#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…

[fairuzfan]

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

[simply-ivanka]

Joseph Biden 46th President of the United States

A complete and utter failure of a President, a corrupt Vice President and a Senator who played party politics for his entire career to serve himself at the expense of Americans.

[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)

[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......

[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."

source 1

source 2

source 3

[louis-sj]

AdSeg

Available light photography

It was DARK. No lights/electricity in the abandoned building.

[lechusza]

It's not a monopoly card

It's one way to get out of jail. “A group of human rights activists, former corrections officials and families of crime victims asked President Biden on Monday to use his clemency power to take all 40 inmates off federal death row before he hands over power to President-elect Donald J. Trump,” #activist #prison #pardon #biden #trump

[not-poignant]

Sorry if you’ve already been asked this, but when did you know you wanted to tell Efnisien’s story through FFS? What motivated you to show his redemption journey?

Hi hi anon!

Honestly I started thinking about it during the chapter where Efnisien gives the USB to Augus, and Gwyn tries to kill him, and he's just laughing-crying, while knowing that he's going to be murdered in cold-blood by Crielle as a result.

And then I just...spent about 8 months trying not to think about it, because I was certain everyone would hate the story. And then one day I started making a playlist, and then started thinking about it a bit more seriously, and decided 'fuck it' because the idea of Efnisien living a barren, empty life in Hillview, dependent on Gwyn, after his sacrifice, just didn't sit well with me.

I funnily enough did not start out planning on writing a redemption narrative. I knew none of his victims would forgive him for his actions, and that his therapist would never be like 'there there it's okay' about it. For a while I even wondered if Falling Falling Stars would have a bleak, semi-hopeful ending. Just like, 'well it's better than it was but it's still terrible.'

But Dr Gary's a really good therapist so, we ended up on a different track. :D

But yeah no, I wasn't motivated to write a redemption journey, honestly. I was just motivated to write Efnisien's story after Spoils, and then it became what it became. But initially, in those early chapters, it could have become a lot of different things, because I had no real conception of it except that I didn't want to write a redepemption narrative, heh.

Now I don't care that this is what it kind of became, but I do like that it's complex enough that if anyone said 'no way I'm not reading that, he's an abusive asshole' even Efnisien would calmly agree with them and respect their right to feel that way.

[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

[nando161mando]

[palms-upturned]

Israeli committee discusses death penalty law for Palestinian fighters

Nov 20th, 10:45 GMT

The Israeli National Security Committee has convened to discuss a bill for the introduction of the death penalty against Palestinian fighters.

The proposal was advanced by the party of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

“The death penalty law for terrorists is no longer a matter of left and right … [it’s] a moral and essential law for the State of Israel,” said Ben-Gvir on X.

The proposal was met with great concern by family members of those taken captive during Hamas’s attack on October 7.

In a moving speech, Gil Dilkma, a cousin to one of the about 240 captives, pleaded with the minister to drop the legislation which could put at risk the lives of those taken captive in Gaza.

“Remove the law, if you have a heart,” he said, holding back tears.

Striking a similar note, the Missing Families Forum said in a statement that such discussion “endangers the lives of our loved ones, without promoting any public purpose”.

Far-right politicians, captives’ families split over death penalty bill

Nov 20th, 12:05 GMT

A member of the Israeli far-right Otzma Yehudit party yelled at a family member of a captive who showed opposition to a bill that would introduce the death penalty for captured Palestinian fighters.

“Stop talking about killing Arabs; start talking about saving Jews,” said a relative of one of the about 240 captives, according to Israeli media. His fear, shared by the Missing Families Forum, is that the legislation, if approved, could endanger the lives of their family members held in Gaza.

“You have no monopoly over pain,” Almog Cohen shouted back.

“You are silencing other families,” said Limor Son Har-Melech of the same party.

Jewish leaders criticise possible expansion of Israel’s judicial death penalty

Nov 20th, 14:00 GMT

The group L’chaim – Jews Against the Death Penalty has expressed alarm over the possible expansion of the statute, which could see Palestinian assailants being sentenced to death.

Earlier, we reported on a Knesset committee hearing over the controversial legislation.

“We urge the Knesset to reject any such proposals. Purely as a practical matter, enshrining capital punishment beyond how it already exists in Israeli law is unnecessary and will be an enticement to more terrorism and murder,” the group said.

“Acceptance of judicial executions as an Israeli norm is irresponsible and will cost innocent Israeli lives,” it said in a statement.

Relatives of some of the approximately 240 captives taken by Hamas on October 7 told the Knesset not to hold the hearing over concerns that it could derail chances of getting their relatives back.

Palestinian detainee was ‘beaten to death’: Prisoner rights groups

Nov 20th, 15:15 GMT

On Saturday, Israeli forces raided a cell in the Naqab/Negev prison and physically assaulted 10 Palestinian detainees, especially Thaer Abu Asab, a witness has said.

A released prisoner told the Palestinian Prisoners Society and the PA Commission for Detainees that Abu Asab, a 38-year-old from Qalqilia in the occupied West Bank, was brutally beaten.

“When his condition deteriorated, prison authorities initially refused to call for medical assistance. After about 90 minutes, a nurse inspected him and he was then taken away. We did not know what his fate was,” the released prisoner said in a statement.

The prisoners’ groups said Abu Asab, who was detained since 2005 and sentenced to 25 years in jail, was “assassinated” by Israeli authorities.

“This is part of Israel’s systemic assassinations against our prisoners, and it is premeditated,” the groups said, adding that five other detainees have died in jail since October 7.

(Emphasis mine)

[ivie-online]

was going to comment on the ‘failure of basic journalistic dilligence in the mass media’ or whatever but realized it would make it seem as of the problem was a momentary lapse in integrity that had been addressed. and it hasn’t been, not in the slightest.

It is so morally unthinkable that these major outlets never once mentioned the thousands of Palestinian adults and children stolen from their homes and from the streets by Israel. And even now, when it comes to their release, these pieces spend endless paragraphs describing Israeli ‘hostages’, but just a few words on the many children being returned (many of whom were arrested after being accosted by the IOF), who they refer to only as ‘prisoners’.

these white supremacist rags have been very consistent in their efforts to uphold the most violent tendencies of western imperialists, yes. but this refusal to acknowledge the reality of the situation: that Israel took thousands of hostages first, is one of the most blatant examples of their explicit support of this project, and of their mass failure to recognize the humanity of Palestinians.

[odinsblog]

More than 9,000 Palestinians living in the West Bank have been arrested since the start of the Israel-Hamas War, a 100% increase over the same time last year. More than a third of them are being held in administrative detention, says Abdullah Al-Zaghari, who works with the Palestinian Prisoner Society, a Ramallah-based association that monitors arrests: “Yeah, without trial, without anything.”

Israeli officials maintain the arrests are in large part tied to curbing an increase in, quote, “suspected terrorist activity since the October 7 attacks,” in which Hamas militants killed around 1,200 people in Israel. But Al-Zaghari says the Israeli government is motivated by something else.

“They just put you in prison because they have a mentality of revenge against what happened in Gaza in the beginning of the war.”

Some analysts have suggested that Israel is arresting so many people, so it has thousands of less threatening prisoners to exchange in a swap with Hamas. Al-Zaghari also says recently released detainees from the West Bank and Gaza have testified that they've been beaten, deprived of food and water, and forced to sit in overcrowded cells with no electricity. Earlier this week, the Israeli military released a statement saying it was investigating allegations of mistreatment of detainees and which shares details in a forthcoming report.

As more prisoners are arrested, anger has been growing across the West Bank, while morale about the possibility of their release has gone down.

Take this weekly rally in support of Palestinian prisoners being held in central Ramallah. Just a few dozen people have shown up. Some people we speak to in nearby shops say they're fed up with the current Palestinian Authority government and see these protests as ineffective.

Others say they're afraid joining these rallies could lead to their own arrests. One man in attendance here every week is 57-year-old Muqbal Barghouti.

He tells me his son has been under administrative detention for six months, and he has no idea what his condition is. He hasn't been allowed to visit him. Then there's Muqbal's brother, Marwan Barghouti, who is perhaps the most famous Palestinian sitting in an Israeli jail.

Thirty years ago, Marwan Barghouti was poised to succeed Yasser Arafat as the new head of the Palestinian Authority. But that was scrapped when he was arrested in the early 2000s on terrorism charges. But Muqbal believes that now, more than ever, is actually a moment of hope for Marwan and the thousands of other Palestinian prisoners living in Israeli jails.

I want them to know that their freedom is very close, Barghouti tells me. He and others believe that their release could be made under a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in exchange for the remaining hostages being held in Gaza.

—Israel is taking hostages in Ramallah, West Bank

[justinspoliticalcorner]

NYT: Trump hypocritically attacks Harris for supporting gender-affirming care for prisoners and migrants in anti-trans ads, while his administration permitted gender-affirming care services in prisons while he was in office.

Glenn Thrush at NYT:

A campaign ad released by former President Donald J. Trump in battleground states slams Vice President Harris for supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners and migrants, concluding: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” But the Trump administration’s record on providing services for transgender people in the sprawling federal prison system, which houses thousands of undocumented immigrants awaiting trial or deportation, is more nuanced than the 30-second spot suggests. Trump appointees at the Bureau of Prisons, a division of the Justice Department, provided an array of gender-affirming treatments, including hormone therapy, for a small group of inmates who requested it during Mr. Trump’s four years in office. In a February 2018 budget memo to Congress, bureau officials wrote that under federal law, they were obligated to pay for a prisoner’s “surgery” if it was deemed medically necessary. Still, legal wrangling delayed the first such operation until 2022, long after Mr. Trump left office.

The New York Times reported that Donald Trump hypocritically attacks Kamala Harris in ads designed to stoke anti-trans animus for supporting gender-affirming care for prisoners and migrants, while his administration permitted gender-affirming care services in prisons while he was in office.