Tag Archives: aclu

Is the government planning a crackdown on Keystone XL protesters?

by EdgarMazure Posted on September 5, 2018

Based on newly released emails, the American Civil Liberties Union suspects the government plans to treat Keystone XL protesters with counterterrorism tactics.

The ACLU sued the Trump administration on Tuesday to turn over more records detailing cooperation between the federal government and state officials in Montana in anticipation of protests against the planned Keystone XL pipeline.

The reason the ACLU is suing? It recently obtained emails through the Freedom of Information Act that provide “substantial evidence of federal preventative measures against Keystone XL protests,” according to the ACLU’s press release. And it’s concerned that government plans to surveil and police indigenous and environmental activists infringe on their First Amendment rights.

TransCanada, the company behind Keystone XL, expects to begin construction on the pipeline expansion next year. The once-dead pipeline project, revived by President Trump, would transport up to 830,000 barrels of oil a day from the Canadian tar sands through Montana and South Dakota to Nebraska, coming within a hundred miles of a dozen tribal lands.

The ACLU obtained emails revealing that federal employees discussed an “interagency team” to “deal with safety and security concerns related to the Keystone XL project.” It also found evidence indicating that the Department of Justice held “anti-terrorism” and “social networking and cyber awareness” trainings in Montana.

These records “suggest that additional documents documents exist, which the government continues to withhold, detailing plans for protests,” the ACLU said in a press release. The organization filed its original records requests in January, after it got its hands on Department of Homeland Security analysis that characterized pipeline opponents as “environmental rights extremists” intent on “criminal disruptions and violent incidents.”

During the Dakota Access pipeline protests in 2016, Standing Rock activists were watched over by drones and monitored on social media. The company behind that pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, hired the private security firm TigerSwan to launch a military-style surveillance and counterintelligence campaign against the activists, who TigerSwan labeled “jihadists.” Police used tear gas and water cannons against protesters. Some Standing Rock activists now face years in jail.

“Evidence that the federal government plans to treat Keystone XL protests with counterterrorism tactics, coupled with the recent memory of excessive uses of force and surveillance at the Standing Rock protests, raises immense concerns about the safety of indigenous and environmental protestors who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights,” writes Jacob Hutt, who filed the ACLU information requests, in a blog post.

There’s a long tradition of environmental activists facing charges of “ecoterrorism,” a word coined by libertarian activist Ron Arnold in the 1983. As we wrote last month, the term picked up steam in the ’80s and ’90s, and was eventually named the “the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat” by the FBI in 2004. Yet a 2013 study that found “there is no documented evidence of harm coming to humans as a result of actions by radical environmentalists.”

Despite their relatively peaceful protests, it seems that environmental activists are still viewed by the government — and by oil companies — as a threat.

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Is the government planning a crackdown on Keystone XL protesters?

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Trump’s Tweets Threaten His Travel Ban’s Chances in Court

by DonteS35zcbu Posted on June 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump began the week with a barrage of early-morning tweets blasting the courts for blocking his travel ban executive order. But in doing so, he may have just made it more likely that the courts will keep blocking the ban.

These tweets followed upon several from over the weekend about the ban and the terrorist attack in London, including this one from Saturday evening:

In January, Trump signed an executive order banning nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days, as well as halting the refugee resettlement program for 120 days (and indefinitely for Syrian refugees). When the courts blocked it, rather than appeal to the Supreme Court, Trump signed a modified version of the order. The new ban repealed the old one, reduced the number of banned countries from seven to six, and added exceptions and waivers. Still, federal courts in Maryland and Hawaii blocked it, and now the Justice Department has appealed to the Supreme Court to have this second version of the ban reinstated.

The biggest question in the litigation over the ban is whether the courts should focus solely on the text of the order or also consider Trump’s comments from the campaign trail, and even during his presidency, to determine whether the order uses national security as a pretext for banning Muslims from the country. The president’s lawyers argue that the courts should focus on the text of the order and defer to the president’s authority over national security. Trump’s tweets Monday morning and over the weekend make it harder for the courts to justify doing that.

The travel ban is supposed to be a temporary remedy until the government can review its vetting procedures. But Trump’s tweets make it appear that the ban itself is his goal. Trump repeatedly and defiantly uses the word “ban” when his administration has instead sought to call it a pause.

The tweets “undermine the government’s best argument—that courts ought not look beyond the four corners of the Executive Order itself,” Stephen Vladeck, an expert on national security and constitutional law at the University of Texas School of Law, says via email. “Whether or not then-Candidate Trump’s statements should matter (a point on which reasonable folks will likely continue to disagree), the more President Trump says while the litigation is ongoing tending to suggest that the Order is pretextual, the harder it is to convince even sympathetic judges and justices that only the text of the Order matters.” And once the courts start looking at the president’s statements, it’s not hard to find ones that raise questions about anti-Muslim motivations.

Even the president’s allies acknowledge his tweets are a problem. George Conway, the husband of top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, responded to Trump on Twitter by pointing out that the work of the Office of the Solicitor General—which is defending the travel ban in court—just got harder.

Conway, who recently withdrew his name from consideration for a post at the Justice Department, then followed up to clarify his position.

Trump may soon see his tweets used against him in court. Omar Jadwat, the ACLU attorney who argued the case before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, told the Washington Post this morning that the ACLU’s legal team is considering adding Trump’s tweets to its arguments before the Supreme Court. “The tweets really undermine the factual narrative that the president’s lawyers have been trying to put forth, which is that regardless of what the president has actually said in the past, the second ban is kosher if you look at it entirely on its own terms,” Jadwat told the Post.

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Trump’s Tweets Threaten His Travel Ban’s Chances in Court

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Donald Trump Can Deport People Without Even Giving Them a Hearing

by LindsaySwint569 Posted on February 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Last week, the Trump administration released its blueprint for implementing the president’s executive orders on immigration. Not only did it lay out plans to vastly increase the number of undocumented people vulnerable to deportation, but it also revealed that the feds intend to deport many more people caught in their immigration crackdown immediately after their arrest.

“Expedited removal” is the term the government uses to describe the swift deportation of undocumented immigrants without an appearance before an immigration judge—and, as pro-immigrant advocates point out, without due process protections. Previously, only undocumented immigrants who had been in the United States for less than 14 days and were apprehended within 100 miles of the US border were eligible for expedited removal. According to a new memo signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, expedited removal can now be applied nationwide to those who cannot produce documentation that they have been in the country continuously for at least two years.

Jennifer Chang Newell, a senior staff attorney on the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights’ Project, said expedited removal has long been marred by widespread, well-documented abuse and that it “violates due process absolutely.” In 2014, the last year for which there are public statistics, 176,752 people were given expedited removal orders. That number, advocates point out, is now sure to go up.

The expansion of expedited removal is part of the administration’s attempt to bypass the bottleneck of immigrants already awaiting deportation in the immigration court system. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) estimates that it has the capacity to deport 400,000 people annually, but there is currently a backlog of more than 500,000 cases in the courts. Expedited removal allows the administration to skip the courts and summarily deport people without a lawyer, or even a phone call.

Under the new plan, apprehended immigrants will be asked for proof (such as receipts, phone records, or identification) that they have been in the country over the past two years. If they can’t produce the necessary documentation, they will be deported in as little as 24 hours. In effect, Newell said, “the police officer who arrests you and interrogates you also convicts you.” While this obviously is a concern for the tens of thousands of immigrants estimated to have illegally crossed the border since 2015, Alyson Sincavage, a legislative associate at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), argues that it could affect all undocumented immigrants who can’t immediately make their case to immigration officials—even those who’ve been here for years. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

And then there’s the question of how this might influence asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. Since 2014, there has been a surge of Central American immigrants—many of them unaccompanied minors or women with children—crossing the southern border due to increased gang violence and instability in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Both Newell and Sincavage expressed concerns that this group, many of whom have valid asylum claims, could be wrongly slated for expedited removal in the general chaos of a large-scale immigration overhaul. A 2013 study by the ACLU found that some asylum seekers were quickly deported because Customs and Border Protection agents failed to adequately screen them in so-called credible-fear interviews, which immigrants must pass before getting a full hearing before an immigration judge. (The Trump administration has indicated that CBP agents should “elicit all relevant information from the alien as is necessary to make a legally sufficient determination” during credible-fear screenings; CBP did not respond to a request for comment.)

Causing further concern, the administration has suggested that many immigrants apprehended at the border could be immediately sent back to Mexico, rather than to their home countries. Luis Angel Gallegos, a program coordinator at the Institute for Social and Cultural Practice and Research, a Mexico City-based nonprofit focused on migrant issues, wrote in Spanish that sending immigrants to northern Mexico would present an enormous logistical challenge and endanger already-vulnerable immigrants. “There is no infrastructure to host and receive them,” he said. “Shelters that help immigrants are often full. Immigration detention centers are full.” Gallegos argued that this could make immigrants targets for extortion, kidnapping, and other crimes by the criminal syndicates operating in the border region.

Even if the Mexican government blocks this part of the plan—on Friday, the Associated Press reported that Mexico’s interior secretary said the country had rejected it in meetings with American leaders—Newell and Sincavage stressed the cruelty of removing people so quickly without a phone call, let alone a day in court. Expedited removal leads to people being “ripped from their communities and whisked away and deported in a matter of hours, based on shoddy paperwork,” Newell said. “This violates our most American notions of fairness.”

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Donald Trump Can Deport People Without Even Giving Them a Hearing

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Judge Grants National Stay Preventing Removal of Green Card Holders and Others Being Detained at Airports

by CathleeSpradling Posted on January 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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Earlier today the ACLU filed a motion for an emergency stay against President Trump’s immigration order. The hearing was held in New York in front of federal judge Ann Donnelly:

This is a very partial victory. It applies to green card holders and others with legal residence status who are on US soil but are being detained in airports. They do not have to be allowed entry into the country, but they cannot now be sent back to their home country. Their eventual status will be determined in subsequent hearings. However, the overall refugee ban stays in place, and the overall entry ban for those from seven Muslim countries also stays in place. Those who are overseas are—for now, anyway—still banned from entering the US, even if they are green card holders.

UPDATE: Here’s a copy of Donnelly’s order. It applies to “individuals with refugee applications approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as part of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, holders of valid immigrant and non-immigrant visas, and other individuals from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen legally authorized to enter the United States.”

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Judge Grants National Stay Preventing Removal of Green Card Holders and Others Being Detained at Airports

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A Federal Judge Just Issued A Stay Against Donald Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

by ThaoGoodell Posted on January 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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A federal judge in Brooklyn just issued an emergency stay against Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration from certain predominantly Muslim countries, temporarily allowing people who have landed in the US with a valid visa to remain.

The historic ruling—a stunning first defeat for President Donald Trump coming at the end of his first week in office—protects anyone with a valid visa who arrived after the executive order (or were en route when the ruling was filed) from deportation under Trump’s order.

The director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project announced the victory on twitter:

The stay, granted by Judge Ann M. Donnelly of the US District Court, is temporary and a court will have to decide whether to make it permanent at a later date—and it only affects people who have already arrived in the United States or are currently in transit—but for now, people will not be deported because of Trump’s executive order:

The lawsuit was brought by the ACLU on behalf of two men detained at JFK airport in New York. The men were subsequently released.

You can read the ACLU’s original complaint below:

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This is a developing story. We’ll update as more news comes in.

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A Federal Judge Just Issued A Stay Against Donald Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

by GroverTovlw Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin voters will likely vote this November under the state’s strict voter ID law after a federal appeals court struck down a trial court’s ruling that would have allowed voters to cast ballots without identification.

In Wednesday’s ruling, a three-judge panel from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the trial court’s decision would likely be reversed on appeal. The lower court ruled on July 19 that election officials had to let people vote without ID if they signed a form saying they had problems getting proper documents.

The trial court’s ruling, in turn, came in response to an appeals court ruling in April finding that the state’s 2011 voter ID law would likely prevent people from voting who had legitimate difficulties obtaining documentation to get IDs, and it tasked the trial court with coming up with a method to help those people. That method was the affidavit, which the appeals court ruled Wednesday wasn’t targeted enough, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“Instead of attempting to identify these voters, or to identify the kinds of situations in which the state’s procedures fall short, the district court issued an injunction that permits any registered voter to declare by affidavit that reasonable effort would not produce a photo ID—even if the voter has never tried to secure one, and even if by objective standards the effort needed would be reasonable (and would succeed),” the appeals court judges wrote, adding that the trial court judge did not attempt to distinguish between genuine difficulties voters might have in obtaining the proper documents and “any given voter’s unwillingness to make the effort that the Supreme Court has held that a state can require.”

Rick Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote Wednesday that the ACLU, which originally brought this case, might appeal the case to the full 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. But the practical effect of the ruling, he noted, is that the strict voter ID law will be in place for November. The ACLU could also appeal Wednesday’s ruling to the Supreme Court.

Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, says he is disappointed that the judges “removed a safety net for voters after earlier this year holding that such a safety net would be appropriate. Their decision will guarantee disenfranchisement of many Wisconsonites in this fall’s election.”

Ho says the ACLU is evaluating its options, but that an appeal to either the full 7th Circuit or the Supreme Court will happen soon.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, said in a statement that Wednesday’s ruling was “a step in the right direction” and that his administration would “continue to work to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

A separate case challenged the 2011 voter ID law and other voter restrictions put in place by Wisconsin Republicans, including limits on early voting and on college students’ ability to register to vote. A federal district judge struck down those provisions on July 29, but its ruling on voter ID affected the ways in which voters can obtain a voter ID. The case is still awaiting appeal. Wednesday’s ruling, for its part, addressed what happens when voters get to the polls without an ID.

This story has been updated with comments from Dale Ho.

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

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Chelsea Manning Could Face Solitary Confinement for Her Suicide Attempt

by JustinFierro Posted on July 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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It has been a terrible month for Chelsea Manning, the transgender former US soldier serving a 35-year prison sentence for sharing classified information with WikiLeaks. Several weeks ago, the Army whistleblower tried to kill herself at Fort Leavenworth military prison, and on Thursday military officials announced that they were considering filing charges in connection with the suicide attempt.

“Now, while Chelsea is suffering the darkest depression she has experienced since her arrest, the government is taking actions to punish her for that pain,” Chase Strangio, one of Manning’s lawyers from the ACLU, said in a statement. “It is unconscionable and we hope that the investigation is immediately ended and that she is given the health care that she needs to recover.”

News of Manning’s suicide attempt was leaked to the media by a US official, while an unnamed source told celebrity news site TMZ that Manning had tried to hang herself. She was hospitalized in the early hours of July 5. After the incident, Stangio reported that Manning had experienced “past episodes of suicidal ideation in connection to her arrest and the denial of treatment related to gender dysphoria.” In 2015, the Army approved her request for hormone therapy after she sued the federal government for access to the medical treatment, but Strangio told Mother Jones that she continues “a challenge in court over the enforcement of male hair length and grooming standards.”

If convicted of the suicide-related charges, “Chelsea could face punishment including indefinite solitary confinement, reclassification into maximum security, and an additional nine years in medium custody,” the ACLU said in its statement, noting that Manning could lose her change of parole.

It wouldn’t be the first time Manning has been held in isolation. After she was first taken into custody in 2010, she spent nearly a year in solitary confinement. Following a 14-month investigation into Manning’s treatment—which included being held in solitary for 23 hours a day and being forced to strip naked every night—the UN special rapporteur on torture accused the US government of holding her in “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” conditions. There is a growing push in the United States to end or limit the use of solitary, since long stints in isolation have been shown to lead to disorientation, hallucinations, and panic attacks. Inmates in solitary are also more likely to engage in self-mutilation or to commit suicide.

Asked about the new investigation into the suicide-related charges, US Army spokesman Wayne V. Hall said he was looking into the matter but could not immediately comment.

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Chelsea Manning Could Face Solitary Confinement for Her Suicide Attempt

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How the Stanford Sexual-Assault Case Could Change the Legal Definition of Rape

by Gloria30H4004 Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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A month has passed since outrage over a sexual assault at Stanford University swept the internet, spurring protests at the school’s graduation and outcry in the US House of Representatives. Brock Turner, the 20-year-old convicted of sexually assaulting a woman outside a fraternity, was sentenced on June 2 to just six months in county jail. According to Judge Aaron Persky, a longer sentence would have a “severe impact” on the young man; many believed Turner got off easy thanks to his privilege.

The case might have passed with little attention but for a powerful statement that the victim, known only as Emily Doe, read aloud to her attacker at the sentencing hearing. Millions soon read the letter online, and since then, lawmakers and activists have seized on the issue of sexual violence in California, funneling the internet outrage into tangible legislative efforts and campaigns. While some efforts have focused on the judge who decided the sentence—for example, erecting a billboard and collecting signatures to remove him from the bench—others have sought broader changes in California rape law, hoping to ensure the next offender receives a harsher punishment. “We all need to try to protect the next Emily Doe against the next Brock Turner,” Alaleh Kianerci, the prosecutor in the case, told a state Senate committee in late June.

Here are the efforts you need to know about:

Mandatory minimums: Three weeks after the sentencing, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen sponsored legislation that would introduce mandatory prison time for certain kinds of sexual assaults.

Turner’s six-month county jail sentence was tied to his conviction on one charge, assault with intent to rape. He was also convicted on two other charges—penetration of an intoxicated person and penetration of an unconscious person, both of which carry a sentence of three to eight years in state prison—but a legal exemption allowed the judge to sentence him to probation on both. Rosen’s bill would eliminate that exemption, making the penalties for sexual penetration of an unconscious or intoxicated person the same as that for sexual assault through physical force.

“Instead of brandishing knives or threats, these predators use vodka or beer,” Rosen testified to the Senate Committee on Public Safety on June 28. “They use the cover of the outdated, offensive perception that campus sexual assaults are simply youthful, drunken indiscretions. Violating an unconscious woman is never an indiscretion. It is a violent, predatory, and deeply destructive crime.”

The bill, introduced in the California House by Assemblymen Evan Low and Bill Dodd (both Democrats), quickly drew criticism for introducing new mandatory minimums. Natasha Minsker, director of the ACLU’s California Center for Advocacy and Policy, cautioned against any laws taking away a judge’s discretion based on backlash to a single, high-profile case. “Everyone’s imaging Brock Turner and wanting him to get a longer sentence,” Minsker said. “We can’t change that sentence. Instead, the mentally ill defendant, or the defendant who has life circumstances that should be taken into consideration—that’s the person who’s going to get the longer sentence. And that person is almost certainly black or Latino.”

Recalling the judge: Within days of the sentence, Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber, a longtime advocate for sexual-assault victims, had begun organizing a recall campaign against Judge Aaron Persky. The campaign argues that Perksy was too lenient in his sentencing decision, in which he cited the “adverse collateral consequences on the defendant’s life”—including media attention and lifelong sex offender registration—as reasons for the light sentence.

“We believe he’s biased,” Dauber said, pointing to Persky’s related decisions—including a recent case in which Persky gave a Latino man a three-year sentence after he pleaded guilty to similar charges.

Critics of the recall, including a group of former Santa Clara County Superior Court judges, argue that Persky’s decision in the Turner case was based on a probation officer’s report, and that a recall would threaten judicial independence by making judges worry about public opinion in their decisions. Dauber, however, says that accountability to the people is already built into the state judicial system. “Under the California constitution, all of our judges are elected,” she said. “A recall is part of that process.”

Right now, the recall campaign is laying groundwork for a campaign that will need to collect around 80,000 signatures from Santa Clara County voters and raising funds (almost $350,000 so far, according to Dauber). They’ll launch their on-the-ground effort next April, aiming to put the recall on the November 2017 ballot.

While the recall campaign does not accuse Perksy of illegal conduct, California lawmakers have also asked the state’s judicial ethics body to investigate the judge. UltraViolet, a women’s rights activist group, is also campaigning for an ethics investigation into Persky’s decision.

Redefining rape: While Turner was publicly excoriated as a rapist, California law technically does not consider his crimes to be rape, since they don’t fall within its strict definition of “nonconsensual sexual intercourse.” That’s why state lawmakers led by Assemblywomen Cristina Garcia and Susan Eggman are seeking to update the archaic state code’s definition of rape to include more acts that are currently considered part of the broader category of sexual assault.

While their initial version of what’s known as Assembly Bill 701 was opposed by the ACLU due to its vague language on sentencing, later versions have made clear that the proposal will not change the sentences for the crimes it considers rape. An updated definition would hew more closely to the FBI’s definition of rape, which was expanded in 2012. Under the bill, Turner’s conviction on charges of sexually penetrating an unconscious and intoxicated person would qualify as rape. So would sexual assaults among members of the same sex, and forcible penetration by a “foreign object.”

A revised version of AB 701 was introduced on June 16 and could be reviewed by committee as soon as early August, according to an Eggman staffer. “When we fail to call rape ‘rape,'” the lawmakers said in a statement, “we rob survivors and their families of the justice they deserve.”

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How the Stanford Sexual-Assault Case Could Change the Legal Definition of Rape

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A Brief History of America’s Private Prison Industry

by WillardArchdall Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

In the early 1980s, the Corrections Corporation of America pioneered the idea of running prisons for a profit. “You just sell it like you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers,” one of its founders told Inc. magazine. Today, corporate-run prisons hold eight percent of America’s inmates. Here’s how the private prison industry took off:

1983


More: Who owns the Corrections Corporation of America?

Thomas Beasley, Doctor R. Crants, and T. Don Hutto start Corrections Corporation of America, the world’s first private prison company.

1984

CCA begins operating a county jail and a juvenile detention center in Tennessee. It also opens its first privately owned facility in Houston, a motel hastily remodeled to hold immigration detainees.

1985

A federal judge orders Tennessee to stop admitting inmates to its overcrowded prisons. CCA offers, unsuccessfully, to pay $250 million for a 99-year lease on the state’s entire prison system.

1986

CCA goes public, saying its facility design and use of electronic surveillance mean it can operate larger prisons “with less staff than the public sector would have needed.”

A guard dog at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana

1987

Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, later known as the GEO Group, gets its first contract to run a federal immigration detention center.

Mid-’90s

CCA co-chairs the criminal justice task force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Among the “model” bills to emerge are truth-in-sentencing and three-strikes legislation that help fuel the ’90s prison boom.

1997

Arguing that it’s in the property business, CCA becomes a real estate investment trust for tax purposes. A new affiliate, Prison Realty Trust, raises $447 million for a prison-buying spree.

Private And Public Prison Populations 1990-2014

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1998

The Justice Department investigates a CCA prison in Youngstown, Ohio, following a spate of escapes, stabbings, and killings. In addition to finding inexperienced and poorly trained guards, the probe reveals that CCA took on maximum-security inmates at a facility designed for a medium-security population.

2000

As prison occupancy rates drop, Prison Realty Trust nearly goes bankrupt. CCA stock, once nearly $150 a share, falls to 19 cents. The company drops the trust and restructures.

CCA Stock Price, 1997-2016

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2004

A Justice Department report finds a “disturbing degree” of physical abuse by staff and underreporting of violence among inmates at a Baltimore juvenile facility run by the private prison operator Correctional Services Corporation. CSC is later acquired by GEO.

2005

Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) introduces the Private Prison Information Act, which would require private prisons holding federal inmates to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests. It died, as have at least seven similar bills opposed by CCA and GEO.

2007

A drawing by an immigrant child held at CCA’s T. Don Hutto Center. ACLU

CCA’s and GEO’s stock prices jump as both companies jockey to run the federal government’s expanding immigration detention centers. Meanwhile, the ACLU settles a case against Immigration and Customs Enforcement for conditions in the CCA-managed T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Texas, where about half the detainees are kids. Under the agreement, children no longer wear prison uniforms and may move more freely.

2008

The New York Times investigates the deaths of immigration detainees, such as a Guinean man at a CCA-run facility who fractured his skull and was placed in solitary confinement before being taken to a hospital. He died after four months in a coma.

2009

A CCA representative attends a meeting where ALEC members draft the legislation that will eventually become Arizona’s notorious anti-immigration law. CCA denies having a hand in writing the bill. It cuts ties with ALEC the following year.

2010

An ACLU suit alleges rampant violence at a CCA-run Idaho prison known as “gladiator school.” The lawsuit claims the prison is understaffed and fosters an environment that “relies on the degradation, humiliation, and subjugation of prisoners.” The FBI investigates but doesn’t pursue charges. In Kentucky, the governor orders all female inmates removed from a CCA prison after more than a dozen cases of alleged sexual abuse by guards.

2011

Inmates at Winn Correctional Center

CCA becomes the first private prison company to purchase a state facility, buying Ohio’s Lake Erie Correctional Institution as part of a privatization plan proposed by Gov. John Kasich and supported by his corrections chief, former CCA Director Gary Mohr.

2012

CCA offers to buy prisons in 48 states in exchange for 20-year management contracts. The same year, a GEO-operated youth facility in Mississippi where staff sexually abused minors is described by a judge as a “cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions.” At another Mississippi facility, a 24-year-old CCA employee is killed during a riot over prisoners’ complaints about poor food, inadequate medical care, and disrespectful guards.

2013

CCA converts back to a real estate investment trust, as does GEO. Mother Jones reports that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $2.2 million in GEO.

2014

CCA’s annual report flags criminal justice reform—including drug decriminalization and the reduction of mandatory minimum sentences—as a “risk factor” for its business. Chris Epps, Mississippi’s prison commissioner and the president of the American Correctional Association, is charged with taking kickbacks from a private prison contractor.

2015

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) co-sponsors the Justice is Not for Sale Act, which would ban all government contracts with private prison companies. After Hillary Clinton is criticized for using campaign bundlers who’d worked as lobbyists for CCA and GEO, she promises to no longer take their money and says, “We should end private prisons and private detention centers.”

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A Brief History of America’s Private Prison Industry

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Hollywood’s Pathetic Treatment of Women Is Ready for Its Close-Up

by CarmellCvf Posted on January 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has taken a lot of heat lately for its failure to nominate any actors of color for the Oscars, two years running. But race may not be Hollywood’s biggest diversity problem.

The number of women directing big-budget films and TV series is stunningly low. Only 9 percent of the directors of last year’s 250 top-grossing movies were female, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. And women accounted for just 12 percent of the directors on more than 225 shows on prime-time TV and Netflix during the 2014-15 season.

The numbers are even more depressing for women of color. Black women directed just 2 of the 500 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2012, according to a study by the Women’s Media Center. Women of color directed only 3 percent of TV episodes during the 2014-15 season, notes a report from the Directors Guild of America.

The numbers aren’t improving, either. The share of big-budget directorial jobs going to women was lower last year than it was 15 years earlier, when it peaked. The TV numbers have been stagnant in recent years. “Women’s underemployment has simply not been perceived by many executives as a problem,” says Martha Lauzen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, who has been gathering data on the topic for nearly two decades. “As a result, little meaningful action has been taken to correct the gender imbalance.”

The shunning of female directors is so rampant that the feds have gotten involved. In October, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, began interviewing female directors so that “we may learn more about the gender-related issues” they face. The probe came after the American Civil Liberties Union called on the EEOC to investigate the film industry’s systemic failure to hire women directors. The agency contacted at least 50 women in October, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In an email, an EEOC representative acknowledged that the agency has “had further discussions” with the ACLU about its data and conclusions, but she said she could not comment on any investigation—or even confirm whether one exists. The EEOC, she wrote, encourages the industry to “publicly address the serious issues raised by the ACLU.”

Part of the problem, female directors told the ACLU, is that male producers often make hiring decisions based on tired stereotypes. Women said they were steered toward romantic comedies and “women-oriented” movies, while the most lucrative, action-driven films went almost exclusively to men. Female TV directors said they were offered shows for women and commercials for “girl” products while being overlooked for car commercials or other types of shows.

What’s more, Hollywood producers, who are overwhelmingly male, will often pick directors from short lists that contain few women, or through word of mouth. Women who haven’t yet directed a major project often end up on the sidelines.

Hiring more female directors could be key to improving Hollywood’s gender imbalance. When women are in charge, Lauzen found, the number of women employed behind the scenes increases considerably: On high-grossing films directed by men in 2015, women made up 10 percent of writers, 19 percent of editors, and 10 percent of cinematographers. When a woman was the director, female representation on the crew increased to 53 percent of writers, 32 percent of editors, and 12 percent of cinematographers.

At stake in all of this, Lauzen explains, is how women are represented on-screen. “People tend to create what they know. Having lived their lives as males, men tend to create male characters,” she says. “If women comprised a larger percentage of film directors, we would see more female characters, particularly as protagonists, onscreen, and we would see more fully developed, multidimensional females.” In another study, Lauzen found that women accounted for just 4 percent of protagonists in films with exclusively male directors or writers. But when at least one woman was writing or directing, nearly 40 percent of the protagonists were female.

TV is way ahead of the film industry on that front—think Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, How to Get Away With Murder’s Annalise Keating, or Jane Villanueva of Jane the Virgin. As X-Files star Gillian Anderson (who says she was initially offered about half of David Duchovny’s salary to reprise her role as Dana Scully) recently put it to Mother Jones: “Television isn’t the issue. There are a lot of female characters on TV who are intelligent, and a good enough portion of them aren’t all about the date and the car and the plastic surgery. It’s in film that it’s lacking…I think there’s a lot of female directors out there—I just don’t think their material gets made. Studios don’t believe they’ll have an audience if women make it. A lot of female directors can’t pay somebody to hire them.”

The Directors Guild’s current agreement with film and TV studios has no quotas for women but asks employers to “make good faith efforts to increase the number of working” women and minority directors. Last May, the Guild’s Women’s Steering Committee considered altering the agreement to treat women and ethnic minorities as separate diversity categories. Supporters of the change felt that it would create more opportunities for women—particularly women of color, who would qualify for both pools. The idea never made it out of committee.

But since the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission got involved in October, there has been some movement within the industry. Two weeks after the agency started its probe, several dozens of Hollywood’s leading CEOs, producers, writers, and directors met privately to discuss solutions to their industry’s gender problem. Among the ideas discussed were introducing “unconscious bias” training across the industry, creating more recruitment programs to identify and hire talented women directors, and rewarding studios that show a commitment to achieving gender parity in hiring.

Gillian Thomas, an attorney at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, says that while an investigation as expansive as this one will take time, she thinks it will ultimately produce results. “I think women in male industries is a priority of the agency’s,” she says. “So I have faith in the process working.”

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Hollywood’s Pathetic Treatment of Women Is Ready for Its Close-Up

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