Photo by Jessey Dearing for the Boston Globe
Reporter David Abel visited Massachusetts prisons to try to break down the barriers of consciousness that prisons raise about prisoners’ daily environment and experience. Here, he describes the grimness of his experience dressing in prisoners’ clothes and sleeping on the other side of the walls, despite the absence for him of what are probably the most defining aspects of the experience of incarceration– involuntary, long-term commitment, extreme power disparities, racism, and abuse, for example.
Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project
Harvard Law School
Month: November 2011
WHEN: Tuesday, November 15, 6-8pm
WHERE: 4th Wall Project, 132 Brookline Ave (Fenway) Boston
FREE to the Public
WHAT: Police Deputy Superintendent Paul Joyce has repeatedly stated that recent surges of urban violence are directly linked to the prison system. Despite the complexity of this violence, the media will not cover prison matters. In 2002, the Massachusetts Department of Corrections banned media from prisons, allowing the prisons to operate without independent oversight. This dialogue will look at the impact of this policy on the already vulnerable population of prisoners and possibilities for interrupting the cycle of incarceration and violence. Guest includes Conan Harris (StreetSafe Boston), True-See Allah (Nation of Islam), Charles Yancey (Boston City Councilor), Darrin Howell (Mass Uniting), Pastor Paris Cherry, John C. Williams (Brockton) and others.
From the Committee for Public Counsel Services:
“Today at 1:00pm, the Massachusetts Senate will begin debate on S.2054 – An Act Relative to Habitual Offenders, Sentencing and Improving Enforcement Tools, a bill crafted by the Senate Committee on Ways & Means.
The scope of this legislation is cause for grave concern. It includes significant changes to the Massachusetts wiretap statute, enhances criminal liability in DNA collection, expands the habitual offender law, adds additional mandatory supervision upon release, and establishes new standards of whom shall be eligible for parole and when. Specifically, if this bill passes, it will:
• Institute one of the harshest 3-Strikes laws in the country by enhancing our present habitual offender statute.
• Increase parole eligibility for those serving life sentences by changing it from 15 to 25 years.
• Lead to fewer grants of parole; leaning more heavily on mandatory post-release supervision and adding nine months to two years to sentences.
• Allow wiretapping of anyone suspected of chapter 94C Controlled Substances offenses and all firearm offenses.
• Expand criminal liability for anyone who does not provide a DNA sample, when so ordered, by changing the standard from “refuses to provide a sample” to “fails to provide a sample.”
• Reduce the school zone from 1,000 ft. to only 500 ft., which does little to offset the “urban penalty” paid by city residents.
• Not ease prison overcrowding, which is currently at 144% capacity, since it maintains mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent chapter 94C Controlled Substances offenses and only decreases slightly the mandatories for some of these offenses.
Please, contact your State Senator to ask him or her to either vote against S.2054 or, at least, vote in favor of the amendments that will provide balance to our justice system. You will find contact information for your Senator here.”
Monday, November 14, 2011, 6:00 PM
AIDS Action Committee
75 Amory Street, Jamaica Plain (near the Jackson T stop)
Shot over three years, this high-definition documentary film tells the story of five transgender women housed in men’s prisons as they face rape, violence, solitary confinement and denial of medical care. It challenges the viewer’s basic ideas about gender and justice through braids of poignantly graphic stories, vibrant landscape portraits and stark prison footage from across the United States. A Transgender Awareness Week event.
For more information, visit http://www.masstpc.org/events/taw/ or call TransCEND at (617)450-1102 or -1103
Join the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice for an evening to honor the Attica prison uprising, explore prison abolition and honor Eddie Ellis, a living legend.
Thursday, November 10, 2011, 5:00 PM
Austin Hall, Ames Courtroom, Harvard Law School
1515 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
Son of Jamaican immigrants, Ellis was born in Harlem, December 1941. At the age of twenty-five, he was director of Community Relations for the New York City branch of the Black Panther Party. In 1969, caught up in the infamous FBI operation which systematically attacked organizations like the Panthers and other radical groups, Ellis was arrested and accused of killing a man he had never before seen, had no connection to, and no motive for slaying. While serving a twenty-five year sentence in New York state prisons for a crime he did not commit (from 1969 to 1994), Ellis survived the Attica massacre and was a trailblazer for prison education. He continues to advocate for economic and social justice and is now spearheading policy reform across the nation. The event will include film clips and a panel discussion.
Hosted by Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
Panel will include:
Soffiyah Elijah, Correctional Association of New York
Edwin (Eddie) Ellis, Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions
Kaia Stern, Prison Studies Project at Harvard University
Christopher Stone, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Including excerpts from the film The Last Graduation: The Rise and Fall of College Programs in Prison.
For more information, visit http://charleshamiltonhouston.org/Events/Event.aspx?id=100146
In a recent opinion piece in the the New York Times, Sarah Shourd connects her experience in Iran’s Evin Prison, where she was held in solitary confinement for 14 and a half months, to the use of solitary confinement in the United States. Reflecting further on this piece, it is clear that policies around solitary confinement are a very real concern in Massachusetts, particularly, where we have one of the highest inmate suicide rates in the country — due at least in part to the overuse of solitary confinement in response to symptoms of mental illness. This is a timely and important discussion, especially when placed in an international context as it is here.
This article describes the major role played by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s largest private prison company, in proposing and drafting what became the notorious Arizona Senate Bill 1070. The language and the title of the bill drafted at a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting last December were virtually entirely preserved in SB 1070. CCA, along with other major prison companies and lobbyists, including the Geo Group and Management and Training Corporation, have major representation in ALEC, and 30 of the 36 co-sponsors of the bill received donations from these companies and lobbyists after the December meeting.
This article discusses the economics of the private prison industry, and how it generally exhibits the logic that the incentive to build more prisons leads to legislation and policies that produce more arrests, sentencing and detention, or prisoners– not the other way around. At a time when the practical extension of this logic seems to be exhausting itself even in the eyes of its proponents, immigration detention presents a promising new market and growth opportunity.
As the ACLU recently reported, “private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1600% between 1990 and 2009. Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6% of state prisoners, 16% of federal prisoners, and, according to one report, nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government. In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion dollars in revenue, and their top executives, according to one source, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million.” This analysis further questions the conventional assumption that local economies stand to gain from the growth of private prisons, since new prisons may drain local resources without offsetting these costs, obstruct possibilities for other types of local job creation, and because profit-incentives lead to more violent prison conditions, among other things.
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