Here's how Florida's prisons were nearly privatized without anyone knowing about it. In a rather arrogant and high-handed move, Republican lawmakers tucked a secret provision into the budget right at the end of the frenzied 2011 legislative session requiring private companies to take over 29 prisons by January 1st. Of course, it was all intended to union-bust and replace nearly 3800 union employees with minimum-wage private company replacements.

Tallahassee.com:

Turner and Johnson said Sen. JD Alexander, a Lake Wales Republican and budget chairman, placed the privatization language in the budget after the prisons portion had cleared earlier committees that would have opposed the move.

Assistant Attorney General Jon Glogau argued that legislators have wide authority to tell departments how to use appropriated funds. He said the Legislature didn't have to pass a stand-alone statute to privatize prisons because the state has had a law for 20 years allowing the DOC to outsource some prison operations.

How many, and where those prisons will be, is up to the Legislature, Glogau said. He said every budget item embodies some form of policy choice and that House and Senate appropriations committees and subcommittees held many public hearings on all phases of the budget, including the final product.

"Slippery-slope arguments are hyperbole, at best," Glogau said. He said agencies have executive authority to organize, operate and staff their offices most efficiently.

"Privatization of prisons is a unilateral right of the employer," said Glogau. "I don't want to make light of the fact that people are losing their jobs but, under the facts and the case law, it is the unilateral right of the public employer to do this."

That sneaky Senator. After the prison portions cleared committees who might have noticed, much less have agreed to it, he slipped it in there. Despite all the false bravado, there seems to be at least a small concern that it might not be one hundred percent on the level, since the good Governor Scott pressured former Florida Corrections overseer Ed Buss not to testify or give a deposition before the case was heard. Fortunately the unions were paying attention, and took it to court. Last Friday, Judge Jackie Fulford ruled the scheme unconstitutional.

Continue reading »

There was a time in this country where the poor went to poorhouses, where they were treated like chattel and had no real opportunity to pull themselves out of poverty. Progress changed all that. Programs like unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps, and Social Security gave Americans an opportunity to survive with at least a foothold to a better life.

This is what Republicans hate. They want the poor to stay poor, to be enslaved to Republican corporate masters, to be grateful for whatever scraps are tossed their way. With that in mind, consider teabagger racist candidate Carl Paladino's latest proposal:

Paladino laid out several plans that included converting underused state prisons into centers that would house welfare recipients. There, they would do work for the state — "military service, in some cases park service, in other cases public works service," he said — while prison guards would be retrained to work as counselors.

"Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we'll teach people how to earn their check. We'll teach them personal hygiene ... the personal things they don't get when they come from dysfunctional homes," Paladino said.

Of course, this is the same guy that thinks bestiality and racist photoshop jobs are fun to email other people, and has no problem using eminent domain to stop the mosque.

I thought teabaggers believed in less government, not more. But Paladino wants to conscript the poor to work for the state and live in prisons in their off time, use state power to confiscate land and the right to build on that land because he doesn't like the religion of the owners of said land, and has no problem with sharing his somewhat twisted fantasies via email.

Fortunately, Andrew Cuomo has a comfortable lead over both GOP candidates, but if Paladino keeps spouting off this stuff, Cuomo might win by the biggest landslide in New York history.

History Eraser Button: A few photos of stuff the same distance from the World Trade Center as the "Ground Zero Mosque. Hallowed Ground? How can I tell?

The Reality-Based Community: Prisons Without Walls

Whiskey Fire: I am aware of his work

slacktivist: There is no basis in law, principle, doctrine or morality for opposition to the free exercise of religion by Islamic Americans. And their proximity to the Temple of Mammon on Wall Street doesn't change that.

Rising Hegemon: Never Speak Ill of the Dead

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Youandmedoweagree's Blog, Great Big Lies, Reverend Manny and the Twilight Empire

Bill's Big Diamond Blog

In the midst of the all-Rove discussions this weekend, a little reality seeps through. Passing through the blogosphere, I stopped by Riverbend to see if she had weighed in recently from Baghdad. She had. Riverbend reported sadly that another blogger, Khalid Jarrar, author of Tell Me a Secret, had been abducted by “the new Iraqi mukhabarat.”

It’s one thing to read the numbers and the see the faceless stories from Iraq. It’s another to be touched by someone’s words and then to know they’ve been taken off, to God knows where, perhaps to rot in jail, perhaps to worse. You get a glimpse of what someone cares about and what their daily existence is like, then see they’ve offended the authorities your own government has set up. By doing what? By simply writing about their life, or turning the wrong corner at the wrong time on the wrong day. Who knows?

Khalid is a blogger I’ve read off and on. His brother Raed is a prolific blogger and both of them have been good sources of information about daily life in occupied Baghdad since the invasion. Khalid had most recently been in Amman, Jordan. He had finished exams at university in Baghdad and had reported about a mortar blowing up one of his fellow students this May (he had suffered from some student laziness and missed class that day). Before that, there was a car bomb 100 meters away from his family’s home. And before that…well, you get the picture. Go, read his blog.

Khalid had recently posted about using real names in his blog and about transparency, a post that makes me now worry for him. Naturally, he’s been critical of the madness around him.
He is now somewhere in an Iraqi prison. His family is thankful to know he isn’t dead. His brother Raed writes today, “my brother is spending his 6th night in jail. He's just one of the thousands of people in Iraq who disappeared and ended up in one of the many jails and prisons around the country without a clear reason.”

Make Judy Talk    The Talent Show is a prolific blogger and both of them have been good sources of information about daily life in occupied Baghdad since the invasion. Khalid had most recently been in Amman, Jordan. He had finished exams at university in Baghdad and had reported about a mortar blowing up one of his fellow students this May (he had suffered from some student laziness and missed class that day). Before that, there was a car bomb 100 meters away from his family’s home. And before that…well, you get the picture. Go, read his blog.

Khalid had recently posted about using real names in his blog and about transparency, a post that makes me now worry for him. Naturally, he’s been critical of the madness around him.
He is now somewhere in an Iraqi prison. His family is thankful to know he isn’t dead. His brother Raed writes today, “my brother is spending his 6th night in jail. He's just one of the thousands of people in Iraq who disappeared and ended up in one of the many jails and prisons around the country without a clear reason.”

There is a prison in Texas where 15.7% of the inmates were raped in the preceding year alone. Think about that for a second. One in six inmates were raped either by other inmates or those charged with guarding them -- which in that prison alone means there were 470 victims of sexual violence in a 12-month period. In any country that likes to think of itself as a beacon of freedom, this is outrageous and must be stopped.

While the percentage is not quite as significant at other prisons around the country, it is still disgracefully high, especially for those who are violated in the most dehumanizing way possible. This includes over 100,000 men, women and yes -- CHILDREN -- a fact that should be every bit as shocking, embarrassing and downright sickening as those photos from Abu Ghraib.

Well, now seems like the perfect time to do something about this. It is currently Sexual Assault Awareness month, and we are approaching the end of a deadline (June 2010) for the Attorney General to act on recommendations mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), passed in 2003. You want bipartisanship in Washington? I give you a bill that was unanimously passed, co-sponsored by Sens. Teddy Kennedy and Jeff Sessions, and signed into law by George W. Bush. Its standards were created by a bipartisan federal commission upon consultation with corrections officials, criminal justice experts, advocates and prison-rape survivors.

So what can you do to make sure the Obama Administration enacts these common-sense solutions, such as weeding out known predators, ensuring the especially vulnerable receive additional monitoring and increasing the overall transparency of our corrections system by providing independent audits of our prisons? You can quite literally make your voice heard.

How? By adding your public comment to the rising tide of those who realize that whether your issue is improving public health, creating a more just and moral society or saving taxpayer money (think litigation), ensuring Attorney General Holder codifies the federal regulations mandated by the PREA, forthwith, should be a top priority.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that "In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." In the era of interactive media, you needn't be part of the elite to make your voice heard. Every one of us has a weapon in our very own progressive arsenal, our ability to raise our voices quite publicly. So speak up, and become a part of a campaign to further ensure we live in the America we want and deserve.

**I am proud to be a media consultant for Just Detention International

This really is a national disgrace. There are numerous studies linking this epidemic of prison sexual abuse to eventual committing of violent crime, yet there seems to be no concerted or sustained effort to force prisons to deal with it at the source. Every once in a while, some kind of report comes out and there's a big fuss, but nothing changes:

The Justice Department reported Thursday that 12 percent of incarcerated juveniles, or more than 3,200 young people, had been raped or sexually abused in the past year by fellow inmates or prison staff, quantifying for the first time a problem that has long troubled lawmakers and human rights advocates.

The report comes as those advocates say that the Obama administration is moving too slowly on reforms that would reduce rape in U.S. prisons and as corrections officials are pressing Justice to overhaul reform proposals it is reviewing.

Four former commissioners on a blue-ribbon prison rape panel that spent years studying the issue say they fear that authorities are deferring to concerns by corrections officials that reforms would cost too much, while not focusing enough on prison safety and the effects of abuse on inmates.

The study by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported a "very high rate of staff sexual misconduct" against juvenile inmates. It cited two facilities in Virginia and one in Maryland, among others.

"These figures are appalling," said Pat Nolan, president of Justice Fellowship, a group that advocates for prison reform. "We stripped a prisoner of their ability to defend themselves. They can't control where they go; they can't control whether the shower has a light bulb in it."

Continue reading »

Look, we know most of the alleged Al Qaeda detainees are innocent, with far too many of them victims of horrifying tactics like the ones reported in this Raw Story article. Will there ever be justice for them, or will President Obama continue to turn a blind eye to the Bush torture policies? Because with recent reports of a known rendition plane in Birmingham, England, I have to wonder if those policies are still in place:

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is "endemic" to the country's justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, a country he describes as a "totalitarian" state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Suspects in Uzbekistan's gulags "were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."

"I was absolutely stunned -- it changed my whole world view in an instant -- to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn't do the torture ourselves," Murray said.

The labor movement has a soundtrack as rich as its history. "Which Side Are You On" was written in 1931 by Florence Reece, the wife of a union organizer for Kentucky mine workers and has been a favorite for generations. The Almanac Singers (Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell) included it on their 1941 classic Talking Union and Other Union Songs along with Woody Guthrie's "Union Maid" and of course, "Talking Union". When Billy Bragg generously lent his guitar, voice and talents to the cause of striking British mine workers, he rewrote the song's lyrics to reflect the plight of striking miners struggling to keep up the fight in the face of extreme poverty from forgone wages and a largely indifferent public. This performance is from May 1985, shortly after the end of the strike.

Bragg stopped by Brave New Films studios in LA last week to tape an intimate concert and conversation and told stories of going into the fields in England where the mines are located and playing for striking workers, talked about Jail Guitar Doors, an organization he founded that brings guitars into UK and US prisons, and of played a few choice cuts. There were about 20 of us in the room for the taping and it was humbling and inspiring. We'll have video soon.

Duuuuuuuude:

(Massachusetts Congressman Barney) Frank has filed a bill that would eliminate federal penalties for personal possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana.

It would also make the penalty for using marijuana in public just $100.

"I think John Stuart Mill had it right in the 1850s," said Congressman Frank, "when he argued that individuals should have the right to do what they want in private, so long as they don't hurt anyone else. It's a matter of personal liberty. Moreover, our courts are already stressed and our prisons are over-crowded. We don't need to spend our scarce resources prosecuting people who are doing no harm to others."

Frank filed a similar bill last year, but it failed.

The law passed in Massachusetts last November.

Given the general timidity of the majority party and the hay that most certainly would be made by the minority party, I don't have much hope that this sensible and long-due bill will succeed, but more power to Barney Frank.

Why is it that, on the issues that count (Iraq, torture, FISA, secrecy), this administration is so much like the previous one? It really makes me wonder:

The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts.

In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called "sensitive operational information" about the interrogations.

The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union "could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed," Panetta argued.

Although Panetta's statement is in keeping with his previous opposition to the disclosure of other information about the CIA's interrogation policies and practices during George W. Bush's presidency, it represents a new assertion by the Obama administration that the CIA should be allowed to keep such information secret. Bush's critics have long hoped that disclosure would pinpoint responsibility for actions they contend were abusive or illegal.

Last month, President Obama said he would seek to bar the release of photographs being sought by other nonprofit groups that depict abusive interrogations at military prisons during the Bush administration.

Panetta argued that none of the 65 CIA documents immediately at issue, which the ACLU has sought for several years in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, should be released. He asked U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to draw a legal distinction between the administration's release in April of Justice Department memos authorizing the harsh interrogations and the CIA's desire to keep classified its own documents detailing the specific handling of detainees at its secret facilities overseas.

He said that while the Justice Department memos discussed harsh interrogation "in the abstract," the CIA information was "of a qualitatively different nature" because it described the interrogation techniques "as applied in actual operations."