Jeanette Williams places a bouquet of roses at a memorial for Sandra Bland near A&M University, in Prairie View, Texas. (AP/Pat Sullivan)
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday signed into law a measure that seeks to address the circumstances that led to the death of Sandra Bland, a black woman found dead in a county jail days after being arrested during a routine traffic stop.
Police state, corporate state, denuded duncery state — a blistery bunch of 80 percenters lost in a carnival of debt, malignant food, maladjusted education and the folly of a full-throttle powerfully propagandist media like a proverbial copper girdle wire around our collective consciousness. That So Called Liberal (sic) Press (sic) playing triple dirges for the death of any emaciated version of democracy with a capital D for dollar.
Prisoners from Sacramento County await processing after arriving at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, Calif. (AP Photo)
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.
So in the Libyan fable, it is told,
That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
“With our own feathers, not by others’ hands,
Are we now smitten.”1
John Kiriakou’s Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison paints a disturbing portrait of a U.S. prison in which Kiriakou spent time as retribution for having admitted that the CIA used torture. His ongoing whistleblowing on the state of U.S. prisons, as well as on the ways in which the U.S. government has gone after him, is as valuable as his opposition to CIA torture.
A prison guard on horseback watches inmates return from a farm work detail at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La.
Legislation that would make it easier for poor people to satisfy traffic tickets with alternatives to payment cleared the Texas House on Tuesday on a vote of 75-70. The bill needs to be approved by the Senate again before moving to Gov. Greg Abbott‘s desk.
WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange speaks following Swedish prosecutors dropping their case on him. He’s now said he will work with US Justice Department about their case on him.
Published in partnership with Shadowproof.
The “Angola 3” spent more time in solitary confinement than any other incarcerated individuals in the United States, and now, a documentary telling their story will soon be released.
In Cairo, Pope Francis, once again, did what he usually does best: he snapped at the state of immorality and selfishness, which is governing the world, particularly in the West. The message to Egypt’s priests could actually be directed at the population of the European and North American cities:
On Oct. 30, 2016, Robert Earl Council was found sprawled unconscious on the floor of his cell in Alabama’s Limestone Correctional Facility after being on hunger strike for 10 days. Medical staff at the prison force-fed him intravenously, as his blood sugar levels had reached dangerous levels.
