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#Prisons
alwaysbewoke · 3 days
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politijohn · 4 months
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This should never have been a thing
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exigencelost · 1 year
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anyway not only did the “legalization” of cannabis in California fail to free Black and Brown people imprisoned for the sale and possession of cannabis, it also did not halt urine testing for cannabis as a means of re-incarcerating people on parole and probation, or change the fact that folks in California prisons who test positive for cannabis can lose visitation or be put in solitary confinement
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mapsontheweb · 1 year
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The minimum ages in which children in each country can be sent to prison
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dduane · 5 months
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Disturbing.
(See also:)
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One of America’s most corporate-crime-friendly bankruptcy judges forced to recuse himself
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Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.
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"I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one." The now-famous quip from Robert Reich cuts to the bone of corporate personhood. Corporations are people with speech rights. They are heat-shields that absorb liability on behalf of their owners and managers.
But the membrane separating corporations from people is selectively permeable. A corporation is separate from its owners, who are not liable for its deeds – but it can also be "closely held," and so inseparable from those owners that their religious beliefs can excuse their companies from obeying laws they don't like:
https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2014/10/13/hobby-lobby-and-closely-held-corporations/
Corporations – not their owners – are liable for their misdeeds (that's the "limited liability" in "limited liablity corporation"). But owners of a murderous company can hold their victims' families hostage and secure bankruptcies for their companies that wipe out their owners' culpability – without any requirement for the owners to surrender their billions to the people they killed and maimed:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed
Corporations are, in other words, a kind of Schroedinger's Cat for impunity: when it helps the ruling class, corporations are inseparable from their owners; when that would hinder the rich and powerful, corporations are wholly distinct entities. They exist in a state of convenient superposition that collapses only when a plutocrat opens the box and decides what is inside it. Heads they win, tails we lose.
Key to corporate impunity is the rigged bankruptcy system. "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," so every successful civilization has some system for discharging debt, or it risks collapse:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/
When you or I declare bankruptcy, we have to give up virtually everything and endure years (or a lifetime) of punitive retaliation based on our stained credit records, and even then, our student debts continue to haunt us, as do lawless scumbag debt-collectors:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act
When a giant corporation declares bankruptcy, by contrast, it emerges shorn of its union pension obligations and liabilities owed to workers and customers it abused or killed, and continues merrily on its way, re-offending at will. Big companies have mastered the Texas Two-Step, whereby a company creates a subsidiary that inherits all its liabilities, but not its assets. The liability-burdened company is declared bankrupt, and the company's sins are shriven at the bang of a judge's gavel:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit
Three US judges oversee the majority of large corporate bankruptcies, and they are so reliable in their deference to this scheme that an entire industry of high-priced lawyers exists solely to game the system to ensure that their clients end up before one of these judges. When the Sacklers were seeking to abscond with their billions in opioid blood-money and stiff their victims' families, they set their sights on Judge Robert Drain in the Southern District of New York:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers
To get in front of Drain, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, NY, then waited 192 days to file bankruptcy papers there (it takes six months to establish jurisdiction). Their papers including invisible metadata that identified the case as destined for Judge Drain's court, in a bid to trick the court's Case Management/Electronic Case Files system to assign the case to him.
The case was even pre-captioned "RDD" ("Robert D Drain"), to nudge clerks into getting their case into a friendly forum.
If the Sacklers hadn't opted for Judge Drain, they might have set their sights on the Houston courthouse presided over by Judge David Jones, the second of of the three most corporate-friendly large bankruptcy judges. Judge Jones is a Texas judge – as in "Texas Two-Step" – and he has a long history of allowing corporate murderers and thieves to escape with their fortunes intact and their victims penniless:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice
But David Jones's reign of error is now in limbo. It turns out that he was secretly romantically involved with Elizabeth Freeman, a leading Texas corporate bankruptcy lawyer who argues Texas Two-Step cases in front of her boyfriend, Judge David Jones.
Judge Jones doesn't deny that he and Freeman are romantically involved, but said that he didn't think this fact warranted disclosure – let alone recusal – because they aren't married and "he didn't benefit economically from her legal work." He said that he'd only have to disclose if the two owned communal property, but the deed for their house lists them as co-owners:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24032507-general-warranty-deed
(Jones claims they don't live together – rather, he owns the house and pays the utility bills but lets Freeman live there.)
Even if they didn't own communal property, judges should not hear cases where one of the parties is represented by their long term romantic partner. I mean, that is a weird sentence to have to type, but I stand by it.
The case that led to the revelation and Jones's stepping away from his cases while the Fifth Circuit investigates is a ghastly – but typical – corporate murder trial. Corizon is a prison healthcare provider that killed prisoners with neglect, in the most cruel and awful ways imaginable. Their families sued, so Corizon budded off two new companies: YesCare got all the contracts and other assets, while Tehum Care Services got all the liabilities:
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/prominent-bankruptcy-judge-david-jones-033801325.html
Then, Tehum paid Freeman to tell her boyfriend, Judge Jones, to let it declare bankruptcy, leaving $173m for YesCare and allocating $37m for the victims suing Tehum. Corizon owes more than $1.2b, "including tens of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices and hundreds of malpractice suits filed by prisoners and their families who have alleged negligent care":
https://www.kccllc.net/tehum/document/2390086230522000000000041
Under the deal, if Corizon murdered your family member, you would get $5,000 in compensation. Corizon gets to continue operating, using that $173m to prolong its yearslong murder spree.
The revelation that Jones and Freeman are lovers has derailed this deal. Jones is under investigation and has recused himself from his cases. The US Trustee – who represents creditors in bankruptcy cases – has intervened to block the deal, calling Tehum "a barren estate, one that was stripped of all of its valuable assets as a result of the combination and divisional mergers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy filing."
This is the third high-profile sleazy corporate bankruptcy that had victory snatched from the jaws of defeat this year: there was Johnson and Johnson's attempt to escape from liability from tricking women into powder their vulvas with asbestos (no, really), the Sacklers' attempt to abscond with billions after kicking off the opioid epidemic that's killed 800,000+ Americans and counting, and now this one.
This one might be the most consequential, though – it has the potential to eliminate one third of the major crime-enabling bankruptcy judges serving today.
One down.
Two to go.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones
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My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!
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gwydionmisha · 7 months
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A group of professors and former students at a Nova Scotia university are working together to deliver post-secondary education to imprisoned individuals throughout the province. The “prison access to education” program, spearheaded by assistant professor El Jones, at Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) is one of a kind — as it makes the Halifax institution the only degree-granting university for incarcerated people in Canada. Jones, who’s also known for her activism and spoken-word poetry, said the program, which started in 2018, connects inmates to professors and covers everything required to attend university, such as program costs associated with fees and textbooks. “We believe that access to education is a right and is so incredibly important in people’s reintegration in their time in prison,” she said during an interview in her MSVU office on Thursday.
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Tagging @politicsofcanada
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chawsl · 3 months
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cuties-in-codices · 4 months
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illustrations for the fable "dimna's trial"
in a german translation of "kalīla wa dimna" (the arabic version of the "panchatantra", an ancient indian collection of animal fables), swabia, c. 1480
source: Chantilly, Musée Condé, Ms. 680 (olim 1389), fol. 121v, 124v, and 126v
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politijohn · 3 months
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Reminder that 53% of Alabama’s prison population is black people who are incarcerated at 3x the rate as white people (source).
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mapsontheweb · 3 months
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Incarceration rates by country; per 100.000 people (top 10 countries).
Highest: 🇺🇸 USA - 629
by Maps_interlude
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nando161mando · 2 months
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philosophybits · 4 months
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Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, willless, ship-wrecked crew of humanity, with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence. It is not at all an unusual thing to find men and women who have spent half their lives — nay, almost their entire existence — in prison.
Emma Goldman, "Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure", Anarchism and Other Essays
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daisy-mooon · 4 months
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The most telling thing about Zionists is about how they will excuse the conditions that Palestinian prisoners are subjected to because they are allegedly "terrorists."
Because even if they were terrorists, that is not how prisons should work??? All humans deserve a fair trial, yes, even if they were supposedly a terrorist. All humans deserve a good diet, yes, even if they were supposedly a terrorist. All humans deserve a prison free from torture, yes, even if they were supposedly a terrorist. All humans deserve to be treated like a human, yes, even if they were supposedly a terrorist.
I like in the UK. If someone is sent to prison for murder, they would be allowed a fair trial, an appropriate diet, a stay completely free from torture, and are always allowed to retain their human rights. Do these things always happen? No, and the prisons are supposed to be investigated and punished when they don't. Do you know why? Because criminals, and yes, terrorists, are human beings, and human beings have human rights.
I can not fucking emphasise how much EVERYONE, and I mean EVERYONE, even the most despicable and vile people on the planet, should be allowed a fair trial. But that's not what happens to Palestinian prisoners whether they are a regular criminal, a "terrorist" or a civilian yanked off the street by the IDF.
They are systematically tried in a military court with a 90-99% conviction rate. Trials are held in Hebrew, which most Palestinians are not fluent in. Palestinians are allowed to be imprisoned for up to 6 months without trial. Compare that to the UK's 14 days. And those imprisonments can be extended every 6 months for another 6 months, leaving many Palestinians imprisoned indefinitely. Their charges are hidden to both them and their lawyers, leaving them struggling to understand how to appeal to the courts. This happens to teenagers. This happens to children.
"The teenagers that are arrested are being trained to be terrorists!" Then the teenagers should be sent to a juvenile prison, receive a support and safety network, rehabilitation, protection and a way to escape whoever is allegedly training them to be a terrorist. But that's not what happens. Racism, abuse and torture is what happens.
"But the people arrested are terrorists!" Surprisingly controversial take but no I do not think that a terrorist deserves to be held indefinitely without a trial or charge and be given a biased and unfair trial, if one even happens. And let's be honest with ourselves, shall we? Judging from the ridiculously biased trials, most of the "terrorists" in Israel's prisons for Palestinians are probably not terrorists.
TLDR: No I don't think that even someone that is actually a terrorist would deserve the treatment and conditions that Palestinians get in Israeli prisons and law systems. Yes I think that even an actual terrorist deserves a fair trial. What the fuck is wrong with you guys actually.
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