WASHINGTON - Ismael Rosa, a salsa singer serving a lifetime prison sentence for drug crimes, had often promised his lawyers that he would sing for them if he ever won his freedom. On Wednesday, Rosa was taken to the warden's office at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pekin, Ill., and was told that President Barack Obama had granted him clemency. As he was on the phone with his lawyer, the lyrics from a gospel hymn slipped past his lips as tears streamed down his face. [continues 280 words]
Nancy Reagan's recent death was a reminder of the shallow moralizing of the Just Say No anti-drug campaign she once championed. Thankfully, attitudes have changed. We're more attuned to the fact that untreated mental health issues are often a precursor to drug use. Nancy's slogan to fight peer pressure won't help much there. Most people realize that the War on Drugs, begun under Nixon, has failed. And there's growing public awareness that we've let our jails and prisons become warehouses for people who need treatment - and who needed it long before they took a criminal turn. [continues 628 words]
Four inmates file Charter challenge of BC Corrections policy they say put them at risk of overdosing on illicit drugs behind bars Four opioid-addicted prisoners are challenging a BC Corrections policy they say impedes swift access to medication that could treat their addictions, putting them at risk of overdose. Lawyer Adrienne Smith, who is representing the men, says her clients have received either limited access, or no access at all, to drugs such as Suboxone and methadone, which are used to treat opioid dependency. Fighting withdrawal, some have turned to illicit drugs behind bars; one has overdosed for this reason, according to an affidavit. [continues 538 words]
Families of Dead Provincial Inmates Grieve As Demands for Accountability Rebuffed SYDNEY, N. S. - Ernest LeBlanc sits by the wooden box that contains his son's cremated remains, clenching his hands as he describes his anger at the wall of silence that has greeted most of his questions about his son's death in a Cape Breton jail hours after being admitted. "I want to know how he died. I know he could have been saved. He didn't deserve to die like this," says the 64-year-old resident of Sydney Mines, N. S. [continues 852 words]
COALINGA - A Southern California company has proposed using a vacant San Joaquin Valley prison for growing marijuana and producing cannabis oil. Ocean Grown Extracts made the proposal last month to the mayor and city manager of Coalinga, which owns the shuttered Claremont Custody Center, The Fresno Bee reported Monday. The 77,000-square-foot facility was closed several years ago when the California Department of Corrections did not renew its contract. City Manager Marissa Trejo detailed the economic benefits of the proposal at a City Council meeting this month. Lease and tax payments would bring nearly $2 million annually. The cannabis oil would be sold wholesale to dispensaries. [continues 150 words]
A Southern California company has proposed using a vacant San Joaquin Valley prison for growing marijuana and producing cannabis oil. The Fresno Bee reported Monday that Ocean Grown Extracts made the proposal last month to the mayor and city manager of Coalinga, which owns the shuttered Claremont Custody Center. The 77,000-square-foot facility was closed several years ago when the California Department of Corrections did not renew its contract. Lease and tax payments would bring Coalinga nearly $2 million annually. The cannabis oil would be sold wholesale to dispensaries. Appeal-Democrat news services [end]
A Florida-based deputy U.S. marshal who robbed drug dealers of marijuana at gunpoint then pointed a firearm at an officer as he fled through Yuba City in 2014 was sentenced to 10 years in prison Wednesday. Clorenzo Griffin, 38, was the last of three defendants sentenced by U. S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller. Andre Jamison, 40, was sentenced to seven years and three months and Rodney Rackley, 24, to six years. Griffin previous pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit a robbery affecting interstate commerce. In the weeks before the sentencing hearing, prosecutors argued he be sentenced to 12 years in prison, in part, due to his violation of the public's trust as a peace officer. [continues 322 words]
There appears to be a growing problem with drugs in both federal and provincial jails in Alberta with more emphasis on keeping information about this issue out of the public realm then keeping the narcotics from getting into the gaol. The latest death at the city remand centre earlier this year is an example of just how far authorities are willing to go when it comes to a clampdown on information pertaining to in-custody fatalities. No name was released or solid information about cause of death was provided, with provincial officials claiming privacy interests. [continues 486 words]
PEOPLE caught with drugs for personal use would be referred for health treatment rather than sent to jail under proposals unveiled by the Scottish Liberal Democrats. Leader Willie Rennie said Scotland's current drugs policy "is costly and fails to work for everyone". Drugs misuse costs society UKP3.5 billion a year amounting to around UKP900 for every adult in Scotland, he said. The LibDems will call for drug users to be "referred for treatment, education or civil penalties, ending the use of i mpr i s on ment " , in a ma n i fe sto p ol ic y put forward for discussion at its Scottish spring conference this week. [continues 174 words]
OTTAWA- The Liberal government should implement prison-based needle and syringe programs to address rates of HIV and hepatitis C estimated to be 10 to 30 times higher than in the general population, proponents say. Emily van der Meulen of Ryerson University, the lead author of a recent study, said she wants to see the government review evidence on the effectiveness of programs that have operated in countries like Switzerland for more than 20 years. "I'm hopeful that the government will look to this evidence, as well as to our recent research report," she said. [continues 333 words]
States are finally backing away from the draconian sentencing policies that swept the country at the end of the last century, driving up prison costs and sending too many people to jail for too long, often for nonviolent offenses. Many are now trying to turn around the prison juggernaut by steering drug addicts into treatment instead of jail and retooling parole systems that once sent people back to prison for technical violations. But the most effective way to keep people out of prison once they leave is to give them jobs skills that make them marketable employees. That, in turn, means restarting prison education programs that were shuttered beginning in the 1990s, when federal and state legislators cut funding to show how tough they were on crime. [continues 587 words]
OTTAWA - The Liberal government should implement prison-based needle and syringe programs to address rates of HIV and hepatitis C estimated to be 10 to 30 times higher than in the general population, proponents say. Emily van der Meulen of Ryerson University, the lead author of a recent study, said she wants to see the government review evidence on the effectiveness of programs that have operated in countries like Switzerland for more than 20 years. "I'm hopeful that the government will look to this evidence, as well as to our recent research report," she said. [continues 187 words]
ADELANTO - On a Wednesday night in December, investors from Orange County and Los Angeles descended on a crumbling outpost that, until then, many had only unwittingly driven past on the way to Las Vegas. The outsiders and residents alike packed Adelanto City Hall, eager to weigh in on the City Council's ongoing debate over its new marijuana ordinance. But when the city attorney announced that Don Kojima of Newport Beach had scored 47 acres of prime city-owned land for just $375,000, men in pricey suits began shouting out offers to pay 10 times that much. [continues 1975 words]
Researchers hope Liberals' 'evidence-based' approach will endorse safe-injection programs After years of pushing for safe drug-injection programs in Canadian jails, health advocates say mounting evidence and a new government in Ottawa present a chance to finally make it happen. In a report published Wednesday, researchers in Toronto provide a framework for the introduction of what they call "prison-based needle and syringe programs" in Canada - programs that the authors argue are sorely needed in provincial and federal jails to address levels of HIV and Hepatitis C infections that are "astronomically" high compared with those in the general population. [continues 723 words]
Critics Say He Lacked Authority to Take Law into His Own Hands, but Others Are Following His Lead Leonard Campanello, the police chief of Gloucester, Mass., took the microphone here in mid-December and opened with his usual warm-up line: I'm from Gloucester, he said in his heavy Boston accent. "That's spelled 'G-l-o-s-t-a-h.' " A casually profane man with a philosophical bent, Campanello, 48, first drew national attention last spring when he wrote on Facebook that the old war on drugs was lost and over. A believer that addiction is a disease, not a crime, he became the unusual law enforcement officer offering heroin users an alternative to prison. [continues 723 words]
SACRAMENTO (AP) - California prison officials are ending visitor strip searches in response to a recent change in state law, but visitors will face increased scrutiny for a year if traces of drugs are detected by dogs or airport-style scanners. It's the first time visitors will be scrutinized by dogs that previously have been used to search inmates, Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Dana Simas said Monday. Visitors who are spotlighted by a dog or ion scanner but refuse clothed searches face an increasing range of penalties under the revised regulations the department proposed Friday. [continues 233 words]
The sudden death of Shauna Wolf on Dec. 27 while she was being held on remand at the Pine Grove Correctional Centre raises some troubling questions, starting with the fact that provincial policy still doesn't require justice officials to publicly disclose every such death as soon as practicable. Surely, there's nothing a government in a democratic society does on our behalf that's more serious or sensitive than to deprive people of their freedom. Whenever someone who is taken into custody then dies while in lock-up, the death should become public information as soon as the person's family is notified. [continues 351 words]
As much marijuana as I admit to smoking almost daily. I still loudly proclaim to anyone I am not addicted to marijuana and, as far as I know, no one is; because marijuana is not addictive, but Facebook is. Ibogaine is a cure for addiction (period), it not only works on drugs like heroin, meth, cocaine but addictive behavior like gambling too from what I've been told. Some say it's the best cure for tobacco use as well. Facebook has suspended my Facebook account for one week starting last Sunday 1/2/2016, and ending on Saturday 1/9/2016. I'm suffering big time cyber pains in Facebook jail. As you know I've been to real jail and in real jail people are there who are drug addicts and they suffer physically for lack of their substance it's called withdrawal. It's a horrible experience to be in a cell with a person suffering from withdrawal, the smells, and the dry heaves, the agony is horrible to witness. I admit to being highly addicted to Facebook and I'm going thru severe Facebook withdrawal right now, I'm not dry heaving or throwing up but......ugggh. As much marijuana as I admit to smoking almost daily. I still loudly proclaim to anyone I am not addicted to marijuana and as far as I know no-one is; because marijuana is not addictive but Facebook is. [continues 920 words]
The sudden death of Shauna Wolf on Dec. 27 while she was being held on remand at the Pine Grove Correctional Centre raises some troubling questions, starting with the fact that provincial policy still doesn't require justice officials to publicly disclose every such death as soon as practicable. Surely, there's nothing a government in a democratic society does on our behalf that's more serious or sensitive than to deprive people of their freedom. Whenever someone who is taken into custody then dies while in lock-up, the death should become public information as soon as the person's family is notified. [continues 352 words]
As I sat with a client I'll call Grace in Baltimore County District Court in Essex, I watched case after case go before the judge. It was mostly less serious crimes: theft, possession of paraphernalia, driving without a license and trespassing. But all the cases, except for most of the traffic cases, had elements of mental illness and addiction, like the mother who was experiencing homelessness and hadn't been getting her children to school on a regular basis. She had prior arrests of possession of a controlled dangerous substance and theft. [continues 714 words]
