Search Results for: Prison

A Private Prison System for Immigrants

“You build a prison, and then you’ve got to find someone to put in them,” said Texas state Sen. John Whitmire, who has seen five of the 13 Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons built in his state. “So they widen the net and find additional undocumented folks to fill them up.”

Most of the roughly 23,000 immigrants held each night in CAR prisons have committed immigration infractions — crimes that a decade ago would have resulted in little more than a bus trip back home. And now, some of the very same officials who oversaw agencies that created and fueled the system have gone on to work for the private prison companies that benefited most.

The low-security facilities are often squalid, rife with abuse, and use solitary confinement excessively, according to advocates.

—from “Shadow Prisons” by Cristina Costantini and Jorge Rivas, published in February on Fusion. The criminalization of immigration has led to a “lucrative boom in private prisons,” the Guardian reported in a June story pegged to an American Civil Liberties Union investigation of the shadow system. Earlier this month a judge allowed a federal lawsuit to proceed that alleges one of the biggest private prison companies unjustly enriched itself with the labor of immigrant detainees.

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Getting Reacquainted With the World After Decades in Prison

Photo: Liz West

In the New York Times Magazine, Jon Mooallem follows two ex-convicts who pick up inmates the day they are released and help then navigate through their first day of freedom, which can be unnerving if they’ve been behind bars for more than a decade:

‘‘The first day is everything,’’ Carlos says — a barrage of insignificant-seeming experiences with potentially big consequences. Consider, for example, a friend of his and Roby’s: Julio Acosta, who was paroled in 2013 after 23 years inside. Acosta describes stopping for breakfast near the prison that first morning as if it were a horrifying fever dream: He kept looking around the restaurant for a sniper, as in the chow hall in prison, and couldn’t stop gawking at the metal knives and forks, ‘‘like an Aztec looking at Cortez’s helmet,’’ he says. It wasn’t until he got up from the booth and walked to the men’s room, and a man came out the door and said, ‘‘How you doin’?’’ and Acosta said, ‘‘Fine,’’ that Acosta began to feel, even slightly, like a legitimate part of the environment around him. He’d accomplished something. He’d made a treacherous trip across an International House of Pancakes. He’d peed.

But what if Acosta had accidentally bumped into a waitress, knocking over her tray and shattering dishes? What if that man had glared at him, instead of greeting him, or snapped at him to get the hell out of the way? Ann Jacobs, director of the Prisoner Re-entry Institute at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me that even the smallest bungled interactions on the outside leave recently incarcerated people feeling ‘‘like they’re being exposed, like they’re incompetent. It’s feeding into their worst fear, their perception of themselves as an impostor who’s incapable of living a normal life.’’ Carlos and Roby have learned to steer their guys through that perilous newness — and to be nonchalant about it, to make the sudden enormity of life feel unthreatening, even fun. On one ride home earlier this year, I watched a third-striker venture inside a convenience store, alone, to buy a candy bar while Roby pumped gas. The man seemed emboldened after a few hours of freedom, actually hopping a bit as he walked. But then he tripped over the curb and tumbled forward, arms thrashing, nearly face-planting in front of the door. Roby just shrugged and said, ‘‘Well, you’ve got to get that one out of the way.’’

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You Just Got Out of Prison. Now What?

Longreads Pick

Mooallem follows two ex-convicts who pick up inmates the day they are released and help then navigate through their first day of freedom.

Published: Jul 16, 2015
Length: 26 minutes (6,606 words)

‘Either Addicted, or in Prison Because of Their Addiction’

Photo by bradadozier

Heroin use and related overdoses have been increasing in nearly every demographic group in the U.S., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report posted earlier this month shows. In obituaries, “a growing number of families are dropping the euphemisms,” instead describing the painful realities of addiction. David Amsden’s April 2014 Rolling Stone story, “The New Face of Heroin,” examined the drug’s connection with pharmaceutical painkillers, and its spread into Vermont and other seemingly unlikely parts of the country:

The portrait of the governor’s native state that emerged was severe, conjuring up images more commonly associated with blighted inner cities than a state with the nation’s fifth-lowest unemployment rate and a populace that is 95 percent white. Since 2000, Shumlin noted, Vermont has seen an eightfold increase in those seeking treatment for opiate use, with an almost 40 percent spike in the past year for heroin alone, and every day hundreds are languishing on waiting lists for understaffed clinics. Deaths from overdoses in 2013 had nearly doubled from 2012; property crimes and home invasions were on the rise; and close to 80 percent of the state’s inmates “are either addicted or in prison because of their addiction.” The same major highways where tourists routinely pull over to take photos of rustic vistas had, in the governor’s description, become pipelines of heroin distribution, with organized gangs setting up outposts across the state, where a six-dollar bag of heroin in their home cities can fetch as much as $30. As a result, an estimated $2 million worth of opiates were now being trafficked into Vermont each week – a staggering amount for a state that, with only 626,000 residents, is the second-least-populated in the country, after Wyoming.

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The World’s Most Notorious Drug Trafficker Breaks Out of Prison (Again)

Photo via Day Donaldson

Drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as “El Chapo,” escaped from a maximum-security prison in Mexico this weekend. It’s his second prison escape. “Anyone who makes a mile-long tunnel from his cell and escapes on a motorcycle is necessarily in collusion with the government,” a government official told Patrick Radden Keefe in his New Yorker post about the news. Last year Radden Keefe described for the magazine how Chapo, whose Sinaloa cartel has long used tunnels to evade law enforcement, was captured after more than a decade on the run:

In the early days of Guzmán’s career, before his time at Puente Grande, he distinguished himself as a trafficker who brought an unusual sense of imagination and play to the trade. Today, tunnels that traverse the U.S.-Mexico border are a mainstay of drug smuggling: up to a mile long, they often feature air-conditioning, electricity, sophisticated drainage systems, and tracks, so that heavy loads of contraband can be transported on carts. Guzmán invented the border tunnel. A quarter of a century ago, he commissioned an architect, Felipe de Jesús Corona-Verbera, to design a grocery store that served as a front company, and a private zoo in Guadalajara for his collection of tigers, crocodiles, and bears. By this point, Guzmán was making so much money that he needed secure locations in which to hide it, along with his drugs and his weapons. So he had Corona-Verbera devise a series of clavos, or stashes—secret compartments under the beds in his homes. Inevitably, a bolder idea presented itself: if you could dig a clavo beneath a house near the U.S. border, why not continue digging and come out on the other side? Guzmán ordered Corona-Verbera to design a tunnel that ran from a residence in Agua Prieta, immediately south of the border, to a cartel-owned warehouse in Douglas, Arizona. The result delighted him. “Corona made a fucking cool tunnel,” he said. Since then, U.S. intelligence has attributed no fewer than ninety border tunnels to the Sinaloa cartel.

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How Prison Nurseries Help Incarcerated Mothers and Their Babies

Photo: Janine

Looking more closely at the results, the researchers found that children who stayed the longest in the nursery had the best outcomes. About half of the mothers had less than a year left on their sentence when their baby was born, and had returned home by the time of the assessment. The rate of secure attachment among those children, while still not significantly different from the rate for the comparison group of middle-class children, was lower than among their peers who had stayed in the nursery for a full year. Byrne hypothesized that rather than being harmed by the correctional setting, the babies actually benefitted from the structure the prison provided—particularly the restriction of drugs and alcohol, as well as the parenting support their mothers got from staff and other inmates. (The longitudinal study included parenting guidance from a nurse practitioner, which Byrne believes also contributed to the outcomes.)

— Sarah Yager reports in The Atlantic about how nursery prisons are helping incarcerated mothers and their babies.

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Prison Born

Longreads Pick

Research shows that prison nurseries that allow babies to remain with their incarcerated mothers leads to lower recidivism rates for mothers and better outcomes for their children.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jun 24, 2015
Length: 24 minutes (6,245 words)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Guide to Prison Life

A sketch of Dostoevsky's mock execution before he was sentenced to a prison camp. Wikimedia Commons

It is now quite understandable why, as I already said earlier, my first question on entering prison was how to behave, on what footing to put myself wit these people. I sensed beforehand that I would often have such clashes with them as now, at work. But, despite any such clashes, I decided not to change my plan of action, which I had already partly thought out at the time; I knew it was right. Namely; I decided that I must behave as simply and independently as possible, by no means to betray any any effort to get closer with them; but not to reject them if they themselves wished to get closer. By no means to fear their threats and hatred and, as far as possible, to pretend I did not notice it. By no means to side with them on certain points, and not to cater to some of their habits and customs—in short, not to invite myself into their full friendship. I realized at first glance that they would be the first to despise me for it. However, by their way of thinking (and I later learned this for certain), I still had to maintain and even show respect for my noble origin before them, that is, to pamper myself, put on airs, disdain them, turn up my nose at everything, and keep my hands clean. That was precisely how they understood a nobleman to be. Naturally, they would abuse me for it, but deep down they would still respect me. Such a role was not for me; I had never been a nobleman according to their notions but instead I promised myself never to belittle my education or my way of thinking before them by any concession. If, to please them, I were to start fawning on them, agreeing with them, being familiar with them, entering into their various “qualities” in order to gain their sympathy—they would at once assume I was doing it out of fear and cowardice, and would treat me with contempt.

-From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Notes from A Dead House, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of his time in a prison camp for participating in a utopian socialist discussion group. Often translated as The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky’s account is considered the first book to expose life inside Russia’s penal system. In order to get Notes from a Dead House published he reframed his experience as a political prisoner as that of a common-law criminal.

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A ‘Survivor’ Producer, a Dead Wife, Four Years in a Mexican Prison

Longreads Pick

Bruce Beresford-Redman was charged with murder after the body of his spouse, Monica, was found naked and beaten in a sewer drain at a Cancun resort in 2010. But he maintains his innocence as he awaits a verdict in a Mexican prison.

Published: Dec 19, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,319 words)

Platinum: A Singer Visits a Women’s Prison

Longreads Pick

Singer Thao Nguyen’s chance encounter with a woman who hasn’t given up.

Source: Radio Silence
Published: Nov 26, 2014
Length: 6 minutes (1,500 words)