Update!

I’m a few weeks late pointing this out here because, frankly, writing more than 140 characters is passé, but in case you missed it — and why would you? — my last article for VICE (all caps) had to do with a recent government study finding that reports of rape behind bars are on the rise. Go read the piece but, as always, not the comments.

Stockpiling inmates

I was unaware that Sarah Palin was still a meme, but the Democratic Party is apparently still using her to raise money and build their email lists. Apparently, because who cares enough to look it up, the former Alaska governor said the US government is "stockpiling bullets" to use against the public. And so a petition has been launched by the Democratic Governors Association to demand an apology because that is important:

Accusing our government of actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people is not only offensive and wrong -- it's downright dangerous. For Sarah Palin to insinuate that the United States is similar to the tyrannical governments in Syria and Iran who do carry out those types of atrocities is completely reprehensible.

Good on the governors for looping Iran into the mix, rather than a Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. President Hillary may have to bomb them someday, so it's important to lay the groundwork now. Sarah Palin and Iran: Bad. Got it.

Of course, the unfortunate thing is that the US government is "actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people" (no one cares about it using them against other people). You don't end up with 2.3 million Americans in prison cells by asking them nicely. You force them in at the point of a gun. The FBI alone gets over $8 billion a year to do this. Federal prisons get over $8 billion to keep them there.

Is that the same as the sort of political repression that goes on in Syria or Iran? No, it's different. The people getting shot in the streets by security forces are usually Black or Latino. And no one has anywhere near the size prison population that America does.

(via @FireTomFriedman)

Prison rape is no joke

As pundits and politicians fill the airwaves with talk of poll numbers and campaign strategies, there's a genuine epidemic of rape going on in the United States among the most marginalized segment of American society: the nation's more than 2.3 million incarcerated men, women and children.

According to a new survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, one in 10 people formerly imprisoned in a state cage reported that they were sexually abused during their most recent stint behind bars. LGBT inmates are abused the worst, 39 percent of gay male prisoners telling investigators they were assaulted by their fellow inmates.

But it wasn't just prisoners who were doing the assaulting, but -- can you believe it? -- the paid enforcers of state violence who are paid to daily dehumanize the chattel before them. Just Detention International, an organization which seeks to draw attention to the sexual assault of prisoners, notes in a press release that nearly a third of all prisoners "reported staff sexual harassment during showers and searches while undressing -- harassment that did not meet the Department of Justice's threshold for sexual abuse." Meanwhile, nearly half of those who were sexually abused by DOJ standards and "reported to a corrections official that they had been sexually abused by a staff member were themselves written up for an infraction." Inmates also reported that they were just as likely to be punished for reporting prisoner-on-prisoner abuse as they were to get the opportunity to speak to an investigator. More than a third said "facility staff did not respond at all."

"With such blatant retaliation for reporting abuse, it’s no wonder the vast majority of prisoner rape survivors choose to remain silent,” says Lovisa Stannow, JDI's executive director. The report "reaffirms the crisis of sexual abuse in U.S. detention, and of the government’s utter failure to protect people in its custody."

If you want evidence of a war on women and other living things, don't just pay attention to the formal goings-on in state legislatures -- look at the prisons and their hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. And keep in mind this depressing thought: that war is condoned by a bipartisan majority of politicians as well as a mainstream culture that thinks prison rape is more material for a stand-up routine than an appalling shock to one's humanity. The federal standard announced by DOJ to address this epidemic is welcome, but as the survey suggests: it's all in how the rules are enforced.

Wells Fargo's ties to the prison industry

Wells Fargo is one of the top five largest banks in America, a fact that on its own is damning enough, basic human decency not exactly being conducive to success in the financial industry. Despite, or rather because of, its role as one of the leading sub-prime mortgage lenders prior to the 2008 crash in the housing market, the bank was handed $37 billion from the U.S. government, a transfer of wealth from the foreclosed upon have-nots to the haves doing the foreclosing – people like chairman and CEO John Stumpf, whose compensation actually rose after his company’s de facto bankruptcy to a cool $18 million last year.

As Wells Fargo has grown over the years, using its bailout funds to gobble up rival Wachovia and expand to the East Coast, so has the U.S. prison population. By 2008, one in 100 American adults were either in jail or in prison – and one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34, many simply for non-violent offenses, justice not so much blind as bigoted. Overall, more than 2.3 million people are currently behind bars, up 50 percent in the last 15 years, the land of the free now accounting for a full quarter of the world’s prisoners.

These developments are not unrelated.

Read the rest at Salon.com.

Anticipation

Earlier this week Inter Press Service published a piece of mine on the situation at California's Kern Valley State Prison, where inmates are being forced to drink water that officials know contains twice the level of arsenic that's considered "safe" by the EPA and World Health Organization.

Now Scott Kernan, the undersecretary of operations for California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (i.e., the Department of Mass Incarceration), has issued a statement that pledges action! to address the problem. The money line:

"We anticipate fully resolving this problem by August 2012."

For a chuckle, here's what a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health told me less than two weeks ago about the plans to build an arsenic treatment facility at the prison:

“Construction should start within 6 months and take 1 year for completion."

That means, at the latest, the treatment facility should have been completed by February 2012. Now for some giggles, here's what the warden of the prison, a Mr. M.D. Biter, said in a memo issued last month:

"We anticipate resolving the problem by October 2012."

And now for some belly laughs, here's what the previous warden, Anthony Hedgpeth, said in a memo issued back in 2008:

"We anticipate resolving the problem by June 2009."

I anticipate having to write about this for . . . awhile.

Prisoners forced to drink arsenic-laced water

I have a piece up today for Inter Press Service about a California prison where more than 5,000 incarcerated men are being forced to drink water known to contain twice the legal limit of arsenic, a known carcinogen. Prison officials have known about the problem for more than five years but have done nothing more than publish a handful of memos wherein they claim to "anticipate" resolving the problem . . . someday.

Those two years of my life I spent as an environmental journalist in DC? Not wasted!

Photo Credit: woodley wonderworks