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| Stuff About Prison; abzug [May 1, 2006] | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 7 2006, 10:16 PM (7,407 Views) | |
| abzug | Nov 1 2006, 05:59 PM Post #16 |
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In love with a prisoner
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I found this article very heartening. Of all the work that inmates do in prison, this seems to be the most rewarding, emotionally etc. From the NY Times.... October 31, 2006 Trained by Inmates, New Best Friends for Disabled Veterans By STEPHANIE STROM CONCORD, Mass., Oct. 27 — Rainbow looks like any other Labrador retriever, but she is not a pet. Trained by a prison inmate, her mission is to help Roland Paquette, an injured veteran of the conflict in Afghanistan, stay on his new feet, the ones he got after an explosion destroyed his legs. While veterans who lose their sight or hearing or must use a wheelchair have long had “service” dogs as companions, Rainbow is one of the first dogs in the country trained to work with someone who uses both a wheelchair and prosthetics to get around. Mr. Paquette’s hope is that eventually Rainbow will allow him to abandon his canes altogether and rely only on the metal handle attached to the harness she wears around her torso. “I’d much rather be able to walk with her at my side than with the canes,” said Mr. Paquette, who is 28. “It makes me less obvious.” Rainbow is the first graduate of a new program, Canines for Combat Veterans, at a tiny nonprofit group here called Neads, or New England Assistance Dog Services. The organization has been training service dogs for the disabled since 1976. “I think we’re going to have to double the number of dogs we train to meet the need,” said Sheila O’Brien, Neads’s executive director. “Because of advances in medicine, a lot more veterans are surviving their injuries than ever before, and we want to be able to help as many of them as we can.” In late 2001, President Bush signed a law authorizing the Veterans Administration to underwrite programs like Canines for Combat Veterans. But the Veterans Administration is still studying the matter, so Neads must raise all the money for its program from private sources. It sells naming rights for its dogs — Rainbow got her name after a group of Rainbow Girls from Rhode Island, an organization affiliated with the Masons, held pancake breakfasts and other events to raise $500 for the right. That fund-raising has proved so successful that Ms. O’Brien has doubled the price to name a dog, but she said it cost up to $17,000 to buy and train a dog. Recipients of dogs are expected to raise about $9,500 for their animal with the help of the organization. Ms. O’Brien also hopes to double the size of a program in which service dogs are trained by prison inmates. Puppies begin their training in the Neads “nursery,” where they are housebroken and introduced to basic skills. Then about 80 percent of the dogs go to live in a prison cell with an inmate who completes their training. It takes about half the time to train dogs in prison as it does in foster homes, Ms. O’Brien said, because of the more intensive training they get from inmates. Inmates are enthusiastic about the program. “It’s great to do something that really helps someone else, especially a guy like him,” said Thomas Davison, who trained Rainbow at the Northeast Correctional Center here. “I’ve never had a chance to do that, and I wasn’t sure I could handle the responsibility.” Kathleen M. Dennehy, the state correction commissioner, said the program had profound effects on the culture of a prison. “Officers stop by to pat the dogs, they smile, maybe they strike up a conversation with the inmate training the dog,” Ms. Dennehy said. “It establishes a basic human connection.” James J. Saba, superintendent at Northeast, is unsure, however, whether the program, already in six prisons in Massachusetts, can be expanded. “We have 268 inmates in this prison alone, which is already too many,” Mr. Saba said. “And for every puppy, we lose a bed because the dogs take the place of an inmate in the cell.” Mr. Paquette and Rainbow visited Mr. Davison and the four other inmate trainers at the prison on Thursday. Mr. Davison gave him a few pointers and handed over the toys he had bought the dog with the $28 a week he received for training her. “She was ready to do this at 9 months,” Mr. Davison said proudly. “She’s a good dog.” Mr. Paquette promised, “I’ll take good care of her.” Mr. Paquette joined the military several months after the Sept. 11 attacks, leaving a job he had recently taken. “I felt like a hypocrite sitting around on the couch in front of the TV and saying, ‘Go do it,’ when I wasn’t,” he explained. He became a medical sergeant on a Special Forces team and headed for Afghanistan in the spring of 2004. He said he treated hundreds of soldiers and thousands of local residents for “everything from the common cold to gunshot wounds.” On Dec. 28, 2004, an explosion went off under the vehicle in which he was riding, severely injuring his legs. Yet he considers himself lucky that the impact was muted by the engine block, that an orthopedic surgeon happened to be on hand to perform the initial amputation and that new medical techniques have calmed the irritated nerves in his legs that threatened to keep him from walking. “At least I’m here, and I’ve got Rainey,” he said, using his nickname for Rainbow. He said that he had been nervous about meeting her — “sometimes chemistry just doesn’t work” — and that the first day of their partnership had been difficult. He had expected to get a bigger dog, who could support his weight, and Rainbow accidentally pulled him over when he was walking with her. The next day, however, Rainbow and Mr. Paquette clicked, taking turns outdoors using just a cane and her harness. The dog appeared to respond well to Mr. Paquette’s commands and looked to him more and more for direction. He stayed in his wheelchair during his visit to Mr. Davison the next day because the Neads trainers were worried that Rainbow would pull him down again in her excitement to see her prison trainer. She was indeed happy to see him but largely remained at Mr. Paquette’s side. The next challenge will be introducing her to Mr. Big, the German shepherd-Great Dane mix that is the Paquettes’ pet. He has been sent to obedience school in preparation for her arrival. In about 10 days, Mr. Paquette and Rainbow will take off for their new life together, first in Albuquerque and then in San Antonio, where Mr. Paquette and his wife, Jennifer, and their daughter, Kristen, 17, and son, T. J., 11, are moving for his new job with an intelligence and security firm. The Army has recently completed a new center in San Antonio specializing in amputation, the Intrepid Center, and Mr. Paquette expects to be an advertisement for service dogs. “I’ve got a feeling that lots of guys who see me with Rainbow are going to want a dog,” he said. |
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| abzug | Nov 12 2006, 11:22 PM Post #17 |
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In love with a prisoner
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This whole initiative is incredibly cool, I think. Bringing the arts into prison in a very meaningful way. And there's a very Sylvia-like character towards the end. You'll know who I mean when you get there. From the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/arts/music/12whit.html November 12, 2006 Music 25 to Life, With Time Off for Puccini By MICHAEL WHITE DUBLIN EVEN in sunshine the approach to Mountjoy Prison is a bleak experience. Under clouds and rain the place chills the heart. And as I rang the doorbell (a surreal touch, but how else do you get into prison as a free man?) on a sodden Irish morning, it felt like that standard horror-movie scene where the innocent tries the knocker at a gothic mansion. Not that Mountjoy is exactly gothic, but its 19th-century granite grimness serves as well. As it was meant to. Mountjoy — known here as “the Joy” — is a relic of British rule. It was built in 1850 to strike fear into the hearts of a turbulent people and was kept busy in the early 1920s executing the most turbulent among them. What is called the hang-house still stands, “complete with everything except the rope,” as I was told by the cheerful guard who showed it to me and who demonstrated the mechanism with a certain pride. And so do the 1850s cells, radiating out from a central hub where the “auld triangle,” immortalized in verse by Brendan Behan, hangs on the wall. Everything at Mountjoy feels so museumlike it’s hard to believe that it still functions. But it does: the largest, roughest, toughest prison in the Irish system. Life is better these days for the female inmates, who occupy a recently built annex. But for the 450 men, things are much as they were a century ago, with one notable exception. A century ago they would have spent their days picking oakum. Now the inmates of the Joy are making opera. Specifically they are making the set and costumes for “La Bohème,” which opens next Saturday at the Gaiety Theater here. Opera in the prisons of the British Isles is not entirely new: several small-scale touring companies have built reputations and secured government financing by taking professional singers behind bars to work on modest productions with prisoners. But the Mountjoy project is of a different order, initiated by Opera Ireland, which is the nearest Ireland gets to a national company, and involving a second prison in faraway Perugia, Italy. It started in 2004, when the Italian film director Porzia Addabbo became interested in a project at the maximum-security jail in Perugia, Maiano. “I had a friend teaching art to the inmates,” Ms. Addabbo explained, “and he had them design an imaginary production of ‘La Bohème.’ I filmed the project. RAI” — the Italian television company — “took the film, and it was shown at the Milan Future Festival in November 2004. All very good. But I wanted to take it further, to see if these people could design something that would actually work onstage. How to make it happen? I didn’t know.” But Ms. Addabbo did know an Irish theater producer, Joe Mitchell, who offered to knock on doors in Ireland. “I ended up sitting with Google looking for politicians with an interest in prison issues,” Mr. Mitchell said “and I found a senator, Mary Henry, who had previously been president of the Penal Reform Trust and even spoke Italian. So I thought, this was meant to be. She set up a meeting with the governor of Mountjoy. Opera Ireland came on board, as did the province of Perugia. And we had ourselves an international project.” The deal was for Maiano prisoners to design costumes and sets for a new “Bohème,” for Mountjoy prisoners to turn the designs into reality and for Opera Ireland to put the whole thing onstage as part of its season at the Gaiety Theater. “It’s national stereotyping really, getting the Italians to design and the Irish to construct,” Mr. Mitchell said, “but that’s how it worked, in prison as in life.” It took a year to put it all together. “It hasn’t been the easiest project I’ve ever done,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I’d never been inside a prison before, and it was daunting. These places aren’t designed to make you feel comfortable. But it’s been a profound experience, and I know that when the curtain goes up on Nov. 18th it will have been worth it.” David Collopy, the chief executive officer of Opera Ireland, agreed, though handing his sets and costumes over to inexperienced amateurs carried a significant risk. Opera Ireland is, for all its status, a small company serving a small public, with only four full-scale productions a year. “Which makes this ‘Bohème’ 25 percent of our annual output,” Mr. Collopy said. “So yes, you might think we were mad. And prison reform is not part of our remit. But when we were approached to do this, I couldn’t help remembering the moment in that film ‘Shawshank Redemption’ where the guy plays Mozart over the prison speaker system, and everything comes to a blissful halt.” Mr. Collopy knows how sentimental that sounds, but his experience bore it out. The prisoners he worked with took a strong interest in the production, and not just because, as a prisoner named Mark advised me, the key to prison life is “finding how to stop the boredom.” (My access to the prisoners was granted only on the condition that they not be asked their full names, what crimes they had committed or how long their sentences were.) Standing in the prison workshop, surrounded by Parisian garret window frames intended for Acts I and IV of “Bohème” and the commercial garden ornaments it usually turns out, Mark said he was skeptical at first. “I expected opera to be boring,” he explained. “I’d change the TV channel if it was on. But I’d really like to see one now because I think I’d understand it. The feelings, the passion: I think I get it now.” Over in the women’s workshop, where every inch of space is filled with hanging racks of 1970s student fashion, band uniforms and gendarmes’ caps (slightly misshapen and not quite what the Royal Opera at Covent Garden would expect, but no doubt perfectly fine in sympathetic lighting from a distance), a prisoner, Jackie, said she would like to see an opera too. “I always had a healthy curiosity about it, and now I’ve started asking questions, it’s turned unhealthy,” she said. “I can’t get enough. It’ll be dreadful when it’s over, because we’ll all feel empty, back on the scrap heap again. Working on the opera, people have taken us for who we are, not what we’ve done. And that’s been great.” Their response has convinced Mr. Collopy that he made the right decision. “We’ve had people working on these sets and costumes who can barely read and write,” he said, “who sign their names with a cross and who thought they had no skills. Now they’ve discovered they can do things they’d never imagined. There’s a lot of wasted talent in prison. So we’re making use of it.” The “making use” is slightly sensitive, as Opera Ireland’s response to questions on the subject indicates. “We’re not in this for publicity or cheap labor,” Dieter Kaegi, the company’s artistic director, took pains to say. “We’ve had some money from the Department of Justice, but it only amounts to a few thousand euros. Most of the money we’ve provided ourselves, together with a lot of effort. We’ve done it because we believe in it.” And perhaps no one believes in it more than Ms. Addabbo, who is the overall stage director for the production. She refuses to refer to her collaborative team as prisoners. They are crew. And they are good. “There’s a carpenter in Mountjoy,” she said, “who I’d work with in any professional context. And in Maiano there are two men who had no contact with theater at all but have great instinct for what the audience must see, how to close the set and achieve focus. And they’ve worked with real heart.” It wasn’t just backstage tech work either. “We’ve argued about the characters,” Ms. Addabbo said, “about the rights and wrongs of what Rodolfo does in leaving Mimi. Most people took the practical view that he should work to support her. Some wanted to change the end so Mimi shouldn’t die. Everyone was in love with Musetta, probably because she’s strong and gets her way. And one thing that affected me deeply was the way the older crew, some of them in prison since they were very young, identified with young love and the energy of youth. “In the end it was decided to set the production very specifically in 1977, because that was when one of the men in Maiano graduated from university and, he argued, it was a year of freedom, of hope, of taking to the streets with what you believed.” The only problems she encountered, she said, were logistical. Supply shipments had to be thoroughly searched by guards, and space was at a premium. “Prisons don’t have 12-meter rooms for scenery painting,” she explained. “We had to take over the gym for things like that. Then we had to cut the sets into small sections to get them through the prison doorways.” But these problems offered an unexpected benefit, she added. “In Mountjoy you’d have officers and inmates scratching their heads together over some technical difficulty, and this creates a neutral zone for both sides. It defuses the tension between jailor and jailed. Time and again I saw this and was impressed.” Getting the officers on board is the critical task in any prison project. You can expect a certain liberality of temperament from the governors, but the guards are likely to dismiss arts initiatives as nothing but extra work, imposed on them by naïvely well-intentioned people who forget why prisoners are behind bars. “In fact my first response was ‘No, it’s too much to take on,’ ” said Richard Keane, the affably avuncular Mountjoy officer who gave me my tour of the hanging house and who, for the last 22 years, has been in charge of the prison workshop. “To make three transportable stage sets for the Gaiety, which is the largest theater in Ireland, as well as 80 or more costumes — I said we can’t do it. Then didn’t they just talk me round? “I’ve never been to an opera in my life, but they brought us DVDs of two different stagings to get the point of the characters, and we all got hooked — not least because there’s all sorts in that story, as there are in here. From philosophers to seamstresses, you find every kind of person in a prison. So for the past year ‘La Bohème’ has been our life. Ask any of them here.” Unfortunately for Mark and Jackie they won’t make it to the Gaiety Theater to see the curtain rise on their work. Mountjoy isn’t in the habit of letting its prisoners out for the night. But there may be other opportunities for them to develop their newfound interest. “This has been a good collaboration,” said Mr. Collopy, the opera executive, “and I don’t think we can let it end here. I’m not saying we’ve turned everyone at Mountjoy and Maiano into opera buffs or that discovering Bohème makes everything right with the world, but it’s certainly opened up something for the people we’ve worked with. It’s had impact. So we have to look at possibilities.” As one obvious possibility Opera Ireland’s 2007-8 season includes Jake Heggie’s prison-based piece, “Dead Man Walking,” in a production whose details haven’t yet been fixed. Mountjoy could help with that in one way or another. Meanwhile Jackie in the women’s workshop has a more pressing argument for Opera Ireland to come back. “They promised me a reward for all these costumes,” she said, “a cream slice. And I haven’t had it yet.” |
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| abzug | Nov 13 2006, 03:16 PM Post #18 |
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In love with a prisoner
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Inmates set for 'cold turkey' money The Press Association Monday November 13, 01:34 AM Prisoners are poised to win undisclosed pay-outs after suing the Home Office because they were forced to stop taking drugs in jail, it was revealed. Drugs charity DrugScope said the group of six inmates and former inmates who used heroin and other opiates were on the verge of settling out of court with the Prison Service. The case - alleging the "cold turkey" withdrawal treatment they were forced to undergo amounted to assault - was scheduled to start at the High Court. The size of the payouts under discussion has not been revealed. But the compensation levels are due to be finalised on Tuesday or Wednesday, legal sources said. High Court judge Mr Justice Langstaff gave the go-ahead in May for a full hearing of the case. It focused on six test cases chosen from a total pool of 198 claimants. When finally resolved this week, all 198 may be handed compensation by the Prison Service - with sums potentially running into tens of thousands of pounds. Mr Justice Langstaff said in May: "All claim that their treatment was handled inappropriately and so they suffered injuries and had difficulties with their withdrawal." Barrister for the claimants Richard Hermer told the court at the time: "Many of the prisoners were receiving methadone treatment before they entered prison and were upset at the short period of treatment using opiates they encountered in jail. Imposing the short, sharp detoxification is the issue." The prisoners were bringing the action based on trespass, because they say they did not consent to the treatment, and for alleged clinical negligence. They also claimed human rights breaches under Articles 3 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which ban discrimination, torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and Article 8, which enshrines the right to respect for private life. A Home Office spokeswoman said: "It would be inappropriate to comment because the litigation is still ongoing." |
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| abzug | Nov 18 2006, 04:12 AM Post #19 |
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In love with a prisoner
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I can't decide if I think this is a good thing or a bad thing. It's not like they have a separate wing for black prisoners, right? Gay and Transgender prison to close The unit, was opened in the 1970s in reply to complaints of abusive treatment of gays in the prison system 30-Dec-2005 Ross von Metzke, Chief Correspondent One of the America's few jail facilities specifically for gay or transgender prisoners is closing on Rikers Island, prompting complaints from gay rights activists who say it is still a much-needed safe haven. The unit, which opened on the city's island prison complex in the late 1970s in reply to complaints of abusive treatment of homosexuals in the prison system, stopped accepting new inmates last month at the direction of Department of Correction Commissioner Martin Horn. The facility could be shut entirely within the next few weeks. The prison has accommodation for up to 146 prisoners, but was holding 126 when it began emptying on November 28th of this year. As of Thursday, 56 prisoners remained. Plans call for the specialized unit to be replaced with a new protective custody system that would be available to prisoners who feel threatened, regardless of their sexual orientation. The change has alarmed members of some civil liberties and gay rights groups, who note that the new protective housing would likely be more restrictive than the old unit. Prisoners whose safety was at risk would be locked in their cells for 23 hours a day, rather than be allowed to mingle with other inmates. Prisoners could avoid the extra restrictions by staying in the jail's general population, but there, they might be subject to harassment or worse, activists said. "We're not talking about people calling you names," said D. Horowitz, a legal fellow at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. "People should not be punished for wanting to be safe." Eighteen groups sent a letter to Horn on Thursday asking him to reconsider, including the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Legal Aid Society, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Correction Department spokesman Tom Antenen said the unit, which held only a fraction of the gay inmates at Rikers, was being done away with as part of a broader restructuring of the jail's prisoner classification system. "Jail administrators have no intention of ignoring Rikers inmates who say they feel threatened because of their sexuality," Mr Antenen said. "If that is the case, and they need to be protected from the general population, then we will endeavour to provide the best possible security," he said. That could include a "23-hour lockdown," or it might entail moving them to a different city facility. Specialized housing units for gay prisoners are rare in the U.S., although jails in a few other places do have them. The Federal Bureau of Prisons does not maintain such units anywhere in the country, nor do state prisons in New York. |
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| richard | Nov 30 2006, 08:40 PM Post #20 |
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Enhanced
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I thought this chunk from the Independent needed to be posted. Bear in mind that it is likely that this guy is likely to have spent a lifetime in a culture not given to overstatement and he uses very strong language. The picture he paints is very striking and all the more believable to me as I do a comparatively lowly job for the government. It paints a scathing picture of a government agenda driven by right wing tabloids and a privatising agenda. This ought to be cross referenced to a top army general being equally scathing about government policy towards Iraq. ..................................................................................................................... Lord Ramsbotham exclusive: Justice system is absurd. Broken. Chaotic Published: 30 November 2006 Independent. The former prison chief lambasts a justice system in meltdown after Tony Blair's decade of failure on crime and punishment Yesterday's announcement that the prison population now exceeds 80,000 is the latest low point in what one can only describe as the Government's headlong and self-induced race to absurdity as far as the conduct of imprisonment is concerned. The reasons for this dreadful figure are not hard to find. If you produce legislation that results in longer prison sentences, more people will be in prison. If you do not resource prisons, to enable them to conduct work, education and training, prisoners are more likely to reoffend, as proved by the fact that the reoffending rate among adult males has gone up from 55 per cent to 67 per cent in the past five years. If you continue to have a dysfunctionally organised prison service, you will continue to have dysfunctional organisation of an overstretched system. And so on. Many people have been warning the Government about this for years but, instead of listening to those with practical experience, it has preferred to take advice from people who know nothing about running large organisations, let alone an operational service. When, as now, the whole is run by a home secretary who, within weeks of taking office, publicly described the Home Office and the overburdened immigration service as not being fit for purpose, and recently disparaged the probation service to prisoners in Wormwood Scrubs, you do not exactly have a recipe for getting out of what is an increasingly dire situation. Leaders undermine the morale of their own troops at their peril. If, at the same time, you continue to bombard them with a continuous torrent of flawed legislation, much of which replaces previous legislation before the ink on it is dry, you create a mess that can only be cleared up by long-term planning, based on discussion with those who understand not only what needs to be done but how it might be done. That requires ditching current plans that are marching the whole system into even greater chaos. The result of all the upheaval in the Home Office over the past decade is we have a prison service left in a state of shambles. Every time a governor changes in a prison, then the regime in that prison changes, and all the good work that is under way is in danger of being ditched - it's a ridiculous way of trying to introduce systems that are meant to prevent reoffending. The probation services are overstretched - there are 300 fewer officers and 1,500 more bureaucrats than five years ago. Now they face a new period of uncertainty as the Government threatens to hand some of their services to the private and voluntary sectors. In addition, they are being asked to focus on the most serious "heavy" offenders, because of pressure from the press, rather than the repeat offenders who cause real concern to the public." |
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| ekny | Nov 30 2006, 10:07 PM Post #21 |
In love with a prisoner
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Too bad. You'd think they were eager to repeat our mistakes. |
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| richard | Dec 2 2006, 03:04 PM Post #22 |
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Hi Ekny. Your post is very likely to be right. The hallmark of the Blair government is that if a reorganisation is shown to fail spectacularly, it has to be repeated to fail a second and third time. For this reason, I wouldn't care to think what goes through what passes through the minds of the so called leaders. Take a look at this which I took this off the website of the union I belong to. There are distinct resonances of BG Series 4 and 5 though reality actually exceeds fiction. If Shed had written this into BG, reviewers would criticise it for being over the top and sensationalising things. The last paragraph but one is definitely written into the script for Karen's verbal protests. 1 Dec 2006 The public are to be offered the chance to buy shares in new prisons under a "buy to let" scheme being considered by the Home Office, it emerged yesterday. The idea has been suggested in an attempt to overcome the refusal of the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to find extra money for the Prison Service, specifically for 8,000 new prison places at a time when the service is at breaking point. The plan envisages that the public can be tempted to invest in a new-style property company that would build jails and then rent them out to private prison operators. Supposedly, this would then provide investors with a guaranteed dividend from the "rental income". Clearly the destruction at Harmondsworth immigration detention centre earlier this week – would not feature in any future prospectus! A PCS Prison Service Group spokesperson said “With a total of 10 private prisons, Britain already has the most privatised prison system in Europe. Rather than invest in measures which we know will tackle re-offending and the record high prison population crisis, this harebrained scheme will now be another opportunity for the government to deliver more prison work to the privateers. In the Prison Service we are told that there has to be cost savings in order to compete with the private sector – which in practice means our pay, staffing numbers and our conditions. If staff ever needed evidence of the ‘madness of privatisation’, the threat to jobs & conditions and the need to support the national PCS campaign – this is it! |
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| abzug | Dec 2 2006, 05:21 PM Post #23 |
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In love with a prisoner
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Wow, that is about the sickest idea I ever heard. It's going to create a perverse situation where all the "investors" are economically motivated to have MORE people in prison!!!! Blech. Prisons are not something which should be profit centers. The market can not solve every problem, as some conservatives seem to think. |
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| richard | Dec 2 2006, 10:27 PM Post #24 |
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Enhanced
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Couldn't agree with you more,especially your last comment, abzug. There's the lyrc of a song that comes to me from time to time,"the lunatics have taken over the asylum.' |
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| abzug | Dec 28 2006, 01:24 PM Post #25 |
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In love with a prisoner
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So Helen wasn't SO crazy to put Rachel back on the wing, rather than in solitary. Inmate suicides linked to solitary Posted 12/27/2006 10:59 PM ET By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY The number of suicides in the nation's two largest state prison systems is ticking upward, and authorities in California and Texas are linking the increase to the rising number of inmates kept in solitary confinement. In California, which has the largest state prison system with about 170,000 inmates, there have been 41 suicides this year, the most in at least six years and a 17% increase from 2005. Although an estimated 5% of California's inmates are housed in solitary confinement — also known as "administrative segregation" — 69% of last year's suicides occurred in units where inmates are isolated for 23 hours a day, according to state Department of Corrections records. About half the suicides this year were in such units. In Texas' prison system, which has 169,000 inmates, there have been 24 suicides this year, up from 22 in 2005. Most of the inmates who killed themselves were in some form of solitary confinement, says John Moriarty, inspector general for the prison system. Texas prisons also are reporting a 17% increase in attempted suicides: 652 so far this year, compared with 559 in 2005. The number of attempted suicides this year is the most in nearly a decade, according to state prison records. Statistics on attempted suicides in California prisons were not immediately available. The figures from California and Texas are fueling a debate over whether solitary confinement is the best way to control or punish violent or dangerous inmates, particularly those who are mentally ill. More than 70,000 of the 1.5 million inmates in state and federal prisons are kept in isolation, a reflection of get-tough policies designed to separate rival gang members and those who have gotten into fights while behind bars. Isolated inmates typically have significant restrictions on visitors and get little help in dealing with the psychological problems that can be caused by isolation. They usually are allowed out of their cells for no more than an hour a day to exercise alone; their exposure to TV and reading material also is limited. "Are we housing the mentally ill in prison facilities?" Moriarty asks. "I think the answer is yes. But I don't know if that's the best place for them to be." Moriarty, whose office investigates every inmate death in Texas, says stress from isolation and increasing numbers of inmates with long sentences have contributed to the rise in suicides. "Length of sentence is a big factor. There is despair about not getting out." The increase in inmate suicides in California has triggered recent changes in segregation units. In October, guards began checking inmates housed in solitary confinement every 30 minutes, rather than every hour, says Shama Chaiken, the state prison system's chief psychologist for mental health policy. Some segregation cells also will be modified to remove shelving, vent openings and other features that offenders could use in hangings, the most common form of suicide in California prisons, Chaiken says. This month, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a $1 billion plan that includes 10,000 new beds in prison medical and mental health units. A few jurisdictions have credited expanded mental health programs with reducing prisoner suicides. After Kentucky set up a mental health program for those in the state's 83 county jails in 2004, suicides in the jails fell 47%, according to The (Louisville) Courier-Journal. There have been 13 suicides this year in the 188,000-inmate federal prison system, the same total as in 2005. Florida, the third-largest state system with 90,000 inmates, has had nine prison suicides this year; it had eight last year. |
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| ekny | Dec 28 2006, 04:57 PM Post #26 |
In love with a prisoner
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Totally stands to reason, don't you think? Why they need deaths upon deaths & a bunch of studies to 'prove' something as evident as the nose on your face is beyond me. Lock someone up for weeks on end with absolutely no respite, and what exactly do they think is going to happen? Score one for our practical Scot. |
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| ekny | Dec 29 2006, 08:59 PM Post #27 |
In love with a prisoner
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Ok, people into this thread will want to take a look... http://www.theprisonfilmproject.com/index.html This is a very clearly-written, well laid-out set of pages. Following are the references to BG I could find, though it's definitely worth checking out anyway. They also have a current (!) and nice set of links to other prison-related websites & projects. --e ------------- From the page on the Women in Prison Film: http://www.theprisonfilmproject.com/prison...nprisonfilm.htm "[...] Overall, the nature of the depiction of women in prison has changed over the years, from the more serious dramas during the early decades, for this subgenre from the 1930s to the 1950s, to some less noteworthy films in the 1970s and 1980s. Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, as America continues its race towards mass incarceration, women continue to be caught up in the ever expanding prison-industrial complex. How this will be reflected in film is less clear. Can the women's prison film raise serious issues about criminal incarceration? Or is this sub-genre now hopeless trapped in the category of exploitation cinema? In recent years Britain has seen few if any film treatments of women's experience of prison. However, women's prison drama continues to have a strong showing on television, most recently with the popular and now long running series Bad Girls. What influence these dramatic representations of prison have on popular perceptions of the role and value of prison within the criminal justice system is surely an issue worthy of serious consideration." ----------- http://www.theprisonfilmproject.com/prison...rtsandminds.htm On another page, author David Wilson, co-editor of Images of Incarceration, a book we've previously cited (in one of those threads I can't remember & can't search for!) for its article 'In Praise of Bad Girls', makes passing reference to the show in his website article 'Hearts and Minds: Restorative Justice in Film'. Though the article's downloadable, that version does not include the reference to BG. In the article he discussed the idea of restorative justice vs punitive justice. I found the BG reference a bit oblique, since his use of the word 'conference' wasn't defined in context (or is too British for me), but basically think he was saying: the whole text of the show Bad Girls raises the issue of restorative justice, as it shows that punishment--prisons as they current exist--simply doesn't work. "You need really to have seen He Got Game to appreciate why it is a Restorative Justice movie. The questions for discussion posed by the film include: Did Jake deserve to go to prison for the crime he committed?’; ‘Does Jake deserve early release, and if so, why?’; and ‘What does He Got Game say about why we punish and what punishment is intended to achieve?’ True He Got Game doesn’t show a restorative conference (although that has been done by the ITV prison drama Bad Girls). But the film does raise some relevant questions for debate and it would be a shame if its debating points were to be overlooked through a failure to recognise that they are there in the film." -------- There's another paper on this page http://www.theprisonfilmproject.com/resour...ssayspapers.htm which contains several even more passing references to BG, simply as part of larger lists. ('Prison Film: Reconnecting Image with Reality', The Prison Film Project 2002) |
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| ekny | Dec 31 2006, 05:46 AM Post #28 |
In love with a prisoner
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The Guardian ran a brief article on prison reform last February I just stumbled across. It contains a short reference to the show: http://society.guardian.co.uk/crimeandpuni...1709611,00.html from 'Locked in the Past', David Wilson, 15/2/6 "The chances of making much of an inroad into the debate about prisons and prisoners look bleak, but this does not mean that those of us who favour prison contraction and eventual abolition should simply give up. Rather, it means trying to engage with the public in ever more creative ways - including, for example, using the public's fascination with prime-time TV series, such as Bad Girls, to create space in which the case for prison reform can be outlined and explained." |
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| abzug | Jan 4 2007, 04:10 AM Post #29 |
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In love with a prisoner
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Scarily, the neighborhood I live in is one of the ones identified as "neon-orange" in this article from The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/arti..._talk_macintyre CRIMINAL JUSTICE DEPT. RAP MAP Issue of 2007-01-08 Posted 2007-01-01 From water pipes to porn shops, cartographers have charted almost every aspect of local urban life, giving rise to a sort of cottage industry: the New York City specialty map. The latest—and one you are not likely to see unless you run in criminal-justice circles—is a rendering of the city that breaks down, block by block, the home addresses of all New Yorkers incarcerated in a given year. This map won’t get you from Century 21 to the Met. But it does reveal that more prison-bound Bronx residents lived in walkups than in any other type of building, that Staten Island is the most law-abiding borough, and that Brooklyn—nicknamed “the borough of churches”—ran up the state’s highest bill in prison costs. Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, co-founders of the Brooklyn-based Justice Mapping Center, collaborated on the project with an architect named Laura Kurgan, at Columbia’s Spatial Information Design Lab. “What started out as a scholarly inquiry has turned into a national initiative,” said Cadora, whose team has mapped twelve cities so far. Their New York is a digital crazy quilt of “bright-against-black”: the areas least touched by incarceration in 2003, the year they chose to study (Riverdale, Bay Ridge, the West Village), appear black and gray; those more so (Coney Island, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Hell’s Kitchen) neon orange. Recently, the mapmakers gathered at Columbia, and Cadora, a substantially built man with a fondness for Camel Lights, turned the face of his laptop to reveal the map. “Zero-value areas”—places where no one went to prison—were shaded black. “You see them crop up all across the city, but they never make up an entire neighborhood,” he said, invoking what might otherwise be a bragging point among New Yorkers: “There is always something going on somewhere.” The exceptions? “What I jokingly call ‘the Mafia neighborhoods’ of South Brooklyn,” he said, “where you’ve got one or two guys going away from an entire neighborhood. Also, this.” He pointed to a dark strip of the Upper East Side—the blocks in the Seventies and Eighties that border Central Park. Just above was Harlem, the area with the highest rate of incarceration in the city: forty-four people from a single block along East 120th Street headed upstate. Such high-density spots are known as million-dollar blocks, because it takes upward of that in state expenditures to pay for their residents’ lockups. They are, unfailingly, in the city’s poorest neighborhoods—Brownsville, the South Bronx, and South Jamaica among them—great splashes of orange, by the map’s gauge. Cadora and his team calculated every block’s prison costs by multiplying the minimum sentence of each incarcerated person by his estimated annual prison fees ($32,400), then adding these numbers together. By this logic, a serial killer on Fifth Avenue who gets a life sentence could make up his own million-dollar block. The borough with the most million-dollar blocks is Manhattan (“mainly because the blocks are so small”); the city’s most expensive block in 2003, a housing project along Harlem River Drive, not far from Yankee Stadium, cost the state $6.2 million and had forty-nine of its six hundred and eighty-nine male residents put behind bars. The map’s data are largely gleaned from prison entry forms. Early in the study, Cadora noticed that an inordinate amount of people gave the same home address, in Queens. Curious, he looked up the address and found not a residential building but an institution: Rikers Island. Why so many New Yorkers would call a jail known as the House of Pain home is “a whole ’nother story,” Cadora said. “A lot are probably homeless, and one of the hugest problems for anyone coming out of prison is finding a place to live.” Cadora and his team believe that their map depicts a system spending millions to imprison people but little on the communities to which they return. Cadora clicked on a map of New York State that charted the migration patterns of Brooklyn criminals: thousands of lines sprang from Kings County to prisons all over—Attica, Watertown, Great Meadow. The image was striking, like a bird’s spread wing. (“We’ve had art galleries ask to exhibit the maps,” Kurgan said.) Cadora has been pleased by the reaction of legislators. “It’s no longer just about getting tough or being soft on crime,” he said. “It’s ‘What are we going to do about Bed-Stuy?’ ” |
Visit the Bad Girls Annex!
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| badgirlnuts | Jan 8 2007, 10:51 PM Post #30 |
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G2 landing
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Who'd be a Prison governor? Although the job has an image problem, high-flying graduates are now running our jails, says Ian Wylie Ian Wylie Saturday April 8, 2006 Guardian There are moments in our working lives when the power to lock someone up and throw away the key seems an appealing perk. But on some days even the chippiest of prison governors must feel they're the ones serving the sentence. New Prison Reform Trust figures show a system creaking under huge pressure and warn of an overcrowding crisis this summer. More than half of prisons are classed as overcrowded. A governor's primary mission is to rehabilitate serious and violent offenders. Instead, "rapidly rising numbers have reduced many prisons to locked warehouses," says the Trust, condemning governors and their staff to "processing people in transit from overcrowded jail to overcrowded jail". Then there's the usual in-tray stuff: assaults, suicides, jail breaks and the occasional riot or hunger strike. How governors must long for more innocent times when prisons were home to "lovable rogues" like Norman Fletcher whose biggest wheeze was to nick the prison governor's soft toilet paper and replace it with the hard stuff reserved for the cons. And when you're not battling with inmates, you're dodging flak from tabloids who howl with rage each time a governor dares to install TVs in cells or create bistro-style dining rooms. It's just like a hotel, they scream. Little wonder then that the average tenure for governors is just one year and four months. It's reckoned that a third of prisons have had three or more bosses in the past five years, even though the Prison Governors' Association recommends that its members stay at one jail for between three and five years. "It's a highly stressful job," admits John Podmore, governor at Brixton for the past three years. "And it never leaves you." Yet, according to Podmore, the ability to "make a difference" is luring a new breed of governor. Tony Hassall was a hypermarket manager for Sainsbury's and is now governor of Holloway. At Belmarsh, the new governor is Claudia Sturt, an Oxford modern history graduate described by the Sunday Times as "tall, blonde, glamorous and aged only 38". In fact, she is one of 31 women governors out of 138 in the service. The service has launched an "intensive development scheme" for graduates and on Monday evening Radio 4 begins a three-part documentary on The Young Governors. "This is a people business," says Podmore, "and when I meet a former prisoner who is now running a volunteer project or working for a drugs charity, I know I've achieved something." Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006 |
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