![yourfandomsucks:
Indiana Prison Cat Program Changes lives
”..During my interviews, I found that whatever the complexities of their relationships with other people, most of the offenders in the cat program have always been animal lovers. And their devotion to their cats goes beyond providing these felines with security. These men adore their cats. Again and again, they affirmed that the cats had changed their lives, calming their anger, offering them love and teaching them about the joys and sacrifices of responsibility. “When I arrived here, I had nothing to lose.” Explains ‘Bear’. “When you have nothing to lose—you can get yourself into a lot of trouble. When I got my first cat, it changed me. There is something about holding a cat that makes your anger melt away. And if someone does something that upsets me—I have to remember my cat. I can’t keep my cat if I get into trouble.” He smiles wryly, reaching for little Ziggy. Bear’s last cat died recently from a pulmonary disorder. Bear was devastated, as were the other men on his floor. Because the cat died of natural causes, he was able to get a new kitten. Ziggy was sourced through a local animal shelter that works with the prison. “
Read the full article here [X]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0qxfc5XWA1r5z4sho1_400.jpg)
Indiana Prison Cat Program Changes lives
”..During my interviews, I found that whatever the complexities of their relationships with other people, most of the offenders in the cat program have always been animal lovers. And their devotion to their cats goes beyond providing these felines with security. These men adore their cats. Again and again, they affirmed that the cats had changed their lives, calming their anger, offering them love and teaching them about the joys and sacrifices of responsibility. “When I arrived here, I had nothing to lose.” Explains ‘Bear’. “When you have nothing to lose—you can get yourself into a lot of trouble. When I got my first cat, it changed me. There is something about holding a cat that makes your anger melt away. And if someone does something that upsets me—I have to remember my cat. I can’t keep my cat if I get into trouble.” He smiles wryly, reaching for little Ziggy. Bear’s last cat died recently from a pulmonary disorder. Bear was devastated, as were the other men on his floor. Because the cat died of natural causes, he was able to get a new kitten. Ziggy was sourced through a local animal shelter that works with the prison. “
Read the full article here [X]
(Source: reekrhymes)
(WARNING: SUICIDE, ALCOHOL, ILNESS, DEATH, INSTITUTIONAL RACISM/PREJUDICE)
American Indians suffer from the most serious health problems in the U.S. On reservations, American Indians have a life expectancy of 47 years. The tuberculosis rate for Natives is 533 percent higher than the national average; the accident mortality rate 425 higher; the infant mortality rate 81 percent higher; the sudden infant death syndrome rate 310 percent higher; the alcoholism rate 579 percent higher; the diabetes rate 249 percent higher; and the suicide rate 190 percent higher than the national average.-
Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
To add to this: 1 in 3 Native American Women will face sexual violence in their lifetime. This is much higher than national estimates of 1 in 4 or 1 in 6 for other groups of women. And, unlike other racial groups (which have assailants of the same race), the majority of assailants are white men.
(via fromonesurvivortoanother)
Why Are Police In America Treating Women Like Dogs?
When I was growing up, police in America generally treated women with gentleness and respect. It was generally understood that women were not to be thrown around or mistreated by police unless they were being openly violent. But in most areas of the United States those days are long gone. Sadly, many police officers seem to make it a point to be especially mean and degrading to women. All over the country women are being openly abused and humiliated by police. In America today, women are being yanked around by their hair by police, women are being pepper sprayed directly in the face by police, and women are being brutally strip-searched in front of leering male police officers. This is not how a civilized nation should be treating women and there is no excuse for treating women like dogs. The incidents that you are about to read about are absolutely shocking. They reveal just how far America has fallen. If police will treat non-violent women like dogs, then what will they do when the time comes to arrest you? That is something to think about.
What police are doing to peaceful female protesters in some areas of the country is absolutely horrific. A recent article by Steve Watson described the degrading things that were done to one group of women when they were arrested in Maryland….
Attorneys with the anti-abortion groups the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), the Thomas More Society of Chicago, and the American Catholic Lawyers Association revealed that after their arrest, the protesters, including women and young girls, one as young as 14, were put into leg shackles and strip searched twice, while being denied the right to make phone calls, and make contact with lawyers. The protesters were kept in jail overnight.
Reports indicate that the first strip search took place in the police station parking lot in full view of male officers. The second strip search was conducted at the Harford County Detention Center.
You can view a few minutes of video from when the women were originally arrested right here.
How would you feel if your mother, your wife or your daughter was being treated like this?
How would you respond if you learned that your female family members were strip-searched in front of leering male police officers?
There is no excuse for treating women like this.
In other parts of the country, police are getting very violent with peaceful female protesters.
For example, you can see videos about female protesters being pepper sprayed in the face here and here.
Is there any excuse for spraying pepper spray directly into the face of a woman that is being completely non-violent?
Police officers like that give all police a bad name.
Perhaps even more disturbing are the police officers that have been yanking women around by their hair.
In the video posted below, police brutally drag UCB English Professor Celeste Langan to the ground by her hair. She was not being violent at all and she actually offered her wrists to the police and verbally told them that they could arrest her. But instead of doing that, the police yanked her by the hair and threw her to the ground. Subsequently, the police did the same thing to two other peaceful female protesters….
In the old days, any police officers that treated women like that would be run out of town.
But in modern “Amerika”, police get to treat women as brutally as they want.
In fact, if a woman calls the police in “Amerika” she may get raped. When one 19-year-old single woman in Milwaukee dialed 911 for assistance, she never imagined that the police officer responding to the call would sexually assault her. But that is exactly what happened.
Yes, there are still lots of good police officers out there in America. Many work incredibly hard in extremely difficult circumstances to try to make our communities a safe place to live.
Unfortunately though, there is a cultural shift happening in America and the number of good police officers continues to decrease. Many good officers are being slowly but surely replaced by brutal monsters that have no problem with treating people like garbage.
This kind of mistreatment of females by police officers is even going on in our public schools.
For example, a sixth-grade girl in Colorado was recently arrested and marched out of her school in handcuffs for being “argumentative and rude”….
An Adams County Sheriff’s Office incident report says the assistant principal found Yajira walking in the hallway during lunch because the girl claimed she was cold and needed to get a sweater from her locker.
The report says the assistant principal was in mid-sentence when Yajira, “turned and walked away saying, ‘I don’t have time for this.’”
When intervention efforts with a counselor failed, Yajira was handcuffed and put in the school resource officer’s patrol car and taken to a juvenile holding facility called “The Link.”
In a previous article, I detailed some other incidents where female students have been arrested and publicly humiliated while at school….
*At one public school down in Texas, a 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume.
*A security guard at one school in California broke the arm of a 16-year-old girl because she left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning up some cake that she had spilled.
*In early 2010, a 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. “I love my friends Abby and Faith” was what she reportedly scribbled on her desk.
*A 6-year-old girl down in Florida was handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.
*A 17-year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father’s lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.
*In Allentown, Pennsylvania a 14-year-old girl was tasered in the groin area by a school security officer even though she had put up her hands in the air to surrender.
Are you disgusted yet?
You should be.
In Massachusetts, police were even sent out to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl.
What kind of country are we becoming?
Of course the federal government is one of the worst offenders when it comes to treating women like dogs.
At airports all over America, women are being strip-searched and publicly humiliated by TSA agents.
The following is how blogger Erin Chase described what she experienced when she went through a TSA pat-down while going through airport security with her young baby….
She patted my left arm, my right arm, my upper back and my lower back. She then said, “I need to reach in and feel along the inside of your waistband.”
She felt along my waistline, moved behind me, then proceeded to feel both of my buttocks. She reached from behind in the middle of my buttocks towards my vagina area.
She did not tell me that she was going to touch my buttocks, or reach forward to my vagina area.
She then moved in front of my and touched the top and underneath portions of both of my breasts.
She did not tell me that she was going to touch my breasts.
She then felt around my waist. She then moved to the bottoms of my legs.
She then felt my inner thighs and my vagina area, touching both of my labia.
She did not tell me that she was going to touch my vagina area or my labia.
Does treating women like this make us a safer country?
No.
The truth is that no other nation on earth is doing this sort of thing.
But it does show that we are becoming a country full of idiots.
After enduring such a horrific pat-down, Erin began shaking and she felt as though she had just been sexually assaulted….
I stood there, an American citizen, a mom traveling with a baby with special needs formula, sexually assaulted by a government official. I began shaking and felt completely violated, abused and assaulted by the TSA agent. I shook for several hours, and woke up the next day shaking.
Here is why I was sexually assaulted. She never told me the new body search policy. She never told me that she was going to touch my private parts. She never told me when or where she was going to touch me. She did not inform me that a private screening was available. She did not inform me of my rights that were a part of these new enhanced patdown procedures.
It is absolutely mind blowing how women are being treated in America today.
How we treat women says a lot about where we are at as a nation.
And right now America is becoming a very heartless place.
Wow. Way to go Harford County, once again I am ashamed to have grown up in that horrible fucking place.
when will white women stop using the word “women” to cover experiences unique to them? have the police ever been universally nice to woc? have they ever been universally nice to poor white women, while we’re at it? just how far america has fallen? it was higher than before? does this person know the history of white women’s activism at all, and what the response by the wider society was? look, lets not be freaking naive here. From the founding of the American Republic, if you went up against the state and corporations you was gonna get beat, period. The difference was gonna be in severity and there white upper class and middle class women had and still do have the edge over everyone else. But alla ya’ll need to go read you some Howard Zinn’s “A people’s history of the USA” and GET OFF this BULLSHIT “good ole days” meme. There has never been a “good ole days” for anybody except the rich white men who built this system. The police have always been what they are now, protectors of rich people and the system they built to keep them rich. Nothing more. Nothing less. its past time everyone knows this so we all can think of taking the next step.
guys, American police stood by and watched strikebreakers beat women over a hundred years ago. Nothing has changed.
rtnt:
The Human Cost of the iPad
In the second of a New York Times series about the global tech industry, Charless Duhigg and David Barboza explore the often brutal working conditions at the factories where some of America’s most iconic high-tech devices are made.
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.
Sex Workers Need HUMAN RIGHTS, Not Legal Wrongs
*TURN OFF THE BLUE LIGHT, IRELAND POSTER CAMPAIGN*
- BILLY BIALOTA (via fatmolly)
(Source: zorascreation)
Happy Bday Angela!
Activist, Scholar, Writer, Professor and FBI’s most wanted
When Angela Davis strode on the political stage with her fist raised high and her iconic Afro standing higher, people noticed. She is a rebel and a revolutionary, a bookish philosopher who has lived out her theories with action and purpose.
Smart, stylish, eloquent and fearless, Davis never lets her style get in the way of the substance. Her life’s work has been built around issues of race, community and the criminal justice system. In the 70s, she was involved with The Black Panthers, but much of her energy was focused on what she termed the Prison-Industrial Complex, the systematic privatization of prisons as profit-making machines. This means the more people in prison, the more lucrative the business. Hence, the absurd increase in men (mostly poor, young, black) sent to U.S prisons in the last two decades.
Davis herself was on the run from the law in the 70s, following the murder of a California judge. Innocent, she went into hiding, which sparked a nationwide search and worldwide media attention, propelling her to the FBI’s most wanted list. Two months later, she was arrested in a motel in midtown Manhattan. Despite pressure from famous rightwing fear-mongers – Richard Nixon (who branded Davis a “terrorist”), the then California governor Ronald Reagan and rat-bag FBI director J Edgar Hoover – Davis became an international cause celebre. A global campaign called for her release and Aretha Franklin offered to post quarter of a million dollars in bail. She was acquitted in the end.
Angela Davis inspired people all over the world, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who recorded their song “Angela” on their 1972 album, Some Time in New York City. The Rolling Stones also wrote about Davis, recording the song “Sweet Black Angel” on their 1972 album, Exile on Main Street.
Davis is now a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the former director of the university’s Feminist Studies Department. She is also the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working against the Prison-Industrial Complex.
theleftcorner | madgastronomer | maymay
While walking in the Mission yesterday, I came across this poster inside Good Vibes, with links added for your convenience:
ANTI-GAY COMPANIES TO BOYCOTT
(Let’s show them that hate doesn’t pay)
- Salvation Army (“practicing homosexuals” are not welcome to work here. Nuff said, don’t support them.) Instead, give your junk to Community Thrift on Valencia & 17th so that you can pick which org. you want the money to go to.
- Gold’s Gym! (owner and CEO gave millions to American Crossroads, a political organization run by Karl Rove that funds many anti-gay politicians)
- Domino’s Pizza (founder Tom Monaghan is a co-founder of the Thomas More Law Center, which advocates in court to restrict access to domestic partner benefits. He also financed a ballot proposal to remove sexual orientation from the non-discrimination ordinance in MI.)
- Cracker Barrel Restaurants (fired 17 people for being “inconsistent with…normal heterosexual values”)
- A1 Self-Storage (owner Terry Caster is the 2nd largest individual contributor to the infamous Prop 8 campaign)
- Cinemark/Century Theaters (CEO gave $10,000 to prop 8)
I was really glad to see The Salvation Army listed first. They’ve long been getting lots of heat for being anti-gay, but The Salvation Army is a sinister organization for many more reasons than that—and I speak from personal experience.
See also:
- PinkPanthers: Boycott these anti-gay companies
- San Francisco Chronicle’s Proposition 8 Contributors Database and LA Times: Tracking the money: Final Numbers (for Prop 8)
- Cinemark/Century Theaters CEO Anti-gay Donor
- Gay Homophobe, by Jonathan Mann
- Gay marriage proponent who urged halt to Prop. 8 enforcement dies
- Same-Sex Marriage Foes Seek Reversal of Ruling by Gay Judge
Chik-fil-a needs to be on this list.
Everyone, you know what to do.
With apologies to fans of Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, et al., by far the most pleasant surprise of this week’s Academy Awards nominee announcements was seeing Demián Bichir get nominated for Best Actor–alongside “conventional” choices like George Clooney and Brad Pitt–for his role as an undocumented single father in A Better Life.
As Colorlines noted, Bichir’s nomination was one of several nods for Latinos in this year’s Oscar race: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, also from Mexico, was nominated for Best Cinematography for Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life; Bérénice Bejo, a native of Argentina, earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her turn in the The Artist; Brazilian Sérgio Mendes was nominated for Best Song for “Real in Rio,” his collaboration with Siedah Garrett, of “Man In The Mirror” fame, from the animated film Rio.
But a look at some relevant figures further illustrates how painfully rare Bichir’s accomplishment is.
- Arturo García breaks down the numbers behind the (sad) rarity of Latin@s winning Oscars here. (via racialicious)
So my goal in writing this piece isn’t to hold him accountable–that’s already gone on. My goal in writing this is to answer his question. And since I recently gave a talk at Swarthmore on rape culture, I just so happen to have a bunch of examples and facts right at my fingertips.
First, the primary premise is flawed.
Damon seems to think that reinforcing to men that circumstances and consent are different things means that we are also letting women off the hook for reckless behavior. However, most men aren’t privy to all the rape prevention tactics women employ everyday, as a matter of course. (For the purposes of this discussion, the framing will be around cisgender, heterosexual men and women, though we are not the only people impacted by this type of thinking and this type of violence.)
I could share stories about being told from the time I started going out to always cover your drink with a napkin, never be alone after dark, always have your keys out in case of an attack, to never be alone with a guy you don’t know. I was also told not to open the door for boys I didn’t know, but in my case, it was the boy you kind of know that gets you. But I digress.
We could tell our stories all day, but where’s the data? When I presented at Swathmore, I ran a little experiment based on a question I had. How do men talk about rape? So I took it to the newsstands.
Interestingly, most men’s magazines don’t do “How Not to Rape” articles. They don’t really do “How Not to Get Raped Articles.” A further reading into what these articles were about revealed that most of the articles listed on men’s mags weren’t about rape at all–many were jokes about prison rape (or reviews of Oz) or contained the specific phrase “against abortion except in cases of rape of incest.” With one huge exception from Esquire‘s Tom Chiarella, the majority of men’s articles that mention rape aren’t actually dealing with the subject.
- Latoya Peterson gives a great response to how pop culture does not teach men how not to rape (or to avoid becoming a rape victim) at the R today. (via racialicious)
