March at Tutwiler Prison: Rally at State Capitol, Aug. 23rd at 11 AM.
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March to End Rape, Sexual Assault, and the Exploitation of Women: August 23rd 2014 11:00 Rally at State Capitol |
By Victoria Law, on SolitaryWatch
December 12, 2013
I didn’t want to believe it but then I experienced it first hand with a close acquaintance of mine. She had conversations with a guard and he asked sexually explicit questions about what she would be able to do in bed because of her disability and it went on for a while. She came to me and said she didn’t want to be around him and she told an office worker about him and he ended up writing a report on her, before she could do it to him and she was eventually questioned. I was questioned and I told the investigator that I believed her and that the officer was a pervert and flirted openly with any girl who was desperate for a man’s attention. I told him I felt like he was a predator and shouldn’t be working at a women’s prison. I later found out she went to the hole and was going to be ad. seg’d just like the others but she left on her mandatory parole to go back to court and was re-sentenced and brought back. Luckily they didn’t ad. seg her when she came back. I’m not sure why they dropped it but maybe it was because she was gone for a while.
Reblogged from: New Statesman, Nov. 9th 2013
By Katharine Sacks-Jones
The reports of sexual abuse at the Yarl’s Wood detention centre were sadly not much of a surprise to people who work with immigration detainees.
Recent reports of sexual abuse at Yarl’s Wood shine a small spotlight on the otherwise invisible world of immigration detention. They detail how guards preyed on isolated women, subjecting them to unwanted advances, using their positions of power to coerce them into sexual acts. Shocking yes. But sadly not much of a surprise to people who work with immigration detainees.
As a trustee of a small charity, Bail for Immigration Detainees, I visited Yarl’s Wood late last year. The desperation was palpable. One of the women I met had heavily bandaged wrists. She was on 24-hour suicide watch after one failed attempt to take her own life. She, like others I spoke to, was desperate to get out of what is little more than a prison. With 30,000 people detained per year, these women are far from rare.
Many people in detention – both men and women – are incredibly vulnerable. They are often fleeing violence and persecution. About half have claimed asylum. Some have been the victims of torture and rape. To have faced and survived such trauma, to have undertaken a difficult journey to get away, to have left behind loved ones and the world that you know, to then reach supposed safety only to be locked up is a cruel irony. And to be detained with no release date and no time-limit must be utterly hopeless.
It is little surprise that detention is incredibly damaging. Self-harm and detention go hand in hand, with studies suggesting there are higher levels of suicide and self-harm amongst detained immigrants than amongst the prison population. The impacts on physical and mental ill health are well-documented – severe distress and depression as a result of detention are common.
Read the rest here.
Today, June 20th 2012:
From: WSFA
MONTGOMERY, AL (AP) –
A joint legislative oversight committee on prisons is planning to meet to discuss reports of increased violence in Alabama prisons and allegations of sexual abuse at one prison.
A committee has scheduled a meeting for 1 p.m. Wednesday in the Joint Briefing Room at the Alabama Statehouse to discuss reports of rising inmate-on-inmate violence in prisons. The Legislature’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee will also discuss allegations of prison employees sexually abusing women inmates at Tutwiler Prison in Wetumpka.
Read the rest here: http://www.wsfa.com/story/18834048/committee-looks-at-prison-violence
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Here is the article by the Equal Justice Initiative about the Prison Overcrowding in Alabama, which is becoming increasingly serious:
ALABAMA’S OVERCROWDED PRISONS BECOMING MORE VIOLENT
June 5, 2012
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Alabama’s prisons house twice as many people as they were designed to hold and the ratio of inmates to correctional officers is the worst of any state in the country. As a result, there is an alarming increase in violent incidents in the state’s overcrowded prisons.
As The Birmingham News recently reported, violence among prisoners was up 40% in 2010-2011 compared to the previous year; assaults leading to serious injury doubled. Three inmates have been killed in Alabama prisons since October 2011.
Actually, the rate of violent assaults in Alabama prisons is likely worse than the official data show. Lawsuits challenging the overcrowding, short staffing, and pervasive violence in Alabama prisons have uncovered evidence that the state underreports attacks on inmates.
For example, the Department of Corrections’ public reports for 2008-2009 listed only one assault with serious injury at Donaldson Correctional Facility, but internal records showed at least 16 Donaldson inmates were taken to outside hospitals during that time for treatment of serious injuries, including collapsed lungs, vomiting and urinating blood, and loss of sight in one eye.
Crowding and staffing shortages are likely to worsen in the coming year, for which the corrections budget has been cut by $16 million.
Corrections officials’ failure to protect inmates from assaultive staff and fellow inmates contributes to the rise in violence. “They’re letting people fight,” said EJI director Bryan Stevenson. “They’re not responding in any meaningful way.”
Stevenson said society at large has a stake in ensuring that inmates are protected from violence in prison. “Most people are going to be released,” he said. “Torturing, abusing and assaulting people over many years and then releasing them to the public is not a sensible public safety strategy.”
Links:
Birmingham News: Alabama Prison Violence Rising in Overcrowded System, 6/3/12
Associated Press: Report: Violence Increasing in Crowded Alabama Prisons as Budget
Cuts Loom, 6/3/12
Birmingham News: Alabama’s Bullock Mental Health Facility the Most Violent Prison in State, 6/3/12
Huntsville Times Editorial: Alabama’s Mean Prisons, 6/8/12
Eufaula Tribune: Clayton Prison Ranks Seventh for Inmate Violence, 6/9/12
Gadsden Times Editorial: No Easy Answers on Prisons, 6/10/12
Huntsville Times: Alabama Prison Chief Faces Budget Cuts, Challenges Over Tutwiler Abuse Reports, 6/13/12
From: WLKY.com
July 23, 2011
FRANKFORT, Ky. — Police said a male guard at the state’s women’s prison has been charged with 25 counts of second-degree sexual abuse.
Kentucky State Police said 52-year-old Sgt. James B. Johnson, of Louisville, was charged Friday at state police headquarters in Frankfort.
A news release from Post 12 in Frankfort said the investigation found Johnson was supplying controlled substances to female inmates and then sexually abusing them at the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women in Pewee Valley near Louisville.
Read more: http://www.wlky.com/news/28645078/detail.html#ixzz1T336QsnN