#us prison system

[the-manwich-horror]

Texas: Please don't execute James Broadnax for murders he didn't commit!

The state of Texas plans to execute James Broadnax on April 30, 2026 for a double murder that he did not commit. The actual shooter, James's

The state of Texas plans to execute James Broadnax on April 30, 2026 for a double murder that he did not commit. The actual shooter, James's cousin, Demarius Cummings, was sentenced to life without parole for his role in the crime. Demarius now admits that he is the one who killed Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler outside their music studio in Dallas in 2008, not James. His admission is corroborated by the presence of his DNA on the murder weapon and on one of the victims. This new evidence fundamentally undermines the State’s case for James’s murder conviction and death sentence. Neither James’s conviction for capital murder nor his death sentence would have occurred had the jury known that Demarius, not James, shot the two victims. James should not receive a more severe punishment than the person who actually committed the killings. Furthermore, James's trial was tainted by racial bias. Dallas County prosecutors deliberately and methodically removed all prospective Black jurors from the jury pool so that James, who is Black, was convicted by a nearly all-white jury. Outrageously, this has been a common practice in Dallas for decades. James was just 19 years old at the time of the crime and had no history of violence, but during the sentencing phase of the trial, prosecutors also introduced rap lyrics a teenaged James had written, describing them as "gangster rap" and claiming they were his "self-admission" of his criminal "mentality" in their effort to persuade jurors he would be a continuing threat to society. These arguments exploited racial stereotypes traditionally associated with rap lyrics and the Black community to transform James’s artistic expression into a death warrant.   Some of the biggest names in rap music have come together in support of James. In amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court, artists including Travis Scott and Killer Mike argue that rap lyrics are cultural and artistic expressions protected by the First Amendment and not indicators of desire or intent to do wrong. In an interview with the New York Times, Killer Mike, the performer and political activist, said that the jury had been encouraged by prosecutors to confuse creative expression with real life. “No matter how beautiful it sounds, or how horrific it may sound, it’s still just art,” he said of James’s lyrics. “It’s an interpretation of the human spirit. It is not an admission of guilt.” Other musical genres, he said, do not get the same treatment. Nobody believes that Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Or that Neil Young shot his baby down by the river — “dead, oh, shot her dead.” Or that Bob Marley shot the sheriff even as he spared the deputy. In addition to the courts, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Texas Governor Greg Abbott have the power to intervene in this case by granting a reprieve or commuting the death sentence. Please join us in urging these authorities to stop the execution of James Broadnax and commute his sentence in the interest of fairness and justice.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Join us for a conversation with Rev. Nora Jacob on a better way to dispense justice than to subject offenders to a strictly brutal prison experience. A way that, by recognizing that hurt people hurt people, aims to empower, not just victims, but also offenders, to heal. This isn’t just showing mercy to incarcerated people, it significantly lowers the chances that they’ll end up back in prison after their release. That's a win for us all.

Ariel's note: Ok, one of the AI-generated titles that YouTube suggested for this one was "What Your Pastor Isn't Telling You About Restorative Justice?" and I am roflcoptering into the sunset.

[tieflingkisser]

Forced Labor Continues in Colorado, Years After Vote to End Prison Slavery 

Coloradans voted in 2018 to amend their state constitution to ban forced labor in prison. Years later, incarcerated people are still being punished for refusing work assignments.

Forced Labor Continues in Colorado, Years After Vote to End Prison Slavery 

Coloradans voted in 2018 to amend their state constitution to ban forced labor in prison. Years later, incarcerated people are still being p

Throughout Abron Arrington’s decades-long incarceration in Colorado, he often found himself in solitary confinement—not because he was causing trouble, but simply because he refused to work. He didn’t see the point given he was paid 13 cents an hour and figured his time could be better spent learning physics. Before Arrington was incarcerated in 1989, he was studying to get his aircraft mechanic license. But within weeks of returning home from the U.S. Air Force, at 22 years old, he was arrested and ultimately sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. In 2019, he received clemency from Governor Jared Polis and was released after three decades behind bars. “I was actually 30 years a slave,” Arrington, who is Black, told a crowd of people gathered in one of Colorado’s oldest Black churches on Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. “So, this is deeply personal to me.”

[...]

In 2018, after years of community organizing, Colorado sparked a national movement when voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment A, a ballot measure that deleted half a sentence from the state constitution that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Colorado was the first state to do so since the signing of the 13th Amendment. Since Colorado removed its language, Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Oregon, Alabama, and Tennessee have followed suit with similar constitutional amendments. Organizers in around a dozen more states are now pushing to get similar ballot measures in front of voters during the 2024 elections. 

[...]

But in some ways, Colorado’s Amendment A only abolished prison slavery on paper. That’s because the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) has continued to punish those who refuse to work. Since 2018, there have been at least 727 documented instances where an incarcerated person was disciplined for failing to work, according to a 9News investigation this past summer, with punishment ranging from changes in housing to loss of privileges and delayed parole.

[...]

Today, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion each year in goods and commodities, and over $9 billion in services for the maintenance of the very prisons that confine them—all while being paid pennies an hour or nothing at all, according to research conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic. Their labor enables mass incarceration by offsetting the cost of the country’s ballooning prison system, which has grown by 500 percent over the last 50 years.

[...]

In addition to off-setting costs for federal, state and local governments, approximately 4,100 companies in the U.S. have directly profited off of prison labor, a number that is likely an undercount—including large companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks, IBM, Tyson Foods and Microsoft, according to a database created by the advocacy organization Worth Rises. “A lot of people are making a lot of money off the system,” said Arrington, who has worked for the reentry nonprofit, Second Chance Center, since his release. “It is no different than it was 200 years ago.” 

[callese]

[midnight-queery]

[video posted Aug 4, 2019]

And when you put all of this together you wind up with a scenario where you’re not just hurting the people who are incarcerated, you’re hurting everyone around them. One in three families of inmates reported going into debt to pay for phone calls or visitation, which is terrible, and that doesn’t really set up a prisoner for success once they are released. 

Look, the current system of low wages and high cost is clearly no good for anyone but for the companies who are somehow managing to massively profit from this.

And there are things that we can do here, small and large. New York City recently made phone calls from jails free, and Connecticut will consider similar legislation next year. 

And if we want to make bigger changes, like paying prisoners more, we could do that. Although, as I’ve said, it would undeniably be incredibly expensive and very unpopular. You saw people argue “crime doesn’t pay- that’s just common sense”.

But part of the way mass incarceration persists in this country is by keeping the true costs of it off the books. And we’re currently doing that through a combination of underpaid labor, from prisoners themselves, financially draining families who’ve done absolutely nothing wrong, and occasionally managing to monetize prisoners being launched into the fucking air with livestock. And at that point, I would argue, we’ve come a long, long way from common sense.

[magdolenelives]

(via)

[passiveagressiveprincessleia]

Something that I don't see anyone talking about that shocked me to my core to learn about US politics is this. Prisoners aren't allowed to vote, however, every prisoner body is counted as republican for the county they are in.

Now do you understand why the republicans always have such a lead?

[nopressurejohn]

Prison Tech

Add this to your cabin fever playlist: Mat from Techmoan tells us how the US penal system kept the audio cassette industry alive...and forced some design choices that certain retro tech retailers are dealing with today.