ConFederation: Canadian prisoners try to form union.

B.C. inmates attempt to form first prison labour union in Canada
Agassiz, B.C.— The Canadian Press / Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 04, 2011 3:25PM EST



Inmates at a B.C. prison are in the final stages of applying to create a labour union, saying the historic event would be a first in Canada.

Their lawyer Natalie Dunbar says organizers at Mountain Institution in Agassiz are trying to sign up members for ConFederation, Canadian Prisoners' Labour Union, Local 001.

But Ms. Dunbar says prisoners are facing resistance from administrators.

She says the inmates are not trying to create another prisoners' rights group but want the right to assemble as any other workers to vote about forming a union that will deal with their various complaints.

Ms. Dunbar says there's a lack of resources at federal institutions to address issues that plague prison populations as a workforce.

She says inmates in Canada want to haul prison life nearer the 21st century so they can work towards their own rehabilitation, and that similar attempts to create unions have taken place in the United States and the United Kingdom.

California Dreaming. Time to wake up.

This via Ken at Private Corrections Working Group. Arizona failed to study and learn from California's experiences before Marcia Powell died, or the ADC may have saved her life. For what, though - the state to chew her up cycling her in and out of prison until she was dead? They need to do a lot more than just abstain from outright killing people they're responsible for imprisoning. 

The governor and state legislature here have no excuse - they and the public are well-enough informed about conditions in the prisons to either make prisoner rights and safety - and real sentence reform - priorities, or shut up already about how much they care about vulnerable Arizonans. That's who's ending up in prison, by and large - other people's victims. Watch how many more end up there now that we're slashing public mental health care again (want to bet that Magellan still makes a profit, no matter how many homes are foreclosed on this year? Off of who's  backs? Who's invested in them, anyway?)


Talk about a colossal waste of public money - all that "profit" that could be used directly to serve people just goes into the pockets of millionaires preying on the good people of this state. That's why they want to privatize prisons, too - not to save the rest of us money, but to make some for themselves. They're invested in a future of crime-ridden communities, and they're pushing Arizona's small town economies into becoming dependent on mass incarceration. That should tell people something about their real priorities. It's got nothing to do with what's good for any of us. We're just consumers and fodder.


We see through it - some of us do, anyway. All the right wing has been doing for years is sticking it to us: cutting education, health care access, basic community services - some "crisis". They aren't ever restoring that funding - this is how they work. Empty the schools and fill up the prisons. Privatize everything (fascists). They have more reason than ever to try to keep people down - those guys are losing control quick (including over their own people - don't think Pearce isn't due for a grand jury if we're looking at abuse of power). 

If it wasn't for the divisive power of racism and misogyny we would have overthrown them by now. That and hunger. Hunger makes a lot of things harder. That's why they try to keep us living out of soup kitchens and food banks...there's nothing charitable about that.


Anyway, I don't agree with some of the arguments here - I think the practice of privatizing prisons should be banned altogether under human rights law, as they have done in Israel. But it does address some of the stupider things our legislature has done (and still plans to do, apparently)...

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A poor prison plan for California

Gov. Schwarzenegger's latest proposal combines a destructive budgeting formula with an untested theory about privatization.

LA Times Editorial

January 17, 2010

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed shifting female inmates out of prisons to community detention centers in 2006, the Legislature said no. When he asked lawmakers the following year to approve $10.9 billion in bonds to build new prisons while also reforming sentencing laws and parole rules, they reduced the bond package and jettisoned the reforms. Last year, when he asked them to cut the prison budget by $1.2 billion, they fell about $200 million short. We don't blame the governor for being frustrated, but we do fault him for apparently giving up.

Schwarzenegger's latest prison plan, unveiled in his State of the State address earlier this month, is less a serious policy proposal than a hunk of red meat tossed out at voters who are understandably furious about cuts in education spending. It combines a deeply destructive budgeting formula with an untested theory about prison privatization. Yet, if there ever was a time when California needed its leaders to get serious about the prisons, it's now. The skyrocketing cost of administering the corrections system is helping to drive the state to the brink of financial collapse, even as the system's overcrowded conditions and abysmal medical care are violating federal law -- and forcing the courts to demand expensive fixes that exacerbate the budget problem.

Schwarzenegger's cynical response is to pit the prisons against colleges and universities, proposing a ballot initiative mandating that the state cannot spend more than 7% of its budget on corrections or less than 10% on higher education. We've already discussed the dangers of this kind of ballot-box budgeting, which puts decision-makers in a straitjacket and is largely to blame for the state government's deficit crisis. But what has received less attention is the governor's strategy for getting the corrections budget to 7%, from its current level of about 10%: privatizing the prisons.

Many politicians, especially on the GOP side of the aisle, are attracted to private prisons, under the theory that private industry runs everything more efficiently than government. That hasn't really panned out in other states. Studies on whether rent-a-reformatories are cheaper for taxpayers than government-run prisons have had conflicting results, largely because the data are hard to compare. Opinions also differ widely on whether private prisons, which tend to have lower guard-to-inmate ratios than public lockups, experience more violence. It's safe to say that if differences exist, they aren't very big.

It's not unreasonable to think that private prisons could be more successful in California than they have been elsewhere, because prison costs here are so out of line. A series of highly generous contracts with the prison guards union, whose political contributions make it a force to be reckoned with in Sacramento, contributed to a 32% jump in the corrections budget between 2006 and 2009, until the financial crisis forced legislators to make cuts in the corrections budget last fall. California spends far more per inmate ($49,000 a year) than any other state. A shortage of guards not only leads to abuse of the overtime system -- according to a September state audit, nearly a third of base-level correctional officers make so much money working overtime that their annual salaries exceed those of managers two pay grades higher -- but the guards have negotiated such bountiful benefit packages that it's actually cheaper for the state to continue paying overtime to older officers than to hire new ones to end the staffing shortage. The audit concluded that it costs between $3,200 and $7,800 more per inmate annually to house them in a California prison than in a comparable private facility.

Yet that doesn't necessarily suggest that privatizing the prisons is a good idea -- and it doesn't come close to suggesting we could lower the prison budget to 7% of the general fund solely through privatization. California's prison population has soared in the past two decades because the voters have passed ever-tougher sentencing laws while also tying the hands of judges to give them less flexibility in setting terms. Privatization won't solve either problem.

Moreover, private prisons come with a host of complications and trade-offs. Perhaps most serious is a loss of accountability and transparency. It's already hard for the public to find out what's going on behind the barbed wire, but abusive behavior by guards, inmate violence, accounting shenanigans and other common prison woes would be even further shielded under private control. What's more, the state might only be trading one influential lobby (the prison guards) for another (private prison operators and the communities that rely on them for jobs). Creating a prison-industrial complex with a financial incentive for locking people up could distort state politics, escalate prison spending and encourage overcrowding at least as much as the current system does.

The debate over prisons is in some ways similar to the debate over education, in which free-marketeers battle organized labor over charter schools. We think charters are a worthwhile experiment that can help make public schools better -- and the same could apply to private prisons, if they're given proper oversight. California already has a handful of private lockups, but they are very low-security facilities. We'd favor a change in union contracts and state laws that would allow privatization of a few higher-security prisons, so the impacts on costs and accountability could be assessed.

In other words, Schwarzenegger has a terrific idea for a pilot program. But to suggest that such an untested and possibly dangerous experiment is the solution to our prison problems, or that it could quickly produce a dramatic drop in expenditures, is disingenuous and irresponsible. What's needed is for the Legislature to do the job it failed to do last year and approve more meaningful parole reforms to get nonviolent drug addicts out of cells and into rehab, create a commission to revisit California's draconian and ineffective sentencing laws and take other steps long recommended by criminal justice experts to reduce the inmate population.

Revive the Prison Abuse Remedies Act: Human Rights Day

Upcoming Events

December 10: International Human Rights Day.

December 17: International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (Tucson Memorial).

December 18: Sex Workers Outreach Project Protest at the AZ DOC in Phoenix.

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This post is from October, but seemed appropriate to renew for Human Rights Day. We need to make sure the next session of congress deals with with the Prison Abuse Remedies Act.

Prison Abuse Remedies Act

Below is an editorial by the New York Times urging revision of the Prison Reform Litigation Act, which has been preventing prisoners from obtaining legal remedies to neglect and abuse since 1996 (another piece of legislative garbage he signed to repress resistance). The authors below make the direct link between the abuses of that law by prison officials, and the deplorable conditions in American prisons today. Let's make sure Congress passes the Prison Remedies Act ths year - before they full on into their 2010 campaigns.

Thanks to Lois at the Real Cost of Prisons Project for passing this on to us. Perhaps in the meantime the draft legislation could be used a the foundation for new state legislation to remedy prison abuse.

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Letter to the Editor: Abuse of Female Prisoners
Published: October 2, 2009
To the Editor: New York Times
Re “Prisoners’ Rights” (editorial, Sept. 24):

You are right to call for legislation amending the Prison Litigation Reform Act. We sued on behalf of female prisoners in the New York State prison system who reported that they had been sexually assaulted by staff members, and have been appalled to spend the last six years litigating whether these 17 women — each of whom bravely complained of her abuse to departmental officials — exhausted their administrative remedies sufficiently to satisfy the law.

As a result, New York State has been able to avoid addressing the prison system’s longstanding failure to protect female prisoners from sexual abuse, allowing more and more women to be victimized.

The Prison Litigation Reform Act was sold in Congress as a measure against frivolous litigation, but has served in reality to prevent the redress of the most serious violations of prisoners’ human rights. The time has come for reform, or better yet, repeal of the law.

Lisa Freeman
Dori Lewis
New York, Sept. 24, 2009

The writers are lawyers with the Prisoners’ Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society and lawyers for the plaintiffs in Amador v. Andrews.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/opinion/lweb02prisoner.html?_r=3&pagewanted=print_

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Editorial - NY Times
Prisoners’ Rights

Published: September 23, 2009

In 1996, Congress passed a law that made it much harder for inmates to challenge abusive treatment. It has contributed significantly to the bad conditions — including the desperate overcrowding — that prevail today. 
 
The law must be fixed.
 

Times Topics: Prisons and Prisoners

In the name of clamping down on frivolous lawsuits, the Prison Reform Litigation Act barred prisoners from suing prisons and jails unless they could show that they had suffered a physical injury. Prison officials have used this requirement to block lawsuits challenging all sorts of horrific conditions, including sexual abuse.

The law also requires inmates to present their claims to prison officials before filing a suit. The prisons set the rules for those grievance procedures, notes Stephen Bright, the president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, and they have an incentive to make the rules as complicated as possible, so prisoners will not be able to sue. “That has become the main purpose of many grievance systems,” Mr. Bright told Congress last year.

In the last Congress, Representative Robert Scott, Democrat of Virginia, sponsored the Prison Abuse Remedies Act. It would have eliminated the physical injury requirement and made it harder for prison officials to get suits dismissed for failure to exhaust grievance procedures. It would have exempted juveniles, who are especially vulnerable to abuse, from the law’s restrictions.

The bill’s supporters need to try again this year. Conditions in the nation’s overcrowded prisons are becoming increasingly dangerous; recently, there have been major riots in California and Kentucky. Prisoner lawsuits are a way of reining in the worst abuses, which contribute to prison riots and other violence.

The main reason to pass the new law, though, is human decency. The only way to ensure that inmates are not mistreated is to guarantee them a fair opportunity to bring their legitimate complaints to court.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/opinion/24thu4.html?scp=1&sq=prisoners%E2%80%99%20rights&st=cse

This and other news about women and mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/