Sunday, May 12th, Raleigh: Mother’s Day Noise Demo
Free All Mothers!
Mother’s Day Anti-Prison Noise Demo
- Sunday, May 12th, 3pm
in the vicinity of State St. and Bragg St. in Raleigh- Spread the word!!!
We’ll be breaking the isolation and monotony of the women in the Raleigh Correctional Center for Women and the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women (a minimum-security prison next door to RCCW). Together these two prisons have almost 1,500 women, almost all of them mothers. RCCW is the state’s largest prison with 1,288 women including women’s death row.
Bring banners,drums, pots and pans, your voice, your love for those inside and your anger for the walls that separate us. Read more…
Sean Swain Frame-up Thrown Out, New Frame-up in the Works.
From Seanswain.org
Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (ODRC) Legal Counsel Trevor Clark has taken over Sean’s case from Angela Hunsinger. Clark says he plans to throw out the Rules Infraction Board (RIB) decision and re-do the investigation himself.
Hunsinger’s RIB report relied on an “ideological match” between Sean’s anarchist beliefs and the propaganda distributed by the Army of the 12 Monkeys. Sean appealed the decision, all the way to ODRC director Gary Mohr. All of his appeals were denied, nobody in the ODRC thought there was a problem. Sean was on his way to supermax, when his lawyer, Robert Fitrakis, threatened a civil rights lawsuit, claiming that Sean’s ideology is rooted in neolithic indiginism, his state-approved religious belief. The ODRC sent Head Legal Counsel Trevor Clark in to look at the situation and prepare a defense against the lawsuit. After reviewing Hunsinger’s conduct report, and listening to the RIB hearing, Clark admitted to Sean that listening to it, he “wanted to shoot [him]self in the fucking face” because the hearing and report was so poorly conducted. Read more…
Judge Refuses to Dismiss Federal Supermax Lawsuits
From Solitary Watch
Andrew Cohen continues his coverage for the Atlantic of two potentially groundbreaking lawsuits directed at the treatment of those incarcerated in the notorious ADX Florence, where about 400 men live in extreme isolation and sensory deprivation for years or decades. Today he reports on a federal judge’s decision to allow the lawsuits to proceed, rejecting the federal governments efforts to have them dismissed. Read more…
Conditions Update at Marion CI
The following is a
direct report by a prisoner on several conditions and grievances at Marion CI in Marion, NC. It briefly gives a good summary of day to day challenges facing prisoners living at the facility, in particular the ways that race, overcrowding, and resource access directly function to increase conflict, violence, and division among prisoners of color. Marion CI is generally understood by prisoners to be one of the most corrupt facilities in the state, as well as the worst in cases of censorship and punishment of politically active prisoners.
Revolutionary Greetings,
This missive is in regards to numerous situations going on here at Marion Corruptional Institution. First and foremost, forget the NCDPS policies. This institution is run by its own policies. For example: every adult close custody facility in NC has a phone in the dorm for inmate usage. Well, Marion doesn’t! One unit here at Marion houses 192 inmates, 96 on the lower level, 96 on the upper level and 32 per dorm (6 dorms per unit). Now understand that there are three units like this and each unit is predominately of color. On each unit there’s one phone on each level located outside of the dorms in the core area. Each inmate is allowed one attempted phone call a day, but you must sign a phone list the day before and then get put in rotation in order to use the phone. Read more…
Accounting for Ourselves
From Crimethinc.
Sexual assault and abuse continue to plague anarchist circles and spaces. In response, we’ve developed processes to hold each other accountable outside of the state. But why can’t we seem to get them right? Our newest feature, Accounting for Ourselves, examines the context in which these community accountability models emerged, analyzes the pitfalls we’ve encountered in trying to apply them, and proposes new directions for our resistance.
Accounting for Ourselves: Breaking the Impasse Around Assault and Abuse in Anarchist Scenes
Printable ’zine (PDF; 750 KB)
Online reading ’zine version (PDF; 450 KB)
This is not intended to serve as an accessible introduction to community accountability processes; it assumes that you have some knowledge of what they are and how they work. If you don’t, here is a reading list offering thorough background.
Jason Sutherlin of Tinley Park 5 Thanks His Supporters
Jason Sutherlin, antifa anarchist, sentenced to six years for the beating of nazis in Chicago.
From Tinley Park 5
I want to publicly thank all my hometown heroes and all the folks holding down rad bookstores from North Carolina to Indiana to Sacramento working on prison support.
Friends & Comrades,
As a community and as individuals you never stop amazing me. The support and solidarity I have felt from all of you is nothing less than overwhelming and amazing. I have been receiving a steady stream of mail and books since being placed in my current institution. Y’all are bad asses! To all my birthday well wishers and all of you who decided “/b/ my valentine”, I love you all.
To everyone who just writes to let me know I’m supported and remembered, either at letter parties or on your own, thank you. I love your letters and appreciate each one. Whether you are telling me about your pets, passions, interests, views, hopes, trumpets, or arm wrestling tactics (that wrist thing is cheating btw)… I find them all interesting and often hilarious. I am unable to respond to all of you every time, but I want you all to know I value every word and you make my week every time I get a letter. Also I am not able to send letters out of the US right now. I do want to send some love to Queensland, Australia. Your letter was awesome and I wish I could write back. Much love to the French Resistance and a certain comrade in Germany. You’re rad K. Read more…
From Solitary Watch
The Obama Administration’s 2014 budget request for the Department of Justice, released this week, confirms that the federal government will open a second ultra-secure supermax prison within the next two years. The new prison will be an “Administrative Maximum U.S. Penitentiary.” Administrative Maximum is a security classification currently held only by the notorious ADX Florence in Colorado, where some 400 individuals are held in isolation and sensory deprivation so extreme that it has been challenged in a series of lawsuits and widely denounced as torture.
The new supermax will be created by renovating Thomson Correctional Center, an unused maximum security prison in Illinois, which was purchased by the federal government last year. Originally, the Obama Administration envisioned Thomson as a future home for Guantanamo detainees–a move that was blocked by Republicans in Congress. Instead, while Guantanamo remains open, the Bureau of Prisons is moving ahead with plans to open hundreds, and perhaps thousands of new isolation cells at Thomson to “reduce crowding in high security facilities.” Read more…
