Can you tell us a little bit about the activities at Northern California ACLU, taking on that regard? prisons . So right now, today, there are a couple of places where we really urge people to be attentive and involved.
is that young black men who have run afoul of the law for a whole combination of reasons--many of them being drugs--constitute an overwhelming segment of our incarcerated population in prisons . It is a national disgrace. Someone who has studied this extensively is Professor Michelle Alexander. She has a book out on this, which I recommend, whose title I can't think ofright now, but she deals with I think it's the rise of the--. I think it's "Jim Crow and the Rise of the Incarcerated State," but I may be wrong.
Let's put it that way. And so we try not to make mistakes. But yeah. Recidivism rate across the country in state prisons runs about 63 percent that's coast-to-coast, and it means that the person in prison who's released returnsin three years, and it's just a cycle and it's depressing. We found that -- I started at Sing Sing, and we've -- and the record at Sing Sing is -- now remember,
There was a story in Canada involving the bad blood scare. Remember when the tainted blood was out there? Red Cross around the world was sourcing blood from San Francisco prisons if you can believe it. And a lot of people got hepatitis and the AIDS virus.And in Canada, they held a Royal Commission to investigate why this was happening. And the President of Red Cross was appearing before the judge and the judge said to him, his name
Eric Schmidt: Did you find -- develop a view about the union structure and culture of Sacramento, in particular, it's widely reported that the teachers' union and the prisons union and so forth have a great deal of power.Has that been your experience? >>Steve Poizner: Yes.
how to address interpersonal harm in various ways or what can we learn from the prison abolition movement who are today fighting for alternatives to prisons , including things like restorative justice, which is an approach that reorients a justice system towards prioritizing assisting the victims with healing, restoring safety in the community, and avoids the whole problems of the carceral system by doing that?
If in a forest you get a wildfire in the wet season, it might propagate a bit and then die out. for prisons , or compensation damages, and so on, the GDP increases.
I've represented him in countless cases. Our prisons and jails in America are filled with men just like him. Fathers who love their children, men who are looking for work, but can't find it, who will do any odd job to make ends meet.
That was absolutely forbidden. But prisons are dense places too.
small uh NGO that is based in Geneva and started by a Canadian what they are allowed to do is that actually go inside Chinese prisons and to post uh political rights of prisoners there uh and they do it in in local languages in other countries in Southeast Asia as well I can't really imagine governmental diplomats being able to do that either uh so the ways in which uh the human
And there's almost no rehabilitation or experience of work while they're in prison. The prisons are basically -- people are idle for years. Once when I was young, I was told that idleness is the devil's workshop.
And then kind of on that thread, so I feel like I've personally learned a lot of lessons from chess. They do chess in prisons , which is actually a massive program.
What do we do instead? We could build prisons in space. That's mostly how we handle crime here on Earth.
Because it's not like you discovered a cheat code that anyone can go in front of a parole board and find a shortcut for leaving prison and entering back So to reform prisons , that's a huge pill to swallow, a huge one to figure out.
by another name. It is the new Jim Crow. It is the ability for states rights to continue because you have the privatizations of prisons you have, you know, the prison labor, um, being utilized even now, in the era of covert 19, What they're saying, Hey, we want to be able to use, you know, prison labor to create hand sanitizer. But yet we don't want to provide safe conditions for the inmates to be in, you know, And and it's
Now, Texas itself has 91 state prisons . These are prisons that are ran by the state of Texas. This is not the federal prisons , nor is this the hold overs.
This is not the federal prisons , nor is this the hold overs. These are state prisons . And so I'm in Coffield Unit, one of the biggest prisons , and I meet a guy that's cutting hair.
I think our private prisons have actually reduced in the last few years.
in our own inner prisons .
into one of our prisons .
So we start inside prisons , and we provide an eight-month long program called "CEO of Your New Life" where individuals engage in character
Like these are the prisons ' numbers.
This is about three prisons .
And the juvenile prisons are wretched places.
Talking about prisons in the criminal justice system, actually brings up another aspect of your book.
They're purposeful prisons that anchor you.
We work within the prisons .
But they're like prisons without facilities, because it's not considered permanent, a long-term solution for an immigrant,
From private prisons to private armies, the governments, especially since 2008,
time in prisons across the state to come up for review and prove that they're eligible or should be eligible for a second chance.
But in most prisons , a lot of wardens do not like the inmates to play chess.
Look at the prisons are filled with people who were not born to be criminals, but something happened in their lives,
The use of prisons that are secret and human rights abuses are still happening at the request of the United States government.
Some people are in prisons with alcohol and drug abuse.
we build more prisons . Prisons show up as an increase in GDP, but it, is it really an
are these secret prisons and you had a couple of different kind
And we were in prisons and we were in battlefields.
and I'm assigned to Coffield Unit. Coffield Unit is one of the biggest prisons in Texas. Now, Texas itself has 91 state prisons .
These are prisons that are ran by the state of Texas. This is not the federal prisons , nor is this the hold overs. These are state prisons .
So I went to the prisons .
There's a drug crisis inside prisons .
We can't keep drugs out of prisons .
The first piece is "Purposeful Prisons ." Lisie wrote that.
You'll pass signs near prisons saying, do not pick up hitchhikers, because 1% of the United States population is in jail.
And yet they absolutely controlled prisons for years.
And they have tons of prisons .
And we under-resource our prisons .
One in four people in prisons were in care.
He said after visiting these prisons -- and he was terrified to do it.
They show the map of all these prisons that she went to for 18 years, visiting Steven while he was wrongly incarcerated.