Prisoners 2013 Quotes

Now, I’ll take the prisoner back to her quarters, and you can run off and do … whatever it is you do when everyone else is working.” Ivan scowled. “I don’t think—” “Clearly. Why start now?” Bardugo, Leigh (2013-06-04). Siege and Storm (The Grisha Book 2) (p. 32). Henry Holt and Co. (BYR). Kindle Edition.

Michael Skakel settles his 2013 slander lawsuit against HLN host Nancy Grace

Out of the lions' den for Daniel, the prison for Peter, the whale's belly for Jonah, Goliath's shadow for David the storm for the disciples, disease for the lepers, doubt for Thomas, the grave for Lazarus, and the shackles for Paul. God gets us through stuff.

Mia might be the hottest girl I have ever seen … okay, she is the hottest girl I have ever seen in life, and the sweetest. And I’m so horny for her that my dick actually hurts. It motherfucking hurts. But the girl’s got enough to deal with. And me spending an invariable amount of time around a hot girl that I cannot put my dick inside … it’s just not possible. I might as well be in prison. Or hell. That’s it, I’m in hell. Towle, Samantha (2013-11-18). Trouble (p. 99). . Kindle Edition.

The moral and ethical questions I explore in Take My Hand remain salient today. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that between 2006 and 2010, nearly 150 women in California state prisons had been sterilized without official approval. A year later, the Associated Press reported on multiple instances of prosecutors in Nashville, Tennessee, submitting permanent birth control as part of plea deals. In 2020, a whistleblower alleged that immigrant women detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being forcibly sterilized without their consent in US detainment facilities. In fact, compulsory sterilization of “unfit” inmates of public institutions is still federally protected by a 1927 US Supreme Court ruling, Buck v. Bell.

Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws, and impose minimum-sentence and Three-Strikes laws, which mandate life sentences after three felony convictions. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, earned $1.7 billion in revenues and collected $300 million in profits in 2013.50 CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day.51 Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services, provides food for six hundred correctional institutions across the United States.52 Goldman Sachs and other investors acquired it in 2007 for $8.3 billion.53 The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent ten-year period for lobbying to keep the prison business flush.54 The resource center In the Public Interest documented in its report “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations” that private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent.55 If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds. CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties, and so-called 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the American Civil Liberties Union reported.56 The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials plus undisclosed sums to lobby state officials.57 The GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison management companies, donated $250,000 to Donald Trump in 2017.58 The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, the ACLU reported.59 Private prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons.60 And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.61

After that letter, I became a victim of the secret agencies in March 2013. I am not going into details, but it is enough information related to my letter written on 20 November 2012 to retired Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and Chief of Army Staff General Pervez Kayani; the details are in my biography, The Prisoner Of The Hague, on Google Books.com. I hope that information will enlighten Pakistani authorities to realize the facts that foreign secret agencies' engagement to damage the Pakistani state through hired ones since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the shameful behavior of our agencies and media figures who stay ignoring and do not take it seriously. Please do not wear the mask if you love Pakistan and its people; there should be clarity between you and the enemy.

A pessimistic orientation does not seek accommodations with the system. We share the goal of the undercommons, which “is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed” (Halberstam 2013, 9). Moten and Harney don’t play the liberal game of reform; they are constantly reframing the problems at hand. What questions we ask are crucial—for bad questions yield worse answers, ones that compound the problem. On prison abolition, their intervention is decisive and reconfigures the coordinates of the debate: for them, it is “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery” (Moten and Harney 2013, 42). How do you abolish a society? How do you fight state power? Is anti-statism, ethical (that is, nonviolent) anarchism, the only solution? Is it a solution? Or do you dare to seize power, as with the example of Morales? A universal politics takes these questions to heart. For this reason, its skeptical negativity is put into the service of a more virtuous end: locating antagonisms, rather than settling for conflicts or pseudo-struggles. Its challenge is to sustain the antagonistic logic of class struggle, and avoid the comfort of static oppositions. The cultural Left has its enemies (Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Erdoğan, Modi, Duterte, Netanyahu, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Suu Kyi, MBS, etc.)—and, conversely, notorious leaders blame liberal media, demonizing bad press with the “enemy of the people” charge—but nothing really changes; the basic features or coordinates of the current society remain the same. Worse, the liberal capitalist system is legitimized (only in a free democracy can you, as a citizen, criticize tyrants abroad and, more importantly, express your outrage at the president, politicians, or state power without the fear of retribution) and the cultural Left is tacitly compensated for playing by the rules—for practicing non-antagonistic politics, for forgoing class insurgency and not engaging in class war (Žižek 2020f)—rewarded with “libidinal profit” (Žižek 1997b, 47), with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment” (2007, 147), an enjoyment-in-sacrifice. That is to say, cultural leftists, with their “Beautiful Souls” intact, enjoy not being a racist, a misogynist, a transphobe, an ableist, and so on. Hating the haters, the morally repulsive, the fascists of the world, is indeed an endless source of libidinal satisfaction for “woke” liberals. But what changes does it actually produce?

More broadly, anti-crack fervor created a general tough-on-crime climate that led to more arrests, more convictions, and longer sentences. The result was a boom in the U.S. prison population. According to the Sentencing Project, there were 40,900 people incarcerated in 1980 for drug offenses. That number swelled to 489,000 by 2013. People of color absorbed much of the explosion in incarceration. In 1980, they comprised more than 40 percent of the state and federal prison population. By 2010, that number had grown to 68 percent—despite people of color accounting for just around 30 percent of the total U.S. population. What did the nation get for the widespread warehousing of citizens?

On December 10, 2013, Eric Boyles, the man who lost his wife Hallie and only daughter Shelby in the fatal accident, discovered that Mr. Couch would serve the minimal time in prison for his actions.[ 16] In fact, Mr. Couch was sentenced to exactly zero days in prison. Although Mr. Couch was driving 70 mph in a 40 mph zone, had a blood alcohol level of 0.24, and had valium in his system, Judge Jean Boyd granted Mr. Couch extreme leniency.[ 17] In lieu of prison time, the Judge sentenced Mr. Couch to ten years of probation and In assessing the ruling, a New York Times Article suggests the defense of “affluenza” played a critical role in the decision. The Article stated: Judge Boyd did not discuss her reasoning for her order, but it came after a psychologist called by the defense argued that Mr. Couch should not be sent to prison because he suffered from ‘affluenza’ — a term that dates at least to the 1980s to describe the psychological problems that can afflict children of privilege. Prosecutors said they had never heard of a case where the defense tried to blame a young man’s conduct on the parents’ wealth. And the use of the term and the judge’s sentence have outraged the families of those Mr. Couch killed and injured, as well as victim rights advocates who questioned whether a teenager from a low-income family would have received as lenient a penalty.[ 19] "This has been a very frustrating experience for me," said prosecutor Richard Alpert. "I'm used to a system where the victims have a voice and their needs are strongly considered. The way the system down here is currently handled, the way the law is, almost all the focus is on the offender.

On June 15, 2013, Ethan Couch killed four pedestrians and injured two others in Westlake, Texas.[ 13] Mr. Couch killed Breanna Mitchell, whose car broke down; Hollie and Shelby Boyles, who came to assist Breanna; and Brian Jennings, a youth minister who also stopped to help. In addition, Mr. Couch critically injured two of his passengers, Solimon Mohmand and Sergio Molina.[ 14] The sixteen-year-old teen admitted to speeding and being drunk when he lost control of his pickup. Tests revealed he had a blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit and traces of Valium in his system at the time of the accident. -------- ------ -- On December 10, 2013, Eric Boyles, the man who lost his wife Hallie and only daughter Shelby in the fatal accident, discovered that Mr. Couch would serve the minimal time in prison for his actions.[ 16] In fact, Mr. Couch was sentenced to exactly zero days in prison. Although Mr. Couch was driving 70 mph in a 40 mph zone, had a blood alcohol level of 0.24, and had valium in his system, Judge Jean Boyd granted Mr. Couch extreme leniency.[ 17] In lieu of prison time, the Judge sentenced Mr. Couch to ten years of probation and In assessing the ruling, a New York Times Article suggests the defense of “affluenza” played a critical role in the decision. The Article stated: Judge Boyd did not discuss her reasoning for her order, but it came after a psychologist called by the defense argued that Mr. Couch should not be sent to prison because he suffered from ‘affluenza’ — a term that dates at least to the 1980s to describe the psychological problems that can afflict children of privilege. Prosecutors said they had never heard of a case where the defense tried to blame a young man’s conduct on the parents’ wealth. And the use of the term and the judge’s sentence have outraged the families of those Mr. Couch killed and injured, as well as victim rights advocates who questioned whether a teenager from a low-income family would have received as lenient a penalty.[ 19] "This has been a very frustrating experience for me," said prosecutor Richard Alpert. "I'm used to a system where the victims have a voice and their needs are strongly considered. The way the system down here is currently handled, the way the law is, almost all the focus is on the offender.

Thus judges on the D.C. Circuit promptly moved the hiring of 2014 clerks before Labor Day. Judge Janice Rogers Brown, for example, was widely reported to have hired a clerk named Shon Hopwood in the first week of August 2013. Hopwood has an unusual personal history: before entering law school he served a lengthy prison sentence. But his early hiring quickly became quite usual. Clerks who wouldn’t begin work until 2015 were being hired in February 2014, a year and a half early.

FOR AS LONG AS ANYONE COULD REMEMBER, THE CEREMONIAL foot washing had taken place at the grand Basilica of St. John Lateran as part of the Holy Thursday Mass. The pope would choose twelve priests, and in remembrance of Jesus’ act of service to his disciples, wash the priests’ feet. But in 2013, just ten days after his election, Pope Francis stunned the world and broke with tradition by traveling to a juvenile detention center outside Rome where he washed and kissed the feet of twelve prisoners, including two women and two Muslims.

In 2013 the FBI admitted that in more than two thousand cases between 1985 and 2000, analysts may have exaggerated the significance of hair analysis or reported them inaccurately.15 The National Academy of Science has said that hair matching is “unreliable.”16 It was this error trap that condemned Jimmy Ray Bromgard, mentioned in chapter 4, to fifteen years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Attempts to Close the Detention Center The United States Detention Center on the grounds of the Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba was established in January of 2002 by the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. It was designated as the site for a prison camp, euphemistically called a detention center, to detain prisoners taken in Afghanistan and to a lesser degree from the battlefields of Iraq, Somalia and Asia. The prison was built to hold extremely dangerous individuals and has the facilities to be able to interrogate these detainees in what was said to be “an optimal setting.” Since these prisoners were technically not part of a regular military organization representing a country, the Geneva Conventions did not bind the United States to its rules. The legality of their incarceration is questionable under International Law. This would lead one to the conclusion that this facility was definitely not a country club. Although, in most cases these prisoners were treated humanely, there were obvious exceptions, when the individuals were thought to have pertinent information. It was also the intent of the U.S. Government not to bring them into the United States, where they would be afforded prescribed legal advantages and a more humane setting. Consequently, to house these prisoners, this Spartan prison was constructed at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base instead of on American soil. Here they were out of sight and far removed from any possible legal entanglements that would undoubtedly regulate their treatment. Many of the detainees reported abuses and torture at the facility, which were categorically denied. In 2005 Amnesty International called the facility the “Gulag of our times.” In 2007 and 2008, during his campaign for the Presidency, Obama pledged to close the Detention Center at Guantánamo Bay. After winning the presidential election, he encouraged Congress to close the detention center, without success. Again, he attempted to close the facility on May 3, 2013. At that time, the Senate stopped him by voting to block the necessary funds for the closure. The Republican House remained adamant in their policy towards the President, showing no signs of relenting. It was not until thaw of November of 2014 that any glimmer of hope became apparent. Despite Obama’s desire to close the detention center, he also knew that the Congress, headed by his opposing party, would not revisit this issue any time soon, and if anything were to happen, it would have to be by an executive order. The number has constantly decreased and is now said to be fewer than 60 detainees. There are still problems regarding some of these more aggressive prisoners from countries that do not want them back. It is speculated that eventually some of them may come to the United States to face a federal court. Much is dependent on President-Elect Trump as to what the future holds regarding these incarcerated people.

Arrests and convictions have increased at such a torrid pace that the states and federal government haven’t been able to build prisons fast enough to hold all of their incoming prisoners. To keep up, they hired corporations to operate private prisons for them. About 130,000 prisoners are held in these “for-profit” prisons (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2010:Table 6.32.2009). Actually, the United States has even more prisoners than shown in Figure 6.2, since this total does not include jail inmates. If we add them, the total comes to about 2.3 million people—about one out of every 135 citizens. Not only does the United States have more prisoners than any other country in the world but it also has a larger percentage of its population in prison (Massoglia et al. 2013). Another way of putting this is that the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population but about 25 percent of the world’s prisoners

In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that between 2006 and 2010, nearly 150 women in California state prisons had been sterilized without official approval.

After the eight-month investigation, Amanda and Raffaele were put on trial and convicted a year later. Their appeal took two more years. (Trials in Italy are notoriously slow.) The court of appeals, in a full jury trial, found them innocent of murder in 2011 and severely criticized the evidence against them as being nonexistent, scientifically flawed, and erroneous. They were released after spending 1,427 days in prison, and Amanda flew home to America. But Italy has no double-jeopardy clause in its constitution, and prosecutors are allowed to appeal acquittals. Mignini appealed the verdict to the Corte Suprema di Cassazione. On March 26, 2013, the Court of Cassation vacated the acquittal and ordered a new trial. That new trial took place in late 2013.

Between China and the Pacific is the archipelago that Beijing calls the ‘First Island Chain’. There is also the ‘Nine Dash Line’, more recently turned into ten dashes in 2013 to include Taiwan, which China says marks its territory. This dispute over ownership of more than 200 tiny islands and reefs is poisoning China’s relations with its neighbours. National pride means China wants to control the passageways through the Chain; geopolitics dictates it has to. It provides access to the world’s most important shipping lanes in the South China Sea. In peacetime the route is open in various places, but in wartime they could very easily be blocked, thus blockading China. All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.

We all know hopelessness; we know Christ crucified when we see it--in the slums of India and Oakland; passed out on city sidewalks; in someone's early, painful death. We know from resurrection. If I use the word 'God,' I sure don't mean an old man in the sky who loves the occasional goat sacrifice. I mean 'God' as Jane Kenyon described God: 'I am food on the prisoner's plate . . . / the patient gardener / of the dry and weedy garden . . . / the stone step, / the latch, and the working hinge.' I mean 'God' as the shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves.

The Egyptian’s asset,” Ron Carter began, tapping a brief command into his laptop to bring an image up on the screen at the front of the room, “is this man. Amr Shafik. He was a member of Egypt's Freedom and Justice Party from 2012 to 2013, and was imprisoned when the military overthrew Morsi and cracked down on Muslim Brotherhood activities in the country. In prison, he made contact with extremist elements, and was drawn into the orbit of the Islamic State. It's not completely clear even at this juncture whether he did so of his own accord or at the order of the Mukhabarat.” Egypt's intelligence service, Kranemeyer thought, looking over at Bell to see the DNI listening intently. As feared and brutal today as it had ever been in the days of Mubarak. A brutal necessity, perhaps. Or at least that’s what they told themselves. He wondered sometimes, about cause and effect. “What we do know is that he was re-arrested for such affiliations soon after release and it was then, if not before, that Egyptian intelligence brought him on side. And that, according to what they’ve shared with us, is where he’s been ever since. Providing intelligence on the Islamic State’s leadership in the Sinai, particularly Umar ibn Hassan. As he’s done now, in giving us Hassan’s location for noonday tomorrow, local time.

What Beijing wants in Angola is what it wants everywhere: the materials with which to make its products, and political stability to ensure the flow of those materials and products. So when former president José Eduardo dos Santos, who had been in charge for thirty-six years, decided to pay Mariah Carey $1 million to sing at his birthday party in 2013, that was his affair – as was any other way he chose to spend his vast wealth in his poverty-stricken country. And if the Mbundu, to which dos Santos belongs, continue to dominate, that is theirs. China does not have a view on human rights or corruption in Africa – only on economics.

a 2013 Gallup study showed that 25 per cent of all people hoping to emigrate put the USA as their first choice of destination. In the same year Shanghai University listed what its experts judged the top twenty universities of the world: seventeen were in the USA.

In 2013 the then UK Prime Minister David Cameron visited Tripoli and told the Libyan people that the lesson learned in Afghanistan and Iraq was: ‘helping other counties, intervening in other countries, is not simply about military intervention.’ To cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ he pledged: ‘In building a new Libya you will have no greater friend than the United Kingdom. We will stand with you every step of the way.’ But then, as the country plunged into chaos, with numerous militia battling for control, the Europeans walked away, leaving a broken state, a desperate people and a new route opening up for illegal immigration into the continent.

I am thinking of poets who haven't written well in years but who rubbed against the sun twenty years ago-- Aren't they in their own kinds of prisons too?

Enemies are people whose stories you haven’t yet heard and whose faces you haven’t yet seen. —Irene Hasenberg Butter, Holocaust survivor, during an interview at her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 13, 2013