Police departments across the country could soon have access to facial recognition technology in the Breathalyzer tests they give and the body cameras they wear.
The post Public to Be Scanned in Real Time as Police Body Cameras May Soon Get Facial Recognition appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The Louisiana Sheriff"s Association admitted that thousands of inmates have been sitting in jail, awaiting a trial for more than a year.
The post Thousands of People in Only One State have Been in Jail for Over a YEAR and Never Proven Guilty appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A Miami 7-year-old was arrested, kidnapped, and transported to a mental health facility after his teacher claimed he hit her and knocked her down.
The post Police Kidnap 7yo Boy From School, Cuff Him Force Him To Undergo Psych Eval in Mental Hospital appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The DOJ has rescinded a legal guidance that requires courts to stop the imprisonment of poor individuals because they cannot pay court fines and fees.
In the land of the free, citizens found in possession of a plant — that grows wild on every continent except Antarctica — can and will be kidnapped, caged or killed. In fact, in just the short time it took you to click this article and read this first paragraph, someone was just arrested for cannabis.
An estimated 653,249 American citizens — who harmed no one — had their lives ruined in 2016 for possessing this plant, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Crime In the United States (CIUS) report.
“Arresting and citing over half a million people a year for a substance that is objectively safer than alcohol is a travesty,” said Morgan Fox, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP). “Despite a steady shift in public opinion away from marijuana prohibition, and the growing number of states that are regulating marijuana like alcohol, marijuana consumers continue to be treated like criminals throughout the country. This is a shameful waste of resources and can create lifelong consequences for the people arrested.”
Arresting people for cannabis is good for business — police state and big pharma business, that is. If we look at who’s lobbying to keep cops kidnapping people for a plant, we see that it is money, and not morals, that motivates this issue.
The prison-industrial complex makes obscene amounts of money kidnapping otherwise innocent people and throwing them in a cage for possessing a plant. Big pharma is also scared to death of pot because it is a cheaper, safer, and often more effective solution to sicknesses than their chemical alternatives.
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READ MORE: Graphic Video: Cops Shoot Man in the Face in Front of Multiple Witnesses, All Hell Breaks Loose
According to a report out of US News, lobbyists work hard to secure for police departments millions of dollars in federal grants towards eradicating weed. Pharmaceutical companies compensate leading anti-marijuana researchers in order to keep their customers on painkillers over cannabis, which is cheaper. The prison-industrial complex would like to keep making money on building more prisons to fill with non-violent grass-smokers.
It’s not just cops and big pharma either, legal drug distributors in the alcohol and tobacco industries need to keep cannabis illegal in order maintain their monopoly on ‘taking the edge off.’
According to the report, the alcohol and beer industries have also lobbied for years to keep marijuana illegal because they fear the competition that legalized weed would bring. Howard Wooldridge, an anti-drug war activist and retired cop told the online publication Republic Report: “Marijuana and alcohol compete right today as a product to take the edge off the day at six o’clock.”
Despite the myriad of evidence showing the harmful economic and societal impacts of arresting people for cannabis, cops, prisons, big pharma, and the alcohol and tobacco industries continue to push for illegal weed. As they lie about arresting people for a plant in your best interests, the police state is wreaking havoc on liberty, freedom, and the economy. It is deadly too.
While there’s never been a documented overdose from cannabis, if the CDC calculated the number of deaths inflicted by police while enforcing marijuana laws, that number would certainly be shocking and could even be deemed a risk to public health. Marijuana is, indeed, dangerous, but only because of what can happen to you if the police catch you with it — just ask the 653,249 people who had their lives ruined for it last year.
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Nothing highlights the hypocrisy, immorality, and sheer idiocy of the drug war quite like marijuana prohibition. Here we have a medicine that kills cancer cells, saves the lives of countless epileptic children, heals broken bones, relieves pain, treats PTSD, is not dangerous, and exhibits a variety of other incredible benefits – yet the state will kill you over it.
Keeping cannabis illegal also creates more crime.
In the study, titled, “Going to pot? The impact of dispensary closures on crime,” researchers Tom Y. Chang from the USC Marshall School of Business, and Mireille Jacobson from The Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, looked at what happens with the government forced medical marijuana dispensaries to close. What they found was immediately following a closure of a dispensary — crime rates went up.
“Contrary to popular wisdom, we found an immediate increase in crime around dispensaries ordered to close relative to those allowed to remain open,” Jacobson told Science Daily.
Also, in 2001, the Portuguese government decriminalized all drugs, and their crime rate dropped. 16 years later, drug use, crime, and overdoses have drastically declined in Portugal exposing the cruel reality of prohibition.
“Regulating marijuana for adults creates jobs, generates tax revenue, protects consumers, and takes money away from criminals,” Fox said on behalf of MPP. “It is time for the federal government and the rest of the states to stop ruining peoples’ lives and enact sensible marijuana policies.”
We agree.
The good news is that the tide is shifting. As MPP notes, there are currently eight states that regulate marijuana similarly to alcohol for adults, four of which voted to do so in November 2016. Marijuana possession is also legal for adults in the District of Columbia. Twenty-three states and D.C. considered legislation in 2017 to regulate marijuana, including in Vermont where the legislature approved such a measure before the governor vetoed it.
READ MORE: Man Escapes 5 Year Sentence After Dashcam Footage Shows Cops Assaulting Him, Cops Indicted
As more and more states refuse to kidnap and cage marijuana users, the drug war will continue to implode. We must be resilient in this fight.
If doing drugs bothers you, don’t do drugs. When you transition from holding an opinion — to using government violence to enforce your personal preference, you become the bad guy. Please, for all that is good, don’t be the bad guy and do your part to stay on the right side of history.
(ANTIMEDIA) California made headlines last week when Governor Jerry Brown allocated a record $11.4 billion to the state’s corrections department in his May Revision to the budget, translating to $75,560 per individual — the highest per-inmate cost in the nation.
Media outlets ran amok with headlines comparing the costs of imprisonment to tuition at the country’s premier private university.
“That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer,” quipped Don Thompson of the Associated Press.
Yet in consideration of decreasing prison populations and statewide ‘reforms,’ this five-figure sum is more alarming than amusing.
Since 2006, California’s inmate population has gone down by nearly a quarter, due in part to a Supreme Court mandate that found conditions in California’s notoriously overcrowded prisons to be ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ The inmate population further declined after California passed a proposition in 2014 that reduced sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders. Still, the annual corrections budget has continued to increase, with current costs now double what they were in 2005.
But the very same budget report that allocates $11.3 billion to corrections also predicts an additional population decrease of 11,500 inmates over the next four years.
So what gives?
Part of the answer, at least, comes down to prison unions.
“It’s an example of how powerful public-sector unions keep the state from getting spending under control, even when the need for such spending plummets,” wrote Steven Greenhut in an op-ed for the California Policy Center.
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) is one of the most powerful public sector unions in the state. In an article shared on the Prison Activist Resource Center, writer Tim Kowell tracked CCPOA’s massive legacy of influence in a timeline spanning over 50 years.
This includes a $2 million dollar campaign contribution that the CCPOA made to Brown’s gubernatorial bid in 2010, reportedly by funneling the money into independent campaign expenditures. This, CalWatch.org says, made Brown “Prisoner of the Guards Union.”
If the union has Brown in a bind, it could explain why correctional officers in California are the second-highest paid in the nation (the first is New Jersey), earning an average of $70,020/year.
“That’s more than the average salary of an assistant professor with a PhD at the University of California,” Kowell noted.
It’s no wonder, then, that incarceration costs are beginning to resemble the tuition fees of a top-tier university.
Further, as the Associated Press reported, California Correctional Peace Officers Association are currently negotiating the details of a contract that would cost taxpayers more than $1 billion over the next three years.
Nichol Gomez, spokeswoman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association Union, says the extra funds are needed for special programming.
“Vocational, academic, mental health and medical programs are not cheap, but we’re doing our best to provide programs that give people the best chance to succeed once released,” she said in an interview with the Associated Press.
California Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer, who also spoke with the AP, backed Gomez’s claims, attributing the increasing cost to “unique pressures,” such as prison healthcare and remote prisons.
What Palmer and Gomez are describing is consistent with a trend in recent years that has states investing more money in reform and rehabilitation than in prisons themselves. This has lead to the corporate privatization of these social services in what is now being called the “treatment-industrial complex.”
The treatment-industrial complex is similar in theory to the well-known prison-industrial complex. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has explained that “the financial incentive for private prison corporations is to keep people in custody or under some form of supervision for as long as possible at the highest per diem rate possible in order to maximize profits.“
The difference between the two is that instead of privatized carceral facilities, the treatment-industrial complex leads to outsourced social services, including privatized treatment centers and halfway houses.
The main players in the treatment-industrial complex are the very same ones involved in the for-profit prison industry. They are corporations like GEO Group, the second-largest private correctional facilities provider in the U.S. In recent years, they have strategically shifted their focus toward prison alternatives.
As the AFSC reports:
“In 2010, GEO Group acquired BI Incorporated, which makes electronic monitoring products, including GPS ankle bracelet monitors, voice verification technology, and alcohol monitors for individuals on home confinement. The company boasts of its newly reorganized ‘Community Services’ unit, which operates halfway houses, day reporting centers, and juvenile detention facilities. This segment represented 20% of GEO Group’s operations in 2012.”
According to their website, Geo Group owns 101 ‘Residential Reentry” “Day Reporting” facilities nationwide. California alone houses 23 of these sites, the most of any state.
As Politico reported last March, California is one of 25 states that contracts some or all of their correctional health care to private companies.
In last year’s Budget Act, California put aside $25 million for a community-based transitional housing program that “encourages cities and counties to support transitional housing that provides treatment and reentry programming to offenders released from the criminal justice system, and to any other persons who the applicant city or county believes may benefit.”
Notably, Brown’s May revision to the program asserts that “there is no limit on the amount the city or county may provide the facility operator.”
For corporations like Geo Group, this means that ‘rehabilitation’ is turning out to be a lucrative business.
As Michelle Chen of The Nation writes:
“On principle, reducing incarceration is necessary and just. But some activists fear private-sector solutions might pervert prison reform into a neoliberal variation of convict leasing, in which industry and state collude to ‘redeem” society’s undesirables.’”
In terms of the costs to taxpayers, criminal justice analyst Drew Soderborg told the Associated Press that “[r]eal savings won’t come unless the inmate population drops so low that the state can start closing prisons.”
Yet within so many vested interests involved in keeping correctional facilities open, that reality seems far-fetched. Even if prisons were to be shut down, the treatment-industrial complex indicates that the next iteration of for-profit prison institutions is already here, and they are already taking our money.
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The “War on Drugs” has failed so miserably, that now even the head of the Department of Homeland Security is admitting that it is won’t stop the current drug crisis.
DHS Secretary John Kelly testified before Congress on the Trump Administration’s 2018 Homeland Security budget request on Tuesday. He told Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) he believes the current methods used by the United States are a “complete waste of time,” given that fact that there is still such a high demand for the same drugs the U.S. is trying to eliminate.
“If we don’t reduce the drug demand in the United States for heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine, this is all a complete waste of time,” Kelly said. “The bad news for Mexico and the southwest border is, largely because of our drug demand, an incredibly efficient network has developed that stretches, frankly, from around the world, goes through the Western Hemisphere … into the United States.”
Kelly said he believes it is not up to law enforcement to solve the problem. He believes it is up to Hollywood, professional athletes, and even politicians, to influence society to turn to a more holistic approach.
“We’ve got to take a much more holistic approach to this [drug problem], demand reduction, rehabilitation,” Kelly said. “Certainly law enforcement plays a role in the homeland. The southwest border plays a role.”
Kelly told Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) that his primary strategy revolves around restrictions on “precursor drugs.”
“The United States wants to try to kill themselves with methamphetamine, heck, we can do it for them,” Kelly said. “Congressional action in terms of restricting the precursors—that’s primarily, in my view, the solution to the problem.”
While Kelly has not pushed for decriminalizing all drugs, or even specifically ending marijuana prohibition, his comments do set him apart from other prominent figures in the Trump Administration.
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Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has a reputation for being one of the most anti-marijuana members of Congress. His voting record includes evidence that he is a vocal advocate for the federal government interfering with state laws on marijuana legalization, and that he is against Veterans Affairs doctors having the right to recommend medical marijuana to veterans who might benefit from it.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is also a strong advocate for the federal government increasing the “War on Drugs,” despite its track record. He even went as far as to say that “good people don’t smoke marijuana” during a Senate hearing in April 2016.
“I can’t tell you how concerning it is for me, emotionally and personally, to see the possibility that we will reverse the progress that we’ve made,” Sessions said. “It was the prevention movement that really was so positive, and it led to this decline. The creating of knowledge that this drug is dangerous, it cannot be played with, it is not funny, it’s not something to laugh about, and trying to send that message with clarity, that good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
Kelly made headlines in April, when he told Meet The Press that he believes filling prisons with nonviolent offenders arrested on drug charges won’t solve the drug crisis.
“The solution is not arresting a lot of users,” Kelly said. “The solution is a comprehensive drug demand reduction program in the United States that involves every man and woman of goodwill. And then rehabilitation.”
Kelly also said marijuana, which is listed as a Schedule 1 drug in the U.S., is not a factor. Hoe noted that the use of drugs such as meth, heroin and cocaine led to over 52,000 deaths in 2015.
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“Marijuana is not a factor in the drug war,” Kelly said. “Drug consumption in the United States is the problem, just cocaine alone when you consider the massive amounts of profit that come out of the United States.”
Law Enforcement Officer deaths by firearm are down slightly through May 20th, as compared to this time last year. In 2016, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), 18 officers were killed by firearms.
So far this year, only 17 officers have been killed by firearms. With nearly one million sworn officers in the U.S., the preliminary report may be welcomed news to officers everywhere. Unfortunately, however, an epidemic of officer-involved shootings persists.
The NLEOMF has been tracking police officer deaths for decades now. Their mission statement reads in part, “Founded in 1984, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund is dedicated to telling the story of American Law Enforcement and making it safer for those who serve.” Unfortunately, in 2017 a surge of officers dying accidentally has been observed.
Total Fatalities: 51—↑ 42%
Firearms-related: 17—↓ 6%
Traffic-related: 22—↑ 69%
Other Causes: 12—↑ 140%
While firearms-related officer deaths are down across the nation, traffic-related and other causes for death, like heart attacks, appear to have skyrocketed. Also, not all of the firearms-related deaths can be attributed to shootouts with bad guys, presumably, as death by friendly fire is also included in that category. We contacted the NLEOMF who confirmed suicides by cops either on or off-duty were not recorded in the publication.
Although 2016 was a tragic year for law enforcement (as several officers were targeted in planned ambushes…NLEOMF noted the 7/7/16 killings of 5 Dallas PD officers), it can hardly reflect a war on police officers as some members of the media may want it to seem. During times of war and most notably, during prohibition, police officer deaths have skyrocketed, rising above the 300 mark during the height of state’s war on alcohol.
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That fact, alone, is enough for those who care about police officer safety to consider becoming anti-war, and even stand against the failed War on Drugs which has led to the United States having a large prison population than any other developed country on earth.
In 2016, 64 officers were shot and killed, 21 of those dying in ambushes. Contrasting those statistics published by the NLEOMF are citizen-led organizations who track the number of people killed by police in the line of duty. Killed by Police tracks the number of officer-involved shootings which lead to someone’s death.
From Jan. 1 to May 20th of 2017, KBP has documented 453 deaths by cop, many of whom as TFTP has reported, were unarmed at the time of their deaths. Several officers in 2017 have already been charged with homicide, with more charges coming for investigations which have not yet concluded.
Deaths by cop are equal to 2016. From January 1-May 20th of 2016, 453 deaths by cop were documented by KBP, an organization which depends largely on news reports for its source work. As TFTP has reported, 2017 is the first year the FBI has tracked the death by cop statistics, depending upon voluntary reporting by law enforcement agencies (LEA). Many fear the number of those killed by cops are much higher and simply don’t get reported in the news.
Worth noting is the fact both the NLEOMF and the DBC statistics both pale in comparison to the number of Americans killed by criminals. While we are still waiting on 2016’s official numbers, there were 15,696 murders in 2015, with guns being used in nearly 3/4ths of those killings.
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Both organizations, one which tracks officer deaths, and the one which tracks those killed by cops, have equally important tasks. Being a police officer in the United States is a dangerous job, but certainly not the most dangerous.
There are a great number of occupations and professions which are much more dangerous than being a police officer, the most dangerous of which is being a truck driver. Nearly 800 truck drivers died in their line of work. Construction worker deaths (mostly Latino) come in second.
And there’s certainly no war on cops. There is, however, as some have called it, a staggering phenomena taking place in law enforcement; nearly 1,200 people are being killed by police every year.
As NLEOMF reported, it’s more dangerous for police officers who are responding in their vehicles to calls for backup, than it is for them to be confronted with someone suspected of being armed. From 2011-2015, 167 officers died in automobile accidents. Almost fifty percent (49%) of the officers who were killed in those automobile accidents died in single car accidents, their own, presumably from driving recklessly or going too fast.
Charleston, SC — Dylann Roof’s mental state was hidden from jurors, according to a November report which concluded Roof suffered from delusions of grandeur and was identified as autistic. Roof was convicted in the killing of nine Black parishioners in 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.
Make no mistake, Dylann Roof is a deranged mass murderer who slaughtered innocent people in cold blood. He deserves to die a horrid death. However, as noted below, there is a lot more to this story than what’s on the surface.
The new details about Roof’s mental state were recently unsealed. According to CNN, “The revelations came after US District Judge Richard Gergel unsealed 19 documents from competency hearings that help paint a picture of the 23-year-old’s mental state both as a teen and while he was being held in prison after the church massacre.”
Gergel halted jury selection for his trial in November to allow for a complete competency to stand trial evaluation to be conducted. Following the evaluation, jury selection resumed and in January Roof was found guilty. He was given the death penalty after pleading guilty to a long list of charges. He’s been sentenced to death for the murders of nine innocent people who’d met for Bible study at their church.
Roof reportedly told a defense team physician he’d never be executed because in his words he’d, “be rescued by white nationalists after they took over the government.” The reports go on to say he exhibited, “psychiatric symptoms that are not explained by autism spectrum disorder, including anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, disordered thinking, and psychosis (including delusions of grandeur and somatic delusions).”
Adding to his psychiatric diagnosis, his autism, and his belief he suffered from unexplained illnesses such as thyroid disease (somatic delusions), was the conclusion the mass-murderer was also schizophrenic. “It is my impression that it is too early to predict his psychiatric trajectory…but his symptoms appear to me to be consistent with the schizophrenia spectrum,” Dr. Rachel Loftin wrote.
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At the time of the killings the crime was largely considered a hate crime, White on Black, leading many politicians, including former President Barack H. Obama to visit the area, express outrage, demand calls for justice, and attend prayer vigils and memorial services.
Obama made the following statement;
The fact that this took place in a black church obviously also raises questions about a dark part of our history. This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked, and we know the hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.
At one point in the aftermath, the former president even sang the song “Amazing Grace” in an apparent attempt to bring healing to a community affected by someone many proclaimed was a racist.
Many mainstream media outlets painted Roof as a cold-hearted racist who hated Black people, even though many of his Black friends denied such characterizations. The George Soros-funded Southern Poverty Law Center even called him a “disaffected white supremacist”.
But now a new picture is emerging of the killer; not one of a racist but, rather, a deranged man who was, according to court documents, autistic, schizophrenic, and suffering from psychosis. Roof, however, wants to be known as a “sociopath” saying to label him as autistic was to equate him with “nerds.” “Nerds and losers have autism. Don’t tell me I have autism,” he told autism expert and William & Mary Professor John Elder Robison.
“I appreciate you coming here, but I don’t need your help. I’m not autistic. There’s nothing wrong with me. The state psychiatrist told me there’s nothing wrong with me. He said I don’t have autism. I’m just a sociopath,” Roof proclaimed to the psychologist.
“I’m going to get pardoned in four or five years. This doesn’t matter. Please don’t come and testify for me. I don’t need or want you here,” he implored.
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Robison believed strongly Roof was suffering from embarrassment with the thought he might be labeled autistic. He made several observations which led him to believe Roof was truly autistic.
After meeting with Roof on November 5th, he prepared a statement under oath, for Roof’s defense attorneys. Robison detailed why he arrived at his conclusions and the concerns his defense team should have moving forward in his case.
Robison’s conclusion was consistent with Roof’s attorney’s requests that he be given special accommodations during his court proceedings.
CNN also detailed the fact Roof was taking antidepressants before the mass murder. As The Free Thought Project has reported on numerous occasions, antidepressants are known to cause suicide and homicides in some individuals.
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While it was known that Roof was abusing suboxone at the time of the murders, the admission of antidepressant use is significant.
Unsealing Roof’s court documents, which revealed not only that he was autistic but was also taking antidepressants, should result in a larger discussion about not only the safety of antidepressants but also a long overdue conversation about the number of mass murderers who were on them.
Suicide, birth defects, heart problems, hostility, violence, aggression, hallucinations, self-harm, delusional thinking, homicidal ideation, and death are just a few of the side effects caused by the medication Roof was reportedly taking.
There have been 150 studies in 17 countries on antidepressant-induced side effects. There have been 134 drug regulatory agency warnings from 11 countries and the EU warning about the dangerous side effects of antidepressants.
Despite this deadly laundry list of potential reactions to these medications, their use has skyrocketed by 400% since 1988.
Currently, 11 percent of all Americans 12 years of age and over take antidepressant medication, which is a higher rate than all other countries in the world.
There are certainly people of all ages that can benefit from certain prescription medication. However, the most worrisome aspect of Roof’s ties to this medication is that the majority of mass shooters in recent U.S. history have links to these same meds.
Unfortunately, the fact that this deranged individual was on a drug that contributes to thousands of suicides, killings, and now mass murder will be glazed over and barely register as a blip in the media.
Disclaimer: While CNN did provide links to Robison’s documents conferring a diagnosis of autism, they did not provide any links to Roof claiming “White nationalists” would rescue him. The original source material for that allegation cannot be located.
A jury has found probable cause to bring criminal charges against seven jailhouse employees in the dehydration death of Terrill Thomas. As TFTP reported last week, Thomas’ death was the subject of an official inquest into the circumstances surrounding the decedent and who, if anyone, might have caused his death. The inquest is over and the jury has determined charges could be filed with probable cause.
Immediately after hearing the advisory verdict, Thomas’ family rejoiced over the potential for justice.
Thomas, a mentally ill inmate, had been placed in solitary confinement for seven days. Throughout his time in his jail cell, it was reported not once was he allowed the customary one hour of free time in the yard. Worse still, he wasn’t given any water. Apparently, his water had been turned off, no one turned it back on, and he died as a result.
The Milwaukee district attorney John Chisholm will have the final say so as to whether or not charges will officially be filed against the seven who’ve been identified. We at TFTP will keep you posted with any updates to this story, but it appears justice may indeed be served in Thomas’ shameful death, a passing which arguably was entirely preventable.
After hearing from nine jail employees, NBC News reported the jury deliberated for two hours before recommending charges be filed with one simple word, “Yes.” The jury’s decision that charges can and should be filed will certainly bring some sense that justice will be done, is a welcomed sight.
“I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy…it’ll take you away. I feel like I passed away, losing my father. I don’t have him anymore. I’m not going to be who I used to be,” said Terrill Barns, Thomas’ son. The family is also confident Chisholm will follow through with filing charges against the employees who will have to give an account for their alleged dereliction of duty.
Sheriff David Clarke — whose jail Thomas was dehydrated to death in — responded to the inquest saying the following on Facebook:
“This is part of a process. I respect the process. Jury recommendations are just that. The next step in the process is for DA Chisholm to decide if actual charges will be brought forth. There will be no speculation of what will happen until it happens.”
Unfortunately, we at TFTP wish it were an isolated incident but it seems jails all across the country are now using water as a reward/punishment. Just this week, we reported on the eerily similar case of Madison Jenson, who may have died from intentional dehydration for not being given intravenous fluids after having diarrhea and nausea for days on end.
Jenson requested medical assistance but never received it. She, too, was neglected. Her father called for everyone in the jail to be fired as well as the sheriff. Jenson’s family can rest assured, with the attention Thomas’ case is receiving, his lawyers are likely watching very closely to those proceedings and will demand equal attention be given to her case as well.
Although Jenson’s death happened in Utah and not in Wisconsin, the news that yet another person has died from dehydration should sound the alarm bells for jails all across the country to at least make sure every inmate’s basic needs are being met. That means water for every prisoner, whenever they damn well ask for it. We at TFTP will continue to hold law enforcement accountable for heinous actions such as these.
Milwaukee, WI — There’s very little doubt among critics as to whether or not solitary confinement is torture. Nevertheless, the practice continues throughout many of the nation’s prisons. But when solitary confinement is combined with deprivation of the basic necessities of life, like water, a murder can take place. That’s what many people are calling what happened at the Milwaukee County Jail to Terrill Thomas.
According to the Journal Sentinel, “Thomas started the weeklong stretch at the Milwaukee County Jail belligerent and loud, the result of an untreated mental illness, prosecutors said. But as the days wore on, he grew weak and dehydrated. He lost nearly 35 pounds and turned quiet, never asking for or receiving medical attention.”
After entering his eighth day without water, Thomas succumbed to his dehydration and passed away in his jail cell where personnel found him unresponsive. The incident took place in April of 2016, but today decisions are being made regarding who was culpable in his death.
Milwaukee prosecutors are conducting an inquest into whether or not charges should be filed against those government employees who were supposed to keep him safe, as well as healthy.
The Sentinel described the inquest and what it entails as “a rarely used legal process that allows prosecutors to question witnesses under oath and in front of a jury before they file any criminal charges. The jury then returns a unanimous verdict as to whether there’s probable cause to charge anybody, and what those charges should be.”
READ MORE: Mentally Ill Man Jailed for Stealing $5 Worth of Food, Tortured & Starved to Death in Prison -- Lawsuit
In essence, the prosecution is afforded the opportunity to conduct the kind of inquisitive work police detectives are accustomed to doing. Prosecutors don’t have to follow the jury’s verdict. However, so the ultimate determination of whether or not to file charges, and against whom those charges should be filed, is a decision they’ll ultimately make.
According to the Sentinel, other inmates had complained about their access to water while incarcerated. But Thomas, according to his family, was really too sick to complain about his need for hydration.
Before dying on his jail cell floor, he suffered severely from bipolar disorder. His family said he was suffering through the throes of a manic episode which led him to allegedly shoot a man and fire into Potawatomi Casino.
Milwaukee County Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Wieslawa Tlomak, who performed the autopsy following Thomas’ death, testified in court she could not determine he’d had any access to water during his time in solitary confinement. Prosecutors also interviewed
Prosecutors also interviewed Decorie Smith, an officer who worked three overnight shifts on Thomas’ wing in the county jail. He told prosecutors when he testified on Monday that he was never informed Thomas’ water was off and Thomas never asked for water during his eight days locked up.
It’s also believed Thomas never left his jail cell during his last days on earth, even though it’s customary to allow inmates in solitary at least one hour outside of their cells daily.
While Thomas’ story is tragic, it’s, unfortunately, reflective of the inhumane practices taking place in the United States. As TFTP has reported on numerous occasions, jails and prisons in America can hardly be considered a safe place to pay one’s debts to society.
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Prison guards are often abusive with impunity, inmates are sometimes murdered intentionally, and now comes this story which seems to indicate even life-sustaining water is being withheld, possibly even used to punish inmates for some perceived misbehavior. Not even animal shelters do that to dogs destined for euthanasia.
If you’re old enough to remember Fat Albert, Happy Days, and School House Rock, you’ll probably be able to recall Partnership for America’s propaganda video attempting to equate the taking of drugs with the frying of an egg. Here’s the 1987 segment, which relied heavily on the sensation of burning, to communicate its message.
Fast-forward to the twentieth century, to 1998, and the organization was still attempting to scare people out of doing drugs. “Generation X” as they were known, the first generation of kids whose parents had gone through the 70’s drug craze, seemed to be more scared of AIDS than they were of drugs, but the ad campaigns continued nonetheless.
That era’s iteration of “your brain on drugs” propaganda turned its focus from what was certainly a concern with LSD and marijuana in the 1980’s, to the dangers of heroin in the 1990’s. Here’s the segment featuring actress Rachel Leigh Cook. The preceding generation dealt with a frying egg, but the 90’s were confronted with a destructive cast-iron skillet which destroyed everything in the kitchen. Here’s the segment, some have considered a powerful, true-to-life representation of what heroin addiction can do to a life and to those around a heroin addict.
But in the year 2017, Americans possess more awareness, appear to be more observant, and hold on to what seems to be a deeper capacity for thinking for themselves. Instead of looking at drugs like something as cut and dry as frying an egg in a pan, or a substance which causes total destruction to everything and everyone around them, they finally can see the bigger picture. The War on Drugs isn’t working.
Rachel Leigh Cook, the actress in the original plate-smashing heroin advertisement, represents the free-thinking individuals who’re now questioning their role in the War on Drugs. On April 20th, 2017, Cook released an alternate version of the original ad she helped create in 1997. This time, Cook reveals what really happens, who wins, and who loses, when someone gets arrested for possession of drugs.
Cook tackles the bigger picture of the prison industrial complex, the jailing and imprisoning of 10 percent of America’s population, the wholesale criminalizing of marijuana users, the revenue-fueled police state, and the damage it does to a drug user’s future, who just so happens to get caught with drugs.
Users who get caught with drugs face shame in the general population, aren’t allowed to get funding to go to college, carry their arrest record around with them for the rest of their lives, and have an extremely hard time finding employment. This time, Cook’s community service announcement focuses on the damage done by the government’s decades-old “War on Drugs.”
Often, when we feature a video, we narrate the scenes, in somewhat of a play by play description. But Cook’s remake of her graphic “Brain on Drugs” film is so powerful, words written on a page simply aren’t enough to convey the sentiments and emotions expressed and impacted by the production. So, it’s best that you have a look for yourself. Let us know what you think by commenting below the video. Has the war on drugs worked? You decide. Here’s Cook’s latest release. Ms. Cook, we salute you.
The production was made by the Drug Policy Alliance, and underscores the real losers in the War on Drugs, those individuals who’ve paid their debts to society for breaking the law, but for whom the effects are life-long. It’s time we end the useless War on Drugs and replace it with a more humane way of dealing with drug users which is treatment centered instead of punitive-based. Any questions?
If mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and mandatory minimum sentencing were not enough of an affront to society, it was recently reported that top federal prison officials received millions in bonuses – despite that fact that federal prisons are mired in scandal and corruption.
USA Today reports:
“The U.S. Bureau of Prisons paid more than $2 million in bonuses to top administrators and wardens during the past three years while the agency was confronting persistent overcrowding, sub-par inmate medical care, chronic staffing shortages and a lurid sexual harassment lawsuit that engulfed its largest institution, according to government records and court documents.
The awards ranged from a $7,000 payment last year to a D.C. administrator, to $28,000 to the agency’s acting director Thomas Kane, and $25,500 for Deborah Schult, assistant director of the Health Services Division. The bulk of the payments, nearly $1 million, were approved last year and amounted to almost double the combined amounts in the previous two years.”
Prison staffers are outraged that their bosses – who did virtually nothing to stop pervasive sexual harassment from inmates over the course of 16 years – are receiving “performance awards,” even as their lawsuit is pending a settlement.
“These people got bonuses off the backs of people who were actually dealing with the predators,” said Sandra Parr, a vice president of the national union of prison workers. She went on to say that top agency officials “chose to ignore it,” which allowed the problem to spiral out of control.
In a private business setting, bonuses are effective incentives to encourage the highest quality work and the desire to improve the product or service. However, in a federal bureaucracy, it’s just a waste of taxpayer money to reward negligence and incompetence.
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None of the officials involved in the scandal has responded to an inquiry from USA Today, but a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons said the bonuses were given as a “strengthening of our (senior executive services).” But the rationale for each “performance award” will not be released.
Tamyra Jarvis, the warden at a Coleman, FL prison embroiled in the sexual harassment scandal, was given $34,500 over the past two years before retiring. The Coleman prison is a primary subject of the lawsuit brought by staffers.
“During the course of the case, which featured allegations that inmates routinely masturbated in front of female workers and threatened them with rape, victims’ attorneys and union officials argued that for years bureau managers and top administrators did little or nothing to intervene.
According to court documents, prison managers routinely either destroyed incident reports detailing the inmate conduct or disregarded the complaints altogether. In one case in which an inmate got close enough to ejaculate on a staffer’s leg, a manager acknowledged “shredding” the staffer’s complaint because the staffer could not positively identify the substance as semen since she was “not medical personnel.”
Besides the problem of rampant sexual harassment, federal prisons are plagued by inadequate medical care and “crisis level” staffing shortages. An Inspector General report found that some prisons had a 40 percent or more vacancy rate, citing the inability to compete with the private sector in recruiting medical staff.
Unfortunately, this comes as no surprise to learn that a federal agency known as the Bureau of Prisons is the cause of needless suffering. The agency thrives on mass incarceration, throwing people in cages for victimless crimes.
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According to its own statistics, almost half (46.3%) of federal inmates are in prison for “drug offenses,” which is a product of federal government’s inhumane, archaic War on Drugs. The drug war, borne of racism and quelling antiwar dissent, helps no one except the agencies and law enforcement who profit from it.
Despite everything we know, the new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, has promised to ramp up the drug war and pursue mandatory minimum sentencing, thus exacerbating the problem of mass incarceration and the injustice of locking people up for victimless crimes.
Bakersfield, CA — After enduring years of sexual assault and abuse — including at least one incident which took place in the presence of her disabled child — a mother of three filed a lawsuit against her former probation officer.
Ben Meiselas, the unnamed woman’s attorney, told Courthouse News the repetitive assaults the victim endured were “sickening and horrific.”
“We filed this lawsuit because [Doe] was brutally sexually assaulted over the course of several years by a now former-parole officer who held a position of trust and control and abused that authority,” Meiselas explained. “It’s clear to us that the parole office was complicit and turned a blind eye to the brutal sexual abuse.”
Courthouse News reports former Kern County probation officer Reyes Soberon Jr. pled no contest to the sexual assaults of the mother, who will not be named in this report to protect the identity of her children, and two other victims, late last year.
Soberon received six months in jail and three years probation “for touching a person intimately against their will for sexual arousal.”
Court documents claim the former officer “brutally” and “methodically” assaulted the woman beginning around April 2012, and didn’t cease until June 2015.
“Soberon would mislead [Doe] into coming into the probation office and would take [Doe] to a corner where he would digitally penetrate her vagina and anus while sticking his tongue down her throat, moaning: ‘I want you to make me cum in my pants,’” the woman’s 10-page complaint states.
“In one horrific instance, Soberon sexually assaulted [Doe] in her home in front of her disabled son suffering from cerebral palsy as he lay helpless, crawling on the ground.”
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Soberon, the woman claims, threatened to “put her in jail for the rest of her life” if she rejected his unwanted advances — which caused her to fear for life and those of her three children.
Assaults continued until one day in 2015, when the woman received an unexpected visit from a female probation officer who sought to arrest her for violating orders to perform community service — a violation which should not have occurred, as Soberon had vowed to allow an extension.
Upon confiscating the woman’s phone, however, the officer discovered Soberon’s text messages calling her “sexy mamacita” and “baby doll” — and abruptly left without further comment, according to the complaint.
“Soon afterward,” Courthouse News reports, “Soberon started calling the woman and threatening to kill her. Emboldened despite this escalation, she told the probation department what was going on. But instead of taking her seriously, she claims the department tried to dissuade her from reporting him and let Soberon continue supervising her probation though he was not officially assigned to her.
“Worse yet, the department’s internal affairs officials told the woman she could not hire an attorney, talk to the media or contact the FBI about her report or the assaults, according to the complaint.”
Throughout the duration of her ordeal, the woman says the now-former officer repeatedly invented excuses to be in her presence and continue the sexual assaults. Seemingly left without recourse to stop the ongoing abuse, she says she “lived in constant fear, believing that Soberon was free to continue molesting her.”
It wasn’t until the woman was subpoenaed to appear at Soberon’s criminal case she learned he had been arrested months before in December 2015.
As Meiselas described, simply attempting to bring the woman justice by filing appropriate documentation with the court exposed startling obstacles — in particular, the treatment of sexual assault victims and the rejection of the woman’s status as disabled from the trauma suffered.
According to Courthouse News, Meiselas says his client “first filed a government late claim two months after the deadline. Though she has post-traumatic stress disorder from being raped, the county denied her petition for a late file though the Government Tort Claims Act states the county must permit a filing if the individual suffers a disability or did not file due to excusable neglect.”
“One of the biggest scandals here is that a Kern Superior Court commissioner found that PTSD from rape does not equal a disability,” the attorney asserted. “Lawyers who file late can get a pass, but sexual assault victims get thrown in the gutter? That ruling shocks the conscience.”
Kuge and other officials not only knew about Soberon’s wrongdoing, but tried to cover up the scandal by pressuring her not to tell anyone what was happening, the complaint states.
Courthouse News notes that as of Monday, Kuge was no longer listed as the chief probation officer on the department’s webpage. Officials declined to comment, telling the outlet the woman’s complaint had not yet been reviewed.
Kern County, the Kern County probation department, former officer Reyes Soberon, Jr., and Chief Probation Officer David M. Kuge are all named in the lawsuit.
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For this gross violation of her civil rights, the woman seeks general, special, and punitive damages through the lawsuit.
This egregious case shows not only a horrendous violation of trust between law enforcement and the public, but, as described in the suit, an inexcusable attempt to cover up wrongdoing — while re-victimizing a mother of three, and potentially others, in the process.
Monroe Gordon Piland III (69) has lived an amazing life according to some estimates. In the late 1960’s early 70’s, Piland served as a naval officer, during the Vietnam war. Upon his return to the states, he earned a degree in nutrition from The University of California – Berkeley, and later a medical degree from the prestigious Wake Forest University, formerly a Southern Baptist university. He completed his medical residency in Elizabeth City, NC, and was a board certified medical doctor from 1979-1984. Somewhere along the way, Piland discovered the healing properties of marijuana, a known fact which has been well established in medical journals since before the time Piland became a medical doctor. But that’s also the same time Piland began to have trouble with the law. Now a victim of the war on drugs and a soon to be resident inside the Prison Industrial Complex, Piland will likely die in prison, all because he simply believes the so-called authorities do not have the god-given authority to criminalize the possession and distribution of a plant, something he equates to blasphemy.
In 1979, the doctor began cultivating marijuana on Hatteras Island to use in treating his patients. Hatteras Island is home to few residents, and in the late 1970’s there were even less who called the North Carolina island their home. Piland successfully grew 111 marijuana plants, which he said was going to be used in his medical practice. The former naval officer, turned medical doctor, turned cannabis advocate, was truly one of the first medical marijuana pioneers, putting his medical practice on the line to bring healing to his NC community. But all that changed when he was charged with possession of a controlled substance.
According to the Citizen-Times, “in the early 1980s, when he was found guilty of growing 111 marijuana plants on his property on Hatteras Island and sentenced to 111 hours in jail, 111 hours of community service and a $1,110 fine,” arguably a slap on the wrist in light of the peril he’s now facing. “It was taken from me because I didn’t recant,” Piland said about the loss of his medical license.
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Piland says he’s currently working on a “therapy based on flower essences” and added, “I never stopped telling people what I see as the truth about their health.”
After he lost his medical license in the early 1980’s, he moved to Candler, NC, an equally rural area of Western, NC. For decades, he’s been able to fly under the radar of authorities, presumably continuing his research with cannabis. But that all changed when he apparently married the wrong woman who took him to court in a custody dispute over their child. Piland’s ex-wife claimed the former doctor had given his son cannabis mixed with goat’s milk, and a social worker paid the former doctor a visit. Upon arrival, the state representative noticed the marijuana plants and alerted authorities, who promptly raided his home.
“Agents later found 7.4 pounds of marijuana, 58 grams of poppies, morphine sulphate, mushrooms, marijuana candies and marijuana oils,” writes the Times. As a result, Piland was charged and later convicted, “of a host of drug-related offenses, including trafficking in opium or heroin, charges that together bring a sentence of more than 18 years.” He’ll be 87 years old if he lives that long in prison.
Doctor Piland defended his actions and his beliefs about marijuana, telling reporters, “What I do know is that the law against a plant is blasphemous…Humans are confused at times, obviously, with trying to make a plant illegal.” He also said he was raised in a, “God-fearing Christian family” in Winston-Salem, NC. He also said, “Anybody that believes in God and believes a plant should be illegal is committing blasphemy.”
And therein lies the problem in NC. Considered the Bible Belt for its numerous churches, the people of the Carolinas have been conditioned to trust their medical doctors. They’re given pain killers, something they quickly become addicted to, and they’re not given the option of treating their illnesses with medical marijuana, unlike more than half the country which already has medical marijuana dispensaries in-state. While marijuana possession has been decriminalized, for the most part, anyone charged with distribution runs the risk of lengthy prison sentences.
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We spoke with a pastor from North Carolina who told us his fellow believers are reluctant to try marijuana because of the social stigma associated with being a believer in Jesus Christ and being a consumer of cannabis, something seen as a sin — more likely the result of the drug war propaganda coming out of the Reagan presidency than any basis in fact or reason. But the preacher also said people are slowly waking up to the reality that many of their fellow parishioners are already addicted to opiates like OxyContin, Oxycodone and other powerful painkillers.
The pastor also said he believes marijuana to be a much safer alternative to those harmful, highly addictive chemical opiate-based painkillers. One doctor, Fathalla Mashali, who became the second-highest prescriber of opiates, was recently convicted of defrauding the healthcare system, and will spend the next 20 years of his life in prison for actually addicting people to opioid painkillers. Ironically, he wasn’t charged with any drug crimes, because as a medical doctor, that was what he was supposed to do, steer people into prescriptions, not heal them with a healing plant like marijuana.
Legalizing marijuana in the Carolinas is going very slow, moving almost at a snail’s pace. Even with it being slow going, North Carolina, within the last decade, worked to legalize CBD oil for medicinal use only. However, that was before the DEA in January classified CBD as a Schedule I narcotic (something it’s not).
For many, a medical marijuana advocate like Piland is viewed as a freedom fighter, a hero to natural medicine practitioners, and a pioneer in the legalization of marijuana in the State of North Carolina. But to the DEA, and the justice system, he’s a very dangerous criminal, even though no one was harmed by his natural medicinal remedies. The state has decided it will use its tax revenue resources to jail Piland and keep him away from his family and friends, all because he is a marijuana and drug legalization advocate.
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By contrast, real criminals see such shorter prison times than drug offenders. Looking at similarities and differences within the criminal justice system, an NYPD sergeant, who raped his 13-year-old stepdaughter repeatedly, got a slap on the wrist for his heinous crime which has likely destroyed another life. According to the Daily Mail Vladamir Krull was, “convicted of twice raping girlfriend’s daughter, 13, and forcing her to perform sex acts on him at school after taking her to the father/daughter breakfast.” When his case went to trial, he was convicted of child rape and received just THREE years in prison.
We want to know why. Why is it pedophiles get off scot free and those who are reportedly trying to do good with their knowledge of natural medicine are kidnapped, jailed, and/or killed, all because of a god-given plant and its healing properties? Studies show pedophiles have dozens of victims before they’re eventually caught or die of natural causes, and few of those who are convicted of crimes against children ever spend a day behind bars. Yet those caught with drugs are much more likely to spend serious time in prison for possession, and distribution, both typically non-violent offenses.
It’s high time we stop sending Vietnam War veterans, medical doctors, dads, and husbands to prison for a plant. It’s time we take action. Call your congressman or senator today and express your desire to see marijuana legalized, and those in prison for marijuana related charges set free. If you live in North Carolina, consider forwarding a copy of this story to Governor Roy Cooper, and asking him to pardon the veteran, doctor, father, and medical marijuana advocate. You can reach him by clicking here. Let’s start a campaign to pardon Dr. Piland. Please share this article so that others may see this injustice for theo brutal tyranny that it is.
Our good friend, Dominik Izzo, is basking in what appears to be his life’s calling: lecturing law enforcement leaders, officers, and anyone who will listen, on why police are hated so much and what each police officer and department can do about it.
As some of our readers may recall, Izzo was fired after blowing the whistle on Round Lake Park IL Police Chief, George Filenko. The former police union president came out against what he perceived to be his superior’s ineptitude in allowing an innocent woman to go to prison, charged and convicted of murder for a crime many, including at least three coroners, now believe she could not have committed. For the complete story click here.
In a recent video, Izzo came out and said what many police often think, but few have the platform to announce: marijuana is not the problem — waging a war against it is.
He first went on record saying, “I’ve never smoked pot…I’ve no desire to…I’ve never tried it,” and admitted the smell of freshly harvested weed gives him a headache. But the outspoken veteran police officer did admit to having arrested several individuals who were in possession of marijuana. “With that said, to my knowledge…I’ve never seen anyone ever do anything impaired on weed that was dangerous, at all, at all,” he said confirming what marijuana users already know. They’re not impaired after smoking weed, and are fully aware of themselves at all times while gettting high. “If cannabis itself, if weed is a plant, it’s organic,” he said adding, “I’ve never seen…(people on cannabis)…do things that are violent.”
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He admitted weed, and the desire to use it, doesn’t compel users to break into a home or prostitute themselves to get weed. On the contrary, the same cannot be said of heroin or cocaine, the officer admitted. Then the teetotaler came out with his own opinion on issues surrounding the legality of marijuana.
“I truly believe that we should legalize weed,” Izzo said, that adding arresting pot users for possession charges amounts to, “cops…wasting their time.”
Izzo’s pro-marijuana position is in line with what much of the rest of the country is thinking in the 21st century. Weed isn’t a substance to be feared or banned, but rather embraced for all of the medical benefits it can give to users.
The former officer of the year called it “stupid shit” when police officers arrest users and legally complicate their lives, potentially resulting in increased medical bills for officer takedowns which may lead to personal injury.
“Anything natural is going to wind up helping us,” Izzo stated after acknowledging Big Pharma’s role in keeping weed illegal for half of the country. The veteran police officer then described how he stays healthy. He says he regularly consumes alkaline green drinks, presumably such as barley grass smoothies. And turning one last time to cannabis, drawing a correlation between his superfood endeavors and marijuana, he said, “I think it has massive health benefits.” Wishing not to be confused with marijuana users, Izzo again reiterated he has no interest in trying a little THC.
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A new report from the Colorado Child Safety Coalition describes “a culture of violence” among staff of the state’s Division of Youth Corrections (DYC). Youths held in the system undergo solitary confinement, shackles, a straightjacket called “the WRAP” and pain compliance techniques such as “knee strikes” and the use of pressure points.
Youths were placed in solitary confinement 2, 240 times over a 13-month period, which is an increase despite a 2016 law to reduce the practice. Restraint by handcuffs, shackles or a full-body straightjacket was used 3,611 times, often with pain compliance techniques. This happened in a population of about 8,000 youths, ages 13 to 21, at Colorado’s 12 “secure youth corrections facilities.”
The Denver Post reported on the detailed investigation, which DYC director Anders Jacobson called “inflammatory.” Nevertheless, he is already moving to reduce the use of force and seclusion.
“The investigation relied on internal data on violence and restraint collected by the Division of Youth Corrections and obtained by researchers, medical and corrections reports, including videos, released after incarcerated youth signed waivers, and interviews with 21 youths who were held in 11 facilities. Scrutiny of youth corrections by community watchdogs and some lawmakers has intensified in the last few years as reports of riots and abuse surfaced from Spring Creek Youth Services Center in Colorado Springs, but this investigation is the most comprehensive and damaging.”
The facilities, which are understaffed in violation of federal standards, first attempt to use verbal de-escalation, but as a last resort will use the WRAP. This restraint is banned in other states, including Arkansas where the child ombudsman called it “torture.” Combined with the “spit mask,” the entire restraint conjures images of Hannibal Lecter.
“The wrap — used 253 times in 13 months, more than once every other day — requires handcuffing a youth’s hands and binding his legs together. The youth is wrapped up, the entire length of the body, and a strap attached to the chest and legs forces the youth into a seated position. In some cases, staff also cover the youth’s head and face with a cloth called a “spit mask.””
Some teens described being kept in the WRAP for one to three hours. It was used on a child who attempted to hang himself with a shirt, and another who was “sitting quietly while tears streaming down face.”
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The spit mask can make breathing difficult, especially with a bloody nose, as one youth described.
“I was trying to breathe to talk to them and say ‘Stop, stop, stop.’ They wouldn’t listen, so they put the spit mask on me. I was trying to breathe and blood was filling up in my mouth and coming up in my nose. And I was trying to spit it out but I couldn’t. And I was crying.”
Despite the best efforts of DYC to hide what really goes on in their facilities — including refusing to release their descriptions of uses of force — researchers found disturbing patterns. Staff use pressure points on the head, neck, wrist, tibia, calves and jaw to force teens to the ground.
“Staff use their knees to strike youths in the legs, stomach and side of the body, documenting strikes to the “femoral nerve point” or “common peroneal,” a nerve in the lower leg, the report says.
Division records confirmed youth reports of head injuries, concussions, rug burns, shoulder separation, bruises and bleeding after altercations between staff and youths, researchers said. Teens reported having their heads slammed to the floor or into furniture, feeling dizzy and being placed on concussion watch. One said staff would treat them nicely after realizing “how much damage” they caused, asking “Can I clean your face? Can I get you a new shirt?””
There are undoubtedly troubled youths and fights at the CYM, and they often have unfortunate pasts of abuse and neglect. But subjecting them to more torment is no way to “correct” a youth.
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The Denver Post notes that violence, meaning assaults and fights, has increased 42 percent from 2013 to 2016. These youths are probably not some unusual ultra-violent group, but could rather be the product of the ‘culture of violence’ perpetrated by Colorado’s DYM staff.
The coalition behind the report – consisting of ACLU Colorado, Disability Law Colorado, the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender and the Colorado Juvenile Defender Center – calls for the WRAP and solitary confinement to be banned, and urges Colorado to look to Missouri for guidance on reform.
“In Missouri, sleeping quarters more resemble dorm rooms than cells. Youths can have comforters, wear their own clothes instead of prison scrubs, and decorate with their own belongings. The goal is “internalized change” instead of “behavioral compliance.” Missouri has significantly lower rates of violence and injury to staff and youths compared with other states.”
These are kids, after all – not hardened adult criminals. Their developing brains are more malleable to the conditions in which they live. Sadly, Colorado’s incarcerated kids are being exposed to the brutality of America’s police state at an early age.
