prison

Throughout the ages, criminal activities in society have been punished by the ruling entity of such societies with a variable degree of justice.

The laws are sometimes ambiguous and criminals are adept at becoming the lawmakers or rulers themselves. The US prison population is quite large compare to other countries. In some countries, the death penalty is still used for "crime against the state", even if the crime is as petty as not to follow the religious edict of such nation. The history of convicts is full of unfair treatment of people and of fabricated conviction. The styles of modern imprisonment are differing in countries, and much have the same purpose: make the convicted people suffer. The case of Julian Assange is special in this regard. He hasn't been convicted of any crimes, except expose the truth.

As well, our media will manipulate interpretations of imprisonment and re-education camps in order to give a particular view about a country "that we do not like". We will say little about imprisonment in Saudi Arabia but pile the dirt on the Chinese treatment of suspected criminals, especially "spies". The treatment of prisoners via isolation is declared "inhumane" by the West in regard to China, yet the West still use the technique on some of its own prisoners including Julian Assange. 

In the USA, a way to reduce the needed surveillance from guards and increase the sadism of the system is to let prisoners fend for themselves in a prison system that allows mistreatment of prisoners by other prisoners... 

Thus we will have various slanted views of imprisonment in other countries to achieve our goal of not liking such countries — or to show that our views are crooked and that "justice prevails". Either way we are often victims of fake reports and views designed to achieve an effect. Here are three items to consider...

CASE A: 

https://journal-neo.org/2021/06/22/the-uyghur-tribunal-inciting-hatred-against-china/

The fascists are very active these days and one of the proofs of this dark shadow looming over the world is the recent so-called “peoples’ tribunal” put on in London over three days in early June. Otherwise called the “Uyghur Tribunal,” it is headed by Sir Geoffrey Nice, Q.C, the Machiavellian British barrister, knighted by the Queen for his services to Britain, who became notorious for trying to frame-up Yugoslavia’s President Milosevic at the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal.

This new ‘tribunal’ follows on the China Tribunal also headed by Nice and also based in London, which focused on fabricated allegations of forced organ trafficking by China. This second tribunal focuses on fabricated allegations against China concerning the treatment of Uyghurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The allegations before both of these ‘tribunals’ have one objective; to slander the Communist Party of China and to undermine China as a developing and sovereign nation.

The ‘tribunal’ is part of the propaganda matrix being constructed by NATO, led by the USA and UK, which has the objective of manipulating peoples minds to generate hatred and hostility towards China to, at the least, hinder its trade and development, at worst, to prepare the minds of people for war. In that sense this ‘tribunal’ is nothing less than a part of the preparation for war, and can be seen, under international criminal law, as part of a conspiracy to engage in the supreme war crime, the crime of aggression.

The same tactics are being applied to Russia with all the false allegations being made by the Americans against Russia, allegations that Joe Biden shamefully repeated in his meeting with President Putin in Geneva, as if he was king of the world dressing down a wayward vassal. No wonder that meeting was cut short. Only a fly on the wall can tell us what was really said and happened in Geneva, but who can imagine the Russians sitting there for long having to listen to a lecture on how they should stop doing what they are not doing “or face the consequences.” How can any serious person sit there and not either laugh out loud or become angry at the absurdity of it? But of course that is the spin in the western media, the spin that Biden put on the meeting; that he “talked tough to Putin.” Bluster and lies is the American way.

The bluster and lies continued at the Uyghur tribunal over the three days of “hearings” that took place from June 4 to 7 which were staged as a piece of theatre, even to the extent of the organisers selling tickets to attend. It was all acted out by a company of roaming players who go from one forum to another playing their roles, speaking their lines on cue from a script written by shadowy men and women in shadowy rooms in London and Washington.

Geoffrey Nice not only is chair of the two tribunals dealing with China and persecutor of President Milosevic, he is also a co-author of the Caesar Report on Syria, produced by the NATO backed Centre For Justice and Accountability so-called, another propaganda outfit focused on slandering Syria, along with his friend, former US Ambassador For War Crimes, Stephen Rapp. He seems to be NATO”s ever eager go-to lawyer when they need some propaganda put out to justify their wars

One of Nice’s most notorious crimes in the Milosevic show trial at the ICTY was to deliberately mislead the judges and the world by stating that the Kosovo Field speech made by Milosevic proved Milosevic was for a Greater Serbia. But Milosevic produced the real speech proving that he had said the exact opposite of what Nice claimed, that he had called for interethnic tolerance. Nice was proved to be a liar. But the judges did nothing to him. He was allowed to continue spewing lies day after day throughout that show trial because NATO wanted the show to go on and Nice was their chosen circus ringmaster. So, it is no surprise that he was chosen to be ringmaster of this new propaganda circus.

This ‘tribunal’ claims to be independent. Yet it is neither a “tribunal’ nor independent. It has no legal or other authority. It certainly has no moral authority when we look at its funding and the experts called upon to give their ‘evidence,’ for we see clearly the connections between it, the NATO governments and western financial interests.

Much of its funding comes from the World Uyghur Congress whose affiliations with the CIA and funding by the National Endowment For Democracy are well known. In fact it was the World Uyghur Congress that asked Geoffrey Nice to set up the tribunal, according to him, and it provided the initial funding, so that we see right at the beginning, that the US government, through the CIA and NED, is directly involved with the Nice tribunal. Let us look at some of the others involved.

There is Nick Vetch, an extremely rich British businessman, who is founder and CEO of BigYellow a large UK storage company, which, in turn, has some of its shares owned by US financial companies such as Blackrock Inc, Standard Life Aberdeen, American Financial Group and others. Vetch is also a director of the Global Human Rights Fund, a UK “human rights’ organisation, which appears to provide some funding to the Nice tribunal. He is also a member of Nice’s China Tribunal.

Vetch’s connection to the Fund indicates who is behind his activities since the Global Human Rights Fund in turn gets its funding from the European Union, the Swedish Government, the Ford Foundation, George Soros, The Rockefeller Foundation, and other US corporate-backed foundations. The Chair of the Fund is Chris Canavan, managing director of Lion’s Head Global Partners, formerly Director of Global Policy Development for the Soros Fund, formerly senior official with Goldman Sachs Bank in New York and a lifetime member of the US Council on Foreign Relations.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Other members of the ‘tribunal’ are members of the British Establishment, and aside from anti-China credentials seem to be brought in to add some credibility to the proceedings. They include Dame Parveen Kumar, a UK doctor and member of the British Establishment, Ambreeana Manji, UK law professor who once worked for the British Institute in East Africa, Tim Clark, a UK lawyer and senior director of Vetch’s company Big Yellow and who is also an adviser to G3, which claims to be ‘one of the leading international strategic advisory groups’. Based in London, G3 seems to be an intelligence group with murky connections.

The list includes Ramindar Kaur, social anthropologist, writer, and “human rights” activist who is also deeply immersed in the British establishment. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and head of a number of government studies on UK social issues. There is Dr. David Lynch, a specialist on cancer at University College London, Audrey Osler, Professor of education and human rights, University of Leeds, an advocate of using human rights education to achieve changes in world societies, and Catherine Roe, who began her career as a British diplomat, specialising in multilateral negotiations and who is now a Trustee of the Institute of International Strategic Studies.

Hamid Sabi, is styled as “counsel to the tribunal.” He is a British lawyer, active in the service of the western powers. He is, among other things, a director of Justice For Iran, an organisation accusing Iran of human rights violations, whose recommendations for sanctions against Iranian officials and Press TV are followed by the US and EU and UK governments and who has a history of attacking China.

He is assisted by Aarif Abraham, another UK lawyer, and former lawyer for the NATO tribunal for Yugoslavia, (ICTY) another very anti-China, pro-foreign intervention type who wrote a paper on the Uighurs accusing China of all sorts of crimes. Another assistant is Aldo Samit Borda, a Maltese, but now a lawyer in the UK involved in human rights, who has connections with the British government as he once worked for the Commonwealth Secretariat. The NATO-ICTY connection continues with Marilena Stegbauer, their general assistant, a German, and former intern for the NATO prosecutor at the ICTY, former researcher at Human Rights Institute in the UK, then a writer for The German Diplomat in Germany, who now calls herself a “human rights consultant”.

There is Frankie Vetch, production assistant, son of the Vetch senior, making the tribunal a bit of a Vetch family affair, and Nevenka Tromp, another NATO asset who also worked at the ICTY as a researcher for prosecution in the Milosevic and Karadzic trials. The group is rounded off with Baroness Helena Kennedy, adviser and member of the British House of Lords, Queen’s Counsel, also member of the International Bar Association Institute of Human Rights who in 2020, worked with the Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith and “democracy activist” with Hong Kong Watch, Luke de Pulford, to create the global pressure group the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, in March 2021,

The Coalition for Genocide Response is a supporter of the tribunal. It is the project of John Luke de Pulford mentioned above who is a prominent London establishment anti-communist, anti Chinese Government figure and a supporter of Nathan Law, the Hong Kong fifth columnist working for British interests in Hong Kong, now fled to London. In fact the tribunal has also revealed that it was launched on 3 September 2020, with assistance from the Coalition for Genocide Response that was founded by John Luke de Pulford, the protégé of British journalist turned activist, Benedict Rogers, and Hong Kong Watch functionary, who also has close links to Stand with Hong Kong. Benedict Rogers is the founder of Hong Kong Watch, a notorious propaganda outfit that specializes in churning out fallacies about China. Rogers also has put out false claims about North Korea, works with governments from the UK to Canada and USA and is a leader of the anti-communist Christian Solidarity Worldwide. He states that he introduced Nice to the Uyghurs a couple of years ago. Rogers recently appointed Nice to Hong Kong Watch as a patron, joining the former British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Another of its patrons is Lord David Alton, who is linked with the concocted report on the Hong Kong Police Force, which the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong, of which he is a vice-chair, produced in 2020.

On Sept 23, 2020, in the House of Lords, Alton asked the British foreign office minister, Lord Ahmad, if the government would “welcome” the initiative to set up the “Uyghur Tribunal”, and “cooperate” with it. The minister did not give a clear reply but the tribunal has since thanked the British government for fast-tracking visas for foreign nationals to attend the tribunal. In view of Alton’s links with Hong Kong Watch, the extent to which it is covertly involved in the tribunal cannot be underestimated as Benedict Rogers is also an adviser to the World Uyghur Congress. The circle of interconnections is complete.

Those are the people behind the tribunal. Some, like Nice, are clearly NATO assets. None of them are independent or objective.

Since this is supposedly a tribunal they had to produce witnesses. These fit into two categories, expert witnesses and witnesses of fact, that is, people who claim to have observed things.

These were duly paraded before the tribunal, one after one, made statements without offering any proof of their claims and then retired with none of them cross-examined on their statements. Their claims were not tested at all; not by the ‘judges’ who are also in fact the “prosecutors” nor by anyone else. Instead the statements were accepted as true without any examination and when the ‘witnesses’ faltered in reading their lines, the ‘judges’ assisted them. This is not the procedure of a trial or even a hearing. It is more closely associated with an Inquisition. Nice and company are not interested in the truth or falsity of the claims being made. Their only interest is in making sure the statements they require to make effective anti-Chinese propaganda are supplied.

The so-called ‘expert witnesses’ included Ethan Guttman, a Senior fellow at the anticommunist “Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an American organisation funded by the US Congress to “educate people on the evils of communism,” who has made many wild claims about China in particular on allegations of “organ harvesting” and Adrian Zenz, also a fellow at the same anti-communist organisation. His propaganda work is notorious.

It incudes Laura Murphy, trained as a literature scholar, who became a “human rights” professor at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, University of Sheffield. Harvard educated, she seems to be a professional witness and has worked for US Government Office of Victims of Crime, and other US government agencies, has put out propaganda on the BBC about “forced labour” in China and received an award for her propaganda work from the US government agency the National Endowment For Humanities, and grants from their National Humanities Centre. She also received grants from the British Academy.

Finally there is Dr. Darren Byler, of the University of Colorado, who is engaged in post doctoral work with the ChinaProject, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, a famous, anti-communist organisation founded by Henry Luce, and, Nathan Ruser, an Australian researcher with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who is an expert in satellite data and surveillance who has written a number of anti-Chinese propaganda articles. There are a few others of the same type.

The factual witnesses are a travelling troupe of players many of whom have given statements in other venues, often contradicting their claims at the tribunal. The Chinese government has exposed the lies of several of these witnesses who travel the world as professional witnesses-earning their keep by telling stories which do not bear up under any scrutiny. But none of the witnesses testified under a real oath, none were questioned on the contents of their statements or how they came to the attention of the organisers, apart from being recruited by the World Uyghur Congress.

Having myself experienced how Nice and the other prosecutors at the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals got people to be witnesses, and how they coerced them into given false testimony when required makes it impossible to accept any of the statements made by these alleged witnesses with anything less than complete disbelief. Not that it matters in legal terms. Despite Nice spouting platitudes about “reasonable doubt” and “assessing the evidence” we all know what the outcome of the hearings, to be continued in September, will be; the condemnation of China.

So there we have it, another propaganda exercise masquerading as a search for justice and accountability, But it is about time these propagandists be held accountable for their actions, for manufacturing hatred and hostility towards a nation that has brought its people out of the poverty imposed on them by the west during the colonial period and which the west wants to impose again.

At the Nuremberg Trials the Nazi propagandist, Julius Streicher, was hanged for putting out propaganda about Jews and inciting hatred leading to genocide. At the Rwanda Tribunal the members of a radio station were convicted of genocide for allegedly making false reports on events that the prosecutors claimed instigated hatred that led to genocide. Hate speech is proscribed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other treaties. Is this not what Nice and his players are doing, trying to instigate hatred and hostility to justify war, to justify harming and killing Chinese? Is this not where it all leads? Is this not a crime against humanity? Are not they the real criminals?

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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CASE B 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-23/chinas-network-of-secretive-prisons-booming-under-xi-jingping/100216432

China's secretive 'residential surveillance' jail system is booming under Xi Jinping, human rights group says

China is expanding the use of a little-known form of extra-judicial detention that allows police to exclude lawyers and cut suspects off from the outside world, with a new report saying it is being used in thousands of cases each year.

Two Australians jailed for alleged national security crimes in Beijing — Yang Hengjun and Cheng Lei — are among those who have been detained under "residential surveillance at a designation location", known as RSDL.

The system was introduced in 2012 in the months before Xi Jinping's reign as China's leader commenced.

Human rights group Safeguard Defenders has published the most in-depth insight to date of conditions inside RSDL facilities, drawing on the accounts of multiple former detainees, including the group's founder, Swedish activist Peter Dahlin. 

Their combined accounts paint a picture ranging from secret beatings and forced medication to long stretches of boredom with two guards watching every moment.

"At night, two guards watched me, even when I went to the toilet or brushed my teeth," human rights lawyer Bao Longjun told the report authors. 

"One of them had a small book in his pocket. Every 10 minutes, he would take it out and make notes.

"My daily routine was entirely regimented, except for the interrogations."

Another former prisoner, lawyer Ding Jiaxi, said sleep deprivation was deliberate. 

"The fluorescent light in the room was lit 24 hours," he is quoted as saying. 

"They put a black hood over my head whenever I was brought out to the hallway or to use the bathroom."

While legislated under Chinese law, RSDL is not part of the formal judicial process for a suspect.

Instead, it is an initial six-month period when investigators can detain suspects incommunicado at "black jails", interrogating them, gathering evidence and building a case without needing to charge them or obtain a court's permission. 

In several high-profile cases in recent years, family members were not told where their loved ones were being held. 

Other former detainees have described being shackled, having exercise time cancelled or having their food reduced as punishment for breaches of the RSDL rules, which largely restrict prisoners to sitting in silence when they are not being interrogated or eating. 

"In six-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, [the guards] would sit there, staring at me, taking notes on any little thing, but not speaking," said Mr Dahlin, who was detained in early 2016 for 23 days before being expelled for running an illegal human rights NGO. 

The exact conditions range depending on the facility, some of which are hotels or police buildings, while others are specially designated prisons. 

"I was forced to stay inside a small, painted square during the day, suffering at the hands of these young [guard] girls," activist lawyer Wang Yu is quoted as saying in the report. 

She was detained in late 2015 during a mass crackdown on activist lawyers. 

"If my leg or a foot were out of the square, even by just a tiny bit, they would warn me or slap me," she said. 

While RSDL is routinely used in sensitive political cases, the Safeguard Defenders report quotes figures from a publicly available legal database showing police across China are increasingly deploying it, even for less sensitive criminal cases. 

Officially, close to 6,000 cases that progressed to trial last year involved suspects initially being detained in RSDL. That figure is well above the few hundred cases during Mr Xi's first year in power. 

But the report authors estimate the real number of suspects subjected to RSDL is likely between 10,000 to 15,000 per year.

And a small but growing number of foreigners are being ensnared in a system that, at best, will allow them one heavily monitored visit or video call with diplomats per month.

Read more....

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CASE C

PRISON VIOLENCE LIKE ALABAMA’S DEMANDS A NATIONAL RECKONING

Despite civil rights victories, prisons continue to be spaces of physical brutality and sexual violence, especially against incarcerated people of color.

During the early fall of 2017, just three days before the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would descend on the Alabama prison system to investigate reports of brutality and sexual violence, an atrocious incident occurred at the Bibb Correctional Facility’s Hot Bay, a dormitory “housing men in bunkbeds multiple rows deep,” as the DOJ would write in its subsequent report. In the back of the room, two prisoners repeatedly stabbed their victim, and when another prisoner attempted to stop the assault he became the next victim. In a desperate struggle to stay alive, the initial victim “dragged himself to the front doors of the dormitory,” the DOJ later wrote, where other prisoners banged on the locked doors to summon the guards. By the time a correctional officer finally arrived, the victim was dead on the prison floor, having bled out from his open wounds. One prisoner witness offered the haunting testimony to the DOJ that “he could still hear the prisoner’s screams in his sleep.” Numerous other prisoners reported that rapes, torture, and physical assaults are routine. Despite the atrocity of such violence, it is not an isolated happening: The DOJ report concluded that “an excessive amount of violence, sexual abuse, and prisoner deaths occur within Alabama’s prisons on a regular basis.”

While the guilty verdict against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd has delivered some accountability for police violence, the routine nature of violence within America’s prisons is hiding in plain sight and yet receives little public scrutiny.

As a historian of U.S. prisons, I have studied civil rights lawsuits demanding prison accountability and have written about prison violence as a matter of state violence. My most recent book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America, offers a historical narrative of state violence in Southern prisons from 1945 to 1990, particularly in Texas. We Are Not Slaves draws upon court documents, affidavits, depositions, prisoner letters, and over 60 oral histories to excavate details on how prison violence was state-orchestrated. In Texas, for example, prisoner field drivers drew from the culture of slavery on East Texas cotton plantations to force the work of fellow prisoners. Within the prison, the administration deputized select prisoners to act as guards who employed coercive and violent means to maintain control over other prisoners. As some prisoners worked the fields effectively as slave labor, privileged prisoners known as ‘building tenders’ went about openly armed and constructed an internal slave-trade economy where they bought and sold the bodies of other prisoners as sexual slaves, subjects of often violent rape, and as domestic cell servants. Because the bodies of other prisoners served as an unofficial state reward for their service, I argued that this was an example of state-orchestrated sexual violence. The building tender system was eventually overturned after two decades of prisoner organizing, work strikes, and legal documentation—an effort that culminated with Ruiz v. Estelle, a lawsuit filed in federal court in Texas that led to a 1980 ruling that conditions in the state’s prison’s constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

But despite civil rights victories like Ruiz, prisons continue to be spaces of physical brutality and sexual violence, especially against incarcerated people of color. To consider one state prison system, let’s take a closer look at the Justice Department’s 2019 report on Alabama’s state prisons for men. The 56-page document is so replete with descriptions of violence, sexual assault, and state neglect that it reads more like a perverse horror story than a government report. As a result of the findings, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in December 2020 against the Alabama Department of Corrections for violating the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

According to the DOJ report, Alabama’s prisons are increasingly overcrowded, understaffed, and violent. By 2017, for instance, Alabama’s prisons had a homicide rate eight times the national average of prison homicides in 2014. Between January 2015 and June 2018, 27 Alabama prisoners died in verified homicides. Moreover, Alabama prisons are dangerously overcrowded as they incarcerate over 15,000 people in a system meant to hold 9,882. Meanwhile, Alabama employs less than a third of the needed administrative staff—just 1,072 out of 3,326 authorized correctional officers.

Weapons, from makeshift knives to hatchets and full-length machetes, are easily acquired by prisoners, as evidenced by the security staff at one Alabama prison collecting 166 makeshift knives in just one sweep in May 2017. Violence is so common in the state’s prisons that many incarcerated Alabamians report taking up arms in self-defense.

Once armed, some prisoners engage in internal economies of buying and selling tobacco and illicit goods, such as the dangerous drug known as “flakka” that’s popular in prisons. The readily available synthetic cannabinoid, known technically as 5F ADB, can lead to “rapid loss of consciousness” as well as “delirium, agitation, psychosis, and aggressive and violent behavior,” as the DOJ noted. In March 2018, a prisoner at Holman prison passed out from smoking flakka and “awoke to one prisoner punching him in the eye” and then four or five prisoners “took turns raping him,” the DOJ found. Compounding matters, widespread drug use leads to debts, which create a complicated web of internal economies that accelerate sexual violence when prisoners cannot pay what they owe.

In other cases, the DOJ report found outright extortion in Alabama’s prisons. In one 2018 case, a prisoner was threatened with rape for his alleged debt. When he couldn’t pay, the DOJ said, his mother received lewd text messages from another prisoner who “threatened to chop her son into pieces and rape him if she did not send him $800.”

When incarcerated victims do report the abuse, prison administrators have a “tendency to dismiss claims of sexual abuse by gay prisoners as ‘homosexual activity,'” the DOJ found, and thus suggest that “gay men cannot be raped.” Making matters worse, if the victim files a report that admits he accrued debts, the prison administration cites the victim with a disciplinary charge. Some prisoners are so afraid of retribution from reporting an assault that they turn to an old Southern prison practice of cutting their wrists out of desperation to stay in protective custody or the hospital wing.

Read more: https://therealnews.com/prison-violence-like-alabamas-demands-a-national-reckoning

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