[FACT comments: Until now, New Zealand has been one of the few Western countries not censoring the Internet. Now NZ pols are working that old flim-flam to sucker their voters. We hope to see as much resistance in NZ as there is in Australia and will publish the NZ blocklist shortly.]
Internet filter sparks outrage
New Zealand Herald: July 16, 2009
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10584710&pnum=0
The Government is spending $150,000 on website “filtering” software, outraging some bloggers who say the move amounts to censorship of the internet.
Since 2007 the Department of Internal Affairs’ Censorship Compliance Unit has worked with a small group of internet service providers on a “trial” project to block access to websites distributing child pornography.
The project, using hardware and software supplied by a Swedish technology company, thwarts access to more than 7000 websites known to offer child sexual abuse material.
If computer users subscribed to the ISPs involved in the trial – which now include TelstraClear, ihug, Watchdog and Maxnet – attempt to access sites on the DIA’s blacklist they are re-directed to a message explaining the site has been blocked.
Until now the DIA’s filtering project has been run on a shoestring Budget of $2000 or $3000 a year, but the department won $150,000 in this year’s Budget to buy software to expand the system beyond a trial. The money was part of a $661,000 Budget increase for “censorship enforcement activity”.
In a letter to Wellington blogger Thomas Beagle, Censorship Compliance Unit manager Steve O’Brien said because New Zealand’s censorship legislation – the Film, Videos and Publications Classification Act – contained no specific authority for website filtering, ISPs’ participation in the trial had been voluntary.
O’Brien said the country’s largest ISP, Telecom, along with ihug owner Vodafone, had “expressed their willingness to participate” in the expanded programme.
In his blog, Beagle wrote he was concerned there was no “external oversight” of websites added to the department’s blacklist.
“It is being implemented in a very ‘under the radar’ way so as to avoid the fuss that has been raised in other countries such as Australia,” he said.
“If we are going to implement internet filtering I believe it should be done openly and through law.”
Beagle also said the filtering scheme was not very effective because it relied on DIA staff manually adding websites to be filtered and it was “relatively easy for motivated users to circumvent” the filtering process.
Mauricio Freitas, the Wellington-based founder of popular technology website Geekzone, also blogged about his concerns there was no oversight to the filtering process, meaning it could be extended beyond blocking child porn sites.
“[T]here isn’t a publicly available list of blacklisted websites, and no guarantees that a secret meeting between government agencies wouldn’t in the future add other ‘categories’ to this list,” he said.
Moves to make internet filtering compulsory in Australia have caused a storm of protest with proponents making similar claims that the process was about more than blocking Australians’ access to child pornography.
Across the Tasman the Federal Government said last year it would spend $42 million on an internet filtering programme that would be compulsory for all ISPs. But the scheme was ridiculed when leaked lists purportedly containing the Government’s banned sites were found to include innocuous web addresses, including one for a Brisbane dentist.
In its statement of intent for 2009 to 2012, the DIA says the aim of its website filtering work is “to assist in preventing New Zealanders from gaining access to websites containing objectionable material”.
“This will restrict website hits and … diminish revenue to criminals.”
MONITORING WEB
* New Zealand’s website-filtering initiative is nothing compared to the efforts of the Chinese Government, which has spent billions of dollars over the past decade on its “Golden Shield Project,” a censorship and surveillance technology programme often dubbed the “Great Firewall of China”.
* Golden Shield is a highly effective system for blocking websites Chinese authorities don’t want citizens to access.
* A small window was opened in the Great Firewall last year when China allowed uncensored access to the internet from some locations in a bid to appease journalists and other international visitors attending the Olympic Games in Beijing.
* Iran has similar censorship and surveillance technology which has been used by authorities to thwart protesters’ attempts to disseminate information
Content Filtering Ineffective, Harmful According to Public Knowledge Study
CircleID: July 22, 2009
http://www.circleid.com/posts/content_filtering_ineffective_harmful_public_knowledge/
A report released today by Public Knowledge points out that their recent analysis indicates that filtering Internet content as advocated by media companies will not be effective and in fact harmful to the Internet. An accompanying 60-page whitepaper contains the full report including a number of reasons—some highlighted below—why the user of copyright filters should not be allowed, encouraged or mandated on U.S. Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks.
1. Copyright filters are both underinclusive and overinclusive. A copyright filter will fail to identify all unlawful or unwanted content
while harming lawful uses of content.
2. Copyright filter processing will add latency. Copyright filters will slow ISP networks, discouraging use, innovation and investment and harming users, businesses and technology policy initiatives.
3. The implementation of copyright filters will result in a technological arms race. Users will act to circumvent the filters and the architects of the filters will find themselves caught in a costly, unwinnable arms race.
4. Copyright filters do not make economic sense. The monetary costs associated with copyright filtering far outweigh any perceived benefits.
5. Copyright filters will discourage investment in the Internet economy. Copyright filters will disrupt the Internet ecosystem, severely
undermining our most promising engine for economic growth.
6. Copyright filters will harm free speech. Due to technological limitations, copyright filters will harm lawful, protected forms of speech
such as parody and satire.
7. Copyright filters could undermine the safe harbor provisions that shield ISPs from liability. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), ISPs are shielded from liability for their users’ actions.
Copyright filters could undermine these safe harbors, which have allowed the Internet to become the most important communications medium of the modern era.
8. Copyright filtering could violate the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act. Copyright filtering could constitute unlawful interception under the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act (ECPA).
—–
Full report:
http://www.publicknowledge.org/pdf/pk-filtering-whitepaper-200907.pdf
Worldwide wiretap-Corbett Report
31-07-09
World Wide Wiretap
Recent cyber attacks provide pretext for sweeping internet snooping by US government
James Corbett
The Corbett Report: July 10, 2009
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14306
Last Friday, while most Americans were preparing for a weekend of fireworks and hot dogs, the Obama Administration had an ominous message: they are going ahead with a Bush-era plan to allow the NSA even more power to invade, intercept and analyze the data of anyone visiting a government website, ostensibly to help prevent a major cyber attack.[1] The timing of the announcement, the day before a holiday long weekend, seemed unusual, but less than 24 hours later just such an attack began to unfold on a series of websites in America and South Korea, including those of the White House, Pentagon, New York Stock Exchange, Treasury Department, Secret Service and The Washington Post, amongst others.
The attack itself turns out to have been fairly innocuous[2]–a run of the mill DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack that did not even employ the latest malware–but you wouldn’t know that from reading the sensational reporting in the controlled corporate media. The VOA reports that the ‘internet attackers’ have struck again.[3] “US State Department under cyberattack for fourth day” blares a headline from the AFP.[4]
Blame for the attack is now falling on North Korea, but what North Korea has to gain by taking down The Washington Post’s website is anybody’s guess (perhaps Kim Jong-il was giving his own pronouncement on the recent revelation that the Post was selling access to high-level politicians to lobbyists for $250,000 a pop[5]). The big winner in this attack, it seems, is the federal government, which has been preparing to unveil an Internet surveillance spy grid for years, but have virtually no mandate to do so from a public that has become tired of invasive government snooping.
Various government stooges have been trying to drum up support for their Orwellian police state fantasy for years by warning of the coming ‘cybergeddon’ at the hands of ‘cyber terrorists.’ In 2003, former National Security Agency (NSA) director Mike McConnell was going on international fearmongering trips warning of attacks “equivalent to the attack on the World Trade Center in New York” unless a new agency were created to deal with the threat.[6] The’cyber 9-11′ meme has carried on ever since, with hysterical coverage of Chinese cyber warriors[7] and teenage hackers[8] attempting to rally the public into supporting a new front in the “War on Terror:” cyberspace.
Of course, exactly as was the case of 9/11, which was used as a pretext for tabling and passing (before anyone had time to read it) the voluminous, labyrnthine constitution-destroying Patiot Act, so too will the ‘cyber 911′ be used to justify an iPatriot Act that will destroy any vestige of legal red tape preventing the government from tracking, tracing and controlling every movement of every citizen in cyberspace forever. That this legislation exists and is in fact merely waiting for a large cyberterrorist incident to justify rushing it into law was actually admitted last year by former Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke to Lawrence Lessig.[9] “I was having dinner with Richard Clarke and I asked him if there is an equivalent [to the Patriot Act],” Lessig recounted to a technology conference in California last year.”‘Is there an i-Patriot Act just sitting waiting for some substantial event as an excuse to radically change the way the internet works?’ He said ‘of course there is’.”
The three prongs of the attack on Internet freedom and privacy come from the military, the NSA and the Executive/Legislative branches of government. In 2003, the military labeled the Internet itself an enemy weapons system[10] and ever since then there has been growing momentum behind various military, intelligence and governmental schemes to track and trace all movements of all Internet users, American or foreign. Last year, the Air Force attempted to establish its own cyber command[11], resulting in military turf wars that last month spawned a new U.S. Cyber Command and the further militarization of cyberspace.[12] The military has even threatened a military responsea gainst any would-be hackers of government systems[13] (unless you are North Korean, evidently).
At the same time, the NSA is jockeying to launch a new system dubbed Einstein that would see all telecoms route data traveling to or from government networks through an NSA monitoring box.[14] This is on top of existing programs like pinwale[15] and Stellar Wind[16] which have already given them legal access to secretly spy on billions of communications records. Now Mike McConnell is back on the fearmongering trail telling anyone who will listen that if the NSA doesn’t have the authority to examine everyone search history, private emails and file transfers, then there will be a (you guessed it) “cyber 9/11.”[17]
The third prong of the attack comes from America’s own elected representatives. Even back in 2007 the powerful thinktank known as the Center for Strategic and International Studies was already preparing for the coming Obama presidency, convening a year-long panel that issued a report called “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency”[18] which contained the following chilling passage under the heading “Regulate cyberspace:”
“Voluntary action is not enough. The United States must assess and prioritize risks and set minimium standards for securing cyberspace in order to ensure that the delivery of critical services in cyberspace continues if the United States is attacked.”
Now, Jay Rockefeller is attempting to do just that with a bill that would kick start this process of setting ‘minimum standards’ for cybersecurity over to an advisory panel filled with globalists, corporate chieftains and hand-picked academics[19]. Rockefeller tried to drum up his own support for the bill by reaching new heights of hysterical fearmongering over the net, even going so far as to say the Internet should never have existed.[20] Obama is getting in on the act as well, threatening to pick a new ‘Cyber Czar’ who is conspicuous for having taken every opportunity during his time in Congress to vote for the expansion of NSA spying programs and authorities.[21]
The entire cyberterror hysteria seems to have reached a peak in the last month, with the announcement of U.S. cyber command, the impending vote on Rockefeller’s bill and the naming of Obama’s cyber czar expected to occur in the near future. Up until this week, there has only been one problem: there has been no clear mandate for any of this hysterical rush toward increased government snooping and regulation on the Internet. The American public is becoming disgusted with Obama's continuation of the NSA spying program[22] and have been unwilling to get behind giving up their online liberties in exchange for protection from the threat of teenage hackers and Russian spambots. The former head of the National Cybersecurity Center resigned this March citing "threats to the democratic process from the NSA’s attempts to dominate all governmental cybersecurity efforts.[23] Wired even ran a story detailing how the U.S. Cyber Command is an agency without a purpose, function or mission that has been trying to find a reason for existing.[24]
Now along comes a relatively unsophisticated DDOS attack from what may or may not be North Korea (there is no proof for the origin of the attack other than the government’s say-so) and suddenly it all seems justified: the creation of new branches of the military to deal with cyber warfare and even create sophisticated new cyberweapons for destroying hackers and rogue governments; the NSA programs to track and trace all searches, file transfers and communications of seemingly everyone on the planet; Rockefeller’s legislation to appoint big business and globalists to advise on mandatory communications regulations. It seems that Obama and the NSA have more to gain from these attacks than do the North Koreans.
Of course, the capability (and presumably the intention) to monitor every electronic communication passing through the United States in real time has long existed. What we are seeing now is the revelation of long-established policies and technologies to a public that may have rejected them before. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994[25] already mandated that every communications device in the country be accessible by law enforcement, and it has now been mainstream news for years that the FBI can (and has) dialled into cellphones to listen in on any conversations taking place within reach of the microphone…even if the power is turned off.[26] In 2006, an AT&T whistleblower revealed an NSA spy room directly in the data hub monitoring every email, every phone call and every fax traveling through that hub.[27] In 2008, it was admitted that part of the NSA’s efforts to catch Al-CIAda included agents passing around particularly humorous phone sex conversations between US military overseas and their wives back home.[28]
No, the capability of spying on all communications of all Americans is not being developed now; that has already happened. Right now we are witnessing the implementation of the phase in which the capability to track and trace all communications are being introduced to the public and justified on the grounds of national security. Expect to see an increasing number of media-hyped ‘cyber attack’ stories before the cyber 9/11 makes the iPatriot Act a reality.
Of course, it should be obvious by now that those in charge of multi-billion dollar agencies are in positions to directly materially benefit from just such large, stunning cyber attacks, opening the door to the false-flag mentality by which attacks are to be welcomed for their transformative nature.[29] Certainly the NSA is not building a $1.6 billion-dollar data center to sit on their hands waiting for an attack[30], nor are the governments of the UK[31], Canada[32], Ireland[33] and many other countries suddenly considering draconian new e-spying legislation for the fun of it.
For those who are interested in how a cyber false-flag terrorist attack could be generated, the PTECH story[34] remains a crucial piece of the puzzle. The technology exists for those in the know to commit sophisticated, convincing and devestating attacks through the government’s own cyber infrastructure. The only question is who has the means, motive and opportunity to use it.
Notes
[1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070202771_pf.html
[2]http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218401127
[3]http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-07-09-voa18.cfm
[4]http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_State_Department_under_cyberatta_07092009.html
[5]http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24441.html
[6]http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/21/1050777200225.html
[7]http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2009/ea_china0377_05_12.asp
[8]http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/38
[9] http://www.infowars.net/articles/august2008/050808i911.htm
[10] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7980
[11] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/06/marlborough-mas/
[12] http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2009/06/cybercommand.pdf
[13] http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=94143§ionid=3510203
[14] http://blog.executivebiz.com/nsa-at-chertoff-weighs-in/3134
[15] http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/06/hbc-90005232
[16] http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/05/11/a-8216-stellar-winda-8217-routinely-eave
[17] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/01/feds-must-exami/
[18] http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/081208_securingcyberspace_44.pdf
[19] href=http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20090626_2244.php
[20] href=http://www.youtube.com/v/Ct9xzXUQLuY
[21] href=http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/cyber_privacy/
[22] http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2009/04/obamas-justice-department-moves-to.html
[23] href=http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/BeckstromResignation.pdf
[24] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/foggy-future-for-militarys-new-cyber-command/
[25]http://www.askcalea.net/
[26]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G1fNjK9SXg
[27]http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619
[28] http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5987804&page=1
[29] http://www.corbettreport.com/articles/20090706_scheuer_false_flag.htm
[30] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/01/nsa-plans-16-billion-utah-data-center/
[31] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8087530.stm
[32] http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/06/19/tech-internet-communications-electronic-police-bills-surveillance-follo-privacy.html
[33] http://www.examiner.ie/Ireland/idsnausnmh/rss2/
[34] http://www.corbettreport.com/index.php?ii=88&i=Documentation
Copyright laws threaten our online freedom
Christian Engstrom
The Financial Times: July 7, 2009
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14321
If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all.
On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.
This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.
File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice.
The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been decided.
The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many politicians who want to push that button.
The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a journey into the future.
The internet it still in its infancy, but already we see fantastic things appearing as if by magic. Take Linux, the free computer operating system, or Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Witness the participatory culture of MySpace and YouTube, or the growth of the Pirate Bay, which makes the world’s culture easily available to anybody with an internet connection. But where technology opens up new possibilities, our intellectual property laws do their best to restrict them. Linux is held back by patents, the rest of the examples by copyright.
The public increasingly recognises the need for reform. That was why Piratpartiet – the Pirate party – won 7.1 per cent of the popular vote in Sweden in the European Union elections. This gave us a seat in the European parliament for the first time.
Our manifesto is to reform copyright laws and gradually abolish the patent system. We oppose mass surveillance and censorship on the net, as in the rest of society. We want to make the EU more democratic and transparent. This is our entire platform.
We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting the fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven per cent of Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other political differences aside in order to ensure this.
Political decisions taken over the next five years are likely to set the course we take into the information society, and will affect the lives of millions for many years into the future. Will we let our fears lead us towards a dystopian Big Brother state, or will we have the courage and wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open society?
The information revolution is happening here and now. It is up to us to decide what future we want.
The writer is the Pirate party’s member of the European parliament.
Facebook ‘breaches Canadian law’
BBC News: July 17, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8155367.stm
Popular social networking site Facebook is breaching Canadian law by holding on to users’ personal information indefinitely, a report has concluded.
An investigation by Canada’s privacy commission found the US-
based website also gave “confusing or incomplete” information to subscribers.
Facebook says it is aiming to safeguard users’ privacy without compromising their experience of the site.
More than 200 million people actively use Facebook.
They include about 12 million in Canada, more than one in three of the population.
‘Practical solutions’
Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart laid out the findings of the report at a news conference in Ottawa.
She accepted that Facebook regarded privacy issues as a top concern “and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates”.
Jennifer Stoddart has the power to take Facebook to a federal court
Facebook’s policy of holding on to subscribers’ personal information, even after their accounts had been deactivated, was one area that breached Canada’s privacy laws, she said.
The law requires organisations to retain such information only for as long as it necessary to meet appropriate purposes, she was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying.
The report said Facebook’s information about privacy practices was “often confusing or incomplete”, and urged the site to make its policies more transparent to users.
Facebook was also criticised for failing to adequately restrict access of users’ personal details to some of the 950,000 developers in 180 countries who provide applications, such as games, for the site.
In response, Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly told AFP it was working with the commission to resolve the issues.
“Overall, we are looking for practical solutions that operate at scale and respect the fact that people come to share and not to hide,” he said.
“We continue our dialogue and have every confidence that we will come to acceptable conclusions. I think the concerns are fully resolvable”.
Ms Stoddart said she would review Facebook’s progress in 30 days.
Under Canadian law, she can take the case to a federal court to have her recommendations enforced, the BBC’s Lee Carter in Toronto says.
Tech giants to be rated on human rights
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: July 21, 2009
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/07/21/search-engines-human-rights-measure.html
A group of prominent Canadian researchers has launched an initiative to examine how closely companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo follow their own principles regarding freedom of expression and privacy.
The Citizen Lab, which runs out of the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, has gained prominence this year after it uncovered an alleged internet spy network based mostly in China in March and last month aided Iranians in accessing blocked content on the web.
Now the group will turn its attention to the private sector, examining how closely technology companies follow their own agreed-upon principles for conduct.
In October 2008, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. were all signatories — along with several human rights groups — of the Global Network Initiative. That group aims to develop agreed-upon and voluntary principles to protect human rights in the information and communications technology sector, even as the companies face pressure from governments to comply with domestic laws and policies that may limit those rights.
Guidelines included asking participating companies:
- To seek to avoid or minimize the impact of government restrictions on freedom of expression.
- To employ human rights impact assessments and develop risk mitigation strategies.
- To work with government to alter government restrictions which appear to go overboard.
- To give clear, prominent and timely notice to users when content has been restricted.
Study not limited to online search companies
Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert said the focus of this summer’s Global Network Initiative (GNI) Monitor would be to assess how these companies were doing in following their own principles.
Human rights groups have kept a close eye on the larger search companies, particularly after a number of high-profile cases of censorship in China.
Yahoo in particular has been a target of human rights groups since it admitted two years ago that it provided information to Chinese authorities that led to the arrests and imprisonment of two Chinese journalists.
Since then, Yahoo settled a lawsuit with the journalists’ families and set up a human rights fund to provide aid to dissidents.
Deibert said while the search engines will be a focus of the examination, the study will not be limited to them.
“We are focusing our technical interrogation part of the GNI Monitor on the search engines simply because we have developed a suite of interrogation tools to do so,” he said. “But we intend to monitor non-search engines and non-signatories to the GNI using non-technical means.”
Deibert said that while the list of companies to be examined has yet to be finalized, Nokia Siemens Networks would be among the companies not associated with the GNI that they will be monitoring.
Iran has reportedly blocked some communications and websites and has been following some types of communication with the help of call-monitoring technology created by the company, a merger of Siemens AG, based in Germany, and Finnish cellphone company Nokia Corporation.
Iranians and Iranian-Canadians have called for a boycott of the company for its role in the potential monitoring of civilians. But the company said while it has provided the Iranian government with Lawful Intercept technology to monitor local voice calls within the country, it has not equipped Iran with technology to monitor data, the internet or international calls.
Did Anti-Drug Propaganda Help Bring About a Psychedelic Renaissance?
Alternet: July 20, 2009.
As the anti-drug program spread into 3/4 of all school districts by the ’90s, America’s youth enjoyed a psychedelic renaissance.
The following is an excerpt from Ryan Grim’s new book, “This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley, 2009) This is the 2nd excerpt in a series from the book. Read the first excerpt here).
The D.A.R.E. program is now in three-quarters of all school districts, reaching more than twenty-five million American kids. It also has branches in more than fifty nations worldwide. Ironically, it was born just as more than a decade of rising drug use was ebbing among all age groups, including baby boomers, who now had the sorts of responsibilities that can preclude taking recreational drugs: careers, mortgages, and, most important, children.
Apprehensive new moms and dads in the eighties and early nineties helped make D.A.R.E. a global phenomenon, but they were surrounded by countless other sources of parenting help. Best sellers such as Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More and Charles Whitfield’s Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families, both published in 1987, helped to build a massive market in recovery and wellness literature during the period. Self-esteem, self-actualization, and self-help, pop-psychological leftovers from the individualistic sixties and narcissistic seventies, became buzzwords to live by as millions of Americans were introduced to their “inner child” and the potentially catastrophic consequences of neglecting it. “With our parents’ unknowing help and society’s assistance, most of us deny our Inner Child,” Whitfield writes of this hidden, wounded aspect of the psyche. “When this Child Within is not nurtured or allowed freedom of expression, a false or co-dependent self emerges.”
Motivational speaker John Bradshaw further popularized the notion with his 1990 best seller, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. He went on to host a ten-part TV special by the same title and to author four more self-help best sellers. Together, his books would sell more than ten million copies. He and Whitfield both identified a national psychological crisis that had been caused by neglectful, unloving, and “spiritually abusive” parents.
They urged boomers not to make the same mistakes while rearing their own children—whether the one within or the ones without. “Give your child permission to break destructive family roles and rules,” advises Bradshaw. “Adopt new rules allowing pleasure and honest self-expression.” He also assures readers that “mistakes are our teachers—they help us to learn.” Kids will make more mistakes than adults, he suggests, because “they have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. Children are natural Zen masters; their world is brand new in each and every moment.” Children, therefore, shouldn’t be held back by rigid rules but allowed the freedom to explore. They shouldn’t be scolded but reasoned with. Parents should be friends and confidants, not authority figures. In a 1990 New York Times article, Wendy Kaminer summed up the codependency movement’s attitude toward parenting: “Shaming children, calling them bad, is a primary form of abuse.”
The movement was strong enough—and ostensibly permissive enough—to disturb some of the more conservative elements of American society. A columnist in Georgia’s Fayette Citizen was perplexed as late as 1998 by the proliferation of “parenting classes,” many taught by folks just out of college. He called one of the programs and spoke to its director. She told him that “the most prevalent problem is improper parental discipline,” which probably reassured spare-the-rod types. But that wasn’t all. “You wouldn’t believe how many parents still don’t realize that under no circumstances should spanking or hitting be used to discipline children,” she added. And “the second most frequent problem,” she said, “is not parents endangering children, but rather parents who try to ‘control’ their children, which stifles self-expression.”
She was working from a set of assumptions that was backed by more than just pop psychology. At a 1995 Aspen Institute program called “The Challenge of Parenting in the ’90s,” those gathered heard from Harvard professor Stuart T. Hauser, then-director of the school’s Judge Baker Children’s Center. Relying on a longitudinal study he published in 1991, he told the conference that the “chances of a teenager experimenting with new ideas and embracing new perceptions are greatly increased when he or she is in a family where curiosity and open-mindedness are valued, and uncertainty is tolerated.” The goal of his research, he said, was to “enhance” parenting “so that it will not interfere, obstruct, or aggravate the greatest difficulties during the teenage years.” The title of his lecture, “Adolescents and Their Families: Paths of Ego Development,” is telling—the family belongs to the child.
Few parents, of course, wanted no structure or discipline at all. Hauser, in his talk, recommended required educational programs dealing with violence, drugs, pregnancy, and school failure. For young potential psychonauts, the rise of the codependency movement and the spread of D.A.R.E. dovetailed fortuitously: Kids were encouraged to satisfy their curiosity, which uniformed officers piqued by waving baggies of pot in their faces during school.
Healthcare activist Mykey Barbitta says that his first exposure to marijuana came during a D.A.R.E.-like field trip to a police station in fourth grade. “They had that cabinet that had all the drugs in it and they said, ‘These are all dangerous,’” he recalled. “I saw marijuana sitting there at the bottom, right in the middle, and I’m like: this I can see, the needles, the pills. I can understand, in fourth grade, that those can hurt you. But how can that little leaf hurt you? I just had my doubts ever since then.”
Today, Barbitta is a drug dealer: he runs a state-sanctioned medical-marijuana shop in San Francisco.
Not surprisingly, the University of Michigan survey shows that just as the inner child was breaking out, LSD use among the children of the most educated parents—the sort who might watch a John Bradshaw special on PBS—began rising. According to most surveys, it’s almost always the children of the least educated parents whose drug use is the highest. But not for LSD in the nineties, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast among white, educated young males.
In 1975, 11.2 percent of all twelfth-graders said that they’d used “hallucinogens” at least once that year. Use skewed toward males, with 13.7 percent claiming to have used compared to 9 percent of women. Use of LSD specifically stood at 7.2 percent. The numbers for both hallucinogens and LSD slowly declined over the next fifteen years, dipping to a low of 5.5 percent of all seniors having taken hallucinogens in 1988.
Then the trend started turning around, and by 1994, use of LSD was back to 1975 levels. Mid-nineties acidheads differed demographically from those of twenty years before, however. The Michigan survey breaks the nation into the Northeast, the North Central, the South, and the West. Acid use in the seventies was spread evenly throughout the country, save for the South, which lagged behind. As far back as the surveys go, blacks barely register on the hallucinogen scale. Whites top it, although Latinos aren’t far behind. The level of education of a child’s parents, however, played little role in whether that kid would try acid or hallucinogens.
Beginning in the late eighties, children of the most highly educated parents took the lead in acid use. In 1975, kids with uneducated parents used hallucinogens at precisely the same rate as kids of highly educated parents—and both groups used it less than children with moderately educated parents. By 1990, the kids of the highly educated were more than twice as likely to trip.
Meanwhile, kids in the Northeast cracked 13 percent for hallucinogen use in 1996 and 1997 and nearly hit 12 percent for acid in those years—the highest of any subgroup for both categories. Numbers for the West for these years are high, too, with a peak of 8.8 percent LSD use in 1996. Whatever their parents’ educational background, kids who said they wouldn’t be going to college or would be going for fewer than four years dropped acid at a significantly higher rate than others.
Acid’s sixties-era distribution network was there to meet the demand. The Grateful Dead, long known to be something of a psychedelics delivery service, had continued to tour throughout the eighties and dropped a top-ten comeback album, In the Dark, in 1987. The year before, Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead, which had been released in 1974, earned Platinum certification by finally reaching one million copies sold. The nineties, though, saw sales really take off. In the Dark went double-Platinum in 1995, and the neophyte-friendly Skeletons hit double-Platinum in 1994 and triple-Platinum just six months later, in early 1995. The cultural comeback the Dead made was in evidence following that year’s drug-related death of front man Jerry Garcia, which played out on the cover of Newsweek and was memorialized with congressional speeches. LSD use among high-school and college students peaked at the same time.
College campuses in the early to mid-nineties were dominated by tie-dyes, some of which came from Dead shows, where hard-core fans set up not only T-shirt booths, but also a drug bazaar known simply as the Lot. There, youngsters all over the country could get a night of mind-blowing psychic exploration for as little as five dollars—and often for free. The Dead had company on the road, too. New England–founded jam band Phish and its southern counterpart, Widespread Panic, grew in popularity during the period. So did gatherings such as the Furthur Festival, which featured projects by various members of the Dead and replicated the Lot scene.
Psychedelia, despite the loss of Jerry Garcia, was on the rise.
Number of Life Terms Hits Record
Solomon Moore
The New York Times: July 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/us/23sentence.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all
Mary Thompson, an inmate at the California Institution for Women here, was convicted of two felonies for a robbery spree in which she threatened victims with a knife. Her third felony under California’s three-strikes law was the theft of three tracksuits to pay for her crack cocaine habit in 1982.
Like one out of five prisoners in California, and nearly 10 percent of all prisoners nationally in 2008, Ms. Thompson is serving a life sentence. She will be eligible for parole by 2020.
More prisoners today are serving life terms than ever before — 140,610 out of 2.3 million inmates being held in jails and prisons across the country — under tough mandatory minimum-sentencing laws and the declining use of parole for eligible convicts, according to a report released Wednesday by the Sentencing Project, a group that calls for the elimination of life sentences without parole. The report tracks the increase in life sentences from 1984, when the number of inmates serving life terms was 34,000.
Two-thirds of prisoners serving life sentences are Latino or black, the report found. In New York State, for example, 16.3 percent of prisoners serving life terms are white.
Although most people serving life terms were convicted of violent crimes, sentencing experts say there are many exceptions, like Norman Williams, 46, who served 13 years of a life sentence for stealing a floor jack out of a tow truck, a crime that was his third strike. He was released from Folsom State Prison in California in April after appealing his conviction on the grounds of insufficient counsel.
The rising number of inmates serving life terms is straining corrections budgets at a time when financially strapped states are struggling to cut costs. California’s prison system, the nation’s largest, with 170,000 inmates, also had the highest number of prisoners with life sentences, 34,164, or triple the number in 1992, the report found.
In four other states — Alabama, Massachusetts, Nevada and New York — at least one in six prisoners is serving a life term, according to the report.
The California prison system is in federal receivership for overcrowding and failing to provide adequate medical care to prisoners, many of whom are elderly and serving life terms.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this week repeated his proposal to reduce the inmate population through a combination of early releases for nonviolent offenders, home monitoring for some parole violators and more lenient sentencing for some felonies. But there are no credible plans to increase the rate at which prisoners serving life sentences are granted parole.
“When California courts sentence somebody to life with parole, it turns out that’s not possible after all,” said Joan Petersilia, a Stanford law professor and an expert on parole policy. “Board of parole hearings almost never grant releases, and that’s the reason that California’s lifer population has grown out of proportion to other states.”
Margo Johnson, 48, also an inmate at the women’s prison here, has served 24 years of a life sentence for a 1984 murder. She has been recommended for release four times by the state parole board, but she said that Mr. Schwarzenegger had rejected the board’s recommendation each time.
“Sometimes I wonder, is it just a game they’re playing with me?” Ms. Johnson said.
Seven prison systems — Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and the federal penitentiary system — do not offer the possibility of parole to prisoners serving life terms.
That policy also extends to juveniles in Illinois, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. A total of 6,807 juveniles were serving life terms in 2008, 1,755 without the possibility of parole. California again led the nation in the number of juveniles serving life terms, with 2,623.
“The expansion of life sentences suggests that we’re rapidly losing faith in the rehabilitation model,” said Ashley Nellis, the report’s main author.
De Angelo McVay, 42, is serving a life term with no possibility of parole at the maximum security state prison in Lancaster, Calif., for his role in the kidnapping and torture of a man.
He said in an interview Wednesday that he had used his 10 years in prison to reform himself, taking ministry classes, participating in the prison chapel program, becoming vice chairman of his prison yard and avoiding behavioral demerits.
“I’m remorseful for what I did,” he said. “But I got no chance at parole, and I know guys who have committed killings and they have parole.”
Supporters of longer sentences for criminals, including victims rights organizations, prosecutors and police associations, often cite public safety, the deterrent effect of punishment and the need to remove criminals from society.
But the number of aging inmates serving life sentences has risen sharply as the sluggish economy has shrunk state budgets. By 2004, the number of inmates over 50 had nearly doubled from a decade earlier, to more than 20 percent, according to the report. Older inmates cost more because they have more health needs. California, for example, spends $98,000 to $138,000 a year on each prisoner over 50, compared with the national average of about $35,000 a year.
But Professor Petersilia said she was skeptical that economic arguments alone would persuade voters to treat inmates serving life terms — most of whom have committed violent felonies like murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery — with more leniency.
“All the public opinion polls say that everybody will reconsider sentencing for nonviolent offenders or drug offenders, but they’re not willing to do anything different for violent offenders,” Professor Petersilia. In fact, she added, polls show support for even harsher sentences for sex offenses and other violent crimes.
Burk Foster, a criminal justice professor at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan and an expert on the Louisiana penitentiary system, said the expansion of life sentences started at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, the nation’s largest maximum penitentiary, in the early 1970s, when most people sentenced to life terms were paroled after they had been deemed fit to re-enter society.
“Angola was a prototype of a lifer’s prison,” said Professor Foster. “In 1973, Louisiana changed its life sentencing law so that lifers would no longer be parole eligible, and they applied that law more broadly over time to include murder, rape, kidnapping, distribution of narcotics and habitual offenders.”
Professor Foster said sentencing more prisoners to life sentences was an abandonment of the “corrective” function of prisons.
“Rehabilitation is not an issue at Angola,” he said. “They’re just practicing lifetime isolation and incapacitation.”
[FACT comments: This article is about women prisoners but its logic applies to all prisoners. Except for a very few crimes of violence, prisons could be easily abolished to the benefit of society. Do tell: How is our world a better place by locking human beings in
cages?]
Beyond Attica: The Untold Story of Women’s Resistance Behind Bars
AlterNet: July 21, 2009.
As the incarceration rate of U.S. women skyrockets, an important book shines new light on the struggles of women prisoners.
“When I was 15, my friends started going to jail,” says Victoria Law, a native New Yorker. “Chinatown’s gangs were recruiting in the high schools in Queens and, faced with the choice of stultifying days learning nothing in overcrowded classrooms or easy money, many of my friends had dropped out to join a gang.”
“One by one,” Law recalls, “they landed in Rikers Island, an entire island in New York City devoted to pretrial detainment for those who can not afford bail.”
Law shares this and other recollections in her new book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press). At 16, she herself decided to join a gang, but was arrested for the armed robbery that she committed for her initiation into the gang. “Because it was my first arrest — and probably because 16-year-old Chinese girls who get straight As in school did not seem particularly menacing — I was eventually let off with probation,” she writes.
Before her release from jail, Law was held in the “Tombs” awaiting arraignment. While the adult women she met there had all been arrested for prostitution, she also met three teenagers arrested for unarmed assault. “Two of the girls were black lesbian lovers. In a scenario that would be repeated 13 years later in the case of the New Jersey Four, they had been out with friends when they encountered a cab driver who had tried to grab one of them. Her friends intervened, the cab driver called the police and the girls were arrested for assault.” Law notes that “both of my cellmates were subsequently sent to Rikers Island.”
These early experiences, coupled with her later discovery of radical politics, pushed Law “to think about who goes to prison and why.” She got involved in several projects to support prisoners, which included helping to start Books Through Bars in New York City, sending free books to prisoners. In college, she “began researching current prisoner organizing and resistance,” and upon discovering almost zero documentation of resistance from women prisoners, she began her own documentation and directly contacted women prisoners who were resisting. A college paper became a widely distributed pamphlet, and at the request of several women prisoners she’d corresponded with, Law helped to publish their writings in a zine called Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison. Law writes that the zine and pamphlet “heightened awareness not only about incarcerated women’s issues, but also women’s actions to challenge and change the injustices they faced on a daily basis.”
“This book is the result of seven and a half years of reading, writing, listening, and supporting women in prison,” Law says about Resistance Behind Bars, noting that each chapter in her book “focuses on an issue that women themselves have identified as important.” The chapters include topics as diverse as health care, the relationship between mothers and daughters, sexual abuse, education, and resistance among women in immigration detention. Resistance Behind Bars paints a picture of women prisoners resisting a deeply flawed prison system, which Law hopes will help to empower both the women held in cages and those on the outside working to support them.
Who Goes To Prison?
Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has skyrocketed, from 300,000 to over 2.3 million. According to the U.S. Justice Department, this staggering increase has not resulted from a rise in crime. In fact, since 1993, the prison population has increased by over one million, but during this same period, both property offenses and serious violent crime have been steadily declining. The New York Times recently cited a 2008 report by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London documenting that the U.S. has more prisoners than any other country. Furthermore, with 751 out of 100,000 people, and one out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, the U.S. also has the highest incarceration rate in the world. With only five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
While women comprise only nine percent of the U.S. prison population, their numbers have been increasing at a faster rate than men. As Law documents, “between 1990 and 2000, the number of women in prison rose 108 percent, from 44,065 to 93,234. (The male prison population grew 77 percent during that same time period.) By the end of 2006, 112,498 women were behind bars.”
Like with male incarceration rates, women behind bars are disproportionately low-income and people of color. Law writes that “only 40 percent of all incarcerated women had been employed full-time before incarceration. Of those, most had held low-paying jobs: a study of women under supervision (prison, jail, parole or probation) found that two-thirds had never held a job that paid more than $6.50 per hour. Approximately 37 percent earned less than $600 per month.”
A 2007 Bureau of Justice study documented that 358 of every 100,000 Black women, 152 of every 100,000 Latinas, and 94 of every 100,000 white women are incarcerated. Explaining this racial discrepancy, Law argues that inner-city Black and Latino neighborhoods are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. She cites a 2005 U.S. Department of Justice study which concluded that Blacks and Latinos are “three times as likely as whites to be searched, arrested, threatened or subdued with force when stopped by the police.”
The so-called “War on Drugs” has played a key role in the growth of the U.S. prison population. Law writes about the impact of New York State’s Rockefeller Drug Laws passed in 1973, “which required a sentence of 15 years to life for anyone convicted of selling two ounces or possessing four ounces of a narcotic, regardless of circumstances or prior history. That year, only 400 women were imprisoned in New York State. As of January 1, 2001, there were 3,133. Over 50 percent had been convicted of a drug offense and 20 percent were convicted solely of possession. Other states passed similar laws, causing the number of women imprisoned nationwide for drug offenses to rise 888 percent from 1986 to 1996.”
Distinguishing women prisoners from their male counterparts, Law cites a Bureau of Justice study which “found that women were three times more likely than men to have been physically or sexually abused prior to incarceration.”
Women Prisoners Don’t Resist?
The central thesis of Resistance Behind Bars is truly profound. In clear, non-academic language, Law argues that recent scholarship documenting and radically criticizing the increased incarceration rates and mistreatment of women prisoners “largely ignores what the women themselves do to change or protest these circumstances, thus reinforcing the belief that incarcerated women do not organize.” Alongside academia, Law also harshly criticizes radical prison activists, arguing that “just as the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s downplayed the role of women in favor of highlighting male spokesmen and leaders, the prisoners’ rights movement has focused and continues to focus on men to speak for the masses.”
Law gives honorable mention to two books that documented women’s resistance at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State: Juanita Diaz-Cotto’s Gender, Ethnicity, and the State (1996) and the collectively written Breaking the Walls of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximum Security Prison (1998). Since these two books “no other book-length work has focused on incarcerated women’s activism and resistance,” writes Law. As a result, Law argues that women prisoners “lack a commonly known history of resistance. While male prisoners can draw on the examples of George Jackson, the Attica uprising and other well-publicized cases of prisoner activism, incarcerated women remain unaware of precedents relevant to them.”
Epitomizing the scholarship that Law criticizes, author Virginia High Brislin wrote that “women inmates themselves have called very little attention to their situations,” and “are hardly ever involved in violent encounters with officials (i.e. riots), nor do they initiate litigation as often as do males in prison.”
To challenge Brislin’s assertion, Law gives numerous examples of women rioting and initiating litigation, including the “August Rebellion” in 1974 at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State. On July 2, 1974, prisoner Carol Crooks won a lawsuit against prison authorities, with the court “issuing a preliminary injunction, prohibiting the prison from placing women in segregation without 24-hour notice and a hearing of these charges,” writes Law. In response, “five male guards beat Crooks and placed her in segregation. Her fellow prisoners protested by holding seven staff members hostage for two and a half hours. However, ‘the August Rebellion’ is virtually unknown today despite that fact that male state troopers and (male) guards from men’s prisons were called to suppress the uprising, resulting in 25 women being injured and 24 women being transferred to Matteawan Complex for the Criminally Insane without the required commitment hearings.”
Law also criticizes author Karlene Faith, who acknowledges that women resist, but who wrote that in the 1970s, women prisoners “were not as politicized as the men [prisoners], and they did not engage in the kinds of protest actions that aroused media attention.” To challenge Faith’s argument, Law cites several rebellions that received significant media attention, including one that the New York Times wrote two stories about. As Law recounts, “in 1975, women at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women held a sit-down demonstration to demand better medical care, improved counseling services, and the closing of the prison laundry. When prison guards attempted to end the protest by herding the women into the gymnasium and beating them, the women fought back, using volleyball net poles, chunks of concrete and hoe handles to drive the guards out of the prison. Over 100 guards from other prisons were summoned to quell the rebellion.”
In light of the many such stories documented in Resistance Behind Bars, Law argues that “instead of claiming that women in prison did not engage in riots and protest actions that captured media attention, scholars and researchers should examine why these acts of organizing fail to attract the same critical and scholarly attention as that given to similar male actions.”
Resisting With Media-Activism
In the chapter “Grievances, Lawsuits, and the Power of the Media,” Law observes that “gaining media attention often gains quicker results than filing lawsuits.” Among the many organizing victories that were significantly aided by media attention, in 1999, Nightline focused on conditions at California’s Valley State Prison for Women. Law explains that “after prisoner after prisoner told Nightline anchor Ted Koppel about being given a pelvic exam as ‘part of the treatment’ for any ailment, including stomach problems or diabetes, Koppel asked the prison’s chief medical officer Dr. Anthony DiDomenico, for an explanation.”
DiDomenico was apparently so confident that he would not be held accountable for his misconduct, that he answered Koppel by saying “I’ve heard inmates tell me they would deliberately like to be examined. It’s the only male contact they get.” After this interview was aired, DiDomenico was reassigned to a desk job, and as of 2001 he had been criminally indicted, along with a second doctor.
Demonstrating the power of this media coverage, Law notes that the “prisoner advocacy organization Legal Services for Prisoners with Children had been reporting the prisoners’ complaints about medical staff’s sexual misconduct to the CDC for four years with no result.”
Along with agitating for coverage in the mainstream media, women prisoners have also created their own media projects. The chapter titled “Breaking The Silence: Incarcerated Women’s Media” documents many important projects. Law explains that these projects are necessary because women prisoners’ “voices and stories still remain unheard by both mainstream and activist-oriented media. Articles about both prison conditions and prisoners often portray the male prisoner experience, ignoring the different issues facing women in prison.” Therefore, “women’s acts of writing — and publishing — often serve a dual purpose: they challenge existing stereotypes and distortions of prisoners and prison life, framing and correcting prevailing (mis) perceptions. They also boost women’s sense of self-worth and agency in a system designed to not only isolate and alienate its prisoners but also erase all traces of individuality.”
Some activist-oriented publications have been receptive and have published prisoners’ writings. From 1999 until its final issue in 2002, the radical feminist magazine Sojourner: A Women’s Forum featured a section on women prisoner issues which included writings from the prisoners themselves. Law writes that this section, entitled “Inside/Outside” covered many topics, including “working conditions in women’s facilities, the dehumanizing treatment of children visiting their mothers, and prisoner suicides.
Law spotlights many different projects. From 2002 to 2006, Perceptions was a monthly newspaper published by and for the women at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. Because of censorship from prison warden Charlotte Blackwell, Perceptions was forced to limit its criticism of the prison, but the women published what they could. For example, in one issue, women wrote about how they would run the prison differently if they were in charge. Law notes that “their fantasies revealed the absence of programming for older women and those in the maximum custody unit, emergency counseling and therapeutic interventions and opportunities for mother-child interactions. It also drew attention to the facility’s overcrowding and increased potentials for violence and conflict among prisoners.”
Tenacious, the zine published by Law, was initiated by women prisoners who sought the help of friends outside the prison to actually publish and distribute it. “Free from the need to seek administrative approval, incarcerated women wrote about the difficulties of parenting from prison, dangerously inadequate health care, sexual assault by prison staff and the scarcity of educational and vocational opportunities, especially in comparison to their male counterparts. Although circulation remained small, the women’s stories provoked public response,” writes Law.
“Prison officials do whatever they can to strip prisoners of their dignity and self-worth,” stated Barrilee Bannister, one of the founders of Tenacious. “Writing is my way to escape the confines of prison and the debilitating ailments of prison life. It’s me putting on boxing gloves and stepping into the rink of freedom of speech and opinion.”
Arguing For Prison Abolition
When Victoria Law was first introduced to radical politics, shortly after her own stint behind bars, she “discovered groups and literature espousing prison abolition.”
“These analyses — coupled with what I had seen firsthand — made sense, steering me to work towards the dismantling, rather than the reform, of the prison system.” Law’s subsequent research has only served to affirm her belief in the need for abolition. She states clearly that “this book should not be mistaken for a call for more humane or ‘gender responsive’ prisons.”
Some readers may view Law’s prison abolitionist politics as being abstract or overly theoretical. However, to support her abolitionist viewpoint, she makes the practical argument that prisons simply don’t work to reduce crime or increase public safety. She writes that “incarceration has not decreased crime; instead, ‘tough on crime’ policies have led to the criminalization … of more activities, leading to higher rates of arrest, prosecution and incarceration while shifting money and resources away from other public entities, such as education, housing, health care, drug treatment, and other societal supports. The growing popularity of abolitionist thought can be seen in the expansion of organizations such as Critical Resistance, an organization fighting to end the need for a prison-industrial complex, and the formation of groups working to address issues of crime and victimization without relying on the police or prisons.”
Towards the end of Resistance Behind Bars, Law quotes Angela Y. Davis, who is a leading activist intellectual of the prison abolitionist movement. In her recent book Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis writes that “a major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more human, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners — calling for less violent conditions, an end to sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing — and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of the prison in our future?”
As if answering Davis’ question, Law concludes that while striving for prison abolition “we need to also reach in, make contact with those who have been isolated by prison walls and societal indifference and listen to those who are speaking out, like many of the women who have shared their stories within this book. Because abolishing prisons will not happen tomorrow, next week or even next year, we need to break through these barriers, communicate, work with and support women who are in resistance today.”
[FACT comments: Much can be judged of a society by the way it treats its prisoners. Not only is the US the world’s largest gaoler but now it wants to deny benefits which have been earned by prisoners. It wasn’t enough to deny them the right to vote.]
Older Prisoners Denied Social Security
Mother Jones: July 22, 2009
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/07/older-prisoners-denied-social-security
Not long ago I described the plight of the growing numbers of older prisoners filling up the country’s prisons and jails. They receive poor health care and are subject to any number of cruel and inhuman punishments—people with bad arthritis are required to climb into upper bunks to sleep; it’s next to impossible for inmates in wheelchairs to access parts of prisons available to younger people, like baths. Among the worst sights described to me by a medical consultant were sick and often older inmates of an Alabama women’s prison who were forced to get out of bed at 3 a.m. and stand in lines to obtain medicine.
Another major issue faced by older prisoners is that they do not receive Social Security from the fund they paid into for years before being convicted of a crime. Lois Ahrens, who runs the indispenable Real Cost of Prisons Project, alerted me to the situation of David Hinman, a prisoner in Iowa. Now 65 years old, he contributed to Social Security for years while in the free world. He is not eligible for parole for a number of years. He wrote to Ahrens:
Currently the government will not pay people in prison social security. I am speaking about paying social security to those who paid into the fund. Payment is based on what they paid in. Even though I am now 65 and paid into the fund, since I am in prison I am not allowed to collect unless I am released from prison. By not paying inmates the social security to which they are entitled, I believe this is in some manner, theft.
He continued: “My question to readers is: should prison inmates who paid into social security and reached 65 be allowed to collected social security while incarcerated or not.” (You can reach David Hinman (#25374), Anamosa State Penitentiary, 406 North High Street, P.O. Box 10, Anamosa, IA 52205-0010.)
Asked about this situation Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, the excellent magazine which tracks prison issues, wrote me:
Part of the problem I have with this is that someone can work their whole life, pay into Social Security, commit a crime at a later age, and go to prison for the rest of their life and never see a penny of the money they paid into SS. The lie used to justify this is prisoners have no need for money but that is not true. I think it is a backdoor way to trim the SS.rolls … To put it into context, retirees can get their pensions in prison, veterans can get their VA benefits in prison. It follows that if you earn something you are entitled to it. It is not a freebie the government can take away because it doesn’t like you and that is exactly what they do here.
Wright attached an article from a 1998 isssue of Prison Legal News that explains the situation in the bleakest of terms:
Denial of Social Security Benefits to Prisoners Upheld
The court of appeals for the Ninth circuit held that a statute denying Social Security benefits to prisoners is constitutional. Robert Butler is a 77 year old Nevada state prisoner. Butler was granted social security retirement benefits in 1983. He was later incarcerated and the Social Security Administration (SSA) determined he was not entitled to benefits while he was incarcerated pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 402(X). An administrative law judge affirmed the SSA’s decision. Butler filed suit in federal court and it was dismissed for failing to state a claim upon which relief could be granted. The court of appeals affirmed.The appeals court noted that every court to consider the constitutionality of 42 U.S.C. § 402(X), this includes the Second, Fourth, Eighth, Tenth and Eleventh circuits, had upheld the law. Congress has wide discretion in administering welfare resources. The court held that § 402(X)’s ban on social security benefits to prisoners does not violate constitutional guarantees to due process, equal protection and protection against ex post facto laws and bills of attainder. The court also held that Butler was provided with ample due process before his benefits were terminated because he participated in the SSA hearing by telephone. Since the statute leaves no room for agency discretion and the only fact issue was whether or not Butler was a felon doing time in prison, the telephone hearing was sufficient to safeguard Butler’s due process interest in his social security benefits. See: Butler v. Apfel , 144 F.3d 622 (9th Cir. 1998)
