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Posts Tagged ‘prisons’

Prison Riot in California

3:34 pm By la Macha · California| Controversia| Violence · 2 Comments

9 Aug 2009

art.prison.fire.newspro CNN is reporting that serious rioting broke out at the California Institution for Men in Chino, California last night.

More than 250 inmates were injured in a riot that erupted overnight at the California Institution for Men in Chino, a spokesman said Sunday.

Flames leap from a housing unit at a prison in Chino, California, on Saturday night.

Fifty-five inmates were taken to area hospitals with serious injuries, said Lt. Mark Hargrove, prison spokesman.

None of the facility’s employees was hurt in the melee, which broke out at about 8:20 p.m. Saturday at the Reception Center West facility, Hargrove said. The situation was under control by 7 a.m. Sunday, he said.

The scene of the violence was the medium-security housing facility with seven units, each of which houses about 200 inmates, he said.

Some 80 officers responded to the riot, during which a housing unit was heavily damaged by fire, he said.

Guards used pepper spray, “less lethal force, and lethal force options” to regain control, Hargrove said in a written statement.

The institution was placed on lockdown pending an investigation of the cause of the fighting, and visiting privileges were suspended.

I have friends that are both prison guards and prisoners. So when I hear news like this I get very anxious. I want both the guards and the prisoners to be safe, and yet it always seems like it’s the prisoners that are subject to “lethal force options.”

I hope that all involved people, including the prisoners, are ok. That everybody survived with the least amount of trauma.

13-year-old wrongly convicted, imprisoned for 16 years

7 May 2009

VL has talked before about the injustices of prison in the U.S., including young teens being locked up for crimes for life with no chance of parole–a heinous and (in my opinion) illegal practice that should have died with Inquisition. Why, you ask? Take a look at the following video (here’s a printed version for those who don’t have video):

How much horrific could this man’s life possibly get? Imprisoned for 50 years at 13-years-old–except, wait a minute, you aren’t guilty?

What does a kid that is raised in a prison do once he’s released? When he’s been taught sexuality, relationships, reasoning skills, etc in a place that has been proven to encourage violence rather than end it?

Has he been raped in prison? Has he been beaten? Has he been taught that hitting women is a good way to prove he’s a man?

And outside of the supposition of violence, what does a person do when that person “graduated” from prison instead of high school? Or the university? What life will Thaddeus Jimenez be able to build for himself when sixteen years of his life has been stolen–because it seems so much easier to lock of up Latino kids and throw away the keys rather than find some alternative? Any alternative?

40% of all Federally Sentenced Offenders are Latinos

5:21 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Immigration| Justice| society · 1 Comment

25 Feb 2009

picture-6 Some rather disturbing data from the Pew Hispanic Research Center: 40% of sentenced offenders at the federal level were Latinos, a percentage which has almost doubled since 1991, when the rate was a “mere” 23%. Here’s the breakdown from Pew:

- Hispanics represented 40% of all sentenced federal offenders in 2007, the single largest racial and ethnic group among sentenced federal offenders. Whites constituted 27% of federal sentenced offenders and blacks 23%. The remainder (10%) are Asians, Native Americans and those whose race and ethnicity is indeterminate.

- More than seven-in-ten (72%) of Hispanics sentenced in federal courts in 2007 did not hold U.S. citizenship. They accounted for 29% of all federal offenders in 2007.

- Latino offenders who did not hold U.S. citizenship represented a greater share of all Latino offenders in 2007 than in 1991 — 72% versus 61%.

- Between 1991 and 2007, the number of Hispanics sentenced in federal courts nearly quadrupled (270%), rising faster than the number of offenders sentenced in federal courts over this period and accounting for 54% of the growth in the total number of offenders.

- In 2007, more than half (56%) of all Latino offenders were sentenced in just five of the nation’s 94 U.S. district courts. All five are located near the U.S.-Mexico border: the Southern (17%) and Western (15%) districts of Texas, the District of Arizona (11%), the Southern District of California (6%) and the District of New Mexico (6%).

One might wonder why the emphasis here in on federal offenders. That would be because the jarring statistics can also be attributed to federal “crimes” such as being undocumented.

Pew says the double whammy of increased immigration and increased enforcement of immigration laws is what is driving this upward trend in federal criminal sentences.

Via / Pew Hispanic Center

San Diego to Clean Out It’s Jails With Help of ICE

11:04 am By Maegan La Mala · Immigration| san diego · 1 Comment

20 Nov 2008

My mentor Richie Perez said once that people of color are the raw material/human fodder for the machine that is the prison industrial complex. And when that machine gets clogged what do you do? You take a page from San Diego County, California and clean up with the help not of Joe the Plumber, but ICE.

San Diego County recently announced that it would soon be partnering with ICE and dedicating its energy to identifying immigrants in jail for deportation. ICE unveiled its new program – The Secure Communities Program – in March 2008. It gives jails access to ICE and FBI databases so that they can identify inmates who lack legal status or have a criminal history and then turn them over to ICE for deportation. Through this new initiative, ICE plans to eventually have a presence in every one of the 3,100 local jails throughout the U.S.

Disturbing Statistic : San Francsico Has More Blacks in Jail than in the City

7:35 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Justice| San Francisco| race · Comments Off

9 May 2008

The prison industrial complex is alive and well in San Francisco and it’s using blacks as the raw material. In recent years the black population in the city of San Francisco has been decreasing, with one exception, prisons.

More than 60 percent of all prisoners are African American, according
to a survey of the city jail’s population. And of the 282 female
prisoners, 67 percent are black.
About 42 percent of the jail population is in custody for drug
offenses, the study found.
A similar study in 1996 found that half of the jail population was
African American. A 2005 study put the number at 53 percent.
In contrast, 6.7 percent of San Francisco residents are black- a number that has been in steady decline, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

What is the reason for this alarming stat? Racial profiling.

Lack of immigrants leads to modern-day slavery

6:12 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Colorado| Immigration| Labor · 8 Comments

7 Mar 2007

Who needs immigrants? Farms do, but that didn’t stop Colorado from imposing some of the strictest immigration laws on the book, and now that state is seeing the effects that has on its agriculture. There simply is no one to do the work, so now they’ve decided to resort to using prisoners in a dynamic that resembles slavery:

Ever since passing what its Legislature promoted as the nation’s toughest laws against illegal immigration last summer, Colorado has struggled with a labor shortage as migrants fled the state. This week, officials announced a novel solution: Use convicts as farmworkers.

The Department of Corrections hopes to launch a pilot program this month — thought to be the first of its kind — that would contract with more than a dozen farms to provide inmates who will pick melons, onions and peppers.

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