Prison

You can take the girl out of high society but you can’t take the high society out of the girl — even if you throw her in a Tallahassee prison. According to a report in the Daily Mail, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has filed a whopping 400 complaints since arriving at the federal prison in July. "Max is the prison Karen. She can file a grievance over anything — she has over 400 of them," a source told the Mail. "She complains about the food, the bedding, when they cancel temple because of bad weather or are late setting up her legal calls." It was also reported that the prison's vegan menu was “insufficient” for Maxwell’s needs.

Viewed from a coldly logical perspective, releasing Viktor Bout for Brittney Griner is a highly lopsided trade in favor of the Russians. The former was one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers on earth, a man responsible for sending weapons to some of Africa’s deadliest conflicts during the 1990s and early 2000s. The latter was a basketball player who was arrested for a smidgen of cannabis oil in her luggage. The two offenses are incomparable, which is one of the reasons why conservatives were so upset about President Biden green-lighting the swap. Donald Trump and John Bolton don’t agree on much, but both believe the decision was the epitome of feckless surrender (for Griner’s family, of course, it’s anything but).

Cockburn has done his fair share of jail time, mostly on overblown bootlegging charges. Yet after paying his dues to society, he decided to venture to a recent press conference on the situation of those imprisoned after the January 6 riot. The Patriot Freedom Project helps aid the families of the January 6 prisoners with legal costs and living expenses. Now, the organization is advocating for a review of the prison conditions of the inmates. One inmate’s mother said, “The conditions at the DC jail are horrendous. His rations often smelled like cleaning fluid. There were pubic hairs included in the small portions of his food. The drinking water, visibly dirty. Mold was visible in cells, and roaches lived amongst [the prisoners].

Colin Pitchfork, the child rapist and murderer who was sentenced to life in prison in 1988, will soon be a free man.  On 31 November 1983, Lynda Mann was raped and strangled by Pitchfork in Leicestershire; on 31 July 1986, Dawn Ashworth was raped and strangled by him in a neighbouring village. Both girls were just 15.  The pathologist who examined Dawn’s body, which had been hidden under branches in a field, said it showed signs of a 'brutal sexual assault'.  Pitchfork, who left his baby son in his car asleep when he raped and murdered Lynda Manns, showed no sign of remorse when caught.  I don't trust the police and probation service to correctly monitor Pitchfork Pitchfork had a history of violence against women.

What do you call someone in prison? An inmate? Prisoner? How about a 'resident'? That's how those locked up in Britain's jails are now described by the Ministry of Justice and the Prison Service. Apart from the cringing absurdity of labelling people whom the state has detained as if they had voluntarily checked into the care home from hell, what does this tell us about the culture of the Prison Service? And why does it matter? The Ministry of Justice has form for assaults on the English language. Recent guidance on offenders, still under a prison sentence but being supervised in the community, has cancelled this apparently dangerously oppressive label replacing it with ‘supervised individuals’.

The Scottish Tories don’t mean to be the way they are. Sometimes they just can’t help it. They are being that way again over plans to let some prisoners vote in the forthcoming Scottish parliament elections. I am not convinced those elections should be going ahead at all in the middle of a pandemic but, if they are to, there are good reasons for prisoners to be enfranchised. The Tories intend to force a vote at Holyrood on Wednesday against allowing those serving custodial sentences of less than 12 months to participate in the May 6 election. MSPs voted last February to extend the franchise in order to comply with a series of judgments from the European Court of Human Rights, beginning with 2005’s Hirst v United Kingdom (No 2).

What's it like being locked up during lockdown? The latest statistics on prison safety paint a grim picture of life behind bars, which has been made worse by the pandemic. Even the good news must be caveated. Assaults on staff have reduced quite dramatically, which in any circumstances must be a good thing given a backdrop of record-breaking rates of violence until the virus struck. However, they have reduced mainly as a consequence of an unprecedented lockdown introduced to prevent the spread of Covid-19. This has dramatically reduced the time inmates spend outside their cells; as a consequence, it has rather limited the available opportunities for prisoners to knock seven bells out of prison officers and each other.