Free Republic

Happy Saturday, Two updates for you: US Capitol Rally: #JusticeforJ6 Yesterday I went on Steve Bannon's show to discuss the Wisconsin Report I sent you earlier this week. But I also made some news and announced our next rally: #JusticeforJ6 on September 18 at noon. And what's special about this rally is where it will take place, right back where it all started, at the US Capitol. You can see the clip from Bannon here: https://youtu.be/JJHNuvRwOus. We will personally attest to the injustice against the nonviolent protesters being held as political prisoners, the government's duplicity in concealing evidence, and the...

A Utah man who has been incarcerated in a Venezuelan jail since 2016 was on a flight home to the U.S., Venezuelan officials said Saturday. Joshua Holt, 26, has been jailed in Venezuela after he traveled to the South American country in the summer of 2016 to marry Thamara Candelo, whom he met on a website for Mormon singles. The two planned to return to the U.S. after getting married, but where jailed in El Hilcolde on what human rights groups said were largely trumped-up charges. “Good news about the release of the American hostage from Venezuela. Should be landing...

The Social Security Administration improperly paid children in juvenile detention facilities $1.7 million, according to a new audit. The inspector general for the agency found that just four states accounted for the improper disability payments. The estimate for fraudulent payments was "conservative" since the audit did not compile all data from the four states reviewed...*snip SEE POST #1* "While SSA had established overpayments for 274 of these juveniles, we identified 273 instances where SSA was unaware of all or part of the confinement period. We determined that 158 of these juveniles were confined for 6 months or longer without SSA's...

More than 1,000 critics of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio are expected to gather Saturday night for a rally to call for the closure of the sheriff's complex of canvas jail tents. Organizers say conditions in Arpaio's "Tent City" complex are inhumane. The sheriff has said he doesn't see any problems with housing inmates in tents and often points out that some members of the U.S. military live in tents.

A chilling look inside the minds of female prisoners unfolds on Thursday with the première of the new TLC show, Prison Diaries. The first episode of the series focuses on Emilia Carr, one of just 63 women on death row in the U.S. Carr is seen in ankle chains and handcuffs, led by a burly, fully-armed female guard as she leaves her cell. She wears bright orange overalls and trainers, her long, dark hair allowed to fall around her hunched shoulders.

Reporting from Sacramento — A panel of three federal judges, saying overcrowding in state prisons has deprived inmates of their right to adequate healthcare, tentatively ruled Monday that the state must reduce the population in those lockups by as many as 57,000 people. The judges issued the decisionafter a trial in two long-running cases brought by inmates to protest the state of medical and mental healthcare in the prisons. Although their order is not final, U.S. District Court Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt effectively told the state that it...

Federal authorities expect to identify and deport more than 200,000 immigrants who are convicted criminals serving time in prisons and jails across the country, the country’s top federal immigration enforcement official said Monday. The effort to speed the deportation of foreign-born criminals is part of a campaign by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to help federal and state prisons reduce the costs of housing immigrants, the official, Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of homeland security and head of the agency, said in an interview. In 2007, Ms. Myers said, the agency, known as ICE, brought formal immigration charges against...

One of the two Portland, Oregon, boys charged with felony sex abuse for swatting girls speaks out.

The Kennedy-Bush amnesty bill or the Comprehensive Immigration Reform must be defeated!

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- California will begin shipping thousands of inmates to prisons in four other states next month at a cost of more than $51 million a year, corrections officials said Friday. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared an emergency this month to speed up the no-bid contracts with two private companies. He said the transfers are needed to ease crowding in the nation's largest prison system, where more than 172,000 inmates are crowded into space designed for about 100,000, forcing some inmates to sleep in gymnasiums and auditoriums. The GEO Group Inc. of Florida will be paid an estimated $28.7...

While the media has obsessed over two high-profile cases in recent months involving improper handling of classified information, communications involving terrorists have been getting translated by people without any security clearances—and there’s been nary a whimper from most of the Washington press corps. There are 119 inmates in the federal prison system with “specific ties” to international Islamic terrorist organizations, and almost all of them are able to communicate with the outside world through phone calls and letters. (Full disclosure: this journalist broke the story on the front page of the Washington Times two weeks ago.) Not only did the...

Minnesota leads the nation in the rise of its prison population, which has grown about 45 percent in the last five years, largely because of increases in methamphetamine and sex offender cases. The number of prisoners in the state rose 13.2 percent, from 7,612 prisoners to 8,613 prisoners, from the year ended June 30, 2003, to the year ended June 30, 2004. The nationwide increase was 2.3 percent, with a total of 2.1 million people incarcerated in the nation's prisons and jails as of June 30, 2004, according to figures released Sunday by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Although...

WASHINGTON -- Insisting that border security is the federal government's job, senators from California, Arizona and Texas are demanding Washington chip in $6.4 billion to cover the cost of jailing undocumented criminals. It costs states an estimated $1 billion annually to jail undocumented immigrants who commit crimes on U.S. soil, but Congress last year appropriated just $305 million. Los Angeles County received $13.8 million toward its estimated costs of $80 million to $100 million. "This legislation is intended to remind the federal government to fulfill its duties and to help state and local governments deal with the burden that illegal...