The fingerprints of antebellum slavery can be found all over the modern prison system, from who is incarcerated to the methods used behind bars to repress prisoners. Like its antecedent system, mass incarceration also fulfills the function of boosting corporate profits to the tune of $80 billion a year. Bianca Tylek, Executive Director of Worth Rises, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss her organization’s efforts to combat prison profiteering across the country, and expose the corporations plundering incarcerated people and their communities to line the pockets of their shareholders.

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

In the heart of downtown Baltimore lies the Maryland Reception, Diagnostic and Classification Center, commonly called Diagnostic, which is a place where people convicted of a crime go to be classified to a particular prison based on their security level.

December the 5th, 2019, I was released from Reception Diagnostic Classification Center after serving 48 years. I was given $50, no identification, and no way of knowing how to get home. I’m not from Baltimore, I’m from Washington, D.C, and I heard my family member called me. I realized then that I had a way home. This is the state that most people are released from the Maryland system, and prison in general. No source of income, no identification, and no place to stay. So I had a few items, so I had to go get my stuff from my apartment. So they let everybody else look… Everybody came out the back, but they let them go “pew, pew, pew.” So most of them dudes wasn’t long term, they was familiar with the layout, right? Me, I know… I’m familiar with Green Mountain Madison, right? Me and another dude stand down here on the corner. I’m like, “Man…”, because I ain’t know my people. I ain’t know my people here was going to be, I ain’t know if they had got… Because they wouldn’t let me make no collect calls. Right? So every time, and I had money.

Speaker 2:

You’ve been released, and they…

Mansa Musa:

I had money on the books. I’m serious. They wouldn’t even let you make the call. So I kept on dialing, and it would go to a certain point, then it cut off, but my sister say, “Look, come on. Something going on. Let’s go down there.” This is what this show is about. This show is about giving a voice to the voiceless.

As we venture into the segments and the stories that we’ll be telling, we want people to take away from these stories, the human side of these stories. More than anything else, this is not about politics. This is about humanity. We’re trying to address the concerns of people, their families, their friends, and their loved ones that’s affected by the prison industrial complex, be it labor, be it medical, be it the food, be it being released with all identification and just a minimal amount of money to get home, and you don’t even live in the city that they released you from. Rattling the Bars will be covering a multitude of subject matters and a multitude of issues, and we ask that you stay tuned and tune in.

Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Recently, I had an opportunity to talk to Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises. Worth Rises is an organization whose mission is to complete abolishment of the prison industrial complex as it now exists, they have a strategy where they identify major corporations that are investing in or exploiting labor out of the prison industrial complex. You’ll be astonished at how many corporations have their tentacles in the prison industrial complex and the amount of money they’re sucking out of it in astronomical numbers, but first, we’ll go to this interview I had with Lonnell Sligh, who was on one of our previous episodes to talk about the impact the prison industrial complex is having on the communities at large.

We’re in East Baltimore at Latrobe Projects talking about how, in the shadow of the Maryland Penitentiary and Diagnostic, the housing projects are affected by the existence of these prisons. Many women walk out of their houses in Latrobe into the Maryland prison system, and why? Because of the devastation of the social conditions that exist in this particular community.

Now, my interview with Lonnell Sligh.

When I first got out, I never thought I’d be out and not be in the van. These vans right here, this is all our modes of transportation, three-piece shackle, and that’s how we’re being transported.

Lonnell Sligh:

What we said about the gloom and doom, one of the first things that I noticed when I got to MRDC was the projects and the kids playing outside of their area. Looking out and seeing the kids, and they looking up at this place. So I’m making a connection of that pipeline, because this all they see.

Mansa Musa:

Then when… That’s what he’s seen. What I seen when I came here, this building wasn’t right here. This was a parking lot. This building wasn’t right here. This was a lot. So the kids had a clean shot to the Maryland Penitentiary. So every kid that lived in these projects right here, this is what they seen. They see barbed wire on the Maryland Penitentiary. Then they seen another big building come up, there’s another prison. Then they seen this is a prison, and outside their front door, what they see when they come out their house is barbed wire and a wall.

Lonnell Sligh:

So it might be ill concealed to us, but for them and their mindset, this was a perfect, “Oh man, we got our clients and our…”, what’d you call it when you check in the hotel? Our patrons, you know what I mean, right here, because they got their industry, they got their pipeline, they got everything that they designed this to be.

Mansa Musa:

As you can see from my conversation with Lonnell Sligh, the prison industrial complex has a devastating impact on everyone. The men and women that’s in prison, the communities that they come from, the infrastructure they build on, the entire system has devastating consequences that should be recognized and addressed.

Some communities that they’re building, it’s the major source of their industry, like in Attica and Rikers, Hagerstown, Maryland, Louisiana, but some communities that they’re building, they’re building it for one reason only. To occupy the psyche of the community. So people walk out of their houses every day, this is all they see, and ultimately they find themselves in these spaces, but now you are going to see who’s behind this, the corporations that’s responsible for this exploitation.

I have the list right here. The Prison Industrial Corporation Database put out by Worth Rises. Super Ammo, Visa Outdoors, Warburg Pincus, 3M, T-Mobile, Tyson Foods, SS Corporation, Advanced Technology Groups, major corporations that are using prison labor to exploit it, profit, and profit alone, with no regard to human life.

Now my conversation with Bianca Tylek.

Yeah, we’re talking to Bianca Tylek from Worth Rises. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Bianca, and how you got in this space.

Bianca Tylek:

Sure. Thank you so much again, Mansa, for having me, and so great to meet you, and I’m glad that you’re home. My name is Bianca Tylek, as you noted. I am based in the New York area, and I’m the executive director and founder of Worth Rises. We are a non-profit criminal justice advocacy organization that works nationally to end the exploitation of people who are incarcerated and their loved ones and dismantle the prison industry.

I came to this where I founded the organization, it’s seven and a half years ago now, and we’ve been doing a tremendous amount of work all over the country towards our mission, and I come to this work through a few different sort of paths. I think most recently, I’m an attorney. Before that, I was on Wall Street, and so I actually worked in the investment banking and corporate sector, and then I think previously, what really makes me passionate about this issue is that I was myself an adjudicated youth and had others in my life who had experienced incarceration and were touched by this system, and all of those sorts of experiences collectively have brought me to this point.

Mansa Musa:

Worth Rises is dedicated to dismantling the prison industrial complex, it’s an abolition group, and as I listened to some of the things that you talked about, I thought about the war in Vietnam when the North first became known for their ferocious fighting where they had what they call a Tet offense, and the Tet offense was like when they had their initial salvo of repelling or resisting the United States and South Vietnam, and I thought when I heard some of the ways you was attacking this industry, that came to mind how systematic your group is in terms of dismantling, as you say, dismantling this group.

Bianca Tylek:

Yeah, I appreciate that so much. So I would say we have a three part strategy that we deploy at the organization, and it is narrative policy and corporate, and so each one of those tentacles is sort of a part of how we approach the industry, and specifically not so much guilting it as much as demanding and forcing it and pressuring it into better getting out or not exploiting our people in the same way, and so just to expand a little bit on each, our narrative work is really designed to help educate the populace, the American people and beyond on the harms that the prison industry is committing.

I think in particular, we know that the prison industry is an $80 billion industry, more than that these days, and a lot of people just simply do not know and are not familiar with it. Folks who have done time, like yourself, are familiar with, for example, the cost of phone calls in prison, but a lot of people walking the streets are not. They don’t know that phone calls are so expensive, they don’t know the cost of commissary, they don’t know that people pay medical co-pays, they don’t know that people are making pennies, if anything, an hour for work, and I think often, when we talk about these things, people are pretty surprised, because all of the modern media has people convinced that you go to prison, you get everything you need, and it’s some kind of luxurious, pushy place to be.

So a lot of our role is to simply… Through our narrative work, what we’re trying to do is get people to understand the reality of prisons and jails, both what the experiences are of people there, the exploitation that happens, and then importantly, at the hands of who, and that’s the industry, and so we do everything from published research to storytelling and beyond to help people really understand what the prison industry is.

So that’s sort of the narrative work, and that really builds the foundation, because we need informed people in order to be able to cultivate their outrage into action, and that leads us to our policy work. Our policy work is really designed to undermine the business model of the industry, and so we work to change legislation and regulations that would sort of hinder the ability of these companies to continue to exploit people in the exact same ways, and so for example, what that means is when it comes to prison telecom, where we know that one in three families with an incarcerated loved one is going into debt over the simple cost of calls and visits, and the large majority of those folks are women who are paying for these calls.

So what we have done in the last about five or so years is we have started a sort of movement to make communication free in prisons and jails. We passed the first piece of legislation in New York City in 2018 to do so, and since then, we’ve been able to pass legislation at the county, state and federal level to make communication entirely free, and today, over 300,000 people who are incarcerated have access to free phone calls, and so that changes the business model and revolutionizes the space entirely.

We also managed to pass game-changing regulations at the FCC to curb the exorbitant charging of phone calls in those places that still do charge for calls, and then finally, in our corporate side of the work, we sort of harness the work we do on the narrative side and the policy side to bring these corporations that are exploiting our communities to account, and really, in some cases, shut them down.

So we have companies that we’ve gone… We’ve had investors divest, we have removed their executives from the boards of cultural institutions like museums. We have blocked mergers and acquisitions. I mean, we’ve done all types of corporate strategies when it comes to those who are exploiting folks who are incarcerated and their loved ones, and we’re bringing some of them to their knees fully to bankruptcy, and so that is the kind of work that we do and really stress that it’s time that this system stopped responding to the profit motives of a few.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, let’s throw in this examination because in California, they was trying to get a proclamation passed about the 13th Amendment, because the genesis of all this has come out of the legalization of slavery under the 13th Amendment. I think that a lot of what we see in concerns of us versus the interest of them comes out of the fact that they can, under… Anyone duly convicted of a crime can be utilized for slave labor, and in California, they voted against this proclamation. How do you see… Is this a correlation between the 13th Amendment prison industrial complex, and if it is and you recognize that, how do y’all look at that? Because this industry is always fluid, it’s continuing to grow, it’s got multiple tentacles, and it’s all designed around profit. So when it comes to profit and capitalism, profit is profit is profit. That’s their philosophy. So however they get it, whoever they get it from, but in this case, they got a cash cow. Talk about that.

Bianca Tylek:

So we actually run a national campaign called End the Exception campaign that is specifically about the 13th Amendment. So we’re very close to this particular part of the fight. So if you visit EndTheException.com, you’ll see that entire campaign, which is, like I said, a campaign to pass a new constitutional amendment that would end the exception in the 13th Amendment.

While we run the national campaign at the federal level, which has over 90 national partners, a lot of states are taking on similar causes, including the state of California, and so California was one of several states in the last five or six years that brought a state constitutional amendment through a ballot initiative. Eight others have won in the last five years. So I do think despite the fact, and I have thoughts about California, despite the fact that California lost, other states like Alabama, Tennessee, Oregon, Vermont have all passed, and so I remained hopeful that it’s something that we can do both at the state level, but also at the federal level.

I think unfortunately, California lost, I think for various reasons, both the moment in time in California. There was also Proposition 36, which was expanding sort of tough on crime policies, and I think Prop 6 got a little bit mixed up into that. The language of Prop 6 was really not particularly helpful, and I think some of the local efforts also needed to coalesce and have those things happen, maybe, and hopefully it would’ve passed. It lost by a relatively small margin, albeit it did lose.

So I think your question, though, about how do these things relate, I mean, I guess what I’d say which degree with you, which is that I think that exploitation in prisons and jails is absolutely rooted in antebellum slavery, right? I think that what the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment in large part did was certainly, obviously, free a lot of people, but it also transitioned slavery behind walls, where you can’t see it, and then our carceral system, because in the years that followed during reconstruction, the prison population went from being 99% white to being 99% black. Many of the practices of antebellum slavery were shifted into the carceral setting and became normalized in that setting and continue today.

I tell people all the time, when you think of solitary confinement, which, as you know, is often referred to as the hole or the box, those are terms that come from antebellum slavery. When enslaved people disobeyed, their enslavers, they would be put in what was called the hot box or a literal hole.

Mansa Musa:

A hole, exactly.

Bianca Tylek:

And held there in darkness, in solitary without food, separation affairs, things like that, and those are essentially punishments that we’ve just modernized, but don’t actually change the true function of them. They’re meant to break down people into obedience, and the same terminology is used and the same practices are used.

Consider another example. When people who are enslaved again would disobey their enslavers, they would often be separated from their families. Their children would be sold off or their spouse would be sent away. Well, similarly, when people who are incarcerated exhibit what the system would call disobedience, they can be denied visits and phone calls with their families, contact, right? All of these sort of penal sanctions that exist today were the same ones that existed then, just in a newer 2025 version, and so I’d say I think much of… And that’s not to obviously mention the most obvious aspect, which people in prison are forced to work and they’re forced to work often for essentially nothing, and then are expected to be grateful for crumbs when given 15 cents or 30 cents on the hour or something like that, and so I think it would be foolish for anyone to suggest that the system isn’t once that was adapted from antebellum slavery.

Mansa Musa:

As you can see from our conversation with Bianca Tylek, the extent to which the prison industrial complex and corporate America merge is beyond imagination.

She was once involved with the criminal justice system. This in and of itself helped her to focus on what she wanted to do. She worked on Wall Street, and while on Wall Street, she started seeing the impact that corporate America was having on the prison industrial complex, the profit margin. From this, she developed this strategy and this organization on how to attack it. As you can see, she’s very effective, as is her organization, in dismantling the prison industrial complex.

Recently, I had the pleasure and opportunity to speak to some young people at the University of Maryland College Park. The group is the Young Democrat Socialists of America. You’ll see from these clips how engaging these conversations were, and when they say we look to our future, remember, our movement started on the college campuses. The intelligent element of society started organizing. As they started organizing, they got the grassroots communities involved, and this is what we’re beginning to see once again.

Student:

So today we have a speaker event with Mansa Musa, AKA Charles Hopkins. He is a former Black Panther, political prisoner. He’s done a lot of activism after re-entering society. He spent nearly five decades in prison, and that kind of radicalized him in his experience, and you can learn a lot more about him today during this meeting.

Mansa Musa:

We’re about completely abolishing the prison system. What would that look like? We was having this conversation. What did that look like? You’re going to open the doors up and let everybody out? I’ve been in prison for their year. It’s some people that I’ve been around in prison. If I see him on the street today or tomorrow, I might go call the police on it, because I know that’s how their thinking is, but at the same token, in a civil society, we have an obligation to help people, and that’s what we should be doing.

People have been traumatized, and trauma becoming vulgar, everybody like, “Oh, trauma experience.” So trauma becoming vulgar, people have been traumatized and have not been treated for their trauma. So they dial down on it, and that become the norm. So we need to be in a society where we’re healing people, and that’s what I would say when it comes to the abolition. Yeah, we should abolish prisons as they exist now. They’re cruel, they’re.

You got the guards in Rikers Island talking about protesting and walk out, wild cat strike, because they saying that the elimination of solitary confinement is a threat to them. How is it a threat to you that you put me in a cell for three years on end, bringing my meal to me, and say that if you eliminate this right here, me as a worker is going to be threatened by that not existing? How is that? That don’t even make sense, but this is the attitude that you have when it comes to the prison industrial complex.

The prison industrial complex is very profitable. The prison industrial complex, it became like an industry in and of itself. Every aspect of it has been privatized. The telephone’s been privatized, the medical has been privatized, the clothing’s been privatized. So you got a private entity saying, “I’m going to make all the clothes for prisons.” You got another private entity saying, “I want the telephone contract for all the prisons.” You got another company saying, “I want to be responsible for making the bids, the metal,” and all that. Which leads me to Maryland Correction Enterprise.

Maryland Correction Enterprise is one of the entities that does this. There’s a private corporation that has preferential bidding rights on anything that’s being done in Maryland. I’m not going to say these chairs, but I’m going to say any of them tags is on your car, that’s Maryland, it’s Maryland Enterprise. I press tags. So I know that to be a fact. A lot of the desks in your classroom come from Maryland Correction Enterprise. So what they giving us? They gave us 90 cents a day, and you get a bonus. Now, you get the bonus based on how much you produce. So everybody… Now you trying to get, “Okay, I’m trying to get $90 a month. I just started.” So somebody’s been there for a while, might be getting $2 a day and some. We pressing tags till your elbows is on fire, because you’re trying to make as much money as you possibly can, you’re trying to produce as many tags as you possibly can to make money, but they’re getting millions of dollars from the labor.

Student:

In your previous podcast episode, you interviewed the state senator, and he mentioned the 13th amendment and the connection between prison labor and slavery. So what do you think are some of the connections between the prison abolition movement and the historical movement for the abolition of slavery?

Mansa Musa:

Right now, the 13th Amendment says that slavery is illegal except for involuntary servitude if you’re duly convicted of a crime. So if you’re duly convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave, and the difference between that and the abolition movement back in the historical was the justification. The justification for it now is you’ve been convicted of a crime. Back then, I just kidnapped and brought you here and made you work. So the disconnect was, this is a human, you’re taking people and turn them into chattel slaves, versus, “Oh, the reason why I can work you from sunup to sundown, you committed a crime,” but the reality is you put that in there so that you could have free labor. All that is is a Jim Crow law, black code. It’s the same. It’s the same in and of itself. It’s not no different.

You work me in a system… In some states, they don’t even pay you at all. South Carolina, they don’t even pay you, but they work you, and Louisiana, they still walk… They got police, they got the guards on horses with shotguns, and they out there in the fields.

In some places, in North Carolina and Alabama, they work you in some of the most inhumane conditions, like freezers. Women and men. Put you to work in a meat plant in the freezer and don’t give you the proper gear to be warm enough to do the work, and then if you complain, because they use coercion, say, “Okay, you don’t want to work? We’re going to take the job from you, transfer you to a prison, where now you’re going to have to fight your way out.” You are going to literally have to go in there and get a knife and defend yourself. So this is your choice. Go ahead and work in these inhumane conditions, or say no and go somewhere and be sent back to a maximum security prison where you have to fight your way out.

So now it’s no different. Only difference is it’s been legislated, it’s been legalized under the 13th Amendment, and in response to abolition, so we’ve been trying to change the 13th amendment. We had an attempt in California where they put a bill out to try to get it reversed, and the state went against it. The state was opposed to it. Why would I want to stop having free labor? The firefighters in California, they do the same work that the firefighters right beside them… They do the same work, the same identical work. They’re fighting fire, their lives in danger, they getting 90 cents a day, maybe $90 a month. They don’t have no 401k, they don’t have no retirement plan, and they’re being treated like everybody else. “Oh, go out there and fight the fire.”

So yeah, in terms of abolition, the abolition movement is to try to change the narrative and get the 13th Amendment taken off out of the state constitution, because a lot of states, they adopted it. They adopted it in their own state constitution, a version of the 13th Amendment, that says that except if you’ve been duly convicted for a crime, you can be treated as a slave. If you’ve been convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. That’s basically the bottom line of it. That’s our reality.

So as we move forward, my message to y’all is don’t settle for mediocrity. Don’t settle for nothing less. Whatever you thinking that you think should be done, do it. If you think that, but more importantly, in doing it, make sure it’s having an impact.

There you have it. Rattling the Bars. As you can see from these conversations, the seriousness that corporations have on the prison industrial complex, how they’re exploiting prison labor with impunity. We’ve seen this from the conversation we had with Bianca Tylek, who talked about her involvement with the criminal justice system, but more importantly, how she worked on Wall Street, how she developed this strategy of dismantling the prison industrial complex by going straight to the heart of the matter, corporate America. Her strategy, the organization’s strategy is to dismantle it one corporation at a time.

We’ve also seen it from our conversation with Lonnell Sligh, as we talked about the impact that these corporations have on the community, how most communities live in the shadow of major prisons, like in East Baltimore, the troll projects, where kids come out every day and see these buildings and ask their parents, “What is that?”, and their parents say, “Oh, that’s where you going to go if you keep doing what you’re doing,” or, “That’s where your uncle’s at,” or, “You don’t want to go there.” At any rate, it has no positive value to their psyche, but more importantly, we’ve seen how the youth are taking the stand to change and find this place in the struggle.

The exception clause and exception movement to abolish the 13th Amendment is constant, and on the rise. We have suffered some major setbacks, we’re trying to get legislation passed, but the fact that we have a consensus on, “This has to go,” because this is the reason why we find ourselves in this situation, where corporations have unlimited access to free prison labor with impunity. We ask that you give us your feedback on these episodes. More importantly, we ask that you tell us what you think. Do you think the exception clause should be passed? Do you think they should abolish the 13th Amendment, or do you think that corporations should be able to profit off of free prison labor? Do you think that communities should not be overshadowed by prisons? That our children should have the right to be in an environment that’s holistic? Or do you think that our youth that’s taking a stand against corporate America, fascism and imperialism should be given coverage? That institutions of higher learning should be held accountable for who they invest in? Tell us what you think. We look forward to hearing from you.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

“Any active military personnel who express loyalty to the enemy through words, actions, texts, pictures, electromagnetic records, scientific and technological methods, etc., which is sufficient to cause military disadvantages, will be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than 1 year and not more than 7 years,” the ministry said.

In recent years, the Taiwanese military, in cooperation with national security units, has cracked many espionage cases, it said in a statement.

“The Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence gathering and espionage activities are becoming increasingly rampant,” it said.

The Chinese side “uses money, investment, gambling and other methods to lure and recruit active-duty military personnel to sign written documents, shoot videos and other methods to swear allegiance to the enemy, which has seriously damaged national security,” the ministry said.

A small number of officers and soldiers had “committed treason and crimes” and should be strictly punished, it said.

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The ministry was working on a draft amendment to Article 24 of the Criminal Law of the Army, Navy and Air Force that would help “strengthen countermeasures against the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration and sabotage activities against the national military.”

The amendment will be submitted to the island’s government for review after completing the notice and legal procedures.

The National Security Bureau said in a recent report that the number of Taiwanese citizens charged with attempted espionage for China rose “significantly” to 64 last year from 10 in 2022 and 48 in 2022.

Seven retired military officials were prosecuted last year for activities such as giving China the coordinates and details of military bases and the de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

Inmate fire crew from South Fork Forest Camp. Photograph Source: Oregon Department of Forestry – CC BY 2.0

Why does American society remain so deeply implicated in the enslavement of Black Americans? Slavery was never abolished in the United States, and today it enjoys widespread support among both Republicans and Democrats. Almost 800,000 people are subject to the conditions of prison slavery, but this estimate is almost certainly low, as the lack of reliable data means that it “excludes people confined in local jails or detention centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and immigration detention facilities.” This system, supported and perpetuated by both halves of the ruling class, is an extension of the country’s history of racism and chattel slavery, a way to reinstitute slavery within a legal framework that loudly insists it has been abolished.

The new slavery is a shameful mark on our country’s pretenses to respect for human rights and the dignity of every human being, the latest chapter in a story of race-based hierarchy and domination. When slavery was formally abolished, a major loophole was left in place, one that would help race-based slavery survive to the present day. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, inscribes the Emancipation Proclamation’s abolition of slavery into the country’s supreme source of law, but it does not contemplate a total end to slavery within the nation’s borders. Rather the amendment carves out a fateful exception to the prohibition of slavery:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction [emphasis added].

Slavery is perfectly legal and permissible as long as the enslaved are deemed criminals, which allows prisons to completely dispense with any protections for prison workers. It goes without saying that this exception to the general rule against slavery creates a major incentive to criminalize the mere existence of Black Americans, to use the criminal justice system to create a permanent pool of free labor. If prison slavery is not, on its own, the primary cause of the mass incarceration crisis besieging Black bodies, then billions of dollars’ worth of free labor every year nonetheless remains a powerful force in the service of a racist, two-tier system of “justice.” And indeed this incentive problem has done its work within the American social system, propelling and insulating a system of mass incarceration that recalls and recreates the race-based slavery that so deeply defines the country’s history.

All available evidence shows that the longer one spends in prison, the more likely they are to end up back in the system after they’re back in society. But here is “the great irony of our American criminal justice system.” Today, we imprison huge numbers of people and the prison sentences have grown longer—“thus our system of mass incarceration all but assures high rates of recidivism.” The scale of mass incarceration in the United States is “unparalleled historically” and the shame of the country on the global stage as an egregious violation of accepted human rights. Today, some 2 million people are held in America’s prisons and jails (the majority, about 1.2 million of them, in the prisons), and they live in some of the harshest conditions of abuse and neglect. The data on the country’s sadistic penchant for mass incarceration are startling: in 1972, the rate of imprisonment was about 93 people per 100,000, but by 2009, it was seven times that number, and in the decade between 1985 and 1995, the prison population grew by an average of 8 percentage points every year. Black Americans are highly over-represented in the contemporary prison system; last spring, the Prison Policy Initiative found that “the national incarceration rate of Black people is six times the rate of white people” (emphasis in original). As we shall see, once they are locked up, Black people are far more likely to be subjected to inhumane treatment and even to conditions regarded as torture under international human rights law.

The criminalization of Black existence is a time-honored tradition in the United States. After the formal abolition of slavery, the policing, court, and prison systems have become the primary means through which Black Americans are deprived of their freedom and relegated to second-class political and economic status. Voting in California this past fall saw voters reject Proposition 6, which would have eliminated a provision in the state’s constitution that permits involuntary servitude as punishment of incarcerated people. It would also have prevented the state from continuing to discipline those in prisons who refuse to work. It seems that America’s voters, even in blue states, remain enthusiastic about slavery.

Those enslaved in America’s prisons “are paid very little (between 13 and 52 cents an hour on average)—if at all—and are excluded from the basic rights and protections afforded to most workers.” Many U.S. states offer no compensation at all for work undertaken while in prison. These are the people who do some of the most dangerous and unpleasant work there is, from fighting massive forest fires and processing poultry to disposing of biohazardous waste, often without appropriate safety equipment, having been stripped of even the most minimal legal protections.

Totally captive and vulnerable, American prisoners are subject to a form of super-exploitation—they can be forced to do anything for any or no pay. They have no right to refuse work. But every year they produce more than $11 billion in economic value through the goods they help to manufacture and the services they provide. Those who do refuse to work under these slavery conditions are subject to severe punishment, often torture, as in the case of solidary confinement. The United Nations has said that indefinite or prolonged solitary confinement of longer than 15 days is a form of torture and thus a violation of international law. More than 3 of every 4 prisoners report that refusals to work are met with additional punishments such as “solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap.”

In 2022, the ACLU and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic released a report detailing the findings of one of the most comprehensive studies of the U.S. prison system to date. Their study gives us one of the clearest pictures we have of the massive human rights crisis ongoing in the country’s prisons, combining a thoroughgoing review of government data with surveys and interviews of over 100 prison workers (in California, Illinois, and Louisiana) and “65 interviews with key stakeholders including experts, formerly incarcerated individuals, representatives of advocacy organizations, academics, and leaders of reentry organizations across the country.” The investigation spanned a period from 2018 to 2022 and involved Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in all 50 states. The study reveals that more than 4 out of 5 enslaved prison laborers work on “general prison maintenance, which subsidizes the cost of our bloated prison system,” meaning that the captive are forced to prop up their own enslavement.

Today, many states require all of their government bodies to purchase things like “furniture, cleaning supplies, printed materials, and uniforms” from the prison system. The ways in which the political class speaks of those enslaved in America’s prisons follows in an unbroken current of racist rhetorical strategies popular throughout the country’s history. The forced labor to which they are subjected is for their own good, instructing and edifying them, providing them a point of access to the superior white, Western mind and its culture. Though it is frequently advanced with the language of dignity and rehabilitation, this rationale is fatally undermined by the best evidence we have from inside the country’s prisons. Prison laborers report that the contemporary slavery to which they are subjected serves in fact to “degrade, dehumanize and further cripple incarcerated workers,” according to Global Human Rights Clinic Fellow and lecturer Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat.

Degradation and dehumanization are fundamental features of this system. In February 2024, both the DOJ Office of the Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office released comprehensive reports on the connected crises of widespread preventable death and continued, pervasive overreliance on solitary confinement. The Inspector General’s report looked at four types of preventable deaths: suicide, homicide, accident, and unknown factors. Over an 8-year period covered by the report, 344 people fell into one of these categories. The report shares its finding that “a combination of recurring policy violations and operational failures contributed to inmate suicides, which accounted for just over half of the 344 inmate deaths we reviewed.” Many of the policy violations and operational failures involved the subject of the GAO report, which was the follow-up on an earlier study that resulted in a number of recommendations. Last year’s report confirmed that the Bureau of Prisons had failed to deliver on “54 of the 87 recommendations from two prior studies on improving restrictive housing practices.” The GAO report also observed the startling racial disparities in the use of restrictive housing. Though they were 38 percent of the total Bureau of Prisons population, Black prisoners were 59 percent of the restrictive housing placements; whites were 58 percent of the total population and 35 percent of these placements. The connection between solitary confinement and the most severe mental health issues is clear in the available data, as more than half of the inmates who committed suicide were in solitary confinement at the time. It is hardly a coincidence that the brutality of this system is today at its worst for Black people in the South. A January 2025 report from the Economic Policy Institute points out that in the South “incarceration rates are the highest, prison wages are lowest, and forced labor arrangements bear the most striking resemblances to past forms of convict leasing and debt peonage.” The report shows that states in the American South “incarcerate people at the highest rates in the world.” If we treated U.S. states as countries for the purposes of the global ranking, 30 of them (plus the U.S. as a country) would find a place at the top of the global incarceration rate list. Only El Salvador tops several Southern states, and only El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan “rank higher or alongside these 30 states” in the world.

Proper maintenance of the prison labor pool has become a major public policy priority, and it is often the rationale for avoiding measurable improvements to prison conditions. As a 2023 note in the Harvard Law Review pointed out, then-Attorney General of California Kamala Harris “met heavy criticism” for advancing this kind of reasoning as a way to fight in court against the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Plata. Against all of the available evidence, California argued that overcrowding was not in fact the source of the constitutional violation. As Justice Kennedy pointed out at oral argument, “Overcrowding is of course always the cause.” While prisoners were sitting in their own feces and dying in record numbers, Harris and her office were insistent that extreme levels of overcrowding in the country’s largest (by population and economy) and richest state should not be directly addressed. California prisoners were commiting suicide at a rate twice that of the national average.

The factual record in the case also clearly demonstrated that alternatives to prison were both more effective at reducing recidivism and less expensive. Harris and her office “filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population.” For Kamala Harris, as for the rest of the political class, upholding the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment was less important than maintaining a proper stock of slaves to fight fires and perform other brutal and dangerous jobs. The example of California here underscores just how easy it has been for the “progressive” quarters of the U.S. political establishment to forsake the clearest and most egregious constitutional and human rights violations with no real criticism from their supporters. Understanding these contemporary political realities requires that we confront American history.

Very few among white society in the South accepted either their defeat in the war or the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment as the final word on whether Black people were their rightful slaves. Without some system of labor super-exploitation, the entire social order and way of life would be upended. And although this was of course the real demand of abolition, that would not stand. Capital, dependent on free labor, had to find a way to replace the productive capacity of the freed slaves. A tidal wave of new legal and social strictures came in the wake of the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment, calculated to reinstate the second-class status of the Black population and concomitantly the exploitative economic system associated with it. New Black Codes imposed a comprehensive and draconian system of control and punishment for the crime of being Black on Southern soil. A form of racial capitalism continued from the slave economy.

Vagrancy laws were used to drive Southern Blacks both into low or unpaid work or else into the prisons, where slavery remained and remains perfectly legal. A complex new system of convict leasing arose in the place of traditional chattel slavery during reconstruction, with discipline and authority enforce brutally through “gang rapes, beatings and harassment of weaker cons,” through ranks of sub-bosses and “trusty shooters” who could be relied upon to eliminate noncompliant prisoners. W.E.B. Du Bois summarizes this state of affairs in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction: “The whole criminal system came to be used as a method of keeping Negroes at work and intimidating them. Consequently, there began to be a demand for jails and penitentiaries beyond the natural demand due to the rise of crime.” As Du Bois points out, prior to formal emancipation, Southern prisons held comparatively few people, the overwhelming majority of whom were white.

As the celebrated historian Gerald Horne put it, “They linked race and class. It’s not as if our ancestors were brought to these shores because people didn’t like us, because people despised us. They were brought to these shores for profit, to be an unpaid working class.” Contemporary elite discourse in the United States has largely attempted to understand slavery without reference to its class component, as an expression of racial hatred in an economic vacuum. Hubert Harrison wrote similarly that Black Americans “form a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group,” “brought here with the very definite understanding that they were to be ruthlessly exploited.”

It is impossible to understand lynching as an accepted cultural spectacle without confronting the question of economic class as the defining aspect of American racism. As even the lowest of the low in white society could partake in the sadistic killing of Black people, this dark ritual buttressed the rigid hierarchical structure of society at the time. Lynchings were the crystallized, concentrated expression of the brutal violence at the heart of the social order, which constructed whiteness in terms of the ability to dispose of Black bodies arbitrarily and at will. This expression of whiteness preempted the possibility of poor whites discovering their class solidarity with enslaved Blacks.

The perpetuation of slavery on American soil gives the lie to the ridiculous, ahistorical idea that the American economic system is something even somewhat like a “free market,” based on robust protection of individual liberty and rights. The capitalist system requires that there be masses of people who can be absorbed into a system of violent, programmatized deprivation. American capitalism continues to be predicated on domination and exploitation, the most severe forms of which still include forms of race-based slavery that, like their antecedents, are treated as legal and legitimate within our class hierarchy.

The post America’s Human Rights Crisis: Prison Slavery appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David S. D’Amato.

“Amid an unprecedented crackdown that has seen dozens of journalists incarcerated, Azerbaijan authorities’ singling out of Aziz Orujov from among thousands of Azerbaijanis living on unregistered land for jailing on dubious illegal construction charges is breathtakingly cynical,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “Authorities should immediately release Orujov and stop jailing journalists in retaliation for their work.”

The Sabail District Court in the capital, Baku, convicted Orujov of building a house for himself without authorization on a plot of land that he had purchased on the city outskirts.

The journalist’s lawyer, Bahruz Bayramov, told CPJ that although the land was not officially registered to Orujov, that’s also the case for around half a million homes in and around Baku, and that authorities had not jailed anyone besides Orujov for the offense. The fact that Orujov’s prosecution has taken place against the backdrop of authorities’ repeated announcement of plans to legalize such buildings shows that it was retaliation for his reporting, Bayramov said.

Kanal 13’s Azerbaijani YouTube channel, which has nearly 500,000 subscribers, regularly covers sensitive topics such as human rights violations and gives space to opposition views. In 2017, Orujov was jailed for a year in reprisal for the outlet’s work.

Azerbaijani police arrested Orujov on the illegal construction charges in November 2023. The next month, they added currency smuggling charges for alleged receipt of Western donor funds, arrested Kanal 13 reporter Shamo Eminov, and ordered Kanal 13 blocked. In December 2024, authorities suspended the currency smuggling case against both and released Eminov.

CPJ’s annual prison census found that Azerbaijan was among the world’s top 10 jailers of journalists in 2024. At least 24 journalists are currently jailed in retaliation for their work, most of them detained since late 2023 over Western funding allegations, amid a decline in relations between Azerbaijan and the West.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Thailand deported the 40 Uyghurs to China on Thursday, ignoring warnings from the U.S., the U.N. and human rights groups that they risked torture when they were returned to the northeastern region of Xinjiang, which they fled more than 10 years ago.

“When they learned that their 40 friends had been sent to China, they were heartbroken,” a 37-year-old friend of the detained Uyghurs, who asked to be identified as just Marzeryya, told Radio Free Asia affiliate BenarNews.

“They cried, something they had never done before, because they are so worried about their friends,” she said.

There are five Uyghurs in Bangkok’s Klong Prem prison where they were sent after trying to escape. Marzeryya said she met four of them on Friday.

It was not clear why the five were not also sent back to China on Thursday.

Thailand has defended its deportation of the 40, saying it had received an “official request” from China and sent them back after assurances from the “highest level” of the Chinese government on their safety.

Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, in her first public comment on the deportations that threatens to create a rift with old ally the U.S., rejected any suggestion Thailand had sent the men back in exchange for some commercial reward from China, adding they had volunteered to go.

“This is about people, not goods. People are not merchandise. We definitely did not trade them,” she told reporters.

“I confirm that they returned voluntarily. Otherwise, there would have been dragging. There was no dragging, they walked up normally,” she said, referring to their transfer from Bangkok’s main immigration detention center to a flight back to China.

Mostly Muslim Uyghurs in China’s vast Xinjiang region have been subjected to widespread human rights abuses, including detention in massive concentration camps.

China denies that but U.N. experts said on Jan. 21 the Uyghurs in Thailand would likely face torture if forced back to China and they urged Thailand not to deport them.

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Trucked at night to airport

The 40 were taken in the dead of night in trucks with windows blocked with sheets of black plastic, escorted by police cars and under a media blackout, to Bangkok’s Don Mueang airport for the flight home.

Marzeryya rejected the suggestion that they had gone back voluntarily.

“Why would they want to return to China when they fled from there because they had no freedom and couldn’t practice their religion? That’s why they’d never want to go back,” she said.

Marzeryya said none of the five in prison wanted to go to China.

“They don’t want to return. They begged us to pray that they would be relocated to a third country,” she said.

Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, also visited four of the imprisoned Uyghurs on Friday.

“They confirmed that they don’t want to go to China, they want to go to a third country,” Chalida told BenarNews.

“They said they had already escaped from China, so why would they want to go back? This contradicts what the Thai government has said.”

Another three ethnic Uyghurs are still being held at the Bangkok immigration detention center. They have Kyrgyzstan passports and so were not sent to China, Chalida said.

The 48 Uyghurs were part of a cohort of more than 350 Uyghur men, women and children, who left China in the hope of finding resettlement abroad and were stopped and detained in Thailand in 2014.

Turkey accepted 172 of them while Thailand sent 109 of them back to China in 2015, triggering a storm of international criticism . Several of them have died of illness over the years.

Edited by RFA Staff.

Pimuk Rakkanam and Jon Preechawong in Bangkok contributed to this report.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kunnawut Boonreak and Nontarat Phaicharoen for BenarNews

.

Another 3 million Uyghurs were subjected to forced labor in 2023, according to the 30-page report by the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Using Chinese state documents, satellite imagery, survivor testimony and findings from recent academic publications, researchers concluded that between 2022 and 2024, China continued all its main repressive policies, including those that led the United States to conclude that China was imposing a genocide on the Uyghur people.

“In some cases, such as mass detention, the institutional forms of the policy have changed without substantially changing their effects, while in others, such as forced labor and the transfer of Turkic minority children to Han care in residential schools, the repressive actions have expanded,” the report says.

The report outlines nine key findings, including an estimate that the current number of Turkic minority individuals in prisons or extrajudicial internment likely exceeds half a million, though it could be higher.

New type of internment

Additionally, as China closed its so-called vocational training centers, it increased the use of another type of internment facility known as kanshousuo — nominally jails for temporary, pretrial detention and interrogation.

(Pedro Pardo/AFP)

Many of those who had been interned in the camps have been moved into forced labor or into the formal prison system, said Rian Thum, the report’s author.

“The other element of significance is that the Chinese state has continued to produce evidence and share online evidence for what they’re doing,” Thum told RFA. “So, we have now very recent evidence that these activities are ongoing.”

The report’s other findings are:

• The annual rate of new formal imprisonments has surpassed levels seen before the initiation of the Strike Hard campaign in 2014, which is still ongoing. However, despite somewhat unreliable government data, it appears these rates have significantly decreased, nearing those of other provinces.
• The number of assimilationist boarding schools for Uyghur and other Turkic children continues to grow, with the aim of enrolling 100% of the middle-school population. New facilities are either under construction or in the bidding process.
• Population growth in the region has continued to decline, dropping to nearly zero growth in 2021 and 2022, according to recent government statistics, amid strict birth control policies targeting minority groups.
• Forced labor programs for Turkic minorities have expanded further, with close to 3 million individuals placed in forced labor assignments in 2023.
• The government is rapidly increasing the number of state-run nursing homes, aiming to triple the number of facilities available to care for elderly people separated from their families on account of the forced labor program.
• State-led land appropriation has risen as part of efforts to push farmers into industrial labor camps.
• Visible surveillance and police checkpoints have decreased.

Some electronic surveillance technologies, such as widespread cameras, AI-driven data processing, GPS tracking, gait and voice recognition, mobile phone scanning, facial recognition checkpoints, and DNA collection, may have become obsolete or replaced by newer methods in recent years, the report says.

(Pedro Pardo/AFP)

“That does not include surveillance that people cannot immediately see or experience, for example, some kinds of digital surveillance,” Ryan Thum, the report’s author, told RFA. “But in terms of controls on everyday movement checkpoints, these kinds of highly visible, highly disruptive surveillance seem to have seemed to have decreased.”

Accusations of whitewashing

Human rights organizations and Uyghur advocacy groups have criticized China for attempting to whitewash the ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang by organizing scripted tours for diplomats and select individuals, showcasing Uyghurs living seemingly happy lives.

“We know from history that perpetrators will go to great lengths to try to hide the evidence of their crimes,” said Naomi Kikoler, director of the Simon-Skjodt Center.

“We also know that they will evolve their techniques to enable them to continue to perpetrate mass atrocities without the international attention,” she said. “This is what the Chinese government has, and continues to do.”

An August 2022 report by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights determined that China’s policies in Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity.

The report came after a decision by a nonbinding Uyghur Tribunal in December 2021 that China had committed genocide against the Uyghurs via birth control and forced sterilization measures, as well as found evidence of crimes against humanity, torture and sexual abuse of Uyghurs in re-education camps.

Additionally, several Western governments and parliaments, including the United States, declared that the atrocities amounted to crimes against humanity or genocide.

(GOH CHAI HIN/AFP)

China has denied the abuses and said it closed down the internment facilities, which it called vocational education and training centers where Uyghurs and others learned skills.

“In their totality, the policies described in this report threaten to erase Turkic minority cultures and lifeways, interrupt cultural transmission across generations, dispossess indigenous populations, reduce the proportion of minority populations in the region, break apart families, and subordinate survivors to Han Chinese colonial goals,” the report concludes.

“Evidence from the last two years suggests that the state’s progress toward these ends continues, at the cost of immense suffering for millions of members of the targeted groups.”

To address the repressive measures, the U.S. Congress must maintain its broad bipartisan backing for Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Kikoler told Radio Free Asia.

“Policymakers can’t take their eye off of the grave threats facing the Uyghur and other Turkic communities,” she said. “Congress needs to sustain its strong bipartisan support for the Uyghurs.”

“China’s efforts to deceive can’t be allowed to succeed,” she said. “The existence of the Uyghur community is at risk.”

Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Uyghar and Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur.

San, a well-known political commentator and author also known by his pen names Huy Duc and Osin, was convicted under Article 331 of the penal code for 13 articles posted to his personal Facebook page between 2015 and 2024 and for independently collecting information, according to news reports.

“Journalist Truong Huy San was convicted and sentenced for gathering and publishing independent news, which Vietnam treats as a criminal offense,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “San and all independent journalists wrongfully held behind bars in Vietnam should be freed immediately and unconditionally.”  

CPJ was unable to immediately determine whether San intends to appeal his conviction. San has been in detention since his arrest in the capital Hanoi on June 1, 2024.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security, which manages the nation’s prisons and authorizes police to make political arrests, did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

Vietnam tied with Iran and Eritrea as the seventh worst jailer of journalists worldwide, with at least 16 reporters behind bars on December 1, 2024, in CPJ’s latest annual global prison census.  

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

We speak with Jose Saldaña, director of Release Aging People in Prison, about a wildcat strike by New York prison guards who claim limits on solitary confinement have made their work more dangerous. “The people who are living in a dangerous environment are the incarcerated men and women,” says Saldaña, who notes the strike began the same week murder charges were announced against six of the guards who brutally beat to death handcuffed prisoner Robert Brooks in an attack captured on body-camera video. “The whole world saw it, and they’re questioning: How long has this been going on in the prison system? This illegal strike is to erase that consciousness that’s building,” says Saldaña. We are also joined by anthropologist Orisanmi Burton, who studies prisons and says the proliferation of solitary confinement and other harsh measures is directly linked to political organizing behind bars starting in the late 1960s. “Prisons in the United States are best understood as institutions of low-intensity warfare that masquerade as apolitical instruments of crime control,” says Burton, author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Sai Zaw Thaike, who was sentenced to 20 years for sedition in 2023, has been subjected to “daily physical abuse” and “retaliatory torture” since January in Insein Prison in Myanmar’s largest city Yangon, the local news publication reported and its editor-in-chief Swe Win confirmed to CPJ.

The abuse is believed to be in response to Sai Zaw Thaike and two other prisoners informing visiting National Human Rights Commission representatives that prison staff were violating other inmates’ human rights, Myanmar Now said, citing a source connected to the prison. 

“Myanmar’s junta must identify and hold to account those responsible for assaulting journalist Sai Zaw Thaike,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “This type of abuse is cruel and grotesque. Myanmar’s military government must stop jailing and abusing journalists now,” Crispin said.  

CPJ was unable to independently confirm the allegations but torture in Myanmar custody has long been documented by groups such as the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners and reported to CPJ researchers. Former inmates have also reported beatings, burns, and electric shocks being administered at Insein Prison.

Myanmar ranked as the world’s third-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 35 members of the press behind bars for their work, according to CPJ’s 2024 prison census.

Myanmar’s Ministry of Information did not immediately reply to CPJ’s email requesting comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Today’s Supreme Court ruling in the case of prominent investigative outlet Temirov Live was a chance for Kyrgyzstan to right the most egregious press freedom violation in the country’s modern history. Instead it serves to underline the apparently irreversible course towards authoritarianism under President Sadyr Japarov,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “Kyrgyz authorities should immediately release Temirov Live journalists Makhabat Tajibek kyzy and Azamat Ishenbekov, withdraw all charges against them and Aike Beishekeyeva and Aktilek Kaparov, and end their attacks on the country’s once-free press.”

Kyrgyz police arrested 11 current and former staff of Temirov Live, a local partner of the global Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), in January 2024. In October, a court convicted Tajibek kyzy, Ishenbekov, Beishekeyeva, and former reporter Aktilek Kaparov and acquitted the remaining seven. Kaparov, who like Beishekeyeva was given a five-year suspended sentence with a three-year probation period, has yet to file a Supreme Court appeal. The four convicted journalists remained in detention pending the October verdict; the seven who were acquitted were previously moved into house arrest or released under travel bans in March and August.

A review of the case by TrialWatch, a global initiative of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, concluded that the convictions suggest “improperly that negative statements [in Temirov Live videos] about the government can serve as a basis for inciting mass unrest” under Kyrgyz law, and said the journalists’ right to a fair trial was violated, “as the court apparently relied almost exclusively on prosecution experts’ conclusions” and failed to address major gaps and inconsistencies in their testimony.

Temirov Live founder Bolot Temirov, who works from exile after being deported from Kyrgyzstan in retaliation for his reporting in 2022, told CPJ that Tajibek kyzy, Ishenbekov, and Beishekeyeva plan to file complaints against their convictions with the United Nations Human Rights Council.

In November 2024, CPJ submitted a report on Kyrgyz authorities’ unprecedented crackdown on independent reporting under Japarov to the Human Rights Council ahead of its 2025 Universal Periodic Review of the country’s human rights record in May.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

More than two dozen Uyghur teachers at a college in Xinjiang were arrested by Chinese authorities in 2017 and are currently still serving jail sentences, Radio Free Asia was able to confirm with officials at the school.

Their arrests eight years ago occurred at a time when authorities in the northwestern region began rounding up Uyghur intellectuals, educators, businesspeople and cultural figures en masse and incarcerating them in re-education camps to prevent what China said was terrorism and religious extremism.

Last week, RFA Uyghur reported that prominent historian Ghojaniyaz Yollugh Tekin, 59, who taught the Aksu Education Institute in the city of Aksu, had been arrested in 2017 and sentenced to 17 years in prison in late 2018 for his research, writings and views that Uyghurs are part of the Turkic world — and not Chinese.

Upon further investigation, RFA learned that authorities also arrested and detained 25 other educators from the same school in 2017. But RFA could not determine the reasons for their arrests or the lengths of their sentences.

Established in 1985, the college currently has about 220 staff members — more than half of whom are Uyghurs — and 3,000 students.

During the early 2000s, there were 100-150 Uyghur teachers, according to Uyghur activist Tuyghun Abduweli, who hails from Aksu but now lives in Canada.

(Mark Schiefelbein/AP)

A person who works at the institute but who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said more than 20 teachers from the school were taken away in several groups in 2017.

Their cases were filed by Aksu prefecture security agents, and the institute’s political affairs department and police station collaborated with them during the arrests and interrogations, the person said.

Held in a Bingtuan prison

A police officer who works at the institute told RFA that 26 teachers — mostly men — were arrested and are serving jail sentences.

He said he was involved in the cases of three of the teachers arrested — Mutellip Mamut, Eli Qasim and Eziz Memet, the last of whom was about 47 years old at the time.

Another police officer named two other imprisoned teachers — Abdusalam Eziz and Abdurahman Rozi — and said he assisted in their arrests as well as the arrest of Mutellip Mamut.

Those arrested were initially taken to Aksu Prison, but were later transferred to a detention center run by the Bingtuan at its headquarters in Shihezi in northern Xinjiang, the police officer said.

The Bingtuan is a state-run economic and paramilitary organization of mostly Han Chinese who develop land, secure borders and maintain stability in Xinjiang.

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“Mutellip Mamut is currently at the Shihezi prison,” the police officer told RFA.

Authorities held secret trials for the teachers, and institute leaders and staffers who collaborated on the cases were not allowed to attend, he added.

Interrogated because of religious practices

According to a person familiar with the situation in Aksu, a literature teacher named Abdusalam had been interrogated by authorities many times because of his religious practices and was eventually suspended from work.

“His wife wore a hijab, and he himself prayed every Friday at home,” the person said. “He was frequently called out by the school because of this, and his wife was also suspended from her job.” Abdusalam was among those detained and jailed in 2017.

A security officer from the school’s legal department confirmed the arrests and detentions of the teachers, but said he could not disclose their identities because of confidentiality requirements.

About 10% of the institute’s teachers had been arrested, said another staffer.

“They’re all in prison now,” said Tuyghun Abduweli.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

Across Maryland’s prison system, incarcerated workers assemble furniture, sew clothing, and even manufacture cleaning chemicals. In spite of making the state more than $50 million annually in revenue, these workers are compensated below the minimum wage in a system akin to slavery. But how does the system of forced prison labor really work, and how do state laws keep  this industry running? Rattling the Bars investigates how Maryland law requires government institutions to purchase prison-made products, and how legislators like State Senator Antonio Hayes are working to change that.

Producer: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to Rattling The Bars. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to State Senator Antonio Hayes from the 40th district of Baltimore City about a bill he sponsored around prison labor in Maryland. The bill was designed to regulate Maryland Correctional Enterprise, which is the prison industry in Maryland, around their preferential treatment they receive for contracts, be it furniture, tags, clothing, or any chemicals that’s used for cleaning. The purpose of the bill was to regulate how much money they were getting from free prison labor.

Antonio Hayes:

They bring in anywhere in a high $50 million a year in business that they’re generating. So they perform everything from furniture making to license plates, to, in some cases, even on the Eastern shore, they have inmates working on poultry farms and agriculture. So the variety of services that they offered have expanded dramatically since its inception.

So here’s the thing, it’s not just state universities. All state universities are using it. The General Assembly is using it. The Maryland Department of Labor is using it. The Maryland Department of Education is using it. Maryland State Police is using it. Maryland DHS is using it. If you are a state agency, you are required by state procurement law to purchase from MCE as long as they have the product. So that’s why they’re able to bring in that type of revenue. Like I said, if you look at their annual reports, it’s somewhere around $58 million a year.

Mansa Musa:

Later, you will hear a conversation I had with former prisoner Lonnell Sligh, who was sentenced in Maryland, but was sent out of state to Kansas. And while in Kansas, he worked in prison industry. I was surprised to hear how Kansas is treating this prison labor force versus how prisoners are being treated throughout the United States of America. But first, you’ll hear this conversation with Senator Antonio Hayes.

I want you to talk a little bit about why you felt the need to get in this particular space, because this is not a space that people get in. You hear stuff about prison, okay, the conditions in prison, the medical in prison, the lack of food, parole, probation. But very rarely do you hear someone say, “Well, let me look at the industry or the job that’s being provided to prisoners.” Why’d you look at this particular direction?

Antonio Hayes:

Yeah. So interesting enough, I’ve been supporting a gentleman back home in Baltimore that has an organization called Emage, E-M-A-G-E, Entrepreneurs Making And Growing Enterprises. So the brother had reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m manufacturing clothing, but I hear the correctional system is teaching brothers and sisters behind the wall these skills. I’d like to connect with them. So when brothers and sisters return into the community, I’d like to hire them.” Muslim brother, real good, very active member of the community. So I said, “Excellent. Let me reach out to Corrections.”

So I found the organization, MCE-

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. Maryland Correctional Enterprises.

Antonio Hayes:

Maryland Correctional Enterprises. And I asked them to come out and do a site visit with me so we could build a pipeline of individuals returning back to West Baltimore, Baltimore City period, especially if they’re already learning these skills so they could get jobs. And I’ll never forget the CEO at the time responding to me, pretty much saying, “Look, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. How dare you invite us to come into the community?” So I was taken aback by the thought that they would clap back in such a way. But if you look at my legislative agenda, it’s really focused around economics. A lot of the things that I push is around economics.

When my mom showed me how to shoot dice in West Baltimore-

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Antonio Hayes:

… one of the things she used to always say, “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Antonio Hayes:

So when I looked at this, like why MCE existed and the fact that they had a procurement law in the state, a preferred provider status, there’s three organizations that have a preferred provider status. It’s America Works, who hire individuals that have disabilities to have employment. Because if they didn’t do it, these individuals would probably be getting state resources from some other pot. But it takes people who have disabilities, so people who are somehow impaired. There’s another organization called Blind Industries.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Antonio Hayes:

They supply janitorial products to the state of Maryland, and these people are blind or visually impaired. And then you had MCE, which were people who were incarcerated for whatever reason. And it didn’t seem to really fit with the other two that were serving populations of individuals with disabilities. So then I began to research even more the existence and how much money they were generating. And I found out, here in the state of Maryland, they were generating revenue of upwards of fifty-something million dollars a year. Whereas, the individuals who are incarcerated, the individuals that were doing the work, were getting paid no more than a $1.16 a day. So that alarmed me, one, the fact that they had a monopoly, because they were eliminating opportunities for other individuals to participate in the economy. Right?

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Antonio Hayes:

So they had a monopoly over. And then two, they had an unfair advantage, because they were essentially paying wages that were subordinate to any other wage anyone could afford. So their overhead was so much cheaper, because they were taking advantage of the status of people who are incarcerated and paying them far less than anyone else could even think of competing against.

Mansa Musa:

And you know, it’s ironic, because as we’re sitting there, we’re talking, and we’re at this table, these chairs, all this furniture was made at Maryland Correctional Enterprise. But on back, I worked in the cash shop at Maryland Correctional Enterprise. And prior to becoming Maryland Correctional Enterprise, it was State Use-

Antonio Hayes:

State Use Industries, correct.

Mansa Musa:

… which is my next lead to my next question. So this particular, going back to your point, it’s three people, or it’s three organizations, three industries that get preferential treatment, but they created… In your research, did you find out that they created this entity solely to be able to get that preferential treatment procurement, or was it a bid more on who is going to get the third slot? Because the first two slots, I can understand, they [inaudible 00:07:45] the Maryland Penitentiary. Some guys had brought in. And they were networking with the Library of Congress to try to bring all the books in the Library of Congress into Braille. And they were getting minimum wage, and they were paying it to the social security. All that was being done in that entity.

But from your research, was this particular… Maryland Correctional Enterprise, was this created as an institution by the private sector for the sole reason to have access to the label?

Antonio Hayes:

Right. So what I found was, actually, the federal government at some point had made it against the law to transfer prison-made goods across state lines. So in order for the industry to… So also, there’s some tie to this. This has really evolved as a result of the abolition of the 13th Amendment.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Antonio Hayes:

So when you had the abolition of slavery, and individuals… They lost a workforce that they would’ve had.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Antonio Hayes:

So there was a need to supplement that workforce, and the way they did that was through the, what is it called? The loophole in the constitution-

Mansa Musa:

The constitution, right.

Antonio Hayes:

… that said that slavery was illegal except for those who were being incarcerated-

Mansa Musa:

Convicted of a crime, right.

Antonio Hayes:

… due to convicted of a crime. But in Maryland and another state, I think they needed a way to create an artificial audience, because they didn’t necessarily have an audience to make the purchases in order to make it sustainable. So what they did was they put this preferred provider label on it through the state procurement so they could create an audience and customer base to support the work that they were doing.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And now I can see. I can see it now, because, like you say, it’s all about exploitation of labor on the 13th amendment, giving them the right to use convicted convicts. So they saw that loophole, they saw the opportunity.

Antonio Hayes:

Yes.

Mansa Musa:

This is continuing black hole. They saw the opportunity. Okay. As we wrap up on this particular segment of this thing, you spoke on the economics, that’s your focus. And we know that, coming out of prison, a person having job, the likelihood of coming back to prison is slim to none. Because if you got an income… This is just my philosophy, and I’m a returning citizen, I came out of prison. Once I got an income, it allowed me to be able to get my own place. It allowed me to be able to create a savings. It allowed me to get my credit score.

In terms of, from your perspective, what would it look like if, and this is something that you might want to look at from your office level, as opposed to the opposition of them having that right, wouldn’t it be more feasible if they gave minimum wage? If the advocacy from policy would be, “Okay, you get this preferential treatment, but in order to get it, you have to provide minimum wage and you got to let them pay into their social security.” Is that something that you could see happening?

Antonio Hayes:

I think something that shows that isn’t as unbalanced as the current system is, is definitely where we want to be. Remember, a lot of the stuff that I do is around economics. I would’ve never looked at the criminal justice system or this system as something that I would want to focus on. I just wanted to make sure that individuals that were returning back to the communities that I grew up in, West Baltimore, had an opportunity to be successful. And this current system, the way it’s structured, it doesn’t give individuals an opportunity to transition back into the community, to have a greater chance of success. It’s literally setting them up for failure.

And my last visit to Jessa, I met three individuals, if you combine their sentences together, they had a hundred years. Some of them were life, some of them were never coming back to the community, ever. And I know to some degree, you need something for these individuals to do. But what I’m told anecdotally is the people that most likely will have these opportunities are people who have very long sentences. Because from a labor perspective, going back to the whole 13th Amendment thing, it’s more predictable that they will be around for a long time, as opposed to just the opposite, using this as a training opportunity. So when they reintegrate back into society, they will have a better chance of being successful and a productive member of society.

I think this current system, the way it’s working, even if you look at the suppliers, where are they getting the equipment from? We’re subsidizing MCE, and the supplies we’re getting from, from somewhere out of state. Right?

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Antonio Hayes:

We’re not even doing business. This wood is being procured from some out of state company. We’re not supporting Maryland jobs. So I think we need to just reevaluate and deconstruct piece by piece, how could we better get a better return on its investment, not just for the state, but also for the individuals who are producing these products that we enjoy?

Mansa Musa:

That was Senator Antonio Hayes, who, as you could see, sponsored a bill to try to get the labor force, prison labor force in Maryland regulated. We’ll keep you updated on the developments of that bill.

Now, my conversation with Lonnell Sligh. Lonnell Sligh told me about his experience in working with the prison industry in Kansas. He told me that the average prisoner in Kansas has saved up to $75,000 while working in prison industry. That it doesn’t matter how much time you’re serving, if you have a life sentence or not, most of the prisoners that’s working in the industry have long term. But because of them being able to work in the prison industry, they’re able to save money, to assist their families, pay taxes, buying to social security, and more importantly, live with some kind of dignity while they’re incarcerated.

Lonnell Sligh:

The blessing of me going to Kansas, I saw the other side of that slave industry that we called and we thought about for so many years. Now, going to Kansas, I saw an opportunity where they afforded guys to work a minimum wage job. And in that, guys were making living wages. I met guys that had 60, 70 or a hundred thousand dollars in their account.

Mansa Musa:

From working in the prison industry?

Lonnell Sligh:

From working in the prison industry. So when I saw that, that kind of changed my mindset. Because at first, I thought it was a joke. Because they asked me say, “Hey, Mr. Sligh, you want to work in the minimum wage shop? Because you’re doing a lot of good things.” And I said, “Man, get out of here.”

So going back to what I was saying, when I found out that it was true and I was afforded to get a job there, it changed my whole outlook on it. Because now, my wheels started turning on, how can we make this better?

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lonnell Sligh:

You know what I mean? How can we change the narrative?

Mansa Musa:

Right. Okay. In every regard, okay, how did you change the narrative? Because, okay, now, reality being reality, Kansas might be an anomaly, and by that, I mean that might be in and of itself something that they doing. But overall, when you look at the prison industry throughout the United States of America, and it’s massive, they don’t have that narrative. So what would you say? How would you address that? What would you say about the Kansas model and the need to adapt it to other states’ prison industries?

Lonnell Sligh:

Well, you know firsthand that when I first came back to Maryland, my whole mindset was bringing some of the things from Kansas back to Maryland and taking some of the things that was progressive and good for Kansas back to Kansas. Now, the prison industry, we are in process now trying to bring that to Maryland. And one of the things that I’m advocating for, and I’m sure, because in the process when I got the job and I saw how we can, it’s an opportunity to make some changes and make it better for the people that’s inside, I crafted a set of guidelines and things that I presented to the administration.

So one of the things was allowing people with long-term sentences to be afforded that opportunity. So when they gave it to me, and I showed them through example that… Because I was never supposed to get out of prison.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Lonnell Sligh:

So I was never supposed to have that job. But the blessing in that, I showed them two sides of promise, and that was that now the companies that were coming in there had a long-term person that can be there that they can depend on, because they had a high turnover rate.

Then secondly, I crafted a thing as far as giving dudes the opportunity to learn financial literacy, things of that nature. Because one of the things that I know for sure, a lot of guys that’s getting those jobs, that was getting those jobs were leaving out of the prison with a lot of money, but they were just as ignorant as when they came in.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lonnell Sligh:

So if you got a hundred thousand dollars in your account and you don’t know how to pay bills or you don’t know any financial literacy, the first thing you’re going to do is go out and buy a Cadillac, a bunch of flashy clothes.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, yeah.

Lonnell Sligh:

So you’re going to end up broke or back in prison. So that’s one of the things that we are working to craft, bringing this to Maryland, having it upfront, having a criteria, a curriculum that’s designated the design for success. And one of the things that, like I said, in Kansas, the politicians, the prison industry, the corporate industry, if y’all want to help with this cause, you say you want to give people a second chance, what better way than bringing in private industry jobs, but making it something for the better, not as a slave camp?

Mansa Musa:

In terms of, how did you come out? And were you able to come out, after being in the industry, to be able to feel some sense of security financially? Or were you in need of getting support from family members to make sure that you had what you needed? Or were you able to save some money, bottom line?

Lonnell Sligh:

Absolutely.

Mansa Musa:

Not going into how much.

Lonnell Sligh:

Yeah.

Mansa Musa:

But what did your savings allow you to do in terms of adjust, readjust back into society? That’s really what it’s all about. If you’re coming out and you can’t adjust in society with the money that you made out of the industry, if you don’t have no sense of security with the money that you’re making out of industry, then likely your chances of survival is slim to nothing.

Lonnell Sligh:

Yeah. But I’m going to take it back even before, because remember, I was never supposed to get out of prison.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lonnell Sligh:

So having that job really took a burden off of my family.

Mansa Musa:

Okay.

Lonnell Sligh:

And it took a burden off of me, because now I didn’t have to reach out and ask for money, somebody to send me money to make commissary. So my whole strategy when I first got the job, because remember, I wasn’t ever thinking about getting out of prison, so my thing was helping my family, saving as much money as I can, building a bank account, like some of them guys that I knew had 60, 70, a hundred thousand dollars in their account.

So then I transitioned over to finding out that now I may have an opportunity to get out of prison. So that really changed the whole narrative and outlook that I had, because now I got in my mind that if I’m able to get out, not only can I afford to pay for a lawyer to help this cause, but now when I get out, I don’t have to come out in a desperate situation not knowing where I’m going to live at, not knowing if I can put a roof over my head or get a car.

Mansa Musa:

Right. Right, right. So then in that regard, the model that Kansas had in terms of giving the minimum wage, allowing you to pay into your social security, and allowing you to save, in that model, it allowed for you to transition back in society. But more importantly, while you were incarcerated, it allowed for you to be able to feel a sense of self-sufficiency in terms of taking care of your family, or providing for your children, not having to rely on them to put money on your phone or put money in your books. So that Kansas model is really a model that you think that… Well, then let’s just ask this, why do you think that other states haven’t adapted this model?

Lonnell Sligh:

Because one of the things we know is that it’s an old mindset. It’s an old way of thinking, that’s not progressive. And it’s not beneficial for a lot of states to transition or to try to do something better. They don’t want to help us. They don’t want to help the incarcerated person or the person that’s serving their times, even though they say their Division of Corrections. And they need to change that name from the Division of Corrections, because they’re not helping correct anything.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right, right.

Lonnell Sligh:

But Kansas most definitely afforded the opportunity for… But their mindset when this first started was in the seventies, so they were about making a dollar themselves.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right, right, right.

Lonnell Sligh:

So it evolved, and just like I said, it was still a hundred years behind the timing, by me being afforded to get in that space, it was a blessing because I was able to help bring a different light to it. But other states, just like I say, it’s about their bottom line and their control and old way of thinking. But my thing is, and what I’m advocating for is, is that you have to think outside the box. Because if you don’t think outside the box, then you’re going to get the same results, the same thing.

Mansa Musa:

Well, how do you address this part of the conversation? That long-term imprisonment people, that most people in those situations, those jobs after you spoke on this and have long-term, and so therefore, the benefits for them is not in comparison to the benefits of people that got short-term that can get the skill and get the money and come out. How do you… Can you have it both ways, or either/or?

Lonnell Sligh:

I think, for me, you can have it both ways. But one of the things that we mess up so much on in our way of thinking in society and in the department, we’re stuck on a certain way of thinking. So my thing is that, if you want to breed a successful person, no matter what kind of time you have… That’s my focus and my mindset, because I took a stance knowing I was never getting out of prison, but I took a stance that I was going to better myself and I was going to walk every day and do the things that I needed to make myself successful and act like I was getting out of prison tomorrow, even though I knew I was never getting out of prison. So for me, it was about me better than myself.

So having a minimum wage job or allowing a person to have a job that they can create wages, it makes a better person. It gives you a better product, whether you’re getting out or not. But you have to instill those things in people so that they can understand that it’s a different way. If not, you’re going to think that old way of thinking. Nothing is going to change.

Mansa Musa:

There you have it. Two conversations about prison labor. The prison industry. I worked in MCE. I earned 90 cents a day, a dollar and something with bonuses, approximately $2.10. The bonuses came from how much labor we produced.

On the other hand, you had the conversation I had with Lonnell about Kansas. In Maryland, I didn’t pay taxes, I wasn’t allowed to pay into the social security. I didn’t pay medical, and I didn’t pay rent. In Kansas, a person is allowed to pay into social security. That means when he get released, he had his quarters to retire. Pay the medical. That means, if he is released, he’ll be able to afford medical. Pay taxes. That means that he’s also making a contribution to society in that form. But more importantly, they’re allowed to save money. And in saving money, they will become less of a burden on the state upon their release.

What would you prefer? A person that earns slave wages and don’t pay back into society, or a system where the person is paying into society in the form of taxes, social security, medical, and also becoming economically sufficient upon their release? Tell me what you think.

Speaker 4:

Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. We need your help to keep doing this work, so please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

Chinese authorities have extended the prison sentence of a Tibetan environmental activist from Sichuan province by an additional eight months after he rejected charges of “disrupting social order,” two sources from inside Tibet told Radio Free Asia.

In a video clip posted in October on the Chinese social media platform WeChat, Tsongon Tsering, 29, spoke out against the illegal extraction of sand and gravel mining activity along the Tsaruma River in his village in Ngaba (in Chinese, Aba) prefecture.

“The large-scale and indiscriminate extraction of sand from the river has led to serious soil erosion in the surrounding area and is posing a threat to the foundations of residents’ homes,” he said in the video, in which he holds up his government ID card.

After posting that, Tsering was arrested. He was initially sentenced to eight months by the Kyungchu County People’s Court on Oct. 27 on charges of “disturbing social order” and “provoking trouble and picking quarrels” after he made the rare public appeal online to authorities.

In January, the Kyungchu County People’s Court extended Tsering’s prison sentence by eight more months, increasing his total prison sentence to 16 months.

Strict surveillance

Tsering’s case illustrates the risks Tibetans face for speaking out, and the swift action authorities take to silence those who raise concerns about environmental degradation in their communities, especially when linked to Chinese companies.

Tsering’s parents have been kept under virtual house arrest with strict surveillance, sources said, adding that his mother’s health has been impacted due to anxiety and concerns over her son.

Chinese authorities have also placed tight restrictions on movement in the historic Amdo region of Tibet, specifically in the Atsoknb Tsenyi Gon Monastery in Ngaba county, Sichuan province, sources said.

Tsering has since been transferred from Kyungchu county to a prison in Barkham, the prefectural capital of Ngaba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, said Tenzin Dawa, director of the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, which first reported the news on Thursday.

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“The Chinese authorities told Tsongon Tsering that he would be relieved of his prison sentence if he made a statement admitting to the charges that he posted the video online to incite social disorder, but Tsongon and his family rejected this,” the first source said.

“They stood by their concerns, stating that the Chinese government is causing major environmental damage in the region,” he said. “The authorities are now trying to make Tsongon Tsering’s situation more difficult for him.”

In December 2024, sources told RFA that Tsering had been held in Kyungchu County Prison since October and that he faced “continued investigation and threats of extended sentencing.”

At the time, sources said authorities had indicated to Tsering’s family that the eight-month prison sentence was “not final” and said they would “continue to investigate the matter completely before making a conclusive ruling.”

‘Respect Tibetans’ rights'

On Thursday, the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, reported that authorities have forbidden Tsering’s family from participating in any religious activities during the Tibetan New Year, or Losar, which begins on Feb. 28.

Authorities also have warned Tsering’s relatives against speaking out about his case, the center said.

The rights group also called on Chinese authorities to “immediately overturn” the conviction and sentence of Tsering and “uphold and respect the fundamental rights of all Tibetans, including human rights defenders and activists, allowing them to freely express their opinions without fear of persecution.”

Other Tibetan environmental defenders, such as Anya Sengdra, have faced persecution for their activism.

In 2019, Chinese authorities sentenced Sengdra to a seven-year prison term on charges of disturbing social order after he complained online about corrupt officials, illegal mining and the hunting of protected wildlife.

Additional reporting by Dorjee Damdul, Tenzin Norzom, Thaklha Gyal and Tsewang Norbu for RFA Tibetan. Translated by Tenzin Palmo and Tenzin Dickyi, Edited by Tenzin Pema, Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Tibetan.

A prominent Uyghur historian and expert in Uyghur place names is serving a 17-year prison sentence for his writings, people with knowledge of the situation said.

Ghojaniyaz Yollugh Tekin, 59, was an educator at the Aksu Education Institute in the city of Aksu in the north of China’s far-western Xinjiang region. His research and publications focused on Uyghur toponymy — the linguistic evolution of place names and the historical and geographical reasons for the names.

A police officer who works in the village where Tekin is from in Aksu prefectur’s Uchturpan county, told Radio Free Asia that the intellectual had been sentenced to 17 years and is serving his sentence in Hotan, about 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of Aksu city.

Tekin was detained in 2017 amid the Chinese government’s mass roundup of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in Xinjiang, according to a list of imprisoned Uyghur intellectuals compiled by Norway-based researcher Abduweli Ayup.

Tekin was sentenced to prison in late 2018 for his research, writings and views that Uyghurs are part of the Turkic world — and not Chinese — according to Ayup’s data.

He was among an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs, including intellectuals, teachers, cultural figures and prominent businesspeople, who were forced into re-education camps.

Harassed for writing on sensitive topics

Besides his influential historical research and writings, Tekin boldly and actively participated in intellectual gatherings and debates in Uyghur society, said his friend Tuyghun Abduweli, an activist now living in Canada.

Chinese state security agents often harassed Tekin after he gained significant recognition for his writings on sensitive historical topics concerning Uyghurs’ connection with the Turkic world, he said.

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Tekin’s professional colleague used to refer to him as “Aksu’s Turghun Almas,” a reference to one of the most influential Uyghur historians of the 20th century who challenged China’s claim that the Uyghur homeland had been part of Chinese territory since ancient times in his book, “The Uyghurs.”

After the book was published in the late 1980s, China banned it and forbade Almas from further writing and publishing anything for the rest of his life.

Tekin was involved in visiting and hosting prominent Uyghur intellectuals, including Almas, Abdurehim Otkur, Nizamidin Huseyin and Abdullah Talip, and organizing meetings between them and readers, Abduweli said.

Turanism

In the late 1980s, Tekin published an article titled “East Turkistan, West Turkistan, and the Concept of Turan,” in an Aksu newspaper, which caused a stir among Uyghurs in Xinjiang and caught the attention of Chinese authorities, Abduweli said.

The term “Turan” refers to a historical region in Central Asia, as well as to a political and cultural movement. In the early 20th century, Turanism emerged as an initiative aimed at uniting Turkic and other Ural-Altaic-speaking peoples throughout Eurasia.

“Because of this article, he was suspended from his teaching position and went through very difficult times thereafter,” Abduweli said, adding that authorities had repeatedly interrogated and detained Tekin since the 1990s.

Tekin was criticized as a “stubborn separatist” in 2018 for not abandoning his research and continuing to speak out about Uyghur history, and ended up in a re-education camp, he said.

China has said that the camps were vocational training centers and has claimed that they have been shut down.

However, the testimony of Uyghurs held in them and other credible reports indicate that political indoctrination, physical abuse, sexual assaults and forced sterilizations of women took place in the facilities.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

Last June, months before her release date, Paula Drake remembers getting called to fight the Gorman Fire in Los Angeles County, California. She was part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Malibu Conservation Camp #13, which is jointly operated by CDCR and the Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACFD).

When her crew arrived at the fire, she remembers, it covered about 500 acres, but by the next day, it had spread to 15,000 acres. Drake knew how to hike through the mountains with a 40-pound bag on her back and run a chainsaw through the rugged terrain — skills that made it possible to help contain the fire. Out of that experience, she felt pride and camaraderie with her crew. 

Drake remembers “just feeling like you’re a part of something bigger and being able to give back to a community that has deemed us unredeemable, and being able to be like a productive member of society.” She returned home in November and is pursuing a career in firefighting.

“The experience there was absolutely amazing,” she said. “It was amazing enough to where I decided, coming home, that this is something that I would like to do with my life, and be able to grow in the firefighter industry, and hopefully make it a career.”

Incarcerated firefighters make up 30% of California’s firefighting crews, and those who participate in the program are able to live at one of the many conservation camps or fire stations outside of prison, where they are given training and work alongside the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL Fire) or the LACFD. Drake said that, while it is still a prison program, the fire camps allowed her to have more freedom.

“Society has deemed us these dangerous criminals that shouldn’t be allowed to have their freedom, yet, here we are running chainsaws and given these tools that are highly dangerous, so is it really even necessary for people like us to be somewhere where we’re stripped of our freedom?” Drake said. “I just think that people don’t realize what an impact it has on us and the community.”

While versions of the CDCR firefighting program have been around in California for over a century, they became the subject of headlines earlier this year when several fires broke out across California and over 1,100 incarcerated firefighters were deployed to fight the Eaton Fire, Hughes Fire, and Palisades Fire in Los Angeles County, which destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses. These firefighters were out for days at a time, and had no contact with their families. However, many reported a sense of pride that they were helping the community.

Even though they put their lives at risk and do the same jobs as any other fire crew, those who are incarcerated get paid between five to ten dollars a day by CDCR, plus an extra dollar an hour by CAL Fire when they are deployed to an active fire. As she worked second saw—a position where she helped clear the terrain with a chainsaw—in the fire crew, Drake said she would make about six dollars a day, and an additional dollar per hour she was working a fire. A seasonal CAL Fire firefighter gets paid a salary of more than $50,000 a year.

“You’ve got paid crew members working right next to you, doing the same exact job, but getting paid a hell of a lot more, and we interact with these crews, we cut lines with them,” Drake said. “We’re putting ourselves at risk. The compensation doesn’t really match up with the job that we’re doing.  

In many cases, incarcerated firefighters are saving lives. Eduardo Herrera, who was a firefighter while incarcerated, remembers being called to a traffic collision in Los Angeles County. He was assigned what the LACFD calls “landing zone coordination” to arrange for a helicopter to pick up victims. At that time, while awaiting transport, a victim went unconscious, so Herrera had to perform CPR. He later found out that the individual that he was performing CPR on was a deputy sheriff of 27 years on his way to work. 

“I was an incarcerated municipal firefighter, so not only was I serving the community, I actually helped save lives of our law enforcement, which is a very unique situation,” Herrera said.

He remembers other police officers and military members thanking him for his work and shaking his hand.

Herrera described his experience as “something that most of the public are not aware of. I think that that’s just another story of the capacity of change and what we’re capable of doing in spite of our circumstances.”

During the two years he worked in this program, Herrera, who was released in 2020, resided at a fire station in Mule Creek. He remembers being deployed to residential structure fires, rescues, traffic collisions, medical calls, and vegetation and wildlife fires. He said that participating in the program reduced his sentence by just under three years.

Hererra said that he is glad that the public is becoming more aware of the important work of firefighters who are incarcerated—people who “have maybe made a mistake in their lives, but they’re no longer defined by that mistake and wanting to pay it forward and make a difference.” He said it is important the public know what change looks like and what it can be and what it can mean for their communities. 

“I’m glad that now we’re having this dialogue, and the narrative is starting to be changed in regards to seeing the capacity that we have to serve the community,” Herrera said. “It gives people hope. I believe the public wants to hear stories of hope and redemption.”

Herrera is now a firefighter with CAL Fire in the Riverside unit. He said that while he was incarcerated, he did not make as much as he makes now.

“The discussion about pay is always going to be a discussion, because we definitely didn’t make what your normal firefighter that’s out here makes,” Herrera said. “At the end of the day, we’re the hard workers, we work two times harder, if not more, than anybody else, because we had more to prove, and there was a sense of pride that went with it.”

Last month, Assembly Member Isaac Bryan introduced a bill, AB 247, which would ensure incarcerated firefighters are paid an hourly wage equal to the lowest nonincarcerated firefighter in the state for the time that they are actively fighting a fire. 

“Incarcerated firefighters are on the frontlines saving lives,” Bryan said in an email. “They are heroes just like everybody else on the frontlines and they deserve to be paid like it.”

Sam Lewis, executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition—which helped write and introduce AB 247—said that incarcerated firefighters have returned to their fire camps and have been in good spirits about the job they did. He said that the ARC, who owns the Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp for incarcerated youth, provided more microwaves, an air conditioning unit, new boots, and sporting equipment for the youth who returned from fighting fires. Through donations, they were also able to give all of them hygiene packages that include new toothbrushes, lotion, deodorant, nice soap—things he said they might not normally be able to get while incarcerated.

In the time that passed since the fire, Lewis said six youth at the camp who were fighting the fires have been released and received a $2,500 scholarship as they transition out of incarceration into training to become full-fledged firefighters. Lewis said the work they are doing to save homes and lives is important, and that they should be paid the same as the lowest paid firefighters on any other crew. 

“The fact that they get paid basically $10 is not equitable, it’s not fair,” Lewis said. “They’re putting their lives on the line too. Why wouldn’t they be paid for something that they’re providing that’s needed, desperately needing in the state of California? So it was a simple question of equity.”

Lewis said that people who are incarcerated often want to demonstrate that they’ve changed and be able to give back to their communities, and participating in the program has been a way for people to transform their lives.

“Sometimes people end up in jails or prisons with the belief that they don’t have value, and it’s clear that every human being has value once you find out what your purpose is,” Lewis said. “In many instances, people who have an opportunity to go to these fire camps find that their purpose is to be of service to their communities in this way, and so it’s a way of them being able to demonstrate their commitment to their communities, but also to find their pathway to redemption.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Victoria Valenzuela.

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The post Leonard Peltier free from prison after 5 decades; US-Russia negotiations begin as Ukraine, Europe complain they’re left out – February 18, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Two Palestinian resistance groups have condemned “the brutal assault” on prisoners at Ofer Prison, saying it was “barbaric criminal behaviour that reflects the fascist and terrorist nature of” Israel.

In the joint statement, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) called the attack a “miserable attempt” by Israel “to restore its shattered prestige”, reports Al Jazeera.

They called on the world to expose “these inhuman crimes against the prisoners”, which “blatantly violate all international conventions and norms”.

• READ MORE: Welcome to hell: The Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps
• Gaza hospital chief Abu Safia detained, tortured in Israeli jail: Lawyer
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The statement called on the international community to intervene to protect the “prisoners, stop criminal violations against them, document them and work to hold the criminal occupation leaders accountable”.

The statement came after Palestinian authorities said Israeli forces had raided a section of Ofer Prison, west of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, and assaulted detainees.

“Prisoners were beaten and sprayed with gas,” the Palestinian Prisoners Media Office said.

Persistent serious allegations of torture and abuse of Palestinian prisoners — many who have not been charged or are held on administrative detention — and beatings right up until the release of detainees under the ceasefire have been made over all six exchange events so far.

Medical director severely tortured
Last week, lawyers representing Kamal Adwan Hospital’s medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya met him for the first time since he was detained by Israeli forces in north Gaza last December 27.

He told them he was severely tortured with electric shocks and was being denied needed medication.

Lawyer spells out torture allegations over Israeli detention of doctor.  Video: Al Jazeera

Samir Al-Mana’ama, a lawyer with the Al Mazan Center for Human Rights, described his brutal torture in a failed attempt to “extract a confession” from him in an interview with Al Jazeera.

Al-Mana’ama said Dr Abu Safiya suffered from “an enlarged heart muscle and from high blood pressure” and was beaten up and refused treatment for the heart condition.

Transferred to Ofter Prison on January 9, he was held in solitary confinement for 25 days and interrogated nonstop by the Israeli army, Israeli intelligence and police, the lawyer added.

There was “no legal justification” for Abu Safia’s arrest and no evidence against him, the lawyer said.

Since the interview, Israeli authorities said he was being held under an “unlawful combatant” law — despite his status as a civilian doctor — stripping him of any rights as a detainee.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in Jordan, said the doctor was one of hundreds of medical workers taken from Gaza by Israeli forces to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp and other Israeli military prisons.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The junta has not announced the release and there has been no explanation as to why they were set free but it comes days after a court in Argentina called for arrest warrants for the junta chief and 22 other military officials for crimes committed against the Rohingya in a 2017 crackdown.

“It is clear that the junta wants to cover up the crimes that they’ve committed against Rohingya,” said a senior member of group Political Prisoners Network Myanmar, Thike Htun Oo.

“They immediately released the Rohingya from detention as soon as a court in Argentina issued international arrest warrants for them. We must be aware of this,” he told Radio Free Asia on Monday.

Most of the 936 people being released on Sunday from prison in the main city of Yangon, including 267 women and 67 children, were arrested after the military overthrew an elected government in 2021, Thike Htun Oo said.

They were due to be sent by boat from Yangon, to the Rakhine state capital of Sittwe in western Myanmar, he said.

On Saturday, officials from the military’s Immigration Department entered Insein Prison in Yangon to issue the Rohingya with identity documents, Thike Htun Oo said, though adding he could not confirm exactly what type of documents they were given.

Details of what those being released had done to be locked up in the first place were not available but most were believed to have been imprisoned for violating restrictions on their movements.

RFA tried to telephone the Prison Department spokesperson and the office of the department’s deputy director general for information about the release but they did not answer.

Most Rohingya are from Rakhine state and most are stateless, regarded as migrants from South Asia and not one of the ethnic groups classified as indigenous in Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s constitution.

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Forced to fight?

Myanmar government troops led a bloody crackdown in Rakhine state in 2017 in response to Rohingya militant attacks on the security forces and more than 700,000 members of the persecuted Rohingya community fled to neighboring Bangladesh, where most remain.

U.N. experts later said the military carried out mass killings and gang rapes with “genocidal intent.” The United States in 2022 determined that the violence committed against the Rohingya amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity.

The Myanmar military said it was engaged in legitimate security operations.

A court in Argentina ruled last week that international arrest warrants should be issued for the self-appointed president and junta chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, and 22 other military officials for crimes committed against the Rohingya.

Argentina became the first country to open an investigation into serious crimes against the Rohingya under the principle of universal jurisdiction, a legal principle allowing for the prosecution of serious crimes no matter where they were committed.

Political analyst Than Soe Naing also said the junta was trying to improve its image in light of the Argentinian court ruling.

“They’re releasing the Rohingya in order to try to restore justice from their side but they’re not going to succeed in trying to cover up their criminal mistakes,” he said.

The leader of a Rohingya welfare organization said there was a danger those being released would be pressed to fight for the military in Rakhine state where an ethnic minority insurgent group battling for control of the state, the Arakan Army, or AA, has forced junta forces into a few small pockets of territory, including Sittwe.

The co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition, Nay San Lwin, said the military was already pressing Rohingya men in camps for displaced people in Sittwe to join junta forces.

“They are really worried about being forcibly recruited,” he said of those who had been released.

Last year, embattled junta forces recruited Rohingya into militias to help fight the AA, which draws its support from the state’s Buddhist, ethnic Rakhine majority.

The recruitment by the military of Rohingya led to attacks by the AA in which international human rights organizations said Rohingya civilians were killed. The AA denied that.

Translated by Kianan Duncan. Edited by RFA Staff.

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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

“The sentencing of journalists Chadha Hadj Mbarek and Chahrazad Akacha is a clear example of how the Tunisian government is using judicial harassment to crush press freedom and independent journalism,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna. “Tunisian authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Mbarek and ensure that journalists and media workers can work freely without fear of reprisal.”

A Tunis court convicted Akacha and Mbarek, a journalist and a social media content editor at local independent content firm Instalingo, of “conspiring against state security” and “committing an offense against the President of the Republic.” 

Mbarek and Akacha, who has fled the country, were among the 41 people prosecuted in connection with their work at Instalingo since September 2021 following accusations that Instalingo was hired by members of the Ennahda opposition party to distribute content critical of President Kais Saied’s government. All were convicted on anti-state charges and handed long prison sentences on February 5. 

Mbarek, in jail at the time of her sentencing, was initially arrested at her home in the city of Sousse on October 5, 2021, on anti-state charges. A judge dismissed the case and Mbarek’s charges on June 19, 2023, ordering her release, but she was arrested again after the state prosecutor filed an appeal.

According to CPJ’s December 1, 2024 census there are at least five journalists behind bars in Tunisia, the highest number since 1992.

CPJ’s email to the presidency requesting comment on Mbarek and Akacha’s sentences did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“The sentence against Al-Ahmadi is yet another example of the escalating intimidation of journalists in Yemen, where legal tools are being weaponized to silence critical reporting on local issues,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York. “Authorities in Shabwa province must allow journalists to work freely and without fear of retaliation.”

Al-Ahmadi, a Shabwa-based freelance journalist who has written for several media outlets, questioned whether local authorities had rented land for a solar energy project in place of using public land in an August 15, 2024, Facebook post. He also criticized power outages in the province. In response, on September 9, 2024, the Shabwa prosecution accused him of spreading false information and inciting tribal and regional divisions through social media, according to legal documents reviewed by CPJ.

“I reaffirm with absolute confidence my innocence of the charges against me and will continue to pursue all legal avenues to prove it,” Al-Ahmadi told CPJ. “Despite this ordeal, I remain steadfast in my principles and values, believing that justice will ultimately prevail. My pen is not for sale, and anyone who thinks they can silence me is mistaken.” 

Shabwa is currently under the control of the Southern Transitional Council, the same entity believed to be responsible for the forced disappearance of Yemeni journalist Naseh Shaker, who has not been heard from since November 19, 2024.

CPJ emailed the local authorities in Shabwa for comment but has not yet received a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction. DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint. 

“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”

The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison. The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker. He’d only just purchased it as a hunting ground, and it was an easy sell. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said. 

The penitentiary has been a gleam in the eye of state and local officials and the Bureau of Prisons since 2006. It has always sparked sharp divisions in Roxana and beyond, and was killed in 2019 after a series of lawsuits, only to be quietly resurrected in 2022. Last fall, the bureau took the final step in its approval process, clearing the way to begin buying land.

Some in Letcher County, which saw 5.2 percent of its population leave between 2020 and 2023 and grapples with a 24 percent poverty rate, believe the prison will replace jobs and tax revenue lost with the decline of coal. Federal prison construction has boomed in central Appalachia as mining has faltered, with eight of the 16 penitentiaries built there, often atop mines, located in Kentucky alone.

“Those are all expressions of the economic crisis that has occurred due to the collapse of the coal industry, and for which the prisons and the jails are proposed,” said Judah Schept, a professor of justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University. In his book Coal, Cages, Crisis, Schept noted that mine sites are considered ideal locations for prisons or a dumping ground for waste, rather than places of ecological value, as some biologists have argued. The Roxana site has been reclaimed, meaning re-vegetated with a forest that now shelters a number of rare species, including endangered bats.

Opponents argue that a prison will bring more environmental problems than jobs. Letcher County is one of 13 counties ravaged by catastrophic flooding in 2022, a situation exacerbated by damage strip mining caused to local watersheds. The prison slated for Roxana will exacerbate the problem. The Bureau of Prisons estimates it will damage 6,290 feet of streams and about two acres of wetlands. (The agency has promised to compensate the state.)

DeVaughan said the purchase also is a step toward rectifying the dispossession that began with the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples. The Cherokee, Shawnee, and Yuchi made their homes in the area before, during, and after colonization, and their thriving nations raised crops, ran businesses, and hunted bison that once roamed Appalachia. In all the time since, coal, timber, gas, and landholding companies have at times owned almost half of the land in 80 counties stretching from West Virginia to Alabama. Several prisons sprang from deals made with coal companies, something many locals consider the continuation of this status quo.

Changing that dynamic is a priority for the Appalachian Rekindling Project, which hoped to buy more land to protect it from extractive industries and return its stewardship to Indigenous and local communities. DeVaughn said Indigenous peoples throughout the region will be welcome to use the land as a gathering place.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Cherokee Nation, and United Keetoowah Band did not respond to requests for comment.

DeVaughan sees its work establishing a new vision of economic transition for coalfields, one that relies less on “dollars and numbers” and more on “healing and restoration” of the land and the Indigenous and other communities that live there. She is working with the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations to acquire a herd of bison and plans to work with local volunteers, scientists, and students to inventory the site’s flora and fauna. 

The plot sits at the edge of the 500-acre site outlined for the prison, which would hold over 1,300 people in the main facility and adjoining camp. A representative of the Bureau of Prisons told Grist land acquisition will continue. 

This isn’t the first time the agency has hit such a pothole. Six years ago, Letcher County master falconer Mitch Whitaker refused to sell nearly 12 acres, requiring the agency to revise its plans. The prospect of doing so again led Representative Hal Rogers, who represents the area in Congress and has been the leading champion for the prison, to lambaste ARP and its allies.

“This land purchase comes as no surprise from a group led by Kentucky outsiders and liberal extremists,” he said in a statement. 

But many of those on-hand that Wednesday to celebrate the sale were local residents like Artie Ann Bates, who grew up in Letcher County and saw waves of strip mining damage her family’s land. “It’s just really hard seeing a place you love be destroyed,” she said. The purchase is a “sign of progress,” she added, bundled up at the foot of the mine site alongside her neighbors.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Bison, not prison: Activists buy a prison site to rewild the land on Feb 3, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

“Sayed Rahim Saeedi has been sentenced to three years in prison without access to a lawyer or due process in the Taliban’s courts, while also suffering from serious health complications,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Taliban authorities must immediately release Saeedi and ensure that he receives necessary medical support and treatment.”

Saeedi has been transferred to Kabul’s central Pul-e-Charkhi prison. He is suffering from lumbar disc disease and prostate complications, the journalist source told CPJ.

The Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence detained Saeedi, his son, journalist Sayed Waris Saeedi, and their camera operator, Hasib, who goes only by one name, on July 14, 2024, in Kabul and transferred them to an undisclosed location. While the younger Saeedi and Hasib were released two days later, Saeedi remained in detention.

According to the exile-based watchdog group Afghanistan Journalists Center, Saeedi was arrested for his work criticizing the Taliban, including a screenplay he wrote about a girl denied an education by Taliban authorities.

According to the Afghanistan Journalists Center, restrictions on the country’s media are tightening.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Baroshky’s lawyer, Revving Hruri, told CPJ via messaging app that the charges stem from a January 23, 2024 Facebook post in which Baroshky reported that political prisoner Mala Nazir had been kidnapped from the prison one day before his scheduled release.

In February, after Baroshky’s reporting was circulated widely in the local media, Zirka prison authorities sued the journalist for allegedly violating of Article 2 of the Misuse of Communication Devices law.

“We are deeply troubled by the sentencing of journalist Omed Baroshky over a Facebook post,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s interim MENA program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Iraqi Kurdish authorities must ensure that journalists are not criminalized for their reporting. We urge authorities to free Baroshky and allow him to continue his work without fear of retaliation.”

Hruri told CPJ that they presented the court with “multiple pieces of evidence proving that he is a journalist and should be tried under the press law, which does not allow imprisonment, but the court refused.”

Hruri said that while the court confirmed during the trial that Nazir had been transferred from the prison, “they alleged that Omed defamed the prison.”

CPJ contacted Aram Atrushi, the director of Zirka prison, for comment, but he declined to discuss the case.

Baroshky previously spent 18 months in jail from 2020 to 2022 under the same law over social media posts that criticized authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan. After his outlet Rast Media was raided and shut down in April 2023, he turned to Facebook as his main reporting platform.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The defendants were charged for alleged ties to the recently deceased exiled Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom Turkey’s government accused of maintaining a terrorist organization called FETÖ. Turkey has claimed that the failed 2016 military coup was organized by Gülen.

“Five Turkish journalists were once again tried because of alleged ties to the failed coup of 2016 without any credible evidence and found guilty again,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should not fight the appeals of those five journalists and stop using judicial measures to put pressure on the media, as such prolonged trials on baseless charges hurt Turkey’s press freedom record.”

The court found Yakup Çetin, a former reporter for the shuttered daily Yeni Hayat, guilty of membership in a terrorist organization and sentenced him to six years and three months, in line with the original 2018 sentencing.  

Ahmet Memiş, former editor for news websites Haberdar and Rotahaber; Cemal Azmi Kalyoncu, former reporter for the shuttered news magazine Aksiyon; Ünal Tanık, former Rotahaber editor; and Yetkin Yıldız, former editor for news website Aktif Haber; were found guilty of “knowingly and willingly aiding a [terrorist] organization” and sentenced to 25 months each. The court acquitted Ali Akkuş, former editor for the shuttered daily Zaman.

None of the defendants were rearrested pending appeal.

All six defendants pleaded not guilty and asked for acquittals due to a lack of evidence for terrorist activity. While the journalists were employed by pro-Gülen outlets in 2016, the court documents CPJ inspected showed that their reporting was used as evidence against them.

In 2018, all six journalists were found guilty of membership in a terrorist organization and received sentences of up to seven years and six months.

CPJ’s email to the chief prosecutor’s office in Istanbul for comment on the case did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

A key activist in protests against a 2016 toxic spill that polluted hundreds of kilometers of Vietnam’s coastline has been released early from prison, relatives told Radio Free Asia.

Tran Thi Xuan was freed on Jan. 17, some 21 months before the end of her nine-year sentence. She still has to serve five years’ probation for “activities aimed at overthrowing the people’s government.”

RFA was unable to contact Xuan, 48, to ask why she was released early.

Xuan was arrested after joining thousands of protesters outside the People’s Committee headquarters in Ha Tinh province’s Loc Ha district in April 2017 after a spill from a Formosa Plastics Group steel plant the previous year.

The demonstrators occupied the building for several hours demanding compensation for people affected by the disaster and calling on the government to investigate police shootings and beatings the previous night.

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She is the latest member of a Vietnamese human rights group to secure early release after being jailed for their part in the protest against the pollution that killed 115 tons of fish and devastated the tourism and fishing industries in four central provinces.

“Ms. Xuan is an official member of the Brotherhood for Democracy, elected by the association as deputy representative in the Central region,” said the group’s co-founder and president Nguyen Van Dai. “She is an active participant in the movement of Catholics protesting against Formosa’s environmental pollution and demanding compensation for the victims.”

Group members Nguyen Van Dai and Le Thi Thu Ha were transferred from prison to Germany in June 2018 before the end of their sentences. Former member, Nguyen Bac Truyen, was also transferred to Germany in 2023 after serving more than half an 11-year sentence.

The association’s former chairman, Pham Van Troi, finished his seven-year prison term on July 30. Four other members are serving sentences of between 12 and 13 years.

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.

Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier is coming home after nearly half a century behind bars. Just minutes before leaving office, former President Joe Biden granted Peltier clemency and ordered his release from prison to serve the remainder of his life sentence in home confinement. In a statement, Peltier said, “It’s finally over — I’m going home. I want to show the world I’m a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me.” Biden’s historic decision came after mounting calls by tribal leaders and supporters, and a community-led campaign that fought for Peltier’s freedom for decades. We speak with the NDN Collective’s Nick Tilsen, who just visited Leonard Peltier in prison after news of his sentence commutation, about fighting for Peltier’s freedom, his health and Trump’s executive orders attacking environmental rights and Indigenous sovereignty. “Indigenous people, we’re going to be on the frontlines fighting this administration.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Myanmar military killed 28 of its own soldiers and their detained relatives in an airstrike on insurgent positions near an ancient capital in Rakhine state, according to the rebels and a human rights group.

The Arakan Army, or AA, is fighting for control of Rakhine state and has made stunning gains over the past year, seizing 14 of its 17 townships from the control of the junta that seized power in an early 2021 coup.

The military has struck back with its air force, launching numerous bombing raids, which early on Sunday included a strike on Kyauk Se village, to the north of Mrauk U town.

“We don’t know the exact details yet but we do know that dozens are dead,” Myat Tun, director of the Arakan Human Rights Defenders and Promoters Association, told Radio Free Asia.

“There were no residents affected, it affected prisoners of war, including children,” he said.

The AA said 28 people were killed and 29 were wounded when the air force dropped three bombs on a temporary detention center run by the AA before dawn on Sunday.

“Those killed/injured in the bombing were prisoners and their families who were arrested in battles,” the AA said in a statement. “Military families were about to be released and were being temporarily detained in that place.”

Some of the wounded were in critical condition and the death toll could rise, the group said.

RFA tried to contact AA spokesperson, Khaing Thu Ka, and Rakhine state’s junta spokesperson, Hla Thein, for more information but neither of them responded by time of publication.

(AA Info Desk)

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Mrauk U is the ancient capital of Rakhine kings who were conquered by Burmese kings in 1784.

The AA has captured hundreds of junta soldiers, police officers and their family members, in its relentless advance across the state, from its far north on the border with Bangladesh, down to the south where AA fighters have launched probes into neighboring Ayeyarwady division.

Families of soldiers and police in Myanmar often live near them in family quarters.

This was not the first AA prison to be bombed.

In September, military aircraft struck a detention center and hospital in Pauktaw town, killing more than 50 prisoners of war, the AA said at the time.

On Jan. 8, junta airstrikes in Ramree township’s Kyauk Ni Maw village killed more than 50, including women and children, and some 500 homes were destroyed in a blaze that the bombing sparked.

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by RFA Staff.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

“Mahdi Ansary’s unjust sentence is indicative of the Taliban’s continued brutality and suppression of press freedom in Afghanistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Taliban authorities must immediately release Ansary and Sayed Rahim Saeedi, the other known detained journalist, as well as all anyother Afghan journalists imprisoned by the group without public knowledge.”

The start of Ansary’s prison term was set as October 5, 2024, when he was apprehended while returning home from his office in Kabul.

The General Directorate of Intelligence confirmed Ansary’s detention but withheld information regarding his whereabouts or the reasons for his arrest. Ansary, who is a member of Afghanistan’s persecuted Hazara ethnic minority, had been reporting on killings and atrocities against the community under Taliban rule.

On October 8, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told CPJ via messaging app that the journalist was working with “banned [media] networks” and had engaged in “illegal activities.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

After commuting the sentences of over 2,500 people imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, Joe Biden has set a record for most pardons and commutations by a U.S. president. But Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier remains behind bars. Over 120 tribal leaders are calling on Biden to grant clemency to Peltier as one of his final acts in office, warning this may be the last opportunity Peltier has for freedom. Peltier is 80 years old and has spent the majority of his life — nearly half a century — in prison despite a conviction riddled with irregularities and prosecutorial misconduct. In December, tribal leaders, including the NDN Collective’s Nick Tilsen, met with a pardon attorney at the Department of Justice to prepare a recommendation on Peltier’s case for Biden. With only a few days left in Biden’s term, Native Americans are eagerly anticipating his decision. “All of us see a little bit of ourselves in Leonard Peltier, and that’s why we fight so hard for him,” says Tilsen. “This is about paving a path forward that gives us the opportunity to have justice and begin to heal the relationship between the United States government and Indian people. And so, this decision is massive.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As part of CPJ’s holistic support for imprisoned journalists, prison support grants can be used alongside ongoing advocacy on behalf of journalists behind bars, and reporting and documentation of their case or trial. In 2024, CPJ supported 58 journalists with prison support, making up just over 10% of all individual financial grants journalists received from CPJ that year. That is the highest percentage CPJ has provided in prison support grants since 2020, and the largest-ever number of prison support grants in a single year, reflecting both the near record number of imprisoned journalists globally, and the scale of their needs behind bars. 

In 2024, prison support was holistically combined with legal support, medical support, and trauma support. A prison sentence can cause or exacerbate a journalist’s mental health or medical issues, which CPJ’s grants can help alleviate. Legal fees are often covered alongside a grant for prison support so journalists can appropriately fight cases against them. And highlighting the unjustly long prison sentences some journalists receive, CPJ has provided multiple prison support grants to individual journalists over several years. 

In 2024, the country that had the greatest need for CPJ’s prison support grants was Belarus. One of the world’s worst jailers of journalists, Belarus held 31 in prison as of December 1, 2024, according to CPJ’s prison data. During the year, CPJ for the first time helped almost the entire population of imprisoned journalists in a single country by providing a prison support grant to nearly every imprisoned Belarusian journalist through a partnership with the Belarusian Journalists Association (BAJ). In total, 23 journalists received grants, which not only covered basic necessities such as medication and food in prison but also allowed families to send care packages to their loved ones. Crucially, these grants fostered a feeling of solidarity, according to BAJ. That made the journalists feel less alone as they fight for their freedom. Imprisoned journalists who also received prison support grants in other countries mirrored the world’s top jailers of journalists in 2024, including Myanmar, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, and Iran.

Although not every journalist included in CPJ’s prison census received financial assistance from CPJ—some do not require it, while for others it may be too dangerous to receive foreign money—CPJ’s prison support grants underscore the complex and often appalling conditions many journalists endure in incarceration. 

CPJ also helped journalists once they were released from prison, supporting 15 journalists with post-prison support grants in 2024. These grants can help journalists put their lives back together and adjust to their newfound freedom. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Lucy Westcott.

Around Los Angeles, firefighting crews continue to battle the Palisades and Eaton fires and other smaller blazes. Nearly a thousand of the firefighters deployed to help contain the devastating fires are incarcerated. They have been working around the clock while earning as little as between $5.80 to $10.24 a day. For more on how California’s incarcerated firefighting program works, we speak to investigative journalist Keri Blakinger, who is herself formerly incarcerated, and who recently had to evacuate her home in Los Angeles.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The closed-door trial was held in the city’s pretrial detention center, with authorities reportedly classifying the case as secret.

“With Tajik authorities having all but obliterated the independent press over the past decade, the hefty sentence meted out to Ahmad Ibrohim shows the lengths they will go to stamp out critical reporting,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Tajik authorities should immediately release Ibrohim, along with seven other journalists serving lengthy sentences on retaliatory charges, and reform the country’s repressive media environment.”

Law enforcement officers in Kulob arrested Ibrohim on August 12 on charges of bribing a state security services officer.

Radio Ozodi, the local service of U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, reported that Ibrohim’s arrest appeared to have been a setup.

The only independent outlet in Tajikistan’s southern Khatlon Province, Payk has previously complained of pressure from local authorities in retaliation for critical reporting.

Radio Ozodi also reported that investigators questioned around a hundred local officials who had paid Payk for services such as for subscriptions or purchases of Ibrohim’s books, and that prosecutors summoned around 20 of them to appear in court — alleging that Ibrohim had extorted them.

Ibrohim denied the charges. In a letter to Rustam Emomali, the chairman of parliament and son of Tajikistan’s president, reviewed by CPJ, he said that none of those who testified in court had said that he extorted them, only that they subscribed to his newspaper. He described the extremism allegation as “risible,” saying he had spent his life fighting against extremism and had been threatened by Tajik members of the militant Islamic State group over his articles on the subject.

A source familiar with the journalist’s case, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation, told CPJ that Ibrohim had defended himself, as lawyers either demanded excessive fees or refused to take the case for fear of reprisal.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.