United States Prison Reform

[usprisonreform]

The process through which imprisonment developed into the primary mode of state-inflicted punishment was very much related to the rise of capitalism and to the appearance of a new set of ideological conditions.

Angela Y. Davis

[usprisonreform]

On April 10, 2006, 60 year old inmate Patrick Cavanaugh passed away due to complications from diabetes that resulted from medical maltreatment during his incarceration at Ely State Prison. In his report on the case, Dr. William Noel describes Cavanaugh’s death as “almost too horrible to believe.”

(Graphic details of medical neglect and death under the cut.)

Cavanaugh was regularly deprived of insulin over the course of three years, leading to him developing gangrene in multiple limbs. As stated by Dr. William Noel about the case, when left untreated, gangrene is almost definitely fatal. Despite this, Cavanaugh did not receive antibiotics, nor were there any attempts to amputate the affected limbs.

Dr. Noel states that Cavanaugh also displayed signs of dementia and paranoia during this time, which prison staff made no orders to treat.

In the last few days of Cavanaugh’s death, staff was ordered to give him morphine sulfate in order to ease the pain of the gangrene. There is no evidence that this was ever followed through with, indicating that Cavanaugh likely spent the last few days of his death in severe pain before literally rotting to death.

Cavanaugh’s cause of death was listed as cellulitis.

Dr. Noel reported that Ely State Prison consistently neglected the inmate’s medical care, and reported that the conditions at the prison were “the most shocking and callous disregard for human life and human suffering that I have ever encountered in the medical profession in my 35 years of practice.”

While Ely State Prison was exposed for this negligence, medical neglect is a significant problem across the prison industrial complex, with a large amount of mentally and physically ill patients reporting little to no medical care.

[usprisonreform]

The 6th Amendment

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.

When I was in elementary school and first learning about this amendment, I interpreted “speedy trial” as having a time limit. In other words, I assumed this amendment was put into place in order to prevent people who had not been convicted of a crime from being held in jail for long stretches of time. In theory, this is how the amendment is supposed to work. The 6th Amendment, in addition to acts such as the Speedy Trial Act, are meant to ensure that people are not held in jail while they are presumed to be innocent.

In practice, it doesn’t work this way.

There are a plethora of things that allow people to delay trials. While these policies (such as tolling, in which a defendant requests or agrees to a delay) generally require a defendant’s permission, the reality is that many of these cases simply get swept under the rug or stuck in the system, leading to people spending days, months, or even years in confinement without ever being convicted of a crime.

A well-known and particularly egregious example is that of Jerry Hartfield, a man who spent 35 years in jail awaiting trial. His case was mishandled by officials, which eventually led to him being released over three decades after his initial arrest.

Hartfield is not the only one who has been subjected to extreme amounts of time spent in jail. According to a CalMatters investigation, at least 1,300 people have spent over 3 years in California jails awaiting trial. 332 of these individuals have been waiting for over 5 years. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, about 445,000 non-convicted individuals are currently being held in local jails; about 80% of the local jail population.

While the United States does allow for credit for time served, people are not guaranteed this, meaning a person could in theory spend a significant amount of time in jail and still have to serve the entirety of their sentence. However, there is also the possibility of the person being found innocent after their trial, in which case credit for time served is useless.

In other words, under existing structures in the United States, people can (and do) spend years confined for crimes they have not been found guilty for.

[marnz]

Prisoners are Not for Sale: Incarcerated Workers Deserve Employee Status

Photo by Sara Simmons Photography Natalie Hurst, Associate Member, University of Cincinnati Law Review I. Introduction In 2020, U.S. incarcerated workers have been on the frontline battling the COV…

The 13th Amendment in conjunction with the lack of protection from the [Fair Labor Standards Act] continues to disenfranchise prisoners by not paying them fairly for their work or recognizing them as employees. However, there is no language in the FLSA that suggests that prisoners should not be considered employees and, thus, afforded employment protection, including minimum wage. […] Congress did pass judgment on who should and should not be considered employees under the FLSA by providing a list of exceptions in the statute. The FLSA, as written, suggests that Congress intended to include prisoners within its scope because Congress never added prisoners to the list of those considered exempt from employee status. Congress had the opportunity to exempt prisoners when drafting the statute, as it made exemptions for other actors, but Congress chose not to do this. Thus, the FLSA can be interpreted to extend protection to incarcerated workers meaning they should be perceived as employees and entitled to federal minimum wage. Some courts have adopted this reasoning, but it needs to be adopted uniformly throughout the country at the state and federal level.  

Though the FLSA can be interpreted as extending protection to prisoners, the 13th Amendment’s “slavery loophole” can always be used to justify low wages (and sometimes no wages) for prisoners. This provides a serious reason for amending the 13th Amendment to remove the loophole and ability to punish prisoners with “involuntary servitude.” Incarcerated workers will never receive just treatment if they can legally be treated as “involuntary servants” or if their labor can be taken advantage of for free. 

[…]

From a financial angle, the meager compensation that incarcerated workers receive harms their ability to adjust to society upon re-entry because they are often in crippling debt. Moreover, prisoners’ earnings are not enough to cover the court fees and fines, restitution, child support, and room and board expenses that most state departments of corrections deduct from prisoners’ earnings. Finally, it is demeaning to exert power over vulnerable human beings by making them work for little to no wages while arguing that it is for their benefit (e.g., arguing that paying prisoners little to no wages somehow helps them re-enter society). In reality, those who take advantage of cheap (or free) prison labor, such as states and federal governments and businesses, are the ones truly seeing any benefits.

It is immoral to utilize prison labor for valuable services while failing to fairly compensate those who provide the valuable service. For example, people tend to collectively disapprove of the use of “sweat shops,” which feature underpaid workers with limited employment protections, and this same view should be applied to the current prison labor industry. 

[brettdoesdiscourse]

Aside from the issue of enforcing death on people, everyone who supports the death penalty put a whole lot of faith in a system that has proven its incompetency and bigotry time and time again.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I just want people to really think about whether they're actually against prisons as a system of violent oppression and state violence or if they're against prisons because they see incarceration as violence that's not extreme enough.

Spoiler alert: a lot of people actually believe the latter because they're basing their beliefs and political stances on anger and revenge fantasies instead of a desire to improve their communities and protect others.

[usprisonreform]

The National Academy of Sciences estimates that at least 4.1% of defendants sentenced to death are innocent.

Source: https://innocenceproject.org/national-academy-of-sciences-reports-four-percent-of-death-row-inmates-are-innocent/#:~:text=News%2004.28.14-,National%20Academy%20of%20Sciences%20Reports%20Four%20Percent%20of%20Death%20Row,the%20United%20States%20are%20innocent.

[usprisonreform]

Prison is painful, and incarcerated persons often suffer long-term consequences from having been subjected to pain, deprivation, and extremely atypical patterns and norms of living and interacting with others.

Professor Craig Haney

[usprisonreform]

Someone in jail is over three times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. 

Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/06/23/jail_mortality/

[usprisonreform]

If you’re a TERF you’re not a prison abolitionist and you’re not a prison reformist, no matter how much you try to conceal your transphobia behind the guise of caring about female prisoners.

If you really care about people being victimized with the prison system, you’d care about the fact that according to one study, trans women housed in male-only facilities are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted in prison. You’d care that 1 in 6 trans people are incarcerated, and that 47% of black trans people are incarcerated. You’d care about the fact that a 2015 study found that 85% of LGBT+ inmates reported being held in solitary, and that trans people are disproportionately likely to be forced to spend time in solitary confinement.

If you really care about the people being the most affected by the prison system, it’s completely hypocritical and illogical not to care about trans prisoners.

(Sources under the cut.)

https://www.lambdalegal.org/know-your-rights/article/trans-incarcerated-people

https://solitarywatch.org/2019/07/22/transgender-women-of-color-face-crushing-rates-of-incarceration-solitary-confinement-and-abuse/

https://www.lambdalegal.org/sites/default/files/transgender_booklet_-_incarcerated.pdf

[whattheysaid]

Well, I think that you can say that all over the world now the institution of the prison serves as a place to warehouse people who represent major social problems… In many ways you can say that the prison serves as an institution that consolidates the state’s inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problems of this era.

Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle (via whattheysaid)

[usprisonreform]

Source: https://nicic.gov/projects/children-of-incarcerated-parents#:~:text=Parents%20in%20State%20Prisons&text=%E2%80%9CToday%2C%20the%20parents%20of%201,time%20for%20non%2Dviolent%20offenses.

[working-class-agenda12]

This is the sad reality that many people are forced to live with everyday in America, we as a nation must do better.

[politijohn]

[usprisonreform]

https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/83635/Profile%20of%20COVID%20deaths%20in%20custody.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y

Here is the report; the statistic is under “key datapoints” on page 6. Some other concerning statistics include the fact that 6% of inmates in one unit died from COVID19.

[liberalsarecool]

Abolish private prisons.

The fact that you can buy shares in private prisons on Wall St is absolutely disgusting. They are a plague on our society. They are incentivised to imprison people. They make more money by criminalizing the population.

[bill-gates-hate-blog]

hey, so if you’re curious about the horrors of prisons you should look at this reddit thread

never have i seen more reasons to re-evaluate the current state of justice as this

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Some people will genuinely be like "let's get rid of prisons and instead use mob violence built on self-righteous and thoughtless anger to brutally assault and murder perceived predators in our communities," like that's never gone wrong or been used as a weapon against marginalized people.

Some prison abolitionists online aren't actually prison abolitionists, they're traumatized people who want to take their anger out on whoever they want and see the prison complex as preventing them from doing that. Prison abolition and other serious activist movements are not here for you to live out your revenge fantasies or to create the goddamn purge with more progressive language.