Human Rights for Prisoners March

Blogtalkradio - Monday nights at 9pm PST

Mary Neal, director

Friday, October 10, 2014

Sick, Naked Prisoners

“Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” ~Matt. 25:44-46

You might have an enviable address on earth, but HERE is the address you will be judged by: prison.

How are inmates treated in your jails and prisons? Are innocent people's pleas for DNA tests or new trials ignored? Are people jailed for having mental illness? Are children tried and sentenced as adults? Are inmates killed with or without death sentences? Is there torture happening? Are inmates malnourished? Are they denied health care? Are visits constrained? Do they have adequate legal counsel? What have you done about these abuses? Here are your instructions:

Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. ~Proverbs 31:8-9 (KJV)

Contact your government officials
http://www.usa.gov/Agencies.shtml

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Thanks for participating in the "Human Rights for Prisoners March" across the Internet to demand respect for all people.

Human Rights for Prisoners March

Blogtalkradio - Monday nights at 9pm PST

Mary Neal, director

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Shannon Nyamodi, Another Wrongfully Convicted Black Man

AFTER TWO YEARS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT TORTURE WITH TRIAL DENIED, SHANNON NYAMODI PLEA BARGAINED. Officials moved Shannon Nyamodi from his solitary prison cell torture for a period of one month. He was moved by the NC DOC to another prison, where he was allowed to visit with his family, meet and talk with other inmates, make phone calls, and receive and send mail. Compared to what Shannon had endured for two years, from age 18 to 20, being an inmate in the general population at a prison where he had contact with other human beings and his family was a huge improvement. However, this too as a part of his torture meant to force the innocent young man into making a false confession.

Shannon Nyamodi wrote to his attorney, Maitri (Mike) Klinkosum, and fired him. He filed the letter with the court. He and his mother felt that their nightmare of apparent collusion between Klinkosum, the sheriff and the prosecutor was over. They believed that without Klinkosum acting as Nyamodi's attorney, they could finally get a new lawyer who would really work on Shannon's defense. But this was not to be. Shannon's exoneration through trial was never the plan.

After a month in the new facility, Shannon was suddenly moved back to Franklin County Jail without warning. He found himself right back in the solitary confinement cell and at the mercy of Sheriff Jerry Jones. Shannon knew about police arresting and brutalizing his mother. He knew all of the hard work Elizabeth Crudup had done to win his RIGHT to a fair trail. He also knew it had done no good. The young man was back in solitary in a cell where he had already spent two years in torture, denied a trial. Being SHOCKED by his removal back to the hole was the last straw.

Klinkosum ignored Shannon's letter of termination that had been filed with the court. He again went to Shannon's solitary jail cell at Franklin County Jail and again offered Shannon the opportunity to sign a plea deal. We may never know what was said to Shannon that night. We don't know if Shannon was threatened or if his family was threatened. Klinkosum had reportedly previously threatened Shannon, saying that if Shannon fired him, then he would work with the prosecutor and have Shannon sentenced to 30 years imprisonment. Shannon was basically a child with no knowledge of the legal process. His mother is a foreign-born woman without much knowledge of America's justice system. Other attorneys, although aware of what they endured, said they could not help until Klinkosum was off the case, and Klinkosum would not accept firing.

This time, whatever Klinkosum said to the tortured young man worked. Shannon Nyamodi apparently signed the plea bargain and was sentenced to 10 years for a crime he did not do. It took two years of torture in isolation, deprivation of phone, mail, and visiting privileges, and many sessions with his attorney, who worked against his interests. But the smartest thing North Carolina did was to remove Shannon from solitary torture for a month's period and let him see that "prison doesn't have to be all bad" like he had endured in solitary. Whoever thought of that, congratulations. You have saved the white youths who witnesses say they saw running from the robbery victim's home, and you now have another innocent black man imprisoned who North Carolina taxpayers will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to incarcerate.

All it took to induce Shannon's plea bargain was denying Shannon Nyamodi's Sixth Amendment right to a speedy, fair, public trial by jury with competent legal counsel representing him while he was tortured in solitary confinement for two years. Shannon never got the opportunity to prove that he had not schemed with a white woman's daughter to shoot and rob her. He never got the chance to present evidence that he had never even corresponded with the woman's daughter or a white boy who claimed falsely that Shannon talked to him on Facebook about buying a gun. No jury would ever see the statement by a North Carolina investigator who examined Facebook records and found that there was no such correspondence and never had been. Shannon was not allowed to present witnesses who said they saw a white man running from the scene of the robbery. Shannon never got to finish his electrical training program or join the military, as he planned. The young black man is just another wrongfully convicted person in a country that has from 5,000 to 10,000 wrongful convictions a year that routinely denies defendants their constitutional rights to enslave them. Congratulations, officers of the court and justice officials. Your great grandfathers would be proud of you.

Paragraph 1 repeated: AFTER TWO YEARS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT TORTURE WITH TRIAL DENIED, SHANNON NYAMODI PLEA BARGAINED. Officials moved Shannon Nyamodi from his solitary prison cell torture for a period of one month. He was moved by the NC DOC to another prison, where he was allowed to visit with his family, meet and talk with other inmates, make phone calls, and receive and send mail. Compared to what Shannon had endured for two years, from age 18 to 20, being an inmate in the general population at a prison where he had contact with other human beings and his family was a huge improvement. However, this too as a part of his torture meant to force the innocent young man into making a false confession.

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Thanks for participating in the "Human Rights for Prisoners March" across the Internet to demand respect for all people.

Human Rights for Prisoners March

Blogtalkradio - Monday nights at 9pm PST

Mary Neal, director

Thursday, June 19, 2014

The Damion Hayes Story: Mentally Ill in SHU

1. WHY IS DAMION HAYES IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT serving a life sentence for an assault that caused no lasting injuries, his first offense? Prison investors prefer young, mentally ill inmates like Damion, because they are most expensive on taxpayers. The increased cost to maintain a prisoner in solitary confinement can range from $14,933 to $21,485 per inmate every year. The average cost of a prisoner in SHU is $78,000 per year. Over 60 percent of inmates in solitary confinement are mentally ill. Multiplying $80,000 per year times 50 years (Damion's remaining life expectancy at sentencing) means the mentally challenged young man is worth $4 million to prison investors, Fred Hayes. That is why your son was imprisoned rather than treated for his mental illness, and it is why I am censored and persecuted continually for advocating to decriminalize mental illness.

2. In many prison facilities, inmates who are not warehoused in solitary confinement nevertheless bring their worth up to $80,000 per year or more by providing prison labor. Inmates who refuse to work are remanded to solitary confinement so that the extra $14,993 to $21,485 can be extracted from taxpayers for unproductive slaves. Some of the corporations that use prison laborers instead of hiring more "free" people include: Starbucks, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, JC Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola, Caterpiller, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, Microsoft, Boeing, and the USA.

3. Prison investors are blinded by greed and unable to see your son as a human being, just as slave owners were blinded by greed for over 400 years and would not acknowledge their slaves' humanity. Dehumanizing mentally ill people protects prison investors and their slave catchers from feeling remorse about the high numbers of mentally ill Americans who receive catastrophic injuries and are killed on our streets and behind bars. You and your family and friends look at the photo above and see Damion, an intelligent, handsome young man who has a health issue that can and should be treated, not punished. But prison investors see only the $4 million which they can earn by continuing to warehouse Damion in a 6 foot by 9 foot cell, just as they have for roughly 14 years. Damion and others are like animals that prison profiteers are boarding for a tremendous fee. In many cases, they are not treated with the respect that is given to animals.

4. The fact that Damion is black makes his inhumane and excessive incarceration all the more acceptable to prison investors, including those in government positions whose duty is to protect the rights of Americans, especially Americans with disabilities and people who are institutionalized. A study showed that black people who are suffering engender less sympathy than other races. The lack of sympathy was evident even among blacks who participated in the study. Therefore, having black people in decision making positions has not and will not positively affect black prisoners who endure brutality and torturous solitary confinement, especially since reversing mass incarceration would incur a personal cost to decision makers in terms of their own stock portfolios and career growth.

5. (Ten numbered paragraphs are in this article, seven urls, one email address.) The recent study by Kelly M. Hoffman and Adam Waytz shows that people, including medical personnel, assume black people feel less pain than white people. The researchers asked participants to rate how much pain they would feel in 18 common scenarios. The participants rated experiences such as stubbing a toe or getting shampoo in their eyes on a four-point scale (where 1 is “not painful” and 4 is “extremely painful”). Then they rated how another person (a randomly assigned photo of an experimental “target”) would feel in the same situations. Sometimes the target was white, sometimes black. In each experiment the researchers found that white participants, black participants, nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less pain than whites.

6. We have before us the same task that our great grandparents did: abolition of slavery. Although whites also suffer in America's prison industrial complex, injustice remains largely a racial issue in the United States. This writer knows of no Caucasian family who had a member secretly arrested, kept nearly three weeks under secret incarceration, deprived of prescription heart and psychiatric medications, then returned to the family as a naked corpse without any explanation, excuse, inquest, investigation, prosecution, or wrongful death payout. It is doubtful that a major law firm could succeed in having courts declare it "nonexistent" to avoid liability after defrauding a Caucasian family like The (Johnny) Cochran Firm did to the Neal family.

7. No Caucasian family would be in danger of financial persecution, censorship, and retribution for asking officials in federal and local government offices what happened to the deceased. That response is limited to Larry Neal's family and black families in the Old South when their loved ones were lynched. Crosses would blaze in the yards of black families to warn survivors not to seek justice. Deprivation of equal protection under the law in 21st century America continues unabated while the nation pretends it entered a post-racial era and undermines affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act, and other provisions that were instituted to improve conditions of blacks in this land that prospered mightily by slavery for 400 years and still benefits from enforced prison labor of a largely black prison population.

8. Fred Hayes sought psychiatric help for Damion when he was 17 years of age and his mental illness manifested itself, but Fred was rejected. Psychiatric treatment is often withheld from mentally ill Americans unless they prove (usually through preventable crimes) that they are a danger to self and others. A year later, Damion attacked a neighbor for no apparent reason, probably while hallucinating, and was sentenced to prison for 23 years to LIFE for his first offense. Mentally ill inmates are unlikely to be treated favorably by any parole board because their illness precludes their ability to follow prison rules and win favor from guards and the warden. Therefore, Damion is likely ineligible to exit prison minus a successful appeal or a pardon.

9. Damion's two appeals have been rejected, and his family continues to work with attorneys to release the young man who should be a hospital inpatient and not a prison inmate. We request your help on the Move.org petition to the White House and Florida's governor for Damion's pardon: "SAVE FLORIDA INMATE DAMION HAYES FROM SHU." Please sign and share the petition at the link below to save Damion as well as Florida taxpayers who would be billed over $4 million during Damion's lifetime if he remains imprisoned. Your support may help deliver Damion from prison, where he has already spent 14 years in torturous solitary confinement. Damion is capable of undergoing treatment and being restored to a wholesome life. Damion Hayes is not an animal.

Save Florida Inmate Damion Hayes from SHU
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/save-florida-inmate-damion

References (four)

"Solitary Watch" fact sheet on solitary confinement costs
http://solitarywatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/fact-sheet-the-high-cost-of-solitary-confinement.pdf

Hoffman and Waytz Study: "Racial Perceptions of Others' Pain"
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0048546

Prison Labor and Taxpayer Dollars
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/04/04/prison-labor-and-taxpayer-dollars/

DAMION HAYES: LIFE SENTENCE FOR MENTAL ILLNESS
http://dogjusticeformentallyill.blogspot.com/2014/06/mental-illness-made-damion-hayes-fl.html

10. This is FREE DAMION HAYES MONTH at "Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill." Please hear Fred Hayes speak on behalf of his son, Damion, and all mentally dysfunctional inmates Wednesday nights in June at 9pm PDT at Blogtalkradio. Your comments and questions are invited at (818)572.2947; the same number will connect you to the "Human Rights for Prisoners March" broadcasts each Monday at 9pm PDT. Previous recordings are archived for your listening any time.

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Thanks for participating in the "Human Rights for Prisoners March" across the Internet to

demand respect for all people.

Human Rights for Prisoners March

Blogtalkradio - Monday nights at 9pm PST

Mary Neal, director

Monday, March 31, 2014

Lawsuit Against Isolating Mental Patient Peter Minich

BOSTON — A Brookline woman filed a lawsuit against the state prisons department Monday, saying her 31-year-old son has been restrained for long periods at a state psychiatric hospital in violation of state law.

Joanne Minich said in her complaint filed in Norfolk Superior Court that her son, Peter Minich, has been held in prolonged isolation at Bridgewater State Hospital and continuously deprived of almost all human contact and exercise for more than 6,300 hours since January 2013.

"My son has an illness, in the same sense as someone with cancer or dementia. The last place he belongs is in a seclusion room behind a solid steel door," Joanne Minich said in a statement.

Reported by The Boston Herald on March 31, 2014. Read the entire article:
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2014/03/brookline_woman_sues_state_over_sons_isolation

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Thank you for participating in the "Human Rights for Prisoners March" across the Internet to demand respect for all people.

Human Rights for Prisoners March

Blogtalkradio - Monday nights at 9pm PST

Mary Neal, director

Friday, March 7, 2014

SHU Hurts Inmates' Families, Too

I straddle a parallel universe. While I wake up each morning to a world of “freedom,” making my own choices in how to live out the next 24 hours, my husband wakes up to a world of confinement, caged in a cell, with his actions dictated by a conglomerate of characters and policies fit for no man, or woman.

Since the beginning of this year a particular female officer landed in his unit on the morning shift, and nothing good has happened since. She is an abusive provocateur who enjoys inciting discomfort, anxiety, and fear in both inmate and staff. What she incites is seething anger and defiance, and he is fearless.

She has made his life miserable and has the power and authority to do so. The culture of prison staff is to support each other however wrong their actions are.

It is Friday morning, and I woke up to the knowledge that Darrell is in segregation/ isolation after being found guilty of a “major infraction,” a concocted “official version” of the truth based on a bully’s perspective of how to treat another human being. He will now lose more good time, our one-hour visits will be behind glass, he will lose his job as laundry porter (where he works 6 hours a day, five days a week making $18/month of which 20% is taken for the cost of incarceration), and he will sit in a cell 23 to 24 hours a day for an unknown length of time, at the whim of his jailers.

My insides roil and turn and burn with disgust at the abuse of this system called “corrections.” My mind sketches out scenarios of demands that I’m going to make and angry words I will use against the authorities. And then I think of the retaliation they will perpetrate on him.

And there remains only tears and silence because the truth is I can do nothing.

I am helpless against this world and the actions of a system of oppression and abuse. The predicament he faces behind the insular walls of secrecy, deprivation, and abuse is a violent construct of inhumanity like no other, designed to keep me, you, us, out of its business.

Written by Suzanne Gordon Cook

Promising news regarding solitary confinement is published in "Legal Victories" blog:

"Limiting Solitary Confinement in Corrections"
http://legalvictories.blogspot.com/2014/02/limiting-solitary-confinement-in.html

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Thank you for participating in the "Human Rights for Prisoners March" across the Internet to demand respect for all people.

Human Rights for Prisoners March

Blogtalkradio - Monday nights at 9pm PST

Mary Neal, director