#prison administration

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Inside and Outside: Wolves and Punks

Early-twentieth-century observations of sex between prisoners were shaped by a burgeoning sexological literature whose conceptual categories proved useful in understanding and mapping prison sexual culture. But heightened attention to prison sex in the 1920s and 1930s, on the part of penologists, prison administrators, and prisoners themselves, is not explained simply by the availability of a new conceptual template. While sexologists puzzled over the etiology of same-sex practices performed by apparently "normal" people, those practices would have been more easily and readily comprehended in urban working-class communities of the period.

George Chauncey has documented the visibility of queer life in early-twentieth-century New York City and its integration in working-class and immigrant communities. In that world, Chauncey writes, "the fundamental division of male sexual actors... was not between "heterosexual' and 'homosexual' men, but between conventionally masculine males, who were regarded as men, and effeminate males, known as fairies or pansies, who were regarded as virtual women, or, more precisely, as members of a 'third sex' that combined elements of the male and female.

Prisons were enclosed communities that gave rise to and perpetuated their own distinctive cultures, but they were far from hermetically sealed. The attribution of sexual deviance or "queerness" to the gender transgression of "fairies" and the possibility of conventionally masculine men having sex with them without compromising their status as "normal" found an echo in men's prison populations. Prison vernacular, especially the terms used to denote participants in prison sex, overlapped closely with working-class vernacular and the roles and expectations it delineated, no doubt reflecting its importation into prisons by a disproportionately working-class inmate population and perhaps its exportation into working-class communities as well.

Prison sexual vernacular was part of a prison argot that attracted considerable attention more generally, from both prison insiders and outsiders. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer and prisoner Hi Simons was fascinated by prison language that seemed to him "full of swagger and laughter, because of the vivid if often violent and vile poetry that streaked through it.... To use it," Simons wrote, "made us feel bold and free." Simons acknowledged that "except for a few terms from the I.W.W. vocabulary," incarcerated labor organizers "added nothing" to the specialized vocabulary of prisoners, but he worked to compile a dictionary of "prison lingo" he learned while an inmate of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth and published it in 1933. Others in this period published glossaries of prison terms as well, testifying to the emergence of a collective consciousness and shared culture among prisoners.

Central to prison argot were the coded terms that delineated sexual types and declared expectations about sexual acts and roles, offering a vernacular analog to sexological taxonomies. Noel Ersine included eighteen terms referring to same-sex sex among the fifteen hundred entries in Underworld and Prison Slang, published in 1933. Simons imagined that "a complete prison dictionary" would constitute "an encyclopedia of all imaginable sexual deviations," rivaling the sexologists' ambitions in cata loging sexual variance."

Prison constituted a unique transfer point between expert and vernacular sexual discourses, the terms of one often inflecting the other. Those men typed by sexologists as "pseudo-homosexuals" or "semi-homosexuals" were known to male prisoners as "wolves" and "punks." Those were men whose participation in same-sex sex was presumed to spring not from their nature but from the exigencies of circumstance. Wolves, sometimes also referred to as "jockers," were typically represented as conventionally, often aggressively masculine men who preserved (and according to some accounts, enhanced) that status by assuming the "active," penetrative role in sex with other men. As Victor Nelson made clear, "The wolf (active sodomist)... is not considered by the average inmate to be 'queer' in the sense that the oral copulist... is so considered. " In contrast to many accounts by penologists and some prison officials who blamed fairies for prison seduction, those most familiar with prison life typically credited wolves with initiating sex behind bars.

That initiation was often aggressive. As their name suggested, wolves were understood to be sexual predators, wooing, bribing, and sometimes forcing other men to have sex with them. Wolves were "always on the lookout for a handsome boy with a weak mind, who had nobody to send them in some food and money," sociologist Clifford Shaw wrote in his 1931 case study of a young juvenile delinquent." Berg described the process by which the wolf secured a sexual partner as "a campaign in which all the luxuries of prison - candy tobacco, sweets, and choice foods - are pressed upon the newcomer." Once the object of the wolf's affection accepted the goods offered, "he is quickly given to understand that he must repay the favor in kind." Sometimes seduction by wolves was described as a deliberate and cold-hearted maneuver of engaging a younger inmate in a relationship of indebtedness, which could be repaid only by sex. Others offered examples of more heartfelt and romantic courtship. Nelson recalled "Dreegan," the "champion "wolf" at Auburn Prison," who

outrageously flattered the objects of his lust; he gave them cigarettes, candy, money, or whatever else he possessed which might serve to break down their powers of resistance; and otherwise courted' them exactly as a normal man 'courts a woman. Once the boy had been seduced, if he proved satisfactory, Dreegan would go the whole hog, like a Wall Street broker with a Broadway chorus-girl mistress, and squander all of his possessions on the boy of the moment.

Wolves may not have been motivated by "true" homosexuality, in the understanding of contemporaries, but the relationships they forged in prison were often far from casual. Jealous rivalries and violent confrontations among inmates were credited to the passionate feelings of some wolves for their partners. Inmate-author Goat Laven described "brutal fights," some fatal, that arose from sexual jealousies: "It means a kick in the back to steal another man's kid." Louis Berg seconded Laven account. "The unwritten law of the prison forbids any 'wolf" to make approaches to another's 'boy friend' once he is wooed and won," Berg observed. "But it is not to be expected that men who break the laws for lesser urges will hesitate when they are driven by passions that rock them to the roots of their being. Fights occur between 'wolves' over some boy which are sanguinary and even end in murder."

Berg went on to recount the murder of "Mildred," an inmate at Welfare Island, by her jealous ex-lover. "From all accounts, Berg observed, "Mildred' was the victim of jealousy caused by 'her' unfaithfulness. That 'she' paid with 'her' life partner. shows the seriousness with which such prison marriages' are regarded." To some, the jealous violence that prison relationships could spark testified not only to depth of feeling but also to their similarity to heterosexual relationships. In a disturbing comparison, Berg concluded that Mildred's murder "proves how completely such relationships are identified with the normal ones between men and women." Charles Ford described jealousies among female inmates that resulted in fist fights, "hair pullings," and "every other conceivable type of trouble making activity" and that were even more real than husband-wife jealousies."

One theory explaining the existence of prison wolves, enshrined in inmate lore by the early twentieth century, proposed that "a 'wolf' is an ex-punk looking for revenge!" The object of wolves' and jocker attentions were known as "punks" and "kids," often identified as younger inmates, unfamiliar with life behind bars and unable or unwilling to defend themselves physically. A type recognized in prison argot at least the early twentieth century, punks were understood to be "normal" men, vulnerable to sexual coercion by other inmates because of the combination of small physical stature, youth, boyish attractiveness, and lack of institutional savvy. A few accounts suggested that punks were potential homosexuals whose latent desires were nurtured and realized the prison context, but most saw them simply as the unfortunate victims of wolves.

The punk's fate was often attributed to naïveté and, especially, his ignorance of the inmate code and the consequences of indebtedness. Charles Wharton wrote in his 1932 prison account of a fellow inmate, "a mere boy" who "seemed to have come direct from a farm" who had "all the bewilderment of a child thrust into strange, frightening surroundings." The youth soon became the object of "pretended interest and sympathy" from other convicts, who showered  him with presents, "silk hose, fancy underwear, food stolen from the kitchen, and best of all, cigarets [sic], the gold standard of prison barter." In the process, Wharton wrote, the boy "became a wretched victim of the most vicious circle in Leavenworth's convict population.

Punks also suffered as a result of their youthful good looks. Jim Tully, author of the many books on his experiences on the road as a hobo and time in prison, recalled Eddie, a young inmate "with yellow hair and wondering hazel eyes" who was "too beautiful to be a boy." Eddie's life in prison as a result "was made a constant hardship by sex-starved men." Berg wrote that prison populations always include "boys at that uncertain age where they have a good deal of the feminine in them." Such boys, Berg wrote, "are in most prized in jails and prisons as virgins." Berg also attributed the fate of punks to "biologic inadequacy (another name for lack of guts)."

Whether understood to be the victims of their own attractiveness, their youth and small stature, or their cowardice, punks were never depicted as wholly willing participants in sex with other men. Although there was little attention to overt sexual violence in early-twentieth-century prison writing, many acknowledged that some form of coercion was often involved in sex in prison, in men's prisons especially. Like wolves, punks were also understood under the rubric of "acquired" homosexuality - they participated in sex with other men not because of a constitutional condition but because of the unusual circumstances of prison life. "Had they never gone to prison," Berg wrote ruefully, "most of them would today be normal men."

Prison sexual vernacular and the culture it delineated overlapped particularly closely with that of itinerant laborers, tramps, and hoboes who traveled the country's highways, rural byways, and railroad arteries in the early decades of the twentieth century. The association between tramping and homosexuality was strong enough by 1939 for a textbook on prison psychiatry to warn of "the possibility of homosexuality in prisoners of the vagabond type," since "this tendency among them appears to be very widespread." In his 1923 study The Hobo, sociologist Nels Anderson characterized homosexual practices among homeless men as "widespread and described relationships between older men, known as wolves or jockers, with younger men, referred to as punks, kids, or "prushuns." In transient communities, young men partnered with older, more experienced men who promised to protect them and teach them how to survive life on the road in return for domestic and sometimes sexual favors.

Judging from many accounts, those relationships were often predatory and abusive. Jim Tully, whose experiences as a "road-kid," hobo, circus worker, prisoner, and professional prize-fighter provided the material exper for his twenty-six books, characterized the jocker as "a hobo who took a weak boy and made him a sort of slave to beg and run errands and steal for him." Punks, he reported, "were loaned, traded, and even sold to other tramps."  John Good recalled that the "criminal tramps or yeggs" who were his companions on the road in turn-of-the-century Denver "needed a boy to beg and steal for them, and to listen around for information." "These boys are degraded to unnatural uses," Good reported, "as well as trained in the arts of pickpocketing and sneak-thieving." Josiah Flynt, an early participant-observer of transient life, also described relationships between boys and their jockers, in which "abnormally masculine" men take "uncommonly feminine" boys as partners." Those attachments sometimes lasted for years, and boys remained with their jockers until they were "emancipated."

Men who lived on the road and on the economic margins were vulnerable to arrest, and incarceration in jails and prisons was a nearly inevitable experience for hobos, tramps, and transient workers. It is not surprising. then, that the vocabulary of prisoners would borrow closely from that of hobo culture, another nearly uniformly single-sex world populated by working-class men. Some prison terms revealed a direct etymology between hobo and prison terminology. When Jack London was arrested for vagrancy in Niagara Falls in 1894, he was locked up in the "Hobo." "The Hobo," he explained, "is that part of a prison where the minor offenders are confined together in a large iron cage. Since hoboes constitute the principle division of the minor offenders, the aforesaid iron cage is called the Hobo." Hi Simons defined the term "Bo" as both a "hobo" and "boy, catamite" in his dictionary of prison argot. The direction of influence was probably two-way, and some prison terms were no doubt ported into hobo and working-class vernacular as well.

The importation of sexual vernacular, customs, and assumptions about same-sex practices from transient men as well as from a larger ur-working-class world meant that some prisoners were familiar with the sexual culture they found behind bars. Fiction writer Chester Himes, who was sentenced to the Ohio State Penitentiary in 1928, claimed "that nothing happened in prison that I had not already encountered in outside life." Himes grew up in a middle-class African American neighborhood in Cleveland, but youthful desire for excitement drew him to the city's rougher side. In prison, he wrote, "all sex gratification derived sodomy, and I had encountered homosexuals galore around the Matic Hotel and the environs of Fifty-Fifth Street and Central Avenue Cleveland." The many incarcerated men with transient pasts would've been similarly familiar with wolf-punk relationships in prison, which mirrored man-kid relationships on the road.

But while prisons, then as now, were by disproportionately populated by working-class inmates, they drew prisoners from other demographic groups as well, some of whom were unfamiliar with prison sexual terminology and the roles and assumptions it described. The persecution of political radicals under the Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during the First World War and in the wake of the Palmer raids of 1919 resulted in the incarceration of activists in the 1920s, many of whom became vocal and articulate critics of the American prison system while behind bars. These spokespeople for the working class often betrayed their own distance from and naïveté about working-class sexual life in their prison writing, and many were shocked by the sexual life they witnessed behind bars.

Alexander Berkman, for example, was candid in detailing his own prison sexual education in a chapter on an encounter with another prisoner, "Red," a hobo who worked alongside Berkman. When Red announced to Berkman, "you're my kid now, see?" Berkman claimed not to understand him and asked him to explain. Bewildered by Berkman's naiveté, Red exclaimed, "You're twenty-two and don't know what a kid is! Green? Well, sir, it would be hard to find an adequate analogy to your inconsistent maturity of mind." When Red explained to him the practice he termed "moonology," which he defined as "the truly Christian science of loving your neighbor, provided he be a nice little boy," Berkman professed not to "believe in this kid love," and was deeply shocked, protesting that "the panegyrics of boy-love are deeply offensive to my instincts. The very thought of the unnatural practice revolts and disgusts me." The pedagogical question-and-answer structure of this chapter allowed Berkman to tutor his readers in "moonology" while maintaining claims to his own sexual innocence. He may also have intended to contrast Red's perverse sexuality with his own presumably platonic love for another inmate that he described later in the memoir. But Berkman was far from alone among early-twentieth-century inmate narrators in professing innocence of same-sex sexuality before life behind bars.

When attorney and former Illinois state congressman Charles S. Wharton was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth penitentiary in 1928 for conspiracy in armed mail robbery, he acknowledged his own pre-prison innocence.  Prefacing his discussion of "the worst of all phases of prison life," which he attempted to describe "as delicately as possible," Wharton wrote that, "looking back, I felt that I had been everywhere, seen everything, done about all which the average man-about-town is expected to do, and I held that impression until Leavenworth made me feel like a country yokel staring slack-jawed at his first sight of urban sin."

Socialist and anti war activist Kate Richards O'Hare was similarly shocked and appalled by the homosexuality she witnessed as an inmate of the Missouri state penitentiary in Jefferson City in 1919-20. Scoffing at O'Hare's estimate that 75 percent of her fellow inmates were "abnormal" as "entirely too high," Fishman speculated that she was "naturally led into such an exaggeration because, having no previous personal knowledge of prisons, she was swept off her feet to find that such things existed. She was utterly amazed when I told her that homo-sexuality was a real problem in every prison."

Eugene Debs, who was convicted of violating the Espionage Law in 1918 and sentenced to ten years in prison, lamented that "every prison of which I have any knowledge... reeks with sodomy" and wrote with dismay about "this abominable vice to which many young men fall victims soon after they enter the prison." "I shrink from the loathesome [sic] and repellant task of bringing this hidden horror to light," Debs wrote. "It is a subject so incredibly shocking to me that, but for the charge of recreance that might be brought against me were I to omit it, I would prefer to make no reference to it at all."  Debs wrote in near-apocalyptic language about the fate of the boy "schooled in nameless forms of perversions of mind and soul" and prison sexual practices that "wreck the lives of countless thousands and send their wretched victims to premature and dishonored graves."

Whether shocked or inured, prisoners of all stripes acknowledged sex in both men's and women's prison as nearly ubiquitous and its roles and customs elaborated to the point that it constituted a culture unto itself. That culture occupied a curious status in early-twentieth-century prisons. Officially, sex between prisoners was unequivocally forbidden. Prisoners who were found engaging in sex were punished, often by placement in solitary confinement and extension of their sentences. Some prisons took harsh and sometimes draconian measures to distinguish homosexual prisoners from the general population in order to humiliate them and punish their behavior. In the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, inmates were reportedly forced to wear a large yellow letter D (designating them as "degenerate") if they were discovered having sex. 

The superintendent of the Ohio prison at Chillicothe boasted to the director of the Bureau of Prisons, in response to a question about how he handled the problem of "sex perversion" at the institution, that he had found a way to deter such practices through the use of humiliation. "By this I mean that all known perpetrators or anyone anyway connected with sexual perversions be been compelled to sit at a certain table at the mess hall."  A report from Kentucky noted that inmates convicted of sexual offenses had one side of their heads shaved to identify them. These practices of marking prisoners as homosexual were forms of punishment for sexual transgression; they also suggested the need for the production of a legible marker of homosexuality that ran counter to the notion that homosexuals, inside and out, were easily identifiable by their gender transgression.

Homosexual prisoners were also dealt physical punishments. A photograph from a Colorado prison depicted two African American prisoners wearing loose dresses, perhaps as another form of stigmatizing market of sexual deviance, and pushing wheelbarrows filled with heavy rocks as a form of punishment for same-sex sex. Kentucky physician F. E. Wylie proposed sterilization and "emasculation" that would "make it impossible for degenerates to commit sex crimes," adding that "surgery might even be used as a punishment" for homosexuality. The authors of an investigation of the Oregon state penitentiary in 1917 moved further to argue that "in cases of congenital homo-sexuality in the penitentiary," the more radical surgery of castration was necessary, to deprive offenders not only of the ability to procreate but of their libido as well. By the 1920s, more than half of the United States had adopted sterilization laws and some targeted "moral degenerates and perverts" specifically. Those laws were most easily and readily applied to people in prisons, mental asylums, and other carceral institutions.

Sex in prison was officially prohibited and sometimes harshly punished. But because of the difficulty of detection and the belief in its inevitability, prison officers often seemed to take it in stride. Joseph Wilson and Michael Pescor criticized prison officers who "regard homosexual practices as only another kind of dirty joke" and wrote that it was "essential that "this question shall always be considered gravely-never with smiles smirks, and a shrug of the shoulder" in their 1939 text on prison psychiatry, suggesting that this was often precisely how it was treated. Berg confirmed that to officials at Welfare Island, "the 'fairies' were, for the most part, simply the butt for lewd jokes. When they spoke of perverts it was with the kind of indulgence that one uses toward children whose peccadillos are amusing rather than serious." He added that "sex indiscretions" were "rarely detected and still less frequently punished." 

If prison guards could not be relied on to maintain a properly vigilant and condemnatory attitude regarding prison homosexuality, the some hoped, prisoners themselves would rise to this role. "Only the co-operation of the decent element will ultimately weed them out," Sing Sing warden Lewis Lawes speculated in 1938. Wilson and Pescor went so far as to suggest that if homosexuals "received a reasonable dose of violence" at the hands of prisoners "known to be aggressively heterosexual," it would "help build up a correct prison community attitude towards this question."

But the community attitude in men's prisons, to the extent that it is possible to generalize, seemed often to be characterized by a rough tolerance, even by those who presumably did not participate in same-sex sex. Samuel Roth, who spent several years in prison for publishing what was considered obscene material, noted that "one thing happened immediately," on his incarceration; "I lost my horrors of [homosexuality] as a vice." He was far from alone. Recalling his experience on a Georgia chain gang in the 1930s, George Harsh had "too many other things to think about to care what two consenting adults do between them." "Under the conditions," Harsh wrote, "I think such a situation was inevitable, and I could understand it and condone it." Indeed, the institutional culture of some prisons recognized the established place of prison fairies. Though fairies were segregated in Welfare Island's South Annex, they were allowed to stage a bawdy Christmas show called the "Fag Follies." In later decades, prisons would sponsor football and baseball games that pitted queens against jockers.

- Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. p. 61-73

[townpostin]

Gangster Ganesh Singh Moved to Giridih Jail

High-security transfer aims to prevent potential conflicts among inmates Jamshedpur Police relocates notorious criminal to maintain peace and security in correctional facilities. JAMSHEDPUR – A notorious criminal has been relocated from a local prison to a facility in a different district, where stringent security protocols are enforced. In the midst of increased security measures, gangster…

[onlytiktoks]

[fairuzfan]

More information on Palestinian political prisoners below. Please make sure to check out the thread for links to further content.

[odinsblog]

During her arrest, Ayesh was subjected to assault, threats, and insults by Israeli soldiers, according to the Addameer human rights organisation. She was transferred to Israel’s Hasharon Prison before being later taken to Damon Prison, where she is now being held.

Ayesh’s work as a human rights defender rose to the fore during her time at the Ramallah-based Lawyers for Justice, representing Palestinian political detainees in PA prisons. In July, she attended a session on behalf of the group at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

Tala Nasser, from the Addameer prisoners’ rights group, explained that Ayesh’s arrest comes amid a “violent mass arrest campaign” carried out by Israel since October 7.

The fact that the vast majority of the more than 6,900 Palestinians arrested in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7 have been transferred to administrative detention highlights the arbitrariness of Israel’s arrests, she said.

“This campaign includes activists, human rights defenders and political leaders,” Nassar told Al Jazeera, noting that it is “an attempt to silence them and prevent the exposure of the occupation’s crimes across the whole country”.

In December, Israeli forces also arrested political and civil society leader Khalida Jarrar, who was similarly transferred to administrative detention.

Despite releasing all but three Palestinian female detainees during the latest prisoner exchange with Hamas at the end of 2023, the Israeli army rearrested dozens. Some 80 female prisoners are being held today, all of whom are in the Damon Prison.

Among the 80 are dozens of women from the besieged Gaza Strip, but lawyers are forbidden from visiting them or knowing anything about them.

Several reports have emerged of female detainees from Gaza being physically beaten and abused, including an unknown number of them being held at Israeli military bases and not in prison.

Lawyers say conditions for all Palestinian detainees, including women, are unprecedentedly difficult. Eight Palestinian male prisoners have also died or were killed in Israeli custody since October 7, most of them in the days and weeks after their arrest.

Over the past few months, many videos have emerged of Israeli soldiers stripping, torturing and abusing male prisoners from both the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

“It is important to note that every female that is arrested is violated in one way or another,” said Nasser. “They are all facing threats, intensive strip searches, verbal assault and physical violence.”

(continue reading)

[politics-pandemonium]

Somebody Just Fucking Shoot Him Already

I really can't with this circus anymore. The fact that things have even gotten this far is just beyond absurd. Republicans shouldn't be allowed to vote anymore. Frankly anyone that voted for Trump should be tried for treason for aiding and enabling a dictator to get into the white house. I get that denying people the right to vote is pretty much in the same vein as what Trump is trying to do, but I can justify it by saying that Republicans are no longer voting in good faith.

Republicans are just traitors to the US entirely at this point, therefore their votes should no longer matter if they're voting to hurt others. The "I didn't know this would happen" excuse is just that. A fucking excuse. They knew it was gonna happen, just not to them, so when it came back and bit them in the ass, they had the audacity to actually cry about it, further proving that they voted in bad faith. Purely to cause harm to others. They WEAPONIZED their vote. You absolutely should not have the right to vote if your vote is cast with the express purpose of harming/suppressing others. Frankly, options with the potential to harm others shouldn't even be allowed to be voted on period.

This also isn't just an issue with the people. It's also an issue with our fucked up politicians putting measures into our ballots that grant the shittiest people the option to weaponize their votes. Politicians should not be allowed to be putting shit that can have the potential to harm anyone into law or on a ballot and should be relieved of their position immediately. No questions asked. You propose a bill that threatens to cause harm to communities, minorities, etc, bolster the power of a company or CEO at a political level, then your career in politics should absolutely come to an end right then and there regardless of what party you're involved with.

Voting on LGBTQ+/POC rights and equality? No. That's not something that should be put to a vote. Someone will always be an absolute piece of shit and have a problem with someone else for whatever personal bullshit because of their lifestyle, the color of their skin, etc. People are people regardless of color, orientation, creed, religion, etc. You treat everyone with fairness and equality. You don't put an option on people's ballots that allow them to vote for anything that harms anyone like removing LGBTQ+ individuals' rights to marry the person they love. They get everything that every "normal" white fucking citizen gets and then you leave them the fuck alone. When was the last time we had to vote whether white people should be out in the cotton fields? What about when heterosexuals should be allowed marry?

Education? Another something that shouldn't be voted on unless it's how to move forward with improving the educational system. Not whether or not to move forward or backward. That should only be improving and getting better in one of X ways presented with no harm to the system or the people involved in the system itself.

Government assistance? This country, any country, ceases to exist without its people. The government's job by default is to take care of and watch over its people whether that's protecting them and their rights or providing assistance to those in need. Not letting people slip through the cracks and acting like it didn't happen, blatantly ignoring entire fucking groups being targeted by racist sacks of shit that should be in cells and not out in society causing harm to it, or protecting companies and CEOs whom have made it their fucking life mission to cause harm to the people that work at their companies.

Health care? The absolute fuck? You want your employees to be healthy so the government or your business can run, right? Cause you don't know how to do one of your low-level employees' jobs. You want another lockdown because people were being stupid and didn't want to wear a mask of all the fucking things? Then you vote for universal healthcare and only improvements upon it.

Wages? Are you fucking kidding me? Why is that even subject to a vote? People need to live. Wages absolutely need to fluctuate with inflation and allow everyone to be able to live at the bare minimum. You want the economy to die? Not allowing people to have money to spend to fucking feed the goddamn economy that's about to slam face-first into the motherfucking ground because of that orange piece of shit and his cabinet of cocksuckers along with that fucking nazi is a great way to tank it. As well as just letting a complete and absolute sociopathic fucking dictator run the country.

No one should present or be given the opportunity to vote in bad faith or to harm someone.

There is always going to be some piece of shit out there who's going to want their black neighbor across the street hanging from their tree on their front lawn.

There is always going to be some piece of shit out there that's going to want to tie a gay kid to the back of their bumper and drive down the road, dragging them along the ground on the way.

There is always going to be some piece of shit out there that thinks that their god is the only one that matters and everyone else should follow their belief system.

There is always going to be some piece of shit out there that wants to make money but doesn't want to work as hard for it, and also doesn't want to pay the people that enable that lifestyle a fair wage.

There is always going to be some piece of shit out there that wants to come into power and fuck the country up from the inside out, and allow people to help him by inviting them into the system to assist in destroying it.

It's fucked that people like this exist and that that'll never change, even if they are given all the means to live a wonderful and healthy life, all the while screaming that it's someone's fault that something isn't happening for them because they're not being allowed to hurt other people.

They shouldn't be given the chance to vote to get their wish, nor should they be given the chance to allow someone like that to get it.

So I say this with my full chest:

If you're a Republican, you're a piece of shit. You have no place in this country, you have no business running it, you are despicable and disgusting voting in favor of the downfall of others because of the color of their skin, race, religion, orientation, etc, especially when you're so short-sighted that you can't see how that'll come back to bite you in your stupid ass until it actually does, like it is right now.

And if you're thinking something along the lines of "who the fuck are you to make that sort of claim?" or "What makes you qualified to make such claims?" guess what?

I'm the guy that wants to fix this miserable country and keep it fixed so that the bullshit that's happening right now, in realtime, causing me to make these claims in the first place, doesn't keep happening or happen again. So shut the fuck up and help me fix this shit or get the fuck out of my way and out of this country, because you don't belong here if your goal is to seek to destroy it and the best way to go about fixing it is to start cutting out the rot and filth that made its way into our government.

[political-us]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Economic Exploitation "Most prisoners I interviewed believe that the California prison system operates as a big business and the profit motive guides important decisions.

It’s all just business. I’ve watched it. Whenever there are a few empty beds around here, you wait. You'll see a bunch of guys getting violated. They got to keep the place full. They get paid by the convict. You watch it. They fill the place up by bringing guys back in, then they go to legislature and get more money to build anew prison.

Though the prisoners’ view of how the system works is somewhat distorted, it is based in reality. Prison systems are big businesses, and many groups, such as guards’ unions, architects, construction companies, prison hardware manufacturers, and prison professionals, have an economic interest in expanding prison populations. Prisoners understand this and have developed a profoundly cynical view of the operation, which they see as corrupt and unjustly exploitative and oppressive.

There are some profit-making practices in the prison operation that directly affect prisoners and are seen as particularly corrupt and exploitative of them and their families. The most blatant of these is the telephone policy. In California prisons, pay telephones are located in all housing units and are readily available to prisoners. Prisoners may only make collect calls from these phones, which are installed and maintained by a private company, which charges an extra fee of $7 per call. This fee is paid by the person (usually a family member) receiving the call. This fee is split by the private company and the CDC. The CDC’s share goes into the state’s general fund. In the year 2000, California earned $36 million from this source. Prisoners feel that this is gross exploitation of them, their friends, and their families, who are usually poorer people and less able to pay this fee. Several prisoners told me that they believe that the CDC unscrupulously delays their mail to encourage phone use. At present, a letter may take as long 21 days to be delivered to a prisoner. Moreover, prisoners must pay an added 10 percent fee for every item they purchase through the canteen or any other source. This fee goes into the Inmate Welfare Fund along with any other money prisoners possess. This fund totaled $10.1 million in 1998, at which time some California prisoners sued the state to receive the interest from this money. The state informed the courts that the money held in the Inmate Welfare Fund had not been deposited in interest-earning accounts. Litigation continues on this issue, and prisoners in other states have filed similar suits. Regardless of the outcome of these cases, California prisoners feel the state has cheated them or has earned money on their money. As California prisoners’ attorney Herman Franck views it, the state is stealing from the prisoners, and though each convict is losing only a few dollars, when you consider the vast number of prisoners, “150,000 small thefts becomes one big, fat theft.”? In addition to aggravating prisoners’ sense of injustice, these practices corrode the administrators’ claims of moral superiority and reduce prisoners’ sense of moral inferiority and responsibility."

- John Irwin, The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class. Afterword by Barbara Owen. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 2005. p. 164-165

[ashadowofburnedoutstardust]

I have no idea if I'm still going to be on this app in four years but I'm scheduling the re-blog now

Let's see which tags came true......

[onlytiktoks]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sherrilyn Ifill at Substack:

Over the past three weeks Trump’s monstrous reign has shaken this country to its core. He has upended every fairy story Americans have ever told themselves, every myth we have indulged about who we are, about merit, the rule of law, about the unshakeable strength of our Constitution, and about American exceptionalism. He has smashed through every norm, every basis for deference and good faith, every presumption of good will, and every rational approach to policy. He has identified and taken advantage of our every weakness. And in so doing he has revealed America to itself. Brutal as it has been, we are left now to see our strengths and to confront our weaknesses with clear eyes. The coming weeks will challenge us like never before, as Trump prepares plans to move U.S. citizen prisoners to El Salvador. This plan will involve either engaging in the mass denaturalization of naturalized American prisoners,[i] or the purchase property in El Salvador[ii] (I’m also hearing about other countries) with the intention of declaring that property U.S. territory with the consent of the government of those foreign nations. It is a brazen effort to turn U.S. prisoners into virtually stateless persons, to disappear them, and put them beyond the reach of our view. Why? This is the ultimate intimidation move by Trump. As he prepares to have his Attorney General to investigate those who disagree with him and as Trump seeks ways to undermine the potential for mass protest, holding the threat of not only arrest and potential incarceration, but disappearance to a foreign gulag is a monstrous, yet effective means of stifling dissent.

According to reports this week, it may also be a scheme that allows military contractors like the notorious villain Erik Prince, to step up once again to feed at the public trough.[iii] What does this have to do with confronting our weaknesses? Trump’s plan to disappear people began quite deliberately with his removal of 250 migrants who he called Venezuelan gang members after activating the Alien Enemies Act. It matters that the AEA has only been activated three times in our history and the last time to conduct the horrifying internment of Japanese Americans – a stain that will never be erased from the annals of our history. And so Trump began by targeting a group whose demonization has been a feature of his xenophobic rhetoric: migrants. Playing to the fear of migrant crime - a fear he has stoked and disseminated - and to racial discrimination is a deliberate predicate to Trump’s AEA proclamation. Trump has regularly described migrants as criminals, as killers, and as gang members. It is not as though there are not actual gang members among some migrant groups. It is that in Trump world, all migrants are violent gang members. Actual evidence of gang membership is beside the point for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security – as we have seen as we learn more about the initial 250 migrants taken to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. A tattoo of the Spanish football club Real Madrid may have been sufficient to deem a Venezuelan soccer player a member of the gang Tren de Aragua.[iv] Tattoos honoring his parents may have resulted in the deportation to CECOT of a gay, make-up artist. Fortunately the ACLU was immediately on top of this horrifying move, but it remains unclear whether any of these migrants will ever be returned to U.S. soil. But Trump’s next move – in fact the primary focus of his thinking – has been how to remove American citizens to foreign prisons. And the group upon which he will workshop the next stage of his plan is another population that most Americans – long before Trump’s rise – have despised and dismissed: incarcerated citizens. It is now well-known that U.S. prisons and jails house almost 2 million people.[v] In fact many states in the U.S. have a prison rate higher than most countries.[vi] Ironically, El Salvador has the highest rate. A disproportionate number of those prisoners are Black and Latino.[vii] America has long abandoned the concept of rehabilitation in prison and instead has fully embraced the retributive rationale for holding people in prison. The conditions of incarceration throughout our country are unconscionable. Alabama prisons are among the most horrifying,[viii] despite having been sued repeatedly by the Department of Justice.[ix] Just in the last 10 years the Department of Justice found unconstitutional conditions of confinement in Georgia prisons,[x] in Louisiana prisons,[xi] in Mississippi prisons and in jails in Texas, Baltimore, California, Harris County, Oklahoma County, and many others.[xii]

[...] Now Trump plans to turn U.S. citizen prisoners over to this facility - those Trump insists are “the worst of the worst.” But we cannot forget that the U.S. justice system is notoriously riddled with racial discrimination in policing, prosecution, conviction and sentencing. And as Bryan Stevenson has said, “it is often better to be guilty and rich, than innocent and poor,” in our criminal justice system. If it were up to President Trump, the five teenagers convicted of raping a woman in Central Park in 1989 would still be in prison, or worse executed, despite their innocence, and those who criticize decisions by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court should be put in jail. We know that every month – sometimes multiple times a month – we learn about a man, most often a Black man, who has been released from prison after serving 20, 30, 40 years for a crime he didn’t commit.[xxi] Some spent decades on death row before being exonerated.[xxii] But even those who are guilty of the crimes for which they are convicted - those who did commit robbery, assault or even murder - are still human beings. For millions of Americans, the incarcerated are brothers, uncles, fathers, mothers. Their lives have meaning and value to their families. And even those who have committed the worst crimes have the possibility of redemption – even if their lives will be lived behind bars. It matters where prisoners are incarcerated in ways great and small. The best evidence demonstrates that family visits and contacts reduce recidivism among prisoners,[xxiii] with some evidence even showing that face-to-face visits are more effective than video visits.[xxiv] And the children of incarcerated parents often benefit tremendously from the ability to visit with their absent parents.[xxv] But this is all beside the central point. American prisoners are American citizens. Their citizenship is not shed at the jailhouse door. They are not pawns to be shuffled about the world to far-flung prisons as part of Stephen Miller’s latest fever dream. They have rights under our Constitution – rights that cannot be stripped away at the whim of an authoritarian president. And we should remember that how a nation treats its prisoners is as powerful an indicator of its democratic health as any election.

Sherrilyn Ifill wrote a solid piece on why Americans must fight for the rights of prisoner with US Citizenship, with reports emerging that Donald Trump is seeking to ship off some US citizens to El Salvador unlawfully.

[destielmemenews]

"Among those being freed are the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who was detained in Russia last year and accused of espionage, and Paul Whelan, a former Marine who has been in Russian captivity since 2018."

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[relaxedstyles]

The face of evil ....

[newstoday365]

The rush by the Trump administration to deport hundreds of suspected gang members

USA News' analysis of flight data and court records indicates the Trump administration disregarded the court's decision, despite the White House's insistence that it has cooperated with a recent court order temporarily prohibiting the president from using a seldom used wartime authority.

A centuries-old statute that would allow President Donald Trump to deport any noncitizen with little to no due process was invoked, sparking the controversy.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to reroute two flights carrying noncitizens back to the United States more than 45 minutes before the first of the two flights landed in Honduras after a group of noncitizens, who were allegedly members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, sued to stop their impending deportations. Read More......

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

On November 14, 1929, a serious prison strike nearly broke out at the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert. Only by the narrowest of chances was the plot discovered by staff and the strike averted. Two of the strike leaders, Ashton and Jones, referred to themselves in furtive notes as “sweethearts” and “lovers” - they dreamed of escaping to be together. Two hatchet-men from Ottawa were sent to clean up, senior officers of the penitentiary were dismissed, and the whole affair hushed up, save for a few reassuring stories in the newspapers. This is part of my earliest efforts to understand the origins and course and impact of the 1930s ‘convict revolt’ in Canada, and other issues related to criminality and incarceration Canadian history. (More here.)

Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert was, in 1929, the newest federal penitentiary in Canada. Opened in 1911, to replace the territorial jail at Regina, parts of it were still under construction. UBC penologist C. W. Topping, who visited the institution several months before the strike, praised Saskatchewan Penitentiary as “the finest in the Dominion,” with supposedly ‘modern’ features in the cell-block and workshops, including an up-to-date brick factory that produced using convict labour for federal buildings in the Prairies. Discipline and the organization of staff and inmates was functionally the same as everywhere else in Canada, however: forced labour, the silence system, limited privileges and entertainments, a semi-military staff force, and an isolated location far from major population centres.

The majority of inmates were sentenced from Saskatchewan and Alberta, but throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Saskatchewan Penitentiary was also used as an overflow facility from overcrowded Eastern prisons. In April 1929, dozens of mostly malcontent prisoners were transferred from Kingston Penitentiary and St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary. A “row” was expected with these men, but they were not closely watched or segregated from the main population. In November 1929, there were 430 prisoners at Saskatchewan Penitentiary – almost 60 were from the prisons in Kingston and Laval.

The staff at Saskatchewan Penitentiary were warned on the morning of November 14, 1929, by a ‘stool pigeon’ that all work crews (called gangs) would refuse to leave their places of work “until all their demands were met with.” The stool pigeon had no idea who the ringleaders were or what their demands were, but the Deputy Warden, Robert Wyllie, ordered his officers to keep “a sharp lookout” for suspicious actions. Over 70 prisoners were working outside the walls in two large groups - building a road and laying sewage pipe - and they were supposed to be the epicentre of the strike. The whole day of the 14th staff observed these convicts talking, passing notes, and making hand gestures. Other warnings from stool pigeons came in throughout the day, so Wyllie ordered the penitentiary locked down and the next day interviewed several inmates picked from the outside gangs who confessed they had no idea how word about the strike leaked out. For reasons we’ll get into, they were "amazed at being locked in their cells" and surprised by the swift reaction from the Deputy Warden. During the morning of the 15th, one man named Ford was strapped - given corporal punishment - 24 times for attempting to incite a disturbance in his cell block. Noise and shouting echoed throughout the cell ranges.

Prisoners working on a building foundation at Saskatchewan Penitentiary, c. 1927 In a state of growing panic, Wyllie first phoned Warden W. J. McLeod, on medical leave since September and so sick he could barely answer the phone. Wyllie then telegraphed Ottawa in a vague way, indicating a “serious situation” and asking for someone to come and take charge. Unsure of what was going on, the Superintendent of Penitentiaries, W. St. Pierre Hughes, dispatched five trusted officers from Manitoba Penitentiary, summoned the nearest RCMP detachment, and ordered his personal hatchet-man, Inspector of Penitentiaries E. R. Jackson, to proceed to Prince Albert and take charge. Jackson would be accompanied by R. M. Allan, Structural Engineer, who had worked at Saskatchewan Penitentiary for a decade in the 1910s and "who knew the prison from long experience."

Almost everything in the historical record about this episode comes from Jackson and Allan’s investigation. Their personalities and prerogatives come through very clearly in their reports. Neither were great record keepers. They were, like many civil servants of the era, bitchy gossips. Both men were severe disciplinarians. Jackson, though only appointed as an Inspector in 1924, had become an indispensable figure to Superintendent Hughes. Jackson would be sent to institutions that Hughes viewed as insufficiently following his regulations, or where inmate unrest posed a problem. Jackson was sent to handle a riot at St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary in December 1925, ordering a brutal round of lashings against accused agitators. He headed the British Columbia Penitentiary for a year and a half when Hughes fired the warden on the grounds that their wives did not get along.

It was at B.C. Penitentiary that Jackson met Allan, then the Chief Industrial Officer in charge of all convict labour, and the two would work together closely not just at Prince Albert but also in the construction and opening of Collin’s Bay Penitentiary in Kingston. Jackson also was acting warden at Kingston Penitentiary in summer 1930. One KP lifer testified in 1932 that Jackson was “a mean son of a bitch” who ordered draconian punishments for relatively minor offences. Allan would himself become warden of Kingston Penitentiary in mid-1934, and held that position until 1954.

In short, these were not men sympathetic to prison officers they viewed as incompetent and they were not remotely curious about inmate complaints. Their investigation was about establishing blame and getting things back to ‘normal.’ They concurred with Hughes that "men never rebel where there is a tight grip retained of them by management." There is some truth to this, as sociologists Bert Useem and John DiIulio have argued in their work on American prison riots: a ruthless but effective and well organized prison staff is likely to stop even the best organized prisoner protest.

In a strictly hierarchical, patrimonial system like an early 20th century penitentiary, where all authority rests with a few men at the top, failures of leadership are often critical. This is a factor sometimes overlooked in popular and academic histories of prisoner resistance and riots (rightly so, perhaps, as we should focus on the actions of the incarcerated, nor their jailers). Strikes and riots in prisons, as elsewhere, never just happen – as Hughes himself noted, this “must have been developing for sometime - [revolts] never occur in a day or two."

This photo shows the chief officers involved in this event. From left to right: Saskatchewan Penitentiary Deputy Warden R. Wyllie and Warden W. J. Macleod, Superintendent of Penitentiaries W. S. Hughes, Accountant G. Dillon, Inspector of Penitentiaries E. R. Jackson.

Jackson quickly fixed blamed on Deputy Warden Wyllie. They were "very much surprised by the lack of initiative" of Wyllie, who seemed to have been cowed by the men working on the outside that had tried to strike. This despite the presence of almost a dozen armed officers nearby! Wyllie had had a nervous breakdown from stress, and had allowed, in Jackson’s eyes, a “lack of efficiency and discipline” to pervade the prison. He was "indecisive" in giving punishments at Warden’s Court, causing “the inmates to gloat over and ridicule the officers…" Inmates charged with fighting, insolence, or swearing at officers were warned or reprimanded, the least severe punishment for such serious infractions of the rules. Several officers felt that “there was no use of reporting the inmates” and so they "closed their eyes to a lot of infractions." Another officer thought that since September 1929 "inmates had became cocky … would laugh in the my face and...tell me to report him when he liked...for it would do no good." This situation was very similar to Kingston Penitentiary before the riot in October 1932, and, indeed, typified the crisis of the 1970s in federal prisons as well.

The November 14-15 disturbance was actually not the first strike episode at Saskatchewan Penitentiary that year. There had been unrest or talk of strikes among the prisoners since early September, with a general atmosphere of defiance and mockery of authorities. Many inmates resisted by going “through the motion of working" but not actually completing tasks. There had been a work refusal in late September, and two other strikes or work refusals in the middle of October. In these cases Wyllie intervened personally, but did not investigate, punish the strikers, or rectify the situation. There are not even reports on file about these events, and the record of reports against inmates for violating rules bears out this feeling that prisoners would “have their own way” and no ‘effective’ action would be taken against their rebellions. That is, effective by the standards of guards, who expected their commands to be obeyed absolutely.

Few demands were discovered – or least Jackson did not think the ones he turned up were worth elaborating on. There seemed to have been general opposition to the Steward's department, where food was prepared by convict cooks under staff supervision: the “grub” was satisfactory, but apparently not distributed fairly, according to the inmates. The Steward and Deputy Warden had allowed inmates to place “special instructions” for their meals, and they would shout out their orders like they were at a diner, or exchanged their tickets to swap meals. The queued, single file, food line, with no talking and the same meal for everyone, had disappeared, and restoring this system was Jackson’s first act when he took over. Of course, food in prisoner protests stands in for more than just a meal, while also representing a very basic need that is one of the few things to look forward to during days of monotonous labour and cellular confinement.

Much of the unrest centred on certain work crews, whose officers were resented, and communication with family, better work arrangements, socializing, access to newspapers, all are mentioned in passing in the investigation files. The “Kingston boys” were also the loudest supporters or organizers of the strikes, and they resented being exiled to Saskatchewan. At least one inmate, Radke, told other inmates he wanted the strike to force a Royal Commission to investigate the prison. This kind of demand would be repeated again and again in 1932 and 1933 during prison riots across Canada.

Cell block in 1930 at Saskatchewan Penitentiary. The beds in the corridors are due to severe overcrowding.

George Ashton was singled out as one of the organizers of the abortive strike. Serving a term for armed robbery, he was one of the Kingston transfers. On November 15, 1929, he was caught trying to throw a letter away. This letter is addressed to another inmate who he had hoped to escape with. Ashton, "a troublesome, Smart Alec kid,” was sentenced to be shackled for ten days to his cell bars and to spend sixty days in isolation. Typical of Jackson’s more ‘effective’ regime.

Ashton’s note was addressed to his 'Pal', Allen Jones. Both worked in different crews labouring outside the walls. Ashton’s letter to Jones identifies him as his sweetheart and lover, and promised that "he'll not get into trouble again because of these screws...I will sincerely try to refrain from letting my emotions run riot....My nature is not one which will allow me to lay down and be trodden upon forever without making some squawk." Ashton indicated he wanted to "make the time elapsing between your release and our reunion as sort as possible." He asked how Jones’ time was going, and ended by expressing his longing and desire to be with Jones:

"OH hawt dawg mamma won't we make up for the time of our separation??? Sweetheart I'll be loving you..." Say what's the answer to that companionate [sic] marriage idea? Thinking of accepting or am I such a damn bothersome person that your going to turn me down?.....there'll be a time when we're happy and gay (in each other arms).”

After this letter was confiscated. the cells of both men were tossed by guards. Jones had time to destroy his letters from Ashton - mostly written on toilet paper, they were flushed away - but several short notes from Jones' to Ashton were found. None were transcribed because of their "degenerate" content, leaving only the above letter as a record of their relationship. Contrary to the usual arrangements of wolves and punks in early 20th century prisons, where older men ‘protect’ younger inmates, often to extract sexual favours, theirs was apparently a consensual and sincere relationship. Not as uncommon as might be expected, of course, but it’s unusual to find such boldly expressed desire and love in this period preserved in the archival record. Of course, Hughes thought this letter confirmed that Ashton was "a low bestial sort" and his homosexual desire was another indication, to prison staff, of how dangerous to discipline he was. Jones was identified as one of the other ringleaders, and he and Ashton had been seen talking to each other and making hand gestures several times in the months leading up to the strike attempt.

Who these men were and what happened to them after their time in prison I don’t know, yet.

Transcript of Ashton's letter to Jones, the only part of their correspondence that survives today

Inspector Jackson stayed in charge for another two months at Saskatchewan Penitentiary. An attempt to start on insurrection on November 20, 1929, was broken by strapping four of the leaders: “since then the Prison is absolutely quiet." Always full of himself, Jackson included letters of thanks from officers who praised his leadership, including the prison doctor: "We were drifting badly, discipline had practically ceased...now we are back and a Prison once more." He felt satisfied that retiring Wyllie and Warden Macleod had solved the problem, and left Allan in charge starting in mid-December 1929.

While I have no doubt that Deputy Warden Wyllie was responsible for the growth of an inmate strike movement, I don’t believe it is purely a case of his incompetence allowing inmates to organize. Rather, he proved himself to be an open door to prisoners already planning protests, and his inability to act with the severity expected by prisoners and staff alike encouraged further protests. As with other federal civil servants of the era, Wyllie was likely promoted above his abilities, with his loyalty to Hughes, seniority, indispensability to superior officers, and local influence helping to further his career. This was Jackson’s trajectory as well, ironically – once Hughes retired in early 1932, Jackson was on the outs, transferred to clerical duties in Ottawa, and he was dismissed in December 1932 as part of the purge initiated of penitentiary officers by the new Superintendent.

Additionally, it is clear to me that the issues at Saskatchewan Penitentiary extended beyond one officer – and indeed blaming Wyllie absolved a bunch of other officers of corruption and incompetence. Serious issues in the Hospital, Kitchen, School, and Workshops, were identified by Allan when he took over, with trafficking and contraband in cigarette papers, pipes, lighters, smuggled cigarettes, photographs and letters widespread. Fake keys were found throughout the prison, likely to be used in escapes or smuggling. Inmates had been allowed for years to order magazines direct from the publisher – and did not have them passed through the censor. The Boiler House, where “considerable contraband has been located,” had seven inmate workers, who laboured "without direct supervision...”

These men resented the crackdown and refused to work in February 1930 – which revealed to Allan the danger of allowing inmates to have full control of the power plant of the penitentiary. Allan fired the officer in charge of the boiler house, the hospital overseer, the storekeeper, and reprimanded other officers for failing to confiscate contraband items. Another mass strike was attempted in January 1930, apparently to protest Allan cracking down on these deviations from the regulations. As always, it should be recalled that what the officers saw as corruption or smuggling against regulations were all activities that made 'doing time' easier.

Why care about this episode, beyond some of the points I’ve already raised? One aspect of historical study I am most interested in are the precursors to a major event - the struggles, organizing, movements, victories and defeats that (sometimes with hindsight, sometimes without) shape a more influential and decisive event. This is especially difficult when writing the history of prisoner resistance, which often appears a discontinuous history, full of gaps and seemingly sudden flare-ups. The 1930s were a decade of prison riots, strikes, escapes and protests in federal and provincial prisons, but obviously these did not arise from nothing. The 1929 strike attempt at Saskatchewan Penitentiary is a transitional event – similar to earlier strikes and protests going back to the late 19th century, but occurring at the very start of the Great Depression, a premonition of things to come.