Tag: county jails

Finally! After three years and countless petitions, letters, phone calls, votes, revotes and two vetoes, Gov. Brown has signed AB 2530, a bill that bans the most egregious forms of shackling of pregnant women in California’s state prisons, juvenile detention facilities and county jails. It’s now in all our hands to STOP SHACKLING PREGNANT WOMEN!

Prisoners in Pelican Bay’s SHU have announced a push to end all hostilities between racial groups within California’s prisons and jails. The handwritten announcement, sent to prison advocacy organizations, is signed by the PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Collective. The statement calls for the cessation of all hostilities between groups to commence Oct. 10, 2012, in all California prisons and county jails. It also calls on prisoners throughout the state to set aside their differences and use diplomatic means to settle their disputes.

On May 23, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision ordering California to release tens of thousands of inmates from its overcrowded prisons on the grounds that their living conditions – including lethally inadequate healthcare – were so intolerable as to be “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The Budget for Humanity, recently released by Californians United for a Responsible Budget's (CURB) calls for drastic reductions to the prison population and an end to prison construction and to cuts in education, health and housing through more aggressive taxation of corporations and the wealthy.