13 Blue Diamonds Persuasions

Order of Authority

2020-08-04T12:04:00.002-04:00

Order of Authority

What is Title of Law?

Under the Constitution of the United States, there are three different jurisdictions.

They are: 1) Equity 2) Admiralty 3) Maritime

Which of these three are the People of the United States being govern under?

Black people still are governed under:

Article 1; Section 2; Clause 3: Three-fifths (3/5) of a person.

Which activates:

Article III; Section 2; of the Constitution of the

United States with the Equity Law which takes away

the Title of civil police to police.

This Law has clothed police with the authority

that includes misuse of power under the Color of Law.

The reason police do not get convicted and the Union works behind the scenes with the

judges and prosecutors is because of this Color of Law (Qualified Immunity).

To change the Order of Authority you must start at the foundation which it is based upon:

Article 1; Section 2; Clause 3: Three-fifths (3/5) of a person*

Followed by:

Article III; Section 2; of the Constitution of the United States with the Equity Law and change the name of Police to Civil Police.

We the People want Laws to Change

To All B.L.M. Members

In the Name of: George Floyd, R.I.P.

Sincerely, Tyrone Samuel

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Smoke Filled Room

2020-07-09T17:30:00.003-04:00

In U.S. political jargon, a smoke-filled room is a term for a secret political gathering or round table style decision-making process. The phrase is generally used to suggest an inner circle of power brokers, as at a convention. It suggests a cabal of powerful or well-connected, cigar-smoking men meeting privately to nominate a dark horse political candidate or otherwise make decisions without regard for the will of the larger group.

A Smoke Filled Room has the effect and obstacles to hinder one's perception. It is seeing a beautiful woman across the a room, you set out to get near her to make her acquaintance, and, when you get there she isn't as beautiful as you thought. Things aren't as they appear to be!

The most notable Smoke Filled Rooms are the ones that are frequently encountered as bars, taverns, clubs, house parties and speakeasy's!

These Smoke Filled Rooms exist everywhere: WORLDWIDE.

However, allow me to touch upon a few that come to mind that are close to home and heart here in America: My Beautiful Black Families who reside here on this land mass.

Feeling the First effects of The Smoke Filled Room:

I wish to point out the so called colonist who raided the Motherland, implementing games of lies and deceit. Telling Blacks of that continent they would receive gold for their labor. This was compounded by the fact that they used our very own brothers as co-conspirators in the furtherance of the entrapment and enslavement of their very own Black people.

They blatantly showed the WORLD how much they valued Black lives. Building this country at the cheapest expense possible, with no regard for the Black Family or Black lives! These Black families were considered 3/5's of a human being from the 16th to the 19th century.

In 1864, at the end of this enslavement period, there were approximately 30 million Blacks missing and/or unaccounted for, and from the estimated 100 million taken from the Motherland, more than 3 out of 4 died before reaching the shores of this so called nation of America. That's 75% or 75 million!

Few nations today could survive a holocaust of this magnitude. They would suffer annihilation, extinction or worse. Total destruction and complete obliteration!

To add insult to the misery endured by the Black families, there has been no mention or offering of Reparations to compensate those directly or indirectly affected by these atrocities!

To show you yet another blatant example of The Smoke Filled Room: America shows just how much, or should I say how little "Black Lives Matter!" Just take a look at the situation faced by Brother George Floyd. The lives of the animals and their well being is more important to America than our Black lives.

America has been taking the lives of our brothers, sisters and our children since the early 16th century, and very few, if any, have been held accountable for their actions.

Those that are herded into these modern day concentration camps are destined to continue enriching this country with free labor, thereby furthering the goals of America the Beautiful! I use that term very loosely, mind you.

The very system that is charged with imposing sanctions and justice, reside with the original supremacist and offenders of Black lives. They are free to roam our environment and continue the endeavors instituted by the early settlers in America.

However, if the supreme beings happen to be Black, that same System will ensure that those individuals spend the major part of their lives, if not all of it, in solitude within our so modern day concentration camps. In most instances, the sentence imposed is illegal in and of itself!

The Smoke Filled Room:

Things aren't as they appear to be, and hence,

the effects of the Smoke:

As Smoke is known to do,

Sudden Death!

THERE IS NO LOVE HERE (AMERICA) FOR ME OR MINE!!!

My name is 13 Diamonds Persuasions

ID# 98B1045

I am currently being held at

Woodbourne Correctional Facility, New York State

13 Blue Diamonds Persuasions

2020-04-17T18:37:00.001-04:00

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LifePlusUs@gmail.com

The Science of Nature: Nature's Flu Shot

2018-01-19T22:01:00.003-05:00

The Science of Nature: Nature's Flu Shot

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The Science of Nature: Nature's Flu Shot

2018-01-19T22:01:00.001-05:00

The Science of Nature: Nature's Flu Shot

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Blackionista: Whitney: A Life in Pictures

2016-02-21T23:22:00.001-05:00

Blackionista: Whitney: A Life in Pictures

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A Sit Down with My Father

2015-12-23T16:02:00.002-05:00

A Sit Down with My Father
by: Ghostwriter

We never even Held a Conversation,

You Never Taught me How to shave.

No pointer on How to Pick up the Girls,

I Missed that Birds and Bees Talk.

Technically, you're my Father,

but, I prefer to call you the Sperm Donor.

It wasn't Prison, a call of duty for the Army's business,

Emergencies, cancer or any or that stuff that

Kept you out of My Life!

You Simply Chose to Abandon Your First Born.

THAT'S DEEP!

For many Years I couldn't Comprehend

WHAT I DID TO CHASE YOU AWAY?

FROM ME?

I asked myself, over and over WHY? What Did I do?

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New York's Black Sites

2014-04-30T15:46:00.000-04:00

Unlock The Box: The Fight Against Solitary Confinement in New York

As a movement against punitive segregation in local prisons and jails, a new report by the New York Civil Liberties Union reveals more disturbing details than ever before.

Americans Receive Sentences to Slavery from Our Courts

2014-03-31T13:50:00.000-04:00

Under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:

All prisoners in America are considered slaves!

We look at slavery like its a thing of the past, but you can go to any penitentiary in this nation and you will see slavery. That was the reason for the protests by prisoners in Georgia in 2010. They said they were tired of being treated like slaves. People need to know that when they sit on trial juries and sentence people to prison time that they are sentencing them to slavery!

Juries Are Sentencing Americans to Slavery....A Must Read for every

American Citizen!

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2014-02-24T16:53:00.000-05:00

The New Asylums

Jails like Cook County's are the nation's new insane asylums

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told newsmagazine "60 Minutes" during Sunday's feature on the repercussions untreated mental illness in America.

"There's no denying that jails and prisons are the new insane asylums -- that's what we are," Dart said .

"This is a population the people don't care about," Dart said of mentally ill inmates who languish in lockup or make return visits -- sometimes hundreds of times over. "As a result of that, there are not the resources out there to care for them."

Watch NOW! CNN Video Interview

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Have Inmates Become Commodities On Wall Street?

2013-11-20T05:02:00.000-05:00

Prison populations are constantly growing, recessions lead to overcrowded government prisons, and the government will look to private firms to house the excess inmate population.

Crime always goes up in a bad economy. Where's there are good times and jobs are plentiful, people who get out of prison can usually find work

and don't have to go back to their old ways.

When the economy fails, so do the former inmates.

Private prison populations have increased faster than the entire incarcerated population. During the last decade, the total prison population grew by 16%. Simultaneously, the number of federal prisoners in private facilities grew by 120%, while the number of state prisoners in private facilities grew by 33%.

According to the state government of California, the average cost to house an individual prisoner for one year is a whopping $47,102. By comparison, the average income for an American individual is $47,200, according to the CIA(GDP per capita purchasing power parity).

The prison industry could be nearing a turning point. Millions of inmates, a very large portion of the total prison population, are serving time for non-violent drug crimes – a group that could decrease in size with looser drug enforcement laws, like the recent decriminalization of marijuana use in Connecticut where Gov. Malloy said that he would prefer to use the criminal justice resources for more serious and violent crime.

“… in a time of declining crime rates and tight state budgets, smart reforms are gaining ground, and most aim to reduce the prison population,” writes The Economist.

Interested in conducting your own research into the private prison industry? To help you out, here is a list of the two largest companies in the industry. Where do you think these stocks are heading?

1. Corrections Corporation of America (CXW): Property Management industry with a market cap of $2.4B. It specializes in owning, operating, and managing prisons and other correctional facilities and providing inmate residential and prisoner transportation services for governmental agencies. As of December 31, 2010, it operated 66 correctional and detention facilities, including 45 facilities that it owns, with a total design capacity of approximately 90,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

As of December 31, 2010, it was also constructing an additional 1,124-bed correctional facility in Millen, Georgia. It also owns two additional correctional facilities that it leases to third-party operators. Its facilities offer a range of rehabilitation and educational programs, including basic education, religious services, life skills and employment training, and substance abuse treatment. It also provides healthcare (including medical, dental, and psychiatric services), food services, and work and recreational programs.

2. The GEO Group, Inc. (GEO): Security & Protection Services industry with a market cap of $1.45B. It is a provider of government-outsourced services specializing in the management of correctional, detention, mental health, residential treatment and re-entry facilities, and the provision of community-based services and youth services in the United States, Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Canada.

It operates a range of correctional and detention facilities, including maximum, medium and minimum security prisons, immigration detention centers, minimum security detention centers, mental health, residential treatment and community-based, re-entry facilities. It offers counseling, education and/or treatment to inmates with alcohol and drug abuse problems at most of the domestic facilities, which it manages. It also provides secure transportation services for offender and detainee populations as contracted.

Don't allow human beings to become commodities like oil or pork bellies

on Wall Street!

Demand that bailed-out banks and businesses like Wells Fargo divest in GEO and CXW, companies that make their money off of incarcerating our families and neighbors for longer and in more harsh conditions--for profit be shut down!

Remember- if you have a Wells Fargo account, this is a great day to put your money in a bank that doesn’t devastate families and communities!

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The New Jim Crow

2013-05-22T10:34:00.000-04:00

By: Michelle Alexander

Fifty years ago, James Baldwin accused his country and his countrymen of destroying hundreds of thousands of black lives. They “do not know it and do not want to know it,” he wrote. “It is their innocence which constitutes the crime.”

Today, in the era of mass incarceration and supposed colorblindness, the white guilt of the Civil Rights era has exhausted itself, as Barack Obama has observed, and the number of African American lives we destroy through not knowing now runs in the millions.

The New Jim Crow is for people “who do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration.” It’s a book to end not knowing.

Is this the willful art of not knowing? It is essentially this: The system of mass incarceration that has resulted in putting one out of every 31 adults behind bars, on probation or on parole, is merely a redesign of the two race-based caste systems that parallels a chilling truth.

1 in 87 working-aged white men is in prison or jail compared with

1 in 36 Hispanic men,

and 1 in 12 African-American men.

There are those who persist in believing that African Americans deserve to be locked up at a higher rate than whites because they commit more crimes. However, the impact of the discretion our law enforcement agencies enjoy in deciding where drug laws are enforced and where they’re not is asinine. Where are illegal drugs more likely to be found than at a fraternity house? Yet how often are frat houses subject to early morning police raids?

Once branded a criminal, people enter a parallel social universe in which they are stripped of the rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. The old forms of discrimination—employment and housing discrimination, denial of basic public benefits and the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service—are perfectly legal again. In some major American cities, more than half of working-age African American men are saddled with criminal records and thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These men are part of a growing under caste—not class, caste—a group of people, defined largely by race, who are relegated to a permanent, second-class status by law.

The question for those who see the racial inequity as merely an unintended consequence of the War on Drugs is: If the consequences are unintended, then why aren’t we willing to change the drug laws to eliminate the inequity?

The New Jim Crow is a call to high-stakes caring across color lines—the kind of revolutionary, grassroots caring that will certainly cost us our innocence and some of our material advantages. But it can also restore the moral force at the heart of the civil rights movement and ensure that we finally listen to—and advocate for—criminals. Read it and be ashamed and angry for the lives and innocence lost.

Read it and start a revolution of caring

TLW
LifePlusUs

Reinvented African Americans

2013-02-20T17:32:00.000-05:00

These are the first black Americans to realize pioneering achievements in their fields. With talent and determination, each one has reinvented not only what it means to be an African American, but also what it means to be an American. Our list celebrates the first African Americans to overcome the obstacles of discrimination and achieve top honors in

their fields of endeavor.

1. Marian Anderson

First black member of the Metropolitan Opera Company, in 1955.

2. Arthur Ashe

First black man to win a Wimbledon singles title, defeating Jimmy Connors in 1975.

3. Halle Berry

First African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Actress, in 2001 for Monster's Ball.

4. Beyoncé

In October 2003, black artists held all "Billboard" Top Ten chart positions for the first time in pop history. Beyoncé was No. 1.

5. James Hubert (Eubie) Blake

Composed first Broadway musical written and directed by African-Americans.

6. Guion Bluford

First African-American astronaut to launch into space, in 1983.

7. Gwendolyn Brooks

First black to receive a Pulitzer Prize, in 1950.

8. Ralph Bunche

First African-American to win a Nobel Peace Prize, in 1950.

9. Shirley Chisholm

First black woman elected to Congress, in 1968 (from Brooklyn to 91st Congress).

10. Nat King Cole

First back entertainer to host his own show on national television, in 1956.

11. Elbert Frank Cox

First African-American to earn a PhD in Mathematics, in 1925 (Cornell University).

12. Benjamin Oliver Davis

First black appointed to the rank of general, in 1940. His son, Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr., was the first black general in the Air Force.

13. Frederick Douglass

First black to receive a major US government appointment, in 1877.

14. Rita Dove

First black female US Poet Laureate, 1993-1995.

15. Keith Ellison

First Black Muslim elected to U.S Congress, in 2006 from Minnesota.

16. Althea Gibson

First African-American to play in the US Open, winning the tournament twice, in 1957 and 1958.

17. Whitney Houston

First artist ever to have seven consecutive singles hit number one.

18. Dr. Mae Jemison

First black woman astronaut to launch into space, in 1992.

19. Jack Johnson

First African-American world heavyweight boxing champion, in 1908.

20. Robert Johnson

The owner of Black Entertainment Television, Johnson became the first black billionaire in 2001.

21. Simmie Knox

First black artist to paint an official presidential portrait (Bill Clinton).

22. John Mercer Langston

First African-American elected to public office, in 1855 in Ohio.

23. Oliver Lewis

First jockey to win the Kentucky Derby, in 1875. Thirteen of the 14 jockeys in the first Derby were black.

24. Reginald Lewis

First black person to own a billion-dollar company, TLC Beatrice Lewis opened TLC Group, a venture capital firm.

25. Thurgood Marshall

First African-American appointed to the Supreme Court, in 1963.

26. Hattie McDaniel

First African-American to win an Oscar, in 1940 for Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind.

27. James Meredith

First black graduate of the University of Mississippi, in 1963.

28. Carol Moseley-Braun

First black woman to serve on the U.S. Senate, in 1992 from Illinois.

29. Toni Morrison

First black to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993.

30. Barack Obama

First African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, 1991.

31. Sidney Poitier

First African-American to win Oscar for best actor ("Lillies of the Field," 1963). First black nominated for Best Actor Academy Award ("The Defiant Ones," 1958). First black to star as romantic lead ("Paris Blues," 1961). First black to become number-one box office draw (1968). First black to insist on a film crew at least 50% African-American ("The Lost Man," 1969). First black to kiss a white woman on screen ("Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," 1967).

32. Colin L. Powell

First black chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 1989, and first black Secretary of State, in 2001.

33. Charley Pride

First African-American inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, in 2000.

34. Joseph Rainey

First black Congressman, in 1870 from South Carolina.

35. Phylicia Rashad

First black woman to win Tony Award for dramatic lead on Broadway, in 2004, role of Lena Younger in "A Raisin in the Sun."

36. Hiram R. Revels

First black member of the U.S. Senate (R-Miss), in 1870, sworn in to fill unexpired term of Jefferson Davis.

37. Condoleezza Rice

First black woman Secretary of State, in 2005.

38. Jackie Robinson

First black major league baseball player, in 1947, and first black player elected to Baseball Hall of Fame, in 1962.

39. Carl Stokes

First black mayor of a major American city, in 1967 (Cleveland).

40. Willie Thrower

First black NFL quarterback, in 1953.

41. Alexander Lucius Twilight

First black college graduate, in 1823 from Middlebury College.

42. Emlen Tunnell

First black elected to the Football Hall of Fame, in 1967 (defensive back, New York Giants).

43. Madam C. J. Walker

First self-made African American woman millionaire.

44. L. Douglas Wilder

The first black governor elected by popular vote, 1990 (Virginia).

45. Daniel Hale Williams

Founded the first black-owned hospital in America, and credited with the world's first successful heart surgery, in 1893 (Chicago).

46. Tiger Woods

First African-American to win the Masters golf tournament, in 1997.

47. Andrew Young

First black U.S. Representative to the UN, in 1977.

48. Eric Holder

In 2008, he became the first African-American attorney general designate in the United States.

49. George Poage

First African-American to win a medal in the Olympic Games

50. Alain Locke

First African-American Rhodes scholar

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New York's Black Sites

2012-07-13T05:26:00.000-04:00

An illustration of Auburn Prison from Harper's Weekly, December 18, 1858.

Johnny Tremont’s trip to solitary confinement started with having too many postage stamps. Until then, he’d been a model prisoner. When Tremont (whose name in this article has been changed at his request) entered the New York prison system at age 20, he was a well-spoken kid from an upstate college town who excelled at pretty much anything he put his mind to. In high school, he’d put his mind to dealing cocaine. Once he was sent to Five Points Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in the Finger Lakes region, he put his mind to keeping his nose clean and getting what he could out of his fifteen-year sentence. He enrolled in every program available, quickly earned his GED and then started tutoring other prisoners working toward theirs.

To relieve the monotony, Tremont sometimes bet on sports with other inmates, using the common prison currency of postage stamps. “I was on my way to pay the guy who won a pool between a few friends,” he recalls, when he was caught with 200 stamps, well over the allowable number. This earned him a month in “keeplock”—round-the-clock confinement to his own cell. His cellmate was also on keeplock, and when Tremont could no longer stand the crowding and idleness, he talked a guard into letting him out to go to his prison job. Caught playing basketball instead, he was sent to twenty-eight days in “the Box.”

“The Box” is how New York prisoners refer to solitary confinement. Less colloquially, it’s the SHU (pronounced “shoe”), for Special Housing Unit, the state’s euphemism for its isolation cells. Officially, New York places prisoners in “disciplinary” or “administrative” segregation, but regardless of the label, the conditions are the same as in prisons across the country: twenty-three hours a day in a cell the size of the average suburban bathroom.

A common misconception is that solitary confinement is a punishment of last resort, reserved for inmates who present a threat of violence or escape. The reality—especially in New York, which has the highest rate of “disciplinary segregation” in the country—is that it’s very much a punishment of first resort, doled out for minor rule violations as well as major offenses. In New York, the most common reason for a stint in solitary is creating a “disturbance” or “demonstration.” This can mean anything from mouthing off to guards to fomenting a riot, and it often involves inmates with psychoses or other psychiatric problems. Second is “dirty urine”—testing positive for drugs of any kind. In a prison system where 85 percent of inmates are in need of substance-abuse treatment, drug use alone can get you up to ninety days in solitary, and a year if it happens multiple times. Other infractions include refusing to obey orders, “interfering with employees,” being “out of place” and possession of contraband—not only a shiv but a joint, a cellphone or too many postage stamps.

With some 80,000 prisoners in solitary, the United States leads the world in isolating its citizens as well as incarcerating them. Though growing local and national movements are fighting solitary confinement as costly, dangerous and fundamentally inhumane—and though states from Maine to Mississippi have taken steps to reduce its use—in this bluest of states, the prison system is in effect rigged to keep its plentiful isolation cells filled, and thousands of inmates spend weeks, months, years, even decades in solitary.

On any given day, there are about 4,500 men, women and children in some form of isolated confinement in New York State prisons. (In New York City’s jails, run under a separate system, there are close to 1,000 more.) Twenty-eight days is a relatively short sentence in a state where prisoners can spend decades in the Box. But either way, conditions are so extreme, says Tremont, “there’s more of a difference between being in solitary confinement and being in general population than there is between being in prison and being in the free world.” In general population, he says, “you do your programming, go to meals, talk to people, and you can still manage to feel like a human being.” In the Box, “you’re like an animal in a cage.”

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“We call it ‘no-touch torture,’” says Bonnie Kerness, who heads the American Friends Service Committee’s Prison Watch Project. “No one who has ever experienced more than the briefest time in solitary would call it anything else, because it was designed to destroy the mind and break the spirit.” While a lot of New Yorkers “are concerned with the torture that’s gone on in Iraq and Afghanistan or at Guantánamo,” she adds, “they’re living with black sites in their own backyards.”

* * *
Whether solitary confinement as practiced in New York can be considered torture is an age-old question. When Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont toured the United States in 1831 to research the American penitentiary system, a primary stop was New York’s Auburn Prison, which had recently conducted an “experiment”: locking eighty prisoners in round-the-clock isolation for a year. Some had gone insane, while others attempted suicide; five had died, apparently from a combination of ill health and pure despair. Of the twenty-six prisoners who were subsequently released, fourteen quickly reoffended, offering “proofs,” according to Tocqueville and Beaumont, “that this system, fatal to the health of the criminals, was likewise inefficient in producing their reform.”

New York abandoned the practice of “absolute solitude,” as Tocqueville and Beaumont called it, only to resume it a century and a half later, with none of the spirit of inquiry that informed the Auburn “experiment.” Today the little research that exists supports their conclusions: that solitary confinement can lead to madness and suicide, and that it tends to increase both prison violence and recidivism. States that have dramatically reduced their use of isolation have seen improvements in the safety of inmates and staff. Why, then, does “liberal” New York have one of the nation’s highest rates of solitary confinement? And why have these levels persisted, even through years when the state’s prison population—and crime rate—have dropped?

In fact, it was New York’s liberal Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who passed the harshest drug laws in the country, and it was his Democratic successor, Mario Cuomo, who began building prisons to hold the resultant twofold surge in the state’s inmate population. Under President Bill Clinton, the federal government offered states generous funding for prison construction if they agreed to reduce or end parole for violent crimes. New York complied, using much of the bounty to construct “supermax” prisons and isolated confinement units. Ten of New York’s eleven facilities dedicated exclusively to holding prisoners in lockdown were constructed between 1997 and 2000, according to the Correctional Association of New York, an independent nonprofit with the legislative authority to monitor New York’s state prisons. And they were built despite the fact that, by 1996, violence levels in the prison system had already begun to drop.

In the past decade, New York’s prison population has decreased by nearly 10,000, to approximately 56,000. In the same period, the number of prisoners in isolated confinement has fallen from about 5,000 to 4,500. But this means the proportion of prisoners in lockdown has actually increased slightly, to just over 8 percent. New York maintains two supermax prisons where all inmates are in lockdown (although it eschews the term “supermax”). Most others have some kind of segregation unit. What these various manifestations of the Box have in common is that they combine near total cell confinement with extreme social isolation and enforced idleness, since prisoners in lockdown are not allowed to work or attend programming. They are also categorically barred from visits by the media (including us) and invisible even to many prison authorities.

Mary Beth Pfeiffer, who has reported on the SHUs for the Poughkeepsie Journal (she, too, is now barred from visiting them), has described the Box as “a small barren chamber…with a concrete floor, a steel door and no clock to mark the time. The essential quality of the box is isolation—a gloved hand passes food through a slot in the door; a caseworker’s muffled voice filters through the holes in a small Plexiglas window. Inmates are allowed few personal possessions. Lights are never fully extinguished. It is four walls for 23 hours a day—a psychologically punishing experience by design.”

Solitary Watch

Jack Beck, director of the Correctional Association’s Prison Visiting Project, has “walked the SHUs” and talked with inmates, usually through their feeding slots. He describes a grim world of small, sometimes windowless cells where the sensory deprivation is so extreme that most prisoners spend their time sleeping, pacing or staring into space. In some units, Beck says, fully half of the inmates suffer from mental illness, so “there would be feces on the walls, there would be people howling into the night,” even “people harming themselves” through self-mutilation. “This, I believe, is torture, in any definition.”
* * *
In New York, a trip to solitary begins with a “ticket,” a disciplinary write-up from a guard. Every year, the state doles out more than 10,000 tickets that result in Box time. The average sentence is between four and five months, but sentences of several years are not unusual. Inmates can challenge the tickets, but John Boston, who heads the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society of New York, calls the hearings a “pro forma exercise” offering nothing more than the “pretense of due process.” Prison officials serve as police, prosecutors, witnesses, judges and juries. One of the few places inmates can turn to for help fighting a SHU sentence in court is Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York. But in the past twenty years, the group has had its funding cut to the bone. As a result, says James Bogin, managing attorney at the Albany office, its members can represent only a small number of the prisoners who write to them. There are others, he says, “who could be subject to real torture, and I can’t take their case.”

Prisoners who contest their treatment risk retaliation in the form of more Box time, and those accused of violating rules inside the Box are further punished with more time or “deprivation orders.” These can include shackles, loss of recreation time and showers, or seven days or more on “the loaf”—described by one advocacy group as “a dense, binding, unpalatable one-pound loaf of bread and a side portion of raw cabbage.” A Correctional Association survey of SHU inmates found that nearly one-third of them had been put on the loaf—one for fifty-six days.

Because they are basically invisible, prisoners placed in the SHU are also more likely to receive off-the-books punishment from the guards, up to and including physical brutality. Michael Mushlin, a law professor at Pace University, calls the Box “fertile ground for abuse, because there are no witnesses to what happens there—not even other prisoners.”

The New York State Corrections Department has denied that unwarranted use of force routinely takes place in the SHU. And one former guard, who worked for more than a decade at several upstate prisons, told us that “any officer who has worked in the SHU doesn’t look for altercations, because they happen all the time” and are initiated by the prisoners. He points out that corrections officers sustain abuse and injuries themselves, often at the hand of inmates with untreated mental illness. Like most who have guarded the SHU, he recalls being frequently cursed, spat upon, even spattered with urine and feces. He also suffered broken bones while trying to subdue a prisoner there.

At the same time, nearly every one of the dozen inmates we spoke or corresponded with reported experiencing some form of abuse while in segregation. Several said that racism was frequently a factor, especially in upstate prisons where almost all of the corrections officers are white. Eighty-two percent of New York’s prison population is black or Latino.

Malik Sheppard, a soft-spoken African-American man, spent nine years in continuous solitary confinement out of a total prison term of fifteen years. Sheppard started running with the Bloods in Queens when he was barely in his teens and, at 17, was arrested for armed robbery. Like all other 16- and 17-year-olds accused of felonies in New York, he was tried in an adult court and sent to an adult prison.

According to Sheppard, he got Box time for violent run-ins with other prisoners. At the Southport Correctional Facility, a supermax some 250 miles from the city, he says he was sent to a “Box within the Box”—a special unit meant for the worst offenders—where guards tormented him because of his gang affiliation, and also because he sometimes “cursed them out.” For three years, “I was on and off the loaf…. They turned my water off for days at a time…. In the winter, they would open my window and I wouldn’t be able to close it.” The only exercise he had was in an eight-by-twelve cage, where “my shackles stay on my feet, my handcuffs stay on, waist chain stays on—so I shuffle in circles.”

By far the worst, Sheppard says, was the thirteen-day period he spent in a completely bare “strip cell” wearing only a paper gown. “Every hour on the hour, my cell would get hosed down while I was in there,” he recalls. He does not hesitate to compare it to Guantánamo: “I was tortured in prison.”
* * *
Concern has grown in recent years over the number of prisoners with psychological problems who end up in the SHU. A 2003 report by the Correctional Association found that while inmates diagnosed with mental illness made up 11 percent of New York’s overall prison population, they constituted nearly a quarter of the inmates in lockdown. Many of the SHU prisoners interviewed were described as “actively psychotic, manic, paranoid or seemingly overmedicated.” In New York, throwing urine or feces at a prison employee—behavior that is not uncommon among mentally ill prisoners in solitary—has been made a felony. Other symptoms of mental illness have been criminalized as well. As a result, a prisoner like Adam Hall—an Attica inmate whose initial sentence was one to three years—could spend up to a decade behind bars because of his mental illness.

Hall grew up outside Utica; when he was 5 years old, he set his apartment on fire and then drew pictures of his family reuniting in heaven. Hall’s mother says that he spent much of his childhood in psychiatric facilities and juvenile homes and was sexually abused in two of them. After a series of run-ins with the law, at 22 he was convicted of assault after stealing a friend’s car and resisting arrest.

According to prison records, Hall attempted suicide and was placed in a Residential Mental Health Unit, where prisoners are locked down for much of the day but receive psychiatric treatment. There, he reportedly tried to set fire to his cell. Instead of dealing with this incident as a symptom of Hall’s obvious mental illness, prison officials sent his case to a grand jury, which indicted him for second-degree arson. Hall pled out and was sentenced to an additional six to nine years. Meanwhile, he owes the prison about $5,000 for damage to his cell, so his commissary account has been frozen and he cannot buy postage stamps. When he does manage to write or call home, he talks about cutting himself “to relieve the pain.” One day soon, he writes, “I’m going to really cut myself and not tell no one so I can bleed out.”

The Poughkeepsie Journal’s Mary Beth Pfeiffer studied prison suicides in New York and found that, in a three-year period between 2007 and 2010, inmates in the Box killed themselves at a rate five times higher per capita than those in the general population. Some of the prisoners who took their own lives were serving long terms in solitary, while others had been in the Box for as little as one week.

“I’ve cut my share of them down,” says the former corrections officer who spent years guarding the SHU. In one instance, “we cut a guy down and resuscitated him, and then he assaulted us because he was upset that we’d saved his life.” Another prisoner, he says, repeatedly attempted suicide by jumping off his bunk head first onto the concrete floor. “I still have my own nightmares about the SHU,” he adds.

Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and former faculty member at Harvard Medical School who has studied the impact of prison isolation for decades, believes that solitary confinement induces a specific psychiatric disorder characterized by “hypersensitivity to external stimuli, hallucinations, panic attacks, cognitive deficits, obsessive thinking, paranoia and impulse-control problems.” Inmates with underlying mental illness have even worse reactions, so they “get into these vicious cycles where they continue to commit this disruptive behavior, and they continue to go deeper and deeper into the belly of the prison system and get sicker and sicker.”
* * *
On June 19 a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee chaired by Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin held the first-ever Congressional hearing on solitary confinement. Focused on the “human rights, fiscal and public safety consequences” of the practice, the hearing signaled a new level of official concern over its widespread use. Among those who testified was Anthony Graves, exonerated from Texas death row after eighteen years, ten of which he spent in isolation. He discussed suicides and self-harm by other prisoners and described how he remains haunted by his own years in solitary. “Today I have a hard time being around a group of people for long periods of time without feeling too crowded,” he testified. “No one can begin to imagine the effect isolation has on a human being.”

The hearing also featured Christopher Epps, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, whose reduction of solitary confinement in his state (largely under pressure from the ACLU) won national acclaim. The few states that have reduced their SHU populations—some by as much as 75 percent—have seen drops in both prison violence and, ultimately, prison costs.

In New York, reform has been modest and hard-won. In 2002, advocates started an effort to ban mentally ill inmates from being placed in the SHUs. Family members and former inmates joined a coalition of activists to form Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement, which organized a “Boot the SHU” campaign. “We held marches and press conferences,” says Leah Gitter, the godmother of a former SHU prisoner named Robert Pena. “We did street theater in Albany—we had a funeral march, referring to suicides in the SHU.” They also baked “the loaf” and handed it out to state senators.

In 2008 the “SHU exclusion bill” was finally signed into law. Sarah Kerr, who is tracking its application for the Legal Aid Society, calls it “a sea change” that will “alleviate the suffering” of hundreds of prisoners with mental illness. “But it isn’t perfect,” she says. While all prisoners are now screened for “serious mental illness,” critics charge that the state Office of Mental Health, which handles the diagnoses, tends to be overly conservative. And the law still allows for mentally ill prisoners to be held in the SHU under “exceptional circumstances.”

A nascent coalition of advocates organized by the New York Civil Liberties Union is pressing for more change, and a parallel reform effort is under way for city jails. The notion of reform is less controversial than it was even a few years ago; at a forum in January held by the New York State Bar Association, Corrections Department Commissioner Brian Fischer insisted that some segregation was necessary, but “I’ll be the first to admit—we overuse it.” Even modest reductions, he said, would require that they “change the culture” of corrections, including the stance of the correctional officers union. And, he added, “we can’t make changes without funding, without the legislature and the public.”

If New York was serious about reducing the population of inmates in isolation, those with mental illness could be moved from the SHUs into secure psychiatric facilities, which could conceivably take the place of costly supermax prisons. Prisoners who test positive for drugs could be sent to drug-treatment programs (which currently have long waiting lists). Other offenses could be dealt with through positive incentives or by terms in segregation that are brief, limited and free of extreme isolation. All of this would take political will to implement, and something more: a shift in public sentiment toward the view that prisoners are human beings, and thus entitled to immunity from torture by the state.

In 2010 the American Bar Association created a set of Standards on Treatment of Prisoners, including those in segregation. But enforcing such standards would require prison practices—as well as the politics that shape them—to be driven by a genuine interest in safety, rather than a thirst for the harshest punishments possible.

Michael Mushlin recalls a former corrections official who had placed inmates in solitary confinement once asking him frankly, “Do you think I’m a torturer?” But Mushlin believes the responsibility lies with a broader constituency. “We are the torturers,” he says. “If we gave prisons the resources they needed and said, ‘Stop this,’ it would stop.”
* * *
In the meantime, men like Billy Blake will continue to be used to justify solitary confinement. In 1987, while in county court on a drug charge, Blake, then 23, grabbed a gun from a sheriff’s deputy and, in a failed escape attempt, murdered one deputy and wounded another. As a cop-killer and an escape risk, Blake is considered a permanent threat to prison safety. For this reason, he is one of the few New York prisoners in “administrative” rather than “disciplinary” segregation—meaning he’s in solitary more or less indefinitely, despite periodic pro forma reviews of his status. He has been in isolation in a series of prisons for close to twenty-five years. He is now 48; since his sentence is seventy-seven years to life, he has no prospect of getting out of prison, and next to none of ever leaving solitary.

Join the Fight.....Join M.I.S.S.

We visited Blake in December at the Elmira Correctional Facility, a dreary building on a hill near the edge of town. After being signed in and searched, we stopped at the vending machines to buy what he had requested in a letter: Dr. Pepper and a pizza roll. (The machine was out, so we got a grayish-looking cheese steak instead.) We then waited in a special SHU visiting room, watched over by a guard.

Blake entered—wiry, sandy-haired and smiling—and talked virtually nonstop for three hours. It was the first time he’d had a visit in more than two years. We discussed his childhood (he says his father was abusive), his poetry (some of which he recites by heart), his love of playing the stock market (he sometimes gives tips to the guards), and his fascination with military history (his dream is to someday walk the battlefields at Omaha Beach and Thermopylae). He described abuse in the SHU, some of it confirmed by a lawsuit he won in 2000. And he told us how bad he feels about having deprived two children of their father when “the one thing I never wanted to do was hurt kids.”

We do not know whether the man we met is too dangerous to be in the general population. We do know that the treatment he is receiving from the state can only be described as torture.
Blake’s subsequent letters, which run twenty-five pages or more, describe his “magic ingredient” for surviving the Box. “I’m a dreamer,” he says, “who refuses to accept that my dreams won’t all come true, somehow…eventually.” Dreaming is what helps him get through the long, colorless nights in the SHU. “Sometimes I watch the roaches and I envy them,” he writes.

“In my mind I have fantasized that I was a cockroach and I maneuver all through the halls of the prison, walk under the locked gates and stay close to the walls to avoid being stepped on by a C.O. who’s walking through the prison. Then I get outside through some crack or under some door, walk through the grass that looks like tall trees to me…then I’m up and over the wall and out. Once I make it I pop myself back to being human and I walk off into the night, free again and not even caring if I die that same night, just as long as I can see some trees and feel a breeze and know for an hour or two that I was free again, that I lived to see the outside of prison before my time in this world was over.”

About the Author James Ridgeway

James Ridgeway edits Solitary Watch (solitarywatch.com), with Jean Casella. He is a 2012 Soros Justice Media Fellow and...Jean Casella

Jean Casella edits Solitary Watch (solitarywatch.com), with James Ridgeway. She is a 2012 Soros Justice Media Fellow...

TAKE ACTION: End Solitary Confinement

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M.I.S.S. "Solidarity Not Solitary" Campaign

2012-05-31T10:25:00.002-04:00

You have probably already heard of Troy Robinson. Troy is a mentally ill inmate in isolation at the Colorado State Penitentiary and has been thought to be too dangerous to be among other offenders for more than a decade.

M.I.S.S. "Solidarity Not Solitary" Campaign is on behalf of Troy and the other millions of mentally ill inmates affected by this atrocity including our loved ones. The M.I.S.S. "Solidarity Not Solitary" Campaign will permeate State Prisons and Capital Buildings throughout the U.S.

We are targeting June 15th as mass email day. A copy of a template e-mail will be set up for you to use with the address and official to whom the campaign addresses. If we conduct mailings on the 16th and 30th of each month we will have addressed all 50 states with in 24 months.

Your support as an Advocate is greatly appreciated! We have a mission and now we can embark on a plan to make some changes in the gross misuse of the prison system as a Mental Institution.

Join something bigger than any one individual!

Effect a change in our justice system!

M.I.S.S. (Mothers of Incarcerated Sons)

is up to this challenge! Are You?

Together we can do the "UN-DO-ABLE"

M.I.S.S. "Solidarity Not Solitary" Campaign

Just Like US on Facebook Today and share with

friends and family what is so dear to our hearts @ M.I.S.S.

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Juvenile Lifers...JLWOP

2012-04-08T09:26:00.000-04:00

As kids we know right from wrong but we do not know the full consequences. Please ask people to give us a second chance. Juvenile Lifer, Michigan

Sentences of life without parole are often erroneously believed to translate to a handful of years in prison followed by inevitable release. The reality is that a life without parole sentence means that the individual will die in prison.

One’s home life in childhood shapes perceptions of the world and provides
instruction on right and wrong. Children model what they see in their immediate environment and when they experience trauma it has lasting effects on their perceptions and actions. Mass incarceration has had a profound impact on communities of color, especially African American communities. African American children are more than six times as likely as white children to have had a parent imprisoned.

When one or both parents are removed from the home due to incarceration, this leaves the children to be raised with another relative, a child welfare agency or even on the streets. Parental incarceration is often associated with emotional and behavioral problems among their children, including elevated aggression, violence, defiance, cognitive and developmental delays, and extreme antisocial behavior. Children of incarcerated parents are also more likely to drop out of school, become delinquent, and subsequently become confined in institutions themselves.

How is it, you can be put in an extremely difficult situation, which you have no experience in and be expected to make adult decisions, when you really don’t understand consequences? [And] then be considered an adult when you have never taken care of yourself or had adult responsibilities? Juvenile Lifer, Illinois

Adjusting to prison is difficult. Inmates often feel they have to establish a sense of toughness and resiliency to secure their safety. Combine this with the fact that this population entered prison as teenagers, surrounded by inmates several years older, and it is not unreasonable to expect that it would take a few years for young inmates to adjust to their new environment. In addition, young people frequently require more reminders about rules than adults in all contexts and the prison environment is no exception.

While there is often a perception that inmate behavior is dominated by violence and manipulation, in reality, many long-sentenced inmates such as lifers become positively engaged in their environment. Ethnographic accounts from lifers show that they view prison as their home, “…an involuntary one, to be sure — but still a domestic world in which they have an investment; they care about such things as the level of cleanliness, the quality of the food, the variety of activities, and even relations with their keepers.”

This man made some terrible mistakes as a fifteen-year-old in 1993. He was then sentenced to life in prison and began serving his sentence in 1995…I find [him] to be an intelligent, thoughtful, self-aware individual who has worked exceedingly hard to turn his life around. He has educated himself in a wide variety of subjects, including a great interest in spiritual matters. He’s a poet and has written some very good prison poetry. Through his poetry, I have discovered the extent of [his] knowledge of himself, his sensitivity, his determination to remain balanced in a situation often filled with chaos. I’ve also seen his despair and fear of dying in prison, never having achieved any of life’s goals that all young men think and dream about. He no more belongs in prison than I do. Mentor of Juvenile Lifer, Florida

The use of life-without-parole sentences for our nation’s youth violates the principles that first shaped our protected treatment of juvenile offenders, a hallmark of the American justice system for over a century. Today, the United States continues to sentence juveniles to life without parole while the rest of the world has rejected this practice. Through JLWOP courts have discarded unprecedented numbers of young, redeemable lives. We arrived at this accepted practice through a series of mistaken beliefs and misguided policies about youth’s culpability; these have landed teenagers in adult criminal court, thus subjecting them—and, in some cases, mandating them–to LWOP. The Supreme Court is now reviewing the appropriateness of treating juveniles as if they were adults in a number of criminal matters and has thus far consistently concluded that youth are quite different than adults in their maturity, responsibility, and capability for reform. Deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors even as it upholds the civil order!

Treating juveniles as if they were adults in criminal matters has proven to be a failure for public safety. There is now a growing body of evidence that has emerged on the array of problems associated with this practice. Many state policymakers are beginning to reconsider transfer policies and are shifting youth back to the juvenile courts where they were previously handled. Mississippi, Connecticut, and Illinois have all enacted legislation in the past several years that limits the ability to transfer juveniles to the adult system.

Lifers

A key factor contributing to this shift is the consistent finding that placing youth in the adult system creates problems for the community later, as transferred youth are more likely to recidivate upon release and their offenses are more likely to be violent than similar youth who were retained in the juvenile system. Young people in the adult system are significantly more likely to be sexually and physically assaulted than if they had been retained in the juvenile justice system.

Life-sentenced inmates will grow old in prison and eventually die, but before they do, they will require substantially greater health care and medical services. Thus, life sentences add to the rising geriatric prison population and place heavy financial burdens on states. The average cost of incarcerating a person is $22,000 annually. A life sentence that begins in one’s late teens can be expected to last at least 55 years. But with rising costs of older inmates, beginning at age 55, the annual cost is closer to $65,000,54 yielding a lifetime cost to taxpayers of $2 million per prisoner. Most state departments of corrections report spending over 10% of their annual budget on the health care and housing needs of elderly prisoners.

The seriousness of the crimes committed by these individuals cannot be dismissed. All juvenile lifers were convicted of serious crimes and usually a life has been lost. Family members of victims have had a terrible injustice done to them and their lives are forever changed. There is little support for victims in the criminal justice system in terms of healing from the loss and compensating for the harms done; surviving family members are frequently left out of the justice process despite how intimately they are involved in the offense that occurred.

Introduction to Corrections

Public safety is compromised when at-risk youth are not provided with adequate, evidence-based, early intervention and violence prevention programming. As a society we can invest early in the lives of high-risk youth to provide skills and support and thus alter the pathways that lead to crime. Waiting until a young person commits a serious violent crime before positively intervening in his or her life is both cruel and misguided.

Eliminating juvenile life without parole would not result in serious, violent offenders escaping punishment. Instead, this would involve adoption of punishments proportionate to the crime while considering an offender’s age, maturity, and capacity for personal transformation through rehabilitation. The imposition of sentences that deny any hope for release contradicts what we know about young people’s potential for change. There is a wide gap between the view that some youthful offenders deserve stiff punishment and the perspective that no juvenile, under any circumstance, should ever be afforded the opportunity to seek release from imprisonment.

Instead of spending scarce resources on warehousing lives that could be transformed, we could be spending money more wisely, helping victims, and improving public safety. The nonpartisan American Law Institute recommends a “second look” after 10 years of imprisonment for life-sentenced youth. 59 Notwithstanding the probability that most prisoners would not be granted release after only 10 years, if even one eligible inmate was determined to be ready for release upon this “second look,” this could save a typical state $1.8 million in needless incarceration. The money saved could instead be directed at prevention and intervention programs that have a strong evidence-base in lowering crime: preschool programs, parenting skills development, multi-systemic therapy, vocational training, substance abuse treatment, and a host of other effective interventions that would reduce crime and repair families and communities from damage associated with violence.

Read More.....

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Peace and Love

TLW, Editor

LifePlusUs@gmail.com

"I'm 83 and I'm Tired"

2012-03-16T06:33:00.005-04:00

This should be required reading for every man, woman and child in Jamaica, the UK , United States of America , Canada , Australia and New Zealand and to all the world...

"I'm 83 and I'm Tired"

I'm 83. Except for brief period in the 50's when I was doing my National Service, I've worked hard since I was 17. Except for some some serious health challenges, I put in 50-hour weeks, and didn't call in sick in nearly 40 years. I made a reasonable salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, it looks as though retirement was a bad idea, and I'm tired. Very tired.

I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it.

I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor," of Muslims rioting over some slight offense, of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers," of Muslims burning schools for girls, of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery," of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls, all in the name of Allah, because the Qur'an and Shari'a law tells them to.

I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries use our oil money to fund mosques and madrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in Australia , New Zealand , UK, America and Canada , while no one from these countries are allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia or any other
Arab country to teach love and tolerance..

I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate.

I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses or stick a needle in their arm while they tried to fight it off?

I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of all parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor.

I'm really tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination or big-whatever for their problems.

I'm also tired and fed up with seeing young men and women in their teens and early 20's be-deck them selves in tattoos and face studs, thereby making themselves un-employable and claiming money from the Government.

Yes, I'm damn tired. But I'm also glad to be 83.. Because, mostly, I'm not going to have to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my granddaughter and their children. Thank God I'm on the way out and not on the way in.

Thanks for visiting "The Smoke Filled Room."
Visit again soon.
Peace and Love
TLW, Editor
LifePlusUs@gmail.com

Are You a Wage Slave?

2012-03-09T09:58:00.001-05:00

Upside Down Kingdom

All things considered, democracy is a pretty decent system of government, especially when compared to types like dictatorships, absolute monarchies and totalitarian regimes. In a democracy, people have the power to make the decisions that affect their daily lives, as opposed to other governing strategies where power is concentrated in the hands of a few.

But it turns out a constitution-based federal republic is actually quite similar to a direct democracy. Basically, it means that instead of everyone heading to Washington, D.C., to vote on every office, resolution and bill, we elect representatives to go for us.

Democracies, Republics and Royalties Are Nothing New

Learn More about Democracy

The Greeks, of course, had a fairly loose interpretation of democracy, since the key word to determine someones right to vote was "citizen," not "person." Women, slaves, foreigners and males under 18 were all excluded from the ranks of citizenship. This tradition was decidedly popular, and the practice of democratic exclusion continued well into more modern times. Today, various civil rights movements have broadened the potential voting populace for America's democracy.

Royalty is also centuries old. It originated with the feudal systems of medieval Europe. Under feudalism, there were a few very powerful landowners who acquired large amounts of territory through military force or purchase. These landowners became high-ranking lords, and one of them was crowned king. This probably happened through a show of military force or through political machinations, or some combination of the two. Powerful as they were, these lords controlled too much territory to manage on their own. They would name vassals, lower-ranking nobles who were granted some property and whatever income it generated (usually through rents paid by commoners or profits from farming).

A Book Too Embarrassing To Read | National Memo | Breaking News, Smart Politics

2012-02-21T08:43:00.000-05:00

A Book Too Embarrassing To Read | National Memo | Breaking News, Smart Politics

Casebriefs Criminal Law Procedure

2012-02-17T13:03:00.001-05:00

Casebriefs, the most widely used web site and mobile applications company in the law student and pre law student markets proudly unveils the nation's first, completely free, LSAT Course. The Course is the only in-depth, comprehensive free course for the preparation of the LSAT exam.

The Course is taught by one of the nation's most respected LSAT Instructors, Sean Murphy. Sean has been teaching the LSAT to thousands of students for more than seven years and has been an LSAT Instructor for the Princeton Review, TestMasters and Knewton. Sean will review with students, on a step-by-step basis, how to efficiently and effectively master the exam.

The Course contains 72 video lectures covering all areas of the LSAT exam. Accompanying the lectures is a completely free workbook which corresponds to each of the lectures for student review and reinforcement. "We are proud to release to pre law students this first of its kind, and best-of-breed Course," said David Gray, CEO of Casebriefs.

The Course may be viewed by logging onto www.Casebriefs.com and clicking on the Pre Law tab. The Course syllabus is shown on the left side of the page, and registering for the Course allows the student to receive the free accompanying workbook. The Course may also be viewed on the Casebriefs mobile apps, for the iPhone and the iPad, which are also completely free and available on the App Store by searching for Casebriefs.

LifePlusUs

13 Blue Diamonds Persuasions

Order of Authority

Smoke Filled Room

The Science of Nature: Nature's Flu Shot

The Science of Nature: Nature's Flu Shot

Blackionista: Whitney: A Life in Pictures

A Sit Down with My Father

A Sit Down with My Fatherby: Ghostwriter

New York's Black Sites

Unlock The Box: The Fight Against Solitary Confinement in New York

Americans Receive Sentences to Slavery from Our Courts

Under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:

All prisoners in America are considered slaves!

Juries Are Sentencing Americans to Slavery....A Must Read for every

American Citizen!

The New Asylums

Have Inmates Become Commodities On Wall Street?

The New Jim Crow

Reinvented African Americans

New York's Black Sites

M.I.S.S. "Solidarity Not Solitary" Campaign

Juvenile Lifers...JLWOP

"I'm 83 and I'm Tired"

Are You a Wage Slave?

A Book Too Embarrassing To Read | National Memo | Breaking News, Smart Politics

Casebriefs Criminal Law Procedure

A Sit Down with My Father
by: Ghostwriter