Prison Industry

Prisoners risking death by refusing food in the Pelican Bay supermax, and those hunger striking in solidarity in prisons around California are a judgment of our sickness. "The degree of civilization in a society," said Dostoyevsky, "can be judged by entering its prisons."

Civilization is something we no longer seem to aspire to. The United States locks up more people and a greater percentage of its people than anyone else. We lock them in training centers for anger and violence. We subject them to rape, assault, humiliation, and isolation. We throw the innocent in with the guilty, the young with the old, the nonviolent with the violent, the hopeful with those who've lost all interest in life.

"The fiscal good has to outweigh the pain," a nameless Democrat told the Washington Post regarding President Obama's latest proposal to massively cut Social Security, against the wishes of the vast majority of Americans, in order to fund a military 670% larger than the next largest in the world, keep in place tax cuts for billionaires, fail to tax corporations or estates or investments or carbon, and balance a budget that nobody gives a rat's ass about balancing when Wall Street comes asking for handouts.

Bradley Manning, alleged U.S. Army whistleblower, is in two ways -- one likely, the other certain -- being punished for the crimes of others.

On Monday a crowd that I was part of staged a protest at Quantico, where Manning has been imprisoned for several months with no trial. At the last minute, the military denied us permission to hold a rally on the base, so we held it in the street blocking the entrance to the base. This visibly enraged at least one of the guards who attempted unsuccessfully to arrest a couple of us.

See quote from my old reporting below:

Former prosecutor said to lie about confession
BY FRANK GREEN, Media General News Service, Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Here's an article about yesterday's jury award of $2.25 million to Earl Washington, whom the state of Virginia came within days of killing for a crime he had been clumsily and obviously framed for. Washington is mentally retarded, poor, and black. White cops in Culpeper, Virginia, interrogated him and fed him information about the crime. They did not take notes for much of this interrogation, and then claimed that Washington knew things that only the killer could have known. But during the sections where they did take notes, they fed him information, and generally when they didn't, he got things wrong. He was guessing and trying to please them, but he still usually got things wrong. Will the state of Virginia rethink its rule barring admittance of exculpating evidence found later (such as DNA)? Or will it, as the Innocence Project is urging, require the videotaping of all interrogations? Time will tell. This was certainly a long time coming.