Tag Archives: human rights

Turkish President’s Arrival Brings Chaos to Downtown Washington

Mother Jones

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Skirmishes between protesters, police, and Turkish security personnel broke out in the streets of downtown Washington, DC, shortly before Turkish President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ&#159;an was set to give a speech at the Brookings Institution.

ErdoÄ&#159;an traveled to the Washington metro area to open a cultural center in Lanham, Maryland, attend the Nuclear Security Summit, and to meet with Vice President Joe Biden. His speech on Thursday, however, was overshadowed by what happened in the streets beforehand.

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Turkish President’s Arrival Brings Chaos to Downtown Washington

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The Surprising Gaps in HIV Care for Louisiana Prisoners

Mother Jones

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With the highest diagnosis rate of any state, Louisiana is a hotbed for new HIV cases, and the groups at greatest risk of infection are the same as those most likely to be imprisoned in the state’s sprawling corrections system: people who inject drugs, sex workers, the poor and racial minorities. But a new report from Human Rights Watch found that for some HIV-positive Louisiana prisoners, medical care is delayed or non-existent, depending on the facility where they are housed.

Louisiana’s nine state-level prisons operate testing programs and transfer inmates to HIV case management resources when they are released. However, only a handful of the state’s 104 parish jails conduct regular testing, with some HIV-positive inmates experiencing treatment that is “delayed, interrupted, and in some cases denied altogether,” according to the report.

That’s significant because more than 40 percent of Louisiana’s incarcerated population is housed in parish jails—including 16,877 convicted offenders and a whopping 12,602 pre-trial detainees at the end of last year. Officials in the Louisiana Department of Corrections told Human Rights Watch that all HIV-positive inmates are transferred from parish jails to states prisons. Yet, Human Rights Watch researchers found that jail inmates don’t get HIV care in state prisons unless the inmates already know their status and choose to disclose it, or until they develop symptoms.

What’s more, in some cases, when inmates did disclose their status, some still did not receive testing or medication unless a friend or family member could bring their pills into the jail. Although the East Baton Rouge Correctional Center has a large medical staff, it does not test new arrivals, the jail’s director of medical services Linda Otteson told researchers. “We cannot afford to treat them if they are positive,” Otteson said.

The result? Parish jail inmates can go weeks or months without treatment, potentially resulting in higher viral loads, increased resistance to medication, and a greater likelihood of infecting others, according to the report.

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The Surprising Gaps in HIV Care for Louisiana Prisoners

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Republicans Are Pushing Obama to Fill This Court…To Try Syrian War Crimes

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution accusing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his allies of committing war crimes. The resolution comes amid concerns from Republicans and some Democrats that the Obama administration—under pressure from Moscow—has all but abandoned its goal of regime change in Syria. It calls on the White House to use its influence at the United Nations to establish a Syrian war crimes tribunal.

“The government of Syria has engaged in widespread torture and rape, employed starvation as a weapon of war, and massacred civilians, including through the use of chemical weapons, cluster munitions, and barrel bombs,” the resolution asserts. It adds that “the vast majority of the civilians who have died in the Syrian conflict have been killed by the government of Syria and its allies,” including Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. As many as 470,000 Syrians have died so far in the conflict, and millions have been made homeless.

The resolution’s sponsor, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who first introduced this bill in 2013, says that establishing a war crimes tribunal for Syria would force a stronger stance from Washington, make it more difficult for other countries to cooperate with the Syrian government, and could potentially lead to Assad’s ouster. “I have continued to ask Secretary Kerry and others in the Administration—they have never said no, but they haven’t said yes—about this idea of establishing a Syrian war crimes tribunal,” a frustrated Smith said at the resolution markup on Wednesday. The resolution passed through the committee on a voice vote.

The only dissenting voice at the hearing was that of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who claimed that Assad is helping fight ISIS, America’s real enemy. He was quickly shut down.

Republicans have generally been skeptical of international prosecutions of accused war criminals. In 2002, George W. Bush signed the the American Servicemembers Protection Act, which shields American personnel and allies from prosecution in the International Criminal Court. Yet this position has softened. In 2013, President Obama signed a bill that would make it easier for the United States to go after war criminals like warlord Joseph Kony; the measure was spearheaded by Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and former chairwoman Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.).

Smith’s approach would circumvent the ICC, which he chastised for only achieving two convictions in 14 years. His resolution would seek the creation of an ad hoc or regional tribunal. He pointed to similar tribunals in the former Yugoslavia (which convicted 67 people), Rwanda (26), and Sierra Leone (16). “Can a UN Security Council resolution establishing a Syrian war crimes tribunal prevail?” he asked. “I would respectfully submit yes.”

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Republicans Are Pushing Obama to Fill This Court…To Try Syrian War Crimes

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Black Movie Directors are Hosting an Oscars-Night Fundraiser in Flint

Mother Jones

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Not really feeling the Oscars this year? Well, there’s another star-studded event you can tune into Sunday night—this one is in Flint, Michigan. Blackout for Human Rights, an activist coalition co-founded by directors Ryan Coogler (Creed, Fruitvale Station) and Ava DuVernay (Selma) is hosting #JusticeforFlint, a live benefit to raise funds for residents of the lead-stricken city. The shindig, hosted by comedian Hannibal Burress, will feature the awesome singer Janelle Monae—who led several Black Lives Matter protests last summer during stops on her nationwide music tour—Empire‘s Jussie Smollett, Jesse Williams of Grey’s Anatomy, and other prominent black actors and performers. It’s free to the public, but attendees can donate to a Flint fund at the event. The event coincides with Oscars day, but that’s just a coincidence, according to Coogler, who was snubbed for the Best Director category for Creed. (DuVernay was snubbed for Selma last year.) The date was chosen because it was the last weekend of Black History Month.

“We will give a voice to the members of the community who were the victims of the choices of people in power who are paid to protect them, as well as provide them with a night of entertainment, unity, and emotional healing,” Coogler said in a statement to BuzzFeed. “Through the live stream we will also give a chance for people around the world to participate, and to donate funds to programs for Flint’s youth.” #JusiceforFlint will be live-streamed exclusively on revolt.tv, the online counterpart to the RevoltTV network founded by hip-hop mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs. The event airs at 5:30 p.m. ET, 90 minutes before the Oscars’ Red Carpet coverage commences. So if you’re interested, you can probably catch most of both.

Blackout for Human Rights also held an MLK Day event in New York City last month where black entertainers including Chris Rock, Michael B. Jordan, and Harry Belafonte read speeches by civil rights icons. Rock is hosting the Oscars on Sunday. He’s expected to deliver a monologue on diversity in Hollywood.

Flint has been in the national news since last October, when news broke that the city’s water had been contaminated with lead for well over a year, despite pleas to local and state officials. Check out this article about the Flint mom who helped bring the scandal to the nation’s attention. It’ll make your blood boil.

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Black Movie Directors are Hosting an Oscars-Night Fundraiser in Flint

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Can the Paris Climate Deal Save This Tiny Pacific Island?

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Newsweek and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

You’ve probably never heard of Nauru. But you might want to learn its name. It may not be around much longer.

Nauru is a speck in the South Pacific. It’s the tiniest island nation and the third smallest nation in the world. At roughly 8 square miles and with just over 10,000 residents, Nauru isn’t exactly a political heavyweight on the world stage. But Nauru is sinking, drying out, and generally in peril due to the ever-accelerating effects of climate change. And it may spark a debate at the Paris climate talks currently underway about what to do with populations on the verge of becoming climate refugees with literally nowhere to go.

Nauru is not your typical drowning-island scenario. What used to be a Pacific island oasis is now, by many accounts, a physical example of how quickly paradise can be destroyed. In the early 1900s, a German company began strip-mining the interior of the island for phosphate, the main component of agricultural fertilizer. Then came Japan, which occupied the country during World War II, and continued the phosphate mining. The U.S. bombed Japan’s airstrip on Nauru in 1943, preventing food supplies from entering the island. Less than a year later, Japan deported 1,200 Nauruans to work as forced laborers on a nearby island—only 737 of them survived the ordeal to be repatriated after the war just three years later. After the war, Australia took control of the country, and phosphate mining resumed as an Australian enterprise, before mining rights were transferred to Nauru when the nation became independent in 1968.

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For more than three decades after that, Nauruans enjoyed the second highest per-capita GDP of any nation in the world. Western food arrived on the island, where topsoil is scant and little food is grown locally. Now, “instant noodles, soda and anything in a tin” are the staple foods on Nauru, according to NPR. Rates of Type 2 diabetes are high, and until recently, Nauru held the title of the nation with the highest obesity rate. Nearly 40 percent of Nauruan men are obese, four times the global average.

But in the early 2000s, the phosphate ran out. By that time, 80 percent of the sland’s land area had been strip-mined. In a This American Life report from 2002, journalist Jack Hitt described peering into the interior of the island as “one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.”

“Almost all of Nauru is missing, picked clean, right down to the coral skeleton supporting the island…it’s all blindingly white,” he said.

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Today, almost all of Nauru’s economy is based on foreign assistance and income generated by a controversial Australian detention center, sometimes referred to “Australia’s Guantanamo,” used to detain refugees seeking asylum in Australia. Refugees from Syria, Iraq, and other war-torn nations have been held there for years under what critics say are harsh conditions; the center has sparked a human rights debate in Australia.

Meanwhile, the complete destruction of the island’s interior has severely limited Nauruans’ ability to adapt in the face of climate change. People can only live on a thin strip around the perimeter, which means, unlike many other island nations, there’s nowhere to move to even temporarily avoid sea level rise, explains Koko Warner, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report and an expert on climate change-related human migration. According to a survey of Nauruans she and colleague Andrea Milan recently conducted for United Nations University, 40 percent of households on the island say they’ve already experienced sea level rise in the last ten years.

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Nauruans’ precarious coastal living makes them uniquely vulnerable to extreme storms, which scientists predict climate change will make make more severe in the region. “A one-degree change in the path of the cyclone could make all the difference,” Warner says.

Nauru’s other big problem is drought. The country has no clean groundwater nor does it have any lakes or rivers to supply freshwater, according to Warner and Milan’s report. The rainy seasons have become irregular, and more than half of Nauruans say they’re concerned about drought.

What does that mean for the future of Nauru? “In the coming five-to- 10 years, barring a massive cyclone, life will probably continue more or less the same. But pushing beyond 10 years, real uncertainty arises,” Warner says. One thing is certain: Without freshwater stores, and without the ability to migrate within their own country, Nauruans will have to go somewhere; 30 percent of the island’s population, according to Warner’s survey, say they’d likely migrate if drought, sea level rise, and flooding worsens.

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Already, the neighboring island nation of Kiribati has leased land on Fiji in anticipation that its residents will become climate change refugees. Nauru hasn’t followed in Kiribati’s footsteps—and only one quarter of Nauruans say they have the financial means to make migration possible themselves.

“Without improved access to international migration, some Nauruans will be ‘trapped’ by worsening environmental conditions, declining well-being and no opportunity to either migrate or generate income necessary for adapting,” Warner and Milan wrote. There must be a way, Warner says, for a country to learn how to best make migration possible, and there must be an international structure in place for such a country to seek funding for it.

But the impact of a warming planet on human migration needs were, until recently, largely absent from international climate change talks, Warner says. Now, nations are beginning to pay attention: The European Commission’s webpage for the Paris climate talks, for example, calls it a “crisis in the making,” noting that the “greatest single impact” of climate change “could be on human migration, with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding and agricultural disruption.”

It remains to be seen if the final document to come out of the Paris talks—expected to emerge Saturday—will include language that addresses migration, but Warner is hopeful. “‘Human mobility,'” she says. “The words need to be in there.”

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Can the Paris Climate Deal Save This Tiny Pacific Island?

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4,600 Central American Kids Have Applied for Refugee Status. 11 Have Gotten It. Here’s Why.

Mother Jones

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In September 2014, in an effort to keep more child migrants from risking the dangerous journey north, President Barack Obama approved a plan to let some Central American kids apply for refugee status without leaving their home countries. Now, more than a year later, only a tiny fraction of applicants have gotten approval to come to the United States.

Roughly 4,600 kids have applied to the Central American Minors Refugee/Parole Program. To be eligible, minors must be from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras, and they must have a parent living legally in the United States. However, just 90 applicants have been interviewed so far by the Department of Homeland Security, the final step before the government makes a refugee decision.

Of those, 11 have been conditionally approved for refugee resettlement in the United States. Another 76 have received humanitarian parole—a category, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, that is “used sparingly to bring an otherwise inadmissible alien into the United States for a temporary period of time due to a compelling emergency.”


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?


Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island

Meanwhile, another 35,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended along the US-Mexico border in the 2015 fiscal year, which ended in September, and tens of thousands more have been picked up in Mexico, where the government recently cracked down on Central American migrants at the request of the United States.

A State Department official who asked not to be named defended the program, noting that the small number of interviews is the result of a lengthy screening process that can take 18 to 24 months. “We all would like that to go faster,” she said. Wendy Young, executive director of Kids in Need of Defense, a nonprofit that helps find pro bono counsel for immigrant and refugee children, said that while the program is a start, “it hasn’t, frankly, been a perfect system.”

When the State Department rolled out the Central American Minors program in December, advocates were concerned that limiting it to kids with parents legally living in the United States made it too restrictive and would turn away truly endangered kids. That didn’t stop Senate Republicans from blasting the program in an April judiciary committee hearing titled “Eroding the Law and Diverting Taxpayer Resources.” Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions—one of Congress’ loudest anti-immigration voices—stated that “rather than stop the new illegal immigration wave, it appears that the results, if not the objective of this program, is to capitulate to the illegality.”

To combat child trafficking, the Central American Minors program requires refugee applicants and their US-based family members to take DNA tests. Parents have up to six months to give a sample, and only after the tests confirm a parent-child relationship will DHS go ahead with interviewing the child in Central America. “We don’t want our refugee family reunification program—and this CAM program is a variant of that—to be used for people to try to bring kids to the United States who aren’t their own,” the State Department official said, adding that “several hundred” applicants have submitted DNA samples to date. “Resettlement to the United States is a golden ticket.”

Beyond that, Central American minors have found building successful refugee cases to be particularly tricky, even with help from attorneys working with organizations like Kids in Need of Defense. Many claim to be fleeing violence caused the region’s powerful gangs. But the official said they often can’t prove that they face persecution on account of a so-called protected ground, such as race, religion, social group, or nationality. It appears as though those kids are receiving humanitarian parole through the Central American Minors program. Yet this does not grant them any immigration benefits and is meant to be temporary. (That didn’t stop Breitbart from blaring, “96 Percent of Interviewed Central American Minors Approved to Fly to U.S.”)

As Young is quick to point out, the situation in Central America hasn’t improved much from just a year and a half ago, when Obama called the surge of child migrants “an urgent humanitarian situation.” Guatemala’s president recently resigned at the center of a corruption scandal, El Salvador has endured renewed violence following the end of a gang truce, and Honduras’ murder rate is still the worst in the world. And according to an upcoming report by social scientist Elizabeth Kennedy, 83 people deported by the United States in the past 21 months have been killed upon their return to El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras.

“The idea that the ‘crisis’ is over makes me cringe a bit,” Young said. “To me, it went from a boiling-over situation last year to a constant simmer. But it could start boiling over again at any time.”

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4,600 Central American Kids Have Applied for Refugee Status. 11 Have Gotten It. Here’s Why.

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6 Years Ago, New York Banned the Shackling of Pregnant Inmates. So Why Are These Women Still Being Restrained?

Mother Jones

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When Maria Caraballo delivered her daughter in 2010, she was handcuffed to the hospital bed.

“They didn’t even remove my cuffs for me to hold my baby,” says Caraballo, who at the time was serving a prison sentence in New York. “I had to hold my baby with one hand for two to three seconds. They didn’t take my handcuffs off until after I was stitched up and in the prison ward, and I didn’t see my baby until the next day.”

Caraballo gave birth to her daughter a year after it became illegal to shackle incarcerated women during childbirth in New York. But her experience wasn’t necessarily unique: New evidence published earlier this year suggests many women continue to be shackled in violation of the law. And now, six years after restraining pregnant inmates was first restricted in the state, an anti-shackling bill is once again headed to the governor’s desk.

Handcuffs, waist chains, and ankle shackles are commonly used to restrain inmates who are transported out of prison, whether it’s for a trial, facility transfer, or medical attention. And though it’s hard to imagine someone making a break for it during labor, shackles are routinely used to restrain women inmates during childbirth, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has called the practice “inhumane.” It’s “almost never justified by the need for safety and security for medical staff, the public or correctional officers,” the ACLU has said.

The medical community agrees. “Physical restraints have interfered with the ability of physicians to safely practice medicine by reducing their ability to assess and evaluate the physical condition of the mother and fetus, and have similarly made the labor and delivery process more difficult than it needs to be,” wrote the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in a 2007 statement, “overall putting the health and lives of the women and unborn children at risk.”

The American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the American College of Nurse Midwives also oppose shackling during childbirth, as do the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the American Correctional Association, two of the country’s primary prison accreditation organizations.

In the last decade, more states have passed laws restricting the use of shackling on inmates during childbirth. New York became the sixth state to ban restraints during birth when in 2009 then-Gov. David Paterson signed the Anti-Shackling Bill, which prohibited shackling during labor, delivery, and recovery. And since the passage of New York’s ban, at least 15 states followed suit.

But a study published earlier this year by the Correctional Association of New York (CA), a nonprofit organization with the authority to inspect prisons, found that 23 of the 27 women inmates interviewed who’d given birth while incarcerated had been shackled in violation of the law. There are an estimated 30 births each year under the supervision of state and local corrections, according to the correctional association.

“The 2009 law did seem to curtail the practice of shackling during delivery in the hospital” says Tamar Kraft-Stolar, director of the association’s Women in Prison project. “But we found that many women experienced shackling during labor, and many experienced it right after they gave birth and on the way back to the prison.”

Kraft-Stolar attributes the continued shackling of these women to a lack of education. Some correctional officers may not know about the law, and without oversight, there’s no way to enforce it. That’s why Kraft-Stolar and other criminal justice reform advocates are hopeful that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will sign Assembly Bill 6430, an update to the 2009 law that would ban the use of restraints on pregnant inmates at any point during their pregnancy and until eight weeks after childbirth.

Passed by both chambers of the state legislature in June and now waiting for the governor’s signature, the bill would also require that every pregnant inmate be notified of her right to not be shackled. It would allow shackling in extraordinary circumstances—with the approval of both the superintendent and chief medical officer and only when a woman is threatening to hurt herself or someone else. However, each incident would have to be reported to the state.

The legislation has a long list of backers, including New York’s correctional officers’ union, which recently expressed its support.

“While it is our duty to monitor all inmates at all times, there are better uses of limited resources than to continue a practice that applies to several dozen pregnant inmates in our prisons who do not pose an immediate threat to the safety and security of our officers and our facilities,” the union said in a statement earlier this month.

And Kraft-Stolar says the legislation can only do so much. “The best solution to the problem of shackling is to not lock women up in the first place,” she says. “Prisons are breeding grounds for human rights violations, and the best way to avoid those violations is to keep people out of prison.”

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6 Years Ago, New York Banned the Shackling of Pregnant Inmates. So Why Are These Women Still Being Restrained?

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Amnesty Tells the US to Stop Selling Arms to Saudi Arabia

Mother Jones

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Citing “damning evidence of war crimes,” Amnesty International has condemned America’s continued support of Saudi Arabia’s air war in Yemen. In a report released yesterday, the human-rights organization called on the United States to stop selling bombs, fighter jets, and combat helicopters to the Saudis

The nearly seven-month-old conflict, which pits Saudi Arabia and a coalition of allied states against anti-government rebels, has claimed thousands of civilian lives. More than two-thirds of those were killed by Saudi-led air strikes, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. While Saudi Arabia claims to only be targeting military targets, bombs have been dropped on power stations, water supplies, schools, hospitals, and a camp for displaced people.

The United States has been aiding the Saudi-led coalition with weaponry, logistics, and intelligence support. Washington and Riyadh inked $90 billion in arms deals between 2010 and 2014, and at least another $7.8 billion in new arms deals have been announced since Saudi Arabia’s air campaign began in March. Among the remnants of American-made bombs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have found on the ground in Yemen are two types of cluster bombs. Cluster bombs are banned by more than 100 countries because of the risk they pose to civilians.

The Amnesty report is the result of field investigations of 13 air strikes that hit Saada, Yemen, between May and July. Fifty-nine of the 100 civilians who died in the strikes were children. “The USA and other states exporting weapons to any of the parties to the Yemen conflict have a responsibility to ensure that the arms transfers they authorize are not facilitating serious violations of international humanitarian law,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s senior crisis response adviser, who led the investigation.

This video was released with the Amnesty report:

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Amnesty Tells the US to Stop Selling Arms to Saudi Arabia

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Solitary Confinement Coffee May Be The Worst Branding Idea Ever

Mother Jones

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Jailhouse Coffee

Do prison cells sell? That seems to be the idea behind Solitary Sumatra, an organic, fair trade coffee blend sold by Jailhouse Coffee, a newish small-batch roastery in New York City. The coffee is not made by prisoners or ex-felons and the company’s only connection to incarceration is that, according to its website, “there is a ‘bighouse’ just near the roastery” in Queens.

The 83 marks scratched into the coffee bag far surpass the 15 days the United Nations specifies as the maximum amount of time anyone should spend in solitary confinement. Anything beyond that “constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that more than 80,000 prisoners are in isolation at a given time in the United States. Some of these are the “worst of the worst,” but many are not. In New York, prisoners have been thrown in the hole for “wasting food” or having an “untidy cell or person.” On Rikers Island, not far from Queens, 16-year-old Kalief Browder spent long stretches in solitary confinement during the three years he spent in pretrial detention for allegedly stealing a backpack. Two years after his release, he committed suicide. Nearly two out of five suicides in prison happen in solitary confinement. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, President Obama, and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy have spoken out against the excessive use of solitary confinement in this country.

So who thought solitary confinement would make a good branding idea? Is it just hipster irony that makes our prison system’s most extreme aspects somehow cute? Perhaps it’s the Orange Is The New Black effect, a consequence of the popularization and romanticization of prison life. (Like the woman who dressed a girl in an orange jumpsuit and blackface for Halloween last year.)

I couldn’t reach anyone at the company to explain their marketing strategy. So far, they seem to have gotten little flack for their brand, though one person has taken it upon himself to circulate a petition asking the company to change its name. Jailhouse Coffee’s blends also include Solitary Peru, Good Behavior Organic Blend, and Chain Gang Espresso, which harkens to the time when black prisoners were used as free labor across the South.

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Solitary Confinement Coffee May Be The Worst Branding Idea Ever

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Oklahoma May Execute an Innocent Man on Wednesday

Mother Jones

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In June, the US Supreme Court cleared the way for Oklahoma to execute Richard Glossip—who has been sitting on death row since 1998, when he was convicted of first-degree murder—using a controversial drug that’s been implicated in several botched executions. Barring a last-minute stay by Gov. Mary Fallin, the state plans to put him to death on Wednesday. But if it does, it may execute an innocent man.

Glossip’s landmark Supreme Court petition challenging the method of his execution is a footnote to a larger story that highlights the death penalty’s many flaws.

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Oklahoma May Execute an Innocent Man on Wednesday

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