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Category: Uncategorized

Inside Coalinga: California’s Worst Shadow Prison

     The American criminal justice system operates upon a very simple principle: Any person who commits a crime is to serve a sentence, and once they serve that sentence, they have paid their dues to society. However, our criminal justice system does not always adhere to this philosophy. The United States has a system of involuntary civil confinement facilities, a detestable system designed to incarcerate people even after they have served their prison sentences, and Coalinga State Hospital is one of the biggest perpetrators of this atrocity. Coalinga is one of the country’s largest shadow prisons, housing an appalling…

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Punishment Without Crime: Technical Violations Drive Mass Incarceration

Introduction   The use of supervised release to oppress formerly incarcerated people is among the American legal system’s most egregious injustices. America is very creative in finding ways to suppress the rights of people living in the community who are on supervised release. Approaches like the notorious sex registry are infamous examples of the American penal system oppressing formerly incarcerated people with draconian, unjust, and objectively unsupportable methods. One of the criminal justice system’s more subtle forms of human rights suppression comes in the form of “technical violations” — infractions of rules imposed by the state on people who are…

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Third Appearance on Crossroads Radio WPFW 89.3FM

Pre-crime preventative detention was the focus of a second hour-long conversation on the Crossroads Radio show hosted by Roach Brown and Nkechi Taifa  on WPFW 89.3FM, known as “Washington’s station for jazz and justice”   Click Play to listen to Kirsten Darby and Bernida Thompson talk about how their families have been directly impacted by these Kafkaesque systems and their work with Just Future Project.  Throughout the radio appearance, Kirsten and Bernida work together to describe the abusive and unconstitutional application of these sex offender laws — especially highlighting the case of Galen Baughman in Virginia, which was the focus of a…

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A Backdoor Around Double Jeopardy

  The original sin of so-called “sex offender civil commitment” laws is that they were never meant to be “nonpunitive”. Legal scholars, civil libertarians, and human rights defenders, have challenged the prison-length nature of these carceral institutions. Many of these opponents to systems of pre-crime preventative detention focused on how these laws have been applied in practice to impose de facto life sentences on those who have already repaid their debt to society.  The following quote comes from a state report published two years before the first so-called sex offender “civil commitment” law was passed in the United States and…

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Virginia Deaths in Custody

Source: Virginia Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation, and Substance Abuse Services Discharge Report From 01/01/2003-03/02/2020. These numbers seem suspiciously low compared to other death-in-custody data we have reviewed. Specifically in Kansas, 260 individuals are indefinitely detained and the facility has 45 deaths to date, whereas in Virginia we have 460 people currently committed and 15 deaths. Because Virginia has much broader use of conditional release, we suspect they are artificially decreasing their death statistics. While the discharge report generated by DBHDS said that it was “death in hospital,” Virginia Center for Behavioral Health (VCBR) is in fact not a…

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Tablets of Stone: JPay & GTL Tablets May Be Free, But Using Them Is a Cost- Prohibitive Rip-off.

The below came from The Legal Pad, Volume 4, Issue 5 (May, 2020), published by Cyrus Gladden from the gulag in Moose Lake, Minnesota.  Editor’s Note: Now let’s shift topics a little to talk about the various ways in which so-called ‘free tablets’ to prisoners and to SOCC confinees are not a substitute for internet access. In case you missed earlier TLP coverage of the advent of these tablets, they do not include any means of access to the internet.  Even when you retrieve emails sent to you and send emails out (where this is even allowed at all via such tablets),…

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PUNISHMENT WITHOUT CRIME (long unedited version)

By Philip Fornaci and Roger Lancaster In a few weeks, the Circuit Court in liberal Arlington County, Virginia will be the scene of an aggressive morality play, with prosecutors seeking lifelong incarceration for a young gay man who has already paid an extraordinary price for youthful, nonviolent sexual indiscretions. With the support of a compliant judiciary, the Commonwealth of Virginia has repeatedly set aside legal, scientific, and commonsensical norms to target him for lifetime punishment as a violent sexual predator. Virginia, like 19 other states and the federal government, has a Sexually Violent Predators Act (SVPA). Under these laws, people…

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Articles from OCEAN Newsletters, Aug. 1, 2019 to Feb. 10, 2020

OVERCOMING CORRUPTION ENCOURAGING ALL NATIONS (OCEAN) The following content was created by using OCR software to read printed documents.  It is in the process of being edited to correct scan errors.  Expect to see this content in the future as posts with one article per post. The following articles were written by two civilly committed men at the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) in gulag:Moose Lake Minnesota. These articles were reformatted to be scanned and put onto internet sites like https://ajustfuture.org. Contact OCEAN at: OCEAN 1360 University Ave. W. Box #145 St. Paul, MN 55104 You can leave a voice…

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