Why did Gynnya McMillen die under Kentucky’s supervision?

January 19, 2016 by 12 Comments

Last week, a sixteen-year-old girl named Gynnya McMillen died in her cell at a juvenile detention center in Elizabethtown, KY. Her family wants answers, and the State of Kentucky remains silent.

An initial autopsy shows no “outward signs” or bruising, and no conclusive cause of death. The State says more information will be available in a few weeks. Gynnya was there for only one day.

The State declares as a matter-of-fact: the autopsy results will take weeks. Do not ask anything else until then. Meanwhile, time drags on for Gynnya McMillen’s family, who struggle with the trauma of losing Gynnya and the lack of even the most basic information surrounding her death.

It is unclear exactly why Gynnya McMillen was in custody at the Lincoln Village Youth Development and Regional Juvenile Detention Center. A police department spokesperson said she was the “perpetrator” in a domestic dispute with her parents. It is unclear what circumstances led up to her death in that facility.

What is clear is that Gynnya McMillen spent time years before in a center for kids in crisis. Gynnya needed help then, and she needed help when the Kentucky Department of Corrections put her in its custody last week. Now, Gynnya McMillen is dead.

A spokesperson for the Kentucky Department of Corrections wants you to know that Gynnya McMillen is the first juvenile death in a Kentucky juvenile center since 1999. Lincoln Village’s website boasts the opportunities it provides for its children inmates, including “continuous supervision.”

Under the “continuous supervision” of Kentucky and all its opportunities, Gynnya McMillen died in a day.

Her name was Gynnya McMillen. She joins the list of women and girls, many Black, who wind up dead under “care” of the State. Her family deserves answers. We all deserve answers.

For updates and to get involved, follow Justice for Gynnya McMillen.

(Photo Credit: Facebook / Justice for Gynnya McMillen)

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I don’t feel sad that David Bowie died

January 13, 2016 by Leave a Comment

I don’t feel sad that David Bowie died. I find it strange to adjust to the idea that figures like him, Lou Reed and some others are no longer alive. They were present somehow for my whole life. They’re close to my parents in age. I have thought about their personal lives, given hours listening to their music in my youth. But their deaths are like the final stages of fame to me. They mark the inequality of this relationship in which I will live an imaginary version of their intimate details, while they don’t know I exist (save for a strange encounter alone with Lou Reed on the subway.)

Both of them lived with fame and success. They represented the carrots on the end of the stick for the music industry, wielded quietly against a million would be musicians. They “helped” (?) categorize aesthetics and sexuality for even more people. They were part of the way kingliness and godliness sneak back in through the back door at the anti-authority after party, even if perhaps DB may have detested that idea. They represented the men’s cool which allowed some women in for a period in the 90s and then kicked them out after 9/11 when, in ‘Merica (and now globally) women lost yet another fight against being seen as childbearers, mothers.

I may never have started playing music if it were not for Lou Reed and David Bowie and their ilk, depending on who more directly credits their existence, and whether they influenced me. Then again, maybe I would have been something else.

Fame defines talent, not the other way around. There are probably a million storytellers on the planet who, given the right means, could make as (or more or differently) insightful and devastating set of final videos. But much of that group is being maimed and tortured by bad labor conditions; they’re being deported or held in an immigration cell; or they are taking care of babies at home. What would we learn if the resources of Columbia Records were put towards documenting these lives? What kind of music might the least musical among them create?

It’s strange to be in a world from which the glam and rock heroes are departing because death now immortalizes and justifies how out of reach they are. Even if Bowie is the nice celebrity, even if I could have run into either of them in Central Park on a nice day and had a conversation; even if I had friends who collaborated with them, their out-of-reachness is not about knowing them. Their subjectivities have been exploited to watermark the heavens and help produce an eternal return of the Same, in which some figures are Great, and others barely exist.

Why do we keep coming back here? On the tragic side, perhaps this kind of impersonal love is much easier than what’s involved in real human relationships. Or perhaps it’s easier to categorize the self according to the Master figureheads whose clothes, tastes and style were circulated by a mega-profiting industry. On the bright side, perhaps this love can be credited for the self’s brilliant moments as inspiration. I still want to ask: what might any of us have created without God?

 

(Photo Credit: Niklas Halle / Agence-France-Press / Getty Images / New York Times)

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Radio WIBG: Sofia Tzitzikou: In Greece, despair is quietly settling in

January 11, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Sofia Tzitzikou

Sofia Tzitzikou

Sofia Tzitzikou, the acting president of UNICEF Greece draws attention to the quiet suffering of women, children and vulnerable people in Greece caused by economic manipulations.

With the best wishes of 2016 that everyone exchanges comes the true reality that goes beyond the turning page of the calendar. In Greece, nothing has been resolved and the measures that were imposed upon the population following the third memorandum are, as anticipated, aggravating the conditions of life for all, and even more so for the already vulnerable. As Sofia regrets, no policies are oriented toward the population in its individual and human representation. Nothing positive seems attainable at the moment, and a sentiment of despair washes over young people.

Notwithstanding, the UN report: Effects of foreign debt and Other Related Financial obligations of States on the full enjoyment of all human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights, that demonstrates and analyses the delirious effects of the system of debt, the harsh restructuring policies still go on.

Here is Sofia Tzitzikou who reminds us that the real danger is to become accustomed to such situations.

 

(Photo Credit: Brigitte Marti) (Interview conducted by Brigitte Marti)

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The Stoned

January 10, 2016 by Leave a Comment

The Stoned image

“I’m dead,” snorted the giant mammal as it crushed me. It fell on me wailing and crying before silence pervaded it. The world suddenly ceased to exist as a hush fell over everything. Over me.

No more of the savage howling of the wind, or the crackling sound of broken bones as stones rained from skies. I am crushed, not more than goo anymore. And I am lost in the abyss of its huge eye pressing onto me.

“I’m dead,” she says.

She pauses. Searching for words she can’t find.

“What about me?” I ask.

She ignores me, as if I don’t matter enough. That’s so typical of humans, so condescending.

“Ants do matter” I try to assure myself.

“If only I could hide in that crack on the wall. Who knows, I might have found myself in wonderlands,” she snorts with bitter laughter.

She pauses, searching for the look of contempt on my face. I realize that the deep nothingness inside me has dwindled. I can see and remember, as if I have always been part of her, present in all moments of her existence. My imperturbable face assures her.

A streak of light invading the wall from the corner of the curtain illuminates the cracks on the wall. It creates the image of a lonely thunderbolt frozen in time among the dried leafless brunches of a jungle. There is a new crack on the wall. It appeared last week. But it seems so familiar now, as if it has always been there, one of the crowds.

She feels a burning sensation as the cold tip of the knife cuts through the skin on her forearm. The world starts moving again. She licks the cut and tastes the salty metallic taste of blood on her tongue and contemplates the millions of bacteria that might have just entered her blood stream. With a faint lopsided smile on her lips, she imagines herself shrinking and entering the narrow crack on the wall.

The feeble light of an old lamp lights the sombre mud walls of the room. The nails holding the old and heavy blanket that covers the window have bent. ‘People talk,’ her mother had thought when she had nailed the blanket to the wooden frame of the window. She had told her, “It keeps the cold away”. The air outside this gloomy room is pitilessly raw. Stars have long forsaken its haunted sky.

Her frail body is crouched in a corner. Her pale complexion and the weariness in her eyes make her look out of this world. She is nostalgically listening to the tinkling of the stars as darkness infiltrates her skin.

Her heart is not beating. She puts her hand through her neckline, her skin feels hot against her cold sweaty palm. She has the look of someone teetering on a cliff, looking for something to hold on to. Anxiously moving her palm around to feel her heartbeat, she slightly brushes a nipple. Her hand violently jerks and withdraws itself of its own accord, creating a rush on the skin on her neck. Her heart is drumming in her ears as fear and disgust cling in the stifled air. Fear of stepping into forbidden territories.

She imagines beyond the curtain the sky changes colour. A storm roars. Rain impinges on earth washing away the walls like paint. The wind howls and uproots the dried up trees sending logs of wood dancing into the sky. She looks up. The gods are feasting and playing and the world is dancing all around her. Incessant needles of rain kiss her skin and she relishes in the pain of it all.

Clinching her fists so tight that her nails tear into the flesh of her palms, she screams. From the bottom of her lungs, with all the power she can gather in her fragile body. And for the first time, she hears her own voice.

Her sound is lost in the whirlwind of all things that should matter.

“I’m dead,” she reiterates calmly; “it really doesn’t matter, not anymore”.

Her corpse is pulled up as her eyes stare blankly into nothingness. A cold drop of tear washes me away from her. And as I fall into the dirt at the bottom of the pit, I see the question in her eyes. ‘Does it?’

 

(Image by Leeda Mehran)

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Radio WIBG: Zoe Konstantopoulou: In Greece, a woman to defend women’s and human rights

December 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Zoe Konstantopoulou

Zoe Konstantopoulou

Progress may be illusionary. At the time of a global set back in terms of women’s human rights, with forceful movements of dispossession, the Greek crisis epitomizes this global process of dismantlement of social and democratic representation. In 2010, Greece was declared guilty of public debt. Consequently, Greece as a country was put in the custody of the Troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the IMF), a non-elected extraterritorial jurisdiction. Zoe Konstantopoulou in her first term in the Hellenic parliament with Syriza showed her determination to change the regime of undemocratic, unattended corruption that reigned in the parliament at that time, allowing the odious measures of austerity to control the country.

Konstantopoulou resisted the outrageous mockery of democracy, as on September 2013, when a series of bills were declared by the President of the Hellenic Parliament (the Vouli) of the time Kiriakos Virvidakis, adopted unanimously without actual votes. No debates took place in the Vouli that day, and only Zoe Konstantopoulou, one of the three delegates present, was screaming and demanding proof of the vote, to no avail.

In January 2015, Syriza won the election and Zoe was elected with 60% of the vote as President of the Hellenic parliament. She immediately instilled an anti corruption climate. In addition, for her restoring the democratic process meant inviting the civil society to be finally recognized. She celebrated women’s struggles for social justice. In April 2015, she mandated an audit of the public debt, forming the Debt Truth Committee, which released a preliminary report in June 2015. She declared during a meeting in Paris last May: “austerity kills, it kills society, human beings, and kills democracy and the Europe of people.”

The recent report of the Independent Expert on the effect of foreign debt and other related Financial Obligations of States on the Full Enjoyment of all Human Rights concurred with Zoe’s analysis. It stated, “To think of Sovereign debt markets as totally independent from the notion and realization of social and economic human rights is something unacceptable…” (Article 55)

The report also emphasized that with a 35.7% increase of the number of people falling into poverty, “austerity appears to have exacerbated the social crisis in Greece and have failed to stimulate the national economy to the benefit of the Greek population.” The same report asserted the importance of an audit of public debt.

Zoe Konstantopoulou lost her seat after the coup that triggered the new election last September. After the election, the audit was abandoned and its preliminary report and process were erased from the parliament web site. Syriza was reformed without people like Zoe; nonetheless she continues the struggle in the name of justice.

Let’s listen to Zoe Konstantopoulou:

A longer set of interviews with Zoe Konstantopoulou is available, in French, here.

 

(Photo credit: Marie-Hélène Le Ny) (Interview by Brigitte Marti)

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THOU SHALT NOT WEAR THE BURQA

December 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Member of Islamic Central Council of Switzerland member distributes flyers against veil ban

A few weeks back Switzerland passed a law banning women from going out in public in a burqa. The fine for such an offence is $10,000. Even tourists are not exempt from this law. A similar contentious debate over Muslim women wearing burqas in public arose in Canada. Conservative candidates want to bring about a ban on the hijab or burqa, while liberals argue for freedom of religion. In protest, one man appeared at the polls wearing a pumpkin mask and another covered his face with a Mexican wrestling mask to make a statement on the foolhardiness of a law that bans burqas in public.

Comedy aside, what are the repercussions of such a law that conveys that some people are not welcome unless they assimilate with the majority culture? Perhaps the burqa makes the Swiss uncomfortable. But in this era of mass migrations, multicultural societies should have made that discomfort passé. So will the Swiss next ban Indian women from wearing saris because this clothing exposes women’s midriffs?

Such a law will further ghettoize Muslims and make them hardened in their beliefs because they are reacting to a majority culture that demonizes Muslims for such customs. Such a hardening in fact harms future generations of Muslims within Switzerland and also increases the gulf between them and the majority culture.

The choice or lack of choice to wear the burqa depends on particular families and the cultures from which they originate. The politics within these cultures have also influenced the wearing of this clothing. There are many debates within Muslim societies about women’s freedom and their choices. If we do not allow for a community to figure out its choices, but impose a choice (or lack) from outside, we are colonizing these communities. The Swiss may argue they are liberating Muslim women by enacting the ban on the burqa. The Swiss are doing exactly what feminists did in much of the last century by imposing their ideas of liberation on minority communities. It is paternalistic and condescending to impose an assimilationist model on Muslim women.

Many of us, Muslims and non-Muslims, may feel that the burqa is a symbol of women’s subjugation, but do we have the right to impose our view on another? And if a Muslim woman does choose to wear a burqa as a sign of her surrender to Allah, do we have the right to tell her that her experience of spiritual liberation does not match with our idea of women’s freedom? Of course, in many fundamentalist communities, women are forced to wear the burqa. But does it mean that the members in these communities are not debating the issue?

In fact, the Swiss will be surprised to find that if the ban did not exist, Muslim women in the next decade could very likely appear in public without the hijab or the burqa or the niqab.

 

(Photo Credit: AFP / AlJazeera)

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Radio WIBG: Sascha Gabizon and COP 21: “We need to include the language of gender equality”

December 7, 2015 by 2 Comments

Sascha Gabizon

COP 21 has opened in a difficult “climate.” After the attacks in Paris, a state of emergency has been declared. With that came the cancelation of all climate demonstrations organized by civil society. Nonetheless, a human-chain was organized gathering 10000 people; creative ways of demonstrating took place, thousands of shoes paved Republic Square to symbolize the march for the climate.

However, the abuses of the state of emergency are now being made visible and denounced, as 24 eco pacifist militants, some not even located in Paris, have been placed under a sort of house arrest during COP 21, marking the widening denial of democratic rights.

Climate change means the global elimination of people not only in Syria or Afghanistan but also generally in the global South. The COP negotiations work within the neoliberal market, shaping the climate paradigm as exchange value of the temperature degrees instead of taking into consideration the harshening condition of human lives, again ranked by gender, race and class.

In this context the task of Sascha Gabizon, one of the co-facilitators of the Women Gender Constituency, a large coalition of feminists and women’s movements, is going to be arduous.

Climate disasters target women. As Sascha recalled, in the 1991 floods in Bangladesh 90% of the casualties were women. As climate disasters occur regularly, as in the Philippines, they impact in majority women, mainly because of gendered distribution of labor and roles.

As a result, we see all kinds of radicalization against women with the widespread expansion of brutal practices against women, in their home, in their everyday life, in prisons and jails, as well as the erosion of women’s rights especially sexual and reproductive rights in an increasing number of countries.

Sascha insists: “We need to include, in the first article of the COP 21 agreement, the language of gender equality, of equality in terms of human rights as defined in the United Nations charter including the rights of indigenous populations. Moreover, she remarks that in the current negotiations, this language is shockingly deemed unnecessary even by countries such as Norway.”

By the same token, she underlines the impossibility of women’s groups even the largest to use the financial system for the climate as currently defined for any of their projects simply because it requires a 10 million Euros investment, an amount of money impossible to collect for these organizations. Additionally, locking up countries in the current public debt system has dire impacts on any initiatives, local or state especially in emerging countries.

Finally, the reality of the increase of temperature means the elimination of lands and therefore populations. While we are justly appalled by the deaths from blind attacks in the streets of Beirut, Tunis or Paris, our eyes turn away from the surviving struggles of the populations of the South who have not produced this climate disaster.

Listen to Sascha Gabizon

and a longer interview, in French, is available here.

(Photo Credit: UN Women / Fabricio Barreto)

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What I’m about to say is based on the belief that a woman’s life matters

December 3, 2015 by 1 Comment

I wanted to start talking about Planned Parenthood and all of the fantastic services they provide to low-income and minority women. And I found myself minimizing their provision of abortion services. And I got pissed. So this post isn’t about that. This post is solely and entirely devoted to the termination of pregnancy and the women and girls who require them. Too many very well-intentioned people talk about Planned Parenthood as only doing some teensy number of abortions. That ain’t the goddamn point. Let me be among the first to call for an all day, everyday, 24 hour, drive thru abortion clinic with twofers and a free milkshake if you come on Mondays. Why? Women, that’s why. Because there aren’t enough abortions in my frank opinion, that’s why (you know you agree with me). Because to terminate a pregnancy is not a bad thing, it is a medical procedure, that’s why. 

This may be hard to read but, honestly, it really shouldn’t be. What I’m about to say is based on the belief that a woman’s life matters. That a girl’s life matters. Well, actually, that’s not fair. What I’m about to say is that our lives and bodies matter more than a baby’s. Yes, I am that warrior. I am saying what I suspect many of us feel but are afraid to speak aloud when confronted by talk of when the fetus is viable, when conception starts, when the fetus grows nails, heart beats, knows its mothers voice in the womb. And that is this: so what. So what if the fetus — fuck it, the baby — is playing chess rivaling Magnus Carlsen, playing double-dutch and hopscotch in the womb. If the mother does not, cannot carry the baby to term for gut-wrenching or superficial reasons then oh the fuck well.

I care about the lives of adult women and girls who are faced with a decision about their bodies and livelihoods. This battle is not about choice versus life. It’s about — and has always been about — whose life matters more and who gets to determine that. Think about it, women have always terminated pregnancies, that’s never going to end. This abortion battle is about the fact that many folk, mostly men but not all men, don’t like women deciding who lives and who does not.  In the history of women and motherhood, whether abortion was legal or not, women have had to determine who mattered more. Folks don’t like that. That’s what this age-old debate is really about and will continue to be about. So folks make it harder for lesser empowered women to make that choice about giving or not giving life. Because last I checked no one’s shooting up insurance companies that fund abortions, nope. Just the places that offer affordable options.

So to sum up, this is not about life versus choice, this is about women deciding to give life and the implications of such a reality. Further, this is about poor and women of color deciding to give life. Because, again, last I checked, private insurance companies can and do cover abortion and nary a protest or shooting occurs outside of their offices.

 

(Photo Credit: Urban Grace Magazine)

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Patriarchy never fails women; patriarchy always assaults women. #PatriarchyMustFall

December 1, 2015 by Leave a Comment

In the news this week: in Cambodia rape victims have been “failed” by the so-called justice system; South Africa’s justice system is “failing” women; the United Kingdom “fails” women who suffer from domestic violence; and the United States’ program of mass incarceration fails all women, particularly women of color. The only problem with these “failures” is that they are successes. They are part and parcel of the public policy of patriarchy-as-nation-State. The State does not fail women; the State assaults women.

One of every twenty women in the world lives in the United States. One of every three women prisoners in the world is currently in a United States prison or jail, and that figure does not include immigrant detention centers. Globally, the 25 jurisdictions with the highest rate of female incarceration are 24 individual states and the District of Columbia. West Virginia tops that list, imprisoning 273 out of 100,000 women. There is no failure here. There is a decades long campaign to cage and otherwise brutalize women, and particularly women of color, all in the name of `protecting’ not only Society but also the women themselves.

In Cambodia, LICADHO, the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, released a report yesterday that documented the massive “failure” of the State to address rape: “LICADHO’s monitors report that it is usually the result of a failure by police to respond to reports by victims, and in some cases, of suspects being tipped off by police that a claim has been made against them … This report brings to light the immense failure of the Cambodian justice system to properly investigate and punish cases of sexual violence against women and children. The reasons for this failure are many: corruption, discriminatory attitudes towards women and girls, misinterpretation of the law, and lack of resources all combine to perpetuate and entrench a system in which impunity prevails.

“The report has focused on the failures of the justice system rather than on the experience of individual victims; it must not be forgotten that at the centre of all the cases discussed there were women and children who had experienced a terrifying and violent attack resulting in psychological and often physical trauma. The failure of the criminal justice system to punish their attackers compounds their experience of abuse and perpetuates the harm they suffer. Moreover, every failure to punish reinforces existing public mistrust of the Cambodian justice system and conveys the message that rape is not an offence that will be treated seriously; it not only lets down the victims concerned but reduces the likelihood that future victims will take the risk of reporting the crimes committed against them.”

There is no failure in Cambodia. Police refuse to respond. The State refuses to put women and children at the center. We hear similar reports from South Africa, where the justice system fails “to adequately address gender based violence since the impunity of men as rapists is tacitly accepted.” Likewise, in the United Kingdom, when the State proposes to cut or almost eliminate domestic violence services, we are told, “The current government is failing women.”

There is no failure here. The State seeks to reduce women’s autonomy and dignity, and thereby extract ever more value, all of which accrues to men’s power, stature, wealth and pleasure. None of this is new. It’s the oldest play in patriarchy’s rulebook. Stop calling structural violence against women “failure.” Call it violence against women, and stop it. #PatriarchyMustFall

(Photo Credit: EPA / Kim Ludbrook / Daily Maverick)

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Amalia Leal: We came to seek refuge, and instead we found punishment.

November 29, 2015 by 4 Comments

 

Women prisoners, almost exclusively Central American and Mexican, at T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, recognized Thanksgiving by engaging in a hunger strike, both in their own name and in solidarity with largely Bangladeshi hunger strikers in Alabama and California. It’s a small world after all, in the global gulag of asylum seeker and refugee detention.

The stories of the women intersect with the story of T. Don Hutto and of the current U.S. regime. T. Don Hutto opened, as T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, in 2006. From the outset, it was a nightmare. Finally, after three years of prisoner protests, supporter protests and law suits, the government decided to shut it down … sort of. In 2009, T. Don Hutto was `transformed’ into a women’s immigration prison, and it’s been a special hell for immigrant women. The Correction Corporation of America runs T. Don Hutto, and they must be very proud of it, since they named the facility after T. Don Hutto, one of the company’s three founders.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is equally proud of T. Don Hutto: “The T. Don Hutto Residential Center (TDHRC) represents a unique and pioneering setting, offering the least restrictive environment permissible to manage persons in administrative U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. In keeping with the director’s call for civil detention reform, TDHRC represents a clear departure from historical detention settings. Residents experience expanded services that include free and open movement, recreational and educational participation, food services and medical and mental health care. TDHRC’s person-centered philosophy guides every interaction with the residents by understanding the often complex circumstances surrounding their detention. TDHRC continues to fulfill the mission of ICE while at the same time recognizing and valuing the dignity of the individual.”

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, over 100 mostly Bangladeshi prisoners Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama, Theo Lacey Facility in Orange County, California, and Otay Detention Facility in San Diego went on hunger strike. Behind them was another Bangladeshi women’s hunger strike.

In October 54 South Asian women started a hunger strike at ICE’s El Paso Processing Center. Five days later, 14 Indian and Bangladeshi women began a hunger strike at ICE’s La Salle Detention Facility in La Salle, Louisiana. La Salle and El Paso hold women and children.

At the time Francisca Morales Macis, a Mexican domestic abuse survivor, was being held at T. Don Hutto. She heard of the hunger strike, and started her own. Within days, over 100 women were on hunger strike. The women described horrendous conditions, including extraordinarily long waits for adjudication. The average wait in the Houston immigration court is 703 days. Francisca Morales Macis and Amalia Arteaga Leal, a Honduran refugee, were identified as the chief organizers of the hunger strike. Both were peremptorily transferred to the South Texas Detention Center, in Pearsall, Texas. South Texas Detention Center is an overwhelmingly male detention center. ICE says this was not retaliation because there was no hunger strike. How could there by a hunger strike in a person-centered institution?

According to Amalia Arteago Leal, “They brought us here from the T. Don Hutto detention center because there was a hunger strike there. Many people were protesting because we want our freedom. We have spent a lot of time appealing our cases, and we are not receiving answers, and when they call us, they always tell us that they are postponing us or giving us other dates, and the truth is, we’ve spent a lot of time in detention and we can’t tolerate this much time … I think that it’s unjust that they have detained us for so much time, because I think we have the right to bond. We came to seek refuge, and instead we found punishment. What I want people to understand is that they should support us, because it’s true that we have entered the United States for a second time, but I want to apply for bond. I’m on strike because I want my freedom. I can’t tolerate imprisonment anymore, because I am between four walls and I think this has a psychological impact. We come from our own country with our problems, and many times, we can’t get out of these problems — we’re trapped, imprisoned — and now, we’ve come to another form of imprisonment. For me, I think it’s an injustice.”

The women in T. Don Hutto know the truth. It’s a prison, where `person-centered’ treatment ranges from abuse to torture. Shut it down, today. Set the women free now. It’s way past time.

 

(Photo Credit: Grassroots Leadership / Twitter / Colorlines)

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