Monday, March 18, 2024
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Tags U.S. Department of Justice

Tag: U.S. Department of Justice

Federal court in Louisiana ignores COVID terror inside FCI Oakdale

Prisoners and staff at federal low-security prisons FCI Elkton in Ohio and FCI Oakdale in Louisiana are being ravaged by COVID-19. At both locations, prisoners have brought federal suits pleading to be released to home confinement in order to escape the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

COVID-19 test kits needed for Federal Bureau of Prisons now! Screening...

COVID-19 test kits must be provided for employees and prisoners who work and are housed in facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. I have engaged in some investigative journalism and discovered that prison administrators at the Federal Correctional Complex at Pollock, Louisiana, have ordered screening for all federal employees entering the federal prison complex at Pollock daily, but because of a shortage of COVID-19 test kits, the BOP employees are not being tested!

North Carolina prisoners plan grievance submission to US DOJ on May...

“Dear U.S. Attorney General: For over 100 years, citizens born and naturalized in the U.S. who have been convicted of crime have endured the inhumane indignity of being stripped of our citizenship and right to vote through felony disenfranchisement by way of the United States Constitution’s 13th Amendment. Additionally, citizens who have been arrested or continue to be housed in jails and prisons nationally in all 50 sovereign states have been subjected to the conspiratorial practice of police and/or prison officials who violate our First Amendment right to free speech as well as political association through on-going censorship practices that limit what we can read or write and to whom.” – Excerpt of grievance crafted by North Carolina Department of Correction prisoners Randy Watterson and Joseph “Shine White” Stewart

Robert Earl Council enters 11th day of hunger strike to protest...

The Alabama Department of Corrections is once again targeting and repressing incarcerated hunger striker Robert Earl Council (aka Kinetik Justice) for exposing the inhumane conditions at Limestone Correctional Facility.

Khalfani Khaldun: Abuse of power at Wabash Valley Prison

My name is Mr. Leonard McQuay, No. 874304, known and honored as Brother Khalfani Malik Khaldun. I am currently in my 31st year incarcerated inside the Indiana Department of Corrections. There was a very serious need for me to compile this complaint and report to inform you of the many violations existing inside Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, with the hope that you will call for an investigation to substantiate the allegations of violations being exposed to you in my complaint. Immediate outside oversight and intervention from you is being requested by me with this complaint and report. Please read the following with an objective eye and an understanding heart, because we need your help.

Comrade Malik exposes nationwide political repression program

First and foremost, I send out a clenched fist salute to all of the women and men incarcerated across the United States who stood up on Aug. 21 and who continue to do so! Without your sacrifice there will be no change. oppressors and enemies of freedom are waging an aggressive war and assault against any individuals or organizations that have defined themselves as anti-imperialists and/or prison abolitionists. This illegal and unconstitutional ”program” is a nationwide program enacted by the U.S. Department of Justice! Ol’ racist Jeff Sessions is at it again!

More police, criminalization and gang suppression will not end homelessness in...

“The End of Policing,” a new book by Alex Vitale, examines the histories and failures of policing policies and provides examples of alternatives that successfully divest from dependence on police while strengthening the community. Vitale’s chapters on criminalizing homelessness and gang suppression in particular can be a useful tool in revealing ineffective policies in effect today in San Francisco. Join the San Francisco No Injunctions Coalition on July 12, City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s last planned court hearing to remove names from the city’s gang injunctions.

Crossing the electronic prison firewall

Six California prisoners wrote to me in 2015 to ask about the Hepatitis C cure, shortly after the San Francisco Bay View newspaper published my interview with activist attorney Peter Erlinder titled “US prisoners sue for constitutional right to lifesaving Hep C cure.” They’d been able to read it because the Bay View sends a print edition to prisons all over the country every month. I tried and failed to answer those letters and I’ve felt bad about it ever since. I would have swiftly responded to all the prisoners who wrote to me about the Hep C cure if I’d been able to send electronic mail.

Delaware returns to death penalty debate after prison uprising

Just after 10 a.m. EDT on Feb. 1, a group of inmates took four staff hostage as they seized control of Building C at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna, Delaware, with 120 prisoners inside. By the end of the 18-hour standoff, Sgt. Steven Floyd Sr. was dead. Republican Rep. Steve Smyk, who had planned to support a bill to reinstate capital punishment, says he thinks the uprising has given some state lawmakers who initially opposed the death penalty a new outlook.

Alabama’s prisons flow with needless deaths yet again. We know one...

“Alabama prison officials are investigating the beating death of an inmate who was attacked by other prisoners Thursday – the second deadly attack on a state prisoner within 24 hours,” reports the Montgomery Advertiser Feb. 19. We have uncovered multiple incriminating facts that have led to the needless deaths at what is called “Hellmore,” the now notorious medium security prison Elmore Correctional Facility.

Un-ban the Bay View!

We, the community of writers, artists, contributors and readers outside and behind the walls, collectively condemn the ongoing attacks, censorship and banning of our San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper. For many years, officials in several prison systems, including the state of California, have from time to time taken away our incarcerated family members’ “freedom of speech” and rights to information, education, communication and connection with our broader community by denying them their Bay Views. Defend and support our San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper!

Katrina Pain Index 2016: Race and class gap widening

Hurricane Katrina hit 11 years ago. Population of the City of New Orleans is down by over 95,000 people. Almost all this loss of people is in the African American community. The gap between rich and poor in New Orleans is massive, the largest in the country. Despite receiving $76 billion in assistance after Katrina, it is clear that poor and working people in New Orleans, especially African Americans, got very little of that help. Here are the numbers.

Incarceration, justice and the planet

Prisons inspire little in terms of natural wonder. But prisoners, one could assume, must have little concern for the flowers or for otherwise pressing environmental issues. With all the social quandaries present in their lives – walls of solitude, the loss of basic human rights – pollution, climate change and healthy ecosystems must seem so distantly important: an issue for the free. In actuality, prisoners are on the frontlines of the environmental movement.

Bernie Sanders speaks to Cleveland’s Black community at Olivet Baptist Church

The Community Coalition Concerned for Black Life convened a town hall-style meeting with Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at the historic Olivet Institutional Baptist Church on Cleveland’s majority Black east side on Saturday, March 5. Organizers said that the overall purpose of the meeting at Olivet was to discuss issues affecting the Black community and how Sanders would address such issues if ultimately elected president.

Boycott Michigan! Jail Snyder, cronies for Flint lead poisoning, domestic terrorism,...

The deliberate lead poisoning of the people of Flint, especially its children, babies and those still in their mothers’ wombs, likely ranks among the greatest genocidal crimes in the U.S. in the 21st century, an act of domestic terrorism comparable only to the thousands of murders of unarmed Blacks, Latinos and poor people by law enforcement since 2000. Direct action by the people can be the only appropriate response.

#LaquanMcDonald: As video released, cop charged with murder 1, activists demand...

The City of Chicago has released, under court order, the dashcam video from the brutal killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer – and it’s as bad as we all expected. At the same time as they released the video, the county prosecutor announced she’d be pursuing first degree murder charges against McDonald’s killer, Officer Jason Van Dyke. Unfortunately, these are charges that should have been filed a year ago.

State of emergency declared in Ferguson as cops shoot Mike Brown’s...

St. Louis County declared a state of emergency for Ferguson on Monday due to the officer-involved shooting that took place on Sunday. Protesters were mourning the anniversary of the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown when shots rang out. The shooting victim is Tyrone Harris Jr. of St. Louis, 18, who was “real close” to Brown, his father says. In a rally the next day, dozens of protesters were arrested during a demonstration against police brutality.

My struggle for freedom in the midst of Virginia’s Truth-in-Sentencing and...

I am a 38-year-old Black male from the city of Richmond, Virginia, who has been incarcerated for over 20 consecutive years. I am serving a 93-year prison sentence without the possibility of parole for my participation in a robbery that resulted in the shooting deaths of two innocent people. Having exhausted all available post-conviction remedies in the courts, prisoners like me have few avenues to regain our freedom here in the commonwealth of Virginia.

White cop charged with murder for shooting Black man in South...

A white South Carolina police officer was arrested and charged with murder Tuesday after video showed him fatally shooting a fleeing, unarmed Black man in the back. North Charleston Police Officer Michael T. Slager, 33, can be seen shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott after a confrontation on Saturday. Slager chases Scott and shoots at him eight times in the video recorded by a passerby

The voice of a slave who is not afraid to speak...

When I arrived at Childersburg Community Work Center on Oct. 25, 2013, I did so with one of the worst cases of ringworm any of the medical staff here or at St. Clair had ever seen. How that came to be I will explain later. It didn’t take long for me to see that I was at a very nasty and unconstitutional facility, and on Nov. 19, 2013, I filed a formal complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice and the State Fire Marshall.