Plains
Why are so many of us in prison this Xmas?
Submitted by Anonymous on February 1, 2010 - 4:26amby Tom Gomez
The holiday season is an unhappy season for many prisoners who are far from home and family. For me, and no doubt many others here who have neither, it is a time for reflection, a time to take stock of ourselves and resolve to make changes in our lives. That is even more true for at least some of those here who have children of their own, children who are waiting on the outside for their parent to get out.
To be sure, that's not everyone here, some prisoners glorify lives of crime and violence, addiction and alcoholism, at least to me. I doubt they do the same on the phone with their 7-year old, or an aging parent they might not see again when they get out. No one dreams of being a convict when they grow up.
So if people don't like prison, why do so many convicts come back over and over again? In Colorado, 70% of paroled convicts return to prison, 27% with new criminal charges. Roughly 50% of those to be released from prison return on a new criminal case. Finishing parole, or 'killing your number' makes it no less likely that you'll be back. So why is it that while 1 in 136 people in our society is in prison, despite the US having the highest rate of incarceration per capita in the world, people here in prison just can't seem to get out and stay out?
Many legislators feel that the problem is that convicts are genetically inferior to the wider population. Backed up by an army of psychologists and social workers, they find the offender to be biologically different from themselves and talk about treating the offender's 'anti-social personality disorder', about the 'disease model of addiction'. They seldom, if ever, talk about poverty.
Marijuana plants earn Prisoner 17 years on 2 year sentence
Submitted by Anonymous on January 27, 2010 - 12:53amby Tom Gomez
Jack was charged with cultivation of marijuana in 2000, and sentenced to 2 years of community corrections. That was 9 years ago, and it will be the year 2012 before he is released from prison (if he serves his full sentence), and 2017 before his parole ends. His story is not uncommon. It illustrates the failure of sentencing laws meant to keep Jack and others like him, mostly non-violent offenders whose crimes were drug and alcohol related, out of prison and promote rehabilitation over incarceration. Instead, as Jack illustrates, they have often done the opposite of what the legislature intended, and have left thousands of prisoners like Jack in the criminal justice system – sometimes for decades – for petty offenses. With the Colorado State Legislature expected to address the issue of sentencing reform later this year, many prisoners hope that stories like Jack's prompt the state legislators to rethink the 'escape' statutes.
No one here in the prison really expects the legislature to decriminalize escape. But the large and growing number of cases like Jack's point out what's wrong with the existing law. Sentenced in 2000 to serve in one of the state's 34 community correctional facilities (aka halfway houses), Jack escaped by simply walking away from the facility. Several months later, he was recaptured and given 4 years for the escape, plus his remainder on the original charge for a total of five years. He served 3 of those 5 years before being paroled into homelessness in 2004. Colorado is one of only a handful of states with mandatory parole, and while Jack's original charges carried one year of mandatory parole, his new charge of escape carried 3 years of mandatory parole.
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Call For Support From Indigenous Resistance Communities of Big Mountain, Black Mesa, AZ
Submitted by Dirty Hands on January 22, 2010 - 4:37pm
Immediate Call For Support From Indigenous Resistance Communities of Big Mountain, Black Mesa, AZ in their struggle for Life, Land and Dignity. January 18, 2010
Although there’s been a recent victory against the reopening of the Black Mesa Complex, the Kayenta mine is still operating and elders on the front lines fighting the continued impacts of coal mining and forced relocation efforts are still requesting support.
We are writing with a request for direct on-land support on behalf of families of traditional resistance communities of Black Mesa, AZ.. One of the Big Mountain elder matriarchs, Blanche Wilson, the mother of Mae Tso, who hosted the 2008 caravan, passed away yesterday. Please hold her and her family in your thoughts and prayers. Mae and Samuel, two of Blanche’s children, and elders themselves, are living alone at their homesite. They are in much need of support–they will need to take four days away from basic necessities and work for the traditional funeral. Additionally Mae injured her back on Christmas day and has been in pain for the last three weeks and at a limited work capacity; Samuel has been working double what he normally does. There are supporters there now until Wednesday the 20th. The funeral will be after that so, as mentioned, they really need the help at this time.
The Supreme Court has Given America to the Corporations By Phillip Reynes
Submitted by phil on January 21, 2010 - 8:57pmWe as a nation my well be doomed. By the time I post this many of you here at COIMC and in IndyMedia's around the country will have heard the shocking news. Namely that the Supreme Court today not only reaffirmed that corporations are people, but that corporations may spend an unlimited amount of money to tilt election campaigns. This is an unprecedented turn of events that threatens to make real the crossover of our country into overt corporate fascism.
You and I and all who care about freedom need to fight this perversion of justice. One thing that you can do is go to this site (http://www.movetoamend.org )and sign a petition to get a constitutional amendment that would explicitly declare that corporations do not have the rights of citizens and are not people.
Our nation is being taken over by corporations and this court decision will make there takeover complete if left unchallenged. This decision by the Supreme Court will shred any hope of anything but the transition of the United States into a corporatocracy! If unchallenged there will be no hope of any compromise short of violence in defense of our rights as people.
The fact is corporationsare not people. Corporations do not die are not subject to the laws of nature, feel no emotion and worst of all live forever with no soul and a relentless desire to maximize profit. This ruling extends the very rights of a person to all corporations that operate within the United States and so this ruling means that foreign multinational corporations that operate in the United States will have more power over our election system than American citizens themselves.
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DOC Rule Change means longer sentences for Prisoners
Submitted by Anonymous on January 16, 2010 - 4:48amA rule change by the Colorado State Department of Corrections could mean offenders with already long sentences, mostly for drug offenses, will be incarcerated longer. Under the new rule, which went into effect on October 1st, 2009, prisoners required to participate in DOC's intensive 9 – 12 month therapeutic community program for drugs and alcohol will not be eligible to do so until they are within 8 years of their mandatory release date.
Under Colorado statute, prisoners are eligible for early release (discretionary parole) after serving 50% of their sentence, and receive 10 days a month earned time if they are charged with a non-violent offense. Violent offenders receive only 6 days a month 'earned time', and are required to serve 75% of their sentences before being paroled. For a non-violent offender serving a 30-year stretch, that means that he or she is parole eligible after 12 years, if they have complied with all conditions of confinement.
In practice, however, such discretionary paroles are seldom granted. Even the Governor's plan to rease prisoners 6 months before their mandatory release date has run into fierce, and very public, opposition from the parole board itself, which remands prisoners to their mandatory release dates more than 90% of the time. On a 30-year sentence that means spending 23 years behind bars.
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Censorship on Colorado Indymedia?
Submitted by Anonymous on January 12, 2010 - 8:44pmThe Red Pill has been active on the Colorado Indymedia site now for about five years. Never it that time have we ever seen any censorship or suppression of debate. But today we are very concerned that photos attached to the announcement that Bash Back's 2010 Convergance is going to be held in Denver have been removed, and comments disabled. We would like to see a full explanation of why the photos were removed, and comments reactivated on that post. That is not too much to ask for an open publishing site that is supposed to be non-hierarchical.
Thank You
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Bash Back! 2010 Convergence in Denver!
Submitted by Dirty Hands on January 12, 2010 - 4:14pm
bash back denver is pleased to host the twenty-ten bash back! convergence from may twenty-seventh to thirtieth.
rsvp > www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=408915865626
more pics > boulevardier4eva.wordpress.com
have pics 2 trade? > bashbackdenver |at| gmail |dot| com
see you in denver
<3 <3 <3
bb!
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Wild Roots Feral Futures 2010: Dates & Call for Workshops
Submitted by Dirty Hands on January 4, 2010 - 1:58am
The 2010 Wild Roots Feral Futures will take place for a seven-day duration, a quarter moon cycle, from June 19th-26th (from the First Quarter Moon on the 19th through the Summer Solstice on the the 21st to the Full Moon on the 26th) in the foothills of the mighty and wild San Juan Mountains of Southwest Colorado.
We are looking for folks of all sorts to join us and help facilitate workshops, conflict resolution and management, direct action and medic trainings, wild food walks, and much more! We will be focusing on many things, including but by no means limited to anarchist theory and praxis, rewilding, ancestral skills, indigenous solidarity, direct action, forest defense, security culture, civil disobedience, hand to hand combat, survival skills, evasion tactics, green anarchism, anti-civ, post-civ, star watching and navigation, maps and orienteering, shelter building, and whatever YOU care to bring and provide. But we need everyone's help to make this as safe, positive, and productive a space as it can be. Our own knowledge, skills, and capacities are limited. We need YOUR help!
Roles we REALLY need filled:
• Kitchen! (we've reached out to Everybody's Kitchen and Seeds of Peace)
• CRAM team (conflict resolution and management: we need people of diverse gender/sexual orientations who know how to give support to survivors of sexual assault and to people with PTSD)*
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Secret ICE Detention Centers in Grand Junction and Elsewhere in Colorado
Submitted by Anonymous on December 25, 2009 - 10:09pmIn the newest edition of The Nation there's a story profiling the existence of 186 Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) Sub-Stations were people are "Disappeared."
National List of Detention Centers
http://www.jacquelinestevens.org...
The Nation Article. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/stevens
From the Nation..."According to Aaron Tarin, an immigration attorney in Salt Lake City, "Whenever I have a client in a subfield office, it makes me nervous. Their procedures are lax. You've got these senior agents who have all the authority in the world because they're out in the middle of nowhere. You've got rogue agents doing whatever they want. Most of the buildings are unmarked; the vehicles they drive are unmarked." Like other attorneys, Tarin was extremely frustrated by ICE not releasing its phone numbers. He gave as an example a US citizen in Salt Lake City who hired him because her husband, in the process of applying for a green card, was being held at a subfield office in Colorado. By the time Tarin tracked down the location of the facility that was holding the husband when he had called his wife, the man had been moved to another subfield office. "I had to become a little sleuth," Tarin said, describing the hours he and a paralegal spent on the phone, the numerous false leads, unanswered phones and unreturned messages until the husband, who had been picked up for driving without a license or insurance, was found in Grand Junction, Colorado (emphasis ours), held on a $20,000 bond, $10,000 for each infraction. "I argued with the guy, 'This is absurd! Whose policy is this?'" Tarin said the agent's response was, "That's just our policy here.""
Here are known substations in our region.
Earth First! Action Alert: Stop the Swap at Wolf Creek! Oppose Legislative Land Exchange
Submitted by Dirty Hands on December 4, 2009 - 9:59pmThe Durango chapter of High Country Earth First! (Colorado) is calling upon ecodefenders to contact officials and rally at the December 8th, 10th, and 15th meetings in Pagosa Springs to oppose the Village at Wolf Creek and the legislative land exchange (more information below).
Unlike our compromise-based counterparts, whose paper-wrenching efforts we do not take for granted, Earth First! takes the stance of NO COMPROMISE! which in turn means NO VILLAGE AT WOLF CREEK! We are prepared to take direct action to stop development if and when it goes forward. We hope you will join us, if you can, and stand in solidarity with us if you can't. SPREAD THE WORD!
12/8 Rally at Archuleta County Court House: Oppose Legislative Land Exchange at Wolf Creek!
12/10 Rally at Pagosa Springs Town Hall: Oppose Legislative Land Exchange at Wolf Creek!
12/15 Rally at Archuleta County Court House: Oppose Legislative Land Exchange at Wolf Creek!
May the forest bewitch you,
— High Country Earth First! (Durango) & Ancient Forest Rescue
Stay in touch! earthfirstdurango@riseup.net
http://groups.google.com/group/southwestearthfirst
PS if you are on Facebook (yeah yeah) please help us spread the word!
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The Archuleta BOCC is tentatively scheduled to vote on whether to support the Legislative Land Exchange at Wolf Creek on Tuesday, December 15th at 1:30pm at the County Court House BOCC public meeting.
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