The nation-State of Jane Doe: Torture in Texas

July 25, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Welcome to the nation of Jane Doe, where State violence forces women into anonymity. Last week, two Jane Doe cases garnered national attention. In one case, a rape survivor was jailed for more than a month to “ensure” she would be present at her rapist’s trial. In the second, a U.S. citizen was forced to undergo body cavity searches at the U.S. – Mexico border. Meet Jane Doe; she is the face, body and name of citizenship in the United States today.

Last Thursday, “the ACLU of Texas and the ACLU of New Mexico announced a record settlement in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) paid a New Mexico woman $475,000 for illegally subjecting her to vaginal and anal searches after she was detained at the Cordova Bridge point of entry in El Paso … Last year the University Medical Center of El Paso paid the same woman — referred to in the lawsuit as Jane Doe to protect her privacy — a $1.1 million settlement for its collusion in the invasive searches.”

Jane Doe’s story began in 2012, as she crossed the El Paso’s Cordova Bridge from Mexico to the United States. A drug-sniffing dog alerted border agents that Jane Doe was carrying drugs. The agents conducted a strip search at the station, using a flashlight to examine her genitals and anus. Finding nothing, the agents sent Jane Doe to University Medical Center, where Jane Doe was forced to undergo observed bowel movement, an X-ray, a speculum exam of her vagina, a bimanual vaginal and rectal exam, and a CT scan. There was no warrant and Jane Doe never consented to anything. Finding nothing, border agents gave Jane Doe “a choice”: sign a medical consent form or pay for the hospital “services.” Jane Doe refused to sign, and received a bill of $5,488.51.

Jane Doe sued and last week won. According to Rebecca Robertson, legal and policy director for the ACLU of Texas, “This result could not have been achieved without Ms. Doe’s courage and perseverance. Had she succumbed to the threats of CBP agents and remained silent, who knows how many others might have suffered a similarly despicable experience.”

In another case, in 2013, a different Jane Doe was raped, in Houston, Texas. This Jane Doe lives with bipolar disorder. Three years later, in December 2015, Jane Doe was testifying against the man who raped her. Midway through her testimony, she broke down. Initially, Jane Doe was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. Once “stabilized”, Jane Doe was sent to the Harris County Jail, where she stayed for 28 days. Why was Jane Doe sent to jail? The court had a holiday break coming up, and so the prosecuting attorney dumped Jane Doe in jail so that she would complete her testimony. Jane Doe “was imprisoned in the hellhole of the Harris County Jail for no reason other than being a rape victim who struggles with a mental disability.”

Jane Doe is suing Harris County, Texas, for the abuse and torture she experienced in jail. During her month in jail, Jane Doe was assaulted, insulted, verbally abused, demeaned, and worse. She was put in with the general population, even though there is a mental health unit in the jail. After all of that, Jane Doe did exactly as she had done all along. She cooperated with officials and completed her testimony in January.

Jane Doe was in the same county jail as the man who raped her: “Her rapist was not denied medical care, psychologically tortured, brutalized by other inmates, or beaten by jail guards,”

This is the State of Jane Doe where two women, all women, become one and the same. Their suffrage and citizenship is violence and torture: sexual, psychological, physical, spiritual, economic, political. Welcome to the State of Jane Doe, no country for women.

 

(Image Credit: Moviefone)

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A victory for Prisoners’ Rights in Zimbabwe!

July 21, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Once again Veritas, a nongovernmental organisation based in Zimbabwe, which provides information on the work of the Parliament of Zimbabwe and the Laws of Zimbabwe and makes public domain information widely available has succeeded in advancing human rights through the Constitutional Court.  This time the rights are those of prisoners who have been sentenced to life imprisonment.  Yesterday 19th July, 2016 in a landmark judgment in the case of Makoni v Commissioner of Prisons and Another, brought by Veritas, the Court ruled that life prisoners will now be eligible for release on parole like all other prisoners.

The parole system allows the Minister of Justice, on the advice of a Board, to grant prisoners early release from prison before they have fully served their sentences.  Prisoners can be released on parole on various grounds – for example humanitarian reasons – that they have become too old or ill to be kept in prison, or, that their good behaviour in prison shows that they have reformed and will not return to a life of crime.

Only one class of prisoner was completely debarred from release on parole:  prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment.  Under section 115 of the Prisons Act the Minister was permitted to release any prisoner on licence – i.e. on parole – “other than a prisoner who has been sentenced to death or to imprisonment for life”.  What this meant was that however young a person might have been when sentenced to life imprisonment, he [and they were almost all male] would remain in prison for the rest of his life.

It was this that Veritas challenged in the Constitutional Court, arguing that sentencing someone to prison with no hope of release violated the person’s dignity and amounted to cruel or inhuman punishment in contravention of section 53 of the Constitution.

The key question for the CC was what standard to apply in determining prisoners’ rights. A high standard would mean that more prisoners’ rights will be recognized in practice. A lax standard, would mean placing a burden on prisoners that is difficult to meet, which might mean that prisoners’ rights are more theoretical than real. In this case it seems the CC has marked out a distinct approach to the question of prisoners’ rights. The CC has abandoned a cautious approach and deference to prison administration. This is a hallmark of a CC that is really trying to take a progressive approach.

The Constitutional Court agreed with Veritas’ arguments.  In a unanimous judgment delivered by Judge Patel J the Court decided that:

  • The Constitution ushered in a departure from the old approach to punishment, which emphasised retribution, towards one of social re-integration and rehabilitation of prisoners.
  • “Whole life imprisonment”, i.e. imprisonment for life without the possibility of release, constitutes a violation of human dignity and amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment in breach of sections 51 and 53 of the Constitution.
  • The power of the President to order the release of life prisoners under his power of mercy in terms of section 112 of the Constitution is entirely discretionary and cannot be enforced or questioned by courts of law.  As such it does not afford adequate redress for the purpose of enforcing such prisoners’ fundamental human rights under the Constitution.
  • There was no justifiable reason, based on the public interest, to distinguish between life prisoners and other prisoners in the matter of parole; hence the exclusion of life prisoners from the parole process contravened their right to equal protection and benefit of the law under section 56(1) of the Constitution.

The court accordingly ordered that, until the Prisons Act was amended to bring it into line with the Constitution, its provisions should be applied so as to extend the right of parole to every prisoner, including those sentenced to imprisonment for life.

This case highlights the limitations of the archaic Prisons Act in its failure to respond to and redress human rights abuses and the need for redress to protect and advance the status of prisoners’ rights.

The judgment is a landmark in the advancement of human rights in Zimbabwe.  It serves as a reminder that prisoners, however heinous their crimes may have been, are human beings entitled to humane treatment. This decision of the Zimbabwe Constitutional Court is a contribution to the progressive constitutional jurisprudence which the court is building up for Zimbabwe.

 

(Image Credit: Veritas)

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The United States prefers mass incarceration to mass education

July 16, 2016 by 1 Comment

Welcome to the United States of Incarceration. According to a recent federal report, from 1989 to 2013, “All states had lower expenditure growth rates for PK–12 education than for corrections, and in the majority of the states, the rate of increase for corrections was more than 100 percentage points higher than the rate for education … Over the past three decades, state and local government expenditures on prisons and jails have increased about three times as fast as spending on elementary and secondary education.” The three decades’ long surge in police violence as well as in prison and jail deaths has been funded by taking money from schools and dumping it, along with Brown and Black bodies, into prisons and jails.

Texas leads this punitive race to the bottom. Between 1989 and 2013, Texas’s “corrections” budget increased by 850 percent, handily leading all other states. Next in line are Wyoming (712% increase), New Mexico (704% increase), and Idaho (701%). While nationally prison spending has risen three times as fast as school spending, in Texas, prison spending has risen eight times as quickly. Between 1989 and 2013, Texas’s public pre-K through 12 budget increased a mere 182%. With a three decades’ long prison – to – school discrepancy of 668%, Texas “leads” the nation.

At the postsecondary level, the situation is even worse. Currently 18 states spend more on prisons and jails than on colleges and universities.

This robbing pupils to cage prisoners scenario is explained away by harsh mandatory sentencing guidelines combined with generalized broken windows policing that results in the working poor being herded into prisons and, even more, jails. In Houston, for example, 75% of those in jail are awaiting trial. They can’t afford to post bail, and so they sit behind bars. Their collective crime is poverty.

But there’s more to mass incarceration than “unfortunate” policy. There’s urban development. A recent federal report on the prison-instead-of-school pipeline notes, “Researchers at Columbia University found that a disproportionate number of the upwards of two million people in U.S. prisons and jails come from disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities; the authors coined the term `million dollar blocks’ to refer to places where the concentration of incarcerated individuals is so dense that states are spending over a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of a single city block. Incarceration in the U.S. occurs disproportionately among people of color.”

Why invest in urban Black and Brown neighborhoods when you can ship resident bodies out of town, to failing predominantly White rural communities where land values have been forced to collapse and unemployment and precariousness reign? Follow the money. The fervid investment in prisons and jails at the expense of grade schools, colleges and universities is part of the overheated urban real estate market of “growing” and “redeveloping” cities. It’s the latest form of root shock where, thirty years ago, the racial politics of `blight’ as a form of `urban renewal’ became a targeted policy of no school left standing in Black and Brown neighborhoods, and no prison or jail cell left behind.

 

(Image Credit 1: Design4Peace) (Image Credit 2: Washington Post)

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The “crisis” of jails in Louisville, Kentucky, is the criminal justice system

July 7, 2016 by 1 Comment

Over the past few months, jails in Kentucky have been making headlines. Earlier in the year, the headlines were about how “a pattern of employee misconduct” in one juvenile jail killed a teenage girl named Gynnya McMillen.

The new headlines, though, are about the jails in Louisville, KY, the largest city in the State. You see, Louisville’s jails are overcrowded. How overcrowded are they? To quote former inmate Jennifer Kennedy, “It was terrible…I slept on the floor, on a mat. I had to borrow a cover from someone who had one in there.”

But wait, there’s more. Louisville’s jails are so overcrowded that the State has deemed it a crisis. The director of Louisville Metro Corrections even ordered the re-opening of an old, now illegal jail. This supposedly temporary jail is illegal because the building is not up to fire evacuation standards. One judge remarked that “If they have a fire there, people are going to die.”

Even when faced with the prospect of a holocaust of prisoners, the State continued putting people in jail, and so the old, illegal jail also filled up. Now prisoners are forced to sleep in gymnasiums and use portable bathroom facilities. With every new “temporary” solution, prisoners get moved around—and moving prisoners is a violent, destabilizing process.

It’s easy to think that this overcrowding crisis is sudden and surprising, but it’s neither. The State of Kentucky created this crisis. Faced with a surplus of revenue and falling wages throughout the commonwealth, state and local governments looked to prisons and jails in which to invest excess capital. More prisons and jails mean more prisoners, an induced demand that does not depend on crime rate. This resulted in the Kentucky having the fourteenth highest overall incarceration rate in the world and the third highest women’s incarceration rate in the world.

First, the State of Kentucky knowingly hyper-incarcerates people, especially women, who worldwide are the fastest-growing prison population. The State keeps demanding more, its thirst for caged bodies never satiated, and puts these prisoners in cramped, fire-prone conditions. State officials throw up their arms, wondering how anyone could have predicted this.

How will Louisville and the State of Kentucky “solve” the crisis? The State government offered to take 200 inmates into its custody from local jails, but the state jails are just as overcrowded; state facilities were already leasing out prisoners to local jails to begin with. Instead, the State is looking to reopen two private prisons run by the CCA as another “temporary” solution. Never mind that the Kentucky CCA facilities were major harbors of sexual abuse against women prisoners.

As Louisville and Kentucky scramble for solutions, two things are clear:

  • Women prisoners, and all prisoners, matter. As the State creates and covers up its own crises, women prisoners become targets of violence to solve said crises. The pain their bodies and minds must endure directly correlates to the amount of money the State invests in prison infrastructure. Women prisoners’ space and time are inversely related to these investments. The conditions that women prisoners endure—such as the risk of being burned to death in overcrowded facilities—are also the conditions on which entire modern cities, like Louisville, are currently being developed.
  • The solution for prison overcrowding is not to build more prisons or to find more “temporary” solutions. The existence of prisons at all, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, is a crisis in itself, a major contradiction in a supposedly “free” society that allows “un-freedom” to exist. The only real, lasting solution is to abolish prisons and create alternative forms of justice that do not inflict more violence on other human beings.

 

(Photo Credit: WDRB)

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The illegal, systemic physical abuse of children in prison, sanctioned by the State

July 1, 2016 by 4 Comments

Ten years ago, the Howard League for Penal Reform released a report, the Carlile Inquiry, into the use of restraint, solitary confinement and strip-searching in penal institutions for children. This inquiry was inspired by the death in prison of Gareth Myatt, “a 15-year-old boy who weighed just seven stone, while being restrained by officers in Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre.” The report described a hell of vicious violence visited upon children’s bodies, psyches and souls. Today, the Howard League for Penal Reform released a ten-year follow up: “There is illegal, systemic physical abuse of children in prison, sanctioned by the state.” Ten years of civil society and governmental austerity and punitiveness have led to this: the State has built an expanding and intensifying hell for children.

In prison, in contravention of all laws, children are routinely restrained to get them to follow directions. “Techniques” that inflict deliberate pain on children make up over a third of all “approved techniques”, all of which are illegal. Between 2011 and 2015, children have been injured 4,350 times while being restrained. Solitary confinement, 23 hours a day in isolation, has become widespread: “Conditions in segregation units have not improved since 2006, when the Carlile Inquiry described them as `little more than bare, dark and dank cells that exacerbate underlying risks and vulnerabilities’. Segregation units should be immediately closed.” Again, the use of solitary confinement, especially long term, is completely illegal, and that illegality makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

The “real story” is in the numbers. In the last five years, the number of children in custody has dropped. In the same five years, the rate of restraint has more than doubled.

What does the continued violation of the law say? What do the numbers add up to? In England, as in other countries that drank and then guzzled the Incarceration Kool-Aid, the will to punish morphed ineluctably into the will to harm. It’s an old story, now fueled by the political economies of neoliberal development and protectionism. Meanwhile, Gareth Myatt becomes Adam Rickwood becomes Joseph Scholes; and Rainsbrook becomes Medway, and the whole State-run theater of cruelty moves faster, farther, and more deeply.

Last year, children’s rights campaigner Carolyne Willow argued, “Nobody has ever designed a prison to make children feel valued, to treat them well and change their lives. It desperately needs a minister with the compassion and courage to change things. We closed workhouses, asylums and orphanages, let’s get rid of child prisons. Let us say, we are not going to do this to children any more.”

We are not going to do this to children any more.

Today’s report concludes: “Children are being harmed in prisons today and steps to ensure their safety must be taken immediately. We know what works – as the Carlile Inquiry found 10 years ago, small, local units that have a record of success in providing the best care and rehabilitation for the few children who require a period in a secure environment. Prisons and the privately-run secure training centres should be closed down forthwith. We do not need to reinvent the wheel or repeat the mistakes of the past.”

What will next year’s report conclude, and the one ten years on? We are not going to do this to children any more … anywhere. Prisons and the privately-run secure training centers must be closed down forthwith. Today. We cannot keep doing this to children.

 

(Image Credit: The Howard League for Penal Reform)

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#ShutDownBerks: The United States of Abandonment Devours Three Year-Old Immigrant Children

June 29, 2016 by 18 Comments

When three-year-old child Catherine Checas vomited blood, Berks staff told her mother to have her ‘drink lots of water’.

Last week, from Wednesday until Saturday, the Berks County Residential Center held a 3-year-old boy-child from El Salvador without his mother. He was only released because of the intervention of local immigration attorney Carol Ann Donahoe. Otherwise, that three-year-old would still be behind bars, alone. The State will tell you mistakes happen. There was no mistake here. This is part of the establishment of the United States of Abandonment, and it now reaches to three-year old children.

The story here is that the boy’s 21-year-old mother was taken to hospital, and so the boy was left behind. That’s it. No one thought to call the mother’s contacts or attorney or anyone. In fact, the three-year-old is now in Virginia, where his grandmother lives. Again, that only happened because of the strenuous labor on the part of attorneys and supporters. If you want to know what the climate, call it reign of terror, is inside Berks, the mother “asked that her name not be used because she feared repercussions from staff.”

Carol Anne Donohoe remarked, “This is outrageous. Picture a 3-year-old being detained without his mother, who is in the hospital. He has no idea what that means at the age of 3.” According to Donohoe, after three or four days of “State care”, the child is “emotionally traumatized”, not eating, throwing tantrums and kicking at doors. This is how we take care of children.

Picture a 3-year-old.

Earlier this year, an immigration judge, who is also responsible for training other judges, stated, in a sworn deposition, that immigrant 3- and 4-year olds can represent themselves in court, “I’ve taught immigration law literally to 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of patience. They get it. It’s not the most efficient, but it can be done.” The Legal Aid Justice Center, in Virginia, decided to picture the 3-year old and the 4-year old, and filmed them answering questions of law. The children failed … brilliantly and adorably, conclusively and predictably as well. Three short months later, a 3-year-old is left to fend for himself in prison.

This is the United States of Abandonment: “Zones of abandonment … accelerate the death of the unwanted.” These are the unwanted: “the mentally ill and homeless, AIDS patients, the unproductive young, and old bodies.” Add to that the Central American woman, and the list is complete.

Can a three-year-old represent herself in immigration court? No. Can a three-year-old take care of himself in immigration detention? No. No ethical human being can ask those questions. The questions are criminal. The posing of the questions is beyond inhumane. Nothing out of the ordinary happened in Berks last week. A three-year-old was traumatized, again, just like the four-year old boy-child last year in Karnes. A young mother was traumatized into anonymity and silence, again. The inhuman geography of the United States of Abandonment spreads and intensifies. End the carnage now. #ShutDownBerks #EndFamilyDetention #Not1More

 

(Photo Credit: The Guardian) (Video Credit: Legal Aid Justice Center / Vimeo)

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Child asylum seekers sacrificed on the altar of efficiency

June 23, 2016 by 2 Comments

How old do you think I am?

On Monday, June 20, Sir Stephen Silber, Justice of the England and Wales High Court, decided that a child who applies for asylum deserves a modicum of justice. The story is fairly straightforward. The fact that there is a story at all is a national, and global, disgrace. An unaccompanied boy-child, called AA in the court proceedings, made it, alone, from Sudan to Italy. From Italy, he made it, alone, to the United Kingdom, where he applied, more like begged, for asylum. He said, rightly, that he was 16 or 17. The border official looked at him and decided he was well over 18. There was no other proceeding. That was it. A guy looks at another guy and decides he’s older. AA was sent to adult immigration detention, where he spent two weeks, first at Brook House and then Tinsley. Officially children can only be detained for 24 hours. The Refugee Council and a team of lawyers from Bhatia Best Solicitors worked for two weeks, and finally secured his release. He was then interviewed by a team of social workers and deemed to be a child. On Monday, Justice Silber ruled, first, that the Secretary of State for the Home Department had illegally detained AA and, second, must pay damages to AA for the two weeks of detention.

According to Stuart Luke, the head of public law and community care at Bhatia Best Solicitors, “Since 2013 when the Home Office introduced these rules about age assessment I have seen an increase in these cases. Today’s landmark judgment is very important because it protects the rights of unaccompanied asylum seeker children who come to the UK.” Refugee Council Policy Manager Judith Dennis added: “This judgment is extremely significant and sends a clear message to the Home Office that its current policy is both unlawful and indefensible. For too long the Government has been jeopardising the safety of children who it should be protecting. It’s clear that the stakes are far, far too high for children to be arbitrarily thrown behind bars with adults on the basis of guesswork. Instead of wasting public money fighting this ruling, the Government should instead ensure that everyone who claims to be a child receives a sensitive, timely, lawful and expert led age assessment.”

Home Office lawyers described the decision as “absurd.” The Home Office lawyers’ entire case was based on “absurdity.” They argued that taking childhood as an objective matter, meaning developing actual processes to determine an applicant’s age, would “lead to an absurd and anomalous outcome.” What is the basis of this absurdity and anomaly? Efficiency. In his decision, Justice Silber responded to this line of reasoning: “I have not overlooked any of the submissions of Mr McKendrick, and, in particular, his contention that the Claimant’s case is `profoundly troubling for the efficient running of a fair immigration system’. My task is not to ascertain what would lead to the most efficient running of a fair immigration system but to apply the established principles of construction.”

For the past three years, the Department of Home Affairs sacrificed children on the altar of efficiency. In so doing, they inverted and abused the story of the binding of Isaac: “God tested Abraham and said to him, `Abraham! And he said, `Here I am.’ He said, `Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.’”

Today’s parable goes like this: “And the State said to a nameless functionary, `Take their son, whom you despise, and go to the prison and offer him there as a burnt offering.’” Where efficiency subsumes justice and compassion, God is dead, and no one weeps.

(Photo Credit: The Guardian)

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Nancy Carroll tells her interstate prisoner transport story

June 22, 2016 by 10 Comments

On March 4th at approximately 6:00 am, I found myself being summoned from a holding cell in the Lake County Jail, in Waukegan, Illinois, to be transported back to Tarrant County, Texas, for six days in a transport van across the country.

I’m a real estate attorney from Southlake, Texas, an affluent suburb of Dallas. Prior to 2016 I had never been charged with or committed a criminal act or incurred an incident record of any kind beyond a speeding ticket. I’ve never had any mental or medical issues or been medicated beyond Advil, antibiotics and blood pressure medicine. Today I am a newly self-professed civil rights activist, wife, mother of three minor children living in Texas on an ankle monitor awaiting indictment for allegations of embezzling and theft from the title company I owned, Millennium Title. In December 2015 through January 2016 following a prolonged audit by the Texas Department of Insurance, I began negotiations for the sale of my company. After failing to sell the company, I decided in January 2016 to put the company into receivership and move to the Chicago area near my younger sister’s family to start over. At the time I moved, no criminal charges were threatened or pending against me. On February 11th, two weeks after moving and with no notice, I was arrested in Illinois on an arrest warrant from Texas. I would spend nearly 30 days sitting in an Illinois county jail waiting for the state of Texas to file a case against me so that the extradition process could begin. My family and I were told I would be transported to Texas by airplane and accompanied by a Federal Marshall. That was not the case.

My six days of transport from Illinois to Texas were the most dangerous, terrifying, demeaning and inhumane conditions I have ever witnessed. The private transport companies hired by jails and prisons to move inmates across the country disregard all basic human rights and protections.

During the interstate transportation process, there was no attempt to classify inmates. Women and men, violent and non-violent offenders were transported together. Nonviolent inmates awaiting trial are transported alongside convicted violent inmates with little or no supervision. For six days, my family called to obtain a status report on my transport and to confirm my safety; no information of any kind was provided, allegedly for “safety reasons”. There is absolutely no oversight or supervision of the drivers placed in charge of inmates’ health and safety while traveling across the country. Furthermore, the policies and procedures for monitoring the condition and safety of the transport vehicles are inadequate or improperly implemented.

What follows is a brief description of two legs of my return to Texas. The first was from Lake County, Illinois, to Mississippi County, Missouri. We had two drivers. I was refused my prescribed blood pressure medication. Upon arrival at the Carver County Jail in Minnesota, my blood pressure was recorded at 180/100, or hypertensive urgency. Carver County contacted the transport company, which refused to authorize blood pressure medicine. Carver County medical authorities finally paid for and authorized the blood pressure medicine.

In St. Cloud, Minnesota, an inmate suffering from pneumonia and on a regimen of prescribed antibiotics was picked up. The St. Cloud jail authorities gave the driver the antibiotics, which then somehow disappeared. One driver chain-smoked the entire trip, to the dismay of an inmate who was asthmatic and the prisoner suffering pneumonia.

We would drive for over eight hours, without a stop. We would be shackled for eight to ten hours, again without a break. Not surprisingly, inmates would urinate and defecate in the van.

We were in the freezing northern Midwest winter, and the van had no working heat system. We were not provided with adequate winter clothing.

Only one of the two drivers actually drove, which meant driving in excess of the Department of Transportation allowed hours of non-stop driving. The van’s headlights didn’t work. At one point, there were twelve inmates crammed into the van for over eight hours.

Male inmates would scream sexual obscenities and threats day and night at the female inmates demanding sexual acts and for the female inmates to expose themselves. I was seated next to an alleged violent male inmate in a segregation cage for over 36 hours. He would reach through open areas of the cage and grab for me, verbally threaten to find my family and me and inflict unspeakable violence.

The second leg of my return was from Mississippi County, Missouri, to Tarrant County Texas. We had two drivers again. In Missouri, the primary driver received a speeding ticket. He consistently drove over 85 miles per hour.

After 7 1/2 hours of no restroom, water or food, inmates asked the drivers as to when there would be another rest stop break. The primary driver responded by shouting obscenities and in then accelerated the van and immediately slammed on the brakes, throwing inmates into one another, on the floor and onto the metal caging in the interior of the vehicle. One inmate suffered severe lacerations to his ring finger and foot and another suffered lacerations to her chin and face. All injuries were witnessed by the sheriff on duty at the next rest stop in Johnson County Texas. The drivers provided no medical attention.

(Photo Credit: PTS of America)

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South Carolina built a special hell for those living with mental illness: prison

June 2, 2016 by 1 Comment

South Carolina’s prisons and jails are overcrowded, under-resourced, and toxic. People, like Joyce Curnell, regularly die in agony, begging for help. Jails are fatally overcrowded. For example, the Pickens County Jail, built for maximum 91 prisoners, currently holds close to 200. South Carolina’s prisons and jails are bad, but for those living with mental illness, the prisons and jails are absolutely infernal. They are described as negligent, outrageous, abusive, where cruel becomes usual, appalling and worse. People living with mental illness spend years in solitary confinement, engaging in self-harm, and scores have died in agony, begging for help. Finally, after twelve years of struggle, this might just change, thanks to prisoners themselves and to Protection and Advocacy for People Living with Disability.

In 2002, Protection and Advocacy and the Death Penalty Resources Center approached a prominent South Carolina law firm and asked for help concerning the systemic abuse of prisoners living with mental illnesses. The lawyers took on the case. In 2005, three inmates – T.R., P.R. and K.W. – and Protection and Advocacy sued the South Carolina Department of Corrections and its director, William R. Byars, Jr. They laid out a horror story of abuse, neglect, mayhem, torture, pain, suffering, and death. The details were horrifying as was the scale. In 2012, the case went to trial. In 2014, Judge Michael Baxley ruled decisively against the State. He opened his remarks noting, “It has been the privilege of this writer to serve the State of South Carolina as a general jurisdiction judge for fourteen years. At the time this case was heard, Court Administration reported there were more than 5,000 new case filings per year for each of our state’s circuit court judges. Thus, over 70,000 cases of every imaginable sort have come to this Court over the years. This case, far above all others, is the most troubling … The evidence in this case has proved that inmates have died in the South Carolina Department of Corrections for lack of basic mental health care, and hundreds more remain substantially at risk for serious physical injury, mental decompensation, and profound, permanent mental illness.”

Judge Baxley handed down his decision January 2014. South Carolina immediately leapt to the defense of its clearly abusive and troubling treatment of those living with mental illness. Meanwhile, self injury and harm continued unabated. A year later, in January 2015, an agreement between the parties was reported, but that proved not to be the case. Finally, this week, a final agreement – with real goals, timelines, independent checks and assessments, and a budget – was signed.

South Carolina built a special hell for those living with mental illnesses. Its ratio of mentally ill in prison or jail to mentally ill in hospital is 5.1 to 1, one of the worst in the country. South Carolina is near the bottom of state rankings when it comes to “availability of public psychiatric beds, efforts to divert mentally ill individuals, per capita state mental health expenditures, and almost every other measure of treatment for mentally ill individuals.” Furthermore, when it comes to investing in prisoner healthcare, it’s the second worst state in the country. Only Oklahoma is worse.

For decades South Carolina has tortured people living with mental illnesses. It was State public policy, everyone knew. Everyone knew that seriously mentally ill people were sent to solitary more than others, and everyone knew that they stayed in solitary for much longer. Judge Baxley wrote repeatedly that the State was aware of what was happening under and within its administration. This torture was public knowledge, and so the question lingers, “What is that public?” Why does it take spectacular deaths for us to acknowledge the torture we already knows? Why does it take heroic struggles that last for years for us to say that we cannot torture people because they live with mental illnesses? Who are we who know and then turn away? Who are we? This case, far above all others, is the most troubling.

 

(Image Credit: The Atlantic)

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Jacinta Francisco Marcial, Alberta Alcántara Juan, Teresa González Cornelio demand justice!

May 25, 2016 by 8 Comments

Jacinta Francisco Marcial

Jacinta Francisco Marcial, Alberta Alcántara Juan, and Teresa González Cornelio are Otomí-speaking ñhäñhú women street vendors who have struggled for the past decade to force the Mexican government to do more than `stop oppressing’ indigenous women. Asserting their dignity as indigenous women, they have demanded justice. This week they may have moved a step closer to that goal.

Jacinta Francisco Marcial, Alberta Alcántara Juan, and Teresa González Cornelio were arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced to decades in prison for a crime that never occurred. On March 26, 2006, members of the now-defunct Federal Investigation Agency (AFI) of the federal Attorney General’s Office showed up at the town plaza of Santiago Mexquititlán in the state of Querétaro. Never identifying themselves as police, they began to shake down the local street vendors, the vast majority of whom were ñhäñhú women. The women massed around the agents and demanded they stop their extortion. The agents’ superiors arrived and offered to pay for damages, and that should have been that.

Four months later, Jacinta Francisco Marcial, Alberta Alcántara Juan, and Teresa González Cornelio were arrested and charged with having kidnapped six agents. The evidence was allegedly a newspaper photograph that showed the three women somewhere in the vicinity of the crowd of indigenous women. The trial dragged on for two years. Not a single federal agent ever showed up or gave testimony, and yet all three women were sentenced to 21 years in prison. That’s justice in Querétaro for the crime of being a working poor, indigenous woman.

At the time of her imprisonment, Jacinta Francisco Marcial was 43 years old. She was married and the mother of six children. She sold juices and ice cream in the town square. Jacinta Francisco Marcial was guilty of the crime of survival with a modicum of dignity.

When she was sent to jail, the Centro Prodh took up her case. Soon after, Amnesty began investigating and campaigning as well. In September 2009, Jacinta Francisco Marcial was released from prison. The Attorney General’s Office had dropped the charges, but never declared her innocent. In April 2010, Alberta Alcántara Juan and Teresa González Cornelio were also released. At the time of their release Alberta Alcántara Juan was 31, and Teresa González Cornelio 25 years old. Teresa González Cornelio gave birth to a baby girl while in prison.

The three women had been released, but Jacinta Francisco Marcial had not been exonerated, and so she sued the State for damages and demanded an apology. In May 2014, in a groundbreaking case, Jacinta Francisco Marcial won, the first time a Mexican citizen sued the State for wrongful incarceration and was awarded reparations and a public apology.

The State refused to pay up or apologize. This week, the earlier judgment was confirmed, and there’s no chance for the State to appeal the decision. The State must compensate and formally apologize, and it must do so by September 2016.

Mexico currently holds over 9000 indigenous people in its prisons. The prisons are hellholes generally, and for indigenous people, even more so. There are little to no language services either in the courts or in the prisons, and so many indigenous people are left to fend for themselves, which is to say disappear. As Jacinta Francisco Marcial has explained on more than one occasion, she didn’t know what kidnapping was when she was charged with that crime.

According to the Mexican National Commission on Human Rights, the conditions of women’s prisons are deplorable. Querétaro’s Centro de Reinserción Social Femenil San José El Alto offers threats, humiliation, discrimination; toxic maintenance conditions; unregulated and irregular application of solitary confinement; overcrowding; and more. According to the Commission, Querétaro’s Centro de Reinserción Social Femenil San José El Alto is not one of the worst women’s prisons in Mexico, not by a long shot.

The State tried to crush Jacinta Francisco Marcial, Alberta Alcántara Juan, and Teresa González Cornelio, because it considered three working poor indigenous women as so much dust. From the streets to the courts to the prisons to the highest offices in the land, State agents thought they could abuse such women with impunity. But when they struck Jacinta Francisco Marcial, Alberta Alcántara Juan, and Teresa González Cornelio, they hit and dislodged a boulder that will continue to roll and pound until the State of impunity is crushed. There are many Jacintas in Mexico and beyond.

 

(Photo Credit: Centro Prodh) (Video Credit: Amnesty / YouTube)

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