Prison Abolitionist

ALEC watch: protests continue in New Mexico.

2012-01-27T14:01:00.001-07:00

---------------------

Protesters Scuffle With Lobbyists

Albuquerque Journal

Fri, Jan 27, 2012

SANTA FE – A fracas that started after protesters affiliated with the occupy movement disrupted a legislative lobbying dinner at a downtown hotel left two people injured, lawmakers steamed and police investigating.

The incident marks the second time in two weeks protesters apparently affiliated with anti-corporation occupy groups disrupted state legislative functions. In the earlier incident, protesters were removed from Gov. Susana Martinez’s State of the State address after screams related to corporate taxes.

“We all believe in free speech,” said Rep. Dennis Kintigh, R-Roswell, a retired FBI agent who recently served as Roswell’s interim police chief. “But there’s also freedom of assembly, and I believe that was infringed upon,” he said Thursday, referring to the latest incident.

Santa Fe police said the handful of unidentified protesters took their demonstration into a banquet hall Wednesday at the Eldorado Hotel where the pro-business American Legislative Exchange Council – or ALEC – was hosting a dinner for New Mexico lawmakers. Protesters threw envelopes at dinner guests and sparked a confrontation with lobbyists there before leaving the hotel, said police Capt. Aric Wheeler. No arrests were made.

Lawmakers said Thursday that a guest of Rep. William “Bill” Rehm, R-Albuquerque, was struck in the eye by a protester’s leaflet and suffered minor injuries. A second woman injured her hand as protesters and lobbyists pushed and shoved over a camera, the Santa Fe police captain said.

Rehm declined to comment on the situation Thursday, speaking through the House Republican caucus. A party spokeswoman said the eye injury was improving.

In remarks made on the Senate floor Thursday, GOP Whip William Payne of Albuquerque decried the incident as a “very ugly, ugly scene.”

“I think there needs to be arrests made, and there needs to be prosecutions of some of these people,” Payne said.

Police said they’re still trying to identify those involved. They arrived after the protesters had left.

Republican House Whip Donald Bratton, of Hobbs, without naming names, warned fellow lawmakers against stoking the fires of political protest amid a tense political environment by encouraging the protesters.

“I would caution all members of the House to be careful with regard to the role they play (to) elevate debate and evoke emotion, because when emotion comes into play … then reason tends to go out the window, and anarchy comes into play. We have a responsibility to be civil,” Bratton said on the House floor Thursday, responding to the protest.

Rep. Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, who has met with Occupy Santa Fe activists and been sympathetic to some of their views, called the actions of protesters at the Eldorado on Wednesday night “terrible.”

Egolf said his interactions with Occupy Santa Fe and his recent comments criticizing ALEC’s corporate influence on politics had no influence on the behavior of a grass-roots group with which he has no affiliation.

“They (Republicans) were trying to say I was involved in that, and that was just … not at all,” Egolf said.

Protesters on “Occupy New Mexico” online blogs Thursday said they filed police reports against some of the individuals who they say were pushing and shoving protesters the group described as “peaceful.” An online video they filmed doesn’t conclusively show who initiated the physical contact.

In the days leading up to Wednesday’s dinner, Occupy Santa Fe organized a protest, describing ALEC in fliers as a powerful institution in which “greedy corporations and corrupt legislators collude behind closed doors.”

They also accused ALEC of promoting laws that are anti-environment, anti-immigrant and anti-union.

The occupy movement mushroomed in 2011, as those affiliated with the movement expressed a growing disillusionment with social and economic conditions, particularly corporate influence.

New Yorker: Gopnick and the Caging of America

2012-01-27T14:00:00.000-07:00

Excellent piece on the problems of mass incarceration in our country. Thank you, New Yorker.

--------------

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

by Adam Gopnik

The New Yorker

January 30, 2012

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)

Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.

In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.

For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.

So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.

All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now.

Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. ♦

Beau Hodai: ALEC's persona non grata

2012-01-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

The Indigenous call-out in Arizona to resist ALEC

(November 2011)

Inside ALEC: Naked Contempt for the Press and Public in Scottsdale

TRUTHOUT.org

Wednesday 11 January 2012

by: Beau Hodai, PRWatch | Report

"Mr. Hodai had a history at the conference--not a very pleasant history. He was considered to be a persona non grata..."

-- Westin Kierland General Manager Bruce Lange to Olivia Ward of the Toronto Star.

Evicting the Press, Part 1: Meet Mr. Black

Scottsdale, Arizona--A suburb awash in money and golf courses, set against the backdrop of the jagged mountains surrounding Phoenix.

I was sitting in a sports bar of the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa, swapping journalism stories with Olivia Ward of the Toronto Star on one of the bar's overstuffed leather couches. Over the course of an hour, the bar filled with conventioneers from the American Legislative Exchange Council's 2011 States and Nation Policy Summit (SNPS). (A new story on Westin's connections to other ALEC corporations is available here.)

My assignment was to cover the 2011 SNPS, taking place at the resort from November 29 through December 2. ALEC had refused to grant me media credentials. Nevertheless, I was a paid guest at the resort.

Most of the ALEC members trickling into the bar were fresh from the ALEC "Holiday Gala." As drinks were consumed and new rounds were ordered by guys with ALEC badges, the place began to take on a distinct "Animal House" vibe.

Ward and I were just about to head to our rooms for the night when I saw Phil Black, director of Kierland's security team, approach two uniformed police officers just outside the entrance to the bar. The cops had arrived an hour earlier, glanced at Ward and me, then stationed themselves by the door.

Black entered the bar and headed straight towards me. "Would you mind coming with me, sir?"

Once outside the bar, we were joined by the cops and I was shuffled up the stairs.

"What's this all about?" I asked with Black facing me; a cop to either side, just behind me.

"We understand that you've attempted to enter ALEC events and been asked to leave numerous times," said Black.

This was not true. I had been on my best behavior. And, I had known, since my first meeting with Black the night before, that I was being watched.

Police with a Photo Array of Personas Non Grata

The previous night, I had passed by some cops. When I glanced back I caught one of the cops staring, a look of intense and painful concentration on his face, at a sheet of paper. The paper displayed an array of photos. As was later explained to me by a cop working the resort, it was a photo array of personas non grata provided to the cops via ALEC.

Moments later, after passing the cluster of cops, I was flagged down by a man who asked me who I was, why I was in Scottsdale, where I was from, what line of business I was in.

I gave vague answers and asked who he was.

"Oh, I'm with the hotel," said Black. "Have a nice stay."

Uniformed Police as Bouncers

The next night, I had wandered back into the ballroom where a swirling galaxy of well-dressed lawmakers and lobbyists were hobnobbing, some with neat single malts in hand. There was no indication posted anywhere that this party was limited to ALEC members. Nevertheless, I had been tailed through the ballroom by a cop. As I stepped outside for a smoke, I heard a voice behind me.

"Sir, are you part of the delegation?" It was a uniformed police officer later identified as Phoenix Police Department (PPD) Sergeant Lowe. I explained that I was not a member of ALEC, but that I was a guest at the resort. Lowe explained that the party was private and asked me to return to resort common areas.

Making my way to the door, Lowe in tow, I was approached by two women with resort security.

"Hi ... you're the one on the motorcycle, right? You're with ALEC? You're a guest at the resort? Just so you know, this is a private function, so we just ask that all our regular guests stay in the main area... Okay?"

No problem. I left.

"The ALEC People Don't Want You Here ..."

So, when Black accosted me at the bar the following night and claimed I had been asked to leave numerous ALEC events at the hotel, I explained that this was the extent of my one and only 'incident' and nodded to Sgt. Lowe over my left shoulder. "Ask him," I said.

"Nevertheless," said Black. "The ALEC people don't want you here ... and we understand that your reservations were made under false pretenses."

I asked Black why--given the fact that I had not been accused of any crime--I was surrounded by armed, uniformed cops. Were Phoenix police usually engaged in evicting hotel guests who were suspected of having made hotel reservations under supposedly "false pretenses?" Must be a slow night....

And, how could a person even make a hotel reservation under false pretenses, I asked. I had given the front desk my valid photo driver's license and my credit card for incidental expenses. I was planning to stay in the resort for two days and those two days had been paid for by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).... "False pretenses?"

Black would not elaborate further, limiting his conversation only to statements emphasizing the resort's urgent need for me to vacate the premises immediately.

Black said that he would--with the help of these nice police officers--escort me up to my room and help me pack.

I was, as Sgt. Lowe explained, being "trespassed"--which meant that I was being formally advised that I was not welcome on Kierland property. If I returned, or refused to leave following this advisory, I would be arrested and charged with criminal trespassing.

ALEC's Corporate Connections

ALEC bills itself as being the nation's largest bipartisan legislative membership organization, dedicated to the advancement of "federalism" and "Jeffersonian ideals."

The simple reality of ALEC is that the organization serves as an intermediary, a conduit through which roughly 2,000 state legislators (the vast majority of which are Republicans) are connected with legions of lobbyists representing more than 300 global and national corporations.

Corporations pony up enough cash to help pay the travel, room, and dining expenses of hundreds of state lawmakers at luxury resorts through "scholarships" facilitated by ALEC. After closed-door meetings between lobbyists and politicians voting as equals on "model legislation," politicians often return to their home state to introduce those bills covering almost every area of law.

For ALEC’s winter meeting in sunny Arizona, corporate sponsors included dozens of global corporations, such as AT&T, Time Warner Cable, State Farm Insurance, Johnson and Johnson, the American Bail Coalition, Diageo, UPS, Exxon Mobil, American Petroleum Institute, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. and AstraZeneca-- to name a few. ALEC’s operations are also underwritten by billionaires Charles and David Koch (who control Koch Industries, including "Koch Companies Public Sector").

ALEC has come under increased scrutiny in recent years in the media due to its tremendous influence over dramatic changes to the law being pushed in states across the country. Public awareness of ALEC jumped dramatically this past summer after the In These Times investigation of ALEC’s "Publicopoly" and the Center for Media and Democracy's detailed exposé of ALEC model bills, legislators, and lobbyists through ALECexposed.org, after a whistleblower came forward.

And, as a result of growing public malcontent with lawmaker malleability in the face of corporate greed, lawmakers attending ALEC events have been met ever more frequently by members of the public voicing their displeasure with the organization’s role in facilitating the cozy relationship between politicians and corporations.

The 2011 States and Nation Policy Summit was no exception to this trend.

Outside: Public Dissent Met with Pepper Spray

On November 30, the first full-fledged day of the conference, rows of police in full riot gear stood along along Kierland's eastern gate, providing a living buffer between the public and the guests at the posh hotel. Helicopters swarmed above the resort. Flanking both entrances were assembled a couple hundred protesters decrying undue corporate influence over elected lawmakers. These protesters were from several activist groups loosely united under the banner of "Occupy ALEC"--in most part an offshoot of "Occupy Phoenix" and a group known as "AZ-Resist."

Inside the resort ALEC conventioneers gathered for lunch and a speech by ALEC alum and Arizona Governor, Jan Brewer.

Brewer welcomed the conventioneers to Arizona, “the state too strong for any union sponsored boycotts to bring down! And their presence is so eloquently so in demonstrating.

They're out there ... they're out there," said Brewer scornfully. "Anyway, thank you all for coming today. And thank you to all you from the business community, I certainly thank you for your private sector sponsorship."

Recently retired Louisiana State Representative and outgoing ALEC national chairman, Noble Ellington, claimed the protests showed ALEC was doing something right:

"It is just so exiting and I hope you feel the same way that ALEC is on the move," drawled Ellington. "We've got things goin' our way and we're bound to be doing something right, or we wouldn't have the helicopters flying around and the demonstrators..."

Uproarious applause.

"Would you join with me in thanking Novartis for this luncheon today? They have been some really good friends to ALEC and we thank them so much..." said Ellington.

ALEC Director of Communications Kaitlyn Buss then sang the national anthem.

By the time Buss hit her high note, "For the land of the Freeeeeeeeee...," Phoenix police officers were treating protesters outside to the second round of pepper spray of the day.

Betsy Schuler, a former school teacher, was pepper sprayed as officers were moving barricades into the crowd. Schuler said an officer reached over the barricade and started pepper spraying the non-violent protesters. Schuler got a face full of the stuff. The officer, recalled Schuler, stood behind police barricades, smiling smugly.

Schuler was a part of a delegation of Unitarian Universalists who had joined the protests as peacekeepers.

According to Phoenix Police Department spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump, the first of a series of confrontations between the police and the protesters had occurred a few hours earlier that morning.

According to Bret "Buddha" Cary, a small business owner and an organizer with Occupy Phoenix, a group of anarchists had brought a large black canvas banner ("Shut Down ALEC") supported by a framework.

The anarchist moved toward the front of the protests and put the banner between the police and the protesters.

At first, police tried to push the banner back with their own barricade. Eventually, an officer reached over the police barricade and grabbed hold of the banner, tearing it apart. The cop then began throwing pieces of the banner back at the protesters.

A protester screamed, "No! No! No!" as pepper spray was sent out in bright orange streams to the crowd.

Cary and others tried to obtain the name of the officer who had reached over the barricade and grabbed the banner but the officer would not divulge his name and retreated to Westin grounds, smiling smugly at the protesters from a distance. Following the incident, Cary filed a complaint with PPD internal affairs. He has received no response to his complaint.

Inside: Public Dissent Met with Laughter

By the time Arizona House Majority Whip and ALEC Public Sector Chair, Rep. Debbie Lesko, kicked off her remarks on the Novartis stage, several protesters had been placed under arrest and loaded into paddy wagons.

"We have some critics--we saw a few of them outside--because a group recently wrote a large report criticizing ALEC," said Lesko ("ALEC in Arizona: The Voice of Corporate Special Interests in the Halls of Arizona’s Legislature," by Common Cause and People for the American Way). "And so, what better way is there to explain Arizona's involvement in ALEC by reading right from that very report?! So, here we go..."

"'Arizona has one of the highest concentrations of ALEC legislators of any state in the United States.'"

Uproarious applause.

"'At least 50 of the 90 legislators now serving in the legislature are ALEC members....'"

More uproarious applause.

"Yay Arizona," said Lesko. "Two-thirds of the Republican leadership in the Arizona House and Senate are ALEC members and the last three Arizona Senate presidents--including the current one--all served in ALEC roles."

Lesko did not mention that Senate President Russell Pearce had just been thrown out of office in a special recall election. Pearce had been criticized for pushing through the controversial SB 1070 immigration bill, for sitting on the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force alongside Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's foremost operator of private immigrant detention and prison facilities, the scandal surrounding the Fiesta Bowl and his ties to special interest lobbyists, among other things.

"Way to go Arizona!" shouted Lesko.

Uproarious applause.

Earlier that morning, Ezra Kaplan, a college student and Arizona resident, was one of those arrested and charged with criminal trespass.

Kaplan was working as part of the media chain for the Occupy ALEC protest.

Arrested while Trying to Film, Taunted by Infiltrator

“There were several gentlemen sitting on the ground, kind of locking arms in peaceful protest. At one point, two officers decided to pick up a metal barricade and slant it down on top of [the seated protesters], pushing them to the ground, trying to get them to move," said Kaplan.

Kaplan entered the area between the banner and the police line and to capture this brutality on film.

Kaplan was taking pictures as police suddenly moved their barrier toward protester banners. Kaplan was caught between the two lines.

"I was basically standing there, with my hands above my head, peacefully and calmly talking to the officers, telling them 'I'm trying to get out,'" said Kaplan.

Kaplan says he was pushed to the ground by police "with a knee on my head and a knee on my neck," and cuffed by no less than three officers. As he was laying on the ground with officers on his back nonsensically shouting, "Stop resisting!" he looked up and saw a man in plain clothes. "Yeah, stop resisting, Ezra," the man taunted.

Kaplan was at a loss as to how this man knew his name. His name had not yet been taken by police, and he had not yet been booked for any alleged crime. (According to Kaplan, the police took his camera and continue to hold his camera as "evidence.")

Police spokesman Crump later said police action had been directly informed by real-time intelligence obtained from plainclothes PPD personnel interspersed through the crowd.

Crump claims these plainclothes officers reported that protesters were engaging in “illegal activity” behind the banner:

"They were doing things like shaking paint cans, and they were using poles to stick them under the pedestrian walkway gate that we put up. And they were trying to do that hiding behind those banners. And so those banners were pulled down when they tried to [push police barriers]. And that is when pepper spray was deployed at those who were the ones engaging in aggressive behavior."

Protesters have uniformly stated that the crowd had no poles or sticks until after police reduced their banners to a mass of rubble (consisting mainly of poles and sticks).

According to Crump, the Phoenix Police Department has made over 100 arrests and expended nearly $250,000 in overtime pay to officers since the outset of Occupy Phoenix and related protests in mid October.

Native Americans and Others Protest ALEC State Co-Chair Salt River Project

photo credit: Censored News

On December 2, an additional 12 protesters were arrested by Tempe police on trespassing charges during a related protest at Salt River Project (SRP) offices in Tempe, Arizona.

SRP Manager of State Government Relations Russell Smoldon serves on ALEC’s corporate board and is the ALEC Arizona private sector chair, tasked with extracting donations from lobbyists and their clients to pay for “scholarships” for ALEC legislators.

From the Novartis stage at the ALEC luncheon, Smoldon lobbied his fellow lobbyists:

"[Gov. Brewer is] the author of a new book. And every time I speak, I am required to put in this plug," said Smoldon. "Her new book is entitled, 'Scorpions for Breakfast.' If you go to JanPAC.com--J-A-N-P-A-C-dot-com--you can contribute to the governor's PAC, which will do great things for America. And, for a $100 contribution, you will get an autographed copy of the book from the governor."

Evicting the Press, Part 2: Rejoining Mr. Black's Inquisition

Hodai: "Surely you can see this is an odd time to be kicking someone out..."

Black: "That's one person's opinion. This is a 24-hour business."

Hodai: "That's a hell of a statement."

I was, by no means, the only reporter in attendance at the ALEC conference to face near arrest or harassment by police.

Almost Arresting a Reporter After He Interviewed Protesters?

Bob Ortega, of the Arizona Republic, stepped outside the Westin's eastern gate on the morning of November 30 to scope out the ALEC occupation. Ortega was one of the few reporters to be credentialed by ALEC for coverage of the conference.

Following the incident where the police tore down the protesters’ banner, Ortega attempted to return to the conference. He was stopped by police in riot gear, pepper spray in hand, at the Westin gate.

The cops told Ortega that he could not enter the grounds. Ortega showed them his ALEC-issued press credentials, identified himself and identified the paper he represented.

"I don't care who you are, turn around and leave or you're going to be arrested," retorted one of the officers.

Ortega persisted in arguing his point, explaining that he had permission from both ALEC and Kierland security to attend the conference-- at which point a cop grabbed him by the arm from behind.

"Okay, you've been warned," said the cop, who commenced to march Ortega off to a waiting paddy wagon.

Ortega narrowly escaped arrest by convincing one of the cops to check with hotel security before sending him off to Maricopa County Jail.

Renting a Real Cop?

This brings us to the interesting arrangement between PPD, Kierland and ALEC.

A few days before the conference, ALEC Senior Director of Membership and Meetings Chas Cirame sent out an advisory to conference attendees stating that, due to planned protests at the event, ALEC would be hiring additional security personnel to protect conference attendees. Cirame advised attendees to wear their ALEC identification badges at all times at the resort.

I had been on the lookout for additional security to see what firm of private spooks ALEC would employ. I had no idea ALEC had actually rented themselves real cops.

As was explained by Black during my eviction: all of these PPD officers on the Westin’s grounds--uniformed and armed--were actually off-duty and being paid, as one cop put it, "really well," to help ALEC and Westin keep undesirables out of the hair of conference attendees.

These were true 'rent-a-cops'-- the best money could buy.

Badgering a Reporter about a Talk over Drinks?

While Sgt. Lowe, another cop and Black supervised me packing in my room, two other officers harangued Ward outside the bar, wearing PPD uniforms but not disclosing that their services were rented for the night.

"Do you know this man? Do you know this man," a rented cop demanded of Ward, referring to me.

"Do you know this man? Do you know this man???" he continued.

Channeling the persona of her British mother, Ward let loose a fusillade of indignation:

"What do you mean? How dare you ask me such a question?! Are you putting me up on some sort of morality charge?! I am a Canadian citizen. Are you telling me that in the Westin hotel, I am not allowed to sit with a man to whom I am not married?!? I have continually attended meetings [at the conference] where I have been told that this is the land of the free and that Arizona is one of the free-est states in the union. So, what is going on here? Why are you asking me these questions?!"

"So, you know this man?" said the cop.

The officers eventually abandoned this cutting-edge line of interrogation and told Ward was told she was "free to go."

Claiming a Reporter "Presented a Threat?"

Ward later received somewhat more cogent answers to her questions from the resort’s General Manager Bruce Lange:

"Mr. Hodai was considered to be a persona non grata from the conference," Lange told Ward ("America's Secret Political Power," Toronto Star, December 17, 2011). "Not by the hotel, not by the police. ... He clearly presented a threat to the conference, based on his history."

Lange did not elaborate as to what "history" he was referring to.

Lange could not be reached for comment.

When asked why Ward had been interrogated by police under contract with the Westin during my eviction, Kierland Director of Communications Stephanie Dowling parried with this spin:

"Our main objective, our goal with anything--and we certainly understand everyone's concerns in this situation--is to protect our property and our guests, regardless of what organization they represent. That includes our friends from the media and everyone else. The safety and security of our guests is our number one priority--so, if there was any reason, or any situation that might have affected that--that would drive [hotel security's] reasoning behind asking someone to leave."

When asked what threat to the "safety and security" of conference attendees a reporter like me posed, Dowling declined to discuss the matter further, stating that the hotel would never compromise the privacy of a guest by discussing that guest's eviction with the press.

Hodai: "Well, I tell you what: I am that guest and I give you permission to speak to me, as a member of the press, about what happened."

Dowling: "Well, I do really appreciate you calling..."

It should be noted that Black later flatly denied he had ever said ALEC did not want me on the premises.

Evicting a Paying Hotel Guest Whom ALEC Did Not Want Nearby

According to Dowling, the argument that my reservation had been made under "false pretenses" stemmed from the fact that my reservation had initially been made under a different name. The Center for Media and Democracy had openly reserved a room at the Westin for its Executive Director, Lisa Graves, reserved with a CMD credit card. This reservation was later openly changed (by Westin personnel, at the request of CMD) to my name and pre-paid by CMD. There was nothing false or misleading about this process.

According to Dowling, the reservation was also problematic because it had been made as part of the "ALEC block."

CMD had clicked through to the hotel through an open reservation portal from the ALEC website. The portal did not require ALEC membership or ALEC approval and was open to anyone.

According to Dowling, during the conference ALEC personnel reviewed the hotel reservation roster and identified me as being "not part of the conference.” Dowling asserted that according to ALEC, CMD had falsely claimed to be a member of ALEC at the time the reservation made. CMD unequivocally denies this assertion and notes that it made no such statements to any Westin personnel.

A Mere "Miscommunication?"

"I don't know where the miscommunication came from. I do know that that was the information that we were given by ALEC," said Dowling.

When asked if it is standard Westin practice to throw paid guests out on the street in the middle of the night due to "miscommunications," Dowling asserted that Westin would never do such a thing without good cause and without alternative accommodations offered.

No such accommodations were offered in my case--unless those other accommodations were at the Maricopa County Jail.

And, just as the Westin has been unable to elaborate on what "safety" threat I posed to the ALEC conference, at least some of the cops involved in the eviction seemed to know that the situation was absurd. They knew I had committed no crime. These were just guys working on their off time, looking to take home a little more pay.

This was not true of Sgt. Lowe. He was committed to the notion I posed an imminent threat to the safety of the conference, not that I was being booted and threatened with arrest because I was a journalist who had caused some discomfort to the powers of the hour due to my past reporting on ALEC.

You've Been "Trespassed"

As I was being escorted from my room to the curb, Lowe asked for my ID--purportedly to file a report detailing how I had been "trespassed."

(Lowe never filed any such report with PPD. The only report detailing the activities of off-duty law enforcement in relation to this incident are maintained by Westin. Westin declined to disclose any portion of these reports.)

Lowe said it struck him as odd that I would carry an audio recorder. He said individuals in law enforcement carried recorders, "such as I am recording this entire conversation with you," showing me a little silver recorder tucked into his utility belt.

Lowe went on to assert that the only non-law enforcement people he knew of who carried audio recorders were those who were expecting trouble.

I explained that reporters routinely carry recorders--that this was not a violation of law.

"Do you, by any chance have journalistic credentials," asked Lowe.

ALEC had refused to credential me, despite my long-standing work as a reporter.

"Most folks who claim to be journalists, if they stumble on a story are actually able to say 'hey, I have media credentials,'" explained Lowe. "If they are carrying a recorder, they are carrying credentials at the same time. You see my dilemma?"

I did not see his dilemma.

"My dilemma is believing your story," Lowe retorted. "You understand that?!"

He was getting red.

Outside, I waited for Graves to pick me up at the curb, where she too would be threatened while attempting to take photos of the evicting officers. Waiting with me were Lowe, three other rented cops, along with Black and two members of his resort security team. Seven Westin Kierland security personnel in all--at least four of them with guns--all working at the behest of ALEC, all for one reporter. I was flattered.

Women's health in prison: Breast Cancer Behind Bars

2012-01-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

The following article was just published on Truthout by Vikki Law, author of "Resistance Behind Bars: The struggles of incarcerated women," and editor of Tenacious, a national zine written by and for women in prison.

In light of some of the distressed correspondence I've been receiving lately from women at Perryville prison complaining of serious medical neglect, I'll be making a point of researching and posting more on women's health in prison here in coming weeks.

In the meantime, for a first-person account on women's health care in Arizona state prisons, see Sue Ellen Allen's book "The slumber party from hell."

Thank you for this, Vikki. Can't wait for this state to finally be sued. What they've done to our people is criminal.

----from Truthout---

Breast Cancer Behind Bars: How a Prison Sentence Can Become a Death Sentence

Wednesday 25 January 2012

by: Victoria Law, Truthout

Imagine finding a lump in your breast. Imagine that your efforts to schedule a medical check-up are stymied and you have to wait weeks, if not months, for that initial exam. In the meantime, the lump continues to grow. Imagine that, when you finally do see a doctor, you are told that you have breast cancer. When you walk out of the office, you are locked into your prison cell with no more information or sympathy than when you walked in. This is the daily reality for women in prison.

In 2006, a Department of Justice (DOJ) study found that women in prison are at significantly greater risk for cancer than their male counterparts. Out of every 10,000 incarcerated women, 831 had cancer, compared to 108 per 10,000 men. Of those, 91 of every 10,000 women behind bars reported having had or currently having breast cancer. Given that 114,979 women were behind bars at the end of 2009, this would mean that over 1,000 women have had or currently have breast cancer.

Despite these numbers, prevention, screening, diagnosis, care, pain alleviation and rehabilitation for breast cancer remain virtually nonexistent in prisons. In 1998, a study at an unnamed Southern prison found that, although many were at high risk because of family histories, women were not provided with a clinical breast exam, information or basic education on self-examination upon admittance. Seventy percent of women who should have had mammograms under standard medical procedure had never been tested. [Williams, Roma D, Terry D. Mahoney, and R. M. Williams, Jr, "Breast Cancer Detection Among Women Prisoners in the Southern United States," Family & Community Health 21.3 (1998): 32.] Even women who enter prison already diagnosed with cancer must fight to receive lifesaving medical care.

Fifty-two-year-old Margaret DeLuca had already been diagnosed with stage 3A breast cancer and undergone a left-breast mastectomy before arriving at Clinton Correctional Facility in New Jersey. "She knew exactly what she needed, but was unable to get it," stated Bonnie Kerness, a human rights advocate and coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee's (AFSC) Prison Watch Project, who helped DeLuca fight for proper medical care. Their advocacy resulted in incremental improvements in DeLuca's medical care but did not change the prison's health care system. [Interview with Bonnie Kerness, December 28, 2011]

Like DeLuca, 57-year-old Sue Ellen Allen entered Arizona's Estrella Jail with a diagnosis of breast cancer (hers was Stage 3B). She had also undergone six sessions of chemotherapy and was awaiting a mastectomy. Two and a half months later, she was awoken at midnight, then handcuffed, shackled and transported to another jail. At 9 AM, she was moved to the hospital for the mastectomy.

"I am locked in a room alone, freezing. I ask for a blanket. No, they snarl. Why is everyone so nasty?" she recounted. "I haven't eaten in twenty hours, I haven't slept, I'm freezing and facing surgery alone." After the mastectomy, Allen should have begun chemotherapy, but the jail delayed it to avoid shouldering the costs. Allen did not receive chemotherapy until she was transferred to the Perryville prison three months later.

The chemotherapy made Allen sick.

"On my way back to my yard, I collapse, vomiting. A guard comes and asks if I can walk the three blocks to medical. There are no wheelchairs." Allen collapsed and vomited twice while walking to the medical unit. Staff watched her, but the only acknowledgment she received about her condition was when a sergeant asked, "What's the issue, Allen?"

Allen made it to the medical unit, where she continued to vomit into a wastebasket. The prison's doctor was not available to administer the shot that would stop Allen's vomiting. Allen continued to vomit for an hour. "Even the nurse is frustrated. She says there is no other emergency. He's doing paperwork." When the doctor arrived an hour later, Allen recounts, he was obviously irritated. "He acts like I'm faking and reluctantly administers the shot. Eventually, I am sent back to my room alone. I am dismissed."

Allen underwent three more chemo treatments. "Despite the rigid schedule, never is the medication ready on time, nor is the newly discovered chemo diet ready. I have to spend my sickest days walking to Medical, begging for what I'm missing. When I'm supposed to be healing, I'm worn out battling for proper treatment."

Allen is one of the more fortunate; she survived the ordeal. When 36-year-old Christina found a lump in her breast in April 2002, Perryville's medical staff ignored her concerns. By the time she was taken to the hospital in September, the lump had grown so large that the hospital skipped the chemotherapy and performed an immediate mastectomy. By then, however, the cancer had already spread to her other breast. Christina died the next year, three months after being released from prison. "If her cancer had been diagnosed and treated when she discovered her lump, maybe she'd still be alive," Allen wrote.

While breast cancer survivors and advocates outside prison would be horrified at these obstacles and delays, Allen received relatively prompt treatment under what passes as current standards for prison health care. Sherrie Chapman, a woman incarcerated in California, waited much longer.

In 1985, Chapman, who had a family history of breast cancer, found a lump in her right breast. She alerted the prison's doctor, who dismissed her concerns. Chapman persisted in demanding that the lump be further examined. In 1994, when the lumps were visibly protruding from her right breast, she finally received a mammogram. The radiologist at the outside hospital found "extremely dense breast parenchyma" and recommended a follow-up mammogram within one year. Chapman was unable to convince the prison's medical department that she needed the follow-up mammogram until late 1994. This time, the radiologist recommended immediate follow-up tests. The prison's doctor, however, refused to order a biopsy, ultrasound or fine needle aspiration. The prison labeled her a "drug seeker" for her repeated requests for something stronger than Motrin for the pain in her breast.

In 1995, Chapman was examined by a different prison doctor, who immediately ordered a biopsy. By that time, the cancer had spread to both breasts and metastasized in her neck, forcing her to undergo two mastectomies. Post surgery, guards signed her out against medical advice to return her to the prison. Staff ignored chemotherapy appointments. In addition, her uterus began to hemorrhage. Medical staff allowed her to bleed for 18 months before performing a hysterectomy. In 2000 and 2001, Chapman discovered other growths in her neck and shoulder areas. The prison doctor's response? "You've just got swollen glands. Don't worry; they're not cancerous."

Chapman appeared before the parole board in June 2002. The board rejected her and admonished her to use the self-help available in the prison, ignoring the fact that, by then, she was too ill to participate in groups that required regular attendance. She died on December 12, 2002, at the age of 45, under the custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), with a prison guard posted in her room.

Women have not quietly accepted this gross medical neglect and failure. They have attempted to advocate for themselves and draw attention to the issue. In California, Chapman testified before the legislature about the dangerous medical care in the state's women's prisons. She also filed a lawsuit against the CDCR and the prison doctor for ignoring her initial complaints about painful breast lumps. Chapman won and was awarded a $350,000 settlement. Her efforts also led to several magazine articles exploring the failures of the prison health care system to address the needs of those battling cancer. [See: "A Cancer Grows," in The Nation, and A. Clay Thompson, "Cancer in the Cells," San Francisco Bay Guardian February 24, 1999 (not available online)]

Breast cancer survivors imprisoned in other states have had less success in finding advocates and attorneys to help them push for change. Allen wrote letters to numerous lawyers, all of whom declined to file suit. "Most firms don't have the resources to fight the state," she noted.

Allen did not allow the lack of legal support to deter her from trying to change the culture of prison indifference and isolation. Recognizing that each woman battled both breast cancer and the prison's life-threatening and indifferent medical care, Allen began a cancer support group. The process of starting such a group would be simple enough on the outside, but behind bars, nothing is ever straightforward. "It took me a year of begging," Allen recounted, "but I finally got permission." The group, which quickly grew to include 14 other women, met once a month with an outside volunteer from the American Cancer Society.

Allen remembered that women were initially reluctant to attend: "They didn't expect anyone to help them or care. They didn't know how to talk about their fears." The support group provided them with a space to talk - and to vent. "There is no place in prison to vent," said Allen. The volunteer also brought information about cancer, enabling the women to understand the protocols and procedures of cancer treatment and to know what questions to ask. Given that women are told nearly nothing about their illnesses, treatments and recuperation, such information is invaluable. [Interview with Sue Ellen Allen, December 27, 2011]

Looking back, she notes that, with the exception of Christina, all of the support group members were white. Although white women are more likely to get breast cancer (125 per every 100,000), African-American women are not far behind, with 116 per 100,000 diagnosed. Latinas, who make up the largest proportion of Arizona's women's prison population, have a rate of 91 per 100,000. Given these statistics, Allen wonders how many women of color remain undiagnosed.

Although Allen was unable to find an attorney or legal group to help file suit against the Arizona Department of Corrections, other prisoners' attempts to change the prison's medical care system over the years finally sparked outside action. In October 2011, Prison Law Office, a legal advocacy group for prisoners nationwide, sent a letter to Arizona Corrections Director Charles Ryan. The letter listed dozens of specific allegations of deliberate indifference to prisoners' health needs and asked Ryan to agree to a court injunction to address problems as a way to avoid a lawsuit in federal court. On November 17, 2011, Arizona's Department of Corrections signed an agreement to investigate the medical claims. Prison Law Office and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Arizona agreed to delay any lawsuit for three months.

In New Jersey, DeLuca reached out to the AFSC to help her advocate for the care she needed. "It was a partnership between inside and out, which is often the most effective way to obtain change," Kerness remembered. Although their efforts did not improve the overall quality of prison medical care, it did have a ripple effect within the circle of women around DeLuca. Through her example, other women became aware of the power of advocacy and their ability to help outside supporters advocate on their behalf. [Interview with Bonnie Kerness, December 28, 2011] Sadly, many women battling breast cancer and other serious medical issues lack outside support. Breast cancer survivors and advocates need to recognize that, for women with breast cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, a prison sentence may mean a sentence to death by neglect. Then they need to speak out and take action to help women inside successfully fight for their lives.

The Trial of Richard Chrisman: Updated Schedule.

2012-01-20T11:29:00.003-07:00

Evidence of a sidewalk chalk protest at a police union (PLEA) fundraiser held for Richard Chrisman last Spring,

after he was fired from the Phoenix Police force due to the murder of Danny Rodriguez.

For those who don't know, Richard Chrisman is the former Phoenix police officer accused of murder in the shooting death of Danny Rodriguez from October 2010. His trial has been postponed so many times I lost track until a reader called today to get current info. It was just rescheduled again, in fact. Here's the latest plan:

Trial of Richard Chrisman

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

8:00am

Superior Court of AZ -

Maricopa County Courthouse

201 West Jefferson St.

Phoenix, AZ 85003

For those who want to stay on top of these hearings yourself - or find information on other criminal cases - you can retrieve Maricopa County Court records (calendars and minute entries) for all prosecutions from the Superior Court website here.

If you're looking for proceedings from other courts in Arizona, try searching the AZ Supreme Court on-line archives instead. You can't access minute entries from most other jurisdictions through there, but it will give you an outline of what charges a person has faced and what their convictions have been across AZ, at least.

I'm planning on organizing an AZ Court Watch action for this trial - please try to drop me a line by May 20 (with your phone, email, and snail mail addresses and availability for what may be a 2-week trial) if you're interested in helping or participating in that in June - we will need anchors to take and publish notes each day. This would be a good trial to kick off an actual Court Watch chapter and website in Phoenix (this is what they've been doing in New Orleans!), if we can get it together. Contact me if you'd be interested in helping me build Court Watch Phoenix (Peggy 480-580-6807 / prisonabolitinist@gmail.com). We'll be starting this spring.

Blacking out for SOPA...

2012-01-18T18:52:00.002-07:00

I won't be blacking out this site in solidarity only because I don't have the technology to leave a marker telling people where I've gone for how long and why. So, instead I'm posting the following information from Wikipedia about why they're protesting the Stop On-line Piracy Act (SOPA) over the next 24 hours, and won't be posting anything else here for the next day out of respect for their blackout (and those of the 7000 other websites lining up with them).

Be sure to contact your congressional representatives during the blackout (midnight 1/18 to midnight 1/19) from the link below and tell them you don't support SOPA, PIPA, or any such legislation

--------------from Wikipedia-----------

SOPA and PIPA - Learn more

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

< Wikipedia:SOPA initiative

What effect is the blackout having, so far?

The purpose of the blackout is twofold: to raise awareness of SOPA and PIPA among the general public, and to encourage people to share their views with their representatives. It's too early to tell what the ultimate impact will be, but here are some early indicators, as of 1PM PT January 18:

More than 10,000 people have commented on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog post announcing the blackout. We have not done a content analysis, but at-a-glance it looks like the overwhelming majority support the blackout;
Almost immediately after the blackout launched, it became a trending topic on Twitter, globally, with hashtags including #factswithoutwikipedia, #SOPAstrike and #wikipediablackout. Trendistic says at one point, #wikipediablackout constituted 1% of all tweets, and Hotspots shows that SOPA has accounted for a quarter-million tweets hourly since the blackout began;
Google News contains 7,200 articles on the blackout;
More than 90 million people have seen the Wikipedia blackout page
More than five million people have looked up their elected representatives' contact information via the Wikipedia tool.

Why is Wikipedia blacked-out?

Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. Readers who come to English Wikipedia during the blackout will not be able to read the encyclopedia. Instead, you will see messages intended to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA, encouraging you to share your views with your representatives, and with each other on social media.

What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

Why is the blackout happening?

Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people's access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world.

Why? SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislation that won't be effective at their stated goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

Does this mean that Wikipedia itself is violating copyright laws, or hosting pirated content?

No, not at all. Some supporters of SOPA and PIPA characterize everyone who opposes them as cavalier about copyright, but that is not accurate. Wikipedians are knowledgeable about copyright and vigilant in protecting against violations: Wikipedians spend thousands of hours every week reviewing and removing infringing content. We are careful about it because our mission is to share knowledge freely. To that end, all Wikipedians release their contributions under a free license, and all the material we offer is freely licensed. Free licenses are incompatible with copyright infringement, and so infringement is not tolerated.

Isn't SOPA dead? Wasn't the bill shelved, and didn't the White House declare that it won't sign anything that resembles the current bill?

No, neither SOPA nor PIPA is dead. On January 17th, SOPA's sponsor said the bill will be discussed in early February. There are signs PIPA may be debated on the Senate floor next week. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. In many jurisdictions around the world, we're seeing the development of legislation that prioritizes overly-broad copyright enforcement laws, laws promoted by power players, over the preservation of individual civil liberties.

How could SOPA and PIPA hurt Wikipedia?

SOPA and PIPA are a threat to Wikipedia in many ways. For example, in its current form, SOPA would require Wikipedia to actively monitor every site we link to, to ensure it doesn't host infringing content. Any link to an infringing site could put us in jeopardy of being forced offline.

I live in the United States. What's the best way for me to help?

The most effective action you can take is to call your representatives and tell them you oppose SOPA and PIPA, and any similar legislation. Type your zipcode in the locator box to find your representatives' contact information. Text-based communication is okay, but phone calls have the most impact.

I don't live in the United States. How can I help?

Contact your local State Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or similar branch of government. Tell them you oppose SOPA and PIPA, and any similar legislation. SOPA and PIPA will affect sites outside of the United States, and actions to sites inside the United States (like Wikipedia) will also affect non-American readers -- like you. Calling your own government will also let them know you don't want them to create their own bad anti-Internet legislation.

Is it still possible to access Wikipedia in any way?

Yes. During the blackout, Wikipedia is accessible on mobile devices and smart phones. You can also view Wikipedia normally by disabling JavaScript in your browser, as explained on this Technical FAQ page. Our purpose here isn't to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it's okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message.

I keep hearing that this is a fight between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Is that true?

No. Some people are characterizing it that way, probably in an effort to imply all the participants are motivated by commercial self-interest. But it's obviously not that simple. The proof of that is Wikipedia's involvement. Wikipedia has no financial self-interest at play here: we do not benefit from copyright infringement, nor are we trying to monetize traffic or sell ads. We are protesting to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA solely because we think they will hurt the Internet, and your ability to access information online. We are doing this for you, because we're on your side.

In carrying out this protest, is Wikipedia abandoning neutrality?

We hope you continue to trust Wikipedia to be a neutral information source. We are staging this blackout because (as Wikimedia Foundation Trustee Kat Walsh said recently), although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. For over a decade, Wikipedians have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Wikipedia is a tremendously useful resource, and its existence depends upon a free, open and uncensored Internet. SOPA and PIPA (and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States) will hurt you, because they will make it impossible for sites you enjoy, and benefit from, to continue to exist. That's why we're doing this.

I have a question that isn't answered here, or, I would like to send feedback to Wikipedia.

You can reach Wikipedia editors at info-en(at)wikimedia(dot)org. If you need a response, please be patient: we may have trouble keeping up with the mail.

What can I read to get more information?

Try these links:

As of 6AM PT, January 18, Google has more than 4,600 articles about the blackout. Here are a few:

Why is Wikipedia staging a blackout and what is SOPA?, from the National Post
Wikipedia joins blackout protest at US anti-piracy moves, from the British Broadcasting Corporation
Wikipedia blackout over US anti-piracy bills and FEATURE: Websites blackout over 'SOPA censorship', from Al Jazeera
Wikipedia, Craigslist, other sites go black in SOPA protest, from the Los Angeles Times
Google Rallies Opposition to Murdoch-Backed Anti-Piracy Bill, from BusinessWeek
SOPA protest: The Net strikes back, from Politico
Wikipedia blackout a 'gimmick', MPAA boss claims, from the Guardian
Wikipedia 24-hour blackout: a reader and Why we're taking Wikipedia down for a day, from the New Statesman
Internet-wide protests against SOPA/PIPA are kicking up a storm, by the Hindustan Times
SOPA, PIPA: What you need to know, from CBS News
Protest on Web Uses Shutdown to Take On Two Piracy Bills, from the New York Times
Protesting SOPA: how to make your voice heard, from Ars Technica
Why We've Censored Wired.com, from Wired

Kierland/ALEC protests continue to make news...

2012-01-03T22:08:00.000-07:00

------from truth-out.org-----

ALEC - America’s Secret Political Power

TRUTH-OUT.org

Tuesday 03 January 2011

by: Olivia Ward, The Star | News Analysis

Scottsdale, AZ - There’s something rotten in the air. A muggy, oniony, chemical smell that wafts over the lines of uniformed riot police, paddy wagons and metal barriers that are holding back a straggle of protesters waving slapdash placards reading “Shut Down ALEC.”

“Get back ma’am, for your own safety,” a courteous voice warns me. “They’re gonna start pepper spraying.”

Pepper spray?

It’s a surreal touch at the lush, sprawling Westin Kierland Resort, where the air is scented with fragrant flowering bushes and the aromatic lotions of the spa.

But the protesters are at the gate, and inside, hundreds of state legislators from all over the U.S., their wives and entourages are meeting with corporate leaders for a three-day annual policy summit. Or, to their banner-bearing foes, a cradle of “corporate profiteering at the expense of our communities.”

“Today only,” blazons a sign hoisted by a silver-haired protester, “Buy One Senator Get One Free!”

The target of this anger is the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC — a benign, user-friendly acronym that fits the friendly turf of Scottsdale, where the grass is always greener and everything is for your comfort and safety.

I’m here to learn more about this increasingly muscular organization, formally an educational non-profit — and one that shuns the “L” word, lobbyist. It puts state lawmakers together with representatives from some of the country’s most powerful corporations to advance their legislative agendas. And it’s the most influential organization the majority of Americans have never heard of.

As the coming federal election sucks all the oxygen out of America’s political room, it’s easy to ignore the power of the states, and the changes that are quietly taking place across the country independent of — and often hostile to — the federal government. But, for understanding grassroots America, ALEC, here in God’s golf country, is a good place to start.

In the words of its manifesto, “ALEC provides its public- and private-sector members with a unique opportunity to work together to develop policies and programs that effectively promote the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty.”

And the success of its efforts is in little doubt.

By its own record, it has created an arsenal of about 800 “model” bills, templates or blueprints for future laws. They are tabled about 1,000 times a year across the country; about one in five are passed.

Some 2,000 state legislators belong to the organization, the vast majority of them Republican, in spite of its avowed non-partisan membership. And with Republicans now controlling half of all state governments, they pack an added punch.

To the protesters, and the growing number of media and non-governmental organizations who study it closely, ALEC is a factory for legislative bills that replicate across the 50 states, with the aim of undercutting the public sector and the role of government and promoting free-market policy at state level, where it often counts the most.

ALEC-backed provisions have opposed climate change legislation and environmental regulation, stoked the effort to privatize prisons and schools, pushed for rollbacks of workers’ rights, for limited voting rights and tax breaks for the wealthy. The results, critics say, line the pockets of corporations — a charge ALEC and its defenders insist is misrepresenting its operating style.

“The benefits of ALEC are that you don’t have to walk through 50 different legislatures,” says Jeff Reed, an Indiana “school choice” advocate who campaigns for developing alternatives to the public school system. “You can share ideas with everyone in the same room. But the people in the room are not in lockstep.”

But ALEC’s very success in advancing its policies has sparked a backlash in states such as Ohio and Wisconsin, where police and firefighters joined protests against anti-union legislation.

Recall campaigns have been launched to end the terms of conservative lawmakers in several states. And the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People petitioned the UN to protest restrictive voting laws in 14 states, inspired, they say, by ALEC’s model legislation.

“When a company needs a state bill passed,” writes the far-from-radical Bloomberg Businessweek, “the American Legislative Exchange Council can get it done.”

ALEC officials routinely deny it, insisting that in this “laboratory of democracy” lawmakers, not corporations, have the final word on the bills that emerge for approval: if companies have a hand on the legislative tiller, it is not the upper hand.

The group’s 300-strong corporate members include some of the most high-profile in America: among them AT&T, Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, UPS, Pfizer, Bayer, Verizon, and Koch Industries — headed by the Kansas-based billionaire brothers nicknamed “the Kochtopus” for their wide-ranging financial and ideological influence.

Outside the wire, the protesters are growing weary, and police have peeled off their sci-fi gas masks.

“We’ve arrested five,” mutters a close-cropped plainclothes man to his phone, as I’m warned again not to venture beyond the barrier. Earlier, an Arizona reporter narrowly escaped arrest for disobeying orders.

As the protesters begin to disperse, a stocky dark-skinned man stays behind to harangue the police: “You and me, bro, we’re all part of the 99 per cent. ALEC is the 1 per cent. D’you get it, bro? Who are you protecting here?” The front line cops glance at each other uneasily, not moving.

“I was taking pictures and I stepped into a line between the police and protesters,” Ezra Kaplan, a 23-year-old student activist, tells me later. “The police moved in and I was trapped.”

Seventeen hours after he was thrown to the ground and arrested, Kaplan says, he was released and his knapsack returned — “but not my camera, which was worth $1,000.”

Like many of the protesters, he was drawn to this site by a conviction that the political system is broken, and ALEC part of the wrecking crew.

“You know that painting The Scream?” asks 51-year-old Diane D’Angelo, another activist and protester. “That’s what it’s like for me most days.

“I work, but I’m here for my friends who don’t have proper jobs or health insurance. I know of some who have committed suicide in this recession, but there’s no interest in people like them. Members of ALEC seem to have forgotten what the Constitution means. They make their own legislation.”

Inside the hotel’s vast conference wing all is calm and bright, in spite of the numerous vigilant security guards. Here, in a parallel universe of bonhomie, the men and women in suits who are liaising over morning lattes are the 99 per cent, and the Occupiers, out of sight and mind, the 1 per cent. It’s not the percentages, but the placement that counts here.

Conference tables are strewn with soberly titled reports by right-wing think tanks allied with ALEC: the Heritage Foundation, the Goldwater Institute, the Franklin Center, the Tax Foundation and more.

They explain how poor states can become richer by cutting taxes, how retiree health benefits can be reined in, how “school choice” can create private alternatives to education. The evils of “Obamacare” are laid out, along with articles inveighing against federal waste. An anti-abortion group, Americans United for Life, hands out a model legislation guide to “changing laws to protect human life, state by state.”

“I heard there was some kind of protest out there,” says a portly man with a jovial smile, who lines up alongside me to pick up ALEC credentials, handily strung on an Arizona Association of Realtors lanyard. “I guess those guys just don’t have anything better to do. They’d be further ahead if they’d go out and get a job.”

The conversation ends abruptly as I’m handed my badge with the radioactive label “Media.”

But in spite of reports of the group’s secrecy and antipathy to the media, my application has been rapidly processed, and response to my interview requests from its diligent young communications director, Kaitlyn Buss, prompt and polite. And although some critics were refused entry, a reporter from a Phoenix paper, who has written sharply unflattering stories on ALEC, was admitted without question.

“There’s a big disconnect between what (the protesters) think happens here and what’s outlined in our publications,” maintains Jonathan Williams, one of ALEC’s senior strategists. “They think we’re a secretive organization — but how do they know that? How do they know we’re here?

“We have it on our website, very clearly, where our meetings are, what our publications are. I write op-eds in the national press that are open to everybody.”

Williams, an affable, articulate tax wizard who calls himself a “centre-right kind of guy,” says ALEC’s agenda is much misunderstood.

Far from being a cheek-by-jowl elite of lawmakers and lobbyists — “crusaders” who aim to shrink government to the size where they can drown it in the bathtub — it creates “the best agenda for taxpayers at large to create jobs and increase the overall standard of living throughout the United States regardless of income group. At the end of the day the best form of welfare is giving everybody a job.”

At a price.

The price includes doing away with the “ever-increasing federal environmental and energy regulations” that are in ALEC’s crosshairs. So are obtrusive unions, workers’ rights, and public pensions and retiree benefits that are threatening states with “generational theft.”

Taxing the rich is no solution to the economic dilemma, Williams assures me. It’s a lose-lose to “demonize business.” Slap on the taxes and “they’ll only move somewhere else” and take the jobs with them. In a globalized world, nobody is safe. Competitiveness is the key. Keeping jobs in America is vital — but China is just around the corner.

Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan and the Constitution. As lunch is served in the cavernous ballroom, homage is paid to ALEC’s holy trinity by an enthusiastic audience that is predominantly white and over 40. Darker-skinned people carry the trays, an echo of 1787.

“Our patron saint, Thomas Jefferson, said that ‘my reading of history convinces me that most (bad) government results from too much government,’” intones a host, to resounding applause. “How true that is.”

The Founding Fathers are dear to ALEC because they speak of a simpler time when the federal government didn’t get in the way of the states, or taxation and regulation in the way of progress. A time when “these” United States took precedence over “this” U.S. of today.

“We’d like to see a shift of power,” William Howell, the gentlemanly, silver-haired speaker of the house in Virginia, explains to me later: “It would restore the states’ powers that (the federal government) has usurped.”

Howell is ALEC’s federalism expert and a prominent backer of a constitutional amendment to repeal federal laws to which two-thirds of states object. Federal health-care legislation, for instance, should be barred because “if the federal government can require you to buy a product (i.e. health insurance) it can do anything.”

Howell’s vision for America is “50 thriving states. A much more limited federal and state government.” A vision devoutly wished by many of the legislative and corporate members here.

That is the Constitutional way, says Howell, the sort of favourite uncle you would invite to a family dinner. “The Constitution was authored by Virginians and we take great pride in it. It’s flexible enough for 300 million people as it was for 13 million.”

Born in 1973, to a group of conservative state lawmakers and policy wonks, ALEC can’t claim the provenance of the Founding Fathers. But after a modest beginning during President Richard Nixon’s term, and a slow ascendancy, it became a resounding hit in recent years, backed by corporate heft.

Now thousands of the elect and the elected head for its conferences, the latter assisted by ALEC’s “scholarship” funds. Some join the nine task forces and legislative boards that create template bills, alongside similar bodies set up for their corporate counterparts. The final vote, ALEC says, has no input from the corporations. (Critics, unsurprisingly, say otherwise. “Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line,” says the watchdog Center for Media and Democracy.)

For Howell, and other lawmakers here, belonging to ALEC is a shortcut to effective, winnable legislation.

“If I flew to Las Vegas I wouldn’t know anybody,” he explains. “We have 50 laboratories to find out what they’ve all been doing. ALEC provides a meeting point, and the distinguishing feature is they’re very interested in liberty and the free market.”

The air of Scottsdale is free too, of pepper spray. I stroll back to my room in the nearby Westin Kierland Villas complex, along the manicured golf course and the limpid pond on which float a family of ducks.

Overhead three helicopters hover. One breaks away and seems to shadow my path. After the years I have spent in conflict zones helicopters are not a good omen. I squint into the dazzling blue sky and wave. The chopper wheels back and lazily retreats. Later, that night I fall into a fitful sleep, pursued by a dark helicopter that always outflanks me.

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. . .

Back at the conference, a workshop on pension reform is winding up a lengthy discussion of a proposed Public Pension Accounting Responsibility Act. The act would force legislators to “tell the truth” about state pensions, which ALEC supporters claim are undermining (if not collapsing) state finances.

As the audience files out for a coffee break, I stay behind and wait for the Fiscal Policy Reform Working Group to begin. It will drill down on one the hottest issues in Washington, tax reform, and review a model bill on opposing state bailouts by the federal government.

A friendly voice greets me: Kaitlyn Buss.

“I hope you’re enjoying the conference,” she says. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the room.”

“But I’ve just sat through another working group. Why is this one different?”

“Some are open, others aren’t. It’s just the rules.”

Night falls, and the tiny sports bar in the hotel basement is crowded. A ruddy-faced man jumps to his feet, sweating, as touchdowns are scored on the big screen. He volleys the results at a huddle of young women who seem barely aware of the action.

Nor am I. I’m talking to a fellow hotel guest, Beau Hodai, a journalist from the left-wing magazine In These Times who has written probing articles on ALEC.

Unlike me, he hasn’t enjoyed its co-operation and credentials. His calls have gone unanswered, and he has been turned back by the police and guards who firewall the meeting.

The noise level in the bar rises and so do I. As I say goodnight, Beau is summoned by hotel security and herded away toward the elevator by uniformed police. Why? In Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, I was evicted from my hotel by machine-gun-toting militias as the Kosovo war began. But in America. . . ?

As I stand staring, two cops flank me: Do I know this man? Who is he?

Beau has disappeared now. Will anything I say be used against him? I square my shoulders and think of my British mother: “How dare you ask me such a question? Is this a morality charge? Are hotel guests of the opposite sex forbidden to speak in a bar? Is this Iran or the land of the free?”

We face off, not blinking. The questions continue. At last the inquisitors give in. “Ma’am, you’re free to go.”

They are pointing me toward the lobby, and the front door. On cue, the helpful young man at the bell desk calls the hotel shuttle to convey me to the Villas.

At 11 p.m., some 45 minutes later, I call Beau’s number. He is now in another hotel, his stay at the Westin Kierland terminated abruptly.

“They said they were throwing me out and that they would escort me to the room to get my belongings,” he tells me. “I had to leave right then and there — or be arrested.” Off-duty police, it appears, were moonlighting as security for the conference, but no less determined to do their duty as they saw it.

(Back in Toronto I reach the hotel’s managing director, Bruce Lang, by phone and am told, “Mr. Hodai was considered to be a persona non grata from the conference.” But he adds, “not by the hotel, not by the police. . . He clearly presented a threat to the conference, based on his history.”) That would be the threat of investigative journalism?

In the Phoenix airport I move through the tanned, jostling holiday crowd toward the Air Canada gate.

What just happened here? I board the plane and settle back to watch the Arizona landscape disappear. The dry, dusty beige and the achingly lush green. The baronial resorts and the desert shacks. The conference too has dispersed, and the hotel resumed the even tenor of its ways. Business as usual. And I think of ALEC and the Constitution it reveres.

The First Amendment.

“Congress shall make no law. . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances.”

The 99 per cent, and the 1 per cent. A nation divided under God.

The conviction of Tony Lester: A juror's regrets.

2012-01-02T07:19:00.000-07:00

Most readers are already well aware of Tony Lester's story. Tony was sentenced to the Arizona Department of Corrections in 2010 for 12 years on assault charges stemming from a suicide attempt during a psychotic episode the previous year - the friends who tried to stop him from cutting his throat got hurt themselves, grabbing the knife.

In Arizona, people with mental illness are almost ten times more likely to be locked behind bars than admitted to the state hospital when they need help. Not surprisingly, instead of being admitted to a psychiatric hospital that night, Tony was put in jail, then criminally prosecuted. Tony was so ill when this happened that it took nine months to restore him to sufficient competency in the wake of the incident to be tried for it. Soon after he arrived in state prison - receiving no treatment there for his mental illness - Tony killed himself.

This weekend one of the people on his jury posted the comment below to the MSNBC website following the piece Wendy Halloran did at KPNX on his suicide...the comment after it was left by Tony's aunt. This seems to be a call for sentencing reform and more diversion of the mentally ill from the criminal justice system in the first place...

---------------from MSNBC.com----------------

Did officers' inaction, lack of training contribute to inmate's death?

By M. Alex Johnson
msnbc.com

"Investigators' interviews with correctional officers at a state prison in Tucson, Ariz., suggest that the officers' indifference and lack of basic first aid training allowed an inmate to bleed to death after his second suicide attempt.
The recorded interviews were obtained by KPNX-TV, the NBC affiliate in Phoenix, which has spent much of the past year digging into the suicide of Anthony Clayton Lester, 26, in July 2010.

The station reports that Lester, who was serving a 12-year sentence for aggravated assault, had a long history of mentally illness and had tried to kill himself the previous month. But he was taken off his medications and was removed from a suicide watch two days before his death..."

(view the rest of the article and other comments here)

READER COMMENTS:

anonymous juror

My Grandson sent me this link to view and after I viewed this I felt that I had no other choice than to find the courage to post this comment. I was one of the jurors on this Anthony Lester criminal case. I sat through this entire trial and heard all the testimony, and I found that there was reasonable doubt in this case and that I and another juror voted not guilty on several deliberation votes, it was another juror on this panel that swayed our votes to vote guilty. There were two victims in this case, we came back with a not guilty verdict on the second victim immediately and it took us a few days to come back with the guilty verdict after we were persuaded to vote guilty.

Like I said before after hearing all the testimony in this case there was a reasonable doubt and now knowing that Anthony Lester was sentenced to a twelve year prison sentence has made me sick and I feel as if we had a hand in this too, the only way to vindicate myself from this incredible tragedy is to tell how I feel and perhaps this young man may forgive us for what we did to him. Knowing now that he was his mother's only child has just ripped my heart apart and taken his daughter's father away from her has made me feel completely saddened by this knowing now how extremely ill he really was. I am so ashamed, I hope his mother will forgive us and his daughter will some day know this truth, that if we the jurors would have known that by finding Anthony Lester guilty of this crime than we automatically sentenced him to a minimum seven year prison sentence. We could see that he was ill and we thought that he would get probation and get the help he needed.

I think that jurors should be told what would result if they find someone guilty of a crime that this could have a great bearing on the verdict. I have struggled with this decision that I made for the last two years, wishing that I could change my verdict, wishing that I stuck to my gut instincts instead of being convinced by a fellow juror to change my verdict. This is something that I will live with the rest of my life and I pray that Anthony's mother and family will find in their hearts to forgive me. I know the next time that I sit on a jury that I will not let someone sway my vote so easily.

I thought prison would take care of someone so ill as Anthony Lester, after viewing this story done by channel 12 news this has sickened me even more that is why I felt I needed to post this comment. Thank-you channel 12 for reporting this story maybe now Anthony Lester's story will help make changes in the criminal system, it certainly needs it. May Anthony Lester Forgive Us for what we did to him.

#122 - Sat Dec 31, 2011 1:42 PM EST

----------------------------

Patti Jones

Just when you think that this could get much worse, than here comes more to grasp. I am completely and utterly speechless. I read your posted comment yesterday "Anonymous Juror" and I just wanted to wait until I could completely be able to post something that was not out of anger. I do not hold anger or any bitterness towards you for what you thought was the right thing. I could only imagine the inner turmoil that you must have felt and continue to feel knowing by changing your verdect the way that you did changed the course of so many lives, perhaps yours the most. If there is one thing that I have learned from this is to forgive and try to help bring the much needed changes, so that no other mentally-ill person will suffer the way Tony has. I will not judge your actions their is only one judge. And if we all try to live a righteous life than the reward will be phenomenal. I know Tony did come to grips with this at the end of his life. I do thank-you for coming out now to speak the truth, I knew that the system all around has let our Tony down.

I will always feel until the day that I die that Tony NEVER deserved that twelve year prison sentence that was handed down to him. But I feel that by you finally speaking out will now help us finally have Justice for Tony and now there can be many more lives like Tony saved. So I commend you on speaking out, and perhaps if you write to your legislatures this could help change these laws. You need to forgive yourself, I refuse to become angry and bitter. Tony would not have wanted this, it is about change in such a broken system. Peace. Patti Jones

#123 - Sun Jan 1, 2012 2:58 PM EST

Criminalizing youth resistance: Truancy in MESA

2011-12-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

I swear I don't know I escaped being criminalized in my youth...

-------from the Arizona Republic------

Courts cracking down on truancy

Students warned of charges that can stem from skipping school

Cathryn Creno -

Dec. 25, 2011 09:24 PM
The Arizona Republic

The excuses for missing dozens of days of school this year ranged from insomnia to asthma to not liking the "drama" in high-school hallways.

But Judge Dan Dodge wasn't having any of it at a new special hearing he holds for truants and their parents once a month.

"Chronic truancy is a criminal offense. Do you want to start out your life with a criminal record?" Dodge said as he stared down from the bench at Gilbert's Highland Justice Court at a sleepy-eyed 15-year-old Dobson High School student.The freshman said he has missed dozens of days of school this year because he usually struggles to fall asleep until 3 a.m. He then has trouble getting up for his 8 a.m. class. And Mom, typically asleep herself at the hour school starts, is no help, the student said.

"I don't really care about school," he had said before walking into the courtroom. "I would rather stay up late and play music."

Dodge was unsympathetic, saying the problem could easy be solved with fewer late-night jam sessions and a louder morning alarm clock. Or maybe Mom should just pour a glass of water on his head every morning at 6 a.m., the judge said.

Dodge told the young insomniac to have no more unexcused absences this year or he could lose his right to apply for an Arizona driver's license until he turns 18.

Potential prosecution

On a recent afternoon, Dodge looked around a courtroom full of accused truants, their parents and their guardians and told everyone to shape up or face prosecution by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office.

Parents in the room eyed each other with chagrin as Dodge told them that they, along with their teens, could face Class 3 misdemeanor charges -- meaning fines and possible jail sentences -- if they did not get their kids to school on time or make arrangements for them to study at home because of chronic illnesses.

"And if you want to drop out and ruin your life at age 16, that is your prerogative. But before that, it is not your privilege," Dodge told the students, who are not identified because The Arizona Republic typically does not print the names of juveniles accused of crimes.

Dodge ordered the kids and parents to return to his courtroom in March with report cards and attendance records. If things have improved by then, charges will be dropped.

At least one student in the courtroom was already on her way to a new life. Wearing a charter-school uniform, she told Dodge that she hated the "drama" at her former district high school and had been in class every day since she transferred.

Truancy court is a no-nonsense year-old partnership between the Mesa Public Schools Safety and Security Department and East Valley justice of the peace courts, including Dodge's.

Mesa, the largest school district in the state, has a long history of being the toughest on truants.

Most schools traditionally let attendance clerks and counselors deal with kids who play hooky occasionally and report chronic truants to local police. Peoria Unified School District in the West Valley has an innovative on-campus program called "Sweeps" that requires kids who are late or loitering around campus to spend at least one class period away from other students explaining to a teacher why they were AWOL.

In contrast, Mesa employs nine uniformed, body-armor-wearing, pepper-spray-carrying security officers who spend at least half of their time tracking truants and their parents. The officers are not sworn law-enforcement officials but have been trained to restrain young offenders until police arrive.

The annual cost in salaries is about $140,000 for the anti-truancy program, said Mesa schools security director Allen Moore, who believes the expense is more than worth it.

Pathway to crime

While the district wants as many kids in school as possible -- it gets nearly $5,000 a year in funding for each child enrolled and has lost 9,000 students in the past decade -- it's even more important to turn around truant kids before they get involved in crime, Moore said.

After performing normal school-security duties, the nine officers patrol areas that truants like to frequent -- shopping malls, electronics stores and restaurants with deals on breakfast -- in search of kids who should be in a classroom.

While one ditch day here or there probably does not mean the start of a criminal career, juvenile-crime experts say habitual truancy often is the first step toward involvement with drugs, vandalism, burglaries and gangs.

"We get calls from the parks, from the malls ... sometimes the kids have already been involved in burglaries," said Tim Pinsonneault, security supervisor for Mesa Public Schools.

"Habitual truants like to hang out with each other," Mesa security officer Nathan Wax said. "Kids all have cellphones. They text each other and meet up at houses where parents aren't home."

In most cases, truancy problems are solved with a simple visit with the child and parents from a school security officer.

"We meet with parents and the student, we explain the state law to them. We say our goal is not to cite them," Pinsonneault said. "But if they don't correct the behavior, they are served by a process server and they have to go to court. If they don't show up, a warrant is issued for their arrest."

Moore said his officers have stumbled onto meth labs and dwellings where the conditions were so uninhabitable that they called Mesa police and the state's Child Protective Services.

But, he said, truancy is a middle-class problem, too.

"We have parents who want to take their kids out of school for a cruise," he said. "That is not allowed. And some parents want to start holiday break by going on vacation early. We don't call that vacation. We call it truancy."

Tutoring, counseling and parenting classes are made available to kids and parents who need them. But Moore said in many cases families just need to be made aware of the law. He said in the last calendar year, his officers have tracked down and given warnings to 1,184 truant junior-high and high-school students and 1,972 parents of truant elementary-schoolers. All but 606 middle- and high-school students and 234 elementary-school students returned to school with no additional action, he said. Those who did not heed the security officers' warnings were summoned to truancy hearings in a court like Dodge's.

Pinsonneault said that before last year, Mesa schools, like most other districts in the county, referred its habitual truants to the county's Juvenile Probation Department. The problem, he said, was that some parents failed to take the juvenile citations seriously.

"Bringing everyone to a justice court gives the process more teeth," he said.

Of the 79 chronic truants who appeared in Dodge's court last spring, only 12 still have charges pending, Moore said. The rest "have corrected their behavior and are attending school successfully," he said.

"It amazed me what a difference a little bit of the fear of the law would make," Dodge said.

Arizona's truancy law

Arizona law requires students to attend a public, private or home school until they turn 16 or finish 10th grade.

Students must be present 90 percent of the time -- 162 days of a 180-day school year -- to get a passing grade and credit in a class.

Kids are considered chronically truant after they miss 18 days of school, even if some of the days were excused absences.

Schools can issue citations that refer students to court or truancy-diversion programs after five unexcused absences.

Kids who fail to return to school after getting warnings face penalties ranging from fines to loss of eligibility for an Arizona driver's license until age 18.
Parents who fail to get their kids back to school can face fines or, in extreme cases, jail time.

Sources: Mesa Public Schools, Highland Justice Court, Maricopa County Juvenile Probation Department

Mike Stauffer and MCSO brutality

2011-12-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

Keep in mind that the following editorial is coming from a conservative challenger to Joe Arpaio in 2012

-------------------from the Tucson Citizen--------------

Law Enforcer Mike Stauffer reacts to death of Ernest M. Atencio
by Hispanic-Politico on Dec. 26, 2011,
TUCSON CITIZEN

Law Enforcement Analysis of the Ernest Atencio Incident
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
December 26, 2011
Police Lt. Mike Stauffer
MCSO Candidate • 2012

In expressing my dismay about the incident that occurred in the MCSO 4th Avenue intake area on December 16, 2011, I have angered some people employed by MCSO. To those individuals, I say, the information that I acted on came from inside the MCSO. There are employees of the organization who are disgusted by the actions of a few and will speak out.

As sheriff, I will not tolerate this behavior or this attitude. I will not tolerate those who stand by and allow this type of incident to take place. Know that the days of covering up behind stalling tactics are over. The cover-up is frequently worse than the incident itself. The MCSO is under a microscope. Even if it was not, I expect all the employees should understand that they are held to a very high standard of conduct and will be held accountable for their actions. I am outraged that even one employee of the MCSO would stand by as this incident unfolded and did nothing to intervene. I am outraged by the atmosphere and attitude fostered by Arpaio that allowed this to happen. Know that those who continue to carry this attitude will have no place at the MCSO.

I stipulate that I have not been privy to an unedited video and have formed some
conclusions based on the video available on You Tube (http://tinyurl.com/7evqt6n) and the report by Fox 10 News in Phoenix (http://tinyurl.com
/7nbuyma). What I saw disturbed me greatly on many levels.

Ernest Atencio according to reports, was arrested for misdemeanor assault. He had not seen a judge. He had not even gone through the full intake process.

Nevertheless, the offense he was arrested for, even if found guilty and convicted at trial, did not warrant a death sentence. American law enforcement is not judge or jury.

Ernest Atencio arrived at the intake area under his own power and apparently healthy. He did not initially appear physically combative, and in fact, the Phoenix Police officers released him from his handcuffs. It has not been reported what the conversation was between PPD officers and Mr. Atencio that precipitated the officers to grab him and attempt to restrain him.

If the reason for the physical contact was to put Mr. Atencio back into handcuffs, why do none of the officers have handcuffs out? There are no restraining tools of any kind visible.

As Mr. Atencio struggles with the officers, a Phoenix officer appears to put Mr. Atencio into a choke hold (2:11), which is considered a deadly force tactic, and takes him forcefully to the ground. It appears that Mr. Atencio goes limp for several seconds at this point. The Phoenix officer is then pushed away by an MCSO detention officer and at least six detention officers appear to be pinning Mr. Atencio to the floor.

Although he can’t be seen under the pile of at least six detention officers, it appears that Mr. Atencio suddenly surges and the detention officers apply a Taser in “drive stun” mode. This tactic involves firing a barb from close range, into the subject and then repositioning the Taser to make contact and complete a circuit that delivers an immobilizing electric current to the subject for a five second duration. The detention officers do not appear to be restraining Mr. Atencio during any of the applications, as those properly trained to use a Taser are instructed. Taser training also warns that repeated applications of the Taser is dangerous to the health of a subject and de-escalation tactics to bring the subject under control should be employed during the subject’s incapacitation to prevent the need for continued force.

Equally disturbing are the actions of the other officers in the area. Several officers run into view from other areas and try to join in the pile. Others appear to be mocking Mr. Atencio and laughing about the encounter. Their behavior reinforces the perception the officers have a callous disregard for Mr. Atencio’s well being.

In the holding cell, a detention officer is seen making what appears to be knee strikes to Mr. Atencio’s head. Another detention officer puts a restraining hand on that officer’s shoulder to stop him. This occurs while Mr. Atencio is being held down by at least five other detention officers. The application of knee strikes to the head while Mr. Atencio is being restrained is an inappropriately high level of force for the circumstances.

Mr. Atencio is limp and unresponsive; yet, he is stripped of his clothing and dumped on the floor of a holding cell. The medical personnel present do not appear to ascertain Mr. Atencio’s medical status. No medical follow-up is conducted and Mr. Atencio is left alone. This again is contrary to Taser policies and training. Training dictates that anyone subjected to a Taser application be seen immediately after the situation is stabilized by certified medical personnel. A person subjected to multiple Taser applications should be seen by an emergency room Physician.

The vague statement issued by Chief McIntyre that night after the story broke suggests an attempt to cover up the situation. His statement indicates that there was no in-custody death that night, an outright falsehood. The week delay in releasing the video and the timing of the release further suggests an all out attempt to bury the story by the MCSO.

These situations require an open, timely release of preliminary findings. Delay and vagueness only fuel anger and distrust in the community. Hiding behind a wall of silence is not appropriate. The leader of the organization must be front and center and accountable to the community. Only in this way can the organization be trusted to do what is right.

Police Lt. Mike Stauffer
MEDIA CONTACT:
West Kenyon
Campaign Manager
Police Lt. Mike Stauffer
Maricopa County Sheriff • Candidate 2012
t: 480.414.6868
e: west@votestauffer.com
w: www.votestauffer.com

SOPA Watch: Internet Blacklist Legislation

2011-12-26T13:43:00.001-07:00

----From the Electronic Frontier Foundation-----

(petition below)

Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation

The Internet Blacklist Legislation - known as PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House - is a threatening sequel to last year's COICA Internet censorship bill. Like its predecessor, this legislation invites Internet security risks, threatens online speech, and hampers Internet innovation. Urge your members of Congress to reject this Internet blacklist campaign in both its forms!

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet Blacklist Legislation as a new way to prevent online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative is nothing more than a dangerous wish list that will compromise Internet security while doing little or nothing to encourage creative expression.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.

It gets worse: Under SOPA's provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites “dedicated to infringing activities,” SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough). And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the “U.S. authorized version”).

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on the Senate version of the bill, taking a principled stand against a very dangerous bill. But every Senator and Representative should be opposing the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA. Contact your members of Congress today to speak out!

sign petition here

New Year's Eve Noise Action targets Jails and Prisons.

2011-12-24T16:32:00.004-07:00

(THIS ACTION ROCKED!!!)

"Resistance."

Tent City, Phoenix, AZ.

April 2011

-----------from Phoenix COPWATCH --------

Global Noise Demo: NYE 2011/2012

Saturday, 31

December 2011

12 noon - 2pm

31st Ave & Durango, PHX

In response to the international callout for New Year’s Eve prison solidarity noise demos, we are organizing an action at the Durango jail in South Phoenix. Noise demos break the isolation and alienation of the cells that the state creates, and reaches those inside to let them know they have not been forgotten. You’ll want some signs, banners, pots & pans, drums, and lots & lots of noise! Abolish prisons and the world that maintains them! We will play for all until the walls fall!

Profiling Sheriff Joe: Class-Action status for latinos in suit

2011-12-23T20:57:00.003-07:00

4th Avenue Jail

Phoenix, AZ

October 15, 2011

-------from the Phoenix New Times--------

Judge Grants Class Status in Lawsuit to Hispanics Stopped by Arpaio's Deputies, Orders Halt to Human Smuggling Enforcement in Current Form

By Ray Stern Fri., Dec. 23 2011

U.S. District G. Murray Snow ruled today that any Hispanic stopped by Sheriff Joe Arpaio's deputies since January 1, 2007 -- or will be stopped in the future -- can sue the sheriff's office in a class-action lawsuit.

The ruling in the Melendres racial-profiling case also enjoins the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office from stopping people based on a suspicion that they might be violating one aspect of the state's human smuggling law, or any other law.

At yesterday's hearing, Arpaio's lawyer said such a prohibition would hamper the ability for MCSO to conduct law enforcement in general. While that may have been an exaggeration, it seems clear the ruling will make it difficult for the sheriff to conduct enforcement operations based on the state's human-smuggling law. That law is how Arpaio justifies the saturation patrols in which illegal immigrants are rounded up.

Snow's latest ruling also hands Arpaio's office some minor victories, including the dismissal of two counts regarding David and Jessika Rodriguez, who say they were hassled while driving near Bartlett Lake. The ruling doesn't dismiss the case in favor of the plaintiffs, so in that respect it shows that Snow isn't fully convinced -- something Arpaio's lawyer brought up yesterday. Snow wants a trial to decide the issue, obviously -- but it'll be one in which he's the prime fact-finder, and one in which he's already signaled in another ruling made public today that he's not happy with the MCSO's dirty tactics, both in the case and on the streets as probable profilers.

If you've been waiting for serious action to come down against Arpaio, this is it.
Here's the ruling:

Class Action Granted

MCSO and Marty Atencio: Video released

2011-12-23T19:22:00.000-07:00

This comes from Dennis Gilman, who edited hours of tapes. Here's the raw footage from the MCSO Booking area, where Marty Atencio was attacked. I frankly, see no provocation....

part I

part II

Here they are putting him in a "safe room". I have a problem with this policy of stripping mentally ill or unstable prisoners naked to assure their "safety" - it just compounds trauma with humiliation.

---narrative from the Arizona Republic---

Phoenix inmate restraint video released

by JJ Hensley - Dec. 23, 2011 06:04 PM
The Arizona Republic

It took 10 Phoenix police and Maricopa County sheriff's officers to wrestle Ernest "Marty" Atencio to the ground during a struggle Dec. 16 in the Fourth Avenue Jail that ended with Atencio receiving CPR and leaving the facility on a stretcher.

Atencio died at a Phoenix hospital five days after the incident when his family decided to take him off life support.

Atencio's struggle with the police and sheriff's detention officers occurred about 90 minutes after he arrived at the Fourth Avenue Jail after Phoenix police arrested him on assault charges. In a jailhouse video, a Phoenix police officer can be seen placing his arm around Atencio's upper chest or neck before Atencio is taken to the floor and surrounded by the officers. Atencio kicks and struggles on the floor, surrounded by 10 officers who wrestle with him before an unidentified sheriff's deputy deploys a Taser that appears to defuse the situation.

The video later shows eight sheriff's officers surrounding Atencio in a padded cell, where they dragged the 44-year-old Gulf War veteran after he was subdued.

Once in the cell, the sheriff's officers continue to struggle with Atencio, although the crowd in the small room makes it difficult to see Atencio, who is on the floor.

The Sheriff's Office on Friday released surveillance video of the fight between officers and the inmate in response to numerous requests from the media.

Sheriff's officials declined further comment, citing the ongoing investigation into the struggle that ultimately ended with Atencio dead.

A Phoenix police spokesman said that the Sheriff's Office is conducting the investigation and that the video speaks for itself.

Michael Manning, an attorney representing Atencio's family, declined to comment at the request of the family. Manning said Atencio's family is "deeply grieving" his death and will schedule a memorial service after the medical examiner and an independent expert conduct an autopsy to determine the exact cause of death.

Shortly after the Taser is deployed, officers carry Atencio into a "safe cell" -- a padded room designed to reduce inmates' ability to injure themselves or others.
Eight sheriff's officers join Atencio in the cell after they drag him into the room as they continue to struggle with him and attempt to remove his clothes. After several minutes, the officers leave and Atencio remains facedown, naked and motionless with his arms around his head.

After several minutes, Atencio's stomach moves with a heaving sigh.

Less than 10 minutes later, with Atencio still motionless, the door to the cell opens and sheriff's officers enter with weapons and shields. The weapons and shields are quickly set aside and replaced with medical equipment as the security check turns into a rescue effort. The officers are joined by health-care workers, who help the officers try to revive Atencio by performing CPR and attaching a defribulator to his chest. The officers and health-care workers perform CPR for more than 10 minutes until paramedics with the Phoenix Fire Department arrive and drag Atencio's limp body into the hall, where he is loaded onto a gurney and transported to the hospital.

Atencio died at St. Joseph's Hospital on Wednesday after family members decided to take him off life support.

"He was brain-dead," Manning said at the time.

The Trial of Peggy Plews (was POSTPONED)

2011-12-23T16:01:00.002-07:00

Margaret Jean Plews

M-0741-4401149

3 counts of CRIMINAL DAMAGE

POSTPONED UNTIL:

January 26, 2012: 10am
Phoenix Municipal Court RM 606
300 W. Washington St.
Phoenix, AZ 85003

NO LOOP 202: Support Indigenous Resistance!

2011-12-18T10:22:00.000-07:00

NO SOUTH MOUNTAIN FREEWAY

January 18, 2011

3pm - Rally against Loop 202

4pm - Transportation Policy Committee

Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) office - Saguaro Room

302 N. 1st Avenue, Phoenix

------

January 24, 2011

4pm - Citizens Transportation Oversight Committee

AZ Department of Transportation - Auditorium

206 S. 17th Avenue, Phoenix

More MCSO brutality towards latino prisoners...

2011-12-17T22:30:00.000-07:00

From facebook last night...

Mike Stauffer for Maricopa County Sheriff

We received news from an inside source that a Latino inmate at the 4th Avenue Jail is brain dead due to excessive force by detention officers.

-------------------------

Update tonight, from the Arizona Republic:

Phoenix inmate still critical after restraint at jail

by Amy B Wang and Kelsey Pfeffer - Dec. 17, 2011 02:10 PM
The Arizona Republic

A man who was taken to a hospital after he became unresponsive while being booked into a Maricopa County jail early Friday remains in critical condition Saturday, officials said.

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has identified the man as 44-year-old Ernest M. Atencio.

Phoenix police brought Atencio in for booking on suspicion of assault at about 3 a.m. on Friday. During the booking process, Maricopa County sheriff's officials said Atencio was abusive and combative, forcing police and sheriff's deputies to use "defensive efforts" in restraining him.

In a statement issued by the sheriff's office, MCSO Deputy Director Jack MacIntyre was quoted as saying the officers took Atencio to a "safe cell" in hopes of getting him under control. While in the cell, Atencio was under observation by medical personnel, MacIntyre said. About 15 minutes later, medical staff checked on Atencio and had to start CPR and other revival efforts, McIntyre said.

Atencio was taken to St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix.

McIntyre said an investigation is ongoing.

----UPDATE December 21: PHX NEW TIMES---

Marty removed from life support;

Marty Atencio Dead, Blood Tests Show Him Free of Illicit Drugs, Lawyer Says

Grand Jury Resister Jordan Halliday loses appeal

2011-12-17T12:52:00.000-07:00

From: Support Jordan <supportjordan@live.com>

Dear friends,

We sincerely regret to inform that Jordan Halliday lost his appeal thismorning. We have attached the 10th circuits ruling below.

It is crucial that we show solidarity and support for Jordan in every waywe can. We are calling for solidarity actions from January 21st - 28th,2012 to show support for Jordan Halliday and grand juryresistance.

During the summer of 2008, the FBI approached Jordan at his place ofemployment; he refused to answer their questions and told them to leave.They warned him that they would return with a subpoena to testify beforea grand jury and six months later they followed through with theirthreats. They subpoenaed both Jordan, and another 'activist' Nikki Viehlwho chose to testify. Jordan, however, chose to resist the grand jury inprotest due to its abusive and archaic nature.

In March 2009, Jordan appeared before federal grand jury investigating aseries of underground animal liberation activities in Utah. He assertedhis 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. The court jailedJordan for nearly 4 months under civil contempt of court in an effort tocompel him to testify. The day after Jordan refused to testify, the grandjury indicted Alex Hall and William 'BJ' Viehl under the AnimalEnterprise Terrorism Act.

The week following his first grand jury appearance Jordan (still in jail)received a second subpoena, which he again refused. While in jail, Jordanalso received letters of support from all over the world, made friends,and confidently reflected on his decision not to snitch.

Upon release the court charged Jordan with federal criminal contempt ofcourt, to which he pleaded guilty in August 2010.

There are no sentencing guidelines for criminal contempt. However, thegovernment decided to follow the guidelines of "obstruction ofjustice", which has a 10-16 month sentence range. Fortunately, thecourt only sentenced Jordan to the low end of 10 months. However, Jordanand his attorney believed this was far too much, and appealed for aguideline range that more closely relates to his charge. They appealed tothe 10th circuit court of appeals asking that the sentence be reevaluatedunder the guidelines for "failure to appear", which has a 0-6month sentence range.

In November 2011, Jordan's attorney argued his case orally before the10th circuit court of appeals in Denver, Colorado. The feeling ofhostility and bias could be felt from the beginning and in an unusuallyfast ruling (it usually takes 3-6 months to rule), the 10th circuitdenied Jordan's appeal exactly a month and a day after his oral argumentin Denver.

It is ironic to note, that also today, baseball legend Barry Bondsreceived a 30-day house arrest sentence which will likely be reduced forperjury, while lying to a grand jury regarding steroid use in December 3,2003. It's unfortunate that Jordan, who didn't lie, rather just simplyrefused to testify, isn't a celebrity.

United States history to be charged with criminal contempt of court afteralready serving time for civil contempt, for the same act ofrecalcitrance.

Over the past 20 years many animal rights, environmentalists, anarchistsand otherwise radical activists and communities have suffered subpoenasand coercive incarceration, but rarely for more than a few weeks. But atpresent we are experiencing an increase of pressure. Shortly afterJordan's incarceration an Iowa grand jury subpoenaed Carrie Feldman andScott Demuth, and held them in civil contempt for four months.Fortunately, neither Carrie nor Scott has been charged with criminalcontempt.

Jordan's case sets a crucial new precedence in terms of grand juryresistance. While friends and family converge to show support andsolidarity for Jordan in this time of great sadness, we are calling outfor an eruption of many more moments, for acts of recalcitrance anywhereand everywhere, for actions that show solidarity with Jordan Halliday andgrand jury resistance. We are asking that support and solidarity beginimmediately. But we will also be focusing on and asking for massiveglobal solidarity actions from January 21st-28th, 2012.

We are expecting Jordan to begin serving

For More information Visit:
http://www.supportjordan.com

*be advised, we have been suffering server-side issues with thesupport site and are working to address them. If the website fails toload, please keep trying back.

You can also visit his support page via tumblr:http://supportjordan.tumblr.com

Donations can be sent to:
Jordan Halliday
West Jordan, Utah 84081

or via paypal:http://t.co/KgyaXV4G

-Support Jordan Committee

Copy of 10th Circuit Decision:http://www.scribd.com/doc/75893505/10thDenial

Indefinite Detention: Congressional roll call.

2011-12-17T09:29:00.001-07:00

The vote on indefinite detention this week, and the facebook page to resist it...

ASPC-Yuma Deaths in Custody: Eddie Martinez.

2011-12-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

Eddie Martinez was beaten unconscious at APSC-Yuma on December 11, and placed on life support. The death announcement below was posted by the Arizona Department of Corrections late today. Condolences to Eddie's family. Please feel free to contact me if you wish to organize with other families to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, or if you need support fighting the state in court. Do what you need to do to grieve, but know that you don't have to go through it alone.

Peggy Plews
480-580-6807
arizonaprisonwatch@gmail.com

National Defense Authorization Act and Civil Liberties

2011-12-15T23:40:00.004-07:00

Look out, Occupiers and De-colonizers - they have new weapons at the ready for us. Continue to resist - just do so with your eyes wide open...

Abolish the Phoenix Camping Ordinance!

Occupy Phoenix: Day 1.

(October 15, 2011)

------from the huffington post-----

Indefinite Military Detention Measure Passes On Bill Of Rights Day

Michael McAuliff
mike.mcauliff@huffingtonpost.com
Huffington Post
December 15, 2011

WASHINGTON -- The Senate passed a defense bill Thursday that authorizes indefinite detentions of American terrorism suspects, coincidentally acting on the controversial measure on the 220th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights.

The bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, passed 86 to 13 and is expected to be signed quickly by President Obama, who withdrew a veto threat against the bill Wednesday. Six Democrats, six Republicans and one independent opposed the bill.

Though the legislation passed overwhelmingly, several senators argued that it was threatening fundamental provisions of the Bill of Rights, which is celebrated every Dec. 15.

"We as Americans have a right to a speedy trial, not indefinite detention," said Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.). "We as Americans have a right to a jury of our peers, which I would argue is ... not enlisted or military personnel sitting in a jury. You cannot search our businesses or place of business or our homes without probable cause under the Bill of Rights."

"You cannot be deprived of your freedom or your property without due process of law, and that, I would say, is not indefinite detention," added Kirk, who voted for the bill. "I would actually argue that no statute and no Senate and no House can take these rights away from you."

The 13 senators who voted against the bill were Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

Supporters of the bill argued that current U.S. law is a combination of rulings and precedents that already allow indefinite detention of Americans. But they say that granting the military explicit authority to investigate and detain terrorism suspects -- including Americans -- is vital to ensuring the nation can keep up with an adaptable and changing enemy threat.

They point to court rulings that have found detentions of citizens to be proper. But opponents say the issue of grabbing up Americans on U.S. soil and putting them in military detention without trial has never actually been tested by the Supreme Court.

"This provision would for the first time in American history require our military to take custody of certain terrorism suspects in the United States," said Durbin, who was especially concerned with two sections of the bill -- 1021 and 1022 -- and voted "no."

He argued -- citing FBI Director Robert Mueller's opposition to the provisions -- that there was no reason to mess with a system that has worked well since Sept. 11, 2001.

"Since 9/11 our counterterrorism professionals have prevented another attack on the United States, and more than 400 terrorists have successfully been prosecuted and convicted -- prosecuted and convicted -- in federal court," Durbin said. "Why do we want to change this system when it's working so well to keep America safe? The fact that these detainee provisions have caused so many disagreements and such heated debate demonstrates the danger of enacting them into law."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who added an amendment to the bill that specifies the resulting measure would not affect current law regarding citizens, argued that her provision provides protection for Americans.

Nevertheless, in voting for the bill, she also proposed a new bill that she, Durbin, Kirk and others intend to pursue later in hopes of making her interpretation the law.

"I strongly believe that constitutional due process requires that United States citizens apprehended in the United States should never be held in indefinite detention," Feinstein said. "That is what this legislation would accomplish."

Feinstein offered a similar amendment during earlier debate over the $662 billion defense bill, and it failed. It was not clear that this measure would do any better, although she noted that it built on a law signed in 1971 by President Nixon meant to curb abuses such as the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.

The bill requires military treatment for foreign terrorism suspects. Defenders of the bill have pointed to one part of the provisions that say U.S. citizens are "exempted" from the requirement to be detained by the military, but legal scholars note that even though that detention is not required, it is allowed.

President Obama had threatened to veto the measure. But after provisions were added that gave him the final say over which suspects stay in military custody, he relented. Those provisions also ensured that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would still be permitted to investigate and interrogate terrorist suspects. Mueller has called the provisions insufficient, warning that they will create bureaucratic roadblocks in the midst of vital investigations.

Obama could sign sign the bill as soon as Friday.

Civil liberties groups were infuriated that Obama retreated from the veto threat, and called on him to reconsider.

"The NDAA enshrines the war paradigm that has eroded the United States' human rights record and served it so poorly over the past decade as the country's primary counterterrorism tool," said Tom Parker, policy director of Amnesty International USA. "In doing so, the NDAA provides a framework for 'normalizing' indefinite detention and making Guantanamo a permanent feature of American life," he said, referring to a restriction in the measure on closing the Cuba prison for terror suspects.

"By withdrawing his threat to veto the NDAA, President Obama has abandoned yet another principled position with little or nothing to show for it," Parker said. "Amnesty International is appalled -- but regrettably not surprised."

Michael McAuliff covers politics and Congress for the Huffington Post. Talk to him on Facebook.

Copwatch and Anarchists help bring down Sheriff Joe; Homeland Security finally ends 287g with MCSO

2011-12-15T21:09:00.000-07:00

My earlier post was critical that the US Department of Justice hasn't gone far enough to prosecute Joe Arpaio, but my Spacebook community reminds me that a lot of people helped move the feds to act as they did today, and that was no small piece of ground we just took. It led to the decision by Homeland Security to finally cancel the 287g agreement they have with the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO), as noted below by Janet Napolitano.

Without the work as well as the sacrifice of a lot of people - folks who don't put on body armor and guns, but have taken great personal risk nonetheless to document and fight our dear sheriff's crimes - today's DOJ ultimatum to Maricopa County never would have come. So, while I wish we were getting more from the feds (and sooner), I'm grateful to all those in this community that helped get us this far.

Much of the evidence the DOJ and ACLU have against the MCSO - particularly in regards to their practice of racial profiling - was provided by people like Dennis Gilman and a fleet of observers with camcorders (organized by everyone from the unions to PUENTE) trained by Phoenix Copwatch (full of anarchists). Props to the undocumented targets of racism, the UUs and black bloc(kers) alike who turned out for the protests when they were both big and small, to keep Arpaio's criminality and his incompetence in the public eye. Finally, thanks to all those journalists, (left and center) and bloggers who have helped amplify the voice of resistance out here, too, rather than just echo what comes out of the MCSO's propaganda machine.

So, relish this day and what comes of it; let's just not forget that the bigger picture without this one man - the capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy and prison industrial complex that have devastated so many lives and communities - will continue to exist long after he's history. Remember, too, that the DOJ is part of perpetuating tyranny as well...

-----------------------

Statement by Secretary Napolitano on DOJ’s Findings of Discriminatory Policing in Maricopa County

Release Date: December 15, 2011
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010

“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is troubled by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) findings of discriminatory policing practices within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO). Discrimination undermines law enforcement and erodes the public trust. DHS will not be a party to such practices. Accordingly, and effective immediately, DHS is terminating MCSO’s 287(g) jail model agreement and is restricting the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office access to the Secure Communities program. DHS will utilize federal resources for the purpose of identifying and detaining those individuals who meet U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) immigration enforcement priorities. The Department will continue to enforce federal immigration laws in Maricopa County in smart, effective ways that focus our resources on criminal aliens, recent border crossers, repeat and egregious immigration law violators and employers who knowingly hire illegal labor.”

ARPAIO and the DOJ: We want a perp walk.

2011-12-15T15:39:00.000-07:00

The DOJ just released a 22-page letter of findings, concluding that the practices of Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office violate the 1st, 4th, and 14th Amendments to the US Constitution, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and Section 14141 of the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act. The feds threaten a civil suit to convince him to change his ways. It's just a letter, though, not an indictment - never mind the blood dripping from Joe Arpaio's hands.

People have been harassed, detained, arrested, abused, and neglected to death in Arpaio's custody, and yet his treatment of them doesn't appear to be a criminal case - not yet, anyway. I "loitered" in a public park after the posted hours at a protest, though, and immediately did 18 hours in Arpaio's jail. I may face more time yet for my graffiti and activism on behalf of human rights, and he's taking campaign donations as if he's running for office again. Texas Governor Rick Perry even courted good old Sheriff Joe's endorsement for the 2012 Republican presidential ticket...that sure says a lot about Perry's character, doesn't it?

I assume that the letter of the DOJ's findings is addressed to Bill Montgomery, Maricopa County Attorney, because his office will represent the county against any suit the DOJ actually brings (Arpaio's office has a private attorney) - all parties will fight at our expense, of course. Then there are the individual civil suits against the county and Arpaio that will all be bolstered by this finding; And there's the $99 million that he "misappropriated"; this man is costing American taxpayers a fortune.

What Arpaio's term in office has cost us, though, far exceeds the expense involved in both prosecuting and defending him - he also cost the public our safety through his harassment and by clearing real crimes by "exceptional" means. He pursued his racist agenda and employed discriminatory tactics chasing down "aliens" at the expense of solving child sexual abuse cases, rapes and homicides - is it any wonder that so many of the victims his office ignored were children of undocumented latinos?

For the harm he's perpetrated all of our communities - flagrantly violating human and constitutional rights in the process - I want to see that man prosecuted. He owes hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution to his victims and has done violence to people's lives, as far as I'm concerned, but right now the DOJ is just talking about "reform" and "remediation". Someday I hope we have no prisons, but until we come up with a better way to protect the public from racist, abusive and dangerous people, I want to see Joe Arpaio locked away by the feds, not put into outpatient rehab. We have far too many people locked up on drug charges to be squandering resources rehabilitating him. It's time to indict this Criminal Joe - and let our people go.

4th Avenue Jail, Phoenix
Chalk the Police Day 2011

-----from the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division------

Investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office

In June 2008, the Civil Rights Division opened an investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) pursuant to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Following a comprehensive investigation, on December 15, 2011, the Justice Department announced its findings that MCSO has engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal law. The documents on this page provide more information about the investigation, the Justice Department's findings, and next steps.

Findings Letter:

English | Spanish

PHX Anarchist Winter Assembly!

2011-12-14T16:49:00.000-07:00

From our brothers and sisters with the Phoenix Anarchists:

-------------------------

Phoenix Anarchist Winter General Assembly Info Here!

December 7, 2011

By admin

December 17th – Downtown Tempe – The Fixx – 3 PM

Facebook Invite: Phoenix General Assembly

Twitter Hash: #phxanarchist

We will have discussion, food and social events after!

During this time of crisis it is essential that we get together to formulate strategy, have debate and plan for an ever increasing uncertain future. Our ideas are spreading faster than ever, let’s fan the flames!

Proposed topics with more to come include:

- Anarchism, The Global Crisis and Resistance
- Items to act on such as teach ins, social events, demonstrations
- Looking towards to the future, a participatory discussion on what may be coming down the road

We invite all anarchists to come, endorsers so far include:

The Phoenix Class War Council (firesneverextinguished.blogspot.com)
Anarchist Anti-Authoritarian Caucus (At Occupy Phoenix)
www.phoenixanarchist.org

Message us to add your group. Please spread the word through fliers, texts, face to face and any other means available.

Attica guards conspire, assault prisoner

2011-12-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

Art by Lawyer Johnson,who created this piece

while he was wrongfully imprisoned

(from website of the law offices of Howard Friedman)

-------------from WIVB.com----------

4 guards charged with assaulting inmate

WIVB.com Channel 4 (Buffalo, NY)

Updated: Tuesday, 13 Dec 2011, 5:17 PM EST
Published : Tuesday, 13 Dec 2011, 3:46 PM EST

ATTICA, N.Y. (WIVB) - Four corrections officers at the Attica Correctional Facility have been indicted on charges they conspired to and assaulted a prisoner.

The Wyoming County District Attorney's office has charged Keith Swack, 37, of Corfu; Sean Warner, 37, of Belfast; Matthew Raddemacher, 29, of Wyoming; and Erik Hibsch, 28, of Gainesville have been charged with first degree gang assault, fourth degree conspiracy, tampering with physical evidence, and official misconduct...

read the rest at WIVB:

http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/crime/4-guards-charged-with-assaulting-inmate

Occupying, Anarchism, and Living Utopia...

2011-12-13T23:30:00.000-07:00

The link to this documentary was posted tonight to a Spacebook discussion covering anarchism and the Occupy Movement. You'll need about an hour and a half for it, and patience for English subtitles (it's in Spanish) but it's well worth watching for those really interested in anarchy, history, and revolution.

Another AZ Regent profits from prisons: DeConcini and CCA

2011-12-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

I posted details on the whole CCA board awhile ago, but this one bears repeating DeConcini is also (in addition to Anne L. Mariucci) on the AZ Board of Regents, and will help select the next University of Arizona president...

---from Corrections Corporation of America---

Dennis DeConcini

Dennis DeConcini, the former U.S. Senator from Arizona, was elected as an independent member of CCA's Board of Directors in February 2008. Senator DeConcini currently serves as a Director of Ceramic Protection Corporation, a publicly traded company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

He is a partner in the law firm of DeConcini McDonald Yetwin and Lacy in Tucson, Arizona, which he co-founded in 1968. DeConcini also is a Principal in the lobbyist consulting firm Parry, Romani, DeConcini & Lacy P.C. in Washington, D.C. Senator DeConcini served three terms, from January 1977 through January 1995, representing the State of Arizona in the United States Senate. As Senator, he served on the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he chaired the Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service and General Government.

He also served on the Subcommittees of Defense, Foreign Operations, Energy and Water Development, and Interior and Related Agencies. Prior to his service as a U.S. Senator, DeConcini served one elected term as the County Attorney for Pima County, Arizona.

He also is a member of the Arizona Board of Regents, a position to which he was appointed in 2006 by Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Senator DeConcini received his B.A. from the University of Arizona in 1959 and his L.L.D. from there in 1963. He also is a member of the Arizona Board of Regents, a position to which he was appointed in 2006 by Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Senator DeConcini received his B.A. from the University of Arizona in 1959 and his L.L.D. from there in 1963.

-----------from the Tuscon Citizen-----------

Here's the Tucson Citizens' Three Sonorans' reporting on the significance of DeConcini's role on the AZ Board of Regents from August:

UA Presidential search committee headed by CCA board member and former SALC president

by DA Morales on Aug. 16, 2011, under Immigration news

The puzzle becomes clearer as more pieces are put together.

One co-chair of the UA presidential search committee is the former SALC president, and the other is a board member of CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, member of ALEC and one of the groups behind SB1070.

Arizona’s plan for the future seems to be less education funding and more prison funding. We knew this was true of the Republicans, but also of the Democrats?

Consider Arizona’s former Democratic Senator, Dennis DeConcini, who has the Border Patrol’s port of entry in Nogales named after him.

Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest provider of corrections management services to government agencies, announced today that Dennis DeConcini, the former U.S. Senator from Arizona has been elected as an independent member of CCA’s Board of Directors.
“Senator Dennis DeConcini has a distinguished career serving the state of Arizona and the U.S. government,” said William F. Andrews, chairman of CCA’s Board of Directors. “We are extremely pleased to bring Dennis onto our Board. His extensive knowledge and understanding of government, coupled with his experience with other directorship positions, make him ideally suited to help lead management’s initiatives to enhance government’s utilization of public/private partnership in corrections.”

The press release goes on to say:

Senator DeConcini, age 70, is a partner in the law firm of DeConcini McDonald Yetwin and Lacy in Tucson, Arizona, which he co-founded in 1968. DeConcini also is a Principal in the lobbyist consulting firm Parry, Romani, DeConcini & Lacy P.C. in Washington, D.C.

The law firm may look familiar as it is the same law firm that TUSD has hired to defend it against Huppenthal’s ruling which demands the immediate end of Ethnic Studies in Tucson or else TUSD will be faced with 10% budget cut.

Talk about a win-win situation. If the appeal goes down, the likelihood of making more profits for the largest private prison corporation in America increases, and Dennis DeConcini still wins.

Respected Arizona Democrats on the board of CCA, the Arizona Democratic Party having a policy of staying silent on SB1070 and immigration… makes you wonder if it really is a two-headed beast.

JOE ARPAIO PETITION: TIME TO RESIGN

2011-12-13T17:30:00.000-07:00

(better yet, let's see him indicted in office...)

In case the DOJ doesn't come through with any of their indictments, please support this Change.org petition for Joe Arpaio to resign as Maricopa County Sheriff - just keep in mind that if he doesn't leave after getting it
(copies go to him and the County Board of Supervisors), he'll still have insane power as well as all of our names...

I signed it anyway. Go for it if you dare.

"Demand the resignation of Joe Arpaio"

"As Maricopa County Sheriff, Joe Arpaio has failed to protect the public and carry out his duties as an elected official in a Constitutional manner. The latest disclosure that MCSO failed to investigate hundreds of sex-crime cases involving children is just one in a long list of atrocities that have taken place during Arpaio's 20 years in power.

Too many people have died in Arpaio's jails, too many citizens' Constitutional rights have been trampled, too many people have been forced to live in fear of retaliation for daring to challenge the Sheriff's policies. Now is the time to end this reign of terror, abuse and willful disregard for the Arizona and United States Constitution.

It's time for Sheriff Joe Arpaio to resign."

Sincerely,

CRAZY ENOUGH TO SIGN

AZ Regent elected to CCA Board of Directors

2011-12-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

AZ Regent Anne L. Mariucci
For education or incarceration?

Something's wrong with this picture; this is really troubling. It would seem to be a conflict of interest to be on the Arizona Board of Regents while also serving on the board of one of the largest for-profit incarcerators in the world. How can anyone truly committed to higher education not have a conflict with the private prison industry? Hasn't she heard of the school-to-prison pipeline?

---------------------------

WALL STREET JOURNAL - Market Watch

press release

Dec. 9, 2011, 9:00 a.m. EST

Corrections Corporation of America Elects Anne L. Mariucci to Its Board of Directors

NASHVILLE, TN, Dec 09, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) CXW +3.36% , America's leader in partnership corrections and the nation's largest provider of corrections management services to government agencies, announced today that Anne L. Mariucci has been elected as an independent member of CCA's Board of Directors.

"We are very pleased to announce Anne Mariucci as our newest board member. CCA is strongly committed to finding the best people to lead our company and help our industry become an increasingly valuable component of our nation's corrections system," said John Ferguson, chairman of CCA's Board of Directors. "Anne brings a significant amount of real estate knowledge and expertise as well as a strong financial background. I believe her experience, vision and leadership will provide a unique perspective and make her well suited to help oversee management's initiatives and will benefit our organization for years to come."

Ms. Mariucci spent the majority of her career in the large-scale community development and home building business. Anne was employed by Del Webb Corporation from 1984-2003 and served in a variety of senior management capacities, including serving as President following its merger with Pulte Homes Inc., which created the nation's largest homebuilding company. Since 2003, Ms. Mariucci has been affiliated with the private equity firms Hawkeye Partners (Austin, Texas), Inlign Capital Partners (Phoenix, Arizona), and Glencoe Capital (Chicago, Illinois).

Ms. Mariucci received her undergraduate degree in accounting and finance from the University of Arizona and completed the corporate finance program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She presently serves on the Arizona Board of Regents, and is its immediate past-chairman. She also serves as a director of Southwest Gas Company, Scottsdale Healthcare, Arizona State University Foundation, and the Fresh Start Women's Foundation. She is a past director of the Arizona State Retirement System and Action Performance Companies, as well as a past Trustee of the Urban Land Institute.

About the Company

Corrections Corporation of America is the nation's largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities and one of the largest prison operators in the United States, behind only the federal government and three states. We currently operate 66 facilities, including 41 company-owned facilities, with a total design capacity of more than 90,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia. We specialize in owning, operating and managing prisons and other correctional facilities and providing inmate residential and prisoner transportation services for governmental agencies. In addition to providing the fundamental residential services relating to inmates, our facilities offer a variety of rehabilitation and educational programs, including basic education, religious services, life skills and employment training and substance abuse treatment. These services are intended to reduce recidivism and to prepare inmates for their successful re-entry into society upon their release. We also provide health care (including medical, dental and psychiatric services), food services and work and recreational programs.

CCA takes no responsibility for updating the information contained in this press release following the date hereof to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date hereof or the occurrence of unanticipated events or for any changes or modifications made to this press release.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=1826665

Troy's last wish: The beginning of the end of the Death Penalty

2011-12-13T10:15:00.004-07:00

On the execution of Troy Davis

Arizona State University - Hayden lawn

September 21, 2011

---------------from POLITICO--------------

States push to end the death penalty

POLITICO

By: Mackenzie Weinger
December 9, 2011 08:42 AM EST

Could capital punishment be at death’s door in 2012?

That’s the goal for several states next year, say leading anti-death penalty advocates who are making a push to end the controversial practice.

In California, supporters of abolishing the death penalty have gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to place a measure on the November ballot, while activists and lawmakers in Maryland, Kansas, Ohio and Connecticut are gearing up for legislative battles in their states.

Advocates say the coming year could be their best opportunity yet to replace the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole in these states, pointing to shifts in public opinion, rising concern over execution costs, Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s recent decision to place a moratorium on capital punishment, and Troy Davis’s high-profile execution galvanizing opposition to the death penalty. And in California, the drive for a public referendum could get a boost by appearing on the presidential election-year ballot, backers say.

Davis’s controversial case, which spurred protests in Georgia and around the country, was a wake-up call for many Americans, said Diann Rust-Tierney, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s executive director. “That was a sad but stark example to folks of how broken the system is,” Rust-Tierney told POLITICO.

It’s a system that’s not just broken, anti-death penalty activists say, but far too costly.

In California — where capital punishment was passed by the voters over 30 years ago and can only be repealed by referendum — the state’s painful budgetary crisis spells a great opportunity for success in 2012, according to those pushing the measure.

Natasha Minsker of the SAFE California Campaign, the group leading the effort to qualify a measure for the state’s November ballot replacing the death penalty with life without possibility of parole, said a recent study that found California has spent roughly $4 billion to carry out 13 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978 has fired up the repeal effort in a state plagued by terrible financial problems. The staggering $4 billion figure comes from all costs funding the death penalty system in California, including the trials, appeals, death-row housing, healthcare of inmates and the executions themselves.

“More voters now realize that the death penalty is enormously expensive, and we’re in the worst budget crisis ever in California history,” Minsker told POLITICO. “With the economic crisis right now — that Californians are living everyday with terrible budget cuts — people are much more likely to pay attention to the fact that we are wasting money on the death penalty.”

The campaign has collected 240,000 signatures — California requires 504,000 valid signatures for the referendum to make it onto the ballot — and is aiming to submit about 750,000 by the end of February. And, Minsker added, they’ve already got $1.2 million in their coffers from contributions that ranged in size from $5 to $500,000.

“The fact that it’s a presidential election year, we definitely believe a large voter turnout and the more Californian voters voting on the measure is better for us,” Minsker said.

And California, where voters must make the final decision through the referendum process, will also seek to capitalize on the slight swing in public opinion: A Gallup poll conducted just after Davis was executed in September showed support for the death penalty has fallen to a 39-year low nationwide — 61 percent of Americans said they back capital punishment, a three point drop from 2010. Just over half of Americans, or 52 percent, said the death penalty is applied fairly, a six point drop in approval from last year.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports the death penalty, said he doubts most of the repeal efforts will go anywhere in 2012. Anti-death penalty advocates often forget there is still overwhelming public support for capital punishment, he said, and noted that the budgetary argument could soon lose steam as the U.S. economy recovers.

“If they manage to convince the people of their spin that it’s much more expensive — and, more importantly, can’t be fixed — then it has a possibility of passing,” Scheidegger told POLITICO. “It’s a concern given that there’s probably a lot more money on that side than what the supporters of capital punishment can possibly muster.”

Scheidegger also said that he doubts the legislative efforts in the states will lead to repeals in an election year when legislators are afraid of supporting bills that could leave themselves open for being attacked as soft on crime.

Repeal advocates are decidedly more optimistic: The effort in California, as well the campaigns in Connecticut, Maryland, Kansas and Ohio stand a good chance of succeeding next year, Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center said.

“Any or none of those could succeed, but they’re all teed up for this coming year,” Dieter said. “It could be three states, and it would be unusual for one year to produce those results.”

There are currently 34 states with the death penalty and 16 states, as well as D.C., without capital punishment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Connecticut offers a particularly unique case for anti-death penalty advocates: Several representatives have said they will not seek to abolish the death penalty without the men convicted of the brutal murders of a mother and her two daughters in Cheshire receiving their sentences. One man has already been sentenced to death, and jurors handed down the same sentence Friday to the second man.

“We have had at points thought that we had a winning vote, but that case always colors everything,” said Democratic state rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, who will work to push an anti-death penalty bill in the February session.

But 2012 could be a different story without the Cheshire case hanging over legislators’ heads, Connecticut advocates say — several members have said they would be willing to support abolition after the sentencing and Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy has said he would sign the bill into law.

“If those senators keep their word, then we will be able to get it passed,” Ben Jones, executive director of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty, told POLITICO. “2012 will be the year.”

That optimism is mirrored in Maryland, where Democratic Delegate Sandy Rosenberg said he believes that as long as their repeal bill makes it to the floor, state legislators will vote to end the practice. Gov. Martin O’Malley, Democrat and staunch supporter of repeal, has said he will sign such a bill.

“We believe that our count, after the election of 2010, we have the votes, we have the constitutional majority in both houses for repeal,” Rosenberg said. “The key is getting a floor vote in the Senate. We do know we have the votes on the floor, but as of now, we do not have the votes in committee.”

In Kansas, Republican state senator Carolyn McGinn is leading the call for an end to the death penalty. Donna Schneweis of the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty noted that the issue has taken hold across the political spectrum: A bill that would have abolished capital punishment in 2010 garnered support from conservatives, moderates and progressives, but ultimately failed on a 20-20 vote in the state senate. In 2012, supporters say they’ll try again.

Another state that’s looking to make moves in 2012 is Ohio, where a new judicial study commission is looking at how the death penalty is working in the state and there’s currently a bill that would replace executions with life without parole. A state senator is planning to introduce a companion measure, Kevin Werner of Ohioans to Stop Executions added.

In Georgia — where Davis was held on death row and executed after the U.S. Supreme rejected a last minute appeal — advocates aren’t ready to push for full repeal, but they’re looking to capitalize on the energy and momentum from the polarizing case. Kathryn Hamoudah of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty told POLITICO the major reform focus in the state in 2012 stems from the key point in Davis’s case: excluding the use of the death penalty based solely on eyewitness testimony.

“It’s not just about Troy Davis, but I think his case was deeply personal to people not just in Georgia, but all over the world,” Hamoudah said. “People in the south were saying, ‘That could be me, that could be a family member, or that could be a friend.’ It really propelled people to action in a way we’ve never seen before.”

For Jeanne Woodford — who spent 26 years working at San Quentin and five years as the California prison’s warden — ending the death penalty is deeply personal for many of those working in law enforcement.

“People do forget that there is an impact on those of us who are asked to carry out these executions,” said Woodford, who now works as the Executive Director of Death Penalty Focus in California.

Whenever she had to conduct an execution — and she did four for the state of California — Woodford said a staffer would ask if they made the world safer tonight. “We all knew the answer was no,” she said.

Resisting State Violence: Occupy PHX Tie Dye March

2011-12-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, December 10, Occupy Phoenix recognized International Human Rights Day by protesting state violence and police brutality. I was busy down at the Sandra Day O'Connor federal courthouse (4th Ave and W. Washington) for most of the march, making another memorial to dead prisoners....

I missed the most powerful part of the action down at the PHX Police Station, where numerous people gave first-hand testimony of how state and police violence have affected them. We're still waiting for Dennis Gilman's footage, but some video of OP member statements on police brutality can be found here.

I joined OP as they came back down W. Washington, taking the street on their way into the Tamale Festival...

"Whose Streets?!"

W. Washington at 4th Ave, PHOENIX

International Human Rights Day

December 10, 2011

What follows is the account of the Tie Dye March of one of the original Hance Park arrestees from her Spacebook post (thanks for this, Janet):

------------from FACEBOOK------------------

The Tie Dye March

by Janet Higgins on Sunday, 11 December 2011 at 12:48

In honor of International Human Rights Day and to protest Police Brutality, Occupy Phoenix had a Tie Dye March, with tie dye banners stenciled with the faces of human rights leaders such as Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Emma Goldman, Mother Teresa, etc. The banners really were beautiful and everyone got a tie dyed t-shirt or a tie dyed bandana. Bandanas are now essential clothing when protesting in America. When I got down to Cesar Chavez Memorial Plaza in the morning, they were setting up for a festival on Washington St. This weekend is the Tamale Festival, which explains why Occupy Phoenix was raided by the Phoenix Police Department two nights in a row without warning and why people were arrested. They were trying to shut us down before hundreds of people showed up for the Tamale Festival. Some of those people might have seen all the canopies set up right next to them and come over to see what was going on.

Not many people were there when I arrived a little before 10:00, but as time went on, more and more people came. We had close to a hundred people. Too bad we didn’t have the hundreds and hundreds of people who had turned out for the first day. But that’s ok, it was the perfect amount.

When we started our March the police officers told us we had to stay on the sidewalk. Our banners were larger than the sidewalk, so we chanted “Whose streets? Our streets.“ We marched on half the street and left the other half open for traffic. We headed towards the Federal Courthouse and took some group pictures, under the words “The First Duty of Society is Justice.“ Then we headed for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s 4th Avenue Jail. A lot of us have been in that jail, so we know how people are treated there. Some great chants of “Hey Hey Ho Ho Sheriff Joe Has Got To Go.” Always refreshing to make that powerful statement. We passed by the Fox News Building on our way to visit the Phoenix Police Department. We had some choice words for Fox News, despite the fact that no one was home. But, hey, is anyone ever at home at Fox News?

The most powerful segment of the March took place in front of the Phoenix Police Department. It was there that people stood up and told their stories of police brutality. One by one, people used the human microphone or the bullhorn to tell their stories. Many of these stories went back to their childhood. It was extremely painful to hear these stories. My heart broke over and over. I can’t recount the stories, because they were so personal and so painful that just thinking about them brings tears to my eyes. They are on video and their own words are much more powerful than mine. I can only hope that being able to tell these stories to the members of Occupy Phoenix, to people who are caring and compassionate, was a cathartic moment. One woman said, “I’ve only told this story to my boyfriend.”

I wonder what the handful of police officers were thinking as these stories were told. The police helicopter circled overhead for a few minutes. The police had a “hands off” approach, even though there was a paddy wagon waiting, just in case. I guess raiding the encampment two nights in a row had given them their fix.

From the Phoenix Police Department, we headed for the Tamale Festival. We marched right down the center of that festival, chanting “Hey Hey Ho Ho Sheriff Joe Has Got To Go.” We got some thumbs ups, we got some hand slaps, we got a lot of stunned people wondering what was going on. We made an impact. We were noticed. I felt really proud carrying a banner through the Tamale Festival.

The first time I marched I was 17. I marched against the War in Vietnam. If you have never marched in your life, now is the time to do it. This country needs you. This country needs all of us. We must all wrap ourselves around this country and push her into the 21st Century. All hands on deck now. We need you. This is the time and this is the moment. This is the most important moment of our lives. So lace up your shoes, find a march near you, and take your power back.

We are unstoppable. Another world is possible.

Janet Higgins
12/10/11

POLICE VIOLENCE at Occupy ALEC: N30.

2011-12-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

Some scenes of Occupy ALEC actions from independent videographer and activist Dennis Gilman:

c

Police State, USA.

2011-12-10T07:52:00.003-07:00

---------from Huffington Post-------

SWAT Raids, Stun Guns, And Pepper Spray: Why The Government Is Ramping Up The Use Of Force

Posted: 12/ 5/11 11:23 AM ET Radley Balko Huffington Post

In February of last year, video surfaced of a marijuana raid in Columbia, Mo. During the raid on Jonathan Whitworth and his family, police took down the door with a battering ram, then within seconds shot and killed one of Whitworth's dogs and wounded the other. They didn't find enough pot in the house to charge Whitworth with even a misdemeanor. (He was, however, charged with misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia when police found a pipe.) The disturbing video went viral in May 2010, triggering outrage around the world. On Fox News, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer and Bill O'Reilly cautioned not to judge the entire drug war by the video, which they characterized as an isolated incident.

In fact, very little about the raid that was isolated or unusual. For the most part, it was carried out the same way drug warrants are served some 150 times per day in the United States. The battering ram, the execution of Whitworth's dog, the fact that police weren't aware Whitworth's 7-year-old child was in the home before they riddled the place with bullets, the fact that they found only a small amount of pot, likely for personal use -- all are common in drug raids. The only thing unusual was that the raid was recorded by police, then released to the public after an open records request by the Columbia Daily Tribune. It was as if much of the country was seeing for the first time the violence with which the drug war is actually fought. And they didn't like what they saw.

That video came to mind with the outrage and public debate over the now-infamous pepper-spraying of Occupy protesters at the University of California-Davis protest earlier this month. The incident was just one of a number of high-profile uses of force amid crackdowns on Occupy protesters across the country, including one in Oakland in which the skull of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen was fractured by a tear gas canister, and in New York, where NYPD Officer Anthony Bologna pepper-sprayed protesters who had been penned in by police fencing.

But America's police departments have been moving toward more aggressive, force-first, militaristic tactics and their accompanying mindset for 30 years. It's just that, with the exception of protests at the occasional free trade or World Bank summit, the tactics haven't generally been used on mostly white, mostly college-educated kids armed with cellphone cameras and a media platform.

Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture. SWAT teams are featured in countless cop reality shows, and wrong-door raids are the subject of "The Simpsons" bits and search engine commercials. Tough-on-crime sheriffs now sport tanks and hardware more equipped for battle in a war zone than policing city streets. Seemingly benign agencies such as state alcohol control boards and the federal Department of Education can now enforce laws and regulations not with fines and clipboards, but with volatile raids by paramilitary police teams.

Outraged by the Occupy crackdowns, some pundits and political commentators who paid little heed to these issues in the past are now calling for a national discussion on the use of force. That's a welcome development, but it's helpful to review how we got here in order to have an honest discussion.

Part of the trend can be attributed to the broader tough-on-crime and drug war policies pushed by politicians of both parties since at least the early 1980s, but part of the problem also lies with America's political culture. Public officials' decisions today to use force and the amount of force are as governed by political factors as by an honest assessment of the threat a suspect or group may pose. Over the years, both liberals and conservatives have periodically raised alarms over the government's increasing willingness to use disproportionately aggressive force. And over the years, both sides have tended to hush up when the force is applied by political allies, directed at political opponents, or is used to enforce the sorts of laws they favor.

How We Got Here

According to Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska, the number of SWAT raids carried out each year in America has jumped dramatically over the last generation or so, from just a few thousand in the 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s, when Kraska stopped his survey. He found that the vast majority of the increase is attributable to the drug war -- namely warrant service on low-to-mid-level drug offenders. A number of federal policies have driven the trend, including offering domestic police departments military training, allowing training with military organizations, using "troops-to-cops" programs and offering surplus military equipment and weaponry to domestic police police departments for free or at major discounts. There has also been a constant barrage of martial rhetoric from politicians and policymakers.

Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they're fighting a "war," and the consequences are predictable. These policies have taken a toll. Among the victims of increasingly aggressive and militaristic police tactics: Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md., whose dogs were killed when Prince George's County police mistakenly raided his home; 92-year-old Katherine Johnston, who was gunned down by narcotics cops in Atlanta in 2006; 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda, who was killed by Modesto, Calif., police during a drug raid in September 2000; 80-year-old Isaac Singletary, who was shot by undercover narcotics police in 2007 who were attempting to sell drugs from his yard; Jonathan Ayers, a Georgia pastor shot as he tried to flee a gang of narcotics cops who jumped him at a gas station in 2009; Clayton Helriggle, a 23-year-old college student killed during a marijuana raid in Ohio in 2002; and Alberta Spruill, who died of a heart attack after police deployed a flash grenade during a mistaken raid on her Harlem apartment in 2003. Most recently, voting rights activist Barbara Arnwine was raided by a SWAT team in Prince George's County, Md., on Nov. 21. Police were looking for Arnwine's nephew, a suspect in an armed robbery.*

The drug war has been the primary policy driving the trend but, since 2001, the federal government has also used the threat of terror attacks to further militarize domestic law enforcement. This includes not only finding new sources of funding for armor, weapons and gear, but also claiming new powers for the "War on Terror" that are then inevitably used in more routine law enforcement.

But paramilitary creep has also spread well beyond the drug war. In recent years, SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, including one at an American Legion Hall in Dallas. In 2006, Virginia optometrist Sal Culosi was killed when the Fairfax County Police Department sent a SWAT team to arrest him for gambling on football games. SWAT teams are also now used to arrest people suspected of downloading child pornography. Last year, an Austin, Texas, SWAT team broke down a man's door because he was suspected of stealing koi fish from a botanical garden.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article indicated that the police may have raided the wrong house. Arwine initially made that claim when the police didn't immediately produce a search warrant. The Prince George's County Police Department has since unsealed the search warrant, which shows that they were looking for Arwine's nephew. The police say they found evidence that the nephew was living or staying in Arwine's home, as well as evidence of the robbery.

Prison Abolitionist

ALEC watch: protests continue in New Mexico.

New Yorker: Gopnick and the Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

by Adam Gopnik

The New Yorker

January 30, 2012

Beau Hodai: ALEC's persona non grata

Women's health in prison: Breast Cancer Behind Bars

The Trial of Richard Chrisman: Updated Schedule.

Blacking out for SOPA...

Kierland/ALEC protests continue to make news...

The conviction of Tony Lester: A juror's regrets.

Criminalizing youth resistance: Truancy in MESA

Students warned of charges that can stem from skipping school

Mike Stauffer and MCSO brutality

SOPA Watch: Internet Blacklist Legislation

New Year's Eve Noise Action targets Jails and Prisons.

Profiling Sheriff Joe: Class-Action status for latinos in suit

MCSO and Marty Atencio: Video released

The Trial of Peggy Plews (was POSTPONED)

Margaret Jean Plews

M-0741-4401149

POSTPONED UNTIL:

January 26, 2012: 10amPhoenix Municipal Court RM 606300 W. Washington St.Phoenix, AZ 85003

NO LOOP 202: Support Indigenous Resistance!

More MCSO brutality towards latino prisoners...

We received news from an inside source that a Latino inmate at the 4th Avenue Jail is brain dead due to excessive force by detention officers.

-------------------------

Marty removed from life support;

Grand Jury Resister Jordan Halliday loses appeal

Indefinite Detention: Congressional roll call.

ASPC-Yuma Deaths in Custody: Eddie Martinez.

National Defense Authorization Act and Civil Liberties

Copwatch and Anarchists help bring down Sheriff Joe; Homeland Security finally ends 287g with MCSO

ARPAIO and the DOJ: We want a perp walk.

PHX Anarchist Winter Assembly!

Attica guards conspire, assault prisoner

-------------from WIVB.com----------

Occupying, Anarchism, and Living Utopia...

Another AZ Regent profits from prisons: DeConcini and CCA

Dennis DeConcini

JOE ARPAIO PETITION: TIME TO RESIGN

AZ Regent elected to CCA Board of Directors

Troy's last wish: The beginning of the end of the Death Penalty

Resisting State Violence: Occupy PHX Tie Dye March

POLICE VIOLENCE at Occupy ALEC: N30.

Police State, USA.

January 26, 2012: 10am
Phoenix Municipal Court RM 606
300 W. Washington St.
Phoenix, AZ 85003