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By Andy Borowitz
$16.95
By Garry Wills
$16.27
$18
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alh1 (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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A review of reports published over the last few years shows poor and lower-income Americans are increasingly being jailed for being unable to pay debts and fines “more than two decades after the Supreme Court prohibited imprisoning those who are too poor to pay their legal debts,” as the ACLU notes.
Posted on Apr 9, 2013
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By Amy Goodman — Albert Woodfox has been in solitary confinement for 40 years, most of that time locked up in the notorious maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary known as “Angola.”
Posted on Feb 27, 2013
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As though we don’t have enough absurd laws in the U.S., a new one has passed criminalizing the unlocking of mobile devices; the U.S. is spending $400,000 a day to keep innocent people incarcerated in Guantanamo; and this Sunday is the Super Bowl, when we watch men cause one another brain trauma. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Jan 30, 2013
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AP/Misha Japaridze
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A Moscow judge on Friday ordered three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot to remain in jail awaiting trial for an anti-Putin performance in Moscow’s major church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, in February.
Posted on Jul 21, 2012
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flee the cities (CC-BY)
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By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman, TomDispatch —
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate.
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Flickr/s_falkow (CC-BY)
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In Texas, some students who show up late for class too many times, or just plain don’t show up, are being sent to courtrooms instead of principals’ offices, while other youngsters face heftier charges and fines for offenses that used to be handled by schools’ internal disciplinary officers and structures.
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AP/Gerald Herbert
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Five ex-officers from the New Orleans Police Department found themselves on the other side of the law Wednesday, as they were sentenced to jail for their respective roles in the shootings of six unarmed civilians in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005.
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Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune —
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AP/Mel Evans
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It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that U.S. Supreme Court justices voted along party lines when approving, on a 5-4 vote, the expansion of strip-searching guidelines to include anyone who’s been arrested for any offense and is en route to jail.
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The great Internet switch-off; the ACLU vs. jailhouse abuse; S&P’s downgrade mania; Robert Scheer on the election, and Chris Hedges discusses his lawsuit against the president.
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The great Internet switch-off; the ACLU vs. jailhouse abuse; S&P’s downgrade mania; Robert Scheer on the election, and Chris Hedges discusses his lawsuit against the president.
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Alberto.. (CC-BY)
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In one part of Southern California, if you do the crime, there’s a chance you’ll pay both the time and the price of imprisonment. Due to a measure passed Tuesday by Riverside County’s board of supervisors, county jail inmates deemed able will be forced to pay $142.42 per day during their stay in the clink. (more)
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Flickr / Neon Tommy (CC-BY-SA)
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The ACLU has demanded the resignation of Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca after the civil rights organization issued a report that he had willfully ignored a growing culture of violence and abuse by jail deputies against inmates. (more)
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Princeton University professor Dr. Cornel West spoke to a crowd of almost 3,000 people at the Riverside Church in New York City on Friday during an evening of remembrance for another sort of 9/11. (more)
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AP
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Iranian authorities have sentenced two American hikers to eight years in prison for espionage, according to an unnamed source on Iran state television. (more)
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey
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On this week’s episode of Truthdig radio in collaboration with KPFK: Unconstitutionally crowded prisons, battlefield medicine, a very special segment on the Marines who collect their dead in Iraq, and just a little bit of Jesus. Plus: Reese Erlich reports from Egypt.
Posted on Jun 15, 2011
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On this week’s episode of Truthdig Radio in collaboration with KPFK: Unconstitutionally crowded prisons, battlefield medicine, a very special segment on the Marines who collect their dead in Iraq, and just a little bit of Jesus. Plus: Reese Erlich reports from Egypt. Update: Full transcript.
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Rob Shenk (CC-BY-SA)
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California’s overcrowded prisons have “fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements,” causing “needless suffering and death,” according to a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. The state, which imposes draconian sentences on repeat offenders, must now find a way to reduce its prison population by at least 38,000 inmates.
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AP
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“Ridiculous ... counterproductive ... stupid.” Those are the words chosen by U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley to describe the country’s treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged WikiLeaker being held in solitary confinement in a military jail.
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Good thing for that, too, as the middle and lower classes are clearly still feeling the fallout from Wall Street bandits’ fraudulent scheming. Here, Taibbi names some names and tells Amy Goodman how the architects of our current economic catastrophe got away with their crime ... so far.
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AP / Vincent Yu
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Jittery Chinese officials, mindful of the political upheaval in Egypt and elsewhere, moved quickly on Sunday, detaining more than 100 activists after a call went out on an overseas website for a “jasmine revolution” in the world’s most populous country.
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AP / Rodridgo Abd
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Justice is coming to Guatemala, as former President Alfonso Portillo has gone on trial in Guatemala City, accused of embezzling a cool $15 million.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Despite drumming up support in the form of testimony from former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, onetime U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and his legal team have failed to ward off a jail sentence ...
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AP / Louis Lanzano
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The cash pot available to compensate victims of Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme has grown by $7.2 billion after a settlement was reached with the estate of a Palm Beach client of the Wall Street shyster.
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AP / Mark A. Stahl
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By Chris Hedges — Staughton Lynd and his wife, Alice, also a lawyer, are soldiering on in the economic and social ruins of Youngstown, Ohio, where the only growth industry is locking people away.
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AP / Irwin Fedriansyah
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The former editor of Playboy Indonesia has begun a two-year prison stint for publishing images of scantily clad women. Playboy Indonesia began circulation in 2006, but Islamic hard-liners found issue with the magazine’s ethos and started legal proceedings against its editor.
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AP / Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
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Los Angeles jails may become the new frontier for science-fiction weaponry after the Sheriff’s Department unveiled plans to use heat-beam ray guns in one county jail, zapping unruly inmates with a beam that “makes them feel as though they are burning.”
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Flickr / greenforall.org (CC-BY)
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For the outrageous crime of hanging two banners in the Senate’s Hart Office Building, environmentalist Ted Glick could get up to three years in jail. The U.S. attorney’s office has asked for triple the normal maximum penalty, because Glick has made a habit of speaking his mind and, apparently, that’s just criminal. (continued)
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Wikimedia Commons
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A onetime comrade, and current critic, of Venezuelan jefe Hugo Chavez has been sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of abuse of power, misappropriation of funds and violation of the military code while an officer in the army.
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U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
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The head of the Gulf Cartel, the leading drug cartel in northern Mexico and southern Texas, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after cooperating with the U.S. federal government and pleading guilty to five counts that included attempted murder and money laundering.
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Human rights organizations are on the offensive as groups mobilize pressure against Ireland’s ban on abortion, accusing the government of a deliberate campaign of misinformation and exposing women to undue risk by forcing them to travel abroad for abortions.
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Two Malawian men could spend the next 14 years in jail after taking part in an unofficial marriage ceremony in the southeast African country. Under the guise of the law, the couple have been subjected to beatings, they say, as well as other indignities, such as the threat of a medical examination to determine whether they’ve had sex.
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Wikimedia Commons
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In one of the most improper of Christmas presents, Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights activist, was sentenced to an unusually harsh 11 years in prison for charges of “subversion.” The decision was ostensibly made on Christmas Day to minimize international attention.
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democracynow.org
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Dissent is alive and well in Los Angeles, with actions like sit-ins against health insurance companies showing a growing disapproval of the sorry state of the health care debate. Some activists are choosing to stay in jail in protest of insurers’ denial-of-coverage policies and in support of universal health care.
Posted on Oct 25, 2009
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City of Hardin
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TPMMuckraker investigates the sad story of Hardin, Mont., a town so desperate for jobs it fell for a private prison scheme that left it with a big empty jail and a load of debt. You know you’re in trouble when you have to beg the state to send you sex offenders.
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journalperu.com
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While serving time in a Peruvian clink, Ex-President Alberto Fujimori found time in his schedule to be convicted of corruption. The sentence handed down in his fourth and final trial on charges of illegal activity in office calls for extending his jail stay by six years.
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AP photo / Amy Sancetta
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By Chris Hedges — If you have defrauded banks and customers and investment firms of billions of dollars, as AIG or Citibank has, you get taxpayer money. If you are moral scum in America we take care of you. But if you are poor, if you are, say, Tearyan Brown of Trenton, N.J., you are in trouble.
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msrb.wordpress.com
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Some of them have only their homes, while others have no remaining assets and no means to earn income, but all of the former clients of Bernard Madoff (above) whose statements were made public by the government on Friday described in nightmarish terms their experiences since Madoff’s fraudulent investment empire crumbled.
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AP photo / Jason DeCrow
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Citing such sketchy precedents as rulings in the cases of Enron’s Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, Bernard Madoff’s legal team filed an appeal at a New York federal court on Friday requesting that their client be released on bail until he is sentenced on June 16.
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pewhispanic.org
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A new study by the Pew Hispanic Center reports that Latinos now constitute the largest single ethnic group in the U.S. federal prison system. The rising arrest and detention levels are driven largely by changes in immigration law that criminalize undocumented immigration, with nearly half of all Latino offenders jailed on immigration-related “crimes.”
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kdka.com
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Ashley Todd, the 20-year-old McCain campaign volunteer who admitted that she had made up her story about being mugged by a 6’ 4” black man who carved a “B” into her face on Oct. 22, has been released from jail under the condition that she undergo psychiatric treatment.
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The busy folks at Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films outfit have kicked off a Web-based campaign to send Karl Rove to the clinker for refusing to honor the subpoena sent by the House Judiciary Committee calling him to testify about his alleged involvement in the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman.
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flickr.com / Willie Stark
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In what seems to be an all too common occurrence across the U.S., an inmate has died in California after being shocked with a taser by sheriff’s deputies. Jason Jesus Gomez is the latest casualty at the hands of the infamous Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
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flickr.com
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So much for the “war on crime”: According to a new report from the Pew Center on the States, 1 in 100 American adults is now in jail. The report states that “current prison growth is not driven primarily by a parallel increase in crime, or a corresponding surge in the population at large”; instead, “it flows principally from a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and ... keeping them there longer.”
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Aislin, The Montreal Gazette
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“Game of Shadows” co-author Lance Williams shares his thoughts on Barry Bonds’ legal woes, the impact of steroids on sports and how Nancy Pelosi helped to keep him out of jail.
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AP photo / Anjun Naveed
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Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is showing signs that he’s feeling the heat from the West, loosening his regime’s steel-trap grip by lifting some of the most severe measures he enforced since imposing a state of emergency rule in his country. As of Tuesday morning, in fact, 3,416 people who were jailed during the initial crackdown had been released, according to a government spokesman.
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sciam.com
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Portugal is the latest European country to pick up on a growing trend of favoring therapy over jail for possession and use of small amounts of illegal drugs. Critics of the new law worry that Portugal will become a hot spot for foreign drug users, but supporters believe the law will shift the focus of the government’s anti-drug efforts from users to traffickers and will give addicts a better chance to get clean.
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AP Photo / Gerald Herbert
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I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr.‘s chances of avoiding time in the slammer are looking slim after Thursday’s ruling by Federal Judge Reggie B. Walton rejecting Libby’s lawyers’ request that their client remain free to roam while he appeals his conviction for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements related to the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity in 2003.
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