Tag: politics

Muncy State Prison

September 12th, 2024

Thursday

“We have chosen each other

And the edge of each others’ battles

The war is the same

If we lose

Someday women’s blood will congeal 

On a dead planet

If we win

There is no telling

We seek beyond history

For a new and more possible meeting.”

–Audre Lorde

September 13th, 2024

Friday

Letter to the Judge:

Prisons and jails have become America’s largest psychiatric facilities. According to a 2014 Treatment Advocacy Center report, over 350,000 individuals (souls) with severe mental illnesses were held in U.S. prisons and jails in 2012, while state psychiatric hospitals held just 35,000 patients.

I am one of these individuals with a severe mental illness. I have Bipolar I Disorder with Psychotic Features and Schizoaffective Disorder, which occasionally make me act erratically and have psychotic episodes. It is because of one of these psychotic episodes that I am currently imprisoned in SCI-MUNCY.

Before this instance, I was fully in compliance with the terms of my parole, and I have no technical parole violations. The reason I am on parole in the first place is due to another psychotic episode three years ago. I have done everything in my power to prevent these episodes from happening and mitigate their effects. I was seeing a therapist every week and a psychiatrist monthly. I was taking my prescribed medication. I have put in an action plan with all of my friends and family in the event of a future psychotic episode that includes calling CRISIS instead of the police and hospitalization at Clarion Psychiatric Facility for stabilization.

I had a job working to Tioga Publishing as a correspondent reporter that I hope to return to upon being re-paroled. My only request is that I not be further punished with house arrest upon parole. My job does not have regular hours, and I cannot predict when news happens in Potter County. Please take this into consideration when imposing a sentence on me. I have done the very best I can to prevent this from ever happening in the future, and I am very sorry for any harm I caused while I was psychotic.

I’d like to close with a quote by Dr. Stuart Grassian, M.D., a nationally renowned solitary confinement expert:

“There’s a tremendous pull toward seeing everything that you’re looking at as bad behavior that needs to be punished, rather than recognizing that it’s actually a response to mental illness. The paradigm in the prison system is if you punish bad behavior enough, it’ll get better. That’s obviously a paradigm that doesn’t work.”

We’ll see how that goes.

September 14th, 2024

Saturday

Criminal Legal News: Published by the Human Rights Defense Center/Sept. 2022 Vol. 5 No. 9

Inextricably Intertwined: The Practice of Negotiated Pleas and the Rise of Mass Incarceration in America by Casey J. Bastian

“America is the world leader in rates of incarceration. This country consists of only 5% of the world’s total population, yet it houses about 25% of the world’s prisoners. As of 2021, there were actively more than 2.1 million people in jails and prisons in the U.S. Is America truly the land of the free?…

The incarceration rate in this country exceeds that of Western European democracies by an astounding 700%. America’s rate is 665 per 100,000 people; much higher than ‘authoritarian’ nations such as Russia (402), Iran (284), and Saudi Arabia (197). The U.S. imprisons more people for much longer periods for reasons that have nothing to do with divergent rates of crime….

The why is likely a result of negotiated pleas in criminal cases. Although it is often referred to as plea ‘bargaining,’ there is rarely any bargain in it for either the defendant or society writ large. America leads the world in plea bargaining and is more dependent on this prosecutorial mechanism than any other nation in the world…

To examine this disturbing phenomenon more closely, Albert W. Alshuler wrote ‘Plea Bargaining and Mass Incarceration’ (‘Study’). Alshuler is a Julius Kreeger Professor Emeritus a the University of Chicago Law School, publishing this latest study in the NYU Annual Survey of American Law in 2021…

The study notes that of those 2.1 million incarcerated at the time, 97% of all federal felony convictions, and 95% of state felony convictions, are the result of guilty pleas. As such, negotiated pleas are a primary of mass incarceration for a variety of reasons. When you combine this mechanism with new sentencing laws and developments that have increased prosecutorial power, it produces ‘skyrocketing imprisonment…’

Worse, negotiated pleas have proliferated more severe sentences as well. Many defendants plead guilty for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason is a belief that they will receive a ‘reduced’ sentence. And if you consider the reality of the ‘trial penalty,’ there is reason for them to believe it. Specifically, in federal courts, the imposed sentence is generally one-third that of those imposed after trial…

Post-trial sentencing is often so severe as to dissuade the next defendant from exercising their constitutional right to have the government prove its case.

Evidence demonstrates that the typical sentence imposed after guilty pleas are not more lenient; they are just less than post-trial sentences…

Inflating post-trial sentences to induce guilty pleas is not an occasional thing, it is systemic…

Negotiated guilty pleas allow for more cases to be filed; those that would typically end in acquittal and those that are so weak they normally ought not to have been filed at all. This also increases the likelihood of convicting the innocent. In 2016, Alshuler wrote a previous report discussing this issue called, ‘A Nearly Perfect Device for Convicting the Innocent…’

Just on a local and state level, in the early 1980s, spending on jails and prisons was $6 billion per year; by 2013, the cost had ballooned to a staggering $80 billion. Between 1985-2000, state and federal governments were opening one new prison per week on average. America had literally engaged in a ‘race to incarcerate.’

The imprisonment rate in America had changed little from the late 19th Century until 1972. Beginning in 1972, this rate rose six-fold in 36 years, going from 93 per 100,000 to a whopping 536 per 100,000 in 2008. 

This is just people in prisons; it does not account for people in jails or detained in other institutional settings. There is not reliable data pre-1970s for jail incarceration rates, but by 2007, including jail populations, increased the overall incarceration rate to 767 per 100,000…

In the 1970 case of Brody v. United States, 397 U.S. 742 (1970), the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of [plea bargaining], departing from earlier opposing standards. And in 1971, the Court called it an ‘essential’ and ‘highly desirable’ part of the criminal process ‘for many reasons.’ 

Santobello v. New York, 404 U.S. 257 (1971)…

In 1964, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater first made crime a national issue. Richard Nixon won election in 1968 by railing against the ‘criminal forces,’ beginning the ‘War on Crime’ siege mentality–pitting lawmakers against American citizens. Nixon was able to transform the Supreme Court with appointees…Congress got in on the act as well. Between 2008-2013, Congress approved an average of 80 new federal crimes per year. The PROTECT Act, RICO Act, Armed Career Criminal Act, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and the infamous ‘1994 Crime Bill,’ just to name a few, broadened federal prosecutorial powers and added to the list of crimes that could be charged federally…In 1962, there were 24,000 federal prisoners and 5,097 criminal trials. In 2017, there were 186,000 prisoners and only 2,123 trials.

The statistics are eerily similar in state-law criminal justice systems. Between 1994 and 2008, in the 34 states that provide reliable data, crime and arrest rates fell. Yet the numbers of felony cases filed by prosecutors rose from 1.4 million to 1.9 million. The Study notes that ‘the number of people admitted to prison rose by about 40% from 360,000 to 505,000 and almost all of that increase was due to prosecutors bringing more and more felony cases against a diminishing pool of arrestees.’ Prosecutors had learned that the leverage of a ‘trial penalty’ sentence can induce nearly everyone charged to plead guilty to something.”

September 16th, 2024

Monday 

4:54pm

I’m reading “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Ever since I started reading it I’ve wanted to write, but I feel so down and depressed lately that I feel like I don’t have anything worthwhile to say. Plus I’m sick–lupus flare–turned–respiratory virus sick. Anyway, the book is about Gilbert traveling to Italy, India, and Indonesia in an effort to find both herself and God in the aftermath of a devastating divorce. Here’s what a plumber/poet gave her on a piece of paper after leading her to the top of some tower:

(p. 184-185)

INSTRUCTIONS FOR FREEDOM

1. Life’s metaphors are God’s instructions.
2. You have just climbed up and above the roof. There’s nothing between you and the Infinite. Now, let go.
3. The day is ending. It’s time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, let go.
4. Your wish for resolution was a prayer. Your being here is God’s response. Let go, and watch the stars  come out–on the outside and on the inside.
5. With all your heart, ask for grace, and let go.
6. With all your heart, forgive him, FORGIVE YOURSELF, and let him go.
7. Let your intention be freedom from useless suffering. Then let go.
8. Watch the heat of the day pass into the cool night. Let go.
9. When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.
10. When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.

On the radio:

“Staring at the blank page before you

Open up the dirty window

Let the sun illuminate the words that you cannot find

Reaching for something in the distance

So close you can almost taste it 

The rest is still unwritten…”

September 17th, 2024

Tuesday

I have an interview later with Zuko, and I haven’t done one in so long I wanted to brush up on my question. Along with Eat, Pray, Love, I’m reading “Go Ask Alice,” which is the diary of a 15-year old drug user-published anonymously. It’s depressing.

Muncy State Prison

August 20th, 2024

Tuesday

I talked to a woman today who has a crazy story–Lolita. She was sex-trafficked in some trap house and raped repeatedly, and then they sent some guy into the basement where she was being kept, and she started crying and showed him her injuries. He felt bad for her and said he was going to get her out and he came back the next morning with a sawed-off shotgun and demanded her release. The three Black men who had kept her captive beat the man who came to save her to death. Ten years later, she was charged with homicide and abuse of a corpse and got a 7-20 year sentence. She was paroled after seven years at Muncy and went home, but is now back for drinking on parole.

Craziness.

August 26th, 2024

Monday

5:49pm

Daisy and Swiper are fighting. Straight screaming at each other. 

Ridiculous.

They’re making it so crowded in here that all people are doing is fighting. There was a big fight in the Chow Hall yesterday. The rumor is that M Unit has asbestos and sewage problems, so they’re moving everyone from M into BB.

This whole fight started over a chair, because they took all the chairs out of the shower today, so Swiper said she was going to take the chair from the cell and use it to set her stuff on while she takes showers. Daisy freaked out and said it was her chair because she’s on the top bunk, and that’s how it started.

Now they’re both locked in for the night.

Great.

August 27th, 2024

Tuesday

Swiper got seven days of cell restriction for having extra sheets. This is great. Lock the two in together who hate each other. 

Fuck.

I’m stressed. 

There’s a song on the radio that says, “If the world is ending, I wanna be next to you.” 

That’s just great.
The apocalypse has reached mainstream music.

Magazine:

Criminal Legal News–Published by the Human Rights Defense Center–April 2023 Vol. 6 No. 4 p. 42

“Time to Find the Key”

By Jayson Hawkins

Excerpts:

“Senior Research Analysts Nazgol Ghandnoosh and Ashley Nellis at the Sentencing Project released a paper in September 2002 compiling findings from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Corrections Reporting Program, and other public agencies across the country. The paper concluded from this data that long prison sentences are keeping people locked up who are no longer a threat to public safety. This conclusion is even more troubling because the paper also found that prisoners are serving longer sentences than ever.

More than 260,000 prisoners in the U.S. have served at least 10 years behind bars as of 2019, representing 19% of the total prison population. This represents a dramatic increase from 2000 when just 10% had served at least 10 years.

These numbers have an impact on public safety. The U.S. Sentencing Commission found that people who had served at least 10 years in federal prison reoffended at a rate that is 29% lower than those who serve less. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found similar data for state prisoners. Those who served at least six years in a state prison were 25% less likely to return to prison than those who served only one year. 

These figures mirror previous findings that showed most criminals stop committing crimes four to 12 years after they start. This has led the American Bar Association, the Sentencing Project, and other groups to recommend that judges have the ability to reevaluate sentences after 10 to 15 years. 

Despite these recommendations and the data that drives them, more people are serving longer sentences in the U.S. than ever before. Approximately 770,000 American prisoners are serving a sentence of 10 years or more, and 12% increase in the faction of such prisoners since 2000. There are 12 jurisdictions in America where two-thirds of prisoners are serving a sentence of at least a decade.

These numbers are even higher among Black Americans who represent only 14% of the total U.S. population and 46% of those who have served 10 years or more.”

August 28th, 2024

Wednesday

Prison Legal News–Publishied by the Human Rights Defense Center–April 2023, Vol. 34 No. 4 article:

“I Was Scheduled to Die in Solitary Confinement–and May Soon Be Again” by Mark Wilson excerpts:

“Prison and jails have become America’s largest psychiatric facilities. According to a 2014 Treatment Advocacy Center report, over 350,000 individuals with severe mental illnesses were held in U.S. prisons and jails in 2012, while state psychiatric hospitals held just 35,000 patients…

In October 2022 the National Judicial Task Force to Examine State Courts’ Response to Mental Illness issued State Courts Leading Change: Report and Recommendations. In it, the group noted that ‘[m]ore than 70% of people in U.S. jails and prisons have at least one diagnosed mental illness or substance use disorder or both, and up to a third of incarcerated people have a serious mental illness.

‘There’s a tremendous pull toward seeing everything that you’re looking at as bad behavior that needs to be punished, rather than recognizing that it’s actually a response to mental illness,’ explains Dr. Stuart Grassian, M.D. A nationally renowned solitary confinement expert, he says that ‘[t]he paradigm in the prison system is if you punish bad behavior enough it’ll get better. That’s obviously a paradigm that doesn’t work.’

This punishment paradigm inevitably creates a vicious cycle in which mentally ill prisoners quickly end up in solitary confinement. In turn, that causes their mental illness to further deteriorate. 

They then engage in impulsive, uncontrollable behaviors that lead to more punishment, extending their solitary confinement and further aggravating their untreated mental illness. This cycle almost always ends very badly.

The Human Rights Watch, a torture watchdog group, estimated from 2003 data that one-third to one-half of those in solitary confinement suffered from some form of mental illness.’ When I started touring…solitary confinement units in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I found that 50% of [prisoners] suffered from [serious mental illness],’ agreed Terry Kupers, MD, a leading national solitary confinement and mental health expert…

In the late 1700s, William Bradford, who would become America’s second Attorney General, cautioned against exceeding 20 to 30 days at a time in solitary confinement, noting that long-term isolation is more than most humans can bear. The U.S. Supreme Court later agreed. ‘A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane. Others still committed suicide,’ the Court acknowledged in its 1890 decision, In re Medley, 134 vs. 160 (1890)…

David Fathi, executive director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, agrees that, ‘solitary confinement is one of the most damaging things you can do to a human being,’”

August 29th, 2024

Thursday

Prison Legal News–Published by the Human Rights Defense Center April 2023 Vol. 34 No. 4 article: 

“Educating Prisoners: “New Meta-Analysis Reinforces That It Reduces Recidivism” by Keith Sanders

“With the highest incarceration rate in the world–over six out of every 1,000 people–America has long known there is one thing that consistently reduces recidivism: education…Participation in an educational program decreases the odds of recidivism by 17 to 19% on average…Education also increases the overall post-release employment rate by 9.75%…Moreover, since the average length of a prison term is 2.7 years and the average cost per year to house a prisoner was $40,000 in 2022 dollars, ‘the cost savings for every person who is deterred from recidivism due to education is $107,075,’ the report notes.”

Article:

“Report Shows How Perverse Financial Incentives Drive Mass Incarceration and Inequity in Criminal Justice System” by Matt Clarke excerpt:

“A 72-page report by the Brennan Center for Justice published on July 6, 2022, shows how civil asset forfeiture, fines, fees and privatized community supervision shift the costs of the criminal justice system to the accused, removing financial disincentives for prosecutors to seek alternatives to incarceration.

Simultaneously, state and federal contracting for detention bed spaces has created a speculative market that rewards construction of excessive prison and jail capacity. That capacity, once built, drives mass incarceration with contracts that collect for a certain number of beds regardless of whether they are needed. Moreover, when lockups lose contracts, they must seek to fill the empty beds to avoid financial losses.

The report also addresses how performance metrics for police and prosecutors drive mass incarceration. Prosecutor performance is generally measured by conviction rates and police performance by arrest rate. A failure to meet these required metrics can result in punishment in the form of job assignments, docked pay, loss of leave time, or even termination…

The report is extensively documented with 506 footnotes. It also contains specific suggestions for improvements, chiefly by reigning in excessive fees and fines on which criminal justice budgets depend, as well as civil asset forfeiture.

According to the report, the current use of fees to finance parts of the criminal justice system has caused an increase in costs for services such as DNA testing, forensic laboratory, drug testing, the local law library and victim services, even when these specific services are not relevant to a particular case.

Likewise, the use of fines might cause a charge to be upgraded to one carrying a greater fine or one that places the use of a fine under local control. The idea of using either to finance the judiciary not only disproportionately effects [sic] the poor and racial minorities, it proved to be financial folly when the pandemic shutdown greatly diminished those revenue sources…

The report concludes that cash-strapped agencies and cities see potential windfalls from over-enforcement and overincarceration, giving them ‘little incentive to divert people from arrest and prosecution of to strengthen alternative approaches to public safety’ and thus further driving mass incarceration.”

In other news, they have people working in the kitchen who have tested COVID positive. 

9:12pm

We have a new woman CO who closed the bathrooms at 9pm, fifteen minutes before count. People are freaking out, and the CO’s response was, “If you can’t hold it for 15 minutes, maybe you should put in a sick call and get that checked out.”

August 31st, 2024 

Saturday

Now I’m reading “The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America” by Sarah Kendzior, © 2015

In one of her essays, she points out that the income gap in America in 2012 was worse than it was in 1927, during the Great Depression. She also says that 15% of Americans are on food stamps, and a whopping 45% of American babies are on WIC. That means that nearly half of all new mothers in the United States live below 185% of the poverty line. Ms. Kendzior tried to interview millennial parents about their children’s futures, but the answer she got the most was that they didn’t like to think about it.

Criminal Legal News–Published by the Human Rights Defense Center, June 2023 Vol. 6 No. 6 Article: Study Explores Factors Underlying High Rate of American Police Killings” by Eike Blohm, MD excerpts:

P. 47 “Each year about 11 people are shot by police in Germany, and 18 Australians lose their life at the hands of law enforcement officers. The number of citizens killed by American police in 2020 was an astonishing 1,133…

Compared to non-Hispanic Whites, Blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police…

An American is 11.7 times as likely to die at the hands of police than a French citizen…racism correlates very well with FPV (Fatal Police Violence) rates. Countries that treat minorities poorly tend to have more police killings…

American police academies essentially train cadets for war, focusing on combat and weapons training while grossly inflating expectations of violence encountered on the job. This coupled with a hero complex nurtured by police culture valorizes bravery and ridicules retreat and de-descalation…

Surveys of U.S. police officers found that they crave car chases and the associated adrenaline rush…

The Supreme Court of the United States established in Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989), that the threshold [for using deadly force] is NOT a probable and immediate threat but the mere REASONABLE BELIEF that such a threat exists suffices…officer are permitted to react violently before a threat actually materializes…

If shooting the suspect becomes unavoidable, police in European countries are encouraged to give warning shots of shoot at the legs. Their American counterparts are trained to shoot center mass where vital organs are located. In the rare instance where German police fire upon a suspect, an average of 1.7 bullets are expended. American suspects on average are shot 7.6 times. European officers shoot to stop; Americans shoot to kill…

U.S. police are bureaucratically fragmented. There are 18,000 independent police departments in America that all get to set their own rules and procedures. In contrast, Scandinavian countries have a single nationally unified police force…

The situation  is particularly dire in rural police departments. Funding and expertise are sparse, so policies and standard procedures are outdated or based on faulty data. 

Unsurprisingly, rural U.S. police contribute to a disproportionate amount of FPVs…

A rational police officer will be deterred from violating policies and standard procedures if it is likely that the violation will be detected and punished.

American police departments police themselves in contrast to the United Kingdom where police killings are all investigated by a civilian body.”

Source: Hirschfield, P. 2022

Exceptionally lethal: American Police Killings in a comparative perspective.

Annual Review of Criminology 6:11 – 11.28