#industrial prison complex

[arthropodboy]

Free LaKeith Smith

Vice's Documentary About LaKeith:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFjFze39Dcc

(would not let me embed because it is age restricted)

Link to LaKeith Smith's Gofundme:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-bring-my-son-lakeith-home?utm_campaign=m_pd+share-sheet&utm_content=undefined&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer&utm_term=undefined In 2015, LaKeith Smith was charged for the murder of his friend A'Donte Washington, who was shot by a police officer. LaKeith was 15, and charged as an adult. He was sentenced to 55 years, for a crime he did not commit. For 8 years his family has been fighting to free him while he has grown from child, to adult in prison. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, they were able to hire a new attorney with the money raised from LaKeith's Change.org page.

On December 2nd, 2022, LaKeith will be attending a post conviction hearing. This may be the only chance he has to escape imprisonment for the rest of his life.

Please, watch Vice's documentary about LaKeith and A'Donte.

If you live in Alabama, please contact your DA, there is a pre-written email and link to the DA's email in the above link.

If you live anywhere else, please sign LaKeith's Change.org. That is in the above link as well.

LaKeith should be living his life right now, he should be spending time with his family and loved ones, he should not be behind bars. Please, help him.

UPDATE (2/12/2024)

On March 21 2023, Judge Sibley Reynolds re-sentenced LaKeith Smith to a total sentence of 30 years. Since then, his family and friends have been working relentlessly to free him.

Recently the Alabama attorney general's office agreed that judge Reynolds' order was confusing, misleading and hard to understand,

SO, WITHIN 30 DAYS OF JANUARY 23 2024 LAKEITH IS EXPECTED TO RECEIVE A COURT DATE FROM THE ALABAMA COURT OF APPEALS.

Please spread the word, LaKeith is so close to being able to live his life. Here is the official Free LaKeith Smith Instagram page which is run by his Mother and updated frequently:

https://www.instagram.com/justice4lakeithsmith/ Here is the linktree with ways you can help:

https://linktr.ee/freelakeith

[metalheadsforblacklivesmatter]

Using food as punishment is cruel, unusual, and inhumane. Especially when said punishment has caused vomiting and intestinal bleeding. But prisons continue to get away with it because despite the fact that it was made to be as unappetizing as possible, it was also made to be as nutrient dense as possible so that inmates couldn't say that they're lacking nutrition in their punishment food.

These are human fucking beings, and they don't deserve subhuman treatment.

Add onto that a large portion of inmates are mentally ill and several neurological differences result in the body reacting negatively to gross food (vomiting on bad food taste and texture).

-fae

[primordialfather]

This is a freestyle performance by BAP, I love it. Source: https://youtu.be/fqMmdbwZOyo

[theconcealedweapon]

And who enforces this? Is it just a few bad apples, or is it all cops?

How hard is it for them to find cops willing to enforce this? Do they have to sift through hundreds of heroic cops who refuse until they find the one cop who's monstrous enough to enforce this, or do they easily find cops willing to enforce this because monstrous cops are everywhere and being a monster is part of the job?

"All cops are bad" is not a stereotype. It's literally a requirement for the job that every single one knew about.

[oneshortdamnfuse]

PLEASE support The Innocence Project. Let the state sanctioned murder of Marcellus Williams radicalize you into caring about incarcerated people. Don’t let those in office that allow for this to defeat you. Incarcerated people are among the most violated and exploited class of people in the United States. We have built a justice system that benefits off of the mass incarceration of marginalized people. Incarceration is used to disenfranchise people. It is used for modern day slavery. Anyone can become incarcerated. It is the quickest and easiest way for your government to strip you of your rights.

[mysharona1987]

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Studies about how giving people money is more effective at stopping homelessness than anything else are never actually going to make conservatives support UBI or anything like that. Under capitalism, homelessness is necessary as a threat to keep workers in line; you're more likely to accept bad wages and exploitation and abuse when the alternative is being thrown out into the street.

Homelessness is the stick that keeps the mule moving. The person riding the mule knows that the stick hurts it, that's the entire point.

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"Maryland Gov. Wes Moore issued a mass pardon of more than 175,000 marijuana convictions Monday morning [June 17, 2024], one of the nation’s most sweeping acts of clemency involving a drug now in widespread recreational use.

The pardons forgive low-level marijuana possession charges for an estimated 100,000 people in what the Democratic governor said is a step to heal decades of social and economic injustice that disproportionately harms Black and Brown people. Moore noted criminal records have been used to deny housing, employment and education, holding people and their families back long after their sentences have been served.

[Note: If you're wondering how 175,000 convictions were pardoned but only 100,000 people are benefiting, it's because there are often multiple convictions per person.]

A Sweeping Act

“We aren’t nibbling around the edges. We are taking actions that are intentional, that are sweeping and unapologetic,” Moore said at an Annapolis event interrupted three times by standing ovations. “Policymaking is powerful. And if you look at the past, you see how policies have been intentionally deployed to hold back entire communities.”

Moore called the scope of his pardons “the most far-reaching and aggressive” executive action among officials nationwide who have sought to unwind criminal justice inequities with the growing legalization of marijuana. Nine other states and multiple cities have pardoned hundreds of thousands of old marijuana convictions in recent years, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Legalized marijuana markets reap billions in revenue for state governments each year, and polls show public sentiment on the drug has also turned — with more people both embracing cannabis use and repudiating racial disparities exacerbated by the War on Drugs.

The pardons, timed to coincide with Wednesday’s Juneteenth holiday, a day that has come to symbolize the end of slavery in the United States, come from a rising star in the Democratic Party and the lone Black governor of a U.S. state whose ascent is built on the promise to “leave no one behind.”

The Pardons and Demographics

Derek Liggins, 57, will be among those pardoned Monday, more than 16 years after his last day in prison for possessing and dealing marijuana in the late 1990s. Despite working hard to build a new life after serving time, Liggins said he still loses out on job opportunities and potential income.

“You can’t hold people accountable for possession of marijuana when you’ve got a dispensary on almost every corner,” he said.

Nationwide, according to the ACLU, Black people were more than three times more likely than White people to be arrested for marijuana possession. President Biden in 2022 issued a mass pardon of federal marijuana convictions — a reprieve for roughly 6,500 people — and urged governors to follow suit in states, where the vast majority of marijuana prosecutions take place.

Maryland’s pardon action rivals only Massachusetts, where the governor and an executive council together issued a blanket pardon in March expected to affect hundreds of thousands of people.

But Moore’s pardons appear to stand alone in the impact to communities of color in a state known for having one of the nation’s worst records for disproportionately incarcerating Black people for any crimes. More than 70 percent of the state’s male incarcerated population is Black, according to state data, more than double their proportion in society.

In announcing the pardons, he directly addressed how policies in Maryland and nationwide have systematically held back people of color — through incarceration and restricted access to jobs and housing...

Maryland, the most diverse state on the East Coast, has a dramatically higher concentration of Black people compared with other states that have issued broad pardons for marijuana: 33 percent of Maryland’s population is Black, while the next highest is Illinois, with 15 percent...

Reducing the state’s mass incarceration disparity has been a chief goal of Moore, Brown and Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue, who are all the first Black people to hold their offices in the state. Brown and Dartigue have launched a prosecutor-defender partnership to study the “the entire continuum of the criminal system,” from stops with law enforcement to reentry, trying to detect all junctures where discretion or bias could influence how justice is applied, and ultimately reform it.

How It Will Work

Maryland officials said the pardons, which would also apply to people who are dead, will not result in releasing anyone from incarceration because none are imprisoned. Misdemeanor cannabis charges yield short sentences and prosecutions for misdemeanor criminal possession have stopped, as possessing small amounts of the drug is legal statewide.

Moore’s pardon action will automatically forgive every misdemeanor marijuana possession charge the Maryland judiciary could locate in the state’s electronic court records system, along with every misdemeanor paraphernalia charge tied to use or possession of marijuana. Maryland is the only state to pardon such paraphernalia charges, state officials said...

People who benefit from the mass pardon will see the charges marked in state court records within two weeks, and they will be eliminated from criminal background check databases within 10 months."

-via The Washington Post, June 17, 2024. Headings added by me.

[danu2203]

THE POLICE ARE NOT YOUR FRIEND

[alwaysbewoke]

america has never been great and will never be great. it's a failed experiment from the start. and don't get it twisted, this is happening everywhere in this country.

[judith-s-murray]

// as I work towards completing my English phd, this makes me incredibly sad. for many, many, many reasons.

By: Brooke Allen

Published: Mar 5, 2023

Many of us who care deeply about education in the humanities can only feel despair at the state of our institutions of ���higher” learning. Enrollment in these subjects is plummeting, and students who take literature and history classes often come in with rudimentary ideas about the disciplines. Interviewed in a recent New Yorker article, Prof. James Shapiro of Columbia said teaching “Middlemarch” to today’s college students is like landing a 747 on a rural airstrip. Technology such as messaging apps, digital crib sheets and ChatGPT, which will write essays on demand, has created a culture of casual cheating.

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks. I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry. The students write essays in longhand; during the pandemic I taught a correspondence class via snail mail. Some of them do read “Middlemarch,” and their teacher finds the experience far more gratifying than trying to land a 747 on a rural airstrip. We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.

Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors, who would have been amazed to know they would one day be read by classrooms full of atheists. One of my more devout students, a Protestant who converted to Islam, was so distressed by Voltaire’s disrespect for established creeds that he had to be comforted by other class members. They informed him that he was exactly the sort of person Voltaire was aiming his polemic at, and therefore he could understand the force of it in a way his irreligious peers couldn’t.

My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades. Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits. No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements. And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same? Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail? Perhaps prison education can serve as a model of how to return to true learning and intellectual exchange.

[ Via: https://archive.ph/5YRih ]

==

The state of things.

[theconcealedweapon]

The government imprisons people so capitalists can use them as slaves.

But for some strange reason, people think capitalism is freedom and anything else is big government tyranny.

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

From @theinnocenceproject:

This is it. We only have 48 HOURS to stop Missouri from executing #MarcellusWilliams, an innocent man.⁠

⁠

Every hour, every minute, every second is critical right now. And even though @GovParsonMO's office is closed today, we can’t let a single moment go by where we’re not urging him to take action. So today, we’re asking you to SHARE Marcellus’ story far and wide by creating your own post about him using the social media toolkit at the link in our bio, and include a call to action to sign our petition and call @GovParsonMO at 417-373-3400. ⁠

⁠

It is not too late for Gov. Parson to ensure that Missouri does not take an innocent man’s life.⁠

⁠

[vraggoee]

If you commit a crime, the government is allowed to take you away from your loved ones, lock you in a cage for 23 hours a day, humiliate you, have guards beat you, force you to do slave labor to make companies (and by extension, the prison itself) money, and if the crime is "severe" enough, they can legally murder you in one of the most painful ways imaginable. Imprisonment is worse than anything a "criminal" can do to deserve it.

[politijohn]

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