Free Republic

It’s getting harder and harder to take Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seriously. She may be extremely popular on social media to radical progressives, keyboard social justice warriors, and left-wing bot accounts, but she’s losing her edge when it comes to promoting extreme ideas. Other radicals have been stealing her thunder, so her natural response is one of the most predictable we’ve seen in DC in recent years. She doubled down on crazy ideas. Her latest scheme was to attempt to make a logical argument for “abolishing prisons” by highlighting anecdotal incidents that represent a tiny portion of the prison population. Then,...

2020 Dem has pledged to ban private prisons Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren wants to ban private prisons because "no one should make a profit locking people up," but the senator has financially benefited from private prison companies in the past. The Massachusetts senator invested up to $50,000 in a Vanguard Group fund that owned hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares in leading private prison companies. Warren sold her stakes in that fund in exchange for a different retirement account in 2013. At the time, the fund was the largest shareholder of America's largest private prison corporation. Warren invested...

The Alaska Department of Corrections has agreed to policy changes to accommodate Muslim inmates who wish to practice their religion, settling a lawsuit brought last year. A federal judge Friday signed the agreement in a case brought on behalf of two Muslim inmates by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which argued that meals provided to the men during the holy month of Ramadan did not meet caloric standards under federal health guidelines. They also said the meals were cold when others received hot meals and sometimes contained pork at odds with their faith.

Shirley Skipper-Scott, the warden of the federal jail in New York City where wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein killed himself was reassigned out of that post by Attorney General William Barr, the Justice Department said. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons also placed two staffers at the Metropolitan Correctional Center who had been assigned to Epstein’s cell unit on administrative leave pending ongoing investigations into Epstein’s death. Epstein, a former friend of Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, was being held without bail on child sex trafficking charges at the times of his death.

So much injustice everywhere. Those deserving of severe punishment and/or execution don't receive it, and yet this man with all of his wealth and connections does die? Now, reports say his cell mate was transferred prior to his death. If all of those inmates who haven't been executed for crimes far worse than Jeffrey's haven't been executed, isn't it time for prison reform?

SunTrust Banks Inc said on Monday it will no longer provide future financing to companies that manage private prisons and immigration holding facilities. "This decision was made after extensive consideration of the views of our stakeholders on this deeply complex issue," the company said in a statement.

While it should be obvious that women’s prisons are for convicted criminals who are female, California Senate Bill 132, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Weiner (D–San Francisco), requires men who say they are women to be housed in women’s prisons.The State Senate passed the bill in May, and it passed the state Assembly with very little opposition on June 25. The bill demands that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation ask prisoners their preferred pronouns and gender identity at intake, then house them accordingly. This means that a man need only say at intake that he is a woman...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here.

An amendment (HR 5, the Equality Act) to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sponsored by 234 Democrats and two Republicans in the House of Representatives would compel schools to allow boys who claim to be girls to participate in girls' gym classes, play on girls' interscholastic athletic teams, and use the same locker rooms and showers. Religious schools would not be exempted from this new regulation. It would also require that biologically male criminals who claim to be women to be sent to women's prisons. Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) hailed the legislation as "the logical next step in our...

Nearly 3 percent of illegal immigrants in Arizona end up in state prison or jail during the course of a year — four times the rate of U.S. citizens and legal residents, according to a study that uses federal reimbursements for prisons and jails to try to calculate one of the most important yet elusive statistics in the immigration debate. In New Jersey, illegal immigrants are incarcerated five times more often, and rates on the West Coast are triple that of legal residents and citizens, according to the study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR based its calculations...

I had an epiphany (or is "epilepsy" the word I want?) Schumer & Pelosi are right! Not just border walls. All over the US, there are federal, state & county facilities with walls & guards that heartlessly separate men from their families. These walls clearly do NOT work! For when these prisons were built, we were promised they would deter crime. And have you noticed any lessening of crime? No way! It's gotten WORSE. Clearly, these walls are total failures. And walls tear apart innocent families. How many young boys & girls are kept apart from their fathers by these...

In a statement, Mr. Kushner played down his role. "For all those who are deserving of a second chance, this legislation will make a meaningful and measurable difference in their lives," he said. "We could not have reached this point without the leadership and vision of the president."

As a former federal prosecutor, I am clear-eyed about crime. Unlike some reformers, I don’t think our justice system is fundamentally broken, unjust, or corrupt. I have nothing but respect for law-enforcement officials, who put themselves in danger every single day in order to protect the public. I know from experience that dangerous criminals exist — individuals who are incapable of or uninterested in rehabilitation and change. We should throw the book at those people. But my time as a prosecutor also tells me that not every criminal is dangerous or incapable of living a productive life. My faith as...

The liberal media trashed Cliven Bundy back in 2014 for using a word that Dr. Martin Luther King used profusely until his murder: "Negro" And the "conservative media" ala Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin also headed for the exits over the matter. But this week the liberal media decided to "come to Jesus" and give Cliven, Ammon and Ryan Bundy some attention for their views on immigration because it appeared to help their anti-Trump cause. But as pointed out in a previous post Ammon Bundy's call for a "process" to be followed to allow some of the migrants...

The Ministry of Justice has blocked a study examining why so many convicts and prisoners in the UK are converting to Islam and turning to extremism. A so-called “corporate culture” in the government department was blamed for the move, with officials allegedly worried about what the academic study might unearth or reveal. Many of the UK’s homegrown extremists have converted to Islam in jail, including the Westminster terrorist attacker Khalid Masood, with some prisons allegedly controlled by Islamic gangs and prisoners forced to covert for their own protection.

The Texas prison system is changing its denture policy — creating a dedicated denture clinic and hiring a prosthodontic specialist — in an effort to ensure that more inmates get teeth. The move to amp up dental care comes after a Houston Chronicle investigation found that toothless and nearly toothless inmates in Texas prisons were routinely being denied dentures and instead offered pureed food. “We want to see more dentures prescribed,’ said Dr. Lanette Linthicum, medical director for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Aside from the new policy proposal and clinic creation, the prison system plans to review denture-related...

Inmate No. 15000-030 is released into the frigid January morning at 8:46, a gray custodial suit of sweatpants and long-sleeved thermal clinging to his immense frame, a bushy salt-and-pepper beard wrapping around his face, a guard escorting him with a high-powered rifle slung over his right shoulder... At the time of his political rise, the Iowa GOP was being subdivided into three sects: libertarian, evangelical, and establishment. The latter two factions had long warred for control of the state party, but it was the “liberty movement” that was muscularly ascendant in 2008 thanks to Ron Paul’s iconoclastic campaign... He believed...

1.5 mill per day

To the jailers of California, the Mexican Mafia is known as 'the gang of gangs'...“They have the ability to turn gangs that are historically sworn enemies that fight on the streets into allies when they come inside our jail system,” said Commander Joseph Dempsey of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Quinones says the gang’s power extended as its 30-year reputation for viciousness in the jail system won the allegiance of Latino street gangs throughout Southern California. “The Mexican Mafia’s influence and importance to Southern California goes far far beyond the prisons now,” Quinones told The Daily Beast. “I came...

The Trump administration has rolled back protections for transgender prison inmates introduced under former President Barack Obama after some prisoners challenged the policies in court. An inmate’s biological sex will now be used to make the initial decision as to where transgender prisoners are housed, instead of the gender to which they identify, according to a change in guidelines announced on Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. The move, decried by transgender rights advocates, comes after four women held at a Texas detention center filed a federal lawsuit. The inmates argued that the previous prison guidelines, introduced in January...