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Misión cumplida, por Lisa Benson 3
La propuesta del Bronco de mochar manos al que robe es una 'regresión al pasado': CNDH 4
Bronco, ¿esto es lo que quieres?: cortan las manos a dos personas en Puebla 6
Coahuila tendrá su primer Encuentro de Personas Transgénero y Aliados 7
Yo también apoyo el asturleonés. La diversidad lingüística nos enriquece. 9
It's Not Just These Cops. It's Not Just Baltimore. 10
el curso gratuito “Diversidad sexogenérica para la no discriminación: niñas, niños y
adolescentes”
13
Javier Corral exige a SCJN declarar inconstitucional Ley de Seguridad Interior 14
La penúltima gran idea de Forges 16
El escándalo no humanitario 17
Yo este verano 19
Bryan Stevenson on what well-meaning white people need to know about race 20
Tribunal superior despenaliza homosexualidad en Trinidad y Tobago 30
¿Volvemos a los valores de la dictadura? 33
Cientos de niños soldados son liberados en Sudán del Sur 36
Rein in the Prosecutors 39
Número de niñas 'no deseadas' en la India alcanza millones, según informe 41
Cumple 100 días plantón que busca aprobación de leyes LGBT en Nuevo León 45
This is Rikers 47
Lo que los hombres tienen que decirle a las mujeres acerca del hijab 82
Efectos disuasivos, atemorizadores e inhibidores a la libertad de expresión 83
Publican Protocolo de Atención a personas LGBT en casos de procuración de justicia 85
La letra con glitter entra 86
Sin solución quejas de personas transgénero por discriminación en México 90
Portugal necesita a #FEMEN para luchar contra la violencia sexual, la discriminación por género,
la industria del sexo, o los ataques contra los derechos de las mujeres.
92
Linda es la que baila 93
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Si el problema es la Ley, cambiémosla. Si el problema son los jueces, cambiémoslos 95
Drag queen y musulmana; Glamrou lucha contra discriminación de occidente hacia los
inmigrantes
99
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Misión cumplida, por Lisa Benson
https://www.arcamax.com/politics/editorialcartoons/lisabenson/s-2070238
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La propuesta del Bronco de mochar manos al que robe es una 'regresión al pasado': CNDH
Luis Raúl González Pérez recordó que "están prohibidas las sanciones infamantes, humillantes".
Por Redacción
MOISÉS PABLO/CUARTOSCURO
El candidato independiente Jaime Rodríguez Calderón y su esposa Adalina Dávalos llegan al Palacio de
Minería para el primer debate presidencial.
Para el presidente de la Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH), Luis Raúl González Pérez, la
propuesta del candidato independiente, Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, el Bronco, de mochar la mano de los
funcionarios que roben es una "regresión al pasado".
"No podemos tener regresiones al pasado. Están prohibidas las sanciones infamantes, humillantes", dijo el
presidente de la CNDH al ser cuestionado en el Senado por los medios de comunicación.
González Pérez dijo que que estas propuestas "son contrarias a los derechos humanos" y recordó la
Constitución y los tratados internacionales que México ha firmado.
Durante el primer debate presidencial el domingo 22 de abril, el Bronco propuso cortar las manos a los
funcionarios que roben: "Tenemos que mocharle la mano al que robe, así de simple. Yo presentaré una
iniciativa al Congreso, a ver si los diputados de ellos (de los otros candidatos presidenciales) se atreven a
aprobarla. Necesitamos mocharle la mano al que robe en el servicio público".
La propuesta de Jaime Rodríguez generó mucha polémica y fue muy criticada por algunos especialistas en
seguridad, como el director del Observatorio Nacional Ciudadano, Francisco Rivas, quien calificó de
"inaceptable" el mensaje del Bronco a la ciudadanía.
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El ministro de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (SCJN), José Ramón Cossío, recordó que la
Constitución del país prohíbe que ese tipo de sanciones.
El artículo 22 de la Constitución establece: "Quedan prohibidas las penas de muerte, de mutilación, de
infamia, la marca, los azotes, los palos, el tormento de cualquier especie, la multa excesiva, la confiscación de
bienes y cualesquiera otras penas inusitadas y trascendentales. Toda pena deberá ser proporcional al delito
que sancione y al bien jurídico afectado".
https://www.huffingtonpost.com.mx/2018/04/24/la-propuesta-del-bronco-de-mochar-manos-al-que-robe-es-
una-regresion-al-pasado-cndh_a_23419262/
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Bronco, ¿esto es lo que quieres?: cortan las manos a dos personas en Puebla
El sangriento hallazgo ocurrió en Yehualtepec, municipio ubicado en el triángulo rojo del estado.
Por MTP Noticias
La violencia en Yehualtepec, municipio ubicado en el triángulo rojo en Puebla, se disparó tras el hallazgo de
tres cuerpos: dos sin una mano y uno desmembrado, este último con un presunto narcomensaje. Los cuerpos
fueron abandonados los días 23 y 24 de abril.
De acuerdo con MTP Noticias , la Fiscalía General del Estado de Puebla informó que "sí hay occisos" y que
"va a revisar en qué condiciones" fueron hallados, sin precisar la cifra de víctimas.
El primer hallazgo se registró el pasado lunes: dos cadáveres en distintos puntos del municipio y en ambos
casos, los cuerpos no tenían una mano. Personal ministerial los trasladó al área forense.
Las dos víctimas siguen ser identificadas y no hay una versión oficial sobre la causa del doble crimen.
Las autoridades municipales hallaron este martes el cuerpo desmembrado de un hombre dentro de una bolsa
en la entrada de una capilla en la localidad San Gabriel Tetzoyocan, en el kilómetro 69 de la carretera federal
150 Tehuacán-Tecamachalco.
Junto a los restos humanos estaba una cartulina con un presunto narcomensaje: "esto le va a pasar a todos los
que anden hablando que son de la empresa. Sigues tu Damián, el Michoacano, y ustedes Fredys, sigan
jugando... Att: CJNJ" (sic).
La terrorífica realidad de mutilar cuerpos
El hallazgo de cuerpos mutilados o desmembrados en los últimos días tiene un impacto mayor, tras la
propuesta surgida en el debate presidencial del pasado domingo, vía Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, el Bronco:
mochar las manos a quien robe en el servicio público.
El Bronco no ha explicado la profundidad de su propuesta. Pero su "idea" tiene orígenes en la conocida Ley
del Talión (principio de justicia retributiva) y la sharia, que pena con castigos físicos muy severos la
observancia musulmana.
En México, el artículo 22 prohíbe cualquiera de estas formas de "justicia": quedan prohibidas las penas de
muerte, de mutilación, de infamia, la marca, los azotes, los palos, el tormento de cualquier especie, la multa
excesiva, la confiscación de bienes y cualesquiera otras penas inusitadas y trascendentales.
Incluso la la Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH) consideró que mochar la mano de los
funcionarios que roben es una "regresión al pasado".
Este texto se publicó originalmente en MTP Noticias y fue editado para su publicación en este sitio.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com.mx/2018/04/24/bronco-esto-es-lo-que-quieres-cortan-las-manos-a-dos-
personas-en-puebla_a_23419249/
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16ABR
Coahuila tendrá su primer Encuentro de Personas Transgénero y Aliados
Por primera vez en Coahuila se organizará un foro destinado a debatir ideas en torno a los derechos y
demandas de las personas transgénero, transexuales y travestis de la entidad. El proyecto tiene la misión de
incidir en materia de salud, inclusión laboral y reconocimiento de identidad de género en el Congreso local.
El foro, que recibe el nombre de “Encuentro de Personas Trans y Aliados”, es organizado por la organización
civil San Aelredo, cuyo presidente, Noe Ruíz, manifestó que su creación está encaminada a la inclusión de los
derechos civiles de las personas trans en el estado.
El evento se desarrollará los días 11 y 12 de mayo, el primer día será albergado en el vestíbulo del Congreso
del Estado, mientras que el segundo día se efectuara en el Museo del Normalismo. Aquellas personas que
deseen participar deberán registrarse en el correo electrónico [email protected], tienen hasta el 30 de
abril.
“Cuando nosotras decidimos expresarnos como persona trans, la invisibilidad ante la ley nos deja a un lado,
negándonos nuestros derechos a vivir en condiciones de igualdad. Parte de esto se traduce en una transfobia
que no permite el avance de nuestra identidad”, declaró Briana Aguilera, mujer trans e integrante de San
Aelredo.
Los ejes sobre los que se desarrollará el foro son la inclusión laboral, salud y educación, los aspectos sociales
más comunes de los que las personas trans son excluidas, razones por las que se enfrentan a más y mayores
retos para acceder a servicios, terminar una grado escolar o ser reconocidas bajo el género con el que se
identifican.
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Los organizadores señalaron que la necesidad de realizar este encuentro se basa en que las autoridades
estatales no han mostrado voluntad política para incluir a las personas trans, pues actualmente no cuentan con
el reconocimiento jurídico de las identidades trans, situación que las coloca en una posición de desigualdad y
marginación.
Con información de Milenio y Vanguardia.
http://desastre.mx/mexico/coahuila-tendra-su-primer-encuentro-de-personas-transgenero-y-aliados/
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Eneko las Heras @EnekoHumor
Yo también apoyo el asturleonés. La diversidad lingüística nos enriquece. Buen artículo @nbardio sobre
un tema poco tratado a nivel nacional. Manifestación sábado 21 de abril a las 12:00 Estación del Norte de
Uviéu http://www.la-politica.com/40-anos-de-lucha-por-el-asturleones-y-una-manifestacion-
para-cumplir-la-constitucion/ … … #Asturianu #Oficialidá #YoVoi
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It's Not Just These Cops. It's Not Just Baltimore.
Lessons we must take from an extraordinary trial.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
Getty Images
This is Baltimore, gentlemen. The gods will not save you.
—Ervin Burrell, The Wire
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As our invaluable guide Justin Fenton of The Baltimore Sun reports, the extraordinary trial of two former
Baltimore police officers is now in the hands of the jury. Both Marcus Taylor and Daniel Hersl worked for
something called the Gun Trace Task Force, a law-enforcement initiative that did not work out for the best.
Federal prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses during the trial, including four officers who have admitted
their roles in brazen robberies the squad carried out. Six members of the task force have pleaded guilty to
federal charges that include racketeering, robbery and firearms violations. The trial included years worth of
allegations that officers from the elite unit used illegal tactics to stop citizens on the street and search their
property without justification, then skimmed money. But the unit also was carrying out much bigger heists,
targeting people they believed to have large amounts of cash and finding ways to get to their property.
Officers testified that Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the unit’s commander, often sought out the next target by asking
victims whom they would rob if given the chance. Hersl and Taylor are charged with racketeering,
racketeering conspiracy, robbery and use of a firearm in a crime of violence, with prosecutors saying their
service weapons were used for the purpose of committing extortion.
That only scratches the surface of the testimony in the trial. The GTTF was engaged in open outlawry, much
of it aimed at Baltimore’s African-American community. A sampling of the testimony, compiled by
the Sun, follows.
Ward said Jenkins liked to profile certain vehicles for traffic stops. Honda Accords, Acura TLs, Honda
Odysseys were among the “dope boy cars” that they would pull over, claiming the drivers weren’t wearing
seat belts or their windows were too heavily tinted. Ward said Jenkins also believed males over the age of 18
carrying bookbags were suspicious and attempted to stop them.
Ward said the officers kept BB guns in their vehicles “in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a
shootout, so we could plant them.” He did not say whether the officers ever planted a BB gun on anyone.
In one incident, police took a man's house keys, ran his name through databases to find his address, went into
the home without a warrant and found drugs and a safe. The officers cracked open the safe, which had about
$200,000 inside. They took $100,000 out, closed the safe back up, then filmed themselves pretending to open
it for the first time. 'Nobody touch anything,' [The unit's Sgt. Wayne Jenkins] can be heard saying on the
video, which was played for jurors.
Ward said the unit’s supervisor, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, instructed the officers to carry replica guns to plant if
they found themselves in a jam. Police recovered a replica gun from the glove box of Taylor’s vehicle after he
was arrested last year. The gun, shown to jurors, is nearly indistinguishable from Taylor’s service pistol.
This was an absolutely astonishing trial, replete with what headline writers love to call “revelations.” But
nothing that was “revealed” in the trial was revelatory to the people who live in the neighborhoods where
these cops ran wild. All of the people they rousted, and all of the people from whom they stole, and all of the
people they set up, have mothers and uncles and sons and grandmothers.
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Getty Images
On Wednesday, Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund appeared with Amy Goodman
on Democracy Now! to talk about the ripple effects of what was placed into evidence in this trial.
Absolutely, because, as I suggested it, it confirms so many things that the community had been saying over
years. And the reframing that needs to happen is to bring those voices to the table, to allow those voices to
have air, to let them be believed, that communities are a key part of the public safety narrative. Without
question, Baltimore has been besieged by violent crime over the past few years. And I’ve been saying for
some time that until we resolve the issue of policing and trust between—the distrust, the legitimate distrust,
that many members of the community have for law enforcement, we can’t deal with issues of public safety.
And this demonstrates the way in which communities have been preyed upon by officers in ways that make
them unwilling to trust the police. They will not call and say, “This is what I saw.” They will not be
witnesses. They will not trust those who claim they need their help to solve crimes. So, until we deal with that
issue, until we deal with the legitimate distrust of the community towards law enforcement, because of
officers like those in this task force, we can’t get to the kind of public safety outcomes that everyone wants.
The next time police violence touches Baltimore off, anybody who claims to be shocked is a liar.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16867610/baltimore-cops-trial-racketeering/
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Memoria y ToleranciaCuenta verificada @MuseoMyT
#FelizLunes El #CentroEducativoTruper y @CONAPRED te invitan a participar en el curso gratuito
“Diversidad sexogenérica para la no discriminación: niñas, niños y adolescentes”. #EntradaLibre. Inf:
https://bit.ly/2qaVPEz
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Javier Corral exige a SCJN declarar inconstitucional Ley de Seguridad Interior
Corral Jurado reiteró su profundo respeto a las autoridades y elementos de las Fuerzas Armadas, pero
consideró que debe acotarse su papel.
MISAEL VALTIERRA/ CUARTOSCURO
Javier Corral, gobernador de Chihuahua, solicitó a la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (SCJN) declarar
inconstitucional la Ley de Seguridad Interior por transgredir la soberanía del estado que gobierna.
Corral considera que la ley aprobada por ambas cámaras legislativas vulnera principios fundamentales de
justicia y derechos humanos, por eso presentó una controversia constitucional ante la SCJN en contra del
precepto. En el texto de la controversia destaca también que la LSI compromete la autonomía presupuestaria y
financiera de los estados, particularmente del Estado de Chihuahua.
En la impugnación presentada por Corral, se alude a la definición de competencias de los municipios, de las
entidades federativas y de la Federación, a través de los artículos 21, 40, 41, 119 y 124 de la Constitución
Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, en los que queda claro que en materia de seguridad pública, el
Gobierno Federal debe de mantener un estricto respeto a la soberanía de las entidades federativas.
El mandatario chihuahuense presentó el recurso en compañía de Santiago Corcuera Cabezut, abogado experto
en Derechos Humanos; así como de la politóloga Denise Dresser, el secretario General de Gobierno, César
Jáuregui Robles; los activistas Emilio Álvarez Icaza y Gabino Gómez, el diputado federal Guadalupe Acosta
Naranjo y el sacerdote Javier Ávila, entre otros.
Ley de seguridad Interior
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El pasado 15 de diciembre del 2017 el Congreso de la Unión (diputados y senadores aprobaron la ley, misma
que fue promulgada por el presidente Enrique Peña Nieto el 21 de ese mismo mes. No obstante, no es vigente
pues la ley fue remitida a la SCJN.
Hasta el momento, la SCJN ha admitido a trámite por lo menos otras 15 acciones y controversias de
inconstitucionalidad. El pasado 10 de febrero pasaron los recursos interpuestos por los municipios de
Nezahualcóyotl, Ocuilan y Cocotilán en el Estado de México; Hoctun, Oxkutzcab y Tepakan en Yucatán; y
por último las localidades poblanas de Ahuacatlán y Tepeyahualco.
La oposición
Aunque el proyecto de ley fue estrictamente señalado por diversos actores de la vida pública, como miembros
de ONGs, destacados académicos o miembros de partidos políticos opositores, Javier Corral es el primer
gobernador que toma una acción legal en contra de la LSI.
"Resulta particularmente preocupante para el estado de Chihuahua la vaguedad en cuanto a la definición de lo
que pudieran constituir las acciones que se requieran a cargo de las entidades federativas, incluyendo
obligaciones de carácter financiero para solventar acciones de seguridad interior que el Ejecutivo Federal
pudiera determinar de manera unilateral y sin haber recibido la petición expresa de la entidad
correspondiente", señala el Gobernador en la controversia presentada.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.mx/2018/02/12/javier-corral-exige-a-scjn-declarar-inconstitucional-ley-de-
seguridad-interior_a_23359783/?utm_hp_ref=mx-politica
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Los Calvitos de Pat @loscalvitos
La penúltima gran idea de Forges
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La vicepresidenta de Oxfam renunció por abusos sexuales de miembros de la ONG
El escándalo no humanitario
Una investigación del Sunday Times destapó 87 casos en los que estuvieron involucrados integrantes de la
entidad enviados a misiones internacionales. Contrataron prostitutas, algunas menores de edad, con fondos del
Reino Unido.
Mark Golding, responsable de Oxam, y Caroline Thomson, del consejo de administración.
Imagen: EFE
La número dos de la ONG británica Oxfam, Penny Lawrence, renunció ayer a su cargo por el escándalo
relacionado a abusos sexuales de integrantes de la ONG en misiones humanitarias internacionales. El
escándalo se hizo público por una nota del diario The Sunday Times del viernes, que denunció que
trabajadores de Oxfam estuvieron involucrados en 87 casos de abusos el año pasado en campañas en Haití. La
ministra de Cooperación británica, Penny Mordaunt, anunció que el gobierno de Reino Unido cortará los
fondos a todas las ONG que no cumplan con los estándares de comportamiento.
Mordaunt sostuvo que “no estaba informada” sobre los abusos cometidos por parte de integrantes de Oxfam,
organización con sede en Oxford, para lo cual los directivos de la ONG desviaron fondos del Reino Unido y
los destinaron a contratar prostitutas, algunas menores de edad, en Haití en 2012. “En relación con Oxfam y
con cualquier otra organización que tenga problemas de salvaguarda, esperamos que cooperen plenamente
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con las autoridades. Cesaremos los fondos a cualquier organización que no lo haga”, advirtió la ministra.
Mordaunt informó que su cartera financió en 2017 con 32 millones de libras esterlinas a Oxfam, y acusó a la
organización de fracasar en su “liderazgo moral”.
El escándalo sobre los casos de abusos por parte de miembros de organizaciones humanitarias se conoció el
viernes, cuando el diario The Sunday Times publicó un artículo en el cual revelaba que más de 120
trabajadores de ONGs estuvieron envueltos en casos de abusos el año pasado. Oxfam registró 87 casos de
abusos; Save the Children, 31 –de los cuales diez “fueron puestos en conocimiento de la policía y las
autoridades civiles”–; y la organización Christian Aid registró dos. El artículo denunció que un ex trabajador
de la Cruz Roja y de la ONU, Andrew MacLeod, advirtió que existe falta de respuestas contra la “pedofilia
institucionalizada” entre los cooperantes.
La nota relata que luego del terremoto en Haití en 2010, integrantes de Oxfam, entre ellos su jefe de entonces,
Roland van Hauwermeiren, contrataron prostitutas con el dinero de la organización. Van Hauwermeiren
admitió haber mantenido encuentros con prostitutas en una “villa” alquilada para él por la organización, pero
abandonó su cargo sin recibir ninguna acción disciplinaria. Además, obtuvo de la directora ejecutiva de
Oxfam en aquel momento, Barbara Stocking, una “salida por fases y digna” para evitar “implicaciones
potencialmente serias” para la reputación de la ONG, según constató el diario.
El artículo reveló que, en suma, Oxfam aceptó la renuncia de tres hombres y despidió a otros cuatro en el
marco de una investigación sobre “explotación sexual, descargas de pornografía, abusos de poder e
intimidaciones”. El diario The Observer publicó el domingo más acusaciones de un antiguo miembro de
Oxfam, que detalló cómo los integrantes de la ONG contrataron prostitutas en Chad en 2006.
https://www.pagina12.com.ar/95362-el-escandalo-no-humanitario
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Bryan Stevenson on what well-meaning white people need to know about race
JAMES MCWILLIAMS
Bryan Stevenson. (Photo: Nick Frontiero/Pacific Standard)
A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2018 issue of Pacific Standard. Subscribe now and
get eight issues/year or purchase a single copy of the magazine.
(Photo: Jerome Sessini/Magnum Photos)
In the United States today, African Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. Bryan
Stevenson, a Harvard University-trained lawyer, works every day to right this wrong. He has argued five
cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court; won reversal, release, or relief for 115 wrongly committed death
row inmates; and also won a Supreme Court case affirming it unconstitutional to deliver life-without-parole
sentences to children 17 and under. I met Stevenson on an August afternoon in Atlanta, where he was the
keynote speaker at Georgia State University's freshmen orientation. His talk, delivered to a largely African-
American audience at an indoor sports arena, was met with a capacity crowd and a standing ovation. One high
point was when he passionately urged students to "get proximate to the problem." As the founder and director
of the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery-based non-profit dedicated to achieving racial and economic
justice, Stevenson, 58, has done just this. His extensive laundry list of accolades includes a MacArthur
"genius" grant, 29 honorary degrees, and a book, Just Mercy, that became a New York Timesbestseller and
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one of Time magazine's 10 Best Books of Non-Fiction in 2014. Stevenson and I met in a small, quiet room at
the student center, with a table of fruit and bottled water between us. When we finished, he grabbed a bottle
for the drive back to Montgomery, where there was much work to pursue.
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An interview with Harvard University-trained public defense lawyer Bryan Stevenson on racial trauma,
segregation, and listening to marginalized voices.
Your work is informed by a powerful sense that history lives in the present. How does the past bear on our
current quest for racial justice?
You can't understand many of the most destructive issues or policies in our country without understanding our
history of racial inequality. And I actually think it begins with our interaction with native people, because we
took land, we killed people, we disrupted a culture. We were brutal. And we justified and rationalized that
land grab, that genocide, by characterizing native people as different. It was the first way in which this
narrative of racial difference was employed to justify behaviors that would otherwise be unjustifiable. When
you are allowed to demonize another community and call them savages, and treat them brutally and cruelly, it
changes your psyche. We abused and mistreated the communities and cultures that existed on this land before
Europeans arrived, and then that narrative of racial difference was used to develop slavery.
In what way? Can you elaborate?
I was in East Africa a few months ago. It was the first time I had been there. And it was startling to be in this
land and see all of these black people and the beauty of that land. Despite the economic and political situation,
there was something so affirming about a space like that. And then I thought about how painful it was that my
people, my tribe, my foreparents were in that group of Africans who were kidnapped. Kidnapping is the worst
kind of crime in many respects because it lasts for a really long time. Some people have been kidnapped for
days and weeks, and that sense of trauma never goes away. And I thought about what it was like for those
people to be kidnapped and then displaced, pulled from their land, and then brutalized and tortured and
chained. And that's before they were made to engage in forced labor.
I genuinely believe that, despite all of that victimization, the worst part of slavery was this narrative that we
created about black people—this idea that black people aren't fully human, that they are three-fifths human,
that they are not capable, that they are not evolved. That ideology, which set up white supremacy in America,
was the most poisonous and destructive consequence of two centuries of slavery. And I do believe that we
never addressed it. I think the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. The racial-
equality principle that is in our Constitution was never extended to formerly enslaved people, and that is why
I say slavery didn't end in 1865. It evolved.
Into what?
Decades of terrorism and lynching and this brutal regime where black people were burned alive and hanged
and taunted and disenfranchised and threatened. Most people don't think about the fact that we had Jim Crow
laws. We had racial segregation. Black people wouldn't have agreed with that. They would not have gone into
the decrepit colored bathroom when the white bathroom was better. They wouldn't drink out of the colored
fountain—unless there was the threat of violence. So you cannot disconnect lynching and terror and violence
from racial segregation and subordination.
And that history continued during the civil rights era, where the response to non-violence was violence. The
response to ministers and activists begging for equality was bombs and billy clubs and dogs and fire hoses.
And even there, I think we won the legal battle. But, again, we lost the narrative war. The people holding up
those signs that said "Segregation Forever," "Segregation or War," were not required to act differently, to
think differently. And that is the prelude to mass incarceration. That is why I don't think you can understand
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the tremendous increase in the incarceration rates, the targeting of black people and menacing of communities
of color and poor communities without understanding this history. We have to understand enslavement in a
new way. I don't think we've done a good job of educating people about what slavery did.
In your book Just Mercy, you cite a 2003 estimate that one out of three black babies will end up incarcerated,
and note that this has everything to do with institutionalized racism, which itself is the product of a great deal
of hidden racism in daily life. What does that racism look like?
Well, there is this burden in America that people of color bear. This presumption of dangerousness weighs on
you. And when we don't talk about it, when we don't name it, the burden only gets heavier. People of color
have to navigate around these presumptions, and it is exhausting.
POLICE KILLINGS ARISE FROM A RACIST CULTURE: NEW RESEARCH FINDS A LINK
BETWEEN THE UNCONSCIOUS RACIAL BIAS OF A REGION'S RESIDENTS AND LAW
ENFORCEMENT'S USE OF LETHAL FORCE AGAINST BLACK RESIDENTS.
And yet, so hard for so many white people to recognize, much less acknowledge.
But when somebody affirms that it exists, it can be really liberating. It can be really affirming to know that
you are not crazy. As I get older, I am beginning to appreciate the weight of a lifetime lived navigating these
presumptions. And so I want to affirm for young kids that the world will still do that to them, but they should
know that the world is wrong, and that you have to not only endure, but you have to overcome. A lot of
people of color applaud when I say this. They do so because they have never had anybody in a public space—
in a mixed space—say it. And I think we have to say that, you know. But, yes, I do think that there's an
implicit bias that undermines how we interact with one another, and I do think that, in America, no one is free
from the threat created by our history of racial inequality.
Whites included.
Yes. You can be very progressive, you can be very educated, and you can still be complicit in the kind of
microaggression that takes place when you look at people through this lens of racial difference. So we all
have a lot to learn. I don't think that we should expect to make progress on these issues without bumping into
one another, without making mistakes. We just have to have the humility and the patience and the courage to
work through that. What I don't think we should do is just retreat because we don't know exactly where all the
landmines are.
You work with a lot of kids. How does this racial bias affect them?
I think we have a real epidemic of trauma in America. We have thousands of children that are born into
violent families. They live in violent neighborhoods and they go to violent schools. And by the time they are
five years old, they have a trauma disorder. There are zip codes in America where a huge percentage of
children are going to end up in jails and prisons. And, you know, for our returning vets, we have increased our
consciousness about what combat exposure can do and the trauma it can create. But what we don't really
understand is the biology of that. If somebody came into this room and threatened to kill us both, both our
brains would start producing cortisol and adrenaline to help us cope with that threat, and then when that threat
is eliminated, our prior exposure to trauma is going to dictate how long it takes before our brains get back to
normal. And with our veterans, when they're constantly in stress, the brain gets tricked into turning those
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chemicals on full time, and so what happens is that those men and women come back from Iraq and
Afghanistan, and they're reacting inappropriately to their family, to their situations. They're overreacting.
The same thing is happening to kids of color, poor kids, because they've been in environments where they are
constantly being threatened. And instead of treating that trauma, what we do in our educational system in so
many places is we aggravate the trauma. We put these kids in schools where the teachers talk to them like
correctional officers and the principals talk like wardens. We make these kids go through metal detectors, and
we threaten them constantly. It is astonishing to me how many threats are made to kids in elementary schools
with poor and minority kids, and those threats are just pushing on all of that stress and trauma. And so when
these kids get to be seven or eight and somebody offers them a drug and, for the first time in their lives, they
have three hours where they don't feel threatened and menaced, they want more of that drug. Or when they
turn 10 and somebody says, "Hey, man, join my gang and we'll help you fight all these forces that are out to
get us," you join the gang.
Bryan Stevenson.
(Photo: Nick Frontiero/Pacific Standard)
Of course outsiders rarely see it this way, right?
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The rest of us see that child's addiction and drug use as a sign that the child is bad—not as a sign that we have
failed to provide services. And we use gang membership as an enhancement for punishment. It doesn't mean
that gangs aren't doing destructive and violent things and have to be stopped, but it does mean we need to get
beyond the labels that we've employed to organize these kids. So that's an area where I think we haven't done
very well. I think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should declare a health crisis in the 200 zip
codes where we know the majority of children are going to end up in jails and prisons, where the murder rates
are so high.
Well-intentioned progressives who want to combat racial injustice talk to each other quite fluently about it,
but what we don't do—and these are your words—is get in proximity. We're trained to come up with solutions
and implement them, but we're not very good listeners. What do these well-intentioned non-African-
American people need to hear?
As we've [the Equal Justice Initiative] started doing community work, what we've learned is that, if we're not
attentive to the power dynamics—who feels privileged and who doesn't—people will act in ways that they
genuinely do not see as problematic but that are incredibly problematic. You can't do reconciliation work, you
can't do restoration work, you can't do racial justice work, you can't create the outcome that you desire to see
until there has been truth-telling. And truth-telling has to happen when people who have been victimized and
marginalized and excluded and oppressed are given a platform to speak, and everybody else has to listen.
(Photo: Nick Frontiero/Pacific Standard)
In South Africa, the model was a forum, and it was one survivor after the other giving voice to their
experience. In Rwanda, the people who had been targeted and victimized had the opportunity to give voice to
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(Graphic: Pacific Standard)
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that, what it felt like, the pain it created to see people lose their whole families. I think this understanding of
truth and reconciliation would mean that some of us would have to reorganize whatever plan we had in mind
to create racial justice. Because if we haven't been in that listening space, if we haven't created an opportunity
for people who are the victims of this bigotry to give their true story, to tell their truths, then our solutions are
not going to be very informed.
For Dr. King, and those who were part of the non-violent tradition in civil rights work, it would have been so
much easier to try to work people up, take advantage of their anger, arm them, and go fight a battle. But it
would not have been successful. It would not have created the reforms that we seek. Non-violence actually
requires something much more evolved, and I think, in many ways, it takes a sort of absence of privilege
sometimes to see the way forward. And so if you are privileged by education or privileged by wealth or
privileged by color or privileged by status, you really need to listen before you can formulate a strategy that is
going to have an impact on these really vexing issues.
Do you see the potential for this kind of mature approach to activism?
I see it all the time. I see it with the young people, who I just want to keep encouraging, because there's a little
bit of a movement in our country now, and I see it on some of the campuses, where people feel very
empowered to give voice to progressive ideas, and they feel very comfortable challenging other people and
holding other people accountable. But I think it's necessary that it be disconnected from a sense of privilege
because too often people who are willing to participate in a sit-in or to engage in counter-protests or to
participate in a demonstration are not willing to actually serve the poor. They're not willing to pursue a career
that creates proximity to the systems that we're so provoked by. And I want to make sure that we understand
that what you do for a couple of hours is not going to negate what you do for a lifetime, if what you do for a
lifetime is adding to the problem.
Back to the idea of truth-telling. EJI is working to highlight the reality of the South's racial legacy by building
an African-American history museum and a monument dedicated to lynching victims, both due to be
completed this year. You have also managed to have several historical markers placed next to warehouses that
were once slave markets. Can you discuss this mission a bit?
Well, we wanted to create a consciousness about slavery, because part of the reason we are comfortable with
the iconography of the Confederacy is because we really haven't told the truth about the barbarity of slavery.
That Michelle Obama can, at the Democratic National Convention, invoke the fact that she is living in a
house built by slaves, and that that would elicit the reaction that it did, and people start defending slavery, just
tells me that we have a lot of work to do in this country to create a consciousness about what that institution
really is. In the South, in particular, this narrative that, "Oh, slavery wasn't that bad and people were happy"—
that kind of stuff is still out there. And if that's what you believe, then it's hard to be provoked by the identity
of the Confederacy. And that's why we're building this museum.
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(Photo: Nick Frontiero/Pacific Standard)
When you walk into our museum, you're going to see a sign that says, "Montgomery, a city shaped by
slavery." And we're going talk about the pain and the suffering that the domestic slave trade created in this
country where half of enslaved people were separated from their families, their children, their spouses. We
found these amazing slave narratives, and we want people to hear first-person accounts about the heartbreak,
about the loss, about the anguish of fearing that your child was going to be taken away from you at the
auction block. And I think if we can learn those stories, if we can understand that history, then we're going to
have to think differently about those who would defend it, those who would fight to preserve it.
The same is true for lynching. You know, lynching was terrorism. We now have a consciousness that
terrorists are really bad people. They are worse than criminals. They are people who you may have to go fight
a war to eliminate. We'll put them in prisons. We're not even worrying about whether they get a trial or not. A
terrorist, we believe, is a species of person for whom there should be no sympathy. And our consciousness
about that has evolved as a result of being targeted by terrorists. And I think it's important that we understand
the way in which we accommodated terrorism in this country in so many communities where African
Americans were victimized and brutalized. And if we understand our own terrorist past, our own terrorist
history, it may sober us in dealing with these contemporary issues, but it also may shame us into thinking that,
you know, we really haven't said enough or done enough to recover from that.
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It seems like there's a really interesting dialogue taking place right now over the removal of statues and
plaques, and I'm wondering where you stand on all that and how your project fits into it.
I think you have a progressive mayor in New Orleans, a city that has enough of a progressive base that you
can politically pull that off. And Charlottesville is a much more progressive community than the rest of the
state of Virginia. And I think we should act in those spaces. But, ultimately, I think we have to work on
creating a new consciousness about this history in Mississippi and Alabama and rural Georgia. I want people
to take down Confederate monuments, symbols, and iconography because they've been persuaded that it's not
right.
And it can be done, right? In post-war Germany, people didn't overnight say, "I hate the Nazis." That was a
long process. But they couldn’t hide from what the Nazis did. There was this effort at exposure. People had to
adjust. And I think that we haven't really done that in America. And because we haven't done that, we are
burdened with this iconography. We've got 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy in Montgomery.
We've got the first White House of the Confederacy. Our two largest high schools are Robert E. Lee High and
Jefferson Davis High. Half of these kids today went to schools named after Confederate generals. And it's that
disconnect that we've got to expose.
We've seen optimistic pieces of legislation—from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendments, to Brown v. Board of Education, to the Voting Rights Act, etc.
Nonetheless, if you're black, you're still about three times more likely to get shot and killed by law
enforcement. How is policy working, and how is it somehow falling short?
I think we have to recognize that policy can be powerful in changing things, creating opportunities. But I
think what's equally important is the narrative battle. That is how we understand what that policy is about,
who is it for, and why does it make sense. The policies on domestic violence have shifted dramatically in the
last 50 years. Fifty years ago, we did not view domestic violence as a serious crime. If a woman called the
police and complained that her husband had beat her or abused her physically, the police officers would show
up, they'd call the husband outside, they'd tell some jokes, they'd smoke. Their job was to make sure the guy
was calm, and then go about their business. And to change the policy we had to change the narrative.
Remember The Jackie Gleason Show, where the punchline was, "To the moon, Alice, to the moon." He was
threatening to hit her and knock her to the moon, and everybody laughed. And then Farrah Fawcett stars in
this movie called The Burning Bed where she plays this domestic-abuse victim. And she was, at the time, this
very attractive, well-admired actress. But she puts herself in that role, and you begin to see stories about what
it's like for women to be abused. And all of a sudden the narrative starts to shift. We're no longer blaming
women for making bad relational choices. We're saying that violence and abuse is always wrong, and it
doesn't matter whether it's some stranger crawling through the window or it's the man you married. And that
narrative shift then began to shift the policy.
https://psmag.com/magazine/bryan-stevenson-ps-interview
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Fuera del Clóset 🏳️🌈 @FDCRadio
Tribunal superior despenaliza homosexualidad en Trinidad y Tobago, al considerar que las leyes que la
castigaban son violatorias a los DDHH de las personas #LGBT; activistas, ONG´s y personas #LGBT
celebran la decisión.
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¿Volvemos a los valores de la dictadura?
Por Lucila Larrandart
Como soy grande (por no decir vieja) he sido protagonista de varias épocas de distinto signo en nuestro país y
vivir por suerte hace 35 años en una democracia. Y pensé que, efectivamente, estábamos viviendo en un
estado de derecho. Pero parece que me equivoqué conforme a lo que últimamente está pasando.
El modelo que se propugna desde el gobierno no es un “cambio”, es una vuelta al pasado. El concepto de
seguridad nacional, que caracterizó a las dictaduras latinoamericanas durante el pasado siglo, correspondiente
a la división del mundo en dos bloques, y que caracterizaba al “enemigo interno” –entonces correspondiente
al disidente político–, pasó a ser, luego del fin de la “guerra fría”, la seguridad ciudadana y los nuevos
enemigos son caracterizados como el “narcotráfico”, el “terrorismo” y, en general, la “delincuencia”.
Asistimos al reemplazo del concepto de seguridad nacional por el concepto de seguridad ciudadana, que
permite todo y todo lo subordina a ella, predominando la idea de que el fin justifica los medios. Es lo que se
conoce como “mano dura”, que propugna dejar de lado las garantías constitucionales en aras de una supuesta
“eficiencia” y que hace aparecer como si el tema de la seguridad se solucionara agravando penas y
procedimientos y otorgando más facultades a las fuerzas de seguridad. Se incrementa la respuesta punitiva,
ganando espacios de la mano de las campañasde “ley y orden”. Este discurso lleva a enfocar el fenómeno
criminal con la lógica de la guerra y a plantearlo en la dinámica amigo-enemigo, se trata de una postura que
describe la situación como un estado de excepción, que se articula con la citada lógica.
El Proyecto de ley de Hitler, que se llamó de Extraños a la comunidad, comprendía a marginados sociales,
mendigos, vagos, ladrones, estafadores de poca monta, contra los que las SS querían proceder, eliminándolos.
Se daba en ese proyecto el control total a la policía y se declaraba la guerra al enemigo interior.
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Y me preocupa que esta política de permitir a las fuerzas de seguridad actuar sin límites, precisamente sea
impulsada por Patricia Bullrich, a quien conocí hace muchos años, en la ahora lejana época de la dictadura y
en la que ella fuera víctima de la violencia estatal.
Como enseñaba el Maestro Francesco Carrara, “La insensata idea de que el derecho punitivo debe extirpar de
la tierra todos los delitos, lleva a la ciencia penal a la idolatría del terror, y al pueblo a la fe en el verdugo.”
En cambio el modelo democrático establece límites a la política criminal, fundada en los principios de
legalidad y certidumbre, se trata de un ejercicio racional y limitado, basado en la dignidad humana y en el
respeto de los derechos fundamentales.
Así, la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos afirmó que “por graves que puedan ser ciertas acciones y
por culpables que puedan ser los reos de determinados delitos, no cabe admitir que el poder pueda ejercerse
sin límite alguno o que el estado pueda valerse de cualquier procedimiento para alcanzar sus objetivos, sin
sujeción al derecho. Ninguna actividad del estado puede fundarse sobre el desprecio a la dignidad humana”.
El sentimiento de seguridad o de inseguridad y la propia seguridad de los ciudadanos, se construye o se
destruye diariamente por la propia conducta de quienes conforman todo el sistema penal. Y su solución no
pasa por una represión indiscriminada, propia de los estados autoritarios o policíacos. Conforma también la
seguridad el hecho de que los ciudadanos puedan tener la tranquilidad de no ser detenidos arbitrariamente, de
no recibir imputaciones infundadas, de no ser privados de la libertad sin fundamento y de que, en caso de
serlo, la justicia rápidamente responda a cualquier atropello, defendiendo las garantías que posibilitan vivir en
un Estado de Derecho.
Nada se soluciona con el endurecimiento de las leyes o con el otorgamiento de mayores poderes a la policía,
sino con el funcionamiento de la agencia policial dentro de los parámetros del estado de derecho, de la
legalidad y resguardando los límites de la acción policial en relación con los derechos fundamentales de los
ciudadanos, así como combatiendo la impunidad frente a hechos delictivos o de corrupción policial.
Es necesario dotar a las agencias policiales de una serie de herramientas y de programas de formación y
capacitación adecuados y supone el diseño de una serie de controles que garanticen a la población que la labor
policial no generará conflictos con sus derechos individuales. Es preciso rediseñar las áreas de control interno
de las instituciones de seguridad, de modo tal de garantizar su efectividad y transparencia y su efectiva
articulación con los mecanismos de control externo.
No resulta tan difícil, solo tenemos que aplicar la Constitución y volver a aquel humanismo que, en la faz
penitenciaria, diseñó a mitad del siglo pasado Don Roberto Pettinato, que no era un especialista ni un experto
en ciencias sociales o en ciencias de la conducta, era solo un miembro del servicio penitenciario con una
concepción humanista, enmarcada dentro de un proyecto popular. Por eso diseñó una política penitenciaria
que fue revolucionaria para aquellas épocas, como la abolición de los grilletes, del traje a rayas, el cierre del
penal de Ushuaia, entre otras cosas. Se trata entonces de retomar caminos, de tener referentes claros y de
plantearse los objetivos y tener la suficiente audacia para llevarlos a cabo, lo que también es una opción
política.
Y por eso ahora, después de haber vivido las distintas épocas institucionales más graves y de pensar, luego de
1983, que habíamos recuperado, por lo menos, la vigencia del Derecho y de la Constitución, como Profesora
de la UBA me pregunto: ¿Cómo enseñar Derecho en este momento en la Argentina?, pregunta en la que creo
me acompañan los juristas de este país.
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Y también por haber formado parte del Poder Judicial y en tal carácter haber tratado de impartir Justicia y
asistir en este momento al total deterioro de la vigencia del Estado de Derecho en un llamado “Estado de
Derecho”, es que me pregunto: ¿Cómo le explico a mis alumnos que se puede privar de la libertad o matar a
alguien sin un juicio previo? ¿Qué alguien puede ser considerado culpable sin que haya pruebas que lo
establezcan? ¿Que la presunción de inocencia constitucional no existe? Que cualquiera pueda denunciar a
alguien por algo que no se sabe qué es, ni qué pruebas hay?
Me resulta imposible la respuesta. No obstante creo que debemos seguir enseñando y luchando –como hasta
ahora– por mostrar que no vivimos en una selva, que vivimos en una sociedad en la que la dignidad humana y
los Derechos Humanos pueden y deben regir.
* Profesora Consulta de la Facultad de Derecho de la UBA.
https://www.pagina12.com.ar/95387-volvemos-a-los-valores-de-la-dictadura
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Cientos de niños soldados son liberados en Sudán del Sur
Más de 19,000 niños han sido atraídos al combate desde que estalló la guerra civil.
By Jesselyn Cook
STEFANIE GLINSKI via Getty Images
Grupos armados en Sudán del Sur liberaron la semana pasada a más de 300 niños soldados como parte de un
programa respaldado por la ONU para liberar a un total de 700 niños, incluidas unas 220 niñas, durante las
próximas semanas. Este es la segunda liberación más grande desde que la guerra civil azotó hace cuatro años
a la joven nación.
"Esta es la primera vez que muchas mujeres jóvenes han estado involucradas en una liberación como esta en
Sudán del Sur", dijo David Shearer, jefe de la misión de la ONU en el país. "Los niños no deberían llevar
armas y matarse unos a otros". Deberían estar jugando, aprendiendo, divirtiéndose con amigos, protegidos y
apreciados por los adultos que los rodean".
Más de 19,000 niños han sido atraídos al combate desde que estalló la guerra a fines de 2013, según UNICEF.
Los grupos armados, incluidos los leales al gobierno, continúan reclutando niños soldados en grandes
cantidades, a pesar del alto el fuego y las promesas de los líderes del sur de Sudán de dejar de armar a los
niños.
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En un informe publicado la semana pasada, Human Rights Watch dijo que este continuo desafío a los
acuerdos internacionales resalta un patrón de impunidad en el país.
"Al fallar repetidamente en detener estos abusos contra los niños, los líderes de Sudán del Sur han dañado
irrevocablemente a otra generación y deben rendir cuentas", dijo Mausi Segun, director de África en HRW.
Los niños no deberían llevar armas y matarse unos a otros.David Shearer, jefe de misión de la ONU en Sudán
del Sur.
HRW entrevistó a docenas de niños y anteriormente niños soldados a finales de 2017. Muchos describieron
haber sido secuestrados a punta de pistola, detenidos en contenedores atestados durante semanas, golpeados,
desnutridos y obligados a luchar. Los militantes obligaron a algunos muchachos a matar a los miembros de su
familia y a violar mujeres.
"La orden era matar todo lo que encontráramos", le dijo a la organización un niño, reclutado por las fuerzas
estatales a los 17 años. "Algunos de nosotros fuimos a saquear. Otros violaron en grupo a una mujer. También
hubo quienes sostuvieron a los niños —algunos de ellos bebés— por los tobillos para estrellar su cabeza
contra los árboles o cualquier cosa dura. Luego llevaron a los civiles a una casa y los soldados les prendieron
fuego. Yo lo vi."
Algunos jóvenes de Sudán del Sur se unen a las fuerzas armadas debido a la presión social, sentimientos de
vulnerabilidad sin protección por parte de los militantes, y una aparente falta de alternativas claras para
sobrevivir a la guerra, según HRW. Otros se sienten atraídos por el encanto de defender a sus comunidades de
grupos enemigos. Muy pocos asisten o regresan a la escuela, y muchos soportan el abuso sexual.
STEFANIE GLINSKI VIA GETTY IMAGESSoldados recién liberados se paran con rifles durante su
ceremonia de liberación en Yambio, Sudán del Sur, el 7 de febrero de 2018.
"[Mis captores] me dijeron que me acercara a la carretera y que si oía el ruido de un automóvil que venía, que
les avisara. Entonces venían y se apoderaban del automóvil, lo disparaban, lo quemaban", dijo Víctor de 15
años, uno de los muchachos liberado el miércoles. "La gente en el interior, a veces huía, otras veces morían",
le dijo a World Vision, la organización que está ayudando a coordinar las liberaciones.
Grupos humanitarios, incluidos UNICEF y World Vision, ayudarán a los niños recién liberados a reintegrarse
a sus comunidades y familias, y proporcionarán asesoramiento y apoyo psicosocial a quienes luchan contra el
trauma.
"Los niños participarán en la formación profesional, regresarán a la escuela o se vincularán con personas de
oficios locales para el aprendizaje y la tutoría", dijo Mesfin Loha, director nacional interino de World Vision
South Sudán. "Estas iniciativas ayudarán a los niños a tener la oportunidad de obtener ingresos en el futuro y
ayudarlos a salir del conflicto".
"La orden era matar cualquier cosa que encontráramos".
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Los disturbios en Sudán del Sur han aumentado el reclutamiento de niños soldados en el país, que había
disminuido antes del conflicto. Los rebeldes reclutaron a miles de niños para luchar en la Guerra civil
sudanesa entre el gobierno central de Sudán y el Ejército de Liberación del Pueblo de Sudán, que duró de
1983 a 2005. Gradualmente con las negociaciones de paz liberaron a unos 4,000 niños soldados para el año
2012.
Dos años después de que Sudán del Sur se independizó de Sudán en 2011, el presidente Salva Kiir acusó a su
ex vicepresidente de planear un golpe de estado contra su régimen, desencadenando una violencia política que
rápidamente consumió a la nación infantil. Agravados por la corrupción de alto nivel, los enfrentamientos
entre las fuerzas rebeldes y las fuerzas gubernamentales se han expandido a una disputa entre grupos étnicos.
En 2015, Sudán del Sur firmó la Convención sobre los Derechos del Niño, que exige que todas las partes
tomen medidas para "evitar el secuestro, la venta o el tráfico de niños". Las partes beligerantes también
firmaron un acuerdo de paz ese año, prometiendo desmovilizar a todos los niños reclutados y darlos en
custodia a UNICEF a fines del mes pasado. Pero ninguno de los lados cumplió esa promesa.
HRW y otras organizaciones humanitarias han instado a organizaciones internacionales como la ONU y la
Unión Africana a imponer un embargo de armas a Sudán del Sur y a sancionar a las personas que sean
cómplices en el reclutamiento de niños soldados.
La liberación del miércoles "es un paso crucial para lograr nuestro objetivo final de lograr que todos los miles
de niños que aún están en las filas de grupos armados se reúnan con sus familias", dijo Mahimbo Mdoe,
representante de UNICEF en Sudán del Sur. "Nuestra prioridad para este grupo, y para los niños en todo
Sudán del Sur, es proporcionarles el apoyo que necesitan para que puedan ver un futuro más prometedor".
Este artículo se publicó originalmente en The HuffPost.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.mx/2018/02/12/cientos-de-ninos-soldados-son-liberados-en-sudan-del-
sur_a_23359561/?utm_hp_ref=mx-internacional
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Rein in the Prosecutors
Former Governor of Alabama proposes reform
By Don Siegelman
As a loyal Democrat, I might be the last person to argue that President Trump has gotten something right,
even inadvertently. Still, in raising a possible bias by the FBI in the Russia collusion investigation, he has
landed on a troubling issue.
Based on my personal experience and observations, federal and state investigators and prosecutors routinely
abuse their power in their zeal for convictions. The absence of effective accountability permits them to do so,
as prosecutors are shielded from civil lawsuits for misconduct under the Federal Tort Claims Act. As a result,
testimony is often suborned; a felon whom the government wants as a witness is convinced to change his
testimony by threatening the felon’s parents, siblings, or children; and most common of all, felons are bribed
with a light sentence or a reduction in an existing prison sentence in exchange for their testimony.
I should know. I am the former governor of Alabama sentenced to prison for 88 months for something 113
former state attorneys general say has never been a crime. I was the victim of gross prosecutorial misconduct.
Most Americans would be surprised to learn that prosecutors are immune from suit for intentionally framing a
defendant at trial. It has even been proposed that there is no freestanding constitutional “right not to be
framed.” This was argued in Pottawattamie, Iowa vs. McGhee by prosecutors who were being sued by two
African American men, Terry J. Harrington and Curtis W. McGhee, who spent nearly 25 years in prison for a
murder they didn’t commit and were seeking damages for false imprisonment.
President Trump’s critique of the FBI may rightly be viewed as an attempt to discredit the investigation of
Trump’s own potentially illegal activities. However, intended or not, the President has raised a serious
question about due process, which Congress must address.
Think about it. There have been more than 1,500 exonerations over the last 20 years; 156 of them have been
death row inmates. If there were not a problem, why would there be so many exonerations?
Prosecutors point out that they are charged with a duty to pursue their causes with zeal and argue that if they
can be held liable for eliciting false testimony it would chill their desire to give their all for a conviction. But
whose interests are served when a prosecutor chooses, knowingly, to seek a conviction he or she knows is
corrupt and wrong? Certainly not the interest of the people. So I ask: Why should the duty to convict not be
balanced by a duty to seek the truth? Or even just to refrain from suppressing the truth?
Allowing false evidence to be presented to a grand jury can set the guilty free or destroy the innocent.
Indictments alone can destroy a career and ruin a life. Just ask former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens’s family. The
Alaska Republican was brought to trial for corruption while he was running for reelection and was defeated
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eight days after his conviction. Federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan subsequently dismissed Stevens’s ethics
conviction and named a special prosecutor to investigate whether the government lawyers who ran the
Stevens case should themselves be prosecuted for improperly withholding evidence.
Allowing false evidence to be presented to a grand jury can set the guilty free or destroy the innocent.
This is a problem that affects all citizens. The government obtains over 99 percent of the indictments it seeks.
Why? It’s just too easy for prosecutors to secure indictments in a secret grand jury proceeding where no one is
watching, there’s no accountability, and there’s no “self-correcting mechanism.”
Not to save President Trump (and here I should stipulate Robert Mueller is in no sense a rogue prosecutor),
but to help balance the scales of justice, Congress must reform our broken system and build a greater degree
of fairness into a process in which the “presumption of innocence” becomes more than a comforting and
rhetorical slogan.
Congress should consider three safeguards:
1. Because a grand jury is arguably the most critical stage of a criminal proceeding, targets should have
the right to have counsel present, empowered to object to improper evidence or false testimony.
These objections should be adjudicated by a magistrate; the same process as in a deposition.
2. Congress must repeal the exemption of civil liability given to prosecutors by the Federal Tort Claims
Act to deter deliberate, intentional, and willful misconduct.
3. Congress must require all FBI interviews with witnesses and targets be recorded and those
recordings be made available to the defense.
These changes would provide the sought-after “self-correcting mechanism,” increase public confidence in the
fairness of convictions, deter government misconduct, and provide a greater measure of justice for U.S.
citizens who have been framed by government investigators and prosecutors who abuse their power in their
rush to obtain convictions.
I was convicted of bribery although there was no personal enrichment or personal benefit to me whatsoever. I
was brought to trial one month before my reelection as governor by the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney, while
the U.S. attorney’s husband, Karl Rove’s partner in Alabama, ran my opponent’s campaign. The Department
of Justice has admitted to the U.S. Congress that the lead prosecutor in my case was emailing my opponent’s
campaign manager giving him updates on my investigation. I lost my election seven days after my conviction.
Injustice occurred in my case as a result of a politically charged prosecution, as it could with Trump and other
U.S. citizens. We need these reforms to protect against overzealous prosecutors and investigators and
politically motivated prosecutions on both sides of the political divide.
Don Siegelman was the Democratic governor of Alabama from 1999 to 2003 and served his state before that
as lieutenant governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. For more information on his case, go
to www.free-don.org.
https://washingtonspectator.org/siegelman-prosecutors/
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Número de niñas 'no deseadas' en la India alcanza millones, según informe
La preferencia generalizada por los hijos hace que las familias sigan teniendo bebés hasta que nazca un niño
varón.
By Carol Kuruvilla
SAUMYA KHANDELWAL / REUTERSA little girl wrapped in a shawl waits along with her mother at a
railway station in New Delhi, India, on the cold winter morning of Jan. 3, 2018.
La preferencia tradicional de las familias indias por hijos sobre hijas ha llevado a la existencia de millones de
niñas "indeseadas" en el país, según un nuevo informe del gobierno.
Muchos padres ansiosos por tener hijos continúan procreando hasta que nace el número deseado de hijos,
según un informe publicado el lunes como parte de la encuesta económica anual del ministerio de Finanzas.
Muchas hijas nacen durante este proceso, también. El informe estima que estas niñas "no deseadas" suman
más de 21 millones. A medida que crecen, a menudo reciben una alimentación más pobre y menos educación
que sus hermanos.
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A pesar de esas niñas "no deseadas", la relación hombre-mujer al nacer en la India, todavía se inclina
significativamente a favor de los hombres. Y no ha mejorado incluso a medida que aumentan los ingresos. La
relación sesgada incluye a todas las clases socioeconómicas. Incluso las familias en los estados indios más
ricos muestran una preferencia por tener hijos.
"El desafío del género es de larga data, probablemente retrocediendo milenios, por lo que todos los
interesados son colectivamente responsables de su resolución", escriben los autores del informe. "India debe
enfrentar las preferencias sociales ... que parecen inoculadas para el desarrollo".
CATHAL MCNAUGHTON / REUTERSA young girl sells balloons by the Yamuna River on the last day of
the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Delhi, India, on Sept. 15, 2016.
Para la India en su conjunto, la proporción de sexos al nacer es de aproximadamente 1,108 hombres por cada
1,000 mujeres, según el informe. En dos estados de ingresos más altos, Punjab y Haryana, la proporción de
sexos para los que están entre la infancia y los 6 años de edad es aún peor: 1,200 hombres por cada 1,000
mujeres. Según el informe, la proporción sexual natural al nacer es de aproximadamente 1.05 hombres por
cada mujer.
¿Cómo se ha sesgado la relación hombre-mujer en la India? Las pruebas para determinar el sexo de un feto
son ilegales en la India, pero las familias aún así se hacen la prueba y luego se realizan abortos selectivos por
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sexo. Los autores estiman que estos abortos, junto con las mayores tasas de mortalidad del país para las niñas,
han llevado a una brecha de género de alrededor de 63 millones de mujeres, a quienes clasifican como
"desaparecidas".
Y, sin embargo, los investigadores también descubrieron que India había mejorado varios indicadores de
equidad de género, incluida la educación de las mujeres y el poder de las mujeres para tomar decisiones en
sus hogares.
"En cierto sentido, una vez que nacen, las vidas de las mujeres están mejorando, pero la sociedad todavía
parece querer que nazcan menos de ellas", escriben los autores.
MUKESH GUPTA / REUTERSA school girl gets her face painted in the colors of India's national flag before
taking part in the country's Republic Day celebrations in Jammu on Jan. 25, 2018.
El informe sugiere varias posibles razones para la preferencia de India por los hijos varones. Los
descendientes masculinos realizan importantes rituales religiosos para sus padres. La propiedad a menudo se
transmite dentro de la línea masculina, mientras que tradicionalmente se espera que las mujeres se muden con
las familias de sus maridos, llevando su trabajo con ellas.
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Entregar a una mujer joven a su nuevo esposo con una dote ha sido ilegal en la India durante décadas, pero
muchas familias todavía practican esta costumbre. Esto significa que el nacimiento de las niñas representa una
carga financiera adicional para sus padres.
Los autores del informe instan a la sociedad india en su conjunto a reflexionar sobre esta preferencia cultural
por los hijos varones, especialmente con la creciente evidencia de que cuando las mujeres adquieren mayor
agencia personal y participan por igual en la fuerza de trabajo, puede impulsar la economía de un país entero.
"Los valores intrínsecos de la igualdad de género son incontestables", escriben los autores.
Este artículo se publicó originalmente en The HuffPost.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.mx/2018/01/31/numero-de-ninas-no-deseadas-en-la-india-alcanza-millones-
segun-informe_a_23349590/
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14FEB
Cumple 100 días plantón que busca aprobación de leyes LGBT en Nuevo León
Activistas LGBT y diputados locales cumplieron esta semana 100 días en un plantón a las afueras del
Congreso del Estado de Nuevo León. Con esta manifestación buscan lograr que se apruebe la legislación
sobre matrimonio igualitario, una ley de identidad de género y mecanismos que faciliten la adopción por parte
de parejas del mismo sexo.
Los activistas y diputados han sumado casi 2 mil 700 firmas de la ciudadanía que respaldan sus demandas
legislativas. Sin embargo, consideran que no hay avances, pues afirmaron que los diputados y diputadas se
ajustan a la agenda electoral de los dirigentes del PRI y PAN.
“Su trabajo legislativo está meramente congelado, y eso incluye nuestras propuestas”, dijo Omar Solís Cigala,
integrante del Movimiento por la Igualdad en Nuevo León (MOVINL).
El presidente estatal del PAN, Mauro Guerra Villareal, ha evitado hablar sobre las iniciativas que los
activistas plantean. Por su parte, el líder local del PRI, Pedro Pablo Treviño Villareal, ha mantenido algunos
encuentros con los manifestantes, pero sin lograr avances.
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En el contexto actual, las legislaciones que reconocerán los derechos a las personas LGBT en Nuevo León no
son prioridad para los partidos políticos. A pesar de ello, los activistas y diputados aliados esperan que las
leyes se aborden antes de que termine el periodo legislativo el próximo 30 de mayo.
“No nos sorprende su falta de voluntad. Nos preocupa porque todas estas iniciativas son cosas que ya se hacen
mediante un juicio o un amparo. Es una conversación vieja, lo único que falta es que tomen la
decisión”, mencionó Solís.
Según datos de MOVINL, el voto de la población LGBT representa el 15% a nivel nacional.
La lucha no ha hecho el eco suficiente con los diputados y diputadas del Congreso, pero sí lo ha hecho con la
ciudadanía norteña, pues se han visibilizado sus demandas.
“Monterrey es un ejemplo de muchas cosas, como la discriminación y familias con valores
ultraconservadores, pero también es ejemplo de resistencia civil. Estamos aquí y seguiremos en pie de lucha
para exigir nuestros derechos, sólo pedimos igualdad, no beneficios. No estamos dispuestos a seguir siendo
pisoteados de nuestros derechos”, comentó Jennifer Aguayo, integrante del MOVINL.
Con información de Milenio y Cultura Colectiva. Imagen tomada de Fotografía de Elliot Ruíz.
http://desastre.mx/mexico/cumple-100-dias-planton-que-busca-aprobacion-de-leyes-lgbt-en-nuevo-leon/
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FEATURE Filed 9 p.m. 06.28.2015
This is Rikers
From the people who live and work there.
This story was produced in partnership with New York Magazine. Join us for a Facebook chat June 29 at 1
PM ET.
As long as the City of New York has owned Rikers Island, since the 1880s, it has been a place for the
unwanted. For a time, pigs were raised for slaughter there. Not longer afterward, the island — conveniently
but remotely located in the East River between the Bronx and Queens, not 300 feet from where La Guardia's
runways now sit — was converted to a partial landfill, full of horse manure and garbage. The odor repelled its
neighbors in the boroughs, and the refuse attracted a sizeable rat population, which the city tried to contain by
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released wild dogs. Instead, the dogs attacked and killed some of the pigs. It took poison gas to kill off the
rodents.
Next the city moved humans to Rikers. The first jail on the island opened in 1935, meant to supplement and
eventually replace the unimprovable disaster that was the Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) jail,
which Time had called, in an exposé, the “world’s worst.” Rikers never had a pristine moment, even at the
start. Before the facility opened, inspectors warned of health hazards occasioned by, among other things,
“dump fires,” and the problems that had plagued Blackwell’s — drug use, corrupt correction officers,
violence, squalor, gang consolidation — moved upriver almost immediately, and have stubbornly stayed ever
since. Today, there are ten jails in total on Rikers, plus vast parking lots, a solitary-confinement complex,
infirmaries, a power plant, and a barge to combat overcrowding — a persistent difficulty in a facility that
holds, on average, more than 9,700 prisoners and sometimes has to squeeze in more than 15,000. Adults and
adolescents who are sentenced to less than a year’s time in New York City serve out their punishment on the
island. (Those sentenced to longer than a year move upstate, to a state facility.)
Rikers has a kind of notoriety in the popular imagination: The city’s highest-profile defendants, from the Son
of Sam to Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Bobby Shmurda, pass through in a cloud of gleeful Post headlines, but
so do two-bit weed dealers and shoplifters and the resourceless mentally ill. As do violent criminals. But the
vast majority of the island’s residents are very poor and awaiting trial for low-level offenses, unable to afford
bail and stuck in a limbo that can last weeks or, thanks to delays in the court system, extend to several years.
The crowded isolation of the island has resulted in a complex society with its own hierarchies, official and
not. Gangs openly control certain dorms; correction officers are in constant battle — often literal — with their
charges, but some of them form transactional relationships with them too, whether for sex or drugs or
cigarettes. People are born on Rikers — there are 15 beds for babies adjacent to the women’s dorm — and
they die there, too.
It is the deaths that have lately moved the gaze of New Yorkers back to Rikers, where we have been troubled
to read stories like the one about a schizophrenic, diabetic inmate named Bradley Ballard who was locked
alone in his cell for six days without medication, insulin, food, or running water; officers and health workers
remarked on the smell coming from his cell, but no one got up to help him until he went into cardiac arrest,
covered in his own feces and with a rubber band around his genitals that had caused sepsis to set in. Or the
one about Victor Woods, who went into a violent seizure while a guard sat watching him and drinking a cup
of coffee. Or, just a few weeks ago, the news about 22-year-old Kalief Browder, accused of stealing a
backpack; his three years on Rikers without a trial had been chronicled in The New Yorker. He hanged
himself after he got out, as he’d tried to do while in jail. There were ten deaths last year alone, and stabbings
and slashings have doubled since 2010. The New York Times has run an investigative series on the jail that
has, among other things, exposed widespread abuse and violence by correction officers toward the mentally ill
(of whom there are many in the jail).
Perhaps in response, the de Blasio administration has made reforming Rikers a priority. This April, the mayor
also announced his intention to tackle the court delays that are part of the reason the Rikers population is so
bloated. He has brought in a new commissioner, Joseph Ponte, a reformer who had previously run the Maine
state correction system. Ponte has ended solitary confinement for those under 18 and limited it to 30 days for
adults. (By 2016, they promise, it will be banned for all inmates 21 and under.) The jail has added a small, 66-
bed pilot program, opened in late 2013, that serves as an alternative to solitary confinement for the severely
mentally ill. The mayor has also decided not to renew the jail’s contract with Corizon, its widely criticized
medical provider. Meanwhile, Norman Seabrook, the powerful union boss of the Correction Officers’
Benevolent Association, is the subject of a corruption investigation by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. In June,
the city settled a long-running class-action lawsuit brought by the Legal Aid Society and Bharara’s office
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concerning excessive use of force against inmates. Additional cameras will be installed, some officers will
wear body cameras, new guidelines will be developed for identifying guards with a pattern of violence, and a
federal monitor will be appointed.
Teenage inmates.
JULIE JACOBSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
And yet, despite all this — or maybe because of it, according to some people who don’t believe the current
approach to reform is the correct one — inmate-on-correction-officer violence increased at the end of last
year and in the early part of this year. Over the past four years, there has been an 1,800 percent increase in
reported assaults on medical staff, suggesting either that something has fundamentally changed inside Rikers
or, perhaps, that retaliation and bureaucratic self-protection are happening in the form of paperwork.
Whatever the reality behind the stats, the violence goes both ways and is persistent: This isn’t the first time a
federal monitor has been appointed to address officer-on-inmate violence in response to a settlement; the
same thing happened 15 years ago, resulting in a temporary improvement in Rikers culture that was quickly
erased by budget cuts, which placed Rikers much farther down its list of priorities than the current
administration.
Jails, in general, have problems that are quite distinct from those of prisons — inmates aren’t acclimated to
institutional life yet, and rapid turnover makes things difficult, too — but the density of Rikers, a natural
extension of New York’s own density, makes it a special dilemma. It’s not that the difficulties that exist here
don’t exist in other big-city jails, but they’re all multiplied in Rikers, resulting in a harrowing case study of
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everything that ails the American criminal justice system. Too many people and too little money to deal with
them, essentially. Policy and atrocity make the headlines, but what is less understood from news reports is the
culture that makes reforms so difficult.
“Jail has a smell,” one correction officer told us. “I can’t even describe it to you. Worse than a sewer. The
island is its own island that people on the outside could never understand.” Reporters from The Marshall
Project spoke to dozens of people who spend their days, in full or in part, on Rikers Island: officers, inmates,
lawyers, volunteers, and the families of inmates. What follows are their experiences, in their words. What
became clear from the interviews is that gangs, which have always been a problem at Rikers, are especially
powerful now. Bloods dominate — but their members are so numerous that they, like other gangs, have begun
to splinter, violently, into smaller subsets. Recent reforms have been polarizing: Some correction officers
believe the changes have utterly hamstrung their ability to do their job. The end of solitary confinement for
16- to 17-year-olds, in particular, they say, has resulted in more violence, since they’ve lost the biggest
consequences for misbehavior. And both inmates and officers think that a new generation of COs, many of
whom have taken a substantial number of college courses, is less street-smart and thus less equipped to deal
with the brutal realities of the job, and therefore more likely to clash with inmates. As for the stench, it shows
no signs of leaving.
— Noreen Malone (Senior editor, New York) and Raha Naddaf (News editor, The Marshall Project)
RIKERS ISLAND
OTIS BANTUM CORRECTIONAL CENTER
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The 1,647-bed unit contains the
400-bed unit for punitive solitary
confinement (known as the bing, and
for being particularly violent),
plus a new super-max unit where
inmates have to be escorted
wherever they go.
NORTH INFIRMARY COMMAND
Houses sick inmates who aren’t ill
enough to be hospitalized, with
separate areas for those needing
special protection (like those who
have cut ties with gangs) and
inmates with HIV or AIDS-related
conditions.
ANNA M. KROSS CENTER
Contains beds for 2,388 inmates in
40 units. Besides its high
concentration of mental-observation
units and a center for inmates
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under treatment for drug detox, it
contains a new experimental unit,
where officials now divert inmates
who have serious mental illnesses
when they violate the rules.
BENJAMIN WARD VISIT CENTER
Check-in for visitors to all ten
jails.
ERIC M. TAYLOR CENTER
Generally known as the calmest
jail, because it houses inmates
with short sentences. It has 1,851
beds, mostly dorm-style units.
GEORGE MOTCHAN DETENTION CENTER
2,098 beds in 50 separate housing
areas. This is where 18- to
Population 9,790
21-year-old inmates often go,
grouped together in part for
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special young-adult programs (GED
prep, cognitive therapy).
ROSE M. SINGER CENTER
Known as “Rosie’s,” it’ s the only
women’s jail. It has 1,139 beds and
a nursery for women who give birth
at Rikers and those who qualify to
have their newborns brought in
after they’re booked. (More than
half of applicants are denied, some
because of prior behavior or
substance issues.)
ROBERT N. DAVOREN CENTER
Contains all 16- and 17-year-old
boys and has a long history of
intense violence. A DOJ
investigation revealed that in
2012, staff members inflicted 1,059
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injuries on inmates (the population
here at the time: under 800).
GEORGE R. VIERNO CENTER
A 1,350-bed jail that contains
restricted housing units.
Traditionally, the inmates here
start off spending 23 hours a day in
their cells and earn more time
outside through good behavior.
RESEARCH BY NICK TABOR/NEW YORK MAGAZINE
TESTIMONIAL
“Sometimes you gotta go in the shower and go knife-to-knife, right?”
As told to ALYSIA SANTO
DAVID JOEL, INMATE. A 19-year-old currently in Rikers on charges of first-degree assault and first-degree
robbery. He has been held since November 2013 on $20,000 bail.
In the BOX1, the bed is on the wall, so it’s lower to the floor. You’ve gotta be careful because there’s a lot of
roaches and mice running around. You’ll be lying down with your eyes closed, and you’ll hear all of them
making noises, going through your bags on the floor, ripping up pages from the books.
BOX 1
Slang for solitary confinement. Joel spent four months in solitary for fighting.
They don’t got no air conditioner [in the box]. Sometimes you be in your cell like nude, because it be hot and
the windows don’t open up, and you’ll be complaining like, “I need my window fixed.” And the officers will
say, “We’ll put in a work order.” But it never gets done.
What I’d do, I’d grab paper and I’d make a fan out of it. Sometimes the paper gets worn out, because I’d use
it a lot, and sometimes there won’t be no more paper, so I’d fan myself with my shirt.
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The box — it’s like you’re locked up twice as much as you’re locked up now. It’s a small room, so you really
don’t move around a lot. You wake up, and there’s a toilet right next to your head. You look out the window
and you see birds flying, and that only leads your mind into wanting freedom more. And since it’s a small
room, it makes you think crazy.
Inside a solitary confinement cell.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON/VII PHOTO, FOR NEW YORK MAGAZINE
I’m not gonna lie, I felt like hanging myself. I felt like committing suicide because of the things that run
through my head when I’m in that thing:
Why me? Why am I in jail? Why do I have to go through these things for this long? Why am I in the box? I
hate it here. I hate my life. I have no life. I hate freedom. I can’t taste freedom. I can’t hold freedom. I miss
my family. I miss my friends.
In the middle of the night, people be yelling. People be singing, people be rapping, people be banging. You
talk to people under the door. You lie on the ground. Which is dirty, so you put a sheet on the floor. And you
put your mouth close to the door. You gotta yell at them so people can hear you. And sometimes you get tired
and sometimes your throat hurts. Hours. ’Cause there’s nothing else to do. We talk about our lives. We talk
about being in jail. Changing our ways. We talk about what are we gonna be when we get out.
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Some people are scared, and they find the box safer for them. I’ve seen inmates — when they get into fights
— they’ll be like, “Can you please send me to the box, because I can’t be anywhere else but the box.” A lot of
people go in the box calm and they come out crazy.
Right now, I’m five-foot-seven. I grew. I came here when I was five feet tall. In the beginning I kept getting
into all these fights because I wanted attention. So I was in the gang. You need people that’s gonna help you
out. You’re repping that gang, and you come to jail, other gangs have problems with that gang. That’s why I
got jumped. Hospitalized like four times.
It was a little bit serious. But that’s how you get your little freedom, too. Because when you’re in the hospital,
you see people from the outside. They give you the attention that you been dying to get. Your family comes to
visit you because you’re in a serious problem, you understand? Once you in the hospital, you wouldn’t want
to leave the hospital, it’s just like a little bit home.
I’ve been incarcerated for so long, and I’ve fought so many people, they know not to bother me anymore. I’ve
been jumped plenty of times and got into a lot of fights and got stabbed a lot, so they know who I am and they
leave me alone. Sometimes you gotta go in the shower and go KNIFE-TO-KNIFE2, right? So when I visualize
who runs the show, I walk up to that person and tell ’em, “Listen, my name is this, my name is that, I don’t
want no problems, I just want my respect.”
KNIFE-TO-KNIFE 2
“You need your weapon. You need to learn how to keep that weapon from getting found. There’s a technique
called boofing. You take a weapon and you wrap it up and it goes into your rectum. I learned how to get out
of my cell without the guard opening the gate. They call it ‘popping the cell.’ Once the guard opens your cell,
all you gotta do is stick some tissue in the mechanism. It reads on their board as closed, but you can shake it
and open it up on your own from that moment on.” — Robert Eaddy, recent inmate
Whoever makes it out the shower gets the crib, gets to own the housing area.
[Since they restricted solitary], a lot of people taking advantage, so now they’re like, “Oh, we can’t go to the
box, we can do what we wanna do now.” The only thing that’s going to happen is just a $25 ticket. Right
now, I owe $183. So I’m actually working it off at commissary.
When you get clothes sent up, that means a lot to other people. People see that and they be like, “Oh, he got
support.” The guards bring things in for the gangs. Like drugs. Lotion from home. Cologne. And they pay the
officers. One time, a female guard had sexual intercourse with an inmate in exchange for money, drugs, a
phone.
One female officer, she’ll sit down and explain to me what to do, what not to do. She’ll help me out
sometimes when I need a new pen. She’ll tell me to do good. That I shouldn’t be here. She makes my day go
by. She brings me books when she’s not supposed to. She does things that she’s not supposed to do. And she
goes out of her way and does it for me because she knows deep inside that I deserve those things. One time
I FELT LIKE HAVING SEX3with her. And I told her, “I respect you, but I’m gonna fall back a little bit
because I feel like I’m catching a lot of love for you. And I know that’s not gonna happen here.” Her response
was like, “I understand, you’ve been locked up for a long time, you know I respect you, you know I wouldn’t
do that.”
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FELT LIKE HAVING SEX 3
“The problem of sexual assault was not that bad at Rikers. Now consensual sex [between guards and
inmates]: That’s pretty common. It could have started from the street — there are so many inmates who know
the officers from the streets, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I know your cousin …” and they start giggling. It goes
from there. Sometimes officers and prisoners used to date back in the neighborhood when they were younger
and they reconnect at Rikers. A lot of these female officers are pretty young.” — Melvin Williams, recent
inmate
I be lonely a lot. I’m lonely now, actually. I just be sleeping most of the time. I’ll take the drugs they gave me.
Seroquel. Benadryl. I’ll save that up so the times I don’t have nothing to do, I’ll take it and just wait until it
hits me. And then I’ll fall asleep and just wake up the next day and keep moving. It’s like, Fuck. I can’t do
this.
AN INMATE’S DAY AT RIKERS
4 AMWake up, shave.
5–5:30 AMBreakfast.
6–7 AMTime outdoors.
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“It’s not like we have pajamas, so you can pretty much just get up and go. But if you want to brush your teeth,
you need to have done that already.”
7:15–10:30 AMWork on grounds crew/trash pickup.
11 AMLunch shifts begin.
“The CO would give us a long pep talk about wearing your ID and tucking in your shirt. They would always
use the phrase ‘You’re grown-ass men.’”
3–5 PMMail, quiet time for napping, reading, and working out.
5 PMTV on, people play chess/checkers.
“You can also shower. COs can see in, but everyone wears their underwear.”
5:30–7 PMDinner.
8 PMPhone, free time.
11 PMLights out (under more recent rules, 9 p.m.).
“And every day is exactly the same.”
AS TOLD BY “DANIEL,” recent inmate
TESTIMONIAL
“What about officers leaving with broken nose, broken arms, spit on, feces thrown on them?”
As told to ALYSIA SANTO
OFFICER HOPE, CORRECTION OFFICER. A 42-year-old woman who works in the commissary at Otis
Bantum Correctional Center.
We deal with a lot of mental and physical abuse, from your inmates to your superiors. The superiors treat you
like you a kid. The inmates, some are okay, very respectful. Some of them use profanity, they call you —
excuse my mouth — bitches. They want you to suck this or that. You see so many penises you go home and
probably don’t want the penis you got lying next to you. They jerk off in front of female officers. They try to
threaten your life, and you have to take the threats very seriously.
It’s a lot of stuff we handle as correction officers and we never get the props. Nobody never says, “Oh, y’all
do a wonderful job.” Nobody. We always are downplayed. Because you have some officers, don’t get me
wrong, that don’t do what they supposed to do. They are dirty. They bring in stuff. It’s not an easy job. You
do sometimes over 100 hours in overtime a month on top of 40 HOURS A WEEK4. As soon as you hear
“Inmate, oh, he get beat up,” nobody don’t understand what happened. What about officers leaving with
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broken nose, broken arms, spit on, feces thrown on them, urine thrown on them? You’re not dealing with a
regular person on the street. Excuse my mouth, you’re dealing with animals. Some of them, some of them not.
The majority are not there for being a good person.
40 HOURS A WEEK 4
The average correction officer’s base annual salary is $69,862, but with fringe benefits like overtime, it rises
to $137,747.
I can tell you one incident I will remember for the rest of my life. It was 1997. It was the housing area, THE
BING5 where guys are locked in 23 hours. And it was on a midnight tour and the officer came and I took my
count like I’m supposed to. And they just threw the keys at me. No one explained what I had to do.
Standard items issued to an inmate upon arrival.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON/VII PHOTO, FOR NEW YORK MAGAZINE
THE BING 5
Another name for solitary confinement.
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You know in a zoo when it’s time to feed the animals? And the animals is banging and screaming? That’s
exactly what it was that night. I had one inmate say, “Pass me the tissue.” And you have to go because if an
inmate calls you, you have to go see. Next cell, “Bring some tissue, bring some tissue.” All along, when I’m
bringing them the tissue, they’re looking at my behind. “Oh, she has a big ass. You ever had dick, you ever
got fucked in your ass?” They’re masturbating in front of you. Oh my God. You can write them up, but that
don’t do nothing. That was the night when I had to decide, was this job for me? Because I sat at that desk, and
I cried that night, and I prayed, and I asked the good lord, “If this job is for me, you will let me survive this
night.”
As a senior officer now, you try to work with these new officers, nobody wants to hear what you have to say.
They come in here with these 60 college credits, but you have to be from where some of these dudes and
women [the inmates] come from so you can communicate better with them. Nobody wants to hear you talking
philosophy to them, because they don’t understand what you saying. You have to really come down to their
level. The 60-college-credit people, they’re not understanding them. And officers who come in here from
college, they usually go back to their other jobs or back to school because they can’t deal with it. People hear
corrections and hear dollar signs. Instead, when they get there, nobody wants to stay there, because who wants
to deal?
People are not seeing or hearing how officers are being assaulted. Why? Because the department tries to hide
a lot of stuff under the carpet about the officers being injured. Right now, your hands are tied because if you
do something to these inmates wrong, the department will want to bring you up on charges. Once an inmate
spits in your face and then he puts his hand behind his head, there’s nothing nobody can do. So now you
walking around with spit on your face from this inmate. Once the inmate THROWS URINE ON YOU6,
there’s nothing you can do.
THROWS URINE ON YOU 6
Known as “splashing.”
The adolescents is assaulting these officers, too, I hear. They took the bing away from them. So, they
feel, Okay, we can beat you up, nothing is going to happen to us. Everything is for the inmates. It changed
when this new commissioner came in. Change is good sometimes, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes you
have to be careful in the changes that you make because it’s your officers that’s suffering, not the inmates.
The funny part about Rikers Island: The inmates that’s out there with the guns and stuff, probably robbing or
raping somebody’s mama or sister or something, that is the man that you have to protect from other inmates.
Ain’t that something? But when he was out there robbin’ and rapin’ and doing what he was doing, who was
protecting the innocent? Here’s this man having three square meals a day, able to call his family. And here it
is you have a mother going to the cemetery on her baby’s birthday. But still, the city gonna pay to make sure
he eats and is well protected. These inmates have 24-hour bodyguards. Why should I have a pity party for
them? I don’t know them. They pay me for the three C’s: care, custody, and control. They don’t say nothing
about social working.
TESTIMONIAL
“We used to play chess through talking in solitary. We’d scream out our moves.”
As told to BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL
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ROBERT EADDY, RECENT INMATE. A 39-year-old man in Rikers most recently in 2010 for sale of a
controlled substance, before serving a three-year sentence upstate.
Most housing facilities on Rikers house 60 people. It could be a dorm situation or 60 cells. But you’re in that
cell alone. When you’re in a cell by yourself, you don’t have to worry about sleeping next to someone who’s
smelly. My cell was very small. I’d say about eight-by-eleven. You have a BED AND A TOILET7. It was rat-
infested. But it’s still better than being in the dorm, dealing with 59 other different body odors and sleeping
problems. It’s hard to sleep because you’re worrying about someone hitting you over the head late in the
night. Somebody could be doing a gang initiation and you’re their target. Someone could have it out for you.
Problems you had on the street could follow you into the jail.
BED AND A TOILET 7
“To get Sanitation to come in, you have to flood the cells. I used to take the books that I’m done reading like
five times and flush them down the bowl so the water could overflow. They come and they’re like, ‘What
happened?’ I tell them, ‘I need Sanitation to come here because the cell, it has old bugs in it, and y’all not
doing anything to clean it.’ And they’ll be like, ‘All right, give me a minute.’ Sometimes you break the toilet
when they walk away. I’m like, ‘If y’all don’t get me out the cell, this cell is not gonna be able to be used no
more because I’m gonna break everything.’ Most of the officers respect violence." — David Joel, inmate
When you’re in solitary, you get an hour outside, but you know in the zoo, how they have the animal in a
cage? That’s how it is. No weights, no basketball, no sports, no nothing. When I was in solitary, I was sending
out many letters. On an average week, five. The guard and the PASTOR8 would come by and speak to you,
make sure you’re okay. And the people in the next cell, you could yell and scream out and talk to them. We
used to play chess through talking in solitary. We’d scream out our moves. You would draw the board on the
paper and scream the moves out to whoever you were playing.
PASTOR 8
Upon arrival, inmates are asked their religion and only allowed to attend those services. To switch requires a
formal application and interview with the chaplain of the requested faith.
My first time in Rikers was in 1994 for selling crack. I was 17. Rikers Island was way worse in 1994 than it is
now. I’ve noticed with the youth today, everything is about trying to gain a reputation. So they think this is
some type of camp, or a place to go to make their names known. Once you get upstate, you can relax. Rikers,
you can’t do that. Rikers, you’re just there, wasting time.
TESTIMONIAL
“People on Lithium or Prozac aren’t getting half that day’s medication.”
As told to ELI HAGER
ALEX ABELL, URBAN JUSTICE CENTER. A 32-year-old who works for the Mental Health Project of the
Urban Justice Center and visits Rikers twice weekly.
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Correction officers often refer to incarcerated people as “bodies” and “packages.” They’ll sometimes say, “I
need a package delivered,” and that means to move a human being to a different housing unit.
Nothing in criminal law in New York says if you’re on trial, you can’t have clean clothes. But people may go
ten, 11 months without access to laundry, outside of the sink and a bar of soap. You’ll see people covered in
their own filth. Last week, an inmate told me that he is supposed to receive twice-a-day medication, sometime
between 6:30 and eight in the morning, and once in the evening. But the officer steps inside the entrance at
the other side of the room and calls his name and says it’s time for meds, but not loudly at all, and doesn’t
make an attempt to actually contact this person. The dorm is so loud. And he doesn’t hear his name or that it’s
time [for his meds]. And the officers don’t follow up. If they don’t get a response, they walk away.
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A small, unbreakable, tin wall mirror in a solitary cell. Reflection is of a slatted window.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON/VII PHOTO, FOR NEW YORK MAGAZINE
In that dorm, this happens maybe half the time. So people on LITHIUM OR PROZAC9 aren’t getting half that
day’s medication, and it can be absolutely disastrous.
LITHIUM OR PROZAC 9
“Patients like to decline treatment in Rikers because they feel sedated, because they feel like they’re not alert
enough." — Daniel Selling, former executive director of mental health in city jails.
That’s not to mention there are often facilitywide lockdowns, when no movement is allowed in the
entire FACILITY10. If that happens when medications or appointments are scheduled, they often don’t get
their [treatment].
FACILITY 10
“There’s very little rhyme or reason about why things get locked down or how long they get locked down,”
one administrator says. “It seems and feels indiscriminate.”
Therapy at Rikers often involves only a one-minute talk in which the doctor or social worker may say,
“You’re at risk of injuring yourself. Are you okay?” And then they say, “Yeah? Good?” And then they move
on.
And it might be done in such a nonconfidential manner. One person I was working with, he had anger —
management issues, and he was aware of it. He knew he needed to talk with someone and had requested
mental-health [services]. But they would only see him in his unit, in the presence of his peers, and that didn’t
work. People could hear everything he was saying, and it wasn’t therapeutic at all.
Meanwhile, if you’re in punitive segregation, these “sessions” are often conducted THROUGH THE CELL
DOOR11. The doctor or social worker puts his mouth to the glass, and the person puts his ear to the glass from
the other side. And they more or less say, “Are you gonna hurt yourself? Okay? See you next week.”
THROUGH THE CELL DOOR 11
“There are plenty of people in solitary who are severely mentally ill and disobeyed a direct order or told an
officer to fuck off or who were just not following directions or may have lashed out against somebody when
they were paranoid.” — Daniel Selling, former executive director of mental health in city jails
TESTIMONIAL
“It was through the autopsy that I found out what happened.”
As told to MAURICE CHAMMAH
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TERRI SCROGGINS, GIRLFRIEND. Age 43, dated Victor Woods, who died of internal bleeding in October
2014 while awaiting trial for drug possession at Rikers Island.
Victor and I were together for about 20 years. A week after Victor had been arrested, a chaplain called me
from the jail and asked me if I knew Victor Woods. He asked if I knew Victor was at Rikers. He said he had a
seizure this morning and passed away.
I just started screaming and yelling and hung up the phone. He called back and asked if I understood. I said,
“Y’all killed him.” He didn’t respond. That was that.
I learned more once Victor’s mom got us a lawyer and we started investigating. Nobody had told me
anything. Eventually, we got the autopsy, which showed he’d had a seizure and ulcers. It was through the
autopsy that I found out what happened. We later learned that he had serious ulcers, and they had started
bleeding, so he bled to death internally. We learned that other inmates had pleaded with officers to get him
medical help and they didn’t help him.
A week earlier, he was perfectly healthy at my aunt’s retirement party. He was dancing. He was fine.
After he died, I went with his niece to Rikers to pick up his things: a red Champ hoodie sweater, his wallet, a
gray-red-and-black Chicago Bulls hat. I still have the hat. His niece took the sweater. She was with me, and it
was getting cold, so she put it on.
TESTIMONIAL
“They just stood there not doing nothing, man.”
As told to ELI HAGER
MIGUEL MENDOZA, INMATE. A 40-year-old man serving four months in Rikers for petit larceny.
Something happened two days ago. The guy overdosed on BuSpar — a mental-health medication. And they
just stood there not doing nothing, man. I went to speak to the guy and his eyes were like in the back of his
head, so I woke him up. He ran into the wall. He pissed on himself and fell down. I ran over to the officer, and
he went and got the medical staff. They took fucking like 30 minutes to get to this guy, man, and they’re right
here! They didn’t want to even touch him. I had to put him on the stretcher and everything. That’s not my job,
I just did it just to help him out.
I’m in the HIV dorm, and sometimes guys shit on themselves, piss themselves. Some of these guys are really
sick and the nurses don’t want to touch them. They don’t want to do their job like they’re supposed to.
I've been in the box. Don't get sick there because you're gonna die up in there. I had to cut my wrist to go see
the dentist. I've got the marks to prove it. I had a toothache for like a week, couldn't take it no more. So I had
to cut up, and when they opened the slot to put the food in, I stuck my hand out and they seen the blood and
they took me out.
Q & A
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“They let you kiss twice.”
By SIMONE WEICHSELBAUM
SHAIAN CABRERA, VISITOR.
Aconversation with three strangers, all riding the Q100 from Long Island City to Rikers Island on a Thursday
afternoon: Mabel Ortiz, 16, an Inwood resident visiting her boyfriend, Joseph, who has been at Rikers for five
months for attempted murder; Candice, 26, a South Bronx resident visiting her 26-year-old fiancé, who has
been in Rikers for four years; and Shaian Cabrera, 19, a Bronx resident visiting her 22-year-old husband, who
is charged with murder and has been in Rikers for three years.
How is it being a young woman visiting Rikers?
Candice: It is horrible. He is on a no-contact visit. You can’t touch. There is a Plexiglas that separates you.
Supposedly, they found contraband in the cells. I THINK IT WAS A SCALPEL12. They found it in his cell,
so they banned him from contact visits and made his incarceration longer. He already did 90 days’ solitary
confinement.
I THINK IT WAS A SCALPEL 12
“For whatever reasons, there’s a lot of scalpels floating around the jail right now. Medical scalpels. And so
face slashings are making a comeback. You see lots of mostly young people with big scars on their faces.” —
Riley Doyle Evans, 27, jail-services coordinator for Brooklyn Defender Services.
Mabel: It’s better than not visiting him. There was a time that I couldn’t visit my boyfriend for a month and a
half. ’Cause he wanted to be a badass. He was fighting. Now I can see him whenever.
How’s it been for you, Shaian?
Shaian: I can only see him for an hour. I used to be able to touch him, but now that’s a lot of problems.
What do you all think about being searched?
Candice: You get searched three or four times. And stuff still gets in there. So it’s all of that for nothing.
Mabel: They just like to touch too much [pointing toward her crotch].
Shaian: They treat us like inmates. They don’t want us to come back.
How much do you worry about them getting hurt?
Shaian: When he doesn’t call me, I get really worried. Sometimes they shut down the building and you get no
phone calls, no visits, no nothing.
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Mabel: He just turned 17. He’s with the adolescents. You know how us teenagers are. We don’t think. We just
do stupid things.
There have been recent reports that Rikers is debating whether to get rid of hugging “hello” and “good-bye”
because of contraband getting in. What do you guys think about that?
Candice: That’s kind of stupid. The reality is, you have the COs that’s really bringing in the shit.
Shaian: Sometimes they use kids to bring stuff in.
Candice: If a man asks you to bring in anything, that man don’t love you.
Mabel, aren’t you supposed to be in school?
Mabel: Yes, I am. But I came to see him today. Last week, only once. I usually come for THREE VISITS13.
THREE VISITS 13
Inmates awaiting trial are allowed up to three hourlong visits per week; once you’ve been sentenced, it drops
to two visits.
Candice: I try to make two. At least once a week.
Shaian: I come three times a week.
Candice: It is a second job.
What about putting money on the books? How much does that cost?
Candice: You buy their clothes. You buy their food. Cosmetics. Phone. The phone costs a lot. It’s a dollar and
some change for one call.
How’s the food?
Mabel: My boyfriend only eats soups. That’s the only thing he know how to make.
Candice: OODLES OF NOODLES14. Mine made a pie last week. Out of something. I don’t know what they
use.
OODLES OF NOODLES 14
“From commissary, people like fudge surprises. Chocolate-chip cookies. You get Sprite, but it’s not really
Sprite. Everything is diet. Except for the snacks.” — David Joel, inmate.
When they are in the box, can you still visit them?
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Candice: You can still visit them, but you just locked in.
Can you kiss them when you visit?
Candice: I don’t think they let you fondle.
Mabel: They let you kiss twice. When you say “hi” and when you say “bye.”
CASE IN POINT
An examination of a single case that sheds light on the criminal justice system
Can you French kiss?
Candice: It all depends on the COs.
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PHONE POLITICS
“I gave a bag of mayonnaise for a week of phone calls. It was like ten phone calls or something like that.
There are things in commissary that are hard to find. So when they have mayonnaise, you try to stock up on it.
BBQ chips are more popular than the other chips, they run out really quick, so you can trade those for phone
calls. Everyone does very exact calculations. Like a pack of mayo costs ten cents and a phone call costs $1.50
for a short phone call. And usually the deals are as close to one-to-one as is possible. A lot of people give
away phone calls because they don’t have anyone to call. The phones are probably the biggest source of
drama.”
“DANIEL,” recent inmate
“I had a phone for two months. Mine was from an officer. I’d look through her pictures. Selfies. At the beach.
A cell phone is like freedom. You’re on the web, you know, Facebook, Instagram. I took pictures and then I
told her, when you go home, to send them to my family members so they can see how I look or they can see
how I’m doing in jail. You’re jail famous if you do that.”
DAVID JOEL, inmate
TESTIMONIAL
“George R.R. Martin was very, very popular.”
As told to MAURICE CHAMMAH
CHRISTIAN REES. A former volunteer librarian at Rikers.
You can’t take anything hardback in. It has to be softcover. What I eventually learned was that there was a
fear they could make armor, so if they taped the hardcovers together, they could protect themselves in fights.
They could have about 12 books maximum in the cells.
The selection ranged a lot. Guys requested computer-programming-language books. Spiritual stuff — Bibles,
Korans, philosophy. We had foreign languages — Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish.
There’s a lot of interest in John Grisham-like-novels. George R.R. Martin was very, very popular. Fifty
Shades of Grey, too. James Patterson was the most popular. There was a culture of collecting books in a series
— they’d talk about them. We had a big call for urban lit, so books geared toward people of color, talking
about neighborhoods they’d grown up in. Playing off the assumed dreams of black or Latino youths. A lot of
them were really well written. Very gritty, with slang and localisms. And it was mostly young black guys who
took these books, who had not finished high school or just finished. And they’d take two or three at a time and
just eat through them.
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Spiritual texts like the Bible are among the most popular books.
LIBRADO ROMERO/THE NEW YORK TIMES, VIA REDUX
The only real censorship I encountered was one time they wouldn’t let a guy take a textbook for getting
licensed as an electrician, because there was a concern that he could teach himself to tamper with the security
systems. There were certain books that it was just generally understood might create problems with the
guards, and we wouldn’t bring them, like THE 48 LAWS OF POWER15, which is popular among gang
leaders.
THE 48 LAWS OF POWER 15
A best-selling how-to guide for gaining influence over people.
In solitary, there would be these big bulkhead doors and we’d lean down and they’d push their books out of a
slot and we’d try to have a conversation. But they couldn’t look through the cart, so a guy would say, “Hey,
do you have a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses?” The same guy also asked for The Odyssey and
Plato’s Republic. Usually it was around lunchtime, so there was this stinking cafeteria food.
TESTIMONIAL
“We do have pepper spray, which is great.”
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As told to ALYSIA SANTO
JOE RODRIGUEZ. A 48-year-old correction officer working at the Robert N. Davoren Complex.
Sometimes, certain inmates, they don’t RESPECT AUTHORITY16. It’s gotten more dangerous now, they say,
because in 2016, they are also removing the bing for the 18-to-21-year-olds, who are the worst. So now the
inmates are feeling more like, “You can’t do nothing to me.” There are cameras, which are in a way good and
in a way bad. It shows the world that it wasn’t us. It was the inmate that was the aggressor. But now the
inmates feel like because the camera is there, they can be more aggressive toward you. A lot of what they say
is SMD. “Suck my dick.” A lot. We do have pepper spray, which is great, and we didn’t have that before,
years ago, when I first started. But once they get this close, you can’t go for that. You have to defend yourself
the best you can.
RESPECT AUTHORITY 16
Rikers, I believe, is more dangerous than state prison. Lots of people are brand new, so there is more
opportunity for peer pressure, more possibility for violence. Especially with gangs — the gangs are way more
vicious than up north, because people feel like they have to keep their reputation up. People are younger,
they’re coming up. People feel like they have to do certain things to prove themselves. It’s closer to the street.
Right now, the Bloods are fighting against each other. They’ll all split internally. There are Hispanic Bloods
and white Bloods, too. It’s way more complicated and messy. There has tended to be a lot of fighting over
what programs to watch. Recently, they’ve added a TV so the blacks can have one and the Latinos can have
another. This is to alleviate the pressure between groups.” — Melvin Williams, recent inmate
I personally don’t like solitary anyway. I feel like I gotta be up and down the tier to make sure nobody’s
killing themselves. But if they commit an infraction, there should be something that we can fall back on
where, like, you’re not gonna get visits for a month. Or you’re not gonna get phone calls for a week.
Something.
Right now, we’re dealing with a new generation of officers. I will tell you myself, I’m a GED baby. No
college. No nothing. And I feel like, I’m a supervisor in the jail. I know everything. I’m an officer 100
percent. And I did come off the streets. Harlem. I had no violent background or anything like that, but I know
how to mix it up. The academy used to be under ten weeks. Now it’s about four months. And I feel like it’s
gotten worse. Anyone can be paper smart. YOU HAVE TO BE JAIL SMART17.
YOU HAVE TO BE JAIL SMART 17
"Gang members like to get into mental observation units to then extort the mentally ill. Could be sexual
favors. It can even be in a correction officer’s interest to have an alpha male running a unit, because they keep
the peace." — Daniel Selling
There was a time where the violence pretty much died. They pretty much enacted a system where if an inmate
commits a violent crime, [they were prosecuted]. Once they implemented that, the inmates got rid of all their
weapons, the slashings and stabbings went down. I would say LATE ’90S18.
LATE ’90S 18
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After a riot almost broke out at the jail in 1994, arrests of inmates increased. “My vision with this was, jail
and prison cannot be a safe haven for criminal conduct,” said Bernard Kerik, the correction commissioner
from 1998 to 2000. “What happened to those policies? … I don’t know myself.”
A lot of times these inmates are looking at life, though. They have nothing to lose. What you gonna do to
them, give them more bing time? We’re human. You know, in the streets somebody comes up to me and slaps
the crap out of me, am I gonna stand there and just take it? Or am I going to defend myself and go after the
dude? It’s hard. And then you’re dealing with inmates who REST ALL DAY19. They eat. They work out.
They sleep their eight to ten hours. They have a whole lot more energy than us. We’re on our feet almost all
day. Sixteen to 18 hours a day by the time we get home and sleep a couple hours. Officers are tired. Mentally
tired. They don’t see their family. It builds.
REST ALL DAY 19
“It’s very strange: Everybody watched crime dramas. Like CSI. All day long. The criminal always loses. So I
don’t know why everyone wants to watch that.” — “Daniel,” recent inmate (Also popular on TV: Jerry
Springer, Law & Order, Criminal Minds, Flashpoint, Blue Bloods.)
I always advise officers, “Have a good relationship with your doctor.” It’s much better now because I came
up in the age where they were allowed to smoke. Sixteen hours a day with just secondhand smoke around
you. And that’s why there’s so many officers who pass away so early in their retirement, because of those
unhealthy things, dealing with inmates like that, a lot of officers end up drinking.
Q & A
“You couldn’t take any part of this organization and say, ‘Boy, that’s running really well.’”
By BILL KELLER
JOSEPH PONTE, COMMISSIONER, DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION.
During his 45 years as a corrections officer, warden and overseer of troubled jails and prisons in several
states, Joseph Ponte has won a reputation as a methodical turnaround artist. In his first 14 months, Ponte
(pronounced “Pont”) has reduced violence in the notorious Robert N. Davoren Center. He has eliminated the
use of punitive isolation for 16- and 17-year-olds and is committed to ending it for inmates 21 and under by
the end of the year. But overall, the use of force on inmates, the serious injuries and the assaults on staff
remain high. Mayor de Blasio and U.S Attorney Preet Bharara recently settled a four-year-old lawsuit with a
deal promising more sweeping reforms, including a federal monitor (which Ponte has said he welcomes) and
detailed new policies to curb the use of force by guards (which Ponte has already begun.). A laconic ex-
Marine with a pronounced New England accent, Ponte says it will take years of recruiting, retraining,
rethinking — and spending — to fulfill the mayor’s promise to make Rikers a “national model of what is right
again.” Ponte spoke on June 12 with Bill Keller. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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On the way to solitary confinement in the Otis Bantum Correctional Center.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON/VII PHOTO, FOR NEW YORK MAGAZINE
Rikers has gotten a lot of attention in the year since you arrived, not much of it very flattering. What do you
see as the main problems of Rikers and what do you see that’s going right?
I’m not sure if I can tell you the main problems. There’s a lot of systems issues that have been deficient for
years. Our emergency response policy was written in the ‘90s, and hasn’t changed much. The fact that New
York in 2014 still had not adopted many of the very good, effective ways to manage young offenders was
surprising to me. Because there’s great models out there that have done complete turnarounds.
What caused New York to be behind on those reforms?
I don’t know. I didn’t come here to throw rocks at anybody. I don’t know if it was a tough political climate,or
if people didn’t propose stuff. In most systems, you’re either adult corrections or juvenile corrections. I
learned a ton about juvenile corrections in Maine. We started in April, we eliminated punitive segregation for
adolescents in December. We’re still kind of fine-tuning how that should work here in New York City.
In your first year, the use of force on inmates is up, serious injuries are up, assaults on staff are up, and you’ve
had some horror stories in the press. Obviously, you can’t change things overnight; is there enough patience
to give you the time you need to fix some of those things?
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Good question. I hope there is, because it will take time. In the AREAS20 where we focused a lot on —
RNDC [Robert N. Davoren Complex], GRVC [George R. Vierno Center], GMDC [George Motchan
Detention Center] — we're seeing really good results. In RNDC, incidents are down, serious use of force is
down, staff assaults are down. We’ve seen very good results at GRVC, an adult facility. We put in new
leadership with a new direction, we’ve seen great reductions in use of force, in every category. We looked at
at basic training, staff hiring, at how did we manage staff probationary periods, what was the oversight and
how did that work? All of those things have just been dysfunctional for some time.
AREAS 20
The Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC) houses about 175 juveniles and, separately, about 575 older men. The
George Motchan Detention Center (GMDC) about 1,200 men. The George R. Vierno Center(GRVC), about
600 male inmates. The Anna M. Kross Center (AMKC) is the largest jail, and includes among its more than
2,000 detainees a large number diagnosed with mental illnesses.
One of your predecessors — Martin Horn — says the single best thing that could happen to Rikers would be
to reduce the population.
We do not have much independent authority to reduce the population, but with some of the mayor’s initiatives
— the mental health task force, the recently announced initiative to look at inmates that have been here for
long periods of time, looking for ways to divert adolescents prior to coming into custody — would be helpful.
Your welcome to New York from the head of the guards union, Norman Seabrook, was a little chilly. It was
kind of, we don’t need any of this sort of hug-a-thug-, touchy feely reform stuff like they do in Maine. How’s
your relationship with him now?
We get along fine. Norman’s Norman. We want the same thing. We want safe, humane facilities.
One issue where you and the union have disagreed is solitary. Corrections officers seem to think that that’s an
essential tool for preserving order and safety in the units. You’ve been focused on the downside of isolation.
For punitive segregation, we reduced the sentence per infraction from 90 days to 30 days. We also increased
our ability to safely house those inmates by using enhanced supervision units and other types of secure
housing units. So it’s not just about the punishment, it’s how you safely house them after.
How does that work? Is that matter of added staffing or different training?
In some areas, it’s added staff, depending on where we house them. What we found was that if somebody had
committed a serious assault on staff or a serious assault on another inmate, there was no central monitoring of
that inmate after the infraction. One, was there an infraction? Was there behavior that should get criminally
charged? And then, if he was found guilty of the infraction, what happened to him or her after? In March or
April, we centralized the people that worked on that, and we put a warden in charge to manage those more
dangerous, problematic inmates and make sure the housing was appropriate to the risk.
How are you handling the gangs?
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It's a constant balancing act for us. It's definitely an influence in jails, and it's typically a little more
problematic because we’re getting new people in every day. Our criminal investigative bureau that does our
gang management, we’ve kinda restarted that unit; we hired some new staff, we’ve trained them up. I
wouldn’t say it's really good yet, but we have a better handle today on the gang makeups and who’s doing
what to who. But it's big. Gangs today are more sophisticated, and there are more different kinds of gangs. So
it’s not like the Bloods, the Crips, the Trinitarios, there’s subsets of those depending on neighborhoods.
How much of the problem at Rikers is just that the buildings are so old?
A lot of the physical plant has deteriorated over time. The old cellblock designs are difficult in visibility —
meaning it’s a long hallway with cells on both sides. Most of the modern designs are kind of like horseshoes,
where you can stand in one place and see almost everything. We’re trying to make up for that deficit with
cameras. There are facilities that should be torn down and rebuilt, either on Rikers or on some other location.
Also, a lot of the buildings are just dilapidated, right? Pieces of the building are often used as weapons.
It's not that they're old, it's that the maintenance hasn’t kept up the condition of the physical plant. We do have
more money today for renovation, but you can’t rehab a housing unit with inmates in it.
I guess that raises the question of whether Rikers can really be fixed or should just be ultimately shut down.
There are facilities that should be torn down and rebuilt, either on Rikers or on some other location.
The city has decided not to renew Corizon’s contract as health provider. What makes you think that HHC can
do better?
With HHC, a lot of the care for inmates in the community transfers back to us when the inmate comes into
custody and when the inmate’s released from custody, so we think there’ll be some benefit to the continuity of
care. We get to build a health-care system knowing what the deficiencies have been.
We’re really trying to rewire the culture to say, okay, everybody’s responsible for health care — it’s not just
the nurse. Everybody’s responsible for security. Everybody’s responsible for safety.
There's been more coverage of Rikers in the last year, I would say, than in the 10 years before. Most of it is
things like the Kalief Browder case, the suicides, the deaths under murky circumstances. What goes through
your mind when you read those stories?
A lot of them happened before my time and we’ve had some while I've been here, there's not like one thing
you see break down, it's like several pieces that typically break down and allow these events to occur. There's
things that I look at and say, geez, in most systems, they would be redundant enough that if this piece failed,
this other piece would pick it up, so we’d catch it. We’re really trying to rewire the culture to say, ok,
everybody’s responsible for health care — it's not just the nurse. Everybody’s responsible for security.
Everybody’s responsible for safety.
You’ve done a lot of shaking up of the department’s leadership. I don’t know what percent, but a lot of
turnover, yes?
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Yes. Probably nearly 100 percent. Off the top of my head, there’s not a lot of people who are still here. You
couldn’t take any part of this organization and say, “Boy, that’s running really well.” Somebody goes to
NYPD and fails, and they come to us and we hire them. We’ll change that. You can’t make it in the NYPD,
you can’t make it in New York City Department of Correction. If you fail there, we will not hire you.
We just started recently — recently being like the last couple of weeks — having exit interviews of people of
why they’re leaving to get a handle on retention. Because after 15 1/2 weeks of training, that’s a big
investment to have you walk out the door in six months or a year. That’s a lot of money we’re losing.
I want to come back to the COs. As far as the healthcare goes, you get rid of Corizon, you bring in somebody
new and you can start from scratch. As far as your staff goes at the department, you can turn over 100 percent.
You don’t have that kind of discretion with the COs because their jobs are relatively well protected by the
union. So how long will it take before you have enough fresh blood in the CO ranks to change the culture?
What everybody wants, and it’s not different than in any other place I’ve been, they want the pride back in
their organization. New York City Correction — probably 15 years ago — nationally, was a model people
wanted to copy. People who are retired are calling and saying, “I’m tired of reading that stuff in the paper,
what can we do to get us back to where we used to be?”
The view from Instagram. Clockwise from left: The bridge to Rikers; bathroom graffiti inside the visitors
center; the new maximum-security wing; the entrance to a chapel; a correction officer at an adolescent unit;
an exercise and recreation area.
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: KEYSEL JORGENSEN; EDGAR SANDOVAL; JB NICHOLAS;
BRYAN R. SMITH; JR; GEE FORCE
TESTIMONIAL
“Desks were thrown around like bottle caps.”
As told to DANA GOLDSTEIN
PETER SELLINGER, TEACHER. Age 44, has taught for 13 years on Rikers.
Right now, we’re having a lot of safety issues because there’s a perception and a reality that there are very
few consequences for bad behavior [since solitary for juveniles was eliminated]. Weapons find their way in,
projectiles are used on teachers. Books, pencils, erasers — they throw them at each other. The deterrent when
a severe fight breaks out is pepper spray. At times, the teaching staff has been very badly affected by its use
[by getting sprayed]. We have roughly 60, 70 [18-21-year-old] students in the solitary program, and that
changes on a daily basis, because students come in as newly incarcerated and then they go. It fluctuates. The
average stay for a student is 50 days. We are following the same Common Core curriculum that every teacher
and student follows.
One of the things that has to be maintained is a separation of potential gang members. So they arrive at class
in stages. We had a riot recently where entire classrooms emptied out and there was a battle royale. It was
around Dominican Independence Day, and a Dominican gang member went into an unlocked classroom and
he had a specific intent to fight with rival gang members. Once that happened, all the classrooms started
emptying out, because there is only one officer in or nearby the classroom. He can’t stop 15 bodies from
emptying out all at once. On that day, there were not that many officers on the school floor in total. Teachers
were pinned down in their classrooms. Desks were thrown around like bottle caps. One teacher protected
another teacher with his body as these desks were flying.
In one particular class, which was made up primarily of Blood gang members, there was a big resistance to
doing anything related to work. This one student, I remember meeting him the first day. I introduced myself,
and his immediate response to that was “Fuck you, get out of my face,” and he proceeded to slap the
schoolwork out of my hand. He got a big reaction from his classmates. Well, fast-forward, I gave him a
certificate of improvement, because he eventually became less belligerent and did some class work and
interacted with me better.
You either have to be crazy or a really caring person. That’s how we get that trust going with students. They
say, “Why are you here?” and I say, “I’m looking at the reason right now.”
TESTIMONIAL
“We run the phones. We are the say-so. But every Blood ain’t your Blood.”
As told to SIMONE WEICHSELBAUM
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AARON “POOTZ” JONES, RECENT INMATE. A 33-year-old in Rikers most recently in 2014, for an
assault charge. (He has since been acquitted.)
When you are blood on Rikers Island, you have a sense of power. We dominate. We are the OBCC, Only
Bloods Can Control. OBCC is a building in Rikers Island, that’s where I was. We run the phones. We run
how we going to eat at night. We are the say-so. But every Blood ain’t your Blood. You might join the gang
later than I did, but you and me had prior problems. But because you Blood now, I gotta love you? Blood
might have saved us from killing each other, but Blood don’t mean I gotta like your ass. The Bloods was
really here to stop the oppression, originally. But in due time, in growing larger in numbers, we became the
oppressor in jail today. It is too much of us. If there are 50 men in a house, 30 IS BLOOD21.
30 IS BLOOD 21
“If you do have an individual who comes into the house that’s of a certain gang, either the other inmates will
let you know he cannot live here or they’ll stay quiet and then something will happen. Or maybe it’s too noisy
and you’re like, Why they making so much noise? Maybe they all have jackets on and it’s warm, they suited
up for something. I don’t expect a new jack to know that.” — Joe Rodriguez, correction officer.
I’ve been to Rikers Island under Giuliani, Bloomberg. Under Giuliani, we be up all night, eat what we want,
do what we want. De Blasio has designed the jail to make you not want to come back.
The COs that they are hiring now, they are uptight. They treat you like you are guilty already.
You know how many ESU BEATDOWNS22 there are? They will come in there and whip yo’ ass. But guess
what? If you in a gang, and if they come in there and hit you, I better be off my bed whupping some ass with
you or getting my ass whupped with you.
ESU BEATDOWNS 22
The ESU (Emergency Service Unit) is a group of correction officers, sometimes donning riot gear, whose
commanders dispatch to break up fights and to conduct contraband sweeps. “We call them ‘Ninja Turtles.’
They throw on the helmets. The gear.” says Diallo Madison, a 49-year-old inmate who was in Rikers last year
for a parole violation.
In 2012, there was a situation with a Blood who was a big Blood. COs, they couldn’t deal with him in no way.
So what they do is cracked his cell. That’s where other inmates come in and whip that ass, while you sleep.
Or it might be COs who take you to a different part of the jail by yourself, to a bathroom, and WHIP YO’
ASS23. They the law in there.
WHIP YO’ ASS 23
The injuries inflicted by officers are often of a different character. I have clients sent to the hospital, because a
guard has beat them so badly they’ve suffered broken bones or dislocated bones. People who are victims of
staff assault typically get written up for assaulting staff. You have to have some justification for why you beat
someone half to death, so often you see these tickets come back later when these guys end up in solitary
confinement say “He left his cell, approached the officer, and punched him in the face.” — Riley Doyle
Evans, jail-services coordinator.
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MEALTIME
“The food was rotten or undercooked. Reminded me of homeless people digging out of a garbage can. In the
middle of the day, they give everyone — they say it’s chicken. But I’ve never seen chicken that looked like
that. Just a big piece of something with a lot of grease. If you didn’t have the ability to buy commissary,
you’d starve. My breakfast would usually consist of oatmeal or Pop-Tarts. All they had was items that could
cook in 190-degree water or was edible as is. Boiling water was very dangerous in that place.”
ROBERT EADDY, recent inmate
TESTIMONIAL
“Officers could look straight in and see the women showering.”
As told to CHRISTIE THOMPSON
LOLITA DUNNING, RECENT INMATE. A 47-year-old released in March on bail after six months in Rikers
on an attempted-murder charge.
The main officers there, they was women. They were all right. But one officer, he was so rude and
disrespectful. He told me because my gray roots were showing that I needed to get my hair done and dye my
roots. And then he was calling me Grandma. He said my husband was gay. He said a whole lot of different
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things. I reported him, and [someone from the Board of Correction] came out to see me, but she wasn’t really
there to help. She was like, “Do you find him attractive?”
Inmates at “Rosie’s,” the women’s unit.
CLARA VANNUCCI
You have to buy the soap, because the soap that they give you has lye in it and it will burn your private parts
up. So you needed to buy soap, shower slippers, deodorant. They didn’t sell makeup. They sell douches and
sanitary napkins. They also give you only like two at a time, so you have to constantly ask for more.
There is a big open shower, that’s in the dorm. In the segregation unit, there’s a wall between the shower
stalls. There’s no doors, but there’s a wall in between. In the dorm, the guard desk, what they call a bubble, is
right next to it. You could look straight into the bathroom from the bubble, and there was always male officers
in that bubble. Officers could look straight in and see the women showering. They pretended not to look, but
you know they do.
In the dorm, you have to go to the bathroom to change your clothes if you don’t want the officers looking at
you, because there’s cameras.
There was this one inmate who actually has a baby by one of the officers. They brought her to the segregation
unit, and she had bruises on her body because another officer physically assaulted her. He spit on her from
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outside her holding cell. She’s a problem inmate, but that didn’t give him the right to hurt her and spit on her.
If we spit on them, we would get another charge. So why are they allowed to do that to us if we can’t do it
back?
TESTIMONIAL
“The first time I met my daughter was in the visiting center.”
As told to ALYSIA SANTO
"DANIEL" AND "ASHLEY," A RECENT INMATE AND HIS WIFE, BOTH IN THEIR LATE 20s (NOT
THEIR REAL NAMES). Daniel served six months in 2014 for leaving the scene of an accident, a
misdemeanor.
Daniel: I went to Rikers six months after my arrest. I was in central booking and then I got bailed out.
$40,000 bond. My family was able to post bail for me.
Ashley: If you don’t have cash, they put you to Rikers and then you have to bail the inmate out there.
Daniel: You don’t pay the whole amount if it’s cash.
Ashley: We paid $25,000 cash.
Daniel: As long as you go to all your court dates, you get it back.
Ashley: I was four months pregnant when he went into Rikers.
Daniel: They check to see if you have drugs in your system and then you have to go through a medical
screening. You’re sitting in a holding cell with 20 other guys. In a place where people that are leaving and
people that are coming in are across from each other in cells. The guys leaving are making fun of the guys
coming in. Guys are coming up with sports involving throwing garbage around because you’re there for like
12 hours. No one seems particularly in shock. No one is sitting there crying or anything like that.
In the short-term dorm, there were fights constantly. The saddest thing in the temporary dorm was the guy
whose girlfriend from like ten years broke up with him over the phone. He had her tattoo on his arm. All the
guys around him started telling their stories about how they got dumped the first time they were arrested. In
the long-term dorm, I got lucky: I found a bed by the window right off the bat. I didn’t have a pillow for a few
days. The guy that worked in the clothes box, he basically ran the house, a guy named Buddha, but I paid him
a couple of bags of chips for a pillow.
Ashley: I came to visit after four days. You can come twice a week for an hour. And after two months, I
figured out if you come from out of state, you get extended visits for two hours. So I pretended that I lived in
Philadelphia with his grandmother. The COs knew it was lie. Everyone did.
They liked me. From the first time, I was like, I’m gonna kiss their asses, and no matter how they treat me,
I’m still going to stay super-nice. You have to laugh at their racist jokes.
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Daniel: For visits, there was a gymnasium, and they bring the inmates up in shifts. Someone from the visiting
center shows up, gets everyone that has visits that day, walks with you down to the changing area, and you
change into different clothes. We wore, like, green JUMPSUITS24 when we’re in the building. And then we
wear gray ones when we’re on the visiting floor. They call it the dance floor. ’Cause you’re going to meet
your girl there. And all the girls are on one side, all the guys are on the other, so it’s like a seventh-grade
dance. The first time I met [my daughter] was in the visiting center.
JUMPSUITS 24
Inmates at Rikers often wear street clothes (no gang colors or logos allowed), and sentenced inmates wear
green uniforms. Adolescents wear brown. For visits, everyone wears gray jumpsuits. Orange jumpsuits are
worn by those in solitary. Green smocks signify someone on suicide watch.
Ashley: I was in a lot of pain because of the C-section. She was 7 days old. And I was stressed and nervous.
And the first thing the CO said to me is, “You’re an irresponsible mom. Moms like you shouldn’t have kids.”
And then the door opens and I see my husband and he walks over to us. If the child is under 2 years old, the
inmate is allowed for his whole visit to hold the child. She gave him the first smile in her life.
Daniel: There were somewhere between like three and six white guys [in my unit]. Out of 60. So not many.
There was one time I saw a statistic on Wikipedia where like the percentage of people that get raped in prison
happens to be the exact same percentage as the percentage of white guys in prison. That got me worried. But
other than that, I wasn’t concerned at all. One thing as a white guy, it really sucks that they don’t allow you to
have sunscreen. I got burnt every single day.
Ashley: I think the real inmates at Rikers are the COs, because they have a lifelong sentence, you know? One
of the COs told me his entire childhood he spent waiting for his dad to get out of prison. He would get out of
prison and go back. And now the guy is a CO in jail. So I was like, “Why would you do that?” And he said,
“Well, it’s good health benefits.” I’m like, “Really?” And he said, “Yeah, you have to feed your children,
right?”
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/06/28/this-is-
rikers?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=opening-
statement&utm_term=newsletter-20180215-954
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Efectos disuasivos, atemorizadores e inhibidores a la libertad de expresión
15/02/2018 03:26 AM
Jalisco
La democracia no es el régimen de las libertades absolutas [eso es sólo posible en el anarquismo], sino el
gobierno de las libertades ponderadas y los derechos superpuestos, con base en criterios de racionalidad y
proporcionalidad. Igualmente sustantivo, resulta que, en democracia, la igualdad ante la ley no tiene valor
absoluto: debe existir igualdad de la ley entre iguales, y no entre desiguales. Eso explica, por ejemplo, la
acertada reglamentación asimétrica que dispuso el Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones, en materia de
libertad de comercio, a América Móvil (Slim) en telecomunicaciones, o a Televisa en radiodifusión, para
calificarlos como “agentes económicos preponderantes” respecto de otros agentes económicos. Otro
paradigmático botón de muestra, ilustra de mejor manera la idea antes expuesta. La jurisprudencia de la Corte
Interamericana de Derechos Humanos enfatiza que el derecho humano a la privacidad y el honor tiene un
‘umbral de protección’ mucho menor entre gobernantes y/o personajes relevantes de la vida pública, respecto
del que obra sobre cualquier ciudadano común.
No es lo mismo la libertad de expresión en voz de un profesional de los medios de comunicación que
cuestiona a un candidato; que la ejercida por un candidato -con posibilidades reales de llegar al gobierno-,
para descalificar a un columnista. Si bien es cierto, ambos personajes ejercen un derecho –la libertad de
expresión–, debe subrayarse que la realizada por un político para descalificar la opinión de un periodista tiene,
desde luego, efectos disuasivos, atemorizadores e inhibidores. Mientras que al periodista le asiste únicamente
la fuerza de la palabra, escrita o hablada; al político y/o gobernante, además de ésta, le asiste el monopolio de
la violencia física legítima [del Estado, a través del gobierno] y/o la de aquella que podría denominarse como
coacción ilegítima [producto de los intereses económicos legales e ilegales que giran en torno a él].
Resulta igualmente contradictorio afirmar que la robustez de la libertad de expresión, depende del aprecio de
la sociedad (civil) para protegerla. Si partimos de reconocer que la libertad de expresión es un derecho
humano [una irrefutable verdad en cualquier parte del Mundo], llegamos a la fiel conclusión de que la inopia
de ese argumento es tal que nos llevaría a desaparecer, por lo menos en México, la CNDH, el INAI, el IFT, la
Fiscalía Especial para la Atención de Delitos Cometidos Contra la Libertad de Expresión, el juicio de amparo
y, por supuesto, a eliminar la jurisdicción de la SCJN en materia de derechos humanos [incluido, desde luego,
el de la libertad de expresión].
La teorización sobre la libertad de expresión supone un principio: la ausencia de censura previa. Sin embargo,
no sólo existe censura ex ante, sino censura ex post «censura sutil». Esto es, la que un gobierno forja a
‘billetazos’ mediante la contratación –cancelación condicionada- de espacios publicitarios en un medio, la que
ocurre mediante agencias de ‘comunicación política’ –que reciben millones de dinero público- para hostigar
igualmente periodistas, que a medios de comunicación –integrando, con dinero público, expedientes ‘de mala
conducta’–; y la «censura implícita», es decir, la que ejerce un político, empresario o narcotraficante a través
de acciones violentas o tácitas amenazas. Cuando un político confronta a un periodista –mediante
descalificaciones o con ayuda de sus ‘agencias’ pagadas por el erario– o sutiles amenazas, en uso de su
‘libertad de expresión’, ejecuta una censura implícita.
Por supuesto, en democracia es deseable que el debate político contraste y descalifique ideas o acciones… no
personas. Sin embargo, la libertina profesión de ofensas e insultos, ya no se diga al interlocutor, sino a su
pensamiento o al comunicador, es también prueba fiel de intolerancia, un antivalor de la democracia. La
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democracia implica la conquista de la cosa pública por medios pacíficos, es decir, a través de elecciones y
debate político. Tiene como espacio de acción el disenso, ¡pero no el conflicto!. También está la violencia
verbal intimidatoria pública, hoy pretendidamente justificada para ciertos políticos, que es el preámbulo por
antonomasia de la violencia física y el autoritarismo.
http://www.milenio.com/firmas/gabriel_torres_espinoza/efectos-disuasivos-atemorizadores-inhibidores-
expresion-milenio_18_1122667776.html?print=1
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07FEB
Publican Protocolo de Atención a personas LGBT en casos de procuración de justicia
El lunes 5 de febrero se publicó el Protocolo de Atención para el Personal de Instancias de Procuración de
Justica en el Diario Oficial de la Federación, el cual establece normas de actuación con perspectiva de género
y no discriminación para funcionarios que investiguen delitos donde la población LGBT está involucrada.
El documento establece conceptos respecto a la discriminación por motivos de orientación sexual, expresión e
identidad de género, además, hay un apartado sobre el trabajo sexual, principios de respeto a la identidad, a la
no revictimización, a la protección integral de los derechos y no criminalización para que el personal de las
instancias de procuración de justicia adopte estas medidas durante el procedimiento penal en el que las
personas LGBT se vean involucradas.
El instrumento busca reforzar las capacidades técnicas de los agentes federales de investigación, de peritos y
funcionarios de los Ministerios Públicos con herramientas y conceptos para que las investigaciones de
crímenes de odio por motivos de la orientación sexual, identidad y expresión de género se realicen bajo una
perspectiva de derechos humanos.
El protocolo surgió en la trigésima octava Asamblea Plenaria de la Conferencia Nacional de Procuración de
Justicia con el objetivo de contribuir a la capacitación especializada de los servidores públicos que imparten
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justicia y poner en práctica acciones afirmativas, es decir, aplicar políticas públicas o acciones encaminadas a
grupos que históricamente han sido vulnerados para lograr una mejora a las condiciones de vida de las
personas LGBT.
Con información de Al calor Político. Imagen tomada de Educando en Igualdad.
http://desastre.mx/mexico/publican-protocolo-de-atencion-a-personas-lgbt-en-casos-de-procuracion-de-
justicia/?utm_content=buffer9fb6c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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La letra con glitter entra
No todo en esta vida se aprende en los tutoriales ni mirando a Ru Paul. Los trucos, saberes y sobre todo los
secretos del glamour se aprenden. SOY visitó la Escuela de Arte Drag Queenla dirigida por Elektra, una
histórica del mundo drag argentino, maestra de un arte que es muchos otros al mismo tiempo.
Por Ignacio D’Amore
arriba: shadia mamani, molly manija, la profe elektra Trash, demerol inn, scarlet vanblood. abajo: emma
boombox, roxy candy, kahlo black
Así como una escuela puede ser a su vez un hogar, un hogar debe necesariamente funcionar como escuela. Y
aunque en el universo drag más que de hogares se hable de Casas (conocidas en la jerga anglo como -
sorpresa- Houses), toda buena Casa drag es, bien se sabe, un verdadero hogar. Se comparten nociones,
malestares, logros; se es protegidx y protectorx; se crece y se recalcula; se presta un atuendo a cambio de un
par de Marlboros. Las Madres, o Mothers, comandan cada Casa y amparan a las Hijas, apellidándolas y
brindándoles un sostén que muchísimas veces trasciende lo escénico.
Elektra Iuculano habita el mundo drag argentino desde hace años. Comenzó su carrera en Rosario, su ciudad,
y hoy es la creadora y encargada de la Escuela de Arte Drag Queen, un espacio donde se imparten todas las
disciplinas que confluyen en la performance drag como la conocemos: se aprende de vestuario y de expresión
corporal, de lipsync y de maquillaje. Se enyesan tocados, se inventan pestañas postizas, se manda tarea para el
hogar, se plusvalizan pelucas.
La charla con Elektra se produce durante su clase nocturna de viernes, lxs alumnxs en compacto silencio y
concentración no franqueable. Los espejos repujados en luz destacan cada milimetrado trazo de sombra, y se
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ven cejas en distintos niveles de resignificación, desde las escindidas hasta las quintuplicadas. Aula contigua:
termina de cobrar forma un casquete fascinante, forrado en tiras de cuero negro y con cornamenta de fábula,
que habrá de ser estrenado poco después en un show en Tucumán.
¿Cómo es la cursada en tu Escuela?
–En el primer año se empieza a entrenar vestuario, y a la mitad de ese año de cursada se empieza a preparar el
show. La performance. Yo lxs voy guiando para que creen algo según sus ideas, que no sea solamente un
lipsync sino un suceso artístico que ocurra en menos de cuatro minutos, porque es un show on stage, y eso es
lo que estamos preparando ahora. También hacen otras perfos, claro, pero el show final es el formato de
presentación del trabajo.
¿Cuántas personas están aprendiendo ahora?
–Ellxs son un grupo de nueve, que ya venían del año pasado y que ahora están en el quinto mes de cursada.
Vemos mucho maquillaje al principio porque la transformación sucede sobre todo ahí, en el make up.
Después trabajamos el cuerpo y los movimientos: cómo hacer playback, cómo sentarse y cómo pararse, cómo
caminar los tacos. Aprenden a moverse como una draga. Por ejemplo, yo les voy dando tips de pasarela de los
noventa y los adoptan según el personaje que vayan creando. En cada clase armamos cuestionarios para que
desarrollen ese personaje, pensando quién es, de dónde viene y a dónde va, qué quiere mostrar y qué no.
Y en ese primer acercamiento al maquillaje, ¿existe un aporte de cada estudiante?
–No en esa instancia. Se empieza con una clase sobre el color, y algo de historia del arte y de las drag queens,
siempre desde mi experiencia. Lo que yo les doy es técnica, no una estructura a seguir. A veces una clase
puede ser con un ejemplo que yo les muestro, u otras les propongo hablar de, supongamos, el círculo o la
esfera. En otras clases hacen un ejercicio completo en lugar de una práctica puntual; hago las correcciones y
cerramos con un ejercicio teatral o de expresión corporal para ir mejorando ese costado. Vemos también
texturas, y ahí sí incluimos propuestas de maquillaje que vienen de ellxs. Además, aprenden a moldearse el
cuerpo, a armar rellenos con goma espuma, a fabricar sus propias pelucas o a transformar una de baja calidad
en una de alta calidad.
A partir de esos primeros maquillajes con impronta personal, ¿cómo hacés vos para que cada personaje siga
creciendo?
–Yo quiero sacar de adentro esos personajes para que sean lo más genuinos posible. Finalmente cada ejercicio
se va adaptando a las estéticas propias. Las clases me permiten conocerlxs, y nunca es algo inmediato, por eso
creo que la Escuela tiene que ser de tres años. Recién ahí están bien formados los personajes: al principio se
trata de reconocerse, es prueba y error, es búsqueda, búsqueda, búsqueda. También es hacer shows con
público, saber leer el aplauso, ver qué le pasa a la gente porque ese es el mejor entrenamiento y el modo más
certero de evaluar la propia evolución.
Más allá de la formación que das en esta escuela, ¿te interesa la idea de formar una House?
–Yo siempre pensé en tener mi palacio. Me dedico a transmitir el espíritu drag queen desde hace mucho, y es
algo que fui descubriendo con el tiempo, algo que fui enseñando -como hacen otras drag queens- porque veía
que muchas personas no tenían ninguna información sobre lo que hacemos. En su momento yo investigaba
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para entender cómo transmitir eso que yo hacía; no era como es ahora, que sobra la información. Yo no
“hago” drag queens que se parezcan a mí, sino que doy conocimientos para que cada quien cree su
performance, que puede ser drag queen o no necesariamente; lo que pasa es que yo vengo del drag, de la
estética camp, que algunas personas conocen como old school pero yo prefiero llamar camp, y esa es mi base
artística. Imaginate que cuando empecé hacía este mismo estilo de maquillaje, tan exagerado, y recuperaba
materiales de descarte para armar vestuarios y utilería. Me di cuenta de que me gustaba esto de transmitir y en
su época éramos muy pocxs, entonces sentía que si podía llevar el espíritu drag queen a más cantidad de
gente, entonces yo iba a poder entender mejor mi propia performance, qué quería hacer, qué significaba mi
trabajo. En algún momento empecé a viajar, fui a Europa un par de veces, fui al norte argentino y a distintas
provincias tratando de meter el drag en distintos tipos de espectáculos, no solamente estando arriba de un
escenario en una disco o en un teatro sino también en una performance callejera, de pronto.
¿Reconocés en ese impulso por enseñar a tus propias maestras?
–Yo soy de Rosario, y cuando empecé a ser drag queen fue Topacio Fresh quien me guió. Ella es mi madre
drag. Yo le volaba la cabeza porque tenía diecinueve años y lo único que quería era saber, saber.
¿Qué parte de lo que vos enseñás te parece que no se transmite en, por ejemplo, un tutorial de Youtube?
–Ahora hay mucha información, demasiada, que no se puede usar o es muy difícil de hacer llegar a la
práctica. Hay algo en lo presencial, en verlo acá, porque si seguís un tutorial vas a copiar lo que ya hay. Podés
experimentar pero seguís siendo un copia de eso que viste. Igual, digámoslo, ya está todo inventado; pero
implementando en vivo las técnicas salen cosas fabulosas, y es diferente a copiar algo que estás viendo
porque eso es seguir un patrón, se produce algo repetido. Lo que yo trato de hacer con cada unx es que saquen
algo nuevo. Como podés ver, cada maquillaje es completamente distinto al otro, aunque hay ciertas, digamos,
reglas, de la “draguización”: las cejas, el delineado, las pestañas, la boca…
¿Cómo avanzás cuando ves que algunx de tus alumnxs está llevando su estética para tu lado?
–Todavía no me pasó, y eso está bueno. Yo trabajé con grupos de drag queens en los que había momentos en
que nos parecíamos, algo que era inevitable porque estando tanto tiempo juntas, trabajando a la par, nos
mimetizábamos. Si estás en un grupo en el que cada persona practica y vas viendo lo que resulta o no en el
resto, lo que te gusta o lo que no, eso te lleva a que te mimetices un poco. En el caso de la escuela no pasó aún
porque yo prefiero que esto sea diverso.
¿Siempre debe haber un componente de exageración? ¿Puede ser sutil el drag?
–Puede ser sutil, sí. Lo que pasa es que el drag es una exageración de por sí. Nosotrxs en Argentina dividimos
lo que es una transformista de lo que es una crossdresser de lo que es una drag. Hacemos esa división
basándonos en algo que, para mí, no tiene sentido. Todo es travestismo. Todo es travesti. Algunxs se travisten
todo el tiempo y otrxs lo hacen solamente para un espectáculo; y de esas personas que lo hacen en un
espectáculo, hay distintos caminos. Uno de ellos es travestirse de mujer, pero no es el único.
https://www.pagina12.com.ar/95726-la-letra-con-glitter-entra
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Sin
solución quejas de personas transgénero por discriminación en México
La última encuesta del Consejo para Prevenir y Eliminar la Discriminación de la Ciudad de
México (COPRED) arrojó que, de acuerdo con la percepción de quienes habitan y transitan la ciudad, las
personas homosexuales, indígenas y de piel morena son quienes más padecen discriminación.
De acuerdo con la Encuesta Nacional sobre Discriminación en México (ENADIS 2010), publicada por el
Consejo Nacional para Eliminar la Discriminación (CONAPRED) , la discriminación por transexualidad o
transgeneridad es aún más cruel que aquella que se expresa hacia las personas lesbianas u homosexuales; sin
embargo, la instancia señala que este tipo de discriminación todavía no está debidamente identificada y
cuantificada en las encuestas.
Por otra parte, una publicación elaborada por CONAPRED sobre discriminación por identidad y expresión de
género señala que las personas transgénero, travestis y transexuales pertenecen a una de las poblaciones que
más se enfrentan a diversas formas discriminación debido, entre otras cosas, a la falta de certeza jurídica, lo
cual las convierte en indocumentadas, y el estigma en torno a su identidad de género.
De acuerdo con una solicitud de información hecha pública por el medio Publimetro, en los últimos tres años
se han levantado apenas 8 quejas ante la Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH) en contra de
servidores públicos por incurrir en actos de discriminación, negación de servicios o agresión física y verbal
basada en prejuicios hacia las personas transgénero y transexuales. Los datos fueron proporcionados por el
Instituto Nacional de Transparencia, Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos Personales (INAI).
Diana Sánchez Barrios, presidenta de la organización civil ProDiana, una asociación que defiende los
derechos de las personas LGBT en todo el país, puntualizó que la población transgénero en México se
enfrenta a un “viacrucis” en el momento de realizar alguna denuncia por agresión o discriminación, ya que en
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muchas ocasiones vuelven nfrentarse a discriminación o violencia por parte de las instancias procuradoras de
justicia.
Esta es la razón por la que en la mayoría de las ocasiones los actos de discriminación o agresión física o
verbal no se denuncian.
“Son doblemente discriminadas, por un lado padecen la violencia cotidiana y cuando quieren denunciar ante
los organismos correspondientes, los funcionarios las agreden, las ofenden y en varios vasos ni siquiera
procede la queja”, declaró Diana Sánchez Barrios.
Según con los datos de la solicitud de información, las autoridades involucradas en los actos de
discriminación son la Secretaria de Educación Pública (SEP), la Secretaría de Seguridad Pública del Gobierno
de la Ciudad de México (SSP-CDMX) y el Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS).
De acuerdo con la información proporcionada, la totalidad de las demandas interpuestas de 2014 a 2017 no ha
tenido solución, ya que en algunos casos no se encontraron elementos suficientes para responsabilizar a las
autoridades, el proceso quedo en trámite o simplemente se desecharon los recursos.
Con información de Publimetro. Imagen tomada de El Universal.
http://desastre.mx/mexico/sin-solucion-quejas-de-personas-transgenero-por-discriminacion-en-mexico/
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FEMEN @FEMEN_Movement 29 mar.
Portugal necesita a #FEMEN para luchar contra la violencia sexual, la discriminación por género, la
industria del sexo, o los ataques contra los derechos de las mujeres. Si quieres comenzar un grupo de
FEMEN en Portugal ahora es el momento! Imagen David Kirchen
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Carnaval en Uruguay
Linda es la que baila
El concurso de belleza que premiaba a las reinas de carnaval uruguayas desde este año ya no corre más.
Ahora no hay monarquía: hay figuras. Carlos Álvarez, reconocido por su activismo afro y LGBT en
Argentina, fue premiado como el mejor bailarín de las llamadas candomberas.
Por Matias Maximo
Primero Uruguay aggiornó el reglamento del concurso de reinas y en 2016 pudieron competir travestis y
trans, lo que generó una polémica por los dichos del presidente de carnavales, Enrique Espert, quien avaló a la
teoría del váyanse a una isla: “Si quieren poner una reina trans, que hagan un concurso trans; si quieren poner
a un puto, que hagan uno de putos; y que no se olviden y hagan de bufarrones, porque si no hay bufarrones no
hay maricas”. Como cachetada queer a Espert y su séquito de tradicionalistas en el peor de los sentidos, este
año los carnavales fueron por más y se acabó la monarquía: ahora ya no hay “reinas”, hay “figuras”. La
resolución municipal dice que no quieren un concurso de belleza “que fomente estereotipos de género y ejerza
violencia simbólica contra las mujeres, sino una celebración al espíritu solidario y la alegría del carnaval”. Así
fue que llegó la oportunidad de Carlos Álvarez –conocido deeste lado del Río por su combinación de
activismo LGBT yafrocultural– que fue seleccionado como el mejor bailarín del carnaval, por su performance
desbordante en la comparsa La Explanada.
Antes de su adolescencia, Carlos ya se imaginaba bailando al son tamboril cuando iba con su familia a las
llamadas de Ansina, el barrio uruguayo que lo vio nacer y tirar los primeros pasos: “Esos domingos o feriados
en las llamadas entendí que había un tabú: el rol de los varones era tocar los tambores mientras las mujeres
bailaban, algo que viendo en perspectiva me parece muy machista. Por entonces tuve una pequeña experiencia
tocando la base rítmica, pero siempre me llamó más la atención la danza. Es ahí donde pongo todo el cuerpo,
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el placer y también la sabiduría, porque veo en el candombe una forma de transmisión de cultura. Ahora algo
está cambiando en los roles: hay cada vez más mujeres en los tambores y casi todas las comparsas tienen sus
integrantes trans. Aunque con los varones jóvenes todavía cuesta y se ven pocos bailarines afro, porque si
bailás para muchos se asocia directamente con que sos gay”.
Hace cuatrocientos años los invasores europeos trajeron al Río de la Plata barcos con esclavizados de África y
nació el candombe, que en su origen era un llamado de tambores y cantos para anunciar las reuniones
populares: el encuentro de los cuerpos que evocaba las ceremonias africanas. En dialecto Kimbundu,
KaNdombe significa “perteneciente a nosotros”, “nuestra gente”, y cada mezcla de tambores daba un mensaje
particular para reconocerse entre los grupos. Algunos de esos repiques se conservan, como una reivindicación
de orgullo, y las llamadas más famosas del triángulo rioplatense se hacen en Uruguay, aunque también en San
Telmo llevan cada vezmás concurrencia.
Para Carlos, el carnaval visibiliza el aporte cultural de la comunidad afro y en este punto se une con demandas
de la comunidad LGBT en el proceso para visibilizarse:”Hubo referentes históricos del candombe, como
Pirulo o La Araña,a los que en las llamadas todo el mundo aplaudía y eran estrellas, aunque después se les
cuestionaba su sexualidad el resto del año. Son pequeñas batallas que hay que seguir dando para generar una
mejor integración cultural y política de nuestros cuerpos. El candombe, el poner el cuerpo en la calle con la
danza,para mí también es parte del activismo: transmitir y promover el orgullo de sentirse negro candombero
es una lucha contra la discriminación y los estigmas. Y sí, también es una forma de ser libre”.
https://www.pagina12.com.ar/95724-linda-es-la-que-baila
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Eneko las Heras @EnekoHumor
Si el problema es la Ley, cambiémosla. Si el problema son los jueces, cambiémoslos. #Yositecreo
#NoesNo #justiciapatrialcal #EstaEsNuestraManada #LaManada
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Drag queen y musulmana; Glamrou lucha contra discriminación de occidente hacia los inmigrantes
Amrou Al-Kadhi es un joven actor abiertamente homosexual y drag queen que comenzó su carrera actoral
hace 12 años en una película de Seteven Spilberg. Al-Kadhi, quien es de ascendencia iraquí y de nacionalidad
británica, ha comenzado a utilizar su visibilidad como drag queen para luchar en contra de la discriminación y
la subvaloración de la vida de los inmigrantes y de las personas musulmanas que habitan en el Reino Unido.
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“La intención política de mi resistencia ha sido siempre presentar una representación edificante de mi
identidad minoritaria, en particular, para mostrar que ser musulmán y queer puede ser una combinación feliz
para Gran Bretaña”, señala Glamrou, su nombre drag, en una columna para Mirror.
El joven de 26 años de edad ha participado en múltiples manifestaciones en contra de las coaliciones políticas
conservadoras en el Reino Unido y constantemente evidencia la narrativa que algunos grupos políticos y
organizaciones utilizan para asegurar que “la caída de Europa” es culpa de los inmigrantes, una posición que
se sustenta en la islamofobia.
“Quería mostrarme como un inmigrante musulmán queer que no es ni una víctima o un villano en el oeste,
pero sí una orgullosa reina a cargo de su identidad”, señaló.
Luego de participar en una manifestación en contra del Partido Unionista Democrático (considerado el quinto
partido más fuerte de Reino Unido con una ideología conservadora en contra del matrimonio igualitario y el
aborto y cuya mayoría de sus integrantes son cristianos evangélicos) comenzó a recibir amenazas de muerte
por primera vez en su vida.
Una publicación de una sección de la Liga de Defensa Inglesa, un grupo de extrema derecha británico que se
opone al islamismo, la sharia y la construcción de mezquitas en el territorio, utilizó su imagen para
caracterizar lo que la agrupación llama “la islamización de Gran Bretaña”. Además, recibió mensajes en su
cuenta personal de Facebook de parte de supremacistas blancos donde le decían que “irían a buscarla”.
Amrou dice que la reacción de los integrantes de la ultraderecha no le sorprende; no obstante, resalta su
preocupación por las reacciones de grupos que al igual que él sufren opresión de alguna manera, como la
comunidad gay y la comunidad islámica.
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“Los musulmanes conservadores me amenazaron de manera similar por asociar mi identidad con el Islam, los
fundamentalistas me enviaron correos electrónicos que me dijeron que mi ‘existencia es una
abominación’”, declaró.
Además agregó: “Esto (el odio) podría esperarse de los supremacistas blancos, pero aparece en lugares
sorprendentes. Por ejemplo, muchos espacios gay están llenos de islamofobia, con incidentes de odio
denunciados en el Orgullo Gay y muchos hombres que afirman que ‘no tienen citas con asiáticos’ en
aplicaciones”.
Glamrou afirma que viven en medio de dos culturas, la británica y la islámica, situación que la coloca en un
espacio complejo para su identidad; no obstante, el drag la ha ayudado a recociliar ambas partes de sus
identidades.
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“Para mí, el drag ha sido el pegamento que mantiene unidos los fragmentos de mi identidad. Cuando estoy en
resistencia puedo aferrarme a los elementos positivos de mi educación musulmana antes de que las cosas se
volvieran traumáticas”.
“Cuando era niño, el Islam solía consolarme: las oraciones rituales cinco veces al día eran como meditaciones
pacíficas, lo que me ayudaba a comunicarme con Alá en un nivel personal y tranquilo. Antes de entender
realmente que era gay y seguidor del género, tenía una fe inquebrantable en el amor incondicional de Alá
hacia mí, y como tal, el Islam me enseñó a amarme a mí mismo”.
Amrou Al-Kadhi no sólo lucha contra la islamofobia y la discriminación hacia los inmigrantes, sino también
hacia los estereotipos violentos que encasillan a las personas musulmanas en el terrorismo. El actor afirma
que debido a su apariencia los directores de cine los buscan para interpretar papeles como terrorista.
Con información de Mirror y Step Feed.
http://desastre.mx/cultura/drag-queen-y-musulmana-glamrou-lucha-contra-discriminacion-de-occidente-
hacia-los-inmigrantes/
