We know this is another broken system …. SMH!!
Prison Reform Movement's Weblog- America: Land of the Free, Home of the Incarcerated
By Cassandra Rules of The Free Thought Project
Heartbreaking enough, this is not some historic footage of a Nazi death camp. This is modern day America.
“We see Mr. Lopez struggling to breath for hours, and then, finally, we have an unobstructed view as Mr. Lopez takes his last breath, dying, half-naked on the cold concrete floor of a prison cell – isolated and alone with no Defendant caring whether he lived or died”
A lawsuit has been filed in the March 17, 2013 death of Christopher Lopez at the San Carlos Correctional Facility.
Along with this lawsuit, attorney David Lane has released a horrific and heartbreaking compilation of footage from the hours leading to Lopez’ death.
The lawsuit begins-
On March 17, 2013, in full view of most of the Defendants, a shackled and stripped Christopher Lopez died alone and ignored, on the cold concrete floor of a…
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What causes this? The men and women in prison are criminals and do not respond well to rules and regulations. The men and women who work in prisons are initially sound in judgement. They undergo a background check and have no prior criminal history. Why is it that they go from law abiding citizens to seemingly cruel keepers? This has been going on for more than a century and we keep letting it happen. What are we to do about changing the prison environment as it is? The popular view is to hold the correctional staff more accountable. Levy more sanctions on staff who commit such atrocities. Unfortunately, this does not take the actual situational factors into account. To be sure, those that do wrong should be held accountable be they inmates or staff, but we should not oversimplify the situation by ignoring the environmental influences that cause such conflict between the keepers and the kept. Prisons as we know them are a failed concept. They don’t work. Prison have become the economic opportunity of some capitalist to put people to work at wages that allow for obscene profits. We as a society should wrestle away prisons from capitalist and view reentry as a human service industry. Instead of always blaming the staff, we should hold policymakers accountable for their lack of funding and create correctional environments more conducive to rehabilitation. Most prisons are overcrowded and underfunded which demonstrates just what policymakers truly think about these institutions.
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