Salt City Sinner

A quick update on Tim DeChristopher's incarceration situation - as I wrote yesterday , Tim had been moved to the Special Housing Unit at FCI Herlong for an e-mail he sent. This morning at 8 AM MST, Dylan Rose Schneider from Peaceful Uprising received a call from Tim: THANK YOU for all of your support and work on this - I received a call from Tim this morning at 8 am letting me know that he was transferred back to the minimum security camp late yesterday due to the thousands of calls that were received. There's a blog post with further details from PeaceUP   here  . It would appear that if you piss enough people off by running roughshod over the civil liberties of a sort of folk hero, those pissed off people can get results!

Most (if not all) prisons have a "Special Housing Unit" (SHU). Previously known as "the Hole," or, in cases where occupancy is one, by the good old standby " solitary confinement ." The use of SHUs is controversial, with many organizations claiming (and research backs them up ) that it constitutes psychological torture. You may remember climate activist and political prisoner Tim DeChristopher. I certainly do. I've written about Tim before ( here  ,   here  and   here ), but a quick recap may be in order. In 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended an oil and gas lease auction held in the hideous, radioactive sunset years of the Bush Administration, when public lands were being ruthlessly auctioned off in an extremely legally questionable last-minute fire sale. DeChristopher "posed" as Bidder 70 (actually, he was mistaken for a bidder by staff and just went along with it), and purchased 14 parcels of land for a cool $1.8 million, w...

Here in the United States of America, we like to "privatize" things. The short definition of this phenomenon is that services usually provided by the State - public roads, public schools, and, unfortunately, prisons - are increasingly being farmed out to for-profit corporations, who "can do the job more efficiently." Whether this is actually true is up for debate, but in at least some cases - perhaps most notably schools and prisons, those great institutional workhouses of ideology - "efficient" generally means "worse for human beings." Two companies in particular, the amusingly sinister-sounding (and genuinely terrifying)  Corrections Corporation of America  ... ...and the more placidly named GEO Group , are the heavy hitters in the incarceration game. The investors in these cutting edge experiments in human degradation and the commodification of suffering include Wells Fargo, Fidelity, General Electric, the usual gang. A siz...

Few things in life make a hardcore political geek like myself squeal with glee like good policy. Perhaps the best policy proposal (it's still technically more of a goal or pipe dream) I've seen in recent memory got a pretty thorough write-up in today's SL Tribune: It’s not a jail. It’s not quite a halfway house, either. The latest innovation in Salt Lake County’s criminal-justice system may combine elements of both in a "community corrections center" designed to help convicted wrongdoers who wrestle with drug addictions or mental health problems break free from their criminal past. It would offer the county a cellblock-free brand of incarceration that would focus on drug treatment, mental health counseling, job training and life skills in a less-restrictive environment, allowing inmates to transition into the community while serving their sentences. They're taking this idea seriously enough that the County is scoping out possible properties for the facility, ...