Mind you, I’ve been covering Guantánamo since President George W. Bush and his team, having responded to the 9/11 attacks by launching their disastrous “Global War on Terror,” set up that offshore prison to house people American forces had captured. Previewing Diaz’s movie, I was surprised at how it unnerved me. After so many years of exposure to the grim realities of that prison, somehow his film touched me anew. There were moments that made me sob, moments when I turned down the sound so as not to hear more anguished cries of pain from detainees being tortured, and moments that made me curious about the identities of the people in the film. Although the names of certain officials are mentioned, the central characters are the detainees and individual interrogators, as well as defense attorneys and guards, all of whom interacted at Guantánamo’s prison camp over the course of its two-plus decades of existence.

While viewing it, I was reminded of a question that Tom Engelhardt, founder and editor of TomDispatch, has frequently asked me: “What is it about Guantánamo that’s so captivated you over the years?” Why is it, he wanted to know, that year after year, as its story of injustice unfolded in a never-ending cycle of trials that failed to start, prisoners cleared for release but still held in captivity, and successive administrations whose officials simply shrugged in defeat when it came to closing the nightmarish institution, it continues to haunt me so? “Would you be willing,” he asked, “to reflect on that for TomDispatch?” As it turned out, the death of my dad somehow helped me grasp a way to answer that question with previously unattainable clarity.

The Missing Outrage

As a start, in response to his question, let me say that, despite my own continued immersion in news about the prison camp, I’m struck that, in the American mainstream, there hasn’t been more headline-making outrage over the never-ending reality of what came to be known as Gitmo. From the moment it began in January 2002 and a photo appeared of shackled men bent over in the dirt beside the open-air cages that would hold them, wearing distinctive orange jumpsuits, its horrid destiny should have been apparent. The Pentagon Public Affairs Office published that immediately iconic image with the hope, according to spokesperson Torie Clarke, that it would “allay some of our critics” (who were already accusing the U.S. of operating outside of the Geneva Conventions).

Rather than allay them, it caught the path of cruelty and lawlessness on which the United States would continue for so many endless years. In April 2004, the world would see images of prisoners in American custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, naked, hooded, cuffed, sexually humiliated, and abused. Later reports would reveal the existence of what came to be known as “black sites,” operated by the CIA, in countries around the world, where detainees were tortured using what officials of the Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Buy the Book

For 22 years now, through four different administrations, that prison camp in Cuba, distinctly offshore of any conception of American justice, has held individuals captured in the war on terror in a way that defies any imaginable principles of due process, human rights, or the rule of law. Of the nearly 780 prisoners kept there, only 18 were ever actually charged with a crime and of the eight military court convictions, four were overturned while two remain on appeal.

A large number of those captured were originally sold to the Americans for bounty or simply picked up randomly in places in countries like Afghanistan known to be inhabited by terrorists and so assumed, with little or no hard evidence, to be terrorists themselves. They were then, of course, denied access to lawyers. And as I was reminded recently on a trip to England where I met with a couple of released detainees, those who survived Gitmo still suffer, physically and psychologically, from their treatment at American hands. Nor have they found justice or any remedy for the lasting harms caused by their captivity. And while the post-9/11 war on terror moment has largely faded into the past (though the American military is still fighting it in distant lands), that prison camp has yet to be shut down. 

A Generation Comes of Age

A second and more timely answer right now to Tom Engelhardt’s question is that my unwavering revulsion to the existence of Guantánamo has stemmed from a worldview that distinctly marked my father and many in his generation — men and women who came of age in the 1940s and early 1950s, whose first moments of adulthood coincided with the postwar emergence of the United States as a global superpower that touted itself as a guardian of civil rights, human rights, and justice. The opposition to fascism in World War II, the support for international covenants protecting civilians, a growing commitment at home to civil liberties and civil rights – those were their ideological guideposts. And despite the contradictions, the hypocrisy, and the failure that lurked just behind the foundational tenets of that belief system, many like my father continued to have faith in the honorable destiny of the United States whose institutions were robust and its motives honorable.

To be sure, there was deep denial involved in his generation’s sugar-coated version of the American experience. The revelation of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam; decisions to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, Iran, and elsewhere; the profound and systemic domestic racism of the country as described in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow; even the dirty dealings of the Nixon White House during Watergate; and, in this century, the official lying that set the stage for the disastrous Iraq War all should have dampened their rose-colored assessment of American democracy. Still, in so many ways he and many of his compatriots held fast to their belief in the power of this country to eternally return to its best self.

True to his belief in the American dream, my father took me to see movies and plays at our local college that amplified a worldview that he, like so many of his generation, embodied. I was often the youngest attendee at those films with stars like Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, an ode to free speech; Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, with its portrayal of the evils of racism; and Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men, whose message doubled down on the tenet that the accused are always innocent until proven guilty. And let’s not forget Judgement at Nuremberg, the dramatization of the post-World War Two war crimes tribunals, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, a series of trials in which Nazi leaders were convicted of committing genocide.

Those films, crying out for fairness, equality, and an end to racism, gave voice to champions of democracy, and energy to my father’s generation’s firm embrace of American possibilities.

Memory and Forgetting

A third answer, also underscored by my recent personal encounter with life’s fleetingness, is my growing fear, as an historian, that Guantánamo will simply be forgotten. In a sense, in the world of Donald Trump, collapsing bridges, and blazing wars in distant lands, it already seems largely forgotten. Although 22 years later it’s still home to 30 detainees from the war on terror, Guantánamo attracts little attention these days. If it weren’t for the invaluable work of Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times, who has reported on Gitmo since Day One in January 2002, as well as a handful of other dedicated reporters including John Ryan at Lawdragon, few could know anything about what’s going on there now. As sociology professor Lisa Hajjar points out, “Media coverage at Guantánamo has become a rarity.” While the press pool for the hearings of the military commissions that are still ongoing there averaged about 30 reporters until perhaps 2013, it’s now been whittled down to, at most, “about four per trip,” according to Hajjar.

Gitmo media coverage (and so public attention) has essentially disappeared — hardly a surprise given the current globally crushing issues of war and deprivation, injustice and extralegal policies, not to speak of the mad discomfort of election 2024 here in America. Guantánamo, whose last inmate arrived in 2008 and whose viable path to closure has remained blocked year after year (no matter that three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — each declared his desire to shut it down), persists, its deviations from the law unresolved.

As it happens, flagging interest in Guantánamo has coincided with an eerie larger cultural phenomenon — a turn away from history and memory.

In the world of social media and the immediate moment, a malady of forgetfulness about past events should be a cause of concern. In fact, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn recently published a striking piece on the phenomena. Citing an Atlantic article by psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman, Corn noted that, while forgetting can help people get on with their lives after a traumatic experience, it can also prevent trauma survivors from learning the lessons of the past. Rather than confront the impact of what’s occurred, it’s become all too common to simply brush it all under the rug, which, of course, has its own grim consequences. “As clinical psychiatrists,” they write, “we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger — exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.”  In other words, events like the 9/11 attacks and what followed from them, the Covid pandemic, or even the events of January 6, 2021, as Corn’s psychiatrists point out, can bring such pain that forgetting becomes “useful,” even at times seemingly “healthful.”

Not surprisingly, an increasing forgetfulness about traumatic events is echoed on an even broader scale in a contemporary trend toward the abandonment of history, presumably in favor of the present and its megaphone, the social media universe. As historian Daniel Bessner has pointed out, this country is now undergoing a profound reconsideration of the very purpose and importance of the historical record. Across the country, universities are reducing the size of their history faculties, while the number of undergraduates majoring in history and related fields in 2018-2019 had already declined by more than a third since 2012.  

No wonder Guantánamo has been relegated to the past, a distant chapter in the ever-diminishing war on terror and no matter that it continues to function in the present moment. For example, two death penalty cases are currently in pretrial hearings there. One involves the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, which resulted in the deaths of 17 American sailors. As the intrepid Carol Rosenberg points out, the case has been in pretrial hearings since 2011. The other involves four defendants accused of conspiring in the attacks of September 11th. A fifth defendant, Ramzi bin al Shibh, was recently removed from the case, having been found incompetent to stand trial due to the post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from his torture at American hands. As for the remaining defendants, originally charged in 2008 and then again in 2011, no trial date has yet been set. The ever-elusive timetable for those prosecutions tells you everything. Evidence tainted by torture has made such a trial impossible.

The Cycles of American History

It’s hard to fathom how my father’s generation, stubbornly rose-colored in their vision of the country, swallowed the blatant failures of the post-9/11 years. My sense is that many of them, like my dad, just shook their heads, certain that the true spirit of American democracy would ultimately prevail and the wrongs of indefinite detention, torture, and judicial incapacity would be righted. Still, as the country spiraled into January 6th and its aftermath, the reality of America’s lost grip on its own promises of justice, morality, lawfulness, and accountability actually began to sink in. At least it did with my dad, who expressed clear and present fears of a country succumbing to the specter of his childhood, fascism, the very antithesis of the America he aspired to.

Philippe Diaz’s film about Gitmo (which I encourage readers to catch when it premieres at the end of April) should remind at least a few of us of the importance of living up to the image of the country my father and others in his generation embraced. Isn’t it finally time to highlight the grave mistake of Guantánamo? Isn’t it finally time to close that shameful prison, distinctly offshore of American justice, and reckon with its wrongs, rather than letting it disappear into the haze of forgotten history, its momentous violations unresolved. 

In 2005, in his confirmation hearings for attorney general, George W. Bush’s longtime legal counsel Alberto Gonzales maintained that the ideals and laws codified in the Geneva Conventions were “quaint and obsolete.” That phrase, consigning notions of justice and accountability to the dustbin of history, encapsulated this country’s post-9/11 strategy of evading the law in the name of “security.” And as long as Guantánamo remains open, that strategy remains in place.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, rather than letting Gonzalez etch in stone an epitaph for the ideals my father and his generation so revered, we could find hope in a future where their trust in the rule of law and in a government of responsible citizens who put country above personal fortune, law above fear, and peace above war might prevail? As we lay my dad’s generation to rest, shouldn’t we take some consolation in the possibility that their spirit may still help us find our way out of today’s distinctly disturbing and unnerving times?

Copyright 2024 Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

She is currently in Evin Prison on multiple charges, including spreading propaganda against the government, with 10 years, nine months left on her sentence. She issued a statement on hearing the news: “I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of all women.”

She supported last year’s movement for “Woman, Life, Liberty” from behind bars, have long criticized compulsory veiling.

Mohammadi’s causes included women’s rights, of course. But she has also campaigned for human rights more generally, including the right of women to be safe from sexual harassment even in prison and of prisoners to be safe from torture and from the death penalty.

Although many observers in the United States will applaud this award as a black eye for the self-styled Islamic Republic of Iran, the fact is that Mohammadi would be critical of American policies as well. That is, if we are to listen to her prophetic voice with approval, we must do more than use her politically to denigrate our enemies; we must take to heart the implications of her ethical witness for our own society, too.

For instance, there were 18 executions of prisoners in the United States in 2022, up 64% from the total of 11 killed by the state in 2021. Although the US executes many fewer prisoners each year than Iran or Saudi Arabia, and although the number in the US has fallen significantly since the 1990s, it still does execute prisoners, and Ms. Mohammadi deeply believes that is wrong. She might well be in jail here if she lived in the United States, from protesting in front of city halls and jails. Only 13 states still permit executions in the US, and half of those killed in 2022 were executed in Texas and Oklahoma.

Moreover, 7 of these executions were seriously botched. In one instance, it took 3 hours of trying to get a fatal intravenous line into the arm of an Alabama convict. Some initial attempts to kill the convict were called off because of difficulties with the intravenous injection or because proper protocols has not been followed.

Between 46% and 54% of Americans believe in capital punishment, depending on which poll you believe. So Mohammadi might well be in a minority on this issue in the US, as well.

As for torture, Karen J. Greenburg wrote this week about the scandal that the Guantánamo Prison Camp still has not been closed. One of the difficulties has been that some prisoners were so badly tortured that no court, including a military tribunal, can now conduct a legitimate trial.

There has never been a reckoning by the US establishment with the Bush administration’s extensive use of torture.

If Mohammadi had been an American she might have been put on trial, as Josie Setzler was, for protesting torture at Guantánamo.

As for sexual abuse of female prisoners by male guards in federal prisons, a Senate report from last year makes it clear that this is a real issue and that it hasn’t been adequately addressed by the Bureau of Prisons.

Regarding women’s rights, I doubt Ms. Mohammadi would approve of Nebraska jailing a woman for two years for giving abortion pills to her daughter. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that she would not like our current Supreme Court much at all. She rails against religious theocrats’ repression of women.

So a warm congratulations to her, and to her cause, of women’s rights and human rights in Iran. But we owe it to ourselves also actually to listen to what she is saying and to take to heart the principles for which she has spent so much of her life in jail, torn from her husband and children.

Instead, most states reneged on “Action for Mental Health” and their obligations to mental health budgets and outpatient services and spent the same dollars for prisons and jails which are clearly not appropriate or safe places for mental health patients. Today, the U.S. has over 1 million behind bars for crimes that could have been avoided had they received proper community mental health treatment. They are mostly incarcerated for non-violent, nuisance crimes that are the result of society’s neglect, not evil/criminal intent.The rate of overall institutionalization for mental health patients has stayed fairly constant for the past 80 years, but the institution of choice has shifted them from hospitals to prisons. County jails and state prisons, ill equipped at providing treatment, have become home to more and more prisoners suffering from mental health issues. The Florida Department of Corrections, for example, estimates as many as 40,000 inmates are mentally ill; in the horror of Florida and other state prisons, mentally ill inmates have been tortured, driven to suicide and been killed by guards. Prisons aren’t appropriate or safe places for mental health patients.

In today’s era of austerity and privatization, we also choose to shift patients from hospitals to corporate private profit prisons/jails. In 2014, one million in US were jailed for crimes that could have been avoided had they received community mental health services. Alarmingly, prisons and county jails are the default disposition for patients who can’t make it on their own in community, with county jails and private profit detention facilities now being the largest mental health facility in many communities. Patients used to languish in snake pit hospitals, now they languish in much more dangerous and degrading snake pit prisons. It’s critical that everyone interested in the welfare of mental health patients should join all state and local efforts to end their barbarous and inappropriate imprisonment.

Next to private health insurance corporations, there is no greater disconnect between the public good and private interests than the rise of corporate owned and operated for profit jails. The interest of private jails lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates, but instead having as many immigrants and prisoners as possible housed as cheaply and profitably as possible. In the push for austerity and privatization, private profit U.S.prison corporations have become premier examples of private capitalist enterprises seeking profits from the misery of man while trying to ensure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Profiteering private prison corporations are cashing in on the misery and desperation of U.S. citizens as many county jail and state prison systems privatize throughout the nation. Private companies house about 9 percent of the nation’s total prison population, with privatization/profiteering madness now extending to well over 6 million people under correctional supervision, more than ever were in Stalin’s gulags. As noted above, misery and desperation has been compounded by the underfunding and deterioration of community mental health services and wreckless abandonment of the “Action for Mental Health” program.

Very alarming, the private prison industry also incarcerates about 73 percent of all immigrant children, adolescents and adults . A spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE), Alonzo Pena, acknowledged that the private companies have all too often fallen short, noting that “It wasn’t their priority to ensure that the highest standards were being met”. ICE deserves some blame/responsibility. “We set up this partnership with the private industry in a way that was supposed to make things much more effective, much more economical, but unfortunately, it was in the execution and the monitoring and the auditing we fell behind, we fell short.”

The standard method for privatization of jails:
1). Defund government services to make sure things don’t work and people get angry
2). Hand program over to private capital.
3). Continue to defund local publically funded jail and state prison services.
4). Urge/pressure county commissions and state government to allow for-profit, private prison corporations to take over under the guise of “rescuing” jail functions.
5). Promote the ‘appearance of rescue’ of the county jail or state service by self-serving private profit driven programs to the community.,

In reality it’s not long until privatization falls short in quality service; the private jail program saves money by employing fewer, less trained guards and other workers and pays them badly, with horror stories often accompanying how these jails are run. In addition to Department of Justice studies and experience showing that governments save little money, if any, by turning over prison functions to private outfits, the DoJ also concluded that private prisons were in general more violent than government-operated institutions, and ordered a phaseout under the Obama administration of their use at the federal level. Regrettably, reversing that order was one of the first things that President Trump’s attorney general did on taking office.

Without evidence, private prison corporations always claim that their program will save the county and state millions annually. Private companies, such as CCA/CoreCivic and GEO Group dominant, tout their virtues by saying they build and operate prisons more cheaply than governments can, due to the public sector’s many mandates. Their day-to-day operations are similarly more efficient and less costly, they assert, and they do it all without compromising public safety. The bottom line, they say, is that they allow governments to free up public funds for pursuits that mean more to most taxpayers than how felons or immigrants are jailed. To make sure that happens, private prisons companies spend millions on donations to politicians from both political parties at all levels of government, campaigns and congressional lobbying efforts, just like businesses that sell cars, real estate, hamburgers or toothpaste.

“Privately operated facilities are better equipped to handle changes in the flow of illegal immigration because they can open or close new facilities as needed,” said Rodney E. King, CoreCivic’s public affairs manager.
Critics tell a different story. They cite moments like a 2015 riot to protest poor conditions at a prison in Arizona run by another major private player, Management and Training Corporation. Earlier at that same institution, three inmates had escaped and murdered two people.

Many case examples show scrimping by private prison and immigrant detention facility operators, with bad food and shabby health care for inmates, low pay and inadequate training for guards and hiring shortages. At immigrant detention centers, operators see little need to offer extensive educational programs for children or job training since people held there are mostly destined for deportation. “To maximize profit, you minimize your expenditures,” said Rachel Steinback, a lawyer for hunger strikers.

Despite many promises that jail and prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings, as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice concluded, “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison and jail operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in trained staff, fringe benefits and other labor-related costs.” Economist Paul Krugman notes that “as more and more government functions get privatized, states become ‘pay-to-play paradises in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become quid pro quo for getting government busines.”

The corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage by privat 1 percent corporations and oligarchs is undermining local and state levels of government across the USA. Since prison/jail treatment, counseling and rehabilitation programs are not profitable and therefore discouraged or rejected, longer-term institutionalization by for-profit corporations is promoted via harsh sentencing guidelines and other means for keeping inmates doing lengthy, and very profitable for the corporation, sentences. To fix this problem, we should demand that private corporations be removed from the administration of our local, state and federal public prison programs. Privatization of jail services increases costs without any corresponding increase in quality or care. Until then, the powerful in county, state and federal government, along with their corporate oligarch partners to whom they are beholden will continue privatizing and profiteering as they please, while laughing all the way to the bank. Everyone interested in the welfare of mental health patients should join all state and local efforts to end privatization. profiteering and barbarous inappropriate imprisonment.

—-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Tina Brown Live Media: “How prisons became warehouses for the poor and mentally ill”

At least 77 million U.S. adults have criminal records, including nearly 7 million currently in prison or jail or on probation or parole.

Typically, more than 10,000 of the incarcerated leave prison and nearly 200,000 churn through jails every week. But because more than 64,000 inmates and workers have become infected with the coronavirus so far, killing hundreds, some incarcerated people are being released ahead of schedule from COVID-19 hotspots.

Kentucky, for example, has reduced its jail population by 32% since March, and the state’s prison population has decreased by 7%.

Like most formerly incarcerated people, those newly released from prison and jail are no doubt having a hard time reconnecting with loved ones and securing health care, housing and jobs. That is the case even without a pandemic accompanied by an economic crisis.

One thing I’ve learned while researching criminal justice reform and teaching college classes in prisons is that the reason the transition to life outside the corrections system is so hard is that there are more than 44,000 indirect consequences of a criminal conviction.

These restrictions, which the Council of State Governments tracks in great detail, can include everything like making it impossible to get a license to work as a barber, manicurist, plumber, driver, interior designer or midwife, to restricting where the formerly incarcerated can live, study and volunteer.

Barriers and bans

These rules and regulations, which researchers like me call “collateral consequences,” tend to be broad, vague and subjective. Punishments associated with a conviction can be mandatory or discretionary. The ramifications can be temporary or permanent.

There are also more than 1,000 federal-level statutes with similar consequences for federal or state crimes.

Because lawyers, courts and other authorities don’t have to inform defendants about these restrictions, they take many of the convicted by surprise.

This heap of state and federal restrictions affects entire families and communities. These burdens continue long after time served, and like incarceration itself, they disproportionately affect people of color and those with low incomes.

These barriers can limit jury duty service, the right to hold public office, the ability to get driver’s licenses or passports and the freedom to serve in the military. Veterans may lose their pensions, insurance and health care.

The number per state ranges widely, from 319 in Vermont to 2,388 in Louisiana.

Nationwide, a hodgepodge of policies prevent millions with felony convictions from voting. An estimated 6 million Americans lacked the right to vote in the 2016 election because of those restrictions.

Employment

At least 19,000 of these penalties affect employment and volunteering.

More than 13,000 relate to occupational licensing and certification.

That’s important because 1 in 4 U.S. workers need mandatory occupational licenses to drive trucks, fix wiring and do other commonplace jobs.

Some state and federal laws do limit the use of arrest and conviction records in making hiring decisions. Yet these discriminatory practices remain widespread.

What about if the previously convicted try to go back to school to fare better in the job market? There are obstacles in that path as well.

Certain convictions may result in partial or full denial of college admission and financial aid during incarceration and afterward.

SNAP

In the mid-1990s, Congress and President Bill Clinton endorsed a move by states to stop providing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to anyone with drug-related felony convictions.

The SNAP restrictions in place today vary and number over 100 nationwide, including seven imposed by the federal government.

South Carolina imposes a lifetime ban on SNAP benefits due to drug-related felony convictions. Michigan and four other states permanently deny anyone with two or more felony drug convictions SNAP benefits.

Many states have eased these restrictions in recent years. But Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf recently signed a bill banning those with felony drug convictions and some convicted as sex offenders from receiving public benefits for 10 years.

Housing

At least 1,000 of these restrictions relate to housing.

Many private landlords and public housing authorities discriminate against the formerly incarcerated, often citing perceived safety risks as a concern.

In some cities, the police can order landlords to evict tenants, simply because they suspect criminal behavior. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, 80% of Section 8 rental properties can ban applicants with felony convictions.

In Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maine and California, housing authorities view being arrested within the past five years as criminal activity and the basis for barring access – even if the resident has never been convicted of a crime.

Signs of change

I see some reasons to expect the number of these collateral consequences to decline, beginning with housing policies.

Local efforts to pass laws protecting those with criminal records from housing discrimination are advancing in at least 11 cities. A related bill is pending in Congress, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development has informed landlords that rejecting renters or buyers based on past arrests or convictions may violate the Fair Housing Act.

And a recent pilot program in New York and three other cities supports allowing those with felony convictions to reunite with their families in public housing.

Change could be on the way more broadly as well.

By a 6-1 majority, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan panel reporting to Congress, endorsed a report in 2019 that questioned the usefulness of these restrictions. The report calls for an end to all “punitive mandatory consequences that do not serve public safety, bear no rational relationship to the offense committed, and impede people convicted of crimes from safely reentering and becoming contributing members of society.”

[Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.]

Cynthia A. Golembeski, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar; School of Law/School of Public Affairs and Administration J.D./Ph.D. Student, Rutgers University Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Those at the head of the march had other ideas. After a brief stop at city hall, they turned the crowd onto the main drag, Washington Street, and for the next few hours, a parade of protesters snaked through Hoboken, New Jersey.

“Whose streets? Our streets!” is a well-worn activist chant, but for a little while it was true as Hoboken’s motorcycle cops played catch-up and the march turned this way and that — first, uptown on Washington, where a conspicuous minority of businesses were boarded up, expecting trouble that never came. Then, a left onto Sixth, another onto Jackson. Monroe. Park. Finally, back to Washington and onward.

All the while, the voices of the mostly white marchers, being led in call-and-response chants mainly by people of color, rang through the streets and echoed off high-rent low rises.

“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”

“No justice! No peace!”

“Say his name! George Floyd!”

As an ever-more middle-aged white guy who, a decade ago, traded covering U.S. protests for reporting from African war zones, I have little of substance to add to the superlative coverage of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have erupted across the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. For that, read some of the journalists who are on the front lines innovating and elevating the craft, like the great Aviva Stahl’s real-time eyewitness observations, incisive interviews, and on-the-fly fact-checking, while marching for miles and miles through the streets of Brooklyn, New York.

Instead, bear with me while I ruminate about something I said to Tom Engelhardt, the editor of this website, TomDispatch, at the beginning of March when our lives changed forever. Instead of simply bemoaning the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic — however devastating and deadly it might prove to be — I uncharacteristically looked on the bright side, suggesting that this could be one of those rare transformative moments that shifts the world’s axis and leads to revolutionary change.

I bring this up not to brag about my prescience, but to point out the very opposite — how little foresight I actually had. It’s desperately difficult for any of us to predict the future and yet, thanks so often to the long, hard, and sometimes remarkably dangerous work of organizers and activists, even the most seemingly immutable things can change over time and under the right conditions.

A Latter Day Lynching

Despite my comments to Tom, if you had told me that, in the span of a few months, a novel coronavirus that dates back only to last year and systemic American racism that dates back to 1619 would somehow intersect, I wouldn’t have believed it. If you had told me that a man named George Floyd would survive Covid-19 only to be murdered by the police and that his brutal death would spark a worldwide movement, leading the council members of a major American city to announce their intent to defund the police and Europeans halfway across the planet to deface monuments to a murderous nineteenth-century monarch who slaughtered Africans, I would have dismissed you. But history works in mysterious ways.

Four hundred years of racism, systemic abuse of authority, unpunished police misconduct, white skin privilege, and a host of other evils at the dark core of America gave a white Minneapolis police officer the license to press a black man’s face to the pavement and jam a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes. For allegedly attempting to buy a pack of cigarettes with a phony $20 bill, George Floyd was killed at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by police officer Derek Chauvin.

At the beginning of the last century, whites could murder a black man, woman, or child in this country as part of a public celebration, memorialize it on postcards, and mail them to friends. Between 1877 and 1950, nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the American South, more than a death a week for 73 years. But the murders of blacks, whether at the hands of their owners in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries or of unaccountable fellow Americans in the latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries never ended despite changes in some attitudes, significant federal legislation, and the notable successes of the protests, marches, and activism of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

From 2006 to 2012, in fact, a white police officer killed a black person in America almost twice a week, according to FBI statistics. And less than a month before we watched the last moments of George Floyd’s life, we witnessed a modern-day version of a lynching when Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, was gunned down while jogging on a suburban street in Glynn County, Georgia. Gregory McMichael, a 64-year-old white retired district attorney, investigator, and police detective, and his son Travis, 34, were eventually arrested and charged with his murder.

Without the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s botched response to it, without black Americans dying of the disease at three times the rate of whites, without the suddenly spotlighted health disparities that have always consigned people of color to die at elevated rates, without a confluence of so many horrors that the black community in America has suffered for so long coupled with those of a new virus, would we be in the place we’re in today?

If President Trump hadn’t cheered on the efforts of mostly older white protesters to end pandemic shutdowns and “liberate” their states and then echoed a racist Miami police chief of the 1960s who promised “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” essentially calling for young black protesters to be gunned down, would the present movement have taken off in such a way? And would these protests have been as powerful if people who had avoided outside contact for weeks hadn’t suddenly decided to risk their own lives and those of others around them because this murder was too brazen, too likely to end in injustice for private handwringing and public hashtags?

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd drew his last embattled breath, a veto-proof majority of the city council recently announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s police department. As council president Lisa Bender put it:

“We’re here because we hear you. We are here today because George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. We are here because here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities safe. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.”

A month ago, such a statement by almost any council chief in any American city — much less similar sentiments voiced across the nation — would have been essentially unthinkable. Only small numbers of activists working away with tiny chisels on a mountain of official intransigence could even have imagined such a thing and they would have been dismissed by the punditocracy as delusional.

But the reverberations of George Floyd’s death have hardly been confined to the city where he was slain or even the country whose systemic bigotry put a target on his back for 46 years. His death and America’s rampant racism have led to soul-searching across the globe, sparking protests against discrimination and police brutality from Australia to Germany, Argentina to Kenya. In Ghent, Belgium, a bust honoring King Leopold II was defaced and covered with a hood bearing Floyd’s dying plea: “I can’t breathe.” In Antwerp, Leopold’s statue was set on fire and later removed.

It was Leopold, as TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild so memorably documented in King Leopold’s Ghost, who, in the late nineteenth century, seized the vast territory surrounding Africa’s Congo River, looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and presided over a fin de siècle holocaust that took the lives of as many as 10 million people, roughly half the Congo’s population. Belgian activists are now calling for all the country’s statues and monuments to the murderous monarch to be torn down.

A Cultural Renaissance or a Societal Black Death?

Like the island off its coast, Hoboken was born of a great swindle. In 1658, the Dutch governor of Manhattan reportedly bought the tract of land that now includes that mile-square New Jersey city from the Lenape people for some wampum, cloth, kettles, blankets, six guns and — fittingly enough, given Hoboken’s startling bars-to-area ratio — half a barrel of beer.

In other words, the city where I covered that demonstration is part and parcel of the settler colonialism, slavery, and racism that forms the bedrock of this nation. But even in that white enclave, that bastion of twenty-first-century gentrification, in the midst of a lethal global pandemic with no cure, 10,000 people flooded its parks and streets, carrying signs like “Racism is a pandemic, too” and “Covid is not the only killer” that would have made little sense six months ago.

There were also posters that would have been shocking in Hoboken only several weeks ago, but didn’t cause anyone to bat an eye like “ACAB” (an acronym for “All Cops are Bastards”) or “Are you a:

[ ] Killer cop

[ ] Complicit Cop”

Not to mention dozens and dozens of signs reading “Defund the Police” or “Abolish the Police.” Suddenly — to most of us, at least — such proposals were on the table.

In reality, social change rarely occurs by accident or chance. It usually comes in the wake of years of relentless, thankless, grinding activism. It also takes a willingness to head for the barricades when history has illuminated the dangers of doing so. It requires persistence in the face of weariness and distraction, and courage in the face of abject adversity.

Where this movement goes, how it changes this nation, and what it spawns around the world will be won or lost on the streets of our tomorrows. Will it mean an America that inches closer to long-articulated but never remotely approached ideals, or usher in a backlash that leads to a wave of politicians in the Trumpian mold? In moments like this, there’s no way of knowing whether you’re on the cusp of a cultural Renaissance or a societal Black Death.

It takes a long time, but the Earth’s orbit and axis do change and once they do, things are never the same again. Already, from Minneapolis to Antwerp to modest Hoboken, this world is not what it was just a short while ago. A man forced to die with his face pressed to the ground may yet shift the earth under your feet.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright Nick Turse 2020

Via Tomdispatch.com

——-
Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

ABC7: “Hollywood All Black Lives Matter protest”

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In January 2002, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility in Cuba opened its gates for the first 20 detainees of the war on terror. Within 100 days, 300 of them would arrive, often hooded and in those infamous orange jumpsuits, and that would just be the beginning. At its height, the population would rise to nearly 800 prisoners from 59 countries. Eighteen years later, it still holds 40 prisoners, most of whom will undoubtedly remain there without charges or trial for the rest of their lives. (That’s likely true even of the five who have been cleared for release for more than a decade.) In 2013, journalist Carol Rosenberg astutely labeled them “forever prisoners.” And those detainees are hardly the only enduring legacy of Guantánamo Bay. Thanks to that prison camp, we as a country have come to understand aspects of both the law and policy in new ways that might prove to be “forever changes.”

Here are eight ways in which the toxic policies of that offshore facility have contaminated American institutions, as well as our laws and customs, in the years since 2002.

1. Indefinite detention: The first item on any list of Guantánamo’s offspring would have to be the category “indefinite detention.” In the context of U.S. law, until that long-ago January, the very notion was both foreign and forbidden. Detention without charge or trial was, in fact, precluded by the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process, a reality that had been honored since the founding of the republic. Though the detainees there were eventually granted access to lawyers and the right to have their cases reviewed, for only a handful of them has that right of being charged or released been realized.

The indefinite detention that began at Guantánamo Bay has now spawned its mirror image in the camps for undocumented immigrants (and their children) along the U.S. Mexican border. Even the optics there are proving to be carbon copies of Guantánamo: the open-air wire cages, the armed guards, and the physical abuse of migrants and asylum seekers, both adults and children. At Guantánamo Bay, the government didn’t distinguish between juveniles and adults until years after the facility had opened, another example of a policy Gitmo brought into existence that was previously inconceivable in the U.S. legal system. In some ways, in fact, the situation at the border may be even worse, as the detained there are kept in unsanitary conditions without sufficient access to doctors.

And here’s another way the border is one-upping Guantánamo. The government was required to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its wartime detention facilities, so the health and medical conditions at Gitmo were monitored and kept to a relatively decent standard once those initial three months of open-air cages ended. In the border detention centers, however, tots have been left in soiled diapers, housed along with their mothers and fathers in bitterly cold, jail-like conditions, and denied adequate medical attention, including vaccines.

2. A new legal language for the purpose of bypassing the law: From the very start, Guantánamo challenged the normal language of law and democracy. The detainees there could not be called “prisoners” as they would then have been considered “prisoners of war” and so subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. The cages and later prefab prison complexes (transported from Indiana) could not be labeled “prisons” for the same reason. So the government invented a new term, “enemy combatant,” derived from “unlawful enemy belligerent,” that did have legal standing. The point, of course, was to create a whole new legal category that, like the offshore prison itself, would be immune to existing laws, American or international, pertaining to prisoners of war.

This evasion of the law has not only persisted to this day, but has crept into other areas of Washington’s foreign policy. Recently, for instance, Trump administration lawyers invoked the term “enemy combatant” to justify the drone killing of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Iraq. Meanwhile, at the border, asylum seekers have been transformed into “illegal immigrants” and, on that basis, denied essential rights.

3. Legal cover: While a new language was being institutionalized, the Department of Justice offered its own version of legal cover. Its Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) was enlisted to provide often-secret legal justifications for the policies underlying what was then being called the Global War on Terror. The OLC would, in fact, devise farfetched rationales for many previously outlawed policies of that war, most notoriously the CIA’s torture and interrogation programs whose “enhanced interrogation techniques” were used at the Agency’s “black sites” (or secret prisons) around the world upon a number of high-profile detainees later sent to Guantánamo.

Before 9/11, few outsiders even knew of the existence of the Office of Legal Counsel. In the years since, however, it’s become the White House’s go-to department for contorted, often secret legal “opinions” meant to justify previously questionable or unauthorized executive actions. Notoriously, OLC memos justified “targeted killings” by drone of key figures in terror groups, including an American citizen. Recently, for instance, that office has been used to explain away a number of things, including why a sitting president cannot be indicted (see: former special counsel Robert Mueller) or the granting of absolute immunity to White House officials so they can defy subpoenas to testify before Congress (see: House impeachment hearings). And as any OLC memos can be kept secret, who’s to know, for instance, whether or not similar legal memos were written to cover acts like the recent killing of Major General Suleimani?

4. The sidelining and removal of professionals: From its inception, Guantánamo’s supervisors shoved aside any professionals or government officials who stood in their way. Notably, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed individuals to run Guantánamo who would report directly to him rather than go through any pre-existing chain of command. In that way, he effectively removed those who would contradict his orders or the policies put in place under his command, including, for instance, that prisoners on hunger strikes should be force-fed.

In the Trump era, this dislike of professionals has spread through many agencies and departments of the government. The twist now is that those professionals are often leaving by choice. The State Department, for instance, has dwindled steadily in size since Donald Trump took office, as those disagreeing with administration policies have simply quit or retired in significant numbers. Similarly, at the Pentagon, in a steady drumbeat, officials have resigned or been fired due to policy disagreements.

5. The use of the military for detention operations: In the fall of 2002, General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, complained to Rumsfeld that his troops were being wasted on detainee operations. Hundreds of prisoners had been captured in the invasion of Afghanistan that began in October 2001 and Army personnel were being asked to serve as guards in the detention centers set up at the new American military bases in that country. Though many of those detainees would subsequently be transferred to Guantánamo, the military was not off the hook. A joint task force of all four of its branches would be deployed to Guantánamo to serve as guards for the arriving detainees. Some of them insisted that it was not a task they were prepared for, that their previous service as guards at military brigs for service personnel who had broken the law was hardly proper preparation for guarding prisoners from the battlefield. But to no avail.

Today, that military has been deployed in a similar fashion to the southern border in support of detention operations there, a steady presence of more than 5,000 troops since the early days of the Trump presidency, including active-duty military personnel and the National Guard. Under U.S. law, the military is not authorized to carry out domestic law enforcement. A letter from 30 members of Congress to Pentagon Principal Deputy Inspector General Glenn Fine made the point: “The military should have no role in enforcing domestic law, which is why Trump’s troop deployment to the southern border risks eroding the laws and norms that have kept the military and domestic law enforcement separate.” Fine is now conducting a review of that deployment, but who knows when (or even if) it will see the light of day.

6. Secrecy and the withholding of information: When it came to Guantánamo, Pentagon officials discussing the number of detainees there would usually offer only approximations, rather than specific numbers, just as they would generally not mention the names of the prisoners. Journalists were normally kept from the facility and photographs forbidden. Meanwhile, a blanket of secrecy shrouded the prior treatment of those detainees, many of whom had been subjected to abuse and torture at the black sites where they were held before being transported to Gitmo.

Today, on the border, the policy towards journalists, infamously dubbed “the enemies of the people” by this president, has been distinctly Gitmo-ish. Information has been withheld and efforts have been made to keep both journalists and photographers from border detention camps. Journalistic Freedom of Information Act requests have often been the singular means by which the public has gotten some insight into government border policies. Even members of Congress have been denied access to the detention facilities, while the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency has failed to keep records that would enable migrant families to reunite or let any oversight agency accurately determine the number of detainees, particularly children, being held.

In the theater of war, similar secrecy persists. Just this month, for example, the administration refused to present Congress (no less the public) with evidence of its assertion that the Iranian major general it assassinated by drone posed an imminent threat to the United States and its interests.

7. Disregard for international law and treaties: In characterizing the Geneva Convention as “quaint” and “obsolete” as part of its justification for the detention and treatment of prisoners in the war on terror, President George W. Bush’s administration began to steadily eat away at Washington’s adherence to international treaties and conventions to which it had previously been both a signatory and a principal moral force. What followed, for instance, was a contravention of the Convention Against Torture, both in the CIA’s global torture program and in Washington’s toleration of the mistreatment of detainees it rendered to other countries.

The lack of respect for treaty obligations and for the sanctity of international cooperation in matters affecting world peace, health, and harmony has only spread in these years with Trump administration decisions to withdraw from agreements and treaties of various sorts. These included: the Paris climate accord, the nuclear agreement with Iran, and Cold War-era nuclear arms treaties with Russia (the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement last year and, more recently, the ignoring of warnings from the Russians that there will not be sufficient time to negotiate the renewal of the essential New Start nuclear arms limitation agreement that will lapse in 2021). As a result, the world has become a more dangerous and unpredictable place.

8. Lack of accountability: Although some of the newly legalized policies of the Bush era, including the use of torture, were ended by the Obama administration, there has been no appetite for holding government officials responsible for illegal and unconstitutional conduct. As President Obama so classically put it when it came to taking action to hold individuals accountable for the CIA’s torture program, it was time “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Today, Donald Trump and his team expect a similar kind of Gitmo-style impunity for themselves. As he’s said many times, “I can do whatever I want as president.” The withholding of military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to get information on rival Joe Biden (and his son) is but one example of the license he’s taken. A sense of immunity from the law is deeply entrenched in this administration (as the refusal of his key officials to testify before the House of Representatives has shown).

It’s worth noting that the House impeachment of the president was a rare step forward when it comes to holding officials accountable for violations of the law in this era (though conviction in the Senate is essentially unimaginable). Whether such accountability will ever take hold in the context of global policy — in the killing of Suleimani, in the separation of children from their families at the border, or in the context of election interference — remains to be seen. At the moment, it seems unlikely indeed. After all, we still live in the Guantánamo era.

The toll of the war on terror in terms of lives and treasure has been well documented. It has cost American taxpayers at least $6.4 trillion (and probably far more than that), while resulting in the deaths of up to 500,000 people, nearly half of whom are estimated to have been civilians (a number that doesn’t include indirect deaths from disease, starvation and other war-related causes). Meanwhile, a new Gitmo-ized narrative for the law and national security policy has come into being.

The irony is unmistakable. The Guantánamo Bay detention facility was purposely established outside the U.S. so that it would not be subject to the country’s normal laws and policies. As many warned at the time, the notion that it would remain separate and anomalous was sure to be illusory. And indeed that has proved to be so.

Instead of remaining an offshore anomaly, Guantánamo has moved incrementally onshore and that is undeniably its indelible legacy.

Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, as well as the editor-in-chief of the CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief. She is the author and editor of many books, including Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State and The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days.

Joshua L. Dratel, a New York-based lawyer, litigates key national security cases involving terrorism, surveillance, and whistleblowers. He is a contributor to Greenberg’s newest volume, Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink.

Julia Tedesco helped with research for this article.

Copyright 2020 Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel

Via Tomdispatch.com

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

News4JAX: “Former Gitmo commander guilty on 6 charges in death investigation”

(Inequality.org) – A nationwide strike takes charge at everything from slavery to sentencing. Organizers say it could be the largest U.S. prison resistance action to date.

As wildfires rage across California, some of the people risking their lives to fight them are paid only a few dollars a day. These workers stand little chance of ever earning the $74,000 average salary California firefighters generally receive. While it may be hard to believe there’s an entire class of workers who are paid sweatshop wages in the United States, that’s the reality for 2.3 million incarcerated workers.

Slave wages are just one of the many reasons why incarcerated individuals in state, federal, and immigration prisons around the US are going on strike from August 21st to September 9th. The strike was organized in response to deadly violence at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina earlier this year, a result of the prison’s abysmal living conditions.

In an interview with Shadowproof, an individual incarcerated at Lee spoke of the prison’s dehumanizing environment. “We need open yards again, not just enclosed rec yards, we need these open rec yards again, where prisoners can move. We need prisoners to start being treated like humans.”

This month’s strikes are just the most recent in a long history of using work stoppages to resist abhorrent prison conditions. But they’re reflective of a shifting approach to organized prison protest, Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, says. Up until ten years ago, strikes generally happened on a prison-by-prison basis, Wright told Inequality.org. But new technology makes it possible to coordinate nationwide resistance.

A few decades ago, strikes were organized through phone calls and letter writing. But now organizers are able to take advantage of social media with contraband cellphones and the help of outside organizers. “I remember trying to organize statewide strikes in the 90’s and how difficult that was,” Wright says. “I think that a lot of the barriers are a lot lower now than they were 15 years ago.” This explains the increase in coordinated national actions. It’s how folks were able to organize the largest prison strike in the U.S. to date in 2016.

And now, in only four months, incarcerated organizers and outside allies are putting together an act of resistance that they hope will top their recent record. Organizers have a list of ten demands, which include the need for prompt improvement of prison conditions and policies. They also call for the “immediate end to prison slavery,” which is legal thanks to a constitutional loophole.

Language in the 13^th Amendment outlaws slavery except “as a punishment for a crime,” which is how the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program was created in 1970. In theory, the program was meant to establish work opportunities for incarcerated people so that they could both earn money and develop skills, increasing their chances of getting a good job upon release. However, this is hardly the case. These work programs teach few relevant skills and, on average, pay less than $1 an hour, if they do pay at all.

Earned income is essential for folks on the inside because it allows them to buy necessities not provided by the prison, like soap, calling cards, and tampons. Incarcerated people are also required to offset the cost of their imprisonment, as a report from the Brennan Center for Justice details. The U.S. criminal system is filled with fees that shift imprisonment costs from the government onto the people accused of crimes, often leaving them with piles of debt when they leave prison. Fair wages during incarceration are doubly important due to the stark barriers to employment upon release.

Incarcerated workers deserve to be paid a prevailing wage, just like anyone else doing the same work. But there’s also an economic argument to be made about the benefit of paying such a wage that extends beyond the prison system. In 2000, five U.S. economists conducted a study on the impact of prison labor and found that it benefits the overall economy if incarcerated workers are paid more, given the opportunity to unionize, and have access to workers’ compensation.

While workers lose out, companies certainly turn a profit off the work of incarcerated people. For-profit corporations like Geo Group and Core Civic – formerly the Corrections Corporation of America – benefit from incarceration in general and prison slavery specifically. Over the years, many corporations – including Victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, Microsoft, Dell, Boeing, and Whole Foods – have also profited by paying incarcerated people substandard wages to do everything from sewing garments to producing plane parts.

Going on strike is the best way for incarcerated folks to contest the inequality they face and leverage what little political power they have. “Frankly, it’s the only way to challenge their slave status,” Wright says of the strike. Since there’s no legal or judicial way to challenge the institutionalized slavery through the courts in U.S. prisons, the only option available is for incarcerated workers is to withhold their labor.

National strikes also draw attention to an issue where media is generally silent. “Even in cases like the massacre that occurred in Lee County earlier this year prisoners were not given space to respond or share their experiences with the press,” Amani Sawari, an outside organizer for Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, explained in an email to Inequality.org. “It wasn’t until the call for the strike that prisoners were beginning to receive media attention directly.”

Organizers are asking people to support the strike by educating themselves on the conditions in prisons and the list of demands put forth by incarcerated people. People can spread the word by posting stickers and flyers, using the hashtags #August21 and #PrisonStrike on social media, or organizing call-in campaigns and solidarity demonstrations.

Via Inequality.org

Content licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Democracy Now! ” National Prison Strike Begins: Prisoners in 17 States Demand End to “Slave Labor” Behind Bars”

One in three Americans has been reported to a private collection agency with the majority of cases affecting Latin American and African-American communities.

The United States, where the streets are paved with gold and US$28 can send a young single mother or an 80-year-old grandmother to jail for a week or longer.

In a world where an estimated 77 million citizens are weighed down with hundreds of dollars in debt, thousands are sent to jail every year, says a new report, ‘A Pound of Flesh’ published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Despite the fact that debtors’ prisons were eliminated from the civil system in the mid-1800’s, hundreds of African-American and people of Latin American descent wind up in prison with U.S. Marshals citing bounced checks, unpaid water bills or student loans as they are carted off to the nearest federal institution.

The ACLU’s report is the first to analyze the private debt collection industry across the U.S. According to its author, Jennifer Turner, a human rights research at ACLU, “The private debt collection industry uses prosecutors and judges as weapons against millions of Americans who can’t afford to pay their bills.”

More than 6,000 debt collection firms operate in the United States, collecting billions of dollars each year and keeping a high percentage of their gains for the trouble.

Turner analyzed over 1,000 cases of civil court-issued arrest warrants for debtors and found that a number of arrests have been made for debts as little as $10, bank errors, and non-existent charges. One in three Americans has been reported to a private collection agency with the majority of cases arising from minority sectors.

“Consumers have little chance of justice when our courts take the debt collector’s side in almost every case—even to the point of ordering people jailed until they pay up,” she said.

In one case cited in the report, a disabled woman with a prosthetic leg was shackled by her waist and feet by two armed U.S. marshals before being put in jail overnight.

“They had a warrant for my arrest and I asked them for what, he didn’t say what it was for. He said, ‘He’ll tell you later,’” said Tracie Mozie of Dickinson, Texas, who found later she was imprisoned for failing to pay a US$1,500 federal student loan from 1986 which mushroomed to US$13,000 in interest and fees.

However, Mozie was luckier than some. Other debtors could be held as long as two weeks for an inflated phone bill.

Via TeleSur

Creative Commons license

U.S. state and local spending on prisons and jails grew at three times the rate of spending on schools over the last 33 years as the number of people behind bars ballooned under a spate of harsh sentencing laws, a government report released Thursday said.

U.S. Secretary of Education John King said the report’s stark numbers should make state and local governments reevaluate their spending priorities and channel more money toward education.

Between 1979 and 2012, state and local government expenditure grew by 107 percent to US$534 billion from US$258 billion for elementary and secondary education, while corrections spending rose by 324 percent to US$71 billion from US$170 billion, the U.S. Department of Education report found.

In that same period, the population of state and local corrections facilities surged more than fourfold to nearly 2.1 million from around 467,000, more than seven times the growth rate of the U.S. population overall. The prison population shot up following the widespread adoption of mandatory minimum sentence laws in the 1990s.

Seven states—Idaho, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia—each exceeded the average rate, increasing their corrections spending five times as fast as they did their pre-kindergarten to grade 12 education spending.

In just two states—New Hampshire and Massachusetts—growth in corrections expenditure did not surpass P-12 expenditures, even after accounting for changes in population. The report did not analyze different state policies that could explain these exceptions, King said on a conference call.

State and local spending on postsecondary education has remained mostly flat since 1990, the report said. Average state and local per capita spending on corrections increased by 44 percent as higher education funding per full-time equivalent student decreased by 28 percent, it said.

Two-thirds of state prison inmates did not complete high school, the report said.

A 10 percent increase in high school graduation rates would result in a 9 percent decline in criminal arrest rates, King said.

The United States spends about US$80 billion a year on incarceration, White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett said on the conference call.

“One in three Americans of working age have a criminal record,” she said. “That creates an often insurmountable barrier to successful reentry.”

Via TeleSur

——
Related video added by Juan Cole:

The Young Turks: ” How The US Prison System Is BROKEN”