Voices from Solitary: High Tech Brutality

Voices from Solitary: High Tech Brutality
by Voices from Solitary

Robert "Saleem" Holbrook is serving life without parole in Pennsylvania for a crime committed when he was a juvenile. When he was 16, Holbrook was recruited by adults to serve as a lookout during a drug deal that escalated to robbery and then murder. Under the state's mandatory sentencing laws, he was given LWOP--an experience he describes in an essay called "Crushed Against the Law: A Child Offender’s Encounter with Blind Justice," published on the blog maintained for him by friends on the outside. It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court's recent decision banning mandatory juvenile LWOP will affect his sentence. Holbrook has now been in prison for 17 years, and has spent many of those years in solitary confinement. He is a member of the Human Rights Coaltion, which opposes solitary confinement and other forms of abuse in Pennsylvania's prisons. He wrote the following piece, titled "Control Units: High Tech Brutality" while in the "Special Management Unit" (SMU) at SCI Greene. -- Jean Casella

A prisoner’s whole existence, especially one in a control unit, is defined by numbers, statistics, and information transferred through an endless process of paperwork. When I go to the Program Review Committee here in the Special Management Unit (a control unit) at SCI Greene, my release to general population is repeatedly denied, they claim, because of a history of assaultive behavior. It is useless to defend myself against their rationale, yet I do to probe the predictable response of my captors.

Their justification for the continual confinement of myself and others in the SMU is based on the rational of a separate committee that determined I am an assaultive prisoner who has demonstrated the potential to harm others. Never mind the fact that this determination was made in another prison. Since a separate Administrative Committee determined that I am assaultive, I must therefore be assaultive. Their system of paper- work and statistics is never wrong; their committees are omnipotent and all knowing.

We the prisoners are mere spectators and captives to the process. Our presence is only necessary to secure our signatures on their paperwork or to say something that can be documented and used against us in future hearings. Our signatures place our consent on their paperwork. They permit us to seal our fate by certifying our consent of their process.

Every step of our day in the control unit is reduced to a methodical and omnipotent numbers system. I am housed in cell 23 on the 2nd tier. I receive 3 meals a day, 3 showers a week for 5 minutes each with 1 bar of soap, and 3 shaves a week with 1 razor that must be turned in after 15 minutes. I go to the yard 5 days a week for 1 hour a day with 1 prisoner per cage. I can only have 1 box in my cell containing only 2 pairs of socks, 2 t-shirts and 2 underwear. I can only have 4 books that must be exchanged on a 1 for 1 basis. I can only have 1 jumpsuit, 1 towel, 1 washcloth, and 1 toothbrush and toothpaste that are exchanged every 30 days on a 1 for 1 basis. I can only have 1 visit for 1 hour every week with only 1 visitor. The SMU Committee reviews my status every 30 days.

The prison officials tolerate no alternation in their process. There is no room for negotiation or compromise. The system must run smoothly. Dissent or resistance is crushed by the Correctional Response Teams dressed in futuristic battle fatigues. It is a ruthless war of attrition de- signed to grind a man down to his breaking point.

The previous method employed by the prison system to break prisoners was to break “bones.” They relied on brute force and unrestrained violence. This method did not sit well with the American public when it was exposed. It also tarnished America’s image in the world as a nation of high standards and values. The method was flawed in that it usually only strengthened prisoners’ resistance and made them stronger men. The prison system therefore directed its resources to develop a method of confinement that would destroy a prisoner’s mind and his will to resist.

The new assault was directed not against a prisoner’s body, but rather his mind and senses. The concept of a complete sensory deprivation and isolation was developed. This concept revolved around the ideas that if a prisoner is deprived of mental, physical, and emotional stimulation, his mind will inevitably turn inward and feed upon itself. With no outlet in an isolated environment, the mind is left to its own devices. The result is that a prisoner’s thoughts run out of control. Concentration becomes difficult and prisoners invent fantasies or images of themselves which they cocoon themselves in.

Some never emerge from this world they create. The mind will seek any relief available. It is not uncommon for men to talk to themselves for hours on end. Insanity and madness rule in a control unit. The units are filled with prisoner’s screams, outbursts and pleas for communication. A man’s nerves deteriorate right in front of his eyes. Each prisoner suffers his own personal hell. Everyone is affected in one way or another. Whether the experience affects him for the good or the bad depends upon the man. Read more of this post

http://solitarywatch.com/2012/06/28/voices-from-solitary-high-tech-brutality/

Teens 170 Years For Crimes That Did not Include Murder

*Sent Away* http://ht.ly/bywzn

Nathan Jordan, (bottom right as a child) who is serving a 170-year sentence
for crimes committed as a juvenile, his sister Allysa Jordan and their
mother. This is the last family picture available as his belongings were
lost after his mother's death .
Photo courtesy of Allysa Jordan

Nathan Jordan is serving a 170-year sentence at Sterling Correction
Facility in Colorado for aggravated robbery, motor vehicle theft and
possession of a weapon.

But most of his crimes, which did not result in anyone’s death or injury,
took place in in the late 1990s, before he was 18 . According to Colorado
law, he was a juvenile offender.

So how did Jordan end up with the kind of sentence that might be meted out
to serial killers or career criminals?

. . . . .


More on Colorado find in
*A photo essay from Time Magazine.*.... *Fremont County, Colorado, has made
incarceration a local specialty industry.* Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2009197,00.html#ixzz0wyOMv3Gm

Help Amber Come Home

https://www.change.org/p/governor-edmund-brown-please-help-amber-riley-come-home?j=229259&sfmc_sub=50997977&l=32_HTML&u=41927255&mid=7233052&jb=846

Alot of you know me as I have been fighting the system for 15 Years: I am asking you to please help us in our fight now. Amber deserves to come home & without this reduction in sentencing she may not make it home while I am still here.
We humbley ask for your help. Please read my blog on her case & then decide if you feel she deserves another chance at life free & with us.
We are also asking for letters of support to be sent to Governor Brown.
If you would like to write Mr. Brown in support please add her Commutation Log #(Com-878-12)
The staff at CCWF has submitted a request for him to consider her for this because she has a positive history, and has worked hard for this. For 15 years she has worked on her education gaining her GED,She has almost completed a AA in Social and behavioral Science, as well as a Certificate in Business. She currently is training dogs for the Mentally and physically disabled through the Little Angels Service Dogs Program, & is starting this week to Mentor At Risk Youth from the new Youth Diversion Program. She wants to make a difference in their lives & her own. Please take minute and go to change.org & sign her petition.
>
Thank you & God Bless You & Yours Gellybean1974@yahoo.com (Earleen Austin)
You can read about Amber's case & trial at>
>
>http://rileyj240.blogspot.com/search/label/Amber%20Riley%3A%20An%20Unjust%20Verdict
>
You can also write to her if you wish: Email Gellybean1974@yahoo.com for her address:


Governor Edmund G. Brown
C/O State Capitol Suite 1173
Sacremento Ca. 95814




https://www.change.org/p/governor-edmund-brown-please-help-amber-riley-come-home?

Amber Requests Evidence Pertaining To Her Case, That She Never Receives

11/19/2007

Amber writes a letter to the persiding Judge:
To The Honorable Judge Bylesh
I am writting to you because I am a defendant in your court
room and I am having some trouble obtaining copies of my reports.
When I was arrested and booked into juvenile hall I filed
a rape report against my co-defendant. and photographs were taken
of my badly bruised thighs and burns & bruises and cig burns were on my
arms, where he burnt me.I know my investagator got copies of these,
I am fighting a very serious case and I am about to go to trial. My Co-defedant
has copies of these as he is pro per.
These reports are very important to my case, and I feel this
is an injustice to me to be kept from my own evidence
while the person who did this to me is allowed to have and carry
my evidence with him.It is against my personal rights .

I will be back in your court room Dec. 2010 & Truely hope
you will have these here for me. ( For My Case)
I have been requesting these reports & pictures for a very long time, please this
is unfair to me & my to my trial.
Thank you for your time
with respect, sincerly
Amber Riley
Please if you get time can you check (Holman V. Superior
Court (1981)29 Cal. App. 3d 1302,1310 (246 cal.Rptr.
775) Thank you very much.

11-year-old serving a 25 year prison term for a crime she did not commit.

Lacresha Murray is an 11-year-old serving a 25 year prison term for a crime she did not commit.

She was charged in the death of Jayla Belton with capital murder, found guilty of negligent homicide and injury to a child, and sentenced to 25 years--with no evidence, witnesses, opportunity, motive, nor history of aggression.

Months before her trial, against juvenile law and State Bar rules, D.A. Ronnie Earle announced her identity and pronounced her guilty in a televised news conference.The media, without any investigation, headlined her as guilty as charged for two months, obliterating any possibility of a fair trial.

Hidden from her family for four days, without a break, Lacresha was lied to, threatened, tricked and brainwashed during a three-hour interrogation by the Austin Police Department (APD). Not only did they deny her an attorney or parent present during this deceptively and illegally arranged interrogation, they threateningly coerced a false statement out of her, and failed to

read her all of her rights
ensure she understood them,
ascertain whether Lacresha could read the statement they typed up, which she could not.
By all accounts, this interrogation was immoral, illegal and inadmissible as evidence, and yet it was used as the only evidence against her. With no evidence, witnesses, motive, opportunity or history of aggressive behavior, Lacresha was found guilty -- twice.


In the first trial, she was denied a defense.

In the second trial, she was provided a rigged defense. During the second trial, the prosecution based it's case on the assertion there was a match between the shoes they alleged Lacresha was wearing and the injuries on Jayla Belton's body; however, these shoes were not Lacresha's. They were boy's tennis shoes, 3 sizes too large. Her family did not recognize them, and everyone who saw her that day, including hospital personnel and police, saw her barefoot.

The State's two "experts" who testified there was indeed a match, admitted on the stand they had not actually measured or tested the shoes in comparison to Jayla Belton's injuries. In fact, one of the "experts" did not see the shoes until minutes before he testified there was a match. The only scientific, forensic testing of the shoes was done by the police department's crime lab, which sent a report to prosecutors stating there was not a match. The only qualified expert evidence the prosecution had completely undermined their case. The jury had the right to see this report, but the prosecutors and judge suppressed it.

The judge, D.A., APD, Travis County Medical Examiner and the prosecutors in this matter failed to obey Texas law, designed to protect innocent children, and colluded with each other to imprison this innocent child for purely political reasons. By framing and imprisoning this innocent child, D.A. Ronnie Earle got national attention and right-before-election proof he was indeed tough on crime. Judge Dietz, Earle's former campaign manager and friend, got to provide a self-serving favor for Earle. The police got to close another case without much effort or cost. The prosecutors got both an easy win for their resumes and a chance to exercise the eagerly-awaited Determinate Sentencing Act, enabling them to imprison juveniles convicted of violent crimes for lengthy sentences.

Lacresha Murray got 25 years.


*Obviously, the goals of our justice system are not always met, but did you know that the legal safeguards we so highly value and trust are increasingly being violated in juvenile cases? For those with children, the travesty of the case against Lacresha Murray literally means that the police can arrest and accuse your children of a horrendous crime, secret them away from you, deliberately and illegally deny them an attorney and/or parent during interrogation, subject them to lies, trickery, threats and bullying during an interrogation, deny them full notification of the charge against them and its consequences, completely slander their reputation, as well as that of the entire family, and put them away for 25 to 40 years, or more -- without evidence.

By any other name, this is child abuse by our justice system. Although this is not supposed to happen in America, it did and it could happen to your child.

This was in 1999
------------------
After 3 long years of confinement for a crime she did not commit.
On August 13, 2001 all charges were dismissed.

Dear Friends and Supporters,


The charges against La Cresha Murray, now 17, have been dismissed with prejudice, which means for all time. They cannot reprosecute. They will also not prosecute the real perpetrators despite the fact that there is and was evidence available in 1996 establishing the time of Jayla Belton's injuries and clearing the Murrays; but lawyers never admit wrong, especially district attorneys and prosecutors and corrupt judges.

http://www.peopleoftheheart.org/home.htm

Joe H. Sullivan:LWOP For A Nonhomicide 1989 (He Is Still Serving Time)

All Locked Up

Did Joe Sullivan, sentenced to life at 13, have a fair trial?


Joe Harris Sullivan is one of two teenagers that young currently doing life without parole for a nonhomicide offense in the United States. His lawyers are hoping that the court will extend its 2005 bar on executing criminals who committed crimes as juveniles to Sullivan's sentence.

The adequacy of that proceeding isn't before the justices now. But a brief review of the trial record reveals a process so pathetic that it raises questions about whether Sullivan committed the crime in the first place. It also seems that the trial judge may not have intended to sentence Sullivan to life without parole. In the end, that judge, along with the prosecutor and defense lawyer, failed Sullivan so deeply that we have to wonder whether his sentence reflects a deep and basic failure of ordinary criminal justice

Here's what we do know happened. One May morning in 1989, Sullivan, then 13, and two older teens, Nathan McCants, 17, and Michael Gulley, 15, burglarized a home in Pensacola, Fla. They left with jewelry and coins. Later that day, someone returned to the house and found a 72-year-old woman, threw a black slip over her head, made her lie on her bed, and raped her orally and vaginally—so brutally that she had to have corrective surgery.

The remaining facts are trickier. The woman testified at trial that her assailant was a "dark colored boy" who "had kinky hair and he was quite black and he was small." She never looked directly at him. However, she remembered her attacker saying something like, "If you can't identify me, I may not have to kill you." At trial, she was permitted to testify that she recognized Sullivan's voice, saying, it "could very well be" his.

The two older boys, who both received brief sentences for their roles in the crimes, also testified. Gulley claimed that Sullivan said he'd raped the woman; McCants claimed not to have gone back to the house the second time.

Sullivan denied raping the elderly woman, admitting only to the initial burglary. But he was tried as an adult on two counts of sexual battery and other related charges. The only physical evidence was a fingerprint lifted from a plaque in the bedroom, which could have been made during the burglary. The clothing and other evidence have been destroyed and couldn't be tested for DNA.

Sullivan's lawyer, Mack Plant, had a straightforward job: to investigate whether Sullivan was guilty of just the burglary or the rape as well. Plant also should have found out if Sullivan's friends got reduced sentences because they flipped on him, as well as what their criminal histories were.

Plant punted at every step, beginning with his failure to address whether Sullivan was even competent to stand trial. Social science research shows that most teens don't have the ability to determine whether to take a plea deal, much less make decisions about strategy for trial. But from the record, it appears Plant never had his client's reasoning and comprehension skills evaluated.

The lawyer declined to give an opening statement, which is like a batter not taking a swing. Plant also failed to cross-examine witnesses vigorously.He did not explore Gulley's and McCants' backgrounds to show they had a motive to lie. He never asked: "Did you get a deal here?" Michael Gulley had an extensive criminal history that included one sexual offense, according to court papers. A lawyer might have used this information to cast Gulley as a possible suspect instead of Sullivan. Plant did not. Instead, he focused on the fact that Gulley had to have his memory refreshed about the entire crime before testifying. This was a good point, but Plant blew through it. (Entire cross: a little more than a page.) And he never challenged the victim's identification of her assailant's voice as Sullivan's or asked her to listen to the other two boys' speech.
Joe Sullivan

In his closing, Plant again said nothing about the self-serving nature of McCant's and Gulley's testimony. Here's his best line to the jury: "You know, I just don't know about this case." How true.

The trial whizzed by in eight hours. The jury took 35 minutes to convict. You could hardly blame them, based on the little they'd heard. Plant has since been suspended from the practice of law in Florida. The adequacy of his representation of Sullivan, however, was never properly raised on appeal.
The judge and prosecutor were also complicit in Sullivan's inadequate trial. At the sentencing hearing, after Sullivan's conviction, the question before Judge Nickolas P. Geeker should have been whether a 13-year-old who committed this horrible crime could be rehabilitated. Unlike an adult who commits the same offense, a young teen can change, according to the research of mental health researchers Laurence Steinberg and Thomas Grisso, who were the main experts in the juvenile death-penalty case and whose work Sullivan's attorneys are relying on now.A daylong hearing exploring the research on brain development and responsibility for young teens, along with Sullivan's juvenile history, family, education, and mental ability, would have given the judge the information he needed to determine whether Sullivan really merited the punishment of prison for life.
While the prosecutor may be less to blame than the defense attorney or the judge, he also has a responsibility to make sure that the punishment he's asking for is appropriate. Prosecutor Lawrence Kaden described Sullivan's criminal history in terms of the number of points he had accrued under the state's adult sentencing guidelines. He apparently didn't take into account that two-thirds of those points were due to a crime Sullivan committed at age 12, when he and his older brother broke into a house and were attacked by a dog, which Sullivan hit in the head, accidentally killing it.
At the sentencing, Judge Geeker should have appointed another lawyer to replace Plant. Instead, he said, somewhat inexplicably, that he wanted it to be "perfectly clear to everyone that when he (Sullivan) gets out again and he commits any more offenses, he'll not be a juvenile offender. Hopefully, he will be an old man."
If the judge meant to sentence Sullivan to life in prison without parole, why did he mention his release? (If he made a mistake, he wouldn't be the first. Another Florida judge has admitted to being confused about the law and incorrectly sentencing a 14-year-old to life without parole.)

There's no way to know, because as at so many other troubling moments in this trial, no legal professional stepped up to ask a question or to protest. Sullivan's trial showcases a common failure of the adversarial system—one that's especially troubling when the stakes involve locking up a child forever.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2009/11/all_locked_up.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_2
---------------------------------
Joe has been in prison since 1989

http://offender.fdle.state.fl.us/offender/flyer.do?personId=59092 >>> Shows Current Statas

Oscar Wilde on the Cruelty of Children in Prison

Voices from Solitary: Oscar Wilde on the Cruelty of Children in Prison
by Voices from Solitary

During and after his own two-year incarceration for "gross indecency," Oscar Wilde wrote several works on the cruelty and degradation of prison life. Among them is a lengthy letter to the editor of the London Daily Chronicle, written in 1897 shortly after his release from Reading Gaol and self-exile to France. It concerns the treatment of children in Britain's prisons, including their solitary confinement. Wilde does not specify the ages of the children in question, but at one point he argues that children under the age of fourteen should not be put in prison at all--so it is safe to assume that the children he refers to were younger still.

What follows is an excerpt from Wilde's letter, highlighting those practices that have changed relatively little since his day. Today, children as young as ten can be locked up in the UK, though they are placed in juvenile facilities rather than adult prisons, and solitary confinement is rare. In the United States, on the other hand, an estimated 10,000 juveniles are in adult prisons and jails. There, they are far more likely than adults to be beaten by guards, sexually assaulted, or end up in solitary confinement. They are also 36 times more likely to commit suicide than children in juvenile facilities. --Jean Casella

= = = = =
The cruelty that is practised by day and night on children in English prisons is incredible, except to those that have witnessed it and are aware of the brutality of the system. People nowadays do not understand what cruelty is. They regard it as a sort of terrible mediæval passion...[But]ordinary cruelty is simply stupidity. It is the entire want of imagination. It is the result in our days of stereotyped systems, of hard-and-fast rules, and of stupidity...Authority is as destructive to those who exercise it as it is to those on whom it is exercised. It is the Prison Board, and the system that it carries out, that is the primary source of the cruelty that is exercised on a child in prison...

The present treatment of children is terrible, primarily from people not under standing the peculiar psychology of a child's nature. A child can understand a punishment inflicted by an individual, such as a parent or guardian, and bear it with a certain amount of acquiescence. What it cannot understand is a punishment inflicted by society. It cannot realise what society is...

The child consequently, being taken away from its parents by people whom it has never seen, and of whom it knows nothing, and finding itself in a lonely and unfamiliar cell, waited on by strange faces, and ordered about and punished by the representatives of a system that it cannot understand, becomes an immediate prey to the first and most prominent emotion produced by modern prison life -- the emotion of terror. The terror of a child in prison is quite limitless.

I remember once in Reading, as I was going out to exercise, seeing in the dimly lit cell right opposite my own a small boy. Two warders -- not unkindly men -- were talking to him, with some sternness apparently, or perhaps giving him some useful advice about his conduct. One was in the cell with him, the other was standing outside. The child's face was like a white wedge of sheer terror. There was in his eyes the terror of a hunted animal. The next morning I heard him at breakfast-time crying, and calling to be let out. His cry was for his parents. From time to time I could hear the deep voice of the warder on duty telling him to keep quiet.

Yet he was not even convicted of whatever little offence he had been charged with. He was simply on remand. That I knew by his wearing his own clothes, which seemed neat enough. He was, however, wearing prison socks and shoes. This showed that he was a very poor boy, whose own shoes, if he had any, were in a bad state. Justices and magistrates, an entirely ignorant class as a rule, often remand children for a week, and then perhaps remit whatever sentence they are entitled to pass. They call this "not sending a child to prison." It is, of course, a stupid view on their part. To a little child, whether he is in prison on remand or after conviction is not a subtlety of social position he can comprehend. To him the horrible thing is to be there at all. In the eyes of humanity it should be a horrible thing for him to be there at all.

This terror that seizes and dominates the child, as it seizes the grown man also, is of course intensified beyond power of expression by the solitary cellular system of our prisons. Every child is confined to its cell for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. This is the appalling thing. To shut up a child in a dimly lit cell, for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, is an example of the cruelty of stupidity.

If an individual, parent or guardian, did this to a child, he would be severely punished. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children would take the matter up at once. There would be on all hands the utmost detestation of whomsoever had been guilty of such cruelty. A heavy sentence would, undoubtedly, follow conviction. But our own actual society does worse itself, and to the child to be so treated by a strange abstract force, of whose claims it has no cognisance, is much worse than it would be to receive the same treatment from its father or mother, or some one it knew...

As regards the children, a great deal has been talked and written lately about the contaminating influence of prison on young children. What is said is quite true. A child is utterly contaminated by prison life. But the contaminating influence is not that of the prisoners. It is that of the whole prison system -- of the governor, the chaplain, the warders, the lonely cell, the isolation, the revolting food, the rules of the Prison Commissioners, the mode of discipline as it is termed, of the life...In this, as in all other things, philanthropists and people of that kind are astray. It is not the prisoners who need reformation. It is the prisons...

http://solitarywatch.com/2012/05/20/voices-from-solitary-oscar-wilde-on-the-cruelty-of-children-in-prison/