Marisa Monte - Mais (1991)
43 minutes ago
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Thailand: The Green Cause Can Kill
In a country where the going rate for a contract killing is around Thai baht 15,000 (500 dollars), the price paid to eliminate Thongnak Sawekchinda, an environmental activist, has caught the police by surprise.
'The 10,000 dollars paid to kill Thongnak is quite a lot for Thailand,' admits Col. Chaicharn Purathanont, who is leading the police investigation in Samut Sakhon, a province outside Bangkok with a range of industries using coal which was - the focus of the Sawekchinda’s activism. The money was distributed among seven men assembled to target Thongnak, 47, says the colonel, spreading a crumpled sheet of paper on his glass-topped desk. It is a photocopy containing the pictures, names and role of each man involved in the killing.
Yothin Theprian, the alleged gunman on that list of suspects, has already turned himself in. Police say he was paid 1,333 dollars for shooting Thongnak as the activist sat outside his noodles shop on the morning of Jul. 28.
The investigation has frustrated the victim’s friends, including fellow activist Chanchai Rungrotsakorn. 'We think there are more powerful people above those the police have identified. There are connections, networks, local businesses and politics...'
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Marwaan Macan-Markar @'Global Issues'
Tibetan Monk Dies in Self-Immolation Protest
The death comes just days after China-designated Panchen Lama, the second ranking spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism, toured the region under heavy Chinese police protection. The Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since a 1959 failed uprising against Chinese rule, originally selected another young man named Gendun Choekyi Nyima to become the 11th Panchen Lama. But the youth was arrested by Chinese police in 1995 at age 6 and has not been heard from since. Many Tibetans oppose Beijing's designee installed by the Chinese government.The remote region where Monday's death occurred and other Tibetan parts of Sichuan have seen repeated protests against the government.
This is the second reported self-immolation this year in this area of Sichuan. In March, a 21 year old monk Phuntsog of Kirti monastery set himself on fire and died near Kirti Monastery in Aba county in apparent protest against the government. The self-immolation triggered a street protest of nearly a thousand monks and lay people against government controls on the restive region prompting an immediate crackdown on the monastery.
In April, Chinese authorities seized more than 300 protesting monks from Kriti monastery and weeks later admitted subjecting them to "legal education" at undisclosed locations.The United Nations Working group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances protested the detentions, accusing Beijing of involvement in "enforced disappearances." But Beijing brushed off the U.N. protest, and instead urged critics to adopt a "fair perspective" on government efforts in the region.
@'Voice of America'
From Tottenham to Oakland Planet of Slums, Age of Riots
Tottenham, Chile, Tunis…
There are too many to count
Oakland, Brixton, Taybat al-Imam…
We almost can’t keep the names straight.
Clichy-sous-Bois, Caracas, Los Angeles…
The phrase “riot in London” echoed strangely in my ear, prompting only muted interest. I have been present for a few riots in London and in nearby Cambridge, marches against the war and the perennial Mayday battle between anarchists and the Metropolitan Police. From these to the more recent anti-cuts marches which ended in sporadic clashes with police, my interest has gradually waned, and when I most recently heard this phrase “riot in London,” I expected it would be followed by yet another description of a ritualized protest, with some marchers “kettled” and some anarchists fighting police. This is not simply a criticism: I was not not excited, but I was certainly not excited either.
Instead, the details began to emerge: the immediate spark was the police murder of a Black man, Mark Duggan, who was shot to death by police, and the beating of a 16-year old woman demanding answers from police about Duggan’s death. The fuel for the fire had been long accumulating, however: institutionalized racism in the form of poverty, police stop-and-search methods, and more recent Conservative Party cutbacks in the name of “austerity,” this year’s chosen catchword if “revolution” doesn’t eclipse it entirely.
The similarities with other serious waves of social rebellion then began to emerge with increasing clarity. This was both about Mark Duggan and it was not (here we can agree with the British Prime Minister David Cameron, albeit toward the opposite end), just as the recent rebellions in Oakland in 2009 were both about more than Oscar Grant, just as 2008 Athens was about more than Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 1992 L.A. was about more than Rodney King, the 1965 Watts Rebellion about more than Marquette Frye, and so on. And like these previous moments, the London rebellions are spreading with a degree of spontaneity and a flexibility of organizational forms that has left police utterly confounded. There have already been more than 1,000 arrests, and as hysterical media outlets up the rhetorical ante with talk of “guerrilla warfare,” the police are gearing up for far more...
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George Ciccariello-Maher @'Counterpunch'
George Pelecanos Reading from The Cut with The Nighthawks
Spero Lucas has a new line of work. Since he returned home after serving in Iraq, he has been doing special investigations for a defense attorney. He's good at it, and he has carved out a niche: recovering stolen property, no questions asked. His cut is forty percent.
A high-profile crime boss who has heard of Lucas's specialty hires him to find out who has been stealing from his operation. It's the biggest job Lucas has ever been offered, and he quickly gets a sense of what's going on. But before he can close in on what's been taken, he tangles with a world of men whose amorality and violence leave him reeling. Is any cut worth your family, your lover, your life?
Spero Lucas is George Pelecanos's greatest creation, a young man making his place in the world one battle and one mission at a time. The first in a new series of thrillers featuring Spero Lucas, The Cut is the latest confirmation of why George Pelecanos is "perhaps America's greatest living crime writer." (Stephen King)
Early Praise:
"Pelecanos's excellent first in a new crime series introduces Spero Lucas, a 29-year-old Iraq War vet who does investigative work for a Washington, D.C., defense attorney...Both vital and timely, this remarkable novel also connects D.C.'s past and present as only Pelecanos does. Readers will want to see a lot more of Lucas." -Publishers Weekly, Starred review
"Triple-distilled excellence: first, a truly great new series character; second, a truly great contemporary crime novel; and third, and as always, Pelecanos's status as the undisputed poet laureate of America's most secret city - the three-quarters of Washington DC that tourists never see. Not just recommended - this is essential reading." - Lee Child
"Every time I read one of George Pelecanos's novels--and The Cut might be the best yet--I'm left a little awed, a little envious, and wholly certain that what I've just experienced is the authentic marriage of art to truth. The guy's a national treasure." - Dennis Lehane
"Spero Lucas is a great character, hes cool, hes honorable and a guy you would want at your back. Hes also interesting to read and the action is totally believable. Pelecanos takes us into a world a lot of us only see on TV and makes us believe we are right there, in on the action. Social issues are brought up, but there is no preaching, George is just telling it like it is. What Pelecanos writes is real, he just does with fictional people. Another awesome book from a true genius of the genre." -Crimespree Magazine
Read more and hear an excerpt read by The Wire's Dion Graham.
HERE
(Thanx beeden!)
#opBART Livestream (San Francisco)
LIVE Police radio
andnotnull andnotnull
Say what you will about #BART shooting people and their distaste for peaceful protest, but at least the trains run on time... #MuBARTek
FCC reviewing SF subway cell shut down
Also today, Bay Area Rapid Transit officials were bracing for a second protest scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. PT (8 p.m. ET) to highlight the civil liberties concerns raised by silencing mobile devices. Today's protest was organized by the group Anonymous, which appears to have been behind an intrusion into a BART Web site over the weekend.
It's unclear whether BART will disable service again. BART spokesman Linton Johnson told CNET this afternoon that he would not reveal his agency's "tactics," and declined to elaborate.
Preliminary reports on Twitter this afternoon suggested that BART police -- the agency maintains a uniformed division, which was involved in a fatal shooting that sparked the initial outcry -- would shut down the subway station where today's protest is scheduled to be held. The location, at the Civic Center BART, is adjacent to San Francisco city hall.
"I can not talk about our tactics tonight because we are obliged by the Constitution to balance everybody's rights," BART spokesman Johnson told KRON TV this morning that he would not reveal what BART plans are in preparation for the protest.
"We were forced into a gut wrenching decision" to cut cell service in order to protect BART users' "constitutional right to safety."
There is, however, no right to safety in the U.S. Constitution, only a right to speak and assemble freely -- which, some legal experts say, BART violated. The word "safety" appears in the state constitution, but in a section that talks about individual rights, not police powers...
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Elinor Mills @'cnet'
Nick Oliveri faces 15 years in prison
According to TMZ, last July the police were called over a 'domestic disturbance' between Oliveri and his girlfriend at his home. A standoff ensued after he apparently wouldn't allow her to leave. Two hours later, when the police finally entered his home, they allegedly found a fully-loaded rifle, cocaine and methamphetamines.
Oliveri has been charged with one misdemeanor count of resisting, obstructing or delaying a police officer, two counts of possession of a controlled substance with a firearm, and two counts of possession of a controlled substance. If convicted on all counts, he could face a maximum of 15 years.
@'The Quietus'
Most Australians duped by science fiction
More than three-quarters of Australians believe microscopic life has been found on other planets and almost half believe humans can be frozen and thawed back to life, despite neither being true.
These are some of the findings from a survey of 1,250 people commissioned by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).Called Fact or Fiction, the survey was conducted as part of National Science Week 2011 to assess whether Australians can separate what is happening in the "real world" from what we see and read in science fiction.
The survey asked people whether eight scientific technologies seen in feature films, such as light sabres, invisibility cloaks or hover boards, were science fact or fiction.
ANSTO's Discovery Centre Visitors Centre team leader Rod Dowler says the results were a surprise.
"This survey has confirmed that willingly or not, we believe in science fiction movies more than we realise," he said.
Only one-quarter of respondents were aware that it is possible to grow an eye in a dish, although 44 per cent correctly believe flying cars exist.
But it is not all bad news.
While many of us might dream of being able to travel through time, more than 90 per cent of survey respondents correctly identified it as still being in the realm of science fiction. A similar survey in Birmingham, United Kingdom, found 30 per cent of respondents thought time travel was possible.
Who wants to live forever?
The survey also revealed the older we are, the longer we want to live, with 46.3 per cent of respondents aged 65 years or more listing "reversing the ageing cycle" in the top three areas of science they would like investigated, compared to only 13.2 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds.
Despite this, only 10 per cent of those surveyed wanted science to discover the secret for immortality.
According to Mr Dowler, three-quarters of respondents said they were interested in science, with most receiving their information from television news stories. Only 6 per cent sourced their information from science magazines and 3 per cent from science centres.
Last year, a survey commissioned by the Australian Federation of Scientific and Technological Societies found 30 per cent of Australians thought dinosaurs and humans co-existed and one-quarter believed the Earth took a day to orbit the Sun.
Mr Dowler says despite the potential for science fiction to blur the line between reality and fiction, it serves a very useful purpose.
"Science [fiction] films can be very inspirational to scientists and the general public, getting more people interested in science and setting the bar for the types of technology we would like in the future," he said.
Darren Osborne @'ABC'
It may be the lucky country, but it's certainly not the intelligent country obvs. Thank heavens we have people who can ride bicycles...
David Cameron's solution for broken Britain: tough love and tougher policing
Thousands more police officers are to undergo riot training, it emerged on Monday, as David Cameron pledged to tackle 120,000 of the country's most "troubled families" as part of the coalition's "social and security fightback" against the "slow-motion moral collapse" of Britain.
The prime minister ruled out race, poverty and spending cuts as factors behind last week's riots, but showed signs of wanting to look deeper into their causes by acceding to Labour's demands for a public inquiry.
As part of the "security fightback" section of the government's response, the home secretary, Theresa May, wrote to Sir Denis O'Connor, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, asking for clearer guidance for forces on their preparations to tackle riots. Senior officers complained that they did not have sufficient number of officers trained in riot control to respond immediately to last week's events, but Home Office sources confirmed on Monday night that they now expected a massive expansion in riot training for the police as a result of May's request.
"I have asked him to provide clearer guidance to forces about the size of deployments, the need for mutual aid, pre-emptive action, public order tactics, the number of officers trained in public order policing, and appropriate arrests policy," the home secretary is to announce on Tuesday in a speech detailing the "security fightback".
As part of the "social fightback", Cameron had a tough-love message for 120,000 of the UK's most "troubled families". He set himself the rigid target of the next election to put all of them through some kind of family-intervention programme.
In a speech setting out his analysis of what led to the riots, Cameron highlighted those families across the UK who were dealing with multiple complex social health and economic problems. Lifting them out of extreme worklessness would be regarded as a measure of his success in his wider agenda of fixing Britain's broken society, he said. Cameron said he would now put "rocket boosters" on attempts to rehabilitate those 120,000.
Speaking at a youth centre in his Witney constituency in Oxfordshire, the prime minister said: "The broken society is back at the top of my political agenda … I have an ambition, before the end of this parliament, we will turn around the lives of 120,000 most troubled families … we need more urgent action on the families that some people call 'problem', others call 'troubled'. The ones everyone in their neighbourhood knows and often avoids."
He said would ask the chief executive of an organisation called Action for Employment, Emma Harrison, who he appointed his "families champion" in December, to use her current experience in dealing with 500 troubled families in three pilot areas to overcome the bureaucratic problems that have prevented the rapid expansion of Labour's similar families intervention programme, which has been running since 2006.
A former coalition government adviser, Dame Claire Tickell, head of Action for Children, which runs some family intervention projects, later told BBC Radio 4 that she was concerned about funding for the intervention. Ringfencing was scrapped last May.
In 2008 Gordon Brown promised to target "more than 110,000 problem families with disruptive young people". The latest official figures show that, in 2009-10, only 3,518 families were actually in the intervention programme and it has helped only 7,300 families since being set up in 2006.
While the intent of Cameron's pledge received cautious cross-party support, Labour echoed Tickell's concerns and doubted whether it could be funded.
Matt Cavanagh, of the Institute for Public Policy Research, and one of the Labour advisers who helped draft the policy when Labour was in power, suggested it would require £100m a year over the next four years. He said: "Local authorities used to part-fund [these programmes] but the government has dismantled all the ringfences and given LAs more autonomy in their reduced budgets. The result for problem family programmes has been neglect and confusion, as ministers now seem to admit."
While the government said it would be making available £200m from the European Social Fund to help fund the target, the rest will come from the early intervention grant, which is to be cut by 11% by 2012 and has funding for Sure Start, teenage pregnancy and youth centres to meet. Labour said Sure Start had been cut by 20% while more than 30 had closed.
A government source acknowledged that using these resources to fund Cameron's new target could vary around the country. They said: "It is for local authorities and their partners, including the voluntary sector, to decide how much they wish to prioritise on families with multiple problems in their area."
Alan Travis and Allegra Stratton @'The Guardian'
Full Transcript
Love the background you chose to deliver yr speech in front of Dave...
The prime minister ruled out race, poverty and spending cuts as factors behind last week's riots, but showed signs of wanting to look deeper into their causes by acceding to Labour's demands for a public inquiry.
As part of the "security fightback" section of the government's response, the home secretary, Theresa May, wrote to Sir Denis O'Connor, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, asking for clearer guidance for forces on their preparations to tackle riots. Senior officers complained that they did not have sufficient number of officers trained in riot control to respond immediately to last week's events, but Home Office sources confirmed on Monday night that they now expected a massive expansion in riot training for the police as a result of May's request.
"I have asked him to provide clearer guidance to forces about the size of deployments, the need for mutual aid, pre-emptive action, public order tactics, the number of officers trained in public order policing, and appropriate arrests policy," the home secretary is to announce on Tuesday in a speech detailing the "security fightback".
As part of the "social fightback", Cameron had a tough-love message for 120,000 of the UK's most "troubled families". He set himself the rigid target of the next election to put all of them through some kind of family-intervention programme.
In a speech setting out his analysis of what led to the riots, Cameron highlighted those families across the UK who were dealing with multiple complex social health and economic problems. Lifting them out of extreme worklessness would be regarded as a measure of his success in his wider agenda of fixing Britain's broken society, he said. Cameron said he would now put "rocket boosters" on attempts to rehabilitate those 120,000.
Speaking at a youth centre in his Witney constituency in Oxfordshire, the prime minister said: "The broken society is back at the top of my political agenda … I have an ambition, before the end of this parliament, we will turn around the lives of 120,000 most troubled families … we need more urgent action on the families that some people call 'problem', others call 'troubled'. The ones everyone in their neighbourhood knows and often avoids."
He said would ask the chief executive of an organisation called Action for Employment, Emma Harrison, who he appointed his "families champion" in December, to use her current experience in dealing with 500 troubled families in three pilot areas to overcome the bureaucratic problems that have prevented the rapid expansion of Labour's similar families intervention programme, which has been running since 2006.
A former coalition government adviser, Dame Claire Tickell, head of Action for Children, which runs some family intervention projects, later told BBC Radio 4 that she was concerned about funding for the intervention. Ringfencing was scrapped last May.
In 2008 Gordon Brown promised to target "more than 110,000 problem families with disruptive young people". The latest official figures show that, in 2009-10, only 3,518 families were actually in the intervention programme and it has helped only 7,300 families since being set up in 2006.
While the intent of Cameron's pledge received cautious cross-party support, Labour echoed Tickell's concerns and doubted whether it could be funded.
Matt Cavanagh, of the Institute for Public Policy Research, and one of the Labour advisers who helped draft the policy when Labour was in power, suggested it would require £100m a year over the next four years. He said: "Local authorities used to part-fund [these programmes] but the government has dismantled all the ringfences and given LAs more autonomy in their reduced budgets. The result for problem family programmes has been neglect and confusion, as ministers now seem to admit."
While the government said it would be making available £200m from the European Social Fund to help fund the target, the rest will come from the early intervention grant, which is to be cut by 11% by 2012 and has funding for Sure Start, teenage pregnancy and youth centres to meet. Labour said Sure Start had been cut by 20% while more than 30 had closed.
A government source acknowledged that using these resources to fund Cameron's new target could vary around the country. They said: "It is for local authorities and their partners, including the voluntary sector, to decide how much they wish to prioritise on families with multiple problems in their area."
Alan Travis and Allegra Stratton @'The Guardian'
Full Transcript
Love the background you chose to deliver yr speech in front of Dave...
Monday, 15 August 2011
Sold Out in America
Another great week for Corporate America!The economy is flatlining. Global financial markets are in turmoil. Your stock price is down about 15 percent in three weeks. Your customers have lost all confidence in the economy. Your employees, at least the American ones, are cynical and demoralized. Your government is paralyzed.
Want to know who is to blame, Mr. Big Shot Chief Executive? Just look in the mirror because the culprit is staring you in the face.
J’accuse, dude. J’accuse.
You helped create the monsters that are rampaging through the political and economic countryside, wreaking havoc and sucking the lifeblood out of the global economy...
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Steven Pearlstein @'The Washington Post'
The Corporations have their very own political party now with the so-called grassroots Tea Party. The concoction of unlimited funding for anonymous attack ads, passive-aggressive racism, and a smoke screen of social conservative concern is a heady mix indeed that has poisoned otherwise good hard working Americans into a state of fear that convinces them to vote against their own best interests.
First Listen: Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks 'Mirror Traffic'
That's a credit to Malkmus and fellow "slacker" iconoclast Beck — who produced the album — because the former's music is not always an easy listen. While his songs are often impeccably arranged with catchy, sing-song melodies, there's always been an off-kilter quality to his music, making it feel like it's about to fall apart. Chord progressions don't resolve where you want them to, he regularly changes keys mid-stream — often only for a few bars — and there's enough dissonance and squawks of guitar noise to give the songs a sneering edge.
Malkmus' lyrics are constructed to be elusive. His oblique stream-of-consciousness songs, with their sardonic wit and hyper-literate descriptions of mundane observations, ask willing fans to parse the lyrics themselves. Malkmus writes lines as much for their encrypted meanings as for the way the words sound rhythmically against his abrupt melodies and messy guitar riffs.
Still, while Mirror Traffic's punchy urgency has the feeling of being loose and unruly, Malkmus and his Jicks are deceivingly turn-on-a-dime tight as a band, thanks to stellar musicianship from Mike Clark, Joanna Bolme and especially Janet Weiss, whose drums give every song a throttling pulse. (Weiss has since left the band to form WILD FLAG.)
Malkmus has said that he and The Jicks were looking for a like-minded ally like Beck for Mirror Traffic. But of all the artists with whom Beck has collaborated recently (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Thurston Moore), here he leaves the smallest musical footprint. Beck practically sits back and lets Malkmus and The Jicks play; there are very few of the production flourishes that have become Beck's calling card, though he likely played a small part in reining in Malkmus' jammier side, and in sweetening the songs along the way. If anything, Beck's influence shows in Mirror Traffic's sonic focus, even as the album presents a variety of microstyles: fuzzy garage rockers like "Tune Grief" and "Tigers," intimate tunes like the solemn folk song "No One Is (As I Are Be)," or the warbling, buzzed-out ballad "Asking Price."
One of the major overarching themes of Mirror Traffic seems to be a reflexive coming to terms with nostalgia and the boredom of adulthood. But "Forever 28" also references a crumbling relationship — "I can see the mystery of you and me will never quite add up / No one is your perfect fit, I do not believe in that s—-" — while "All Over Gently" includes the kiss-off line, "Stay if you want, but don't forget we're through."
Mirror Traffic is about as brutally forward and honest as Malkmus has ever sounded, revealing a new side to the enigmatic songwriter. But it's also an album with plenty of hooks and lyrical surprises.
Michael Katzif @'npr'
Hear 'Mirror Traffic' In Its Entirety
Squelching social media after riots a dangerous idea
In an emergency session of Parliament on Thursday, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that the violence, looting and arson sweeping his country "were organized via social media." He said his government is now considering how and whether to "stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."
On Friday, China's state-run Xinhua news agency published a commentary contrasting Cameron's latest statements with his Arab Spring-inspired speech earlier this year, in which he loftily proclaimed that freedom of expression should be respected in Tahrir Square as much as in London's Trafalgar Square.
"We may wonder why Western leaders, on the one hand, tend to indiscriminately accuse other nations of monitoring, but on the other take for granted their steps to monitor and control the Internet," Xinhua said. "For the benefit of the general public, proper Web-monitoring is legitimate and necessary."
The Chinese government has been making similar arguments since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered her first speech declaring Internet freedom to be a core pillar of American foreign policy in January 2010. For example, here is Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu responding to a foreign correspondent's question in May about heightened Internet censorship and surveillance: "The Chinese government's legal management of the Internet is in line with international practice."
While perpetrators of crime and violence, such as the kind we've witnessed this past week in Britain, must of course be pursued and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, it is critical that both the British government and Internet companies that operate in the U.K. or serve British users proceed responsibly.
Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights...
On Friday, China's state-run Xinhua news agency published a commentary contrasting Cameron's latest statements with his Arab Spring-inspired speech earlier this year, in which he loftily proclaimed that freedom of expression should be respected in Tahrir Square as much as in London's Trafalgar Square.
"We may wonder why Western leaders, on the one hand, tend to indiscriminately accuse other nations of monitoring, but on the other take for granted their steps to monitor and control the Internet," Xinhua said. "For the benefit of the general public, proper Web-monitoring is legitimate and necessary."
The Chinese government has been making similar arguments since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered her first speech declaring Internet freedom to be a core pillar of American foreign policy in January 2010. For example, here is Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu responding to a foreign correspondent's question in May about heightened Internet censorship and surveillance: "The Chinese government's legal management of the Internet is in line with international practice."
While perpetrators of crime and violence, such as the kind we've witnessed this past week in Britain, must of course be pursued and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, it is critical that both the British government and Internet companies that operate in the U.K. or serve British users proceed responsibly.
Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights...
Continue reading
Rebecca MacKinnon @'CNN'
Torture in the US Prison System: The Endless Punishment of Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier, a great-grandfather, artist, writer, and indigenous rights activist, is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota Nations and has been imprisoned since 1976. (Photo: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee)
Your visit to one of America's prisons may last only a few hours, but once you pass the first steel threshold, your perception of humanity is altered. The slammed doors, metal detectors and body frisks introduce you to life on the inside, but the glaring hatred from the guards and officials make it a reality. When you creep back into your own world afterward, you wonder what is really happening to the people who permanently languish behind bars. In June 2006, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons released "Confronting Confinement," a 126-page report summarizing its 12-month inquiry into the prison systems. The commission follows up the analysis based on its findings with a list of recommendations. Topping the list of needed improvements is better enforcement of inmates' right to proper health care and limitations on solitary confinement. Five years after the report's release and despite its detailed and well-researched studies, inmate abuse continues. More recently, news reports from California's Pelican Bay Prison amplified the need for change, but after the three-week inmate hunger strike ended, the torture of solitary confinement continues nationwide.
More than 20,000 inmates are caged in isolation in the United States at any one time. Originally designed as a temporary disciplinary action, solitary confinement has drifted into use as a long-term punishment. This act of inhumanity is a clear contradiction of the Eighth Amendment. During the Pelican Bay hunger strike that rippled into prisons across the country, a 66-year-old man with extreme medical needs, Leonard Peltier, was forced into "the hole" at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania...
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