#State Prison

[thoughtportal]

Luigi Mangione and other inmates enduring human rights abuses

[mus1g4]

Hey, I’m turning 18 soon and am thinking of going to the jail, my question is for my role play character, all I know I want to be a punk put in my place by the guards and inmates. But I don’t what my story should be like I’m a college freshman who got a little too drunk and now has years to be spent behind bars, or a Juvie inmate being moved up to adult prison, you got any ideas?

Nice to meet you!

How exciting for you! I would be happy if you shared your first experience with us.

Definitely NOT a punk. You need to be the spoiled brat who fucks up at a party. You get wasted and have a traffic crash. You kill one of your fraternity brothers who was riding in your car. You get sentenced to 7 years of hard labor because the judge wants to "send a message" to other brats like you.

This is the little brat I am thinking about!

You end up doing hard labor behind razor wire!

How's that?? I hope you will reply back.

Question about Hampton Jail Role Play Scenario

[reasonsforhope]

"On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.”

That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction.

DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint.

“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan said. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”

The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison.

The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from a family who owned the land generationally.

Retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker, who owns neighboring land and had considered purchasing it as a hunting ground, told Grist he was supportive. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said.

The penitentiary has been a gleam in the eye of state and local officials and the Bureau of Prisons since 2006. It has always sparked sharp divisions in Roxana and beyond and was killed in 2019 after a series of lawsuits, only to be quietly resurrected in 2022. Last fall, the bureau took the final step in its approval process, clearing the way to begin buying land...

In his book Coal, Cages, Crisis, Schept noted that mine sites are considered ideal locations for prisons or a dumping ground for waste, rather than places of ecological value, as some biologists have argued. The Roxana site has been reclaimed, meaning re-vegetated with a forest that now shelters a number of rare species, including endangered bats.

Opponents argue that a prison will bring more environmental problems than jobs. Letcher County was 1 of 13 counties ravaged by catastrophic flooding in 2022, a situation exacerbated by damage strip mining caused to local watersheds. The prison slated for Roxana will exacerbate the problem.

The Bureau of Prisons estimates it will damage 6,290 feet of streams and about 2 acres of wetlands. (The agency has promised to compensate the state.)

DeVaughan said the purchase also is a step toward rectifying the dispossession that began with the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples. The Cherokee, Shawnee, and Yuchi made their homes in the area before, during, and after colonization, and their thriving nations raised crops, ran businesses, and hunted bison that once roamed Appalachia.

In all the time since, coal, timber, gas, and landholding companies have at times owned almost half of the land in 80 counties stretching from West Virginia to Alabama. Several prisons sprang from deals made with coal companies, something many locals consider the continuation of this status quo.

Changing that dynamic is a priority for the Appalachian Rekindling Project, which hoped to buy more land to protect it from extractive industries and return its stewardship to Indigenous and local communities. DeVaughn said Indigenous peoples throughout the region will be welcome to use the land as a gathering place...

DeVaughan sees its work establishing a new vision of economic transition for coalfields, one that relies less on “dollars and numbers” and more on “healing and restoration” of the land and the Indigenous and other communities that live there.

She is working with some personal connections in the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations to acquire a herd of bison and plans to work with local volunteers, scientists, and students to inventory the site’s flora and fauna."

-via GoodGoodGood, February 6, 2025

[rosietherivendell]

Okay but the idea that Christians in the Severance universe believe that getting severed creates a completely separate, innocent individual who has the ability to be judged and go to either heaven or hell is actually so completely fucked. The implications for society at large are so scary like how long until that religious belief filters down into general belief and then into the legal system? Prisons no longer carrying out the death sentence but performing severance under the guise of mercy. You're sentenced to death/life in prison? Fear not! You can choose to get severed! Time will pass more quickly! Your innie is innocent and would get to work a normal job so at least some part of you is free! Meanwhile Lumon gets full time workers/slaves who are completing prison sentences for crimes they've never committed

[architecturethroughouthistory]

[political-us]

[trans-axolotl]

PA DOC Sued for Discriminating Against Person with Disabilities: The Right to AAC in Prison

there was a recent press release from Disability Rights PA about current litigation happening in PA that is trying to ensure that John Topper, a man with Huntington's disease, can access an Augmentative/Alternative Communication device while incarcerated.

Currently, the DOC is denying him all access to any communication aids, forcing him to "communicate by typing notes on a tablet and passing it back and forth with the person he is attempting to communicate with. This tablet breaks frequently, and prison staff regularly prevent him from bringing the tablet with him everywhere in the prison...After returning from the hospital, the DOC denied him a working communication aid for ten days. As a result, he was only able to communicate with psychiatry staff via thumbs up and down gestures."

this has dramatically impacted Topper's wellbeing: " 'This has been such an emotional and mental struggle for me daily. Day-to-day routines are very hard without a means of effective communication and I have to struggle to have my daily needs met,' said John Topper, the plaintiff in the case. "

Topper cannot access healthcare, daily programming, or stay in contact with his family members. Prison staff refuse to provide any forms of communication aids for daily interactions, making it difficult and sometimes impossible for Topper to request things like toothpaste, toilet paper, or other daily needs. This is cruel, harmful punishment that highlights the types of carceral violence that disabled people face while incarcerated.

This lawsuit is suing to get Topper daily and continuous access to an AAC text to speech device. His counsel already bought him this device and the prison has it available, and yet they refuse to give it to him for pointless and arbitrary reasons. They've told Topper he has to choose between a wheelchair accessible cell and a cell with an outlet, they've told him that they were making his current tablet accessible but then said the only accessible adaptation they could add was a screen-reader, which his does not need, and have threatened and taken away his current tablet many times. The cruelty is the point.

It's vital as disabled people that we have solidarity with those most targeted by the state, and that we fight for our comrades currently incarcerated. Prisons are disabling and prisons target disabled people: we need to fight to make sure our comrades can get their needs met, and we need to fight to free them all!

keep an eye on Disability Rights PA and Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project for updates about Topper's case and for any steps the public can take to support him. I've reached out to ask about how to send letters to him/info for his commissary fund; I will update this post when I get more information.

disability justice means free them all!!

[luulapants]

We talk about prison "abolition" and not prison "reform" not because we believe it's possible to create a system where no incarceration is necessary. We say "abolition" because we want to create systems that allow the establishment of a new reparative justice structure, which uses incarceration as little as possible, and which is not a reform of the current incarceration structure, which does not repair or do justice. We do not believe the current structure can be reformed.

Reforming our current incarceration system into a justice system would be like reforming a dog fighting structure into a dog training structure. (And before anyone accuses me of comparing people in prison to dogs - no, I'm not, but I am saying that people who run prisons treat people like dogs.) Dog fighting structures were never designed to train dogs. The people that run them aren't qualified to train dogs for anything but violence (and are incentivized to continue training violence). The incarceration system creates violence and antisocial behavior. It is incentivized to continue doing so. It was never meant to repair social harm.

Prison abolition means, piece by piece, cutting off the supply of bodies to the incarceration structure.

When drug users get medical care instead of being criminalized, prisons are no longer needed to house drug users. When the mentally ill are given medical care instead of being criminalized, prisons are no longer needed to house the mentally ill. When homeless people are given housing instead of being criminalized, prisons are no longer needed to house the homeless. When impoverished people are given welfare and food benefits instead of being criminalized, prisons are no longer needed to house the poor. When youth are given opportunities outside of gangs, prisons have fewer gang members to house. We shrink the system, and we keep shrinking it. Next we create systems to reduce the population of domestic abusers. Next we tackle sexual assault. Every time it shrinks, we look at the remaining population and figure out what population we can tackle next.

That's how prison abolition works.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

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[idolomantises]

In all honesty, I kind of predicted this outcome a few weeks ago, so it’s hard to really feel that disappointment and despair I felt in 2016.

I just think “wow that sucks. But I’ll live. I know I’ll survive. I know my family and friends will survive. I’m not going to succumb to despair. It’s not worth it.”

[allfor-thegames]

andrew becomes increasingly tense during aaron's trial. neil expected it to be the anticipation of andrew's testimony and cross examination. that day comes and it's horrific, but it ends. andrew remains tense. he exerts more than neil and kevin at night practices, he doesn't sleep, he joins neil on runs.

sentencing comes and andrew is so wound up that neil thinks he could tip andrew over and he'd fracture into thousands of pieces. they stand as the judge enters. andrew grabs neil's wrist hard enough to break the bone. he stops breathing. his eyes are closed.

it's self-defense. aaron is acquitted of all charges.

that night, andrew invites neil upstairs to share the bed, and to neil's surprise, he leans into neil's space and rests his head on neil's shoulder. he is relaxed.

"trial had you nervous?" neil whispers.

"it was enough," is all andrew says back as if every burden he's carried since the start of the trial has been lifted off his shoulders.

[in4newz]

ALT

The U.S. government is taking people off the street and sending them to the place in the bottom picture without charges filed, no arraignments, no due process and without notifying anyone of the people’s whereabouts.

El Salvador intends to never release anyone from CECOT.

[keferon]

Hey, saw that you're having a bit of rough day. :(

I'm almost finished the next part.

But, would you like Prowl to bully "the wet bread moron" Josh? (as a treat. there's a part I could slide it in) Like a little petty revenge like get back at people being jerks to orcas?

-GLC

Oh I would absolutely love that yes🥺👉👈

[the-potus-is-a-russian-asset]

On July 18th, 2015, I realized that the Republican Party had left me behind. On this day, while seeking the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump had the following to say about an Annapolis graduate who was shot down, captured and tortured as a POW by the communist North Vietnam regime:

“He's not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

This verbal diarrhea came out of the mouth of a man who used his father’s wealth and privilege to dodge the draft five different times due to his “bone spurs”. Donald Trump is a traitor, a repeated draft dodger and the largest fraud in the history of our country.

[sylveongender]

please share this is important!!!

link to tweet: https://x.com/shimmeringolds/status/1726054168916304250?s=46&t=KZJMvptKg1sELtIK2ugHbg

[ID: tweet from @/shimmeringolds on november 18th, 2023 that reads: “You all please look at this!!!! On Monday the Israeli occupation parliament is presenting a law to kill 7000 Palestinians in illegal israeli occupation prisons!!! If it passes, it means that the Palestinians who are in those prisons will be killed as part of the zionist law!!!”

the tweet she is quoting is from @/QudsNen (Quds News Network) on november 18th, 2023 and that tweet reads: “The Extremist "Itamar Ben Gvir" Minister of National Security in the Israeli occupation government:

"On Monday, there will be the first reading of the death penalty law for Palestinian political prisoners, this law is presented by the

"Otzma Yehudit" party (led by the extremist Ben Gvir) this law will be discussed in the national security committee. He added, I expect all members of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) to support this important law"

The number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons has increased to 7000 prisoners, 64 of whom are women. And tens of children. #Palestine_Genocide” Below the text there is a photo of Itamar Ben Gvir. End ID.]

[casualavocados]

#he doesn't want to fight with you ai di, he wants to Kiss🙄💘🥺

Nat Chen as CHEN YI KISEKI: DEAR TO ME (2023)