SUMMARY:While one phrase of Syria's brutal nine-year civil war may be concluding, the systemic forced disappearance, torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrians has not ceased. Amna Nawaz talks to Anne Barnard of the Council on Foreign Relations and formerly The New York Times about the staggering inhumanity of Bashar al-Assad's regime and what accountability, if any, it will face.
SUMMARY: For decades, China obtained human organs such as kidneys and livers from executed prisoners, a practice condemned by human rights activists and medical ethicists. China says they no longer do this, and have built a new system for organ transplants that now relies on volunteers, not prisoners. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
SUMMARY: Somewhere between 5,000 and 13,000 people were tortured and executed at one Syrian military prison between 2011 and 2015, according to Amnesty International. A new report alleges that officials at the high level of government approved the killings. William Brangham discusses the disturbing details and larger implications with Amnesty's Sunjeev Bery.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):Amnesty International has just issued a report documenting what it says is clear evidence that the Assad regime in Syria has been illegally imprisoning, torturing and murdering political opponents.
William Brangham has more.
And a warning: Some of the details here are disturbing.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Amnesty's report says that somewhere between 5,000 and 13,000 people were tortured and executed at one military prison outside Damascus between 2011 and 2015.
Amnesty alleges that officials at the highest level of the Syrian government approved the killings, as did the grand mufti of Syria, the highest ranking religious figure in the country.
I'm joined now by Sunjeev Bery. He's Amnesty's director of advocacy for the Middle East and North Africa.
SUNJEEV BERY, Amnesty International: Thank you for having me.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Very, very troubling reading in this report and the stories of the people who were tortured and executed at this prison.
Can you tell me, who were these people?
SUNJEEV BERY: There were thousands of civilians, as well as some ex-military officers, who are held at Saydnaya prison in Saydnaya, Syria.
We estimate that between 10,000 and 20,000 people are held there now. And for years, on a weekly basis, as many as 50 people have been hanged in mass executions by the Syrian government at this prison.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And are these people who are picked up — what are the crimes that they're accused of?
SUNJEEV BERY: Many of them are perceived to be opposition to the government, although when you're doing this kind of mass arrest, mass torture and miss execution, who knows what the individual people's backgrounds are?
And, of course, peaceful, nonviolent opposition to a government is certainly not a crime. But with that background, many of them are subjected to forced confessions through extraordinarily brutal torture, and once that confession is put via ink to paper, then the execution process begins.
SUMMARY: In September 1971, Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York became the site of a bloody uprising that would shock the nation. Over several days, some 1,300 inmates seized parts of the prison, demanding better living conditions. Heather Ann Thompson documents the untold story in her new book, “Blood in the Water,” and joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss the truth about the riot's violent end.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): September, 1971, Attica Prison in Upstate New York became the site of a bloody prison clash that would shock the nation. Over several chaotic days, some 1,300 inmates seized parts of the prison and demanded better living conditions.
ELLIOT ‘L.D.' BARKLEY (prisoner): We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be driven or beaten as such!
JEFFREY BROWN:In the initial takeover a guard was killed. Inmates held about 40 prison employees as hostages, negotiating with the state of New York, and bringing in outside counsel including Attorney William Kunstler. Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused a face to face visit, talks soon disintegrated. And on September 13th, hundreds of armed troopers stormed the prison to retake control.
MAN: The instructions is your weapon is not to be taken or you to be taken.
JEFFREY BROWN: Twenty-nine inmates and ten hostages were killed in the takeover, scores more injured.
The story, much of it long kept hidden from view, is told in the new book “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising o f 1971 and Its Legacy.”
Author Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan.
Now, you argue there are two stories to tell. One is the “what happened”, one is the aftermath. Start with the “what happened.” What did the period leading up to the riot, what led to it?
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON, Author, “Blood in the Water”:Well, prisons in 1971, much like today, were these out of sight, out of mind places where people were treated very badly, and the guys inside worked through the system first to try get their conditions improved — again, very basic things, enough food to eat, sufficient sanitary supplies — and when that really fails, frustration mounts.
Ultimately, they erupt in a protest, and the book tells that story. It's a remarkable story of men from very different backgrounds who stand together, negotiate with the state of New York, with the help of observers.
JEFFREY BROWN: The riots were not planned.
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON:No, not at all. It actually begins in a quite unexpected clash between prisoners and guards that morphed into something much more organized. The guys elect representatives from the cell block to speak for them, they begin negotiating to the state for better conditions and, for four days, the world watches as the media is there to see how this thing is going to unfold.
Matthew Trevithick, the fifth American released from Iran’s notorious Evin Prison this month, described being watched in the months leading up to his detention and the treatment by his interrogators.
Foreigners are openly watched on the streets; their emails and Skype conversations are monitored, he told PBS NewsHour’s Hari Sreenivasan on Thursday. “You just accept it as the cost of being in Iran.”
A photo Trevithick posted on Twitter perfectly illustrated the combination of Iran’s deep beauty and scrutinizing surveillance, he said.
Trevithick, who was not a part of the prisoner exchange but was released at the same time as the others, was picked up by Iranian authorities as he was leaving Tehran University to buy an airplane ticket home for the holidays.
“I had a simple check-in system with my mother” of texting each day. When he no longer replied, it triggered her concern, he said.
“I was arrested and accused of trying to overthrow the Iranian government. They said I had access to bank accounts with millions of dollars in them, and that I knew the locations of weapons caches around the country,” he said, adding that they weren’t happy when he told them all he had were some Farsi textbooks and a pencil.
In all, Trevithick spent 41 days in the prison, 29 of them in solitary confinement. The six-by-seven-foot cell was empty except for a thin rug. Everything was worn, including the flip-flops they gave him to wear, indicating that many people passed through before him and many would likely follow. “In a very bizarre way, you take a small bit of comfort that you’re not alone in being in this less than desirable place.”
SUMMARY: In the second part of our series looking at how prison recidivism can be reduced, NewsHour follows three inmates, Jordan Taylor, Carlos Colon and Ashley Wilson as they move from prison back to everyday life, in our series “Broken Justice.” William Brangham reports.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): But, first, last night, we introduced you to three inmates serving time at a maximum security jail in Southern Maryland. All three were part of a pilot jobs program aimed at teaching them the skills to stay out of prison after their release.
Tonight, a look at their struggles and successes as they try to do just that.
William Brangham continues our report.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Twenty-year-old Jordan Taylor is about to be a free man. He changes out of his county-issued jumpsuit, and back into the clothes he was wearing the day he got locked up over a year ago for violating probation on an armed robbery charge
MAN: What’s your name sir?
JORDAN TAYLOR: Jordan Taylor.
MAN: Good luck to you.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And with that, he’s done, and he heads out to the open arms of his parents and older brother.
JORDAN TAYLOR: Are you all right, mom? You know I was coming home, mom.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: For the past several months, we have been following Jordan and two other prisoners, Carlos Colon and Ashley Wilson, as they transition from a life behind bars to a life outside them. Will they fall back into a life of crime, or will they manage to start over?
This isn’t an idle question, because, as the number of people behind bars in the U.S. has skyrocketed from 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.2 million today, so has the cost of incarcerating them. It now costs taxpayers roughly $80 billion a year.
Now there’s a strong bipartisan push to do something about this trend. And one of the key efforts is to reduce recidivism. Right now, two-thirds of convicts end up getting rearrested within three years of their release. So the goal is to somehow stop that revolving prison door from spinning.
Unlike a lot of newly-released prisoners, Jordan Taylor has a pretty big welcome mat laid out for him. He’s back at home in Gaithersburg, Maryland, with his mom and dad. They have been married 26 years. His longtime girlfriend, Shawna, also is thrilled to have him back.
Ex-prisoners with strong support systems do better, lower rates of drug use, higher employment, and less criminal activity.
SUMMARY: In upstate New York, two prisoners from the state's largest maximum security prison were discovered missing Saturday. Since then, police have swept the town and countryside, searching for the two convicted murdered who cut through cement walls and steel gratings to emerge from a manhole outside the prison's walls. William Brangham talks to Jesse McKinley of The New York Times.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): An intensive manhunt continued in Upstate New York today, after two prisoners were discovered missing Saturday from the state’s largest maximum security prison, following a remarkable escape that stunned the authorities.
William is back with that story.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Police continue to sweep the town and countryside surrounding Dannemora Prison, searching for two convicted murders who cut through cement walls and steel pipes, then eventually emerged through a manhole outside the prison’s walls, about a block away.
Richard Matt kidnapped, killed and dismembered a man in 1997. David Sweat killed a sheriff’s deputy in 2002, shooting him more than a dozen times. Over the weekend, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo toured the prison and talked about the breakout.
GOV. ANDREW CUOMO, New York:This is the first escape from the maximum security portion of the institution ever since 1865. So, by definition, it was an extraordinary act.
And when you look at how it was done, it was extraordinary. I mean, we went through the tunnels. You look at the precision of the operation, it was truly extraordinary.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: For the latest, we’re joined by Jesse McKinley, who has been reporting on the break for The New York Times, and joins me from Dannemora, New York.
Jesse, thank you very much for being here.
We have this enormous manhunt under way. Tell us where this latest — where it stands right now. Given how long ago these men broke out, this has got to be a huge search area.
JESSE MCKINLEY, The New York Times: Yes, this is day three of this.
And according to the state authorities, at this point, there are about 300 officers involved. And according to the governor of the state of New York, Andrew Cuomo, this could be a national — nationwide search.
Initially, of course, they were interested in the area around this prison, which is just to my right here, but at this point, it’s expanded beyond the borders of the state, potentially to Canada. Mexican authorities have been alerted, as have officials in the Southwest, where one of the suspects, Richard Matt, was believed to have taken refuge at one point.
ACTOR: You must not just take his blood. You must take his hope
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): In 2009, Maziar Bahari was held for 118 days in solitary confinement in a Tehran prison, a very real ordeal dramatized in the new film “Rosewater.” (trailer link)
Bahari was a Canadian citizen who’d returned to his native Iran as a journalist working for Western media organizations, his assignment, to cover a momentous election that would end in mass demonstrations and mass arrests, after reformer Mir Hossein Mousavi’s challenge to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ended in a defeat widely condemned and discredited as fraudulent.
The film shows how Bahari, played by actor Gael Garcia Bernal, met and interviewed protagonists on both sides, before being arrested and charged as a spy. He then endures interrogation by a man known only as Rosewater.
One bit of absurdist evidence, an actual appearance in a Tehran cafe that Bahari had made on the Comedy Central program “The Daily Show.”
MAN: What do I have in common with you?
MAN: Who is the number one enemy of the United States?
MAN: Al-Qaida.
MAN: Al-Qaida is also the number one enemy of Iran.
JON STEWART, “Rosewater”: And then you are going to back up and just go out of frame that way.
JEFFREY BROWN: That connection and the courage and even humor shown by Bahari even in the face of torture drew the real-life host of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart, to the story, and to his first foray into directing a feature film.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The nation's chief law enforcement officer said today it's time to scale back tough prison terms for low-level drug crimes. He announced he's changing the way federal prosecutors go after small-fry offenders.
The United States is home to just five percent of all the people on Earth, but accounts for more than a quarter of the world's prison population, more than 2.2 million people.
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Today, in San Francisco, the U.S. Attorney General said that number must come down. Eric Holder addressed the American Bar Association's annual meeting.
ERIC HOLDER: Although incarceration has a significant role to play in our justice system, widespread incarceration at the federal, state, and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable. It imposes a significant economic burden totaling $80 billion in 2010 alone. And it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.
As a nation, we are coldly efficient in our incarceration efforts. And with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter, and to rehabilitate, but not merely to warehouse and to forget.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Should a 14-year-old convicted of murder be required to spend life in prison without parole? That was the key question at the heart of a pair of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court today.
You probably know that the United States has more people in jail than any other country in the world. The staggering number is 2.3 million. China, which has four times as many people as the US, is a distant second with 1.6 million prisoners.
What you may not know is that the US also tops the charts in the numbers of youth offenders serving life without parole sentences in adult US prisons. The score? The world: 0; the US: 2,570.
Right. The US is only country in the world that incarcerates people in adult prisons for crimes they committed when they were below the age of 18.
Furthermore, those prisoners experience conditions that violate fundamental human rights. That’s the depressing conclusion of a new study by Human Rights Watch, “Against All Odds: Prison Conditions for Youth Offenders Serving Life without Parole Sentences in the United States.”
Three months from now, in March, the US Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of the life-without-parole sentence for youth offenders.
The 47-page report draws on six years of research, and interviews and correspondence with correctional officials and hundreds of youth offenders serving life without parole. Human Rights Watch found that nearly every youth offender serving life without parole reported physical violence or sexual abuse by other inmates or corrections officers. Nationwide statistics indicate that young prisoners serving any type of sentence in adult prison, as well as those with a slight build and low body weight, are most vulnerable to attack.
You probably know that the United States has more people in jail than any other country in the world. The staggering number is 2.3 million. China, which has four times as many people as the US, is a distant second with 1.6 million prisoners.
What you may not know is that the US also tops the charts in the numbers of youth offenders serving life without parole sentences in adult US prisons. The score? The world: 0; the US: 2,570.
Right. The US is only country in the world that incarcerates people in adult prisons for crimes they committed when they were below the age of 18.
Furthermore, those prisoners experience conditions that violate fundamental human rights. That’s the depressing conclusion of a new study by Human Rights Watch, “Against All Odds: Prison Conditions for Youth Offenders Serving Life without Parole Sentences in the United States.”
Three months from now, in March, the US Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of the life-without-parole sentence for youth offenders.
The 47-page report draws on six years of research, and interviews and correspondence with correctional officials and hundreds of youth offenders serving life without parole. Human Rights Watch found that nearly every youth offender serving life without parole reported physical violence or sexual abuse by other inmates or corrections officers. Nationwide statistics indicate that young prisoners serving any type of sentence in adult prison, as well as those with a slight build and low body weight, are most vulnerable to attack.
“Children who commit serious crimes and who inflict harm on others should be held accountable,” said Alison Parker, director of the US program at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. “But neither youth offenders, nor any other prisoner, should endure any form of physical abuse.” Most of the life-without-parole inmates have been convicted of homicide offenses.
“The penalty [of life without parole] forswears altogether the rehabilitative ideal…. For juvenile offenders, who are most in need of and receptive to rehabilitation, the absence of rehabilitative opportunities or treatment makes the disproportionality of the sentence all the more evident,” the report says.
This new research sheds light on the severity of prison conditions for those serving this sentence, Human Rights Watch said.
“Scared to death,” said a youth offender serving life without parole in California. “I was all of 5’6”, 130 pounds and they sent me to PBSP (Pelican Bay State Prison in California). I tried to kill myself because I couldn’t stand what the voices in my head was saying…. ‘You’re gonna get raped.’ ‘You won’t ever see your family again.’”
Youth offenders are serving life without parole sentences in 38 states and in federal prisons. They often enter adult prison while still children, although some have reached young adulthood by the time their trials end and they begin serving their sentences.
IMHO our prison system has NEVER been about rehabilitation. Prisons are places of punishment (aka revenge) or to lock dangerous persons away from the general public.
The men showed up in a small town in Australia’s outback early last year, offering top dollar for all available lodgings. Within days, their company, Serco, was flying in recruits from as far away as London, and busing them from trailers to work 12-hour shifts as guards in a remote camp where immigrants seeking asylum are indefinitely detained.
It was just a small part of a pattern on three continents where a handful of multinational security companies have been turning crackdowns on immigration into a growing global industry.
Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.
Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.
But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.
“They’re very good at the glossy brochure,” said Kaye Bernard, general secretary of the union of detention workers on the Australian territory of Christmas Island, where riots erupted this year between asylum seekers and guards. “On the ground, it’s almost laughable, the chaos and the inability to function.”
Private prisons in the United States have long stirred controversy. But while there have been conflicting studies about their costs and benefits, no systematic comparisons exist for immigration detention, say scholars like Matthew J. Gibney, a political scientist at the University of Oxford who tracks immigration systems.
Still, Mr. Gibney and others say the pitfalls of outsourcing immigration enforcement have become evident in the past 15 years. “When something goes wrong — a death, an escape — the government can blame it on a kind of market failure instead of an accountability failure,” he said.
In the United States — with almost 400,000 annual detentions in 2010, up from 280,000 in 2005 — private companies now control nearly half of all detention beds, compared with only 8 percent in state and federal prisons, according to government figures. In Britain, 7 of 11 detention centers and most short-term holding places for immigrants are run by for-profit contractors.
If many of us outside could be tipped to violence by extreme circumstance, he appears to have been tipped the other way, by the Bard College prison program. Barely 24 months out of jail, Cardenales is a rising middle manager at an electronics recycling company in Westchester county, New York, making some $80,000 a year. He's proof that a liberal education in prison, or at least a Bard degree, can pay off.
Moreover, says his boss, he represents a hidden national economic resource just begging to be tapped.
VIRGIL FISHER, WeRecycle: Look, we have got a hidden work force out here. I'm talking about you all.
PAUL SOLMAN: In a job-challenged economy, Virgil Fisher is looking to hire, as the company he runs, WeRecycle, expands. Impressed by the ex-con grads of Bard College's prison program who already work for him, he's looking to recruit more of them at Woodbourne. ---- PAUL SOLMAN: Fisher isn't targeting everyone behind bars. Talent inside, he believes, is distributed just like outside: as a bell curve.
VIRGIL FISHER: You're going to have a group in the middle that is average, and then you're going to have a group that is below average, and then you're going to have a group that just rises to the occasion. And that's typically about 10 percent to 15 percent.
PAUL SOLMAN: Aren't you skimming the cream of the crop here?
VIRGIL FISHER: Absolutely. What business wouldn't want to have the best and the brightest?
PAUL SOLMAN: The best and the brightest who no one else is competing to hire. ---- PAUL SOLMAN: In 2001, Cardenales made the inaugural class of a new college program for convicts run by Bard, an elite liberal arts school in nearby Annandale-on-Hudson. He graduated in 2008.
ANTHONY CARDENALES, Bard Prison Initiative: The title of my senior project was "Space, Time and Human Resilience."
PAUL SOLMAN: Any particular authors that influenced you?
ANTHONY CARDENALES: I used Kierkegaard. I used a lot of the existentialist writers. They had that deeper vision and deeper dialogue that made me struggle with it. And then, in struggling with it, it enabled me to tie it into, you know, the everyday experience.
VIRGIL FISHER: Talking about existentialism, and I can't even pronounce it. I -- we get in a lot of philosophical discussions. And you have to sometimes pinch yourself and say, well, how could they be so smart, because they were away for so many years?
PAUL SOLMAN: But a lot of companies would say, I'm running a huge risk by taking the best and the brightest from a prison in upstate New York.
VIRGIL FISHER: But are they any different than the population that is coming out of college? I would say that they have better work ethic. And their work ethic rubs off on the rest of the team.
PAUL SOLMAN: Yet another hidden work force benefit for a small company, says Fisher, that has trouble both competing with blue-chip firms for top talent and finding good workers willing to get down and dirty.
VIRGIL FISHER: We have gotten used to a certain lifestyle and a certain concept of what our job should look like. You take, for example, our jobs that we have downstairs.
The majority of college-degree people wouldn't do that job even if it meant, within six months, you're going to move up to a production supervisor and, after about a year, you're going to move up to a plant manager. I -- that's fast trajectory right there, but it's that first six months of working as a material handler, and that's thought to be a menial job. ---- PAUL SOLMAN: The grads here have roughly the same credentials, but perhaps a better, some might say more desperate, work ethic.
BENJAMIN WILSON, inmate: When I leave here, I'm not coming back to prison. I have no choice in the matter.
BILL DOANE, inmate: I'm going to work harder for you than the next guy, because I have to. You understand? Because...
PAUL SOLMAN: Because the stakes are high.
BILL DOANE: The stakes are very high. I can't afford to screw up even a little bit. And so I'm going to -- I'm going to give you 150 percent, where maybe the kid coming out of college, he might be just using you as a stepping-stone, or he's looking around, he's feeling his way around in the world. You see the difference?
Personal Comments: While watching the videos (Part-1 & Part-2) I noted just how well Anthony Cardenales speaks.
Also, the Bard Prison Initiative represents what prison rehabilitation SHOULD be.
MAX KENNER, Bard Prison Initiative: We get the best 15 students at each place, each year. And, typically, you have roughly 10 applicants per spot.
PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour): Forget SATs or GPAs. Some of these guys never even started high school, much less finished it. The key criterion for admission, how badly do they want it, determined by an essay and interview.
MAX KENNER: Those students that are most intellectually ambitious, that are most curious are so often the same people as children who dropped out of conventional school the youngest.
MIGUEL MUNOZ-LABOY, Columbia University: How many people will you do in your survey?
MAN: I would think about what would be a representative number. If it was a large study, I would need maybe one percent of the population maybe. I don't know. I will have to figure that out.
PAUL SOLMAN: The courses within these walls are nearly identical to those without.
MIGUEL MUNOZ-LABOY: So, what is the decision-making process?
PAUL SOLMAN: Professor Miguel Munoz-Laboy teaches the same class to these inmates at Woodbourne Correctional Facility that he teaches to grad students at Columbia University School of Public Health. Yes, he acknowledges there is a difference. The students at Woodbourne are better.
MIGUEL MUNOZ-LABOY: It's incredible. I have never had a student who reads everything, every page that I assign. And they do.
NOTE: Later in the transcript it's commented that, "Admittedly, this is a captive audience, with study periods that last all day. But they sure do use them." Prison convicts are not distracted by outside social activities.
This is much the same experience I had in my Navy carrier with long deployments at sea (with fighter and helo squadrons aboard carriers and destroyers) where there are not daily social distractions, so study was easier.
Also, excerpts from transcript
PAUL SOLMAN: With 2.3 million prisoners, one in 100 adults, the U.S. locks up the most people anywhere in the world, and at the world's highest rate. Repressive China comes in a distant second, with 1.6 million inmates, closer to one in 1,000. ---- PAUL SOLMAN: Bard practices what so many academics preach; not vocational, but liberal education, like Max Kenner got at Bard.
MAX KENNER: Our belief is that a liberal education prepares people to find work wherever the jobs may be. You give them job training for job X, job X disappears, you have nothing. You give someone the opportunity to think critically and to understand the context in which they're looking for work, they go where the jobs are to be found. ---- PAUL SOLMAN: What the Bard prison program tries to do, redirect the impulses that put these men away while maximizing the rationality they will need when they get out.
One such graduate is Anthony Cardenales, who has come back to speak to those still working on their degrees and their sentences.
ANTHONY CARDENALES (Bard Prison Program grad): Bard is here for a reason.
PAUL SOLMAN: But can Bard actually place a self-described stick-up artist, who did years in here for homicide, in a meaningful, well-paying job?
ANTHONY CARDENALES: I don't care what state the economy is in. If one person is successful, then so can I be successful.
PAUL SOLMAN: In other words, is that pep talk poppycock? Or are Bard grads getting real jobs?
ANTHONY CARDENALES: Is it difficult? Yes. Is it impossible? Absolutely not.
The United States, which has the most prisoners of any country in the world, last year recorded the largest increase in the number of people in prisons and jails since 2000, the Justice Department reported on Wednesday.
It said the nation's prison and jail populations increased by more than 62,000 inmates, or 2.8 percent, to about 2,245,000 inmates in the 12-month period that ended on June 30, 2006. It was the biggest jump in numbers and percentage change in six years.
Reasons for the increase:
Criminal justice experts have attributed the record U.S. prison population to tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high crimes rates.
Question, is this the America we really want? Do we want a nation whose only solution to crime is to put more people in prisons no matter the cost (lives & dollars)? Or do we want a nation that works very hard to prevent people from turning to crime in the first place?
Are we a nation that has become so lazy that we accept the easy answer so we can go on to more important things? Important things like the latest Paris Hilton episode, or who won the last World of Wrestling Championship.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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