Life at FCI Alderson - Martha Stewart's Home For the Next 5 Months

It's been called "Camp Cupcake" in the media, but the federal prison for women at Alderson, WV will hardly be cushy for Martha Stewart.

Founded by representatives of 21 women's organizations in the 1920's, Alderson was the first federal prison for women. It's purpose was to protect women from the many kinds of abuse suffered while being incarcerated with men. The visionary founders believed that if female prisoners were treated with dignity and self-respect and given opportunities for education, they could earn a living and care for themselves and their families after their release.

Today Alderson is run on the typical military model of administration where intimidation and humiliation support the power and control male guards have over the female prisoners. The mostly male staff can order pat-down searches at any time and wander freely into the women's sleeping and bathing quarters.

Clare Hanrahan, an anti-war activist, spent 6 months at Alderson as a consequence of peaceful protest against the US Army School of Americas. She wrote this article about her experience there. An article in the Smoky Mountain News also talks about her experince. Hanrahan wrote the book Conscience & Consequence: A Prison Memoir about her time at Alderson and the abuses of the federal prison system. The book is available from the author's web site.

"Senseless Killings, Flagrant Abuse of Police Power, Willful Disregard of Prisoners' Rights"

Democray Now 9/28/04 show clip.

"Senseless Killings, Flagrant Abuse of Police Power, Willful Disregard of Prisoners' Rights" - A Look at Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio *

Democracy Now takes a look at Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Abuses and killings have been documented in his county's notorious "tent-city" jail where detailed reports about deaths and riots are illegally withheld from public inspection.

Listen/Watch/Read

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/28/1427243

"Incarceration, Inc." - The Nation

"If you want to win a political race in the little south-central Arizona town of Florence, look for work in the area or just hear the local gossip, chances are pretty high that you'll find your way to Gibby's Bar. All day long, behind its old saloon doors, along its dim interior, that's where the town drinks. Surrounded by slightly absurd-looking saguaro cacti and harsh scrub-desert, along with a smattering of cotton fields and pecan farms, Florence is a raw town whose men and women drink hard and talk a talk from which more delicately constituted big-city dwellers might recoil in horror. The copper miners--the few who are left after decades of downsizing--come here after a day's work in their union jobs in the surrounding red-rock mountains. And so do the prison guards."

Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040719&s=abramsky&c=1

What Is It Like To Be a Prison Librarian?

Here's an interesting article on books, prison libraries, and prisoners written by a library intern at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility in Napanoch, NY. Many facilities don't have libraries like the one described here.

The Great Escape

Much of what the library does is merely palliative, and colludes with the other parts of the prison to keep things quiet. But if they believed crowd control was their only function, librarians would flee from prisons. The library, and the librarian too, work a paradox. Help men by control, control men by help. It's something they don't teach in library school.

new Jailhouse Lawyer Handbook

The new Jailhouse Lawyer Handbook put out by the National Lawyer's Guild is now available on the internet.

http://www.nlg.org/resources/resources.htm

Sentenced to Literature Class

"Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL) is a program that began in Massachusetts in response to a growing need within our criminal justice system to find alternatives to incarceration. Burdened by expense and repeat offenders, our prisons can rarely give adequate attention to the needs of inmates and, thus, do little else than warehouse our criminals. Disturbed by the lack of real success by prisons to reform offenders and affect their patterns of behavior, Professor Robert Waxler and Judge Robert Kane discussed using literature as a way of reaching hardened criminals."

The result was an exemplary alternative sentencing program in Massachusetts and several other states where in addition to probation, criminal offenders take part in literature reading groups. By reading and discussing classic books, they gain new insight into their lives and potentially realize that there may be a different way to live their lives.

A five-year study of the program in New Bedford, MA looked at the numbers and types of offenses committed by CLTL graduates. The study showed an impressive reduction in both misdemeanors and felonies.

We applaud this innovative program as proof that books can indeed open doors!