Have to take care of each other when we are inside. A whole lot of things but mean to each other teach. Me and i used to. Have to make do so you try to figure. We have to. Take to washington all close. Put your clothes in a bag. You take to the laundry and. You dont know which. You might. Be not good at all. The mole in the prison is coming through the wall you bring to be inhaled there. A lot of people sick. From that. Not all the. Toilets. All even and the unit to be the newest the most modern unit is still crumbling the infrastructure is crumbling and its visible to anybody who even walks into the normally when you go to a visit. Its going to be hotter its going to be cold either its going to be extremely cold out or is going to be extremely hot inside normally in temperatures. Excess of 100 degrees theres no active theres no air conditioning. Theres no accusation for this in a ventilated area. And in the actual pods in the sails that whole guys they have no circulation at all so what you normally would see is that you see. This and theyre laying on the coal for because you know when that is in made out of senator lotts cinder blocks they hold in either cool air they hold so dear in the summer months theyre holding in all the cool air so the gas just lay bare just like bare chested on the floor its not uncommon to see 5 or 6 guys just laid out in a sale on the floor vironment is visible in the visiting area rats roaches spiders. And little Fire Fighters mosquitoes. Waltz in you want to see in the corners of the facility and these are areas where the public are. I mean theres nothing new about whats happening in march and i would say in very recent history i think 2 summers ago in august there was basically every other day most of them parchin and in a little bit further back history if we look at the 1970 s. Theres this successful suit that they are sort of people win against the state that leads to the end of the trustee system and that was around cruel and unusual punishment. As long as the prison has existed there have been these sort of cruel inhuman conditions and what were going to continue to see and have seen in the past is these. Periods where the state violence is sort of most apparent to us but for people who are incarcerated that state violence every day. I would never drink the water or i dont like to wash my hands in the bathrooms because when you turned water on its literally the color of my water fountains when they were the same way they were they come on the water fountains youre too scared to drink the guards will tell you not to drink i had guards give me about water because i didnt have any they went to water but my client that water all the time so the water varies between 2 ways its either to chlorinate it or it smells like sewage and so all the pipes leak right so the gas had their socks around the leaky pipes and so. They know not to drink the water if the sox are why they know chlorine is in the water we can wash our clothes and that if you dont enter into water youre going to drink it at that time if there is a border notice in the area you guys dont get by the water theyre still forced to drink that water they take their medication with water that smells like sewage they take medication in water that visibly if you put it in a cup and they think as well take it they let the water sit and they let the soil and all the particles go to the bottom and then they just drink the water that is clarified on top. Conditions that have been this way. Behind me is the Mississippi State penitentiary known locally as parchment prison where an astounding 9 individuals have died in the past month alone since the start of the new year reports of everything from fights and fires and suicides to insufficient food and Water Supplies Power Outages and individuals sleeping on the floors have been reported and a mountain of human rights abuses are allegedly going on behind these walls we traveled here today to speak with locals activists politicians celebrities and everyone in between and to try and figure out why these things are happening here parchment and what can be done to fix the problem in order to understand the Current Crisis inside parchment you have to go way back in history and understand the prisons roots of former governor of mississippi and open my supreme mrs james k. Vardaman was instrumental in creating the Mississippi State prison he believed that the money made from convict leasing and chain gangs should go to the state instead of private entities and those of the Mississippi State penitentiary was born the prison itself is a reform so parchment prison comes about at the turn of the last century as a as a way to sort of. Undo what some people are see as the problems of the comically system and in particular governor the governor at the time James Vardaman who is an unapologetic white supremacist actually runs on a campaign of white supremacy. Believes that the problem with comic leasing was not really the sort of. Human rights abuse that it was but rather that he saw it as sort of lining the pockets of the plantation class that he was a white supremacist populist and believe that this sort of state run plantation style prison would instead be a way of sort of socializing africanamericans to their place which he saw as. Manual labor the reform that led to the establishment of parchment was also white supremacist in its intent. As i mentioned james james vitamins the person who established. Parchment and he used to actually incarcerated people on the grounds of parchment with blood hounds for sport so if you think about that kind of context in which this place is born theres really no some getting white supremacy. Initially because we have the timeline of so there were about 4 or 5 its within 3 or 4 days between december 29th and january 2nd either on january 2nd in the o. C. Issued a statement stating that everything was under control however on january 3rd 2 more people died as a result of the incidents have occurred within one of the indio see it was still a tease throughout the state we did a timeline breakdown of everything that was occurring what we did that time last week we deployed the article on Twitter Facebook all of our platforms and certainly it began to go really viral we posted a video image of that was sent of several mean being housed in a in unit 32 of parchment unit 32 a question has been condemned and closed down since 2009 says 2000 i suffered for over 10 years and that was closed down a. C. L. U. Into than agreement with the city state prison for parchment to close it down the reason it was closed down was because it was a hellhole the essential it was it was a place where where 6 of the people that were being housed there it was the different facility it was the place where where people who were very sick was also being housed but it was also a. A place that was a violent place to say the least essentially the a. C. L. U. Decided. This facility should no longer be open so for 10 years this this place had been closed down and this was the place that. These these incarcerated people were moved to this facility now is flooded it has black mold in it they have no mattresses it basically has not been maintained in 10 years it was continue to be able to years ago but we have video surfaces of these men inside of this facility and we had already told the story that no other new site was telling with regard to those men being in unit 32 nobody else had disclosed because they didnt have the inside information once we got that we shared it and we share the video and the video went viral on twitter it was shared by. Many hip hop artists and its heinous on twitter and instagram can people like t. I. David banner and big create i think even so a lot of rappers have really been vocal about it parchment is located at least 2 hours away from many major cities making it difficult for lawyers Family Members and having kids to visit in recent months in person to people have used contraband cell phones to share videos and photos of their conditions on social media a risky act and incidents of forced transparency in a deadly situation one of the prison officials allege that prison gangs are to blame for the mounting debts the merged and many are pushing against that narrative stating that the inhuman conditions are driving people beyond sanity i think now with all of that. Technology that now were going to have people are now going to be able to see inside and i think thats whats threatening to. The people that are supposed to be in charge of the prisons now disappoint i think this is was threatening to warm because you cant you get so many people in so much of that is around so much contraband they were going there you cant you cant really control and find out who were to get retrieve this from who and so its going to continue to leak were going to change a lot more things that continue to slip because people are getting bold but now people are also coming up here the main way their prisons have been able to skirt any type of Regulation Authority around issues involving prisoners and litigation pretty much came out of the night and if im in Congress Passed the prison litigation reform act and what that was is that at that Time Congress was seeing in prisons were seeing a large number of prisoners filing suits about the conditions that they lived in and it was causing a backlog in the backlog in the in the system and so congress wanted a way to limit the rights of prisoners to bring federal lawsuits about the conditions that they were being to. And so what the p. L. R. A does is that it basically calls for or prisoners to allow their captors time and notice to fix issues that are conditions based so basically which you have to do is that you have to say you have to say to the people who are holding you in these conditions hey. This water smells like or this water tasted like corey and then you have to give those people are a reasonable amount of time to address the issue before you can move on. To even file a lawsuit against the prison. In this community there are people who believe. Its really hard there are no jobs and you see the kids. And as a parent. I can come up with arguments and theres a lot of conflict within the game and between the teams most of the conflict i would say. Is maybe. Close one on each other since. Theres Good Business the state of california makes 6000000000. 00 a year of the prison complex to get some 25. 00 where. You dont care. The system is working. This big clear is not a broken criminal Justice System the criminal Justice System is doing what it was designed to do steal kill and destroy. People its working what needs to happen with the system is tear the system apart and thats what needs to happen because if we dont repeal it put some lousy imply were going to keep this repetitive cycle. That only rubio will you bring different people to the table would do for them and it would be mississippi you would always go boom the good old boy all. Right but i believe this generation promo. The good old world wont work for them its not the gang leaders who are feeding them only one meal a day its not the gang leaders who are not repairing the. Plumbing where they can get water i mean more than just one water bottle a day its not the gang leaders who are leaving trash everywhere i mean this is obviously a problem with the state of mississippi when we think of prisoners we dont think humans we think criminals we think gang members we think murderers rapists we dont think that over half the population in prison are in there for victimless crimes we dont think that these are indeed humans who deserve human rights. We want to think that theyre terrible people so whenever the state tells us that theyre terrible people we feel like its ok and they get treated terribly and thats just not the case most prisoners are not in there for any other reason than possibly smoking a plant or doing some other victimless crime. For example you have. I have the a. A. R. P. Process which is called the administrative remedy process and the way its supposed to work is that there is supposed to be a box each unit on each zone in each tier and there are supposed to be these little forms that you can fill out in it and it has to you can only bring up one issue at a time and it has to be so specific as to give the m. T. O. 3 reasonable notice to fix your problem before you can move on and so its just that its a 3 step process 1st you fill out the a. A. R. P. And you tell them which your complaint is and you put it in the box and you hope to get a response. If you dont get a response within 30 days you move on to the 2nd step and the 2nd step is i did not get a response as they all want to respond. You put that in the box they have 30 days to respond and then and only then if you have gotten no response in 60 days then if you can find somebody to file a lawsuit on your behalf against in the o. C. They do so it makes it virtually impossible to file to get any kind of remedy legally for prisoners who dont have any. Solutions to the problems of parchment are difficult but they do exist Holding Elected Officials and prison officials accountable is on the lips of everyone i spoke with as well as Creative Solutions to addressing the issue people that are making decisions about what should happen with prisons are either there should be prayers or have not a clue whats really going on youve got the wrong people at the table you know you need those people at the table that really care people that are connected to the issue at hand people who have had Family Members behind you know the bars how can you really connect how can you really see what youre willing to see and be human and see people as human if you have not been through the experience one way or the other whether youve been a Family Member if you had a Family Member in there or locked up to hold somebody accountable for whats happening you almost have to do. Because it go back so far it didnt just or. It didnt just happen you just keep getting people in position to not change and it is the problem but in order to deal with hold of somebody accountable you gotta go way back so was ham you got to actually have legislators and people actually going to the facility actually talking to people like theyre people and not just walking me and ignoring them like youre looking at the paint on the wall but actually human as im bring them me and you know find out that they ask him them name you know make them human because they can help you solve the problems they can tell you is needed they can fix it guess who gets to bow light on this not us not any other organization not even the state of mississippi the inmates the prisoners are 100 percent in charge 100 percent in show it. Out of the Media Attention has pressurize out the more the abuse the abnormal use behind the walls we live behind the wall and youre going to have offices this going to say oh. Yeah really have made jamel today you get channel 3 for fat. Guy washington whoever here and guess would they go now and you last shall i will when i say you can shall you go eat when i say you can eat and guess would i say take your reckon take it now thats the reality of it was going on behind the walls in the prison would lock down and in lockdown in this in a state but especially in mississippi is a time for dio say out to more to allow staff who are rated been overworked. To have time off. Is a lot of. This going out even more pressure rises a pressure situation. We want you to 29. We want any brothers or sisters as inside you know 32 to be our unit 32 we were partially shut down in the interim. Immediately what we want is for those brothers and sisters assad to have Better Food Better Health care Better Mental Health care we want them to be treated like human beings we want them to be able to have access to their family existed to their representation because these are things that theyre being done now right now just this year value of which you have to try and do in this year manage time and the amount of money that it takes to even to file any litigation the bad conditions we can take the Alabama Department of corrections case as an example thats a 6 year lift. You know organizers and have attorneys seek he to even get into a point to where they can bring Alabama Department corrections to the table in mississippi. Question when he let the Health Department here last week the reason is the Health Department is can deal with them before. But since that time they refused to allow those brothers access to the necessary thing and we want people out of there ultimately we want them to immediately reinstate parole for those who have the ability to have access to parole we want them to a media really released those who have been killed on the on the finances on drug offenses to de coster rate this system also really. As with your goal is to abolish the system started over you know what i mean like reboot because weve never had a say in this process this is that nobody had a say in this process but this process has always come down on us is very defensive. We demand that whatever changes come in a transformative way the the problem of the prison and prison organizing has remained the same over time which is visibility its how do you draw attention to these dark sites across the country when theyre specifically designed to sort of prevent the public from understanding and empathizing in and knowing how to. Address the problem so i think a starting point for all of these campaigns is greater connectivity between people outside and inside so we make sure that we are responding to peoples needs inside and also aware of the conditions and creating sort of networks. So that when we have these episodes of extreme violence were able to better address the sort of everyday violence as well as it gets more and more attention and we get more and more leaders stepping up who are using their voices and using their their power 70 or their power to create a voice for. For the incarcerated were still trying to be centric on the voices of the actual prisoners i know theyre theyre bringing in celebrities who are taking their own actions and what not but our thing is were talkin directly right now to incarcerated people and to direct Family Members of people who are incarcerated because when we look at the root cause and the Root Solutions of what needs to be done these are the people who are closest to the issue and theyre going to know what they need done a thing a lot of time people have will to listen to speak almost they didnt have a wall. Because they have time knowledge or heard someone else speak about it they may feel is deliverable voice booked into you want to march. Argue you would know right its hard to explain to people. You know it expert if you went to school to learn criminal Justice Reform or you went to law school or you now been elected june june now this you you want to be the expert you want to have the answers you pay this price of educating your sim to be the expert and then when you have some magic come allow you did the time in to prison this lie all hung out tell you what you need this is what you need and thats a lot of. The criminal Justice System in whats happening here in mississippi is happening because we have deafen our sadness the voices of the people they need to be heard because here we are 30 plus years in the gang and we still havent been heard although i hope that we are being heard you heard your ear. If our state has heard us desta key because we can have people come from all over the world even local give Media Attention to it but the only way we know that weve been hurt is because china or the right but its a cause for pride pressure conditions thats what makes this a pressure water. A water pipe if you put too much pressure on it and. Everything is happening. Right now and disappoint. So say it lives a loss. For no reason. In people in sales was good enough supposed to be with you and its not good. Not good its called as its causing death. To prison and you want to go to prison in due time. Go to prison you own they have locations but not to disc a pass to. This is the worst ive ever heard. I will say to my brothers and sisters get out. Of tripping. We have a stout from the day we. To the current moment and we just asked him stand down is strength in the wants back and while there are weak in areas where you can stop valid. Where you can encourage flow do they just like you would embrace want would love on the inside like you would if you want out sad a like you desire only and sad. And to know that you have people here work in a way to for you. I cant show you my face but im going to teach you must story in 99. This man was sentenced to death. Charged with capital murder even though he didnt have the gun didnt pull the trigger didnt intend to kill anybody imagine living in your bathroom for that week with his son of a 23. Confined within 4 gray walls. To leave death row. You. Thank you. Thanks as. Line from the World Headquarters of the r t america in our Nations Capital this is the news with rick sanchez and hello again everybody im rick sanchez whether youre picking us up in taipei or tacoma or any place in between as we broadcast live around the world we welcome you you may be watching us on portable t. V. The app by the way were so glad that you were there you know our job here every day is to look out for you so one of the stories that were going to be bringing you today has to do with a tech company that might be selling your personal information to facebook and if they are you should know about it so were going to tell you but lets go ahead
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