Research on the crime control industry
Prisonsucks.com is a clearinghouse for useful, verifiable statistics about the crime control industry. Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong. One of these days the public will start listening to prison activists, so let's be prepared to win without being sidetracked by arguments over defective statistics. In some cases, the numbers we need don't exist. In others, the facts exist but activists don't know where to find them. Now you do.
July 2002
There is a prisoner phone scam but it's not #90
July 25, 2002
For years an email has been going around the net warning people about a scam where someone calls you up, says they are from the phone company doing a line test, and they ask you to press #90. Then -- says the email -- this person takes over your phone line and runs up a huge bill at your expense. This email is a hoax. This can't happen on a residential line. Because the email asks people to forward it, and well-meaning people do so, the email spreads like a virus.
But there is a new version of this hoax that refers to the scam as originating from prisoners! After bouncing around on a prison issues mailing list, a well-meaning friend of this site sent it to us to try and protect us from this "scam". Here is our response:
The message you sent me is an urban myth and does not affect residential phone customers. See http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa021898.htm
It especially sucks that this urban myth is getting a "new life" by including the fear of prisoner scams. Almost everywhere, prisoners can only call collect, so most people are safe since they would never accept a a collect call from a prisoner they didn't know. Furthermore, this scam could not originate in a Mass prison or from a prison in many states, where the phone system is designed to prevent 3 way calling. These systems are so extreme it disconnects a prisoner if his mom gets a beep from call waiting. These "security" features are a package deal with the phone companies that provide electronic phone tracking and recording for the prisons. In exchange, the phone company charges the recipients of prisoner collect calls a surcharge and sometimes a higher rate. The prison and the phone company split this extra profit of $5 or more per call.
Taxing the families of prisoners -- the poorest families in the state -- to pay for the high cost of over-incarceration is the real scam.
How the prison system makes minority communities pay
July 15, 2002
The cover article of July/August, 2002 issue of "The Crisis" Magazine, (NAACP national publication) is on how rising incarceration is spilling over
into critical arenas of black political (electoral) and economic power, i.e. affecting the lives of African-Americans not under criminal justice control. Key issues focused on are felony disenfranchisement, impact of census prisoner-counting practices on redistricting and federal funding, etc. as well as the relationship between those phenomena and post-reconstruction initiatives designed to take away from the newly enfranchised what had just been granted...
The article discusses the Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout report about the census counting urban prisoners as rural residents from our parent organization the Prison Policy Initiative.
An internet version of the article is not yet available but you can order a hard copy from Crisis Magazine.
Factsheets being indexed too....
July 6, 2002
As of today, Prisonsucks.com now indexes factsheets. If it's a high quality piece suitable for printing out, copying and distributing, we'll try and include it. You can submit new factsheets here into our online system....
Federal death penalty declared unconstitutional
July 1, 2002
"A judge declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional Monday, saying too many innocent people have been sentenced to death.
"U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff issued a 28-page ruling reaffirming his earlier opinion that the death penalty act violated the due process rights of defendants" reported CNN.
The decision is subject to appeal, and at the moment affects only the case that was before Judge Rakoff. If affirmed, it could apply to the federal (but not state) death penalty in some or all of the country.
Read Opinion and order re: U.S. v. Quinones, supplement: prior opinion dated 4/25/02. Both are highly readable for non lawyers, and the opinion and order does a great job refuting the argument that the federal death penalty was created with knowledge that executing the innocent was an allowable risk. The Judge's opinion shows the contrary, that Congress thought executing the innocent to be very unlikely.