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HOMES NOT PRISONS!!!

ARIZONA PRISON NEWS:

HOMES NOT PRISONS!!!

Government Surveillance of the Occupy Movement

Abolish the PRISONS
DBA Press/Center for Media and Democracy Report (May 20, 2013)


PHOTO: PHX PD riot cop motorcycles at an Occupy Phoenix protest of Freeport MacMoran, February 2012. Chalk art and digitally rendered image by suspected anarchist/possible terrorist Margaret J Plews.

Abolish the PRISONS!

STOP the new LEWIS SUPERMAX!!!

STOP the new LEWIS SUPERMAX!!!
$50 million is about to go into guaranteeing that our grandchildren have space in prison, instead of seats in a classroom...
FIRE CHUCK RYAN!!!

PARSONS v RYAN is a certified CLASS ACTION!

As many of you know, under the current administration of Governor Jan Brewer the suicide and homicide rates among state prisoners doubled almost immediately, and has persisted over the course of the past four years, on the watch of Arizona Department of Corrections' Director Charles Ryan. On March 6, 2013, "Parsons v Ryan" , the civil rights lawsuit filed last year by the ACLU and Prison Law Office, among others, against Ryan and AZ DOC Health Services Director Richard Pratt on behalf of 14 state prisoners was certified as a CLASS ACTION!!!! That means every prisoner in the state is now a litigant.

Thank you not only to all the legal staff who brought it this far, but also to Wendy Halloran, KPNX, and the families who have survived the horrors of prison violence in this state with a resolve to make sure that the gross indifference to human life at the AZ DOC kills no more.
ABOLISH THE PRISONS!
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AZ Prison Watch BLOG POSTS:


May 22, 2013:

On Loving to Hate Jodi Arias...


This is to all you visitors “enjoying” reading about Jodi Arias' future in my blogs, which I write largely for those who have lost loved ones in az prisons or are fighting to keep them alive through their sentences:

It is clear that your desire for vengeance is far greater than any yearning for true justice to prevail in the world, for you are celebrating the suffering of others. Please remember how happy you were that Jodi Arias would be miserable next time a young women who was sexually abused by a guard hangs herself in that prison, and know you had something to do with creating the culture of dehumanization and vindictiveness that makes that so likely to happen these days.

Perryville prison has killed many women through abuse and neglect, sometimes quite hideously – Google Marcia Powell, for one. No one deserves that kind of death. Most women there are mentally ill and survivors of trauma and shouldn’t even be in prison but for Arizona’s grossly inadequate mental health system, the right wing's contempt of the poor and people of color, and this overall fascist police state we live under.

In any case, by saying that it’s okay for the killers among them to be condemned to less-than-constitutional conditions of confinement, you lower the chances of survival of other women warehoused at Perryville as well. So, to those of you who truly care about “justice” – please just think on that before you pat the AZ DOC on the back for hurting and killing their prisoners as they do.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Tucson's Niedhart on prison privatization in Arizona


You rock, Fred. Thank you...


• What: Lecture on Arizona Prisons by Fred Neidhardt

• When: 3:30 p.m. Dec. 20

• Where: Arizona Senior Academy Building at Academy Village, 
13715 E. Langtry Lane

• Admission: Free; donations accepted

• Reservations: Recommended; 
email info@arizonasenioracademy.org or call 647-0980



 ------------------------------

Ariz. prison reform, trend of privatization focus of talk

AZ Daily Star
Three months ago the Arizona Senior Academy hosted a talk about why a coalition of 314 religious organizations, including every major religion in the world, has focused public attention on Arizona and other states for not complying with national and international laws governing prisoner treatment.

The featured speaker at that talk, Fred Neidhardt, will update his lecture at 3:30 p.m. Dec. 20 with additional information on the privatization of prisons.

In April, Amnesty International issued a scathing indictment of the Arizona prison system, stating that some inmates are being housed under conditions constituting "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in violation of international law."

Placing minors 14 to 17 years of age, as well as adults who have yet to be convicted, in conditions of solitary confinement in the Special Management Units came under particular scrutiny.

A month earlier, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona and the Prison Law Office, a prisoner-rights group based in Berkeley, Calif., filed a class-action lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections. The suit alleges that due to neglect by prison officials, inmates "are in grave danger of suffering serious and preventable injury, amputation, disfigurement and even death."

In Tucson, the American Friends Service Committee has suspended work on other major projects to commit itself to an all-out effort to ban solitary confinement and other practices it considers inhumane in Arizona prisons and jails.

The Dec. 20 talk will review the history of the American penal system and add more information on the current nature of Arizona's prisons, focusing on the effects of privatization.

Neidhardt has been a member of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture for more than six years, the last three representing the Pima Monthly Meeting, Society of Friends (Quakers) in Tucson.

He is working with the American Friends Service Committee-Arizona to highlight the conditions of isolation in the Arizona Department of Corrections.
Neidhardt has received many honors during his 50 years of research and teaching in molecular biology at Harvard University, Purdue University and the University of Michigan. He lives at Academy Village and is a member of the Arizona Senior Academy.

The lecture will be in the great room of the Arizona Senior Academy at Academy Village, an active-adult community at 13715 E. Langtry Lane.

The academy's concert and lecture programs are free and open to the public.

If you go

• What: Lecture on Arizona Prisons by Fred Neidhardt

• When: 3:30 p.m. Dec. 20

• Where: Arizona Senior Academy Building at Academy Village, 13715 E. Langtry Lane

• Admission: Free; donations accepted

• Reservations: Recommended; email info@arizonasenioracademy.org or call 647-0980