Prison Industry

Talk Nation Radio: Hunger Strikers and the Law vs. the Prison Industry

https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-hunger

Diana Zuniga is statewide coordinator for CURB, Californians United for a Responsible Budget: CurbPrisonSpending.org  She discusses the hunger strike in California prisons and the ongoing struggle to resist further expansion of mass incarceration, and to move our society in a healthier direction.

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Prisons Full of Innocents

There are probably more innocent men and women in prison in the United States now than there were people in prison here total — innocent and guilty — 30 years ago, or than there are total people in prison (proportionately or as an absolute number) in most nations on earth.

I don’t mean that people are locked up for actions that shouldn’t be considered crimes, although they are.  I don’t mean that people are policed and indicted and prosecuted by a racist system read more

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Prisoners Have Nothing to Gain By Eating

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. read more

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Punishing Bradley Manning for the Crimes of Others

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 read more

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Wrongly Convicted, Almost Executed, Awarded $2.25 Million

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, read more

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