An interview with Asia Czapska of Justice For Girls.
prison justice
The implications of denying prisoners pensions
Fear, anger and distraction are great tools for getting your way, particularly in government.
If the opposition asks about detainee torture, accuse them of supporting terrorists. If they want information from your staff, bully your way into a meeting and shout them down ...and if you want to pass law without interference, attack a monster no one will dare to defend.
It hardly matters that with the recent proposed amendment to the Old Age Security Act the pitchforks came out before the bill itself. Prime Minister Stephen Harper learned in March that serial child murderer Clifford Olson was collecting OAS and Guaranteed Income Supplement payments. He was outraged, and ordered that they be stopped.
Alleged Chicago torturer gets day in court
Abu Ghraib has nothing over Chicago. Forty years ago, Jon Burge returned from Vietnam, joined the Chicago Police Department and allegedly began torturing people. He rose in the ranks to become a commander in Chicago's South Side, called Area 2. Electric shocks to the genitals, mock executions, suffocation with bags over the head, beatings and painful stress positions are among the torture techniques that Burge and police officers under his command are accused of using to extract confessions in Chicago, mostly from African-American men. More than 110 men are known to have been victims of Burge and his associates. Victims often went to prison, some to death row. Facing mounting evidence and increasing community outcry, Burge was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993.
Support prisoners
There's a huge difference between pitying prisoners and actually supporting them. Charity groups may want to "help" prisoners by implementing programs that they think are needed, pitying them and blaming them for their situation.
A true ally sees prisoners as partners in change, as peers who should be listen to and as those who are held captive by the state. It's not a coincidence that prisons populations are for the most part indigenous folks and people of colour. It's systemic oppression. Non-prisoners can address this by being a support for prisoners in several different ways.
Writing letters
International Day of Solidarity with Leonard Peltier
February 4, 2012 is the first international day of solidarity with Leonard Peltier. After decades wasted in prison, charged with a crime that has no evidence, Peltier's supporters are once again appealing to the United States government to set him free.
Background
The Activist Toolkit: Africville, unionizing non-profit workers, mad survivors guide, radical research, access to information
| January 19, 2012Access to information for prisoners
Getting an access to information request can be hard at the best of time but incarceration just complicated matters. Mike Larsen, co-managing editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons has created a simple guide to putting forth request for government information. Though the guide is written for prisoners, the process of submitting a request is the same.
Access the guide for prisoners here.
Troy Davis
On September 21, 2011 Troy Davis was shamefully murdered by the the state of Georgia. He was executed after being given the death penalty even though there were (and remain) serious doubts about his guilt.
The case
In 1989, police officer Mark Allen MacPhail was killed near a fast food restaurant in Savannah, Georgia. Davis surrendered himself to police, confident in his innocence. His trial began in 1991, which found him guilt of murder. Davis appealed this decision many times and throughout the case discrepancies began to emerge.
