Major International Leaders Plead for the US and the World to Get Smart and Stop the War on Drugs

The Commission on Drug Policy urged a shift from incarceration to consideration of a full range of alternatives, from decriminalization to legalization and regulation.

Check it out!  This is NOT a boring meeting.  This meeting (Aug 23, 2011) could have only happened due to the courage and strong acts of prisoner hunger strikers!

http://www.calchannel.com/channel/viewVideo/2949
(part 1 of 2)

http://www.calchannel.com/channel/viewvideo/2950
(part 2 of 2)

For very detailed notes (almost complete transcript), click here:

http://redwoodcurtaincopwatch.net/files/ASSEMBLY HEARING_'transcript'5.pdf

Prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison (Crescent City, California) will begin an indefinite hunger strike July 1, 2011 to protest the cruel and inhumane conditions of their imprisonment.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
has been found guilty of constitutional rights violations by federal courts, and its practice of long-term isolation, particularly at Pelican Bay, has been identified by human rights monitors as constituting a form of psychological torture.

The lives of the prisoners who say they are going to participate in the strike are at great risk.

Locally and All Over the Country

Brothers of Chris Burgess, killed by Eureka cop 4 years ago, Oct 23rd

Christopher        Jan 6 1990 ~ October 23 2006

California Street, Eureka CA October 23, 2010

New research shows precisely how the prison-to-poverty cycle does its damage.

By Sasha Abramsky, Posted Friday, Oct. 8, 2010

Forty years after the United States began its experimentation with mass incarceration policies, the country is increasingly divided economically. In new research published in the review Daedalus, a group of leading criminologists coordinated by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (which paid me to consult on this project) argued that much of that growing inequality, which Slate's Timothy Noah has chronicled, is linked to the increasingly widespread use of prisons and jails.

[article in The Economist!]

Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little

Jul 22nd 2010 | Spring, Texas

THREE pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved against a wall and frisked for weapons. He was forced into a chair for four hours while officers ransacked his house. They pulled out drawers, rifled through papers, dumped things on the floor and eventually loaded 37 boxes of Mr Norris’s possessions onto their pickups. They refused to tell him what he had done wrong. “It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” he recalls.

Rough Justice [article in The Economist!]

America locks up too many people, some for acts that should not even be criminal

Jul 22nd 2010 | Spring, Texas

IN 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, which bars Americans from breaking foreign rules when hunting or fishing. The original intent was to prevent Americans from, say, poaching elephants in Kenya. But it has been interpreted to mean that they must abide by every footling wildlife regulation on Earth. The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece. Two are still in jail.