Posts tagged: prison
Klint Finley
Ann Neumann writes about William Coleman, a U.S. prisoner who has been on a hunger strike for the past five years:
There are two places in the U.S. where you can be fed against your will: a Catholic hospital and a prison.
Staff turned off the video camera typically used to record medical procedures. They strapped Coleman down at “four points” with seatbelt-like “therapeutic” restraints. Edward Blanchette, the internist and prison medical director at the time, pushed a thick, flexible tube up Coleman’s right nostril. Rubber scraped against cartilage and bone and drew blood. Coleman howled. As the tube snaked into his throat, it kinked, bringing the force of insertion onto the sharp edges of the bent tube. They thought he was resisting so they secured a wide mesh strap over his shoulders to keep him from moving. A nurse held his head. Blanchette finally realized that the tube had kinked and pulled it back out. He pushed a second tube up Coleman’s nose, down his throat, and into his stomach. Blanchette filled the tube with vanilla Ensure. Coleman’s nose bled. He gagged constantly against the tube. He puked. As they led him back to his cell, the cuffs of Coleman’s gray sweatshirt were soaked with snot, saliva, vomit, and blood.
“I have been tortured,” he would say later. And it was enough to make Coleman start drinking fluids again. For a while. When he stopped a few months later, the prison force-fed him again, and twelve more times over the next two years. By last year they could no longer use Coleman’s right nostril. A broken nose in his youth and repeated insertion of the tube have made it too sensitive.
Full Story: Guernica: The Longest Hunger Strike
The Obama administration announced new regulations intended to reduce prison rape recently. This CBS News piece seems to bury the lede:
Just about the same number of former inmates were victimized by facility staff as were victimized by other inmates. About 27,300 — 5.4 percent — reported incidents with other inmates, while 23,300 — 5.3 percent — reported incidents that involved facility staff. Of the former inmates who reported incidents with staff, 6,300 — or 1.2 percent — of the former inmates said they had unwilling sex or sexual contact with staff, while the rest said they “willingly” had sexual contact with the staff member.
Any sexual contact between staff and inmate is officially classified as nonconsensual. Prisons uniformly forbid inmate-staff sexual contact.
CBS: White House steps up efforts against prison rape
The way the story presents the numbers is a bit confusing. To say that inmates are victimized as much by staff as other inmates might be overstating the issue since all sexual contact, consensual or not, is considered abuse. However, that’s 1.2% of the total population surveyed who have had unwilling sexual contact with staff - not 1.2% of the 5.3% who reported sexual contact with staff. That puts the number of unwilling contact at 27% of total staff sexual contact. If we don’t count willing contact, then prisoner are still much more likely to be sexual abused by other prisoners, but we can still see that there is a significant amount of abuse happening on the part of prison staff.
(via Jesse Walker, who unburied the lede)
The U.S. government now owns the story of Colton Harris-Moore, the gawky delinquent thief and burglar who will cool his heels in prison while a movie about his exploits as the “Barefoot Bandit” appears headed for a theater near you.
The 20-year-old Harris-Moore pleaded guilty to seven federal felony charges Friday in a plea agreement that recommends he serve between 5 ¼ and 6 ½ years in prison to resolve the federal aspects of his two-year crime spree, including the thefts of two airplanes and a boat and being a fugitive in possession of a firearm.
Seattle Times: ‘Barefoot Bandit’ pleads guilty to 7 federal charges, forfeits possible profits
He’s also up on 30 state charges in four counties.
As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.
Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.
The Guardian: China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work
Mark of Cain, a documentary by Alix Lambert about the culture of Russian criminal tattoos, is now available for free online under a creative commons license. This documentary served as a reference for the David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises.
You can also buy it on DVD from Amazon.com. You might also be interested in Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia.
(via Brain Pickings)
Hmmm…
The scheme was initiated by Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabiliation), a company that promotes the arts within the prison system. Co-director Chris Johnston says its aim is “to influence the decisions that are made about prison architecture and design, which almost always relegate education provision to a low priority and the role of the arts even lower.”(Guardian)
Apprently it’s “purely conceptual” with the prisoners only building models of otheir projects at the end… but the idea of engaging prisoners in a different way is facinating. This will no doubt raise questions about prisoners being treated too well, etc. But if it helps keep these people from coming back to prison, why not?
(via Cool Hunting)
