIKERS ISLAND, the city's vast jail complex in the East River near La Guardia Airport.
[...] In New York, the nonprofit LEGAL AID SOCIETY is the closest thing to a public defender's office [which almost every other US urban area provides]. But it represents fewer than 10% of ... defendants."
The Judges on Monica Lewinskii's Panel, and her Scribes with this cyberpublication, would like to congratulate JUSTICE EMILY JANE GOODMAN for her courageous interpretations of the laws of the State of New York, and for her concern for prisoners rights, and for the plight of the homeless.
from the current issue of the ...
THE NEW YORK LAW JOURNAL
"Ban on Waiving Inmate Court Fees is Lifted"
[excerpted from the article by Cerisse Anderson]
"A STATE Supreme Court Justice has declared that indigent prison inmates should be treated like other poor litigants when applying for a waiver of filing costs in a civil action in state court.
Justice Emily Jane Goodman ruled UNCONSTITUTIONAL an amendment to Civil Practice Law and Rules Sec.1101(f), which took effect nine months ago, eliminating a judge's discretion to APPROVE the WAIVER of an inmate's filing fee in civil litigation.
[...] the law [amended] requires indigent inmates to pay a FILING FEE of no less than $15 or more than $50. If an inmate does NOT HAVE THE MONEY, the state gets a LIEN AGAINST THE INMATE'S PRISON TRUST FUND.
[...] Ruling in GOMEZ v. EVANGELISTA, filed in Supreme Court ... Justice Goodman raised the constitutional question herself [.].
Mr. Gomez was seeking poor person status to initiate a proceeding under the Freedom of Information Law AGAINST the New York City Police Department[.].
The new restriction on INMATE FILING FEES was passed last year as part of the State's Budget Package. GOV. PATAKI and the bill's supporters pushed for this [.].
[... JUSTICE GOODMAN] "This court can discern no rational basis for the State's discriminating between poor persons who are non-inmates and poor persons who are inmates, such as petitioner Gomez. Prison inmates, no less than other persons, are to be afforded unhampered and equal access to the legal system."
[Justice Goodman then proceeded to cite a copy of Gomez's prison trust fund account statement, that showed he had a ZERO "spendable" balance. She then directed the Court to issue an index number to Mr. Gomez FREE OF CHARGE.]
PRISON INMATES BATTLING FIRES FOR $1 an Hour !!!
[excerpted from a recent NEW YORK TIMES article]
"[...] About 13,000 people belong to crews assigned to the fire lines ... of these, more than 2,000 are inmates ... with the most operating in California, home to the nation's largest inmate-firefighter program.
[...] Bryan Kawa, 32, of South Ogden, Utah, who was convicted on a weapons charge ... is housed in a minimum security dormitory, 30 men to a room, when he is not on the fire lines.
[...] In California, where the state prison population now stands at 162,000, it costs $21,000 a year to house a prisoner behind walls but just $13,000 a year at one of these conservation camps.
[...] the Utah crew is better paid than any other inmate teams, though the rate is just a fraction of civilian wages. A civilian firefighter with the same elite status would make about $15 an hour plus overtime ... two fellow inmate firefighters were killed last week in Utah ... raising questions about just how much value might be attached to an inmate's life. The State of Utah has paid only for the inmates' funerals, and state officials say they cannot be confident that the two prisoners will become eligible for federal death benefits of nearly $150,000 that is routinely paid to firefighters slain in action."
This dove is the only one from its forest that got away from "dove temp agency slavery" and protected itself from being OUTSOURCED. Look how beautifully it flies!!!
