Vision Without Action Is A Daydream. Action Without Vision A Nightmare.
The National Public Service Council To Abolish Private Prisons made a concerted effort when choosing its name to erase any possibility of ambiguity regarding who we are and our mission statement. It is our unwavering organizational belief that as long as our government permits Private Prisons For Profit to operate as legal businesses, the American Criminal Justice System, in particular, will never have the capacity to develop -in theory or otherwise- a credibility that the people of this great nation can respect and feel morally comfortable with. This is not a complicated matter. In spite of the endless assortment of political debates and the countless number of discussions among independent committees appointed to research and examine the economic pros and cons of privatization, and in spite of all the "other" arguments created by design, to distract, divide, frighten and confuse the citizens of this country and prevent them from using humane common sense, one cannot ignore or pretend not to see the flashing red flag draped around the philosophical question standing at attention in the middle of the room. Arguably, the criminal justice system is not designed to be a "moral compass." However, it cannot ignore or deny the inherent components at the core of its foundation: equality, fairness, and the humane practice of justice. These are more than lofty concepts to be arbitrarily applied when convenience allows. Our justice system must offer unequivocal, resplendent and reliable standards of "right and wrong" ..."just and unjust" because the people cannot respect or pledge an allegiance to a justice system that fails to demonstrate the difference between "right and wrong" in its own application. The inherent and most fundamental responsibility of the criminal justice system cannot be shirked, avoided, taken lightly or "jobbed out." Like it or not, when an institution is the definitive symbol representing authority and judicial proceeding, your function must reflect a fundamental fairness, and above all else, it must be accountable to all of its citizens. If ever there was a reason for second guessing the process or the ability of the United States Government (Federal & State) to perform its duty when addressing the important task of corrections and rehabilitation in the criminal justice system, the cornerstone of that uncertainty sits squarely upon the shoulders that permit private prisons for profit to operate in the United States of America. Clearly, this immoral profit driven system is without parallel in its resemblance to the most heinous institution to ever exist upon American soil. Slavery.
Aristotle wrote, "It is the peculiarity of man, in comparison with the rest of the animal world that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust"
INCARCERATING PEOPLE FOR PROFIT IS IN A WORD WRONG
All law emanates from the people, so that, when the laws thus enacted are not executed, the power returns to the people, and is theirs whenever they may choose to exercise it.
We are mindful that the Supreme Court is the final interpreter of the constitution...we are also mindful that the federal and state correctional facilities originate from government design and, therefore, must be regulated and maintained by the government.
We must restore the principles and the vacated promise of our judicial system. Our government cannot continue to "job-out" its obligation and neglect its duty to the individuals confined in the corrections and rehabilitation facilities throughout this nation, nor can it ignore the will of the people that it was designed to serve and protect.
There is urgent need for the good people of this country to emerge from the shadows of indifference, apathy, cynicism, fear, and those other dark places that we migrate to when we are overwhelmed by frustration and the loss of hope.
My hope is that you will support the NPSCTAPP with a show of solidarity by signing our petition to send one million signatures to congress expressing the will of the people to abolish the private prison for profit industry. Ahma Daeus
--Ahma Daeus
"Practicing Humanity Without A License"
Man In The Mirror
Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Judge Ciavarella was unusually harsh. He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.
“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.
“There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down.”
Immigrant Jail Tests U.S. View of Legal Access
By: Nina Bernstein
A startling petition arrived at a New York City Bar Association in October 2008. Signed by 100 men, all locked up without criminal charges in the middle of Manhattan. The little-known detention center in Greenwich Village,on the fourth floor, reopened last year. Daniel Miller, a former detainee at the Varick Street Center, complained of abuses there. "These people have no rules," he said. In vivid if flawed English, it described cramped, filthy quarters where dire medical needs were ignored and hungry prisoners were put to work for $1 dollar a day.
A citizen's nightmare! U.S. Citizens wrongly detained, deported
SFGate
Chronicle Editorials
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say they never would knowingly detain or deport a U.S. citizen. But it happens, as staff writer Tyche Hendricks outlined Monday in a series of chilling anecdotes about citizens who were held - and even deported - by U.S. immigration authorities.What is clear in those incidents is that this nation does not have sufficient safeguards against the detention of people who lack the financial means or mental wherewithal to readily prove their citizenship. Some detainees are shipped thousands of miles from their homes, without access to an attorney.
Justice Ignored
Editorial
In January 2007, two immigrant advocacy groups and two former immigration detainees petitioned the Department of Homeland Security to take a simple but important step. They asked it to establish legally enforceable standards for the detention system, a fast-growing network of federal centers, county jails and private prisons that has been plagued by medical neglect and abuse.
Fear of Crime and Things to Come
AMERICAN CHRONICLE
Fear resides in all living creatures. It´s what keeps us alive down at the watering hole or out on the street.
The fear of crime strikes all who live with its dread, as well as those who are personally victimized. Fear keeps us from doing what we want to do; it causes us to distrust friends and to view strangers with prejudice; and it can trick us into trading freedom for a false sense of security.
"War on Crime" Targets Immigrants
BY: TOM BARRY, CIP AMERICAS PROGRAM REPORT
Immigrants have reenergized the flagging "war on crime." Charges against immigrants are clogging federal courts, and new prisons and detention centers are opening to accommodate immigrants. The Obama administration is asking for more money to expand the dragnet for "criminal aliens" and to crack down on drugs and crime along the border.
Violent crime has been declining since the early 1990s, but rising fears about foreign terrorism and new immigrant flows have recharged the political pressures to ramp up the flagging "war on crime" since the mid-1990s. Republican-led legislative measures in 1996 that targeted immigrants and terrorists and the post-Sept. 11 measures linking immigration and homeland security issues have combined to put immigrants in the center of the battle against crime in America.
The National Imperative to Imprison Immigrants for Profit
Tom Barry
Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)
There is a codependent relationship between the private prison industry and the federal government's immigration enforcement apparatus. Immigrant detention jumpstarted the two largest prison companies—Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group—in the prison industry.
The Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) contracted CCA in 1983 and GEO (then Wackenhut Services, Inc.) in 1987 to provide prison beds for detained immigrants. These INS immigrant detention centers were among the first private prisons in the United States.
Group Protests Geo Group in Pecos
Staff Report
NewsWest 9
PECOS - About twenty people gathered outside the Reeves County Courthouse in Pecos Thursday morning to protest the Geo Group, which runs the Reeves County Detention Center. The group chanted and waved signs. The signs said the government should run prisons and not private companies
Guards Threaten Strike at Texas Detention Facility
By: Paul J Weber
SAN ANTONIO — Guards at the largest immigrant detention facility in Texas readied to strike Tuesday in a dispute with the same private contractor running a West Texas prison disrupted by two inmate riots in as many months.Unionized workers at the South Texas Detention Facility in Pearsall say that unless The GEO Group Inc. agrees to better wages and working conditions Tuesday, more than 300 employees could walk off the job as early as this week.
Immigration detention center considered for L.A. area
The federal government is looking for contractors to build a possible detention center in the Los Angeles area that would hold up to 2,200 illegal immigrants and others suspected of violating immigration laws.
Sojourners are there for detainees
AP Special Correspondent
"H-26," the guard yelled. "You have a visitor."
Locked in a windowless warehouse for three months, Ibrahim Cisse had long given up hope of anyone finding him. Now, his mind raced. How could he possibly have a visitor when no one in this country knew his name?
Detention system criticized as cruel
"We are a country that cares about people but first we care about our own people and that they know who is here and why," said ICE spokeswoman Pat Reilly.
But a broad coalition of human rights groups criticize a system that indefinitely incarcerates people who have committed no crimes, and the groups argue, inflicts lasting psychological damage on top of traumas many have already experienced. They also raise questions about the legality of some ICE policies and the accountability of programs that cost billions of taxpayer dollars and affect millions of lives.
Immigrant center draws criticism
KVUE News
Inside a former prison in Taylor, surrounded by chain link fences, sit nearly 400 immigrants.
"The people who are being housed there are not criminals," said former Mayor of Georgetown, Mary Ellen Kersch.
Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored. Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse
Go Directly to Jail...and Die
Cover Story Otay Mesa
Francisco Castaneda came to the United States from El Salvador during its civil war of the 1980s. Fleeing the violence, his mother crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in 1982 with Francisco, aged 10, and his three siblings. Her husband had died of a heart attack just before they left. For years, she did odd jobs and sewing in and around Los Angeles. But she died of cancer before turning 40 and before she secured legal status for her children.
Locals Think Crime & Immigration Pays Big Time For GEO! Detention Facility May Expand; Corley Honored
GEO Group Inc., which has a two-year contract with the county, is running the facility, which houses inmates of the U.S. Marshal’s Office and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On Tuesday, the jail had 1,062 inmates, warden Chris Strickland said.
Vigil Opposes Renewing of Hutto Center Contract
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
GEORGETOWN — More than 100 Central Texans gathered for a vigil outside the Williamson County Courthouse on Sunday night, asking Williamson County commissioners to end a contract with the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.
Immigrants fuel one economic growth sector: Prisons
At a time when most other industries are reporting slackening consumer demand and plunging revenues, the executives of the major private companies providing prison services attribute their fortunes to the sorry fate of America's immigrant population. That's not likely to change any time soon.
Help Stop Immigrant Detention Center in Farmville!!!!
Who profits from private prisons?
California has shipped more than 5,100 inmates to private prisons run by Corrections Corp. in Arizona, Mississippi and other states since late 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered emergency measures to control a ballooning state-prison population. Prisons were so overcrowded that hundreds of inmates were sleeping in gyms, according to one report. An additional 2,900 prisoners are scheduled to be transferred to private prisons outside the state by the end of next year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation....
Cheney, Private Prisons, Slave Labor And Latinos
Click The Cage To Read "Silja Tavi's" Compelling "Women Behind Bars"
Jailed Moms Earn Time To Bond With Their Kids
Strength To Love
BOSTON LEGAL'S "GUARDIANS AND GATEKEEPERS"
CHECK OUT THE CR10 VIDEO
http://vidsearch.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=26210031
Ahma Daeus' Favorite Quotes
- "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable" JOHN F. KENNEDY
- "We must be the change we want to see in the world".........GANDHI
- "We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies".... M.L. KING JR.
- "Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty, the obedient must be slaves"
- "The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free"..... HENRY DAVID THOREAU
- "The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear" ................AUNG SAN SUU KYI
- "When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less & less important whether I am afraid"................... AUDRE LORDE
- "The function of freedom Is to free someone else".............TONI MORRISON
Links We Recommend
- ARC
- Ella Baker
- Provisions
- Van Jones
- Hard2Hire
- Just Seeds
- Sister Song
- Prison Talk
- Openureyes
- Justice Now
- U.S. Congress
- Injustice Line
- Lee Gaylord
- Prison Activist
- Simple Justice
- Thousand Kites
- The Situationist
- Dissident Voice
- Why I Hate CCA
- All Of Us Or None
- Educate-Yourself
- Prison Legal News
- Critical Resistance
- Grits For Breakfast
- Women And Prison
- Books Through bars
- Women Behind Bars
- United States Senate
- Justice Reinvestment
- Convict Criminology
- Texas Prison Bid'ness
- Prison Policy Institute
- Grass Roots Leadership
- Prisoners With Children
- The Innocence Project
- The Sentencing Project
- People Against Injustice
- The November Coalition
- Slavery By Another Name
- Prison Moratorium Project
- Penal Reform International
- Write Your Representative
- The Justice Policy Institute
- Private Corrections Institute
- Peoples Law Office (Chicago)
- Prison Law Office (California)
- The Real Price of Prisons Site
- The Media Awareness Project
- Citizens Against Recidivism, Inc
- Criminal justice Policy Coalition
- The Real Cost Of Prisons Project
- The Private Corrections Institute
- Death Penalty Information Center
- The Council On Crime And Justice
- Abolish Prisons Social Justice Wiki
- Human Rights Watch Prison Project
- Yeshua's Second Chance Foundation
- iAbolish "American Antislavery Group"
- The Public Eye (Political Research Assoc.)
- Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
- Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition
- The Center On Juvenile And Criminal Justice
- The Coalition For Higher Education Act Reform
- FACTS: Families To Amend California's Three Strikes
- Architects/Designers/Planners For Social Responsibility
- Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities
- The Project On Law & Mind Sciences - Harvard Law School
- Informational Resources On The Second Chance Act of 2005
- California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
