Some folks tell me that I should listen to "all sides", instead of
staying with the information sources that I use. But to my way of
thinking, the actions of the American Corporate Empire speak far
louder than all the glossy words they can babble.
And for that matter, it's the same garbage that Every Single Empire
has uttered since the first man crawled out of his cave. Actually, it
was the first woman, since the first man was too lazy to get off his
butt and find something to eat.
We Americans have been told so often that we are, "Special", that we
believe it. Just like the Good Book tells us that God Created Man in
His Image, and put man over all the other animal life. Either it was
all made up out of Man's big head, or God has proven the He is not
infallible.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/21/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2017/8148/814852.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 48 December 25, 2017
Report documents over 100 prisoners killed with Tasers
BY TERRY EVANS
One brutal aspect of the capitalist rulers’ criminal “justice” system
that has received little publicity is prison guards using Tasers against
workers locked up in U.S. jails and prisons. A special report released
by Reuters Dec. 6 documents the deaths of 104 inmates, nearly all since
2000 when the weapon became widely used. Over two-thirds of those killed
were already immobilized — handcuffed or held down by officers — before
guards armed with the “nonlethal” weapon shot them.
The report described hundreds more instances where cops used Tasers to
assault people in jail that were not fatal. When cops in Franklin
County, Ohio, arrested Martini Smith in 2009, they told the pregnant
woman to strip naked and remove all her jewelry. They deemed her too
slow obeying their command to remove a stud from her tongue. Smith had
been handcuffed for the previous six hours and said she needed help. So
they stunned her with a Taser. She miscarried five days later.
Smith and eight other former inmates won a lawsuit against Franklin
County prison officials for allowing guards to use Tasers 180 times
between January 2008 and May 2010. The case detailed how guards used
Tasers in “callous and sadistic” ways “to inflict pain, fear, corporal
punishment and humiliation.”
On May 5 this year Tory Sanders, a mentally ill inmate, was stunned
three times with a Taser at the Mississippi County jail, in Missouri,
Reuters reports, when he refused to leave his cell after being detained
on a misdemeanor warrant. He died shortly afterwards.
Because of the drastic decline in mental health facilities in the U.S.
today, thousand of workers who are having trouble coping end up behind
bars.
The website of Taser International Products says the weapons work by
hitting a person with 50,000 volts. They can either be used in “probe
mode,” causing muscle contraction to incapacitate someone, or in “drive
stun mode,” which simply inflicts sharp pain.
Following publication of the Reuters report, Nils Melzer, the U.N.
special rapporteur on torture, urged the U.S. government to investigate
the deaths. He cited four jails in particular where Tasers are used to
inflict “grave abuse” on inmates — Franklin County, Ohio; Cheatham
County, Tennessee; Franklin County, Arkansas; and McCurtain County,
Oklahoma.
In all four counties working people have been hard hit by the economic
and social effects of today’s crisis of capitalism. Each has a higher
than average poverty rate. In Franklin County, Ohio, deaths from opioid
overdoses were up 88 percent from last year.
Amid this carnage, prison authorities’ brutal use of Tasers is one part
of the capitalist rulers efforts to keep those they consider the
“dangerous class” in check. And the deadly consequences are one more
indication that the role of the capitalist “justice” system is to
intimidate and break working people.
Taser International made a special effort to market their guns to
California prison officials, because of the large numbers of workers
behind bars there, some 126,000 in 34 different facilities. Los Angeles
County jails hold about 17,000 people a day. This year San Bernardino
County paid out $2.8 million to settle class action lawsuits involving
prisoners who the guards persistently used Tasers on at the county jail
there. These included prisoners in cruel and degrading “hazing rituals”
and the routine use of stun guns on inmates while they slept in their
cells at night.
Most of the deaths and abuse occurred in state and county jails, where a
big majority of the 2.2 million workers in U.S. prisons are incarcerated.
The brutal and degrading use of Tasers is just one of the abuses
inflicted on prisoners. An estimated 80,000 prisoners were kept in
dehumanizing solitary confinement in state and federal prisons in 2015.
Three state governments allow the sentencing of inmates to solitary
units for up to 10 years for a single violation of prison rules.
Conditions like these led thousands of prisoners in California — where
solitary confinement has been widely used — to go on a series of hunger
strikes that won widespread support from working people across the
country. Faced with the protests, state officials there were forced to
pull back. The use of solitary confinement fell by over 50 percent
between 2013 and 2016, the rights group Solitary Watch reports.
Related articles:
‘Militant’ wins victory over prison censorship
Florida officials lift ban on socialist paper
Holiday greetings to workers behind bars from the ‘Militant’
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