True Crime – Page 252 – The Pen Hustle With Brandy Cavalli

Why Women Are the Fastest-Growing Prison Population

The ranks of female prisoners are surging nearly twice as fast as men’s.

Should the conversation about criminal justice reform be gender-specific? The answer from a group of panelists at Politico’s Women Rule Summit in Washington D.C. on Thursday morning is a resounding yes.

When we think about America’s prison system, we think almost exclusively about young men—and for good reason, as more than 93% of inmates are male, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

But while the proportion of incarcerated women is small, the actual number is surprisingly large: There are more than one million women currently behind bars in the U.S., and that number is on the rise.
In fact, women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population in the country, and the rate of incarceration for women has been growing nearly twice as fast as that of men since 1985, according to the ACLU.

The drastic increase in the number of women is due to the past two decades’ war on drugs, said Congresswoman Karen Bass (D-CA). Many of the women in today’s prisons are there because of romantic or other relationships with male drug dealers, who give their names to officials in exchange for more lenient sentencing, she explained. In 2000, 40% of women’s criminal convictions leading to incarceration were for drug crimes, according to the ACLU.

Yet when efforts are made to reform the prison system, women are almost entirely left out of the conversation, said Bass. “When they were making the efforts for criminal justice reform and they forgot women, they didn’t mean to,” she said.

Bass pointed out that women tend to be in prison often for different reasons than men are—the majority are non-violent offenders—and have different needs than male prisoners. “It should absolutely be gender-specific,” she said, referring to the conversation about women’s prison reform.

Among the women-specific measures that the panelists discussed was the shackling of pregnant prisoners, which has been outlawed in 21 states, according to the New York Times, yet continues to occur. “The policy is that inmates transported to medical visits get shackled. For pregnant women, you can’t fake the pregnancy. There’s an armed guard in the room. Why on earth would you torture women this way?” asked panelist Pat Nolan, director of the American Conservative Union Foundation’s Center for Criminal Justice Reform.

Incarcerated mothers face other obstacles, including the sky-high cost of phone calls, and strict reunification laws that prevent mothers who are in jail for longer than a specific period of time to regain custody of their children once they are released. Mignon Clyburn, chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission, said that some families spend up to $30,000 on phone bills so that children can stay in touch with their mothers—and as a result, only 38% do.

Many women are “totally lost in the system,” said Nolan, pointing out that while a hardened criminal may know how to survive prison, many incarcerated women, who are there because of relationships to criminal men, are unable to cope.

Originally posted in Fortune Magazine

FEATURED POST: Here’s Why Americans Join ISIS And Other Terrorist Groups

Syed Rizwan Farook, a suspect in the San Bernardino attacks, was an American citizen. Handout Getty Images

A market researcher explains why Westerners join Muslim extremist groups.

After authorities disclosed an American couple killed 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, December 2, the question has become urgent: What causes Westerners to join Muslim extremist groups, like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)?

A Lebanese market research company says it has coaxed out a more complete profile of their motivations, according to an article in Defense One, a national security news website. The Beirut-based firm Quantum Communications studied televised one-on-one interviews with former and current fighters shown on Saudi and Iraqi channels.

According to the study, released earlier this year, Americans and other Westerners are more likely to be drawn to Islamic extremist groups as they search for identity. They feel like outsiders in Western culture and seek out the rules, structure and cohesiveness of the group to provide them a sense of belonging, the report says.

“Belonging defines them, their role, their friends, and their interaction with society,” as the group of “identity seekers” is described in the report; more than 60 percent of this group was from the West that included U.S. French and British nationals. “In this context the Islamic Ummah (identity) provides a pre-packaged transnational identity.”

The report succinctly describes Western converts as “confident naïfs with an axe to grind.” Among the identity seekers the report identified Moner Mohammad Abusalha, a 22-year-old Florida man who, according to authorities, blew himself and others up using a truck bomb in Syria in 2014. He was fighting with an al-Qaeda splinter organization known as al-Nusra Front.

The 2015 study uses a psycho-contextual analytical technique developed by a Canadian psychologist to glean people’s motivations.

In testimony to Congress earlier this year, Michael Lumpkin, assistant defense secretary for special operations/low-intensity conflict, said the Pentagon would use a framework similar to that in the Quantum study to analyze, detect and deter homegrown Islamic terrorists.

Besides the Western recruits, the market researcher also studied televised interviews with ISIS supporters from Syria and Iraq as well as other Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia. The firm grouped the fighters into nine categories, based on why they said they joined Islamic radical groups.

Besides identity seekers, the other categories included:

Status seekers who want to improve their social status through money and recognition;

Revenge seekers who identify with those oppressed by the West;

Redemption seekers who are seeking to erase past sins;

Responsibility seekers, most often from the war zone, who are looking to better ways to support and protect their families;

Thrill seekers who are looking for adventure;

Ideology seekers who are looking to impose their view of Islam;

Justice seekers who believe they are righting a wrong; and

Death seekers, who are often people who have lost people in the conflict and now seek to die as martyrs, rather than commit suicide.

A more common reason among Westerners was a search for identity.

But a few also were characterized as thrill seekers. An example given by the report was Eric Harroun, a 30-year-old American veteran, who went to fight in Syria in 2013 with the Free Syrian Army. He later died of a drug overdose.

El Salvadorian Castaway Who Survived 14 Months At Sea Sued For Cannibalism By Shipmate’s Family

Alvarenga is pictured shortly after washing ashore in the Marshall Islands in 2014, following 438 days at sea.

A Salvadoran fisherman who survived 438 days lost at sea is now being sued by his dead shipmate’s family over allegations that he ate the man in order to stay alive.

The family of Ezequiel Cordoba, who was reported to have starved to death months into the ordeal, is seeking $1 million, reports Fox News Latino, citing El Diario de Hoy.

Jose Salvador Alvarenga the world’s longest surviving castaway — has repeatedly denied the accusation.

In November 2012, Alvarenga set sail in a small fishing boat from a coastal town in Mexico with Córdoba. He’d agreed to pay the 22-year-old $50 for the planned two-day fishing trip.

Instead, the men ran into a massive storm and seemingly vanished. More than a year later, Alvarenga washed ashore, alone, on an atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 6,700 miles away from where he went missing.

The story Alvarenga, 37, told in the wake of his rescue — surviving on raw fish, turtle blood and his own urine — was nothing short of incredible. After some initial doubts, officials said his account checked out.

His full story is detailed in Jonathan Franklin’s book, “438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea.” In an excerpt, published in The Guardian November, Franklin describes the horrific ordeal, including how Alvarenga was so hungry that he ate his own fingernails and that Córdoba had difficulty stomaching their challenging diet.

Córdoba died after a few months, according to Alvarenga. Before he did, he reportedly made Alvarenga promise two things — that he would not eat his corpse and that he would find Cordoba’s mother and tell her what happened.

Alvarenga met with Córdoba’s mother in May last year. About a month later, however, he was defending allegations that he cannibalized his companion.

In Alvarenga’s account, Córdoba convulsed and died on the floor of the boat with his eyes open. Alvarenga said he continued talking to the corpse for six days, unable to cope with having lost his only companion.

When Alvarenga finally regained his composure, he said he performed as best a burial as he could manage:

First I washed his feet. His clothes were useful, so I stripped off a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt. I put that on — it was red, with little skull-and-crossbones — and then I dumped him in. And as I slid him into the water, I fainted.

Read the rest of this story on Huffington Post.