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City/Nation Watch
jail & prison policy
Greene County Jail At the end of September face-to-face meetings in the Greene County Jail will be a thing of the past. The story broke in major local news outlets in the last week or so of August. The Jail will now require inmates to communicate to outsiders solely through video chat via service provided by the private company Gettingout. This comes just shortly after restrictions on written communication. The Jail now only permits postcards to be sent or received. Of course, lawyers are exempt from both these rules but these restrictions on communication tear into people’s lives. They also cause financial burdens as third-party middle-services like Gettingout charge fees for their use. These changes come in the first year of returns on a new countywide sales tax that was approved Nov 2016, meaning a budget increase for the Jail and County Sheriff ’s Office. They’ve used most of that new money to begin an expansion to the jail and maintain temporary extra inmate housing in outside trailers. They are maximizing returns and minimizing staff effort through outsourcing services to private companies, and transferring costs and work onto families and inmates. They are no doubt constructing a maximally efficient new structure too, ready to process and hold large quantities of inmates with as little staff as possible. The ACLU lost a case regarding postcard limitations shortly before Greene County instituted theirs, and the move to video chat as a sole visitation option has become increasingly common across the country. Prison Strike! This all comes at a time when attention and interest in jail and prison reform across the nation is burgeoning. August 21st marked the beginning of nationwide prison strikes. Organized by prisoner members of the IWOC (Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee), these strikes and the demonstrations associated with them have officially spread to dozens of prisons and ICE detainee facilities. They’ve been coordinated in conjunction with outside solidarity demonstrations and have already begun to win small concessions, like the lowering of phone call costs in one prison. As one may infer from the above, it can be hard to communicate to the outside from within prison, but from prisoners being paid pennies to fight fires in California to the recent headline news of Texas spending $7 million to legally fight $4 million in demanded air conditioning in their prisons, these issues are getting more mainstream attention. Please seek out incarceratedworkers.org to learn more.
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Local Yokel Poetry Little Country Looking exactly like Johnny Cash I put on black boots and murder my evil darling. Delia's gone, Though I called her apple-sweet on the phone She was sitting orange-breasted like an oriole Last spring we were suplexing each other in the yard Our thirst for anger When she was a strong root twisted under the rocks Or a vein of diamond And I am mining her now on the hooked rug in the parlor An evil thing and a wicked thing together
Pam My imagination furnishes the plastic stroke on iron hair In the mornings Tying knots alone Smoke styling a bracelet for each wristÍž Now painting the bathroom Lyndhurst Celestial Blue Fingers dripping noxious Painting the bags of your eyes almost to match the skin of your face