Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years in Wikileaks case

Bradley Manning (Photo credit: Truthout.org)

The US soldier convicted of handing a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website Wikileaks has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Pte First Class Bradley Manning, 25, was convicted in July of 20 charges against him, including espionage. Last week, he apologised for hurting the US and for "the unexpected results" of his actions.

Prosecutors had asked for a 60-year sentence in order to send a message to future potential leakers. Pte Manning will receive credit for time he has already served in jail, plus 112 days' credit in recompense for the harsh conditions of his confinement immediately after his arrest.

Military prisoners can earn time off their sentences for good behaviour but must serve at least one-third of any prison sentence before they can become eligible for parole. Read more >>

Over half of Guantanamo Bay prisoners on hunger strike as number increases to 84

Over half of all detainees at the US-run Guantanamo Bay military prison are now taking part in a hunger strike, with many being force-fed, a US military spokesman confirmed today.

The number of prisoners on hunger strike has risen to 84, an increase of 32 since last Wednesday, with 16 now receiving “enteral feedings,” a process involving being force-fed via tubes.

Inmates at the facility, which houses 166 detainees, have been refusing food since 6 February, when they claim prison officials searched their Korans for contraband, an act they considered to be religious desecration. Officials denied mishandling the Islamic holy book. Some prisoners, including Shaker Aamer, the last British inmate being held there, have since said they are continuing the strike in protest against their incarceration at Guantanamo for 11 years without charge or trial. Read more >>

As economy flails, debtors' prisons thrive

Thousands of Americans are sent to jail not for committing a crime, but because they can't afford to pay for traffic tickets, medical bills and court fees.

If that sounds like a debtors' prison, a legal relic which was abolished in this country in the 1830s, that's because it is. And courts and judges in states across the land are violating the Constitution by incarcerating people for being unable to pay such debts.

Ask Jack Dawley, 55, an unemployed man in Ohio who between 2007 and 2012 spent a total of 16 days in jail in a Huron County lock-up for failing to pay roughly $1,500 in legal fines he'd incurred in the 1990s. The fines stemmed from Dawley's convictions for driving under the influence and other offenses. After his release from a Wisconsin correctional facility, Dawley, who admits he had struggled with drugs and alcohol, got clean. But if he put his substance problems behind him, Dawley's couldn't outrun his debts.

Struggling to find a job and dealing with the effects of a back injury, he fell behind on repayments to the municipal court in Norwalk, Ohio. He was arrested six years ago and sent to jail for not paying his original court fines. Although Dawley was put on a monthly payment plan, during his latest stint behind bars in 2012 the court ordered him to pay off his entire remaining debt. Read more >>

California World Leader in Imprisonment

 Press TV
An American activist says the state of California leads the world in terms of incarcerations and suppression-style policing methods it uses, Press TV reports. Kim McGill of Youth Justice Coalition, a community-based Los Angeles organization that works to curb youth violence, also said prisons have become a big business in the state and politicians are not unwilling to change that.

Driving Force Behind Massive Prison System is Cheap Labor

The Intel Hub
“Prison Industrial Complex” is a term that refers to private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. What is interesting about this term and the concept of “prison labor” is how it’s rise parallels the rapid expansion of the US inmate population.

The Prison Industrial Complex is big growth industry. While other sectors of our economy continue to struggle in this recession, the private prison industry is booming! Is there a connection between this booming business and the record rise in incarceration in this country?

Let’s take a deeper look… Did you know that for every 100,000 Americans, 743 of them reside behind bars? That is nearly 1 out 100 Americans! Today, the United States has the highest prison population in the world with more than 2 million people either incarcerated in prison or in jail awaiting trail. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, surpassing China, North Korea and Russia.

A study conducted by the Bureau of Justice in 2005 showed that a record 33-year continuous rise in the number of inmates in the United States despite falling crime rates. To put this concept into perspective, consider the following:

The Return of Debtors' Prisons

Yahoo Finance
Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff's deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.

Under the law, debtors aren't arrested for nonpayment, but rather for failing to respond to court hearings, pay legal fines, or otherwise showing "contempt of court" in connection with a creditor lawsuit. That loophole has lawmakers in the Illinois House of Representatives concerned enough to pass a bill in March that would make it illegal to send residents of the state to jail if they can't pay a debt. The measure awaits action in the senate.

"Creditors have been manipulating the court system to extract money from the unemployed, veterans, even seniors who rely solely on their benefits to get by each month," Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said last month in a statement voicing support for the legislation. "Too many people have been thrown in jail simply because they're too poor to pay their debts. We cannot allow these illegal abuses to continue." More...

Private Prison Corporations Are Slave Traders

Prison cell, Fort Leavenworth. Deutsch: Gefängniszelle, Fort Leavenworth. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Concertina razor wire at a prison (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, this month sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.

For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag. More...

Man jailed for cashing Chase check at Chase Bank - loses car and job

Image via WikipediaBy Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story
A 28-year-old construction worker was mistakenly thrown in jail after trying to deposit a check at a local Chase bank, and the whole ordeal ended up costing him his car and job.

KING5 reported that Ikenna Njoku of Auburn, Washington received a home buyer rebate from the IRS, which Chase Bank sent him in the form of a $8,463.21 cashier's check. When he tried to cash the check, a teller at his local Chase Bank suspected it was a forgery and took it, along with his driver license and credit card, to contact bank support.

When he arrived at the bank the next day to get his money, he was arrested for trying to cash a fraudulent check and thrown in jail.

The following day, on Friday, Chase Special Investigations realized the mistake and left a message with the police department. But Njoku ended up staying in jail until Monday morning.

In the meantime, he was fired from his job for failing to show up to work and his car had been towed from the bank's parking lot and was later sold at an auction.

A year after the incident, Chase has yet to apologize to Njoku.

“It’s one thing to make a mistake,” Felix Luna, a Seattle attorney who offered to help Njoku, said. “It’s one thing to make multiple errors of judgment like Chase has made and then, once you realize that your error has caused such harm to somebody else, to just ignore it for a year. I think he deserved better. I think all their customers do.”

In Minnesota the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent

Image by G Travels via Flickr

startribune.com
In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives, because enforcement is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.

In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man "to indefinite incarceration" until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt. More...

Modern-day Cattle Rustling at Record Levels

LITA BECK
A crime as old as the West is taking off again like a stampede as cattle rustlers armed with wire cutters and cattle trailers crisscross country roads.

"We've got some awful good cowboys, you know," said Marvin Willis, Texas Special Ranger. "They can load the cattle in a hurry."

For the second year in a row, cattle rustling may reach record levels. There were 6,404 cattle thefts in Texas in 2008 and only 2,400 thefts in 2007, according to the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.

A modern-day posse of more than two dozen Texas Rangers -- including Willis -- is charged with tracking down cattle thieves.

But it's nothing like the old Westerns, Willis said.

"I haven't seen any romance in any of the cattle thieving I've been involved in," he said.

Willis called the modern-day outlaws "common thugs."

"If it wasn't cattle, it would be something else they'd be stealing," he said.

Ranchers such as Sammy Ward said they fear the increase in cattle thefts is tied to the economic recession.

"But I think the worse the economy gets, you're going to see more," he said.

The victims are often small ranchers, and the loss cuts deep.

"One rancher I've been working a theft case on July -- he lost about $30,000 worth of livestock, and it's impacted him," Willis said. "That's a pretty good lick."

The thieves can be hard to catch, Willis said. Stolen cattle are often sold quickly at auctions. Some are sold out of state -- or even on the street.

"Some boys we caught here a while back, they actually sold one at a convenience store to another (rancher)," Willis said. "I mean, he just thought he was getting a pretty good deal."

Texas recently toughened the penalty for cattle rustling from two years in prison to 10 years. Of course that's mild compared to the old vigilante justice, when rustlers were hanged from the nearest tree.

"I don't think the punishment's hard enough. That's my opinion," Ward said.

To prevent thefts, the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association is stationing inspectors at auction barns across the state to check tags and brands and try to identify stolen cattle before they're sold.

The New Debtors Prisons

Image by Melody Kramer via Flickr

Charles Hugh Smith
Local government is desperate for new funding but doesn't dare tap the wealthy. So they're busily criminalizing poverty and filling new Debtor's prisons.

Correspondent Jeff Ray sent in this story Milking the Poor: One Family's Fall Into Homelessness (The Atlantic) which is representative of the trend in local government to criminalize poverty for its own enrichment.

Here's the deal. Local government has grown fat in a decade of gargantuan capital gains and real rising real estate taxes. Employees pulling down over $100,000 each are legion, as are public retirees pulling down over $100,000 a year in pension payments. Local government has added 15% more employees even as population grew by a meager 3%. (The numbers may vary in your area but the percentages won't.)

Now the seven fat years are over and local government is not liking the seven lean years. Now that housing has plummeted, so have the tax rolls; capital gains have dried up and even sales tax revenues are crashing. Despite the usual bleatings of hope, the chances of tax revenues recovering are slightly lower than the proverbial snowball's chance of remaining frozen in Heck.

Foreclosures: 'Worst three months of all time' Despite signs of broader economic recovery, number of foreclosure filings hit a record high in the third quarter - a sign the plague is still spreading.

Meanwhile, a perfect storm is gutting public pension funds. More Pain for State's Taxpayers, Cities: CALPERS losses $50B. In order for the State amd local governments of California to meet their future pension obligations (paid by CALPERS, the massive public pension fund), they need to kick in hundreds of millions of dollars more in coming years, even as their revenues are falling.

The conclusion that the medical and pension benefits which were promised in the fat years are no longer payable is anathema to public unions and managerial staff alike, and so the machinery of local government has geared up to stripmine the citizens like a giant trawler stripmines the sea: parking tickets have been jacked up to $60 or more, traffic violations are in the hundreds of dollars, speed traps abound, and as noted in the top story, fees for "crimes" like driving without auto insurance now cost more than the insurance itself.

And gosh forbid if you don't pay on time--the penalties double the original fine and then go up from there.

Is there anything more pernicious, malicious and immoral that this criminalization of poverty to engorge the coffers of local government? If John Q. Citizen defaults on his credit card, he might have to endure harrassing phone calls from bill collectors. But worst case, he can unplug his phone or cancel that number and get another phone number. Fortunately, the bank cannot have him imprisoned (yet).

But local government isn't quite as kind and gentle as the bankers. Mess with their revenues (i.e. don't pay the hefty fines they levy) and they'll haul your carcass into court and then into jail (can't make bail? Too bad. You're a full-blown criminal now.)

Exactly what is the difference between racking up $1,000 in fines off an innocuous violation and being imprisoned for lack of payment and a 19th century-era Debtors prison?

Isn't this part of the reason why the Parisian mobs tore down the Bastille?

Does this make any sense at all, arresting people who can't pay their nonsensically stupendous fines and penalties just so government employees don't have to take a cut in pay and benefits? When did a ticket go from $50 to $300 and up? And why? Does anyone think the cost leaped up "for the public good"?

Is getting nailed for a ticket you can't pay really a deterrent to being too poor to keep your auto insurance current?

Let's follow this all the way to the end. Now that John Q. Citizen is in jail because he was nabbed driving without insurance and a big fat fine is outstanding, aren't the taxpayers throwing away $50,000 to $100,000 a year to process his tortured journey through the Kafkaesque court and jail system with those other "dangerous criminals"?

Hey, the war-on-drugs/prison/gulag pays very well, thank you, and filling cells with Mr. Citizen is just grist for the mill.

Now when Mr. Citizen is released (darn it, we can't get blood from a turnip!), his car has been impounded and he owes the towing yard $1,000 which he doesn't have. So he no longer has a car to get to work, or even drive to an interview.

OK, so maybe he was irresponsible in not setting aside enough money for the car insurance. Is that now a criminal offense? Is this the best use of police officers, judges, jails and the "justice" system? Is anyone being deterred by the ruthless criminalization of poverty? Please make the case for that, local politicos and bureaucrats.

Great work, local government. You've not only stolen the citizen's last few dollars, you've also deprived him of his employment opportunities and livelihood.

Here's a thought: you need more tax revenue? Then make the case to the citizens at the ballot box to pay more. Prove you're not squandering the tax money you're already getting by the boatload. Show us how you're going to spend our money as carefully as we do.

If you really want to stripmine somebody's cash assets, why not start with your local Wal-Mart? I can guarantee you they won't leave town when you enact a new ordinance taxing all retail establishments of 50,000 square feet or more.

Or impose a tax on all homes worth more than triple the median price in your zip code. You want to nail somebody with higher taxes? Then go after the top 5% who still have assets. Don't trawl the streets for the folks who can least afford your rapacious imposition of authority.

Bankers aren't the only rapacious greedheads in this nation. Look no farther than city hall, the county building and the State capitol. Just hope it isn't you who runs low on cash and gets nailed with that $395 ticket which soon morphs into $695 and an arrest warrant.

You can't blame local government avarice on Washington or the bankers. All this greed is homegrown, local and entirely unnecessary. As it stands now, 10% or maybe even 20% of the citizenry will soon have outstanding arrest warrants for what amounts to local government Debtors Prison.

Come November 2010, we can only pray that the citizenry "takes care of business" at the ballot box, and all the incumbent politicos who approved this evil criminalization of poverty get tossed out en masse, regardless of party affiliation.

American Gulag - Criminalizing Everyone

Image via Wikipedia

The U.S. Government is totally and completely out of control.

Brian W. Walsh
Washington Times
Criminalizing Everyone

"You don't need to know. You can't know." That's what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.

The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris' longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with - get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That's right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary - based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.

Mrs. Norris testified before the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime this summer. The hearing's topic: the rapid and dangerous expansion of federal criminal law, an expansion that is often unprincipled and highly partisan.

Chairman Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, and ranking member Louie Gohmert, Texas Republican, conducted a truly bipartisan hearing (a D.C. rarity this year).

These two leaders have begun giving voice to the increasing number of experts who worry about "overcriminalization." Astronomical numbers of federal criminal laws lack specifics, can apply to almost anyone and fail to protect innocents by requiring substantial proof that an accused person acted with actual criminal intent.

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn't have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal - but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty's new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: "Life sometimes presents us with lemons." Their job was, yes, to "turn lemons into lemonade."

The judge apparently failed to appreciate how difficult it is to run a successful lemonade stand when you're an elderly diabetic with coronary complications, arthritis and Parkinson's disease serving time in a federal penitentiary. If only Mr. Norris had been a Libyan terrorist, maybe some European official at least would have weighed in on his behalf to secure a health-based mercy release.

Krister Evertson, another victim of overcriminalization, told Congress, "What I have experienced in these past years is something that should scare you and all Americans." He's right. Evertson, a small-time entrepreneur and inventor, faced two separate federal prosecutions stemming from his work trying to develop clean-energy fuel cells.

The feds prosecuted Mr. Evertson the first time for failing to put a federally mandated sticker on an otherwise lawful UPS package in which he shipped some of his supplies. A jury acquitted him, so the feds brought new charges. This time they claimed he technically had "abandoned" his fuel-cell materials - something he had no intention of doing - while defending himself against the first charges. Mr. Evertson, too, spent almost two years in federal prison.

As George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg testified at the House hearing, cases like these "illustrate about as well as you can illustrate the overreach of federal criminal law." The Cato Institute's Timothy Lynch, an expert on overcriminalization, called for "a clean line between lawful conduct and unlawful conduct." A person should not be deemed a criminal unless that person "crossed over that line knowing what he or she was doing." Seems like common sense, but apparently it isn't to some federal officials.

Former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh's testimony captured the essence of the problems that worry so many criminal-law experts. "Those of us concerned about this subject," he testified, "share a common goal - to have criminal statutes that punish actual criminal acts and [that] do not seek to criminalize conduct that is better dealt with by the seeking of regulatory and civil remedies." Only when the conduct is sufficiently wrongful and severe, Mr. Thornburgh said, does it warrant the "stigma, public condemnation and potential deprivation of liberty that go along with [the criminal] sanction."

The Norrises' nightmare began with the search in October 2003. It didn't end until Mr. Norris was released from federal supervision in December 2008. His wife testified, however, that even after he came home, the man she had married was still gone. He was by then 71 years old. Unsurprisingly, serving two years as a federal convict - in addition to the years it took to defend unsuccessfully against the charges - had taken a severe toll on him mentally, emotionally and physically.

These are repressive consequences for an elderly man who made mistakes in a small business. The feds should be ashamed, and Mr. Evertson is right that everyone else should be scared. Far too many federal laws are far too broad.

Mr. Scott and Mr. Gohmert have set the stage for more hearings on why this places far too many Americans at risk of unjust punishment. Members of both parties in Congress should follow their lead.

Brian W. Walsh is senior legal research fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/05/criminalizing-everyone/

CDC Drafts “Isolation Order” for H1N1

Kurt Nimmo
PrisonPlanet.com
September 29, 2009

The following draft of an “isolation order” was discovered on the CDC’s website. It is a template for state and local officials to impose quarantines and what would effectively be martial law.

“Your illness [as determined by state and local officials] requires that you be isolated and requires further public health investigation and monitoring.”

Failure to obey will result in imprisonment without bail prior to trial and the possiblity of a two year prison term.

In other words, according to this document, officials can impose quarantine without evidence that somebody is actually infected with a virus that is now negligible at best. It may also be used to quarantine potentially millions of people suffering from any number of illnesses — or not suffering from any disease at the discretion of the state — that have nothing to do with H1N1. It is basically a carte blanche for martial law under the cover of protecting the public from a communicable disease that is demonstrably a manufactured and weaponized threat.

Wall Street Prison Consultants

Corruption runs rampant on Wall Street, so much so that "wealthy first-time convicts are turning to a novel cottage industry: prison coaches with advice on what it's like inside the big house". Of course most of the big time financial crooks will never see the inside of prison walls, not until mass arrests are made on members of Congress.

Meet Larry Levine, a Los Angeles based consultant who served 10 years for drug trafficking, securities violations and distribution of machine guns. His "Fedtime101" course covers it all: coping with the daily grind of prison, avoiding assaults, decoding prison lingo, and even an inside scoop on what the best prison jobs are. Levine is one of "a half-dozen similar firms [that] have emerged across the country, according to USA Today's Kevin Johnson. Johnson says Levine's website has photos depicting the harsh transition "from the exchange floor to the prison yard." and that last week, the New York Stock Exchange Group demanded Levine drop the references, arguing that they tarnish the exchange's image -- an image Congress lauds as they praise Goldman Sachs for manipulating the stock market for profit.

At least a half-dozen similar firms have emerged across the country, says Johnson. Steve Oberfest, who opened his firm after the 2002 Enron collapse, calls himself an "inmate adaptation specialist" and offers a course in close-quarters combat. "I can prepare you to go into hell," says Oberfest. The fees for these prison coaches go up to $20,000, and clientele includes the likes of Martha Stewart and Bernard Madoff. Johnson says Madoff and Stewart got their penitentiary insight from the Baltimore-based National Center for Institutions and Alternatives. Herbert Hoelter, its co-founder, says the firm waived its fee for Madoff because his assets were frozen.

What an indictment this is of the hopelessly corrupt American political system, a system that serves as nothing but a front for thieves, liars, cheats, cons, and confidence men, with the main stream media serving as their obedient stenographers. The fact is, in most prisons in America, all the wrong people are in jail. Most prison inmates are petty criminals compared to the grand theft of America Wall Street and Congress are pulling off.