Angela Davis

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Angela Davis is speaking at Santa Barbara in the above YouTube clip. And soon she’ll be speaking at Babson College for students, faculty and staff — an unlikely place, one might say, considering that it is a business school — but that would be unfair.  Today everyone is beginning to see that mass incarceration is one of the greatest problems facing our country.

I first met Angela Davis a few years after my book Shakespeare Behind Bars had come out. I went to a wonderful conference ” on women in prison in Brisbane, Australia, put on by a group called “Sisters Inside,” which works along side incarcerated women to create change in the system.Davis talked about “prison abolition,” which at the time was a new concept to me. As Sisters Inside advocates in their upcoming conference, “Is Prison Obsolete,”

Davis asked questions about building the kind of society that would not need prisons, the kind of society that redistributed of power and income, with a sense of community to support every member.In an age where mass incarceration costs so much in terms of money and spirit, the answer for many who come in conflict with the law should be effective and swift punishment and perhaps that can best be achieved with alternatives to prison.

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Bail Jails are a Bad idea

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If you haven’t seen my newest piece on Boston Magazine where I lay out why bail jails are not the way to go, please check it out here. The basic idea is this: Other states have jumped into the lead with bail reform, but Massachusetts is still lagging behind.

“If you could save $125 a day per person, increase public safety, reduce overcrowding without building new prisons and jails, and only lock up those awaiting trial who have been deemed truly dangerous, would you take that deal?”

Tweets from the Belly of the Beast

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COVID-19: Overcrowded Jails To Release Prisoners On Parole, But This May Just Kick The CanSome months ago on twitter, I came across Shane Bauer, whose amazing article “Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons,” I had read in Mother Jones Magazine. Like me, Shane did not intend to become a prison activist. It happened because of his experience inside prison. Unlike me he was a hostage and suffered as a prisoner. His work is always informed by insight and knowledge and he doesn’t pretend to know all.

So, when I saw a tweet by Shane that he was in “Tampa for the American Correctional Association’s annual convention–the big meet-up of prison industries, guards, and wardens,” I had a strange reaction. Why on earth go to a convention where everyone is making money off prisoners? I have been to these conventions, seen the products and talked to the practitioners. Even Alan Mills, a fellow follower and prison activist, told him to have fun in “the belly of the beast.” But Shane’s tweets assured us he would eventually us his insights for another piece. I asked him if I could share them, so here are some of his tweets from today, February 1st. They speak for themselves.

  • “Learn prison Spanish! A guide at the American Correctional Association convention.
  • CCA private prison warden in Tennessee says to me: ‘No one says, “I want to be a warden when I grow up.'”
  • “A corrections consultant who worked in Afghanistan says to me, ‘Afghans are easy to lock up. A lot easier than Americans.'”
  • “Sitting in a workshop at the American Correctional Assoc. Convention on how to save money on prisons–telemedicine!”
  • “If your doing mental health, you don’t need anything more sophisticated than a camera and a screen,” says x-warden re telehealth in prison.”
  • He also tweets that “ER and Trauma visits” are a “new frontier,” — over a TV.
  • “Nurse giving class on seizures…says threatening to take someone’s temp anally (then doing it) is a way to tell if they are faking it.”
  • “Sitting in a workshop “Avoid Falling in Love With an Inmate,”… (The teacher is a man).”
  • My favorite tweet: “‘Stand if you’ve worked in a jail or prison.’ About 50 stood. ‘Sit if you’ve never heard of staff having sec with an inmate.’ No one sat.”
  • Some prisons have had staffing problems, so they reduced the age limit for guards from 21 to 18. In Tennessee the limit is 18 statewide.
  • “How do you know if an inmate is trying to manipulate you? They try to make friends with you. Once you go down to their level, you’re toast.”
  • CCA private prison warden to colleague: “You know what you need to do? You need to start a nursing home company for geriatric inmates.”
  • Next workshop at the American Correctional Association convention: suicide resistant cell design. (Taught by a former ER cast member.)
  • A company that designs suicide proof vent grills offered a Harley to anyone who could hang himself successfully. Many tried. None succeeded.
  • “‘Loss of life has a very demoralizing effect on staff and the threat of liability is significant.’ That’s the most emotion we’ve got so far.”
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Thanks Shane–I look forward to whatever you write from this. I have written about some of these issues on Boston Magazine, (suicide smocks as a disastrous fix, for example) but it is profound to hear them in 140 words or less, so shockingly straight up. The business of Corrections was written about well by Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind in their report at The Sentencing Project in 2002, and CNBC featured an expose on the billions made on Corrections which is available online

The beat goes on as long as under 2% goes to programming and 98% goes to Corrections, as in my state of Massachusetts..

Kids For Cash

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There are movies. And then there are movies and by that, I mean films that change the way we look at the world. Kids for Cash is a movie that’s going to rock your understanding of what we do with kids in our criminal justice system—at least what we do when we have bad judges, bad policies, and a public that desperately needs to be educated. The movie is currently in previews across the U.S. and should hit your town in February, so be on the lookout.

Kids for Cash depicts a small town in Pennsylvania that “celebrates a charismatic judge who is hell-bent on keeping kids in line,” until parents and legal agencies finally question the motives behind his so-called “brand of justice.” It takes you into the lives of the youth and their families, and the justifiable rage that resulted from a scandal that devastated the lives of over 5000.

In 2007, the Juvenile Law Center in Pennsylvania discovered that hundreds of children in Luzerne County were routinely waiving their rights to counsel when they appeared before Judge Mark Ciavarella, and not only were they found guilty for incredibly minor offenses—one girl got in a fight at school that could have been solved by parents and counselors working together; another student made fun of a teacher on a MySpace page; the kind of drinking or dope smoking that might have resulted in being grounded, if a rational approach was in the offing—but Ciavarella was sending these kids away to so-called “camp,” essentially detention centers, i.e. jails for kids. Ultimately the Law Center was able to expunge the records of 2251 of these teens.

Along the way it was discovered that Ciavarella and another Luzerne County judge had accepted nearly $2.6 million in alleged kickbacks from two private for-profit juvenile facilities.Ciaverella and his crony, Judge Michael Conahan, were found guilty of $2.6 million in tax evasion and fraud. Ciaverella went to prison for 28 years. But not before one of his charges shot himself in the head.

This story has elements that are truly tragic. Taking a child from his or her home should be the last resort not the first! In Massachusetts, the term “detention” refers specifically to holding youth in the custody of the Department of Youth Services or DYS, prior to trial. Citizens for Juvenile Justice says that our kids who “pose a flight risk” are the ones who should be held, and that all others do better staying in their homes and with their family while awaiting trials, many of which are ultimately dismissed.

The ACLU says that it is not uncommon for youth who become involved in the juvenile justice system to be denied “procedural protection,” in the courts, and there are cases where up to 80% of children (in one state), do not have lawyers. Kids of color are more likely to be suspended, expelled or arrested for the exact same conduct in school. Plus, the horrendous policy called “zero tolerance,” which even President Obama has cited as horrific is adding to our tragedies as a nation.

The Juvenile Law Center posted this on its blog, January 7th, 2014, showing the kinds of cases and results that this national school policy has led to: “the boy scout who brings his pocket knife to school, the kid pretending to ‘shoot’ people with a finger gun, the teen who packs ibuprofen in a book bag….suspended or expelled for minor, childish behavior under the guise of ‘zero tolerance.’ These policies are meant to keep children from bringing weapons, drugs or alcohol to school, and deter any form of violence or sexual behavior. While keeping our schools safe is a shared goal, zero-tolerance policies actually undermine that goal and often yield absurd results.”

When I worked at a residential school some years ago, I saw these kids, the ones that were taken out of their homes because they were considered too dangerous to be in public schools. The reality is that parents needed more help to deal with them; they needed more support to succeed in terms of one-on-one education and counseling; they thankfully got to go home on weekends and be at the school during the week. They were not imprisoned.

A line from the film that really knocked me out came from the former Chief Public Defender in the Ciaverella case: “The last couple years if you threw a spitball, they got the police, and you ended up in juvenile court and got sent away. Schools loved it! They got rid of all their problems.” This is an important film. I hope you will see it, share it with friends, and think about how we want to discipline our children. After all, they are children. Corrupt judges aren’t news but these judges took abuse of power to a new level.