Over 3.000 US prisoners serving LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE for non-violent crimes (LIVING DEATH)

 

ACLU report chronicles thousands of lives 

ruined by life sentences for crimes 

such as shoplifting or possession of a crack pipe

65% of the prisoners identified nationwide by the ACLU are African American. In Louisiana, that proportion rises to 91%. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images


At about 12.40pm on 2 January 1996, Timothy Jackson took a jacket from the Maison Blanche department store in New Orleans, draped it over his arm, and walked out of the store without paying for it. When he was accosted by a security guard, Jackson said: “I just needed another jacket, man.”

A few months later Jackson was convicted of shoplifting and sent to Angola prison in Louisiana. That was 16 years ago. Today he is still incarcerated in Angola, and will stay there for the rest of his natural life having been condemned to die in jail. All for the theft of a jacket, worth $159.

Jackson, 53, is one of 3,281 prisoners in America serving life sentences with no chance of parole for non-violent crimes. Some, like him, were given the most extreme punishment short of execution for shoplifting; one was condemned to die in prison for siphoning petrol from a truck; another for stealing tools from a tool shed; yet another for attempting to cash a stolen cheque.

“It has been very hard for me,” Jackson wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as part of its new report on life without parole for non-violent offenders. “I know that for my crime I had to do some time, but a life sentence for a jacket value at $159. I have met people here whose crimes are a lot badder with way less time.”

Senior officials at Angola prison refused to allow the Guardian to speak to Jackson, on grounds that it might upset his victims – even though his crime was victim-less. But his sister Loretta Lumar did speak to the Guardian. She said that the last time she talked by phone with her brother he had expressed despair. “He told me, 'Sister, this has really broke my back. I'm ready to come out.'”

Lumar said that she found her brother's sentence incomprehensible. “This doesn't make sense to me. I know people who have killed people, and they get a lesser sentence. That doesn't make sense to me right there. You can take a life and get 15 or 16 years. He takes a jacket worth $159 and will stay in jail forever. He didn't kill the jacket!”

The ACLU's report, A Living Death, chronicles the thousands of lives ruined and families destroyed by the modern phenomenon of sentencing people to die behind bars for non-violent offences. It notes that contrary to the expectation that such a harsh penalty would be meted out only to the most serious offenders, people have been caught in this brutal trap for sometimes the most petty causes.

Ronald Washington, 48, is also serving life without parole in Angola, in his case for shoplifting two Michael Jordan jerseys from a Foot Action sportswear store in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2004. Washington insisted at trial that the jerseys were reduced in a sale to $45 each – which meant that their combined value was below the $100 needed to classify the theft as a felony; the prosecution disagreed, claiming they were on sale for $60 each, thus surpassing the $100 felony minimum and opening him up to a sentence of life without parole.

“I felt as though somebody had just taken the life out of my body,” Washington wrote to the ACLU about the moment he learnt his fate. “I seriously felt rejected, neglected, stabbed right through my heart.”

He added: “It's a very lonely world, seems that nobody cares. You're never ever returning back into society. And whatever you had or established, its now useless, because you're being buried alive at slow pace.”

Louisiana, where both Washington and Jackson are held, is one of nine states where prisoners are serving life without parole sentences for non-violent offences (other states with high numbers are Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina). An overwhelming proportion of those sentences – as many as 98% in Louisiana – were mandatory: in other words judges had no discretion but to impose the swingeing penalties.

The warden of Angola prison, Burl Cain, has spoken out in forthright terms against a system that mandates punishment without any chance of rehabilitation. He told the ACLU: “It's ridiculous, because the name of our business is 'corrections' – to correct deviant behaviour. If I'm a successful warden and I do my job and we correct the deviant behaviour, then we should have a parole hearing. I need to keep predators in these big old prisons, not dying old men.”

The toll is not confined to the state level: most of those non-violent inmates held on life without parole sentences were given their punishments by the federal government. More than 2,000 of the 3,281 individuals tracked down on these sentences by the ACLU are being held in the federal system. Overall, the ACLU has calculated that taxpayers pay an additional $1.8bn to keep the prisoners locked up for the rest of their lives.
.

 

Timothy Jackson, in an old license photograph. Photograph: Jackson family
'It doesn't have to be this way'

Until the early 1970s, life without parole sentences were virtually unknown. But they exploded as part of what the ACLU calls America's “late-twentieth-century obsession with mass incarceration and extreme, inhumane penalties.”

The report's author Jennifer Turner states that today, the US is “virtually alone in its willingness to sentence non-violent offenders to die behind bars.” Life without parole for non-violent sentences has been ruled a violation of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights. The UK is one of only two countries in Europe that still metes out the penalty at all, and even then only in 49 cases of murder.

Even within America's starkly racially-charged penal system, the disparities in non-violent life without parole are stunning. About 65% of the prisoners identified nationwide by the ACLU are African American. In Louisiana, that proportion rises to 91%, including Jackson and Washington who are both black.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2.3 million people now in custody, with the war on drugs acting as the overriding push-factor. Of the prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent offences nationwide, the ACLU estimates that almost 80% were for drug-related crimes.

Again, the offences involved can be startlingly petty. Drug cases itemised in the report include a man sentenced to die in prison for having been found in possession of a crack pipe; an offender with a bottle cap that contained a trace of heroin that was too small to measure; a prisoner arrested with a trace amount of cocaine in their pocket too tiny to see with the naked eye; a man who acted as a go-between in a sale to an undercover police officer of marijuana – street value $10.

Drugs are present in the background of Timothy Jackson's case too. He was high when he went to the Maison Blanche store, and he says that as a result he shoplifted “without thinking”. Paradoxically, like many of the other prisoners on similar penalties, the first time he was offered drug treatment was after he had already been condemned to spend the rest of his life in jail.

The theft of the $159 jacket, taken in isolation, carries today a six-month jail term. It was combined at Jackson's sentencing hearing with his previous convictions – all for non-violent crimes including a robbery in which he took $216 – that brought him under Louisiana's brutal “four-strikes” law by which it became mandatory for him to be locked up and the key thrown away.

The ACLU concludes that it does not have to be this way – suitable alternatives are readily at hand, including shorter prison terms and the provision of drug treatment and mental health services. The organisation calls on Congress, the Obama administration and state legislatures to end the imposition of mandatory life without parole for non-violent offenders and to require re-sentencing hearings for all those already caught in this judicial black hole.

A few months after Timothy Jackson was put away for life, a Louisiana appeals court reviewed the case and found it “excessive”, “inappropriate” and “a prime example of an unjust result”. Describing Jackson as a “petty thief”, the court threw out the sentence.

The following year, in 1998, the state's supreme court gave a final ruling. “This sentence is constitutionally excessive in that it is grossly out of proportion to the seriousness of the offence,” concluded Judge Bernette Johnson. However, she found that the state's four strikes law that mandates life without parole could only be overturned in rare instances, and as a result she reinstated the sentence – putting Jackson back inside his cell until the day he dies.

“I am much older and I have learned a lot about myself,” Jackson wrote to the ACLU from that cell. “I am sorry for the crime that I did, and I am a changed man.”

Jackson expressed a hope that he would be granted his freedom when he was still young enough to make something of his life and “help others”. But, barring a reform of the law, the day of his release will never come.

SOURCE
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/13/us-prisoners-sentences-life-non-violent-crimes

UK CRIMINALISING POVERTY AND HOMELESSNESS : HER MAJESTY'S PRISON

By Tony Gosling

Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist.



Click! Another notch on the ratchet turning the UK from civilization to fascism this week as Britain's Justice minister, Chris Grayling, announced ten year jail sentences for those who claim too much state benefit.

The latest statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that £1.3bn was fraudulently claimed in 2012/13. Tax Justice Network figures estimating tax fraud by the super-rich at £60bn, which is around 50 times greater, seem to have 'evaded' Grayling; as has the estimated five times greater figure of £10bn in unclaimed benefits.


The sad fact is simply that tyrants are running the show and rather than pay their fair share they intend to squeeze the poor until the pips squeak.

Most government legal aid has also been cut off this year while destitute squatters who manage to find a derelict or empty home to spend the night have also been turned into criminals for the first time in British history. Rather than the wealthy owner of the empty property having to pick up the eviction tab, now it's a job for the taxpayers and police.


So who benefits from the unspeakable cruelty of criminalizing poverty and homelessness?


At 15% Britain has more private prisons than anywhere else in Europe. This particular US policy of containment, where 2.4 million, one quarter of the world's 'criminals' are incarcerated, means the more people go to jail the bigger the bags of cash for cold-blooded private interests.


This was illustrated in the US in 2009 when Pennsylvania Judges Mark A. Ciavarella & Judge Michael Conahan were discovered taking $2.6m from private prison firms and convicted of racketeering. The only surprise about that case was that they were caught and convicted. Those who gain from such backroom handshaking deals are more careful now.




A general view shows C wing at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London (Reuters/Paul Hackett)

In Victorian times the poor were sent to the workhouse: a state institution which was supposed to provide gainful employment and a roof over the head of the destitute. Charles Dickens portrayed the regime brilliantly in his 1839 classic Oliver Twist, but his lessons are being forgotten. If the present government gets their way the backbreaking days of the workhouse will be back.

In 1900, during the Boer war, Britain had the dubious honor of creating the world's first concentration camps where 30,000 political prisoners, mostly families of the Afrikaans enemy, were killed.


In the 1950s Kenya too, during the freedom struggles of the native Land and Freedom Army, 20,000 are estimated to have been killed. Nicknamed Mau-Mau by the dying British Empire, torture and labor camps were set up with summary capital punishment to eliminate political prisoners.

Back home there were a couple of decades of respite after the bloodletting of World War Two before 1980s Thatcherism created a permanent pool of millions of unemployed in Britain and deunionization began.


After 2000, economic migrants from an eastward expanding EU forced wages down even further. Mass mesmerism by the London media branded anyone who questioned the wisdom of driving down hard fought pay and conditions, as a racist.


It became taboo to even question what has been arguably Britain's biggest wave of immigration since the Saxons in the 5th Century AD. From 55 million in 1970 the UK population has grown to the present 64 million.


As if it were not enough for our 'owners', unencumbered by the interests of the majority, to force pay below survival level, bills are now increasing way above inflation while pay remains static, forcing millions into poverty whether in or out of work. It's miserable social engineering on a massive scale.




Prison officers attend a meeting outside Birmingham prison in central England (Reuters/Darren Staples)

So, like the loan shark firms, Britain's Prison Industrial Complex gawps longingly at the new underclass of desperate Untermenschen and licks its collective lips. The shameless generals in charge of this business battle group will have those contracts come hell or high water.

Around 15% of Britain's prison population is presently behind private bars. According to the Howard League for Penal Reform, G4S and Serco jails are the worst.

The world's biggest private security firm G4S, famous for the Olympics fiasco when the British Army had to be drafted in less than a month before the games, are suffering criminal investigation with Serco over their joint £50m government fraud.


Serco's contract for managing Britain's nuclear weapons establishment at Aldermaston, amazingly, has carried on unperturbed. Are bored civil servants deliberately courting disaster to add a little excitement to their lives?

Britain's National Association of Probation Officers, NAPO, who manage murderers, sex offenders, pedophiles, the country's most dangerous criminals, began opposition to their service being sold off this week. Likely bidders being known fraudsters G4S and Serco, the directors of which should, themselves, be behind bars.

The privatization of the criminal justice system is a strategy of malice. It is about dehumanizing the people who most need society's help. The greedy simply scapegoating the weak. They're turning our cities into 'people farms' where only the fit deserve to survive, justice is ditched, and money is the only law in the human jungle.

Back in the 1940s Nazi Germany perpetrators of 'crimes against the party' were worked to death in labor camps. Under the Claims Conference scheme companies that still existed after the war such as Volkswagen, whose slave laborers manufactured the V1 flying bomb, Porsche and Mercedes put their hands in their pockets, compensating the families of the concentration camp victims.

One company though was peculiarly reluctant to contribute. The Quandt family employed 50,000 slave laborers during the war. They owned the Mauser gun firm and AFA which manufactured essential batteries for submarines, tanks, aircraft of the Nazi war machine.





A homeless woman from north Wales, sits huddled under a sleeping bag next to her dog in a shopping arcade near the Victoria rail station in central London (Reuters/Chris Helgren)

At the end of the war, with marital ties to the Goebbels family and a tidy fortune, they sold up to buy a controlling share in the private car manufacturer Bayerische Motoren Werke or BMW. The family felt the money had been made elsewhere so exonerated them from paying reparations to the Claims Conference.


Not all Germans agreed and on October 2007 an award winning documentary 'The Silence of The Quandts' appeared one night to a shocked nation. The surprise film was kept off TV schedules so as to avoid the billionaire Quandts getting an injunction to halt the broadcast. In most of the rest of the world, sadly, where the documentary has not been shown the BMW brand has survived intact. Several months ago I stopped to give some change to a rough-shaven Bristol beggar in his late twenties who, it turned out, was a skilled electrical worker, just released from prison. 'It can seem worse on the outside', he said, 'I left with nothing but the clothes I went in with and nowhere to go'. He went on to tell me about the prison labor he'd been doing for pennies an hour over his 12 month stretch: wiring up thousands of indicator stalks for BMW.

SLAVE TRADER Judge Sentenced to 28 Years in Prison for Selling Kids to Private Prisons