Government Grants for All

Attitude is everything.(Schools)(School hopes new grant will turn around funding threat): An article from: The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR)

Attitude is everything.(Schools)(School hopes new grant will turn around funding threat): An article from: The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR)

This digital document is an article from The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), published by The Register Guard on September 30, 2002. The length of the article is 1244 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Tags: Around, Article, Attitude, Eugene, everything.SchoolsSchool, From, Funding, Grant, Hopes, RegisterGuard, Threat, Turn

LESOTHO: Government to Turn its Back on Textile Industry

Lesotho’s textile sector – the country’s largest employer – is regarded by many
as the only way out of the poverty trap in a tiny kingdom where more than half
of the population lives on less than 1.25 dollars a day. But what many do not
know is that the government and the World Bank have unofficially turned their
backs on the sector and will soon cut important subsidies.

Subsidies: Who Really Benefits? – INTER PRESS SERVICE

Tags: Back, Government, Industry, Lesotho, Textile, Turn

Turn profit analysis on Hilton Head airport

The May 31 story on the town of Port Royal’s 11th Street shrimp dock was most interesting.

Island Packet: Letters to the Editor

Tags: 'Head, Airport, Analysis, Hilton, Profit, Turn

Zimbabweans Turn to Indigenous Medicine

Zimbabwe’s government recently announced that the country had run out of the critical painkiller morphine. It was just the latest development in a debilitating health care crisis that has seen hospitals turn away patients because of drug shortages.

Southern Africa – INTER PRESS SERVICE

Tags: Indigenous, Medicine, Turn, Zimbabweans

When Turned Down For A Business Loan, Turn To A Business Grant

When Turned Down For A Business Loan, Turn To A Business Grant

Columbus, OH (PRWEB) November 3, 2008

The National Institute of Business Grants is encouraging entrepreneurs to look to business grants for financing, when turned down for a loan.

If you’ve applied for a business loan in the last six months, its a strong possibility that you were denied – even if you have good credit. This is because the current economic times have forced banks to be super cautious towards all loan applicants, even if you appear to be responsible.

This is even worse news for minorities and women who have always found it difficult to obtain business and personal loans from financial institutions. In this regard, many have turned to business grants as a solution. In 2008 alone, $ 360 billion dollars in grant money was awarded and more than 25% of that was given to individuals who wanted to start or expand a business.

Though many grant programs have been eliminated or reduced by corporations and government agencies, there are still plenty of opportunities available.

For instance, business grants continue to be awarded from the Small Business Administration, the Department of Commerce, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Business and Cooperative Programs, and many more. Even companies such as Miller Brewing Company, Ford Motors, and others are offering business grants through various competitions and contests.

The National Institute of Business Grants (http://www.Business-Grants.com) is encouraging entrepreneurs and small business owners to not give up in their efforts to seek financial support, but just to redirect their search towards business grants.

Helpful Resources Include:

http://www.Grants.gov – a central storehouse for information on over 1,000 grant programs that provides access to billions in annual awards.

http://www.Business-Grants.com – a useful reference to learn about frequently asked questions pertaining to business grants

http://www.Business.gov/guides/finance/financing/ – a directory of local and national business financing programs

###

©Copyright 1997-

, Vocus PRW Holdings, LLC.
Vocus, PRWeb, and Publicity Wire are trademarks or registered trademarks of Vocus, Inc. or Vocus PRW Holdings, LLC.

Tags: Business, Down, Grant, Loan, Turn, Turned

America’s most unwanted turn to the law

The US “supermax” prison system, which is built on the twin pillars of prolonged solitary confinement and extreme conditions, was put on trial this week by the inmates of one of the country’s toughest jails, the Ohio state penitentiary at Youngstown.

Prisoners who have spent years in isolation at the jail watched through the food slots cut knee-high in the steel cell doors as their lawyers listed the complaints against the prison conditions.

They described a regime more draconian than anything found anywhere else in the industrialised democracies, one that has been cited as violating international agreements on torture.

The prisoners spend 23 hours a day in small, sealed metal cells, described by one as living tombs. The 60 minutes of exercise allotted to each prisoner is also spent alone in a bare room. There is no outdoor yard.

The cell lights are never turned off, and prisoners who try to cover them to shield their eyes are penalised, setting back their chances of ever returning to a normal jail.

Prisoners leaving the cell block wear a set of rigid metal handcuffs, known as a black box, which allows no movement of the wrists. They are strip-searched on their way out and on their way back.

Brian Eskridge, imprisoned since 1990 for aggravated robbery, told the court: “It’s wild in there. You’ve got so many people isolated in there with no way of talking with anybody. You have a sense of anxiety and a sense of panic attack. You get isolated so much, the frustration just builds up inside you.”

In the last 20 years of the 20th century, the US built more than 50 super-maximum security prisons, designed as an intentionally merciless environment for the “worst of the worst”: serious felons considered too violent for ordinary prisons.

The get-tough solution was politically enormously popular at the time, when fear of crime was at its height. Some states, spurred by generous federal funding, built themselves two supermaxes.

“Buried in the crime bills of each new administration are subsidies for isolation units,” said Bonnie Kerness, a prison reform campaigner for a Quaker organisation, the American Friends Service Committee. “It’s a moneymaker for the states.”

The prison authorities defend the cells on the grounds that they make ordinary prisons safer for their inmates and create a secure working environment for the warders. They have the generally enthusiastic backing of the guards’ unions.

“I feel very strongly that we are achieving our mission,” the Ohio warden [governor], Todd Ishee, told this week’s trial. “First is always security. We’ve had no escapes and no serious assaults.”

But in the rush to lock up America’s most wanted, far more supermax cells were built than needed for true psychopaths – Ohio has 450 – and they have become a dumping ground for convicts unwanted by the country’s overcrowded jails: those from minority populations, the maladjusted and the mentally ill.

“They say they put purported gang members in there, but who’s a gang member becomes a whole political discussion. In some states it’s Asians, in others it’s native Americans,” Ms Kerness said.

“We also found a lot of mentally ill in these prisons. They don’t know what to do with them so the response is to put them in isolation.”

Some who are relatively stable when they arrive lose their grip on reality in the constant solitary confinement. At the Ohio state penitentiary, (OSP), psychotherapy is available, but the patients are shackled to a pole during the sessions.

After the opening arguments were heard in one of the cell blocks, the trial moved to a courtroom in nearby Akron. One by one, inmates in bright orange overalls were ushered in with shackles on their ankles and chains around their stomach, connected by a short leash to their cuffed wrists.

Keith Garner, a 44-year-old convicted murderer, told Judge James Gwin that he had been in jail since the age of 19, but his worst moment came when the OSP authorities decided to put metal strips around the steel doors of the cells, making them virtually airtight, to prevent disturbed prisoners throwing faeces or urine at the guards.

“Once they sealed it up, it’s like being in a tomb,” Garner said, explaining that it cut off the possibility of yelled conversations with other inmates.

Like Hannibal Lecter

Edward Tilley, serving time for attempted murder, was consigned to a 10x10ft (three metres square) isolation cell for stabbing another inmate who, he claimed, was trying to force him to have sex. Since then he has hardly seen the sky.

“I didn’t even know what time of day it was for those nine months,” he said.

David Clark, sent to the supermax because of a record of escape attempts, complained about the use of the black box. “It cuts my skin and my wrist swells up. Your family has to look at you chained up like Hannibal Lecter or something. They have to look at you in pain, squirming around.”

Human Rights Watch says that the conditions in supermax prisons violate the international covenant on civil and political rights and the convention against torture, both ratified by the US.

Prisoners have legally challenged the system in Wisconsin, Illinois and Virginia. Some cases focused on the constitutionality of their treatment, arguing it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The Ohio prisoners, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, say they are denied due process, because the decisions to place them in supermax and keep them there are arbitrary.

For example, most of the prisoners giving evidence were sent to the OSP for acts of violence against other prisoners. But Daryl Heard was transferred for smuggling marijuana into his cell.

Review boards are meant to assess the prisoners’ behaviour according to an honour points system, with a view to returning them to lower-security prisons better equipped to prepare them for eventual release into the outside world. But their recommendations are commonly overruled by the warden.

Lawyers for the warden argued that he and his officers should be given the discretion to judge when inmates had earned the right to be reclassified. But civil rights lawyers believe that other factors, political and economic, are in play.

“Obviously there’s a pressure, once you build one of these places, to use the beds for prisoners from other overcrowded prisons,” said Jules Lobel, from the Centre for Constitutional Rights. “They have to justify it.”

Rules and practices

Inmates can have four books each, two of which must be religious, and six photographs

They spend 23 hours a day in their cells, and one hour alone in an exercise room

On leaving the cell block they are strip-searched, shackled and accompanied by at least two guards

Supermax prisons hold 20,000 people, 2% of the total prison population

There are supermaxes in 42 states and the District of Columbia, and a federal supermax in Florence, Colorado

Other notorious supermaxes include:

Boscobel, Wisconsin – successfully sued by inmates for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, and forced to stop taking mentally ill prisoners.

Wallens Ridge, Virginia – found last year to be taking overspill prisoners from Connecticut.

Tags: America's, Most, Turn, unwanted

America’s most unwanted turn to the law

The US “supermax” prison system, which is built on the twin pillars of prolonged solitary confinement and extreme conditions, was put on trial this week by the inmates of one of the country’s toughest jails, the Ohio state penitentiary at Youngstown.

Prisoners who have spent years in isolation at the jail watched through the food slots cut knee-high in the steel cell doors as their lawyers listed the complaints against the prison conditions.

They described a regime more draconian than anything found anywhere else in the industrialised democracies, one that has been cited as violating international agreements on torture.

The prisoners spend 23 hours a day in small, sealed metal cells, described by one as living tombs. The 60 minutes of exercise allotted to each prisoner is also spent alone in a bare room. There is no outdoor yard.

The cell lights are never turned off, and prisoners who try to cover them to shield their eyes are penalised, setting back their chances of ever returning to a normal jail.

Prisoners leaving the cell block wear a set of rigid metal handcuffs, known as a black box, which allows no movement of the wrists. They are strip-searched on their way out and on their way back.

Brian Eskridge, imprisoned since 1990 for aggravated robbery, told the court: “It’s wild in there. You’ve got so many people isolated in there with no way of talking with anybody. You have a sense of anxiety and a sense of panic attack. You get isolated so much, the frustration just builds up inside you.”

In the last 20 years of the 20th century, the US built more than 50 super-maximum security prisons, designed as an intentionally merciless environment for the “worst of the worst”: serious felons considered too violent for ordinary prisons.

The get-tough solution was politically enormously popular at the time, when fear of crime was at its height. Some states, spurred by generous federal funding, built themselves two supermaxes.

“Buried in the crime bills of each new administration are subsidies for isolation units,” said Bonnie Kerness, a prison reform campaigner for a Quaker organisation, the American Friends Service Committee. “It’s a moneymaker for the states.”

The prison authorities defend the cells on the grounds that they make ordinary prisons safer for their inmates and create a secure working environment for the warders. They have the generally enthusiastic backing of the guards’ unions.

“I feel very strongly that we are achieving our mission,” the Ohio warden [governor], Todd Ishee, told this week’s trial. “First is always security. We’ve had no escapes and no serious assaults.”

But in the rush to lock up America’s most wanted, far more supermax cells were built than needed for true psychopaths – Ohio has 450 – and they have become a dumping ground for convicts unwanted by the country’s overcrowded jails: those from minority populations, the maladjusted and the mentally ill.

“They say they put purported gang members in there, but who’s a gang member becomes a whole political discussion. In some states it’s Asians, in others it’s native Americans,” Ms Kerness said.

“We also found a lot of mentally ill in these prisons. They don’t know what to do with them so the response is to put them in isolation.”

Some who are relatively stable when they arrive lose their grip on reality in the constant solitary confinement. At the Ohio state penitentiary, (OSP), psychotherapy is available, but the patients are shackled to a pole during the sessions.

After the opening arguments were heard in one of the cell blocks, the trial moved to a courtroom in nearby Akron. One by one, inmates in bright orange overalls were ushered in with shackles on their ankles and chains around their stomach, connected by a short leash to their cuffed wrists.

Keith Garner, a 44-year-old convicted murderer, told Judge James Gwin that he had been in jail since the age of 19, but his worst moment came when the OSP authorities decided to put metal strips around the steel doors of the cells, making them virtually airtight, to prevent disturbed prisoners throwing faeces or urine at the guards.

“Once they sealed it up, it’s like being in a tomb,” Garner said, explaining that it cut off the possibility of yelled conversations with other inmates.

Like Hannibal Lecter

Edward Tilley, serving time for attempted murder, was consigned to a 10x10ft (three metres square) isolation cell for stabbing another inmate who, he claimed, was trying to force him to have sex. Since then he has hardly seen the sky.

“I didn’t even know what time of day it was for those nine months,” he said.

David Clark, sent to the supermax because of a record of escape attempts, complained about the use of the black box. “It cuts my skin and my wrist swells up. Your family has to look at you chained up like Hannibal Lecter or something. They have to look at you in pain, squirming around.”

Human Rights Watch says that the conditions in supermax prisons violate the international covenant on civil and political rights and the convention against torture, both ratified by the US.

Prisoners have legally challenged the system in Wisconsin, Illinois and Virginia. Some cases focused on the constitutionality of their treatment, arguing it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The Ohio prisoners, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, say they are denied due process, because the decisions to place them in supermax and keep them there are arbitrary.

For example, most of the prisoners giving evidence were sent to the OSP for acts of violence against other prisoners. But Daryl Heard was transferred for smuggling marijuana into his cell.

Review boards are meant to assess the prisoners’ behaviour according to an honour points system, with a view to returning them to lower-security prisons better equipped to prepare them for eventual release into the outside world. But their recommendations are commonly overruled by the warden.

Lawyers for the warden argued that he and his officers should be given the discretion to judge when inmates had earned the right to be reclassified. But civil rights lawyers believe that other factors, political and economic, are in play.

“Obviously there’s a pressure, once you build one of these places, to use the beds for prisoners from other overcrowded prisons,” said Jules Lobel, from the Centre for Constitutional Rights. “They have to justify it.”

Rules and practices

Inmates can have four books each, two of which must be religious, and six photographs

They spend 23 hours a day in their cells, and one hour alone in an exercise room

On leaving the cell block they are strip-searched, shackled and accompanied by at least two guards

Supermax prisons hold 20,000 people, 2% of the total prison population

There are supermaxes in 42 states and the District of Columbia, and a federal supermax in Florence, Colorado

Other notorious supermaxes include:

Boscobel, Wisconsin – successfully sued by inmates for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, and forced to stop taking mentally ill prisoners.

Wallens Ridge, Virginia – found last year to be taking overspill prisoners from Connecticut.

Tags: America's, Most, Turn, unwanted

America’s most unwanted turn to the law

The US “supermax” prison system, which is built on the twin pillars of prolonged solitary confinement and extreme conditions, was put on trial this week by the inmates of one of the country’s toughest jails, the Ohio state penitentiary at Youngstown.

Prisoners who have spent years in isolation at the jail watched through the food slots cut knee-high in the steel cell doors as their lawyers listed the complaints against the prison conditions.

They described a regime more draconian than anything found anywhere else in the industrialised democracies, one that has been cited as violating international agreements on torture.

The prisoners spend 23 hours a day in small, sealed metal cells, described by one as living tombs. The 60 minutes of exercise allotted to each prisoner is also spent alone in a bare room. There is no outdoor yard.

The cell lights are never turned off, and prisoners who try to cover them to shield their eyes are penalised, setting back their chances of ever returning to a normal jail.

Prisoners leaving the cell block wear a set of rigid metal handcuffs, known as a black box, which allows no movement of the wrists. They are strip-searched on their way out and on their way back.

Brian Eskridge, imprisoned since 1990 for aggravated robbery, told the court: “It’s wild in there. You’ve got so many people isolated in there with no way of talking with anybody. You have a sense of anxiety and a sense of panic attack. You get isolated so much, the frustration just builds up inside you.”

In the last 20 years of the 20th century, the US built more than 50 super-maximum security prisons, designed as an intentionally merciless environment for the “worst of the worst”: serious felons considered too violent for ordinary prisons.

The get-tough solution was politically enormously popular at the time, when fear of crime was at its height. Some states, spurred by generous federal funding, built themselves two supermaxes.

“Buried in the crime bills of each new administration are subsidies for isolation units,” said Bonnie Kerness, a prison reform campaigner for a Quaker organisation, the American Friends Service Committee. “It’s a moneymaker for the states.”

The prison authorities defend the cells on the grounds that they make ordinary prisons safer for their inmates and create a secure working environment for the warders. They have the generally enthusiastic backing of the guards’ unions.

“I feel very strongly that we are achieving our mission,” the Ohio warden [governor], Todd Ishee, told this week’s trial. “First is always security. We’ve had no escapes and no serious assaults.”

But in the rush to lock up America’s most wanted, far more supermax cells were built than needed for true psychopaths – Ohio has 450 – and they have become a dumping ground for convicts unwanted by the country’s overcrowded jails: those from minority populations, the maladjusted and the mentally ill.

“They say they put purported gang members in there, but who’s a gang member becomes a whole political discussion. In some states it’s Asians, in others it’s native Americans,” Ms Kerness said.

“We also found a lot of mentally ill in these prisons. They don’t know what to do with them so the response is to put them in isolation.”

Some who are relatively stable when they arrive lose their grip on reality in the constant solitary confinement. At the Ohio state penitentiary, (OSP), psychotherapy is available, but the patients are shackled to a pole during the sessions.

After the opening arguments were heard in one of the cell blocks, the trial moved to a courtroom in nearby Akron. One by one, inmates in bright orange overalls were ushered in with shackles on their ankles and chains around their stomach, connected by a short leash to their cuffed wrists.

Keith Garner, a 44-year-old convicted murderer, told Judge James Gwin that he had been in jail since the age of 19, but his worst moment came when the OSP authorities decided to put metal strips around the steel doors of the cells, making them virtually airtight, to prevent disturbed prisoners throwing faeces or urine at the guards.

“Once they sealed it up, it’s like being in a tomb,” Garner said, explaining that it cut off the possibility of yelled conversations with other inmates.

Like Hannibal Lecter

Edward Tilley, serving time for attempted murder, was consigned to a 10x10ft (three metres square) isolation cell for stabbing another inmate who, he claimed, was trying to force him to have sex. Since then he has hardly seen the sky.

“I didn’t even know what time of day it was for those nine months,” he said.

David Clark, sent to the supermax because of a record of escape attempts, complained about the use of the black box. “It cuts my skin and my wrist swells up. Your family has to look at you chained up like Hannibal Lecter or something. They have to look at you in pain, squirming around.”

Human Rights Watch says that the conditions in supermax prisons violate the international covenant on civil and political rights and the convention against torture, both ratified by the US.

Prisoners have legally challenged the system in Wisconsin, Illinois and Virginia. Some cases focused on the constitutionality of their treatment, arguing it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The Ohio prisoners, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, say they are denied due process, because the decisions to place them in supermax and keep them there are arbitrary.

For example, most of the prisoners giving evidence were sent to the OSP for acts of violence against other prisoners. But Daryl Heard was transferred for smuggling marijuana into his cell.

Review boards are meant to assess the prisoners’ behaviour according to an honour points system, with a view to returning them to lower-security prisons better equipped to prepare them for eventual release into the outside world. But their recommendations are commonly overruled by the warden.

Lawyers for the warden argued that he and his officers should be given the discretion to judge when inmates had earned the right to be reclassified. But civil rights lawyers believe that other factors, political and economic, are in play.

“Obviously there’s a pressure, once you build one of these places, to use the beds for prisoners from other overcrowded prisons,” said Jules Lobel, from the Centre for Constitutional Rights. “They have to justify it.”

Rules and practices

Inmates can have four books each, two of which must be religious, and six photographs

They spend 23 hours a day in their cells, and one hour alone in an exercise room

On leaving the cell block they are strip-searched, shackled and accompanied by at least two guards

Supermax prisons hold 20,000 people, 2% of the total prison population

There are supermaxes in 42 states and the District of Columbia, and a federal supermax in Florence, Colorado

Other notorious supermaxes include:

Boscobel, Wisconsin – successfully sued by inmates for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, and forced to stop taking mentally ill prisoners.

Wallens Ridge, Virginia – found last year to be taking overspill prisoners from Connecticut.

Tags: America's, Most, Turn, unwanted

Turn Left for Growth

Both the left and the right say they stand for economic growth. So should voters trying to decide between the two simply look at it as a matter of choosing alternative management teams?

If only matters were so easy! Part of the problem concerns the role of luck. America’s economy was blessed in the 1990s with low energy prices, a high pace of innovation, and a China increasingly offering high-quality goods at decreasing prices, all of which combined to produce low inflation and rapid growth.

President Clinton and then-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, deserve little credit for this – though, to be sure, bad policies could have messed things up. By contrast, the problems faced today – high energy and food prices and a crumbling financial system – have, to a large extent, been brought about by bad policies.

There are, indeed, big differences in growth strategies, which make different outcomes highly likely. The first difference concerns how growth itself is conceived. Growth is not just a matter of increasing GDP. It must be sustainable: growth based on environmental degradation, a debt-financed consumption binge, or the exploitation of scarce natural resources, without reinvesting the proceeds, is not sustainable.

Growth also must be inclusive; at least a majority of citizens must benefit. Trickle-down economics does not work: an increase in GDP can actually leave most citizens worse off. America’s recent growth was neither economically sustainable nor inclusive. Most Americans are worse off today than they were seven years ago.

But there need not be a trade-off between inequality and growth. Governments can enhance growth by increasing inclusiveness. A country’s most valuable resource is its people. So it is essential to ensure that everyone can live up to their potential, which requires educational opportunities for all.

A modern economy also requires risk-taking. Individuals are more willing to take risks if there is a good safety net. If not, citizens may demand protection from foreign competition. Social protection is more efficient than protectionism.

Failures to promote social solidarity can have other costs, not the least of which are the social and private expenditures required to protect property and incarcerate criminals. It is estimated that within a few years, America will have more people working in the security business than in education. A year in prison can cost more than a year at Harvard. The cost of incarcerating two million Americans – one of the highest per capita rates (pdf) in the world – should be viewed as a subtraction from GDP, yet it is added on.

A second major difference between left and right concerns the role of the state in promoting development. The left understands that the government’s role in providing infrastructure and education, developing technology, and even acting as an entrepreneur is vital. Government laid the foundations of the internet and the modern biotechnology revolutions. In the 19th century, research at America’s government-supported universities provided the basis for the agricultural revolution. Government then brought these advances to millions of American farmers. Small business loans have been pivotal in creating not only new businesses, but whole new industries.

The final difference may seem odd: the left now understands markets, and the role that they can and should play in the economy. The right, especially in America, does not. The new right, typified by the Bush-Cheney administration, is really old corporatism in a new guise.

These are not libertarians. They believe in a strong state with robust executive powers, but one used in defense of established interests, with little attention to market principles. The list of examples is long, but it includes subsidies to large corporate farms, tariffs to protect the steel industry, and, most recently, the mega-bailouts of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. But the inconsistency between rhetoric and reality is long-standing: protectionism expanded under Reagan, including through the imposition of so-called voluntary export restraints on Japanese cars.

By contrast, the new left is trying to make markets work. Unfettered markets do not operate well on their own – a conclusion reinforced by the current financial debacle. Defenders of markets sometimes admit that they do fail, even disastrously, but they claim that markets are “self-correcting.” During the Great Depression, similar arguments were heard: the government need not do anything, because markets would restore the economy to full employment in the long run. But, as John Maynard Keynes famously put it, in the long run we are all dead.

Markets are not self-correcting in the relevant time frame. No government can sit idly by as a country goes into recession or depression, even when caused by the excessive greed of bankers or misjudgment of risks by security markets and rating agencies. But if governments are going to pay the economy’s hospital bills, they must act to make it less likely that hospitalization will be needed. The right’s deregulation mantra was simply wrong, and we are now paying the price. And the price tag – in terms of lost output – will be high, perhaps more than $1.5trn in the US alone.

The right often traces its intellectual parentage to Adam Smith, but while Smith recognized the power of markets, he also recognized their limits. Even in his era, businesses found that they could increase profits more easily by conspiring to raise prices than by producing innovative products more efficiently. There is a need for strong anti-trust laws.

It is easy to host a party. For the moment, everyone can feel good. Promoting sustainable growth is much harder. Today, in contrast to the right, the left has a coherent agenda, one that offers not only higher growth, but also social justice. For voters, the choice should be easy.

Tags: Growth, Left, Turn

America’s most unwanted turn to the law

The US “supermax” prison system, which is built on the twin pillars of prolonged solitary confinement and extreme conditions, was put on trial this week by the inmates of one of the country’s toughest jails, the Ohio state penitentiary at Youngstown.

Prisoners who have spent years in isolation at the jail watched through the food slots cut knee-high in the steel cell doors as their lawyers listed the complaints against the prison conditions.

They described a regime more draconian than anything found anywhere else in the industrialised democracies, one that has been cited as violating international agreements on torture.

The prisoners spend 23 hours a day in small, sealed metal cells, described by one as living tombs. The 60 minutes of exercise allotted to each prisoner is also spent alone in a bare room. There is no outdoor yard.

The cell lights are never turned off, and prisoners who try to cover them to shield their eyes are penalised, setting back their chances of ever returning to a normal jail.

Prisoners leaving the cell block wear a set of rigid metal handcuffs, known as a black box, which allows no movement of the wrists. They are strip-searched on their way out and on their way back.

Brian Eskridge, imprisoned since 1990 for aggravated robbery, told the court: “It’s wild in there. You’ve got so many people isolated in there with no way of talking with anybody. You have a sense of anxiety and a sense of panic attack. You get isolated so much, the frustration just builds up inside you.”

In the last 20 years of the 20th century, the US built more than 50 super-maximum security prisons, designed as an intentionally merciless environment for the “worst of the worst”: serious felons considered too violent for ordinary prisons.

The get-tough solution was politically enormously popular at the time, when fear of crime was at its height. Some states, spurred by generous federal funding, built themselves two supermaxes.

“Buried in the crime bills of each new administration are subsidies for isolation units,” said Bonnie Kerness, a prison reform campaigner for a Quaker organisation, the American Friends Service Committee. “It’s a moneymaker for the states.”

The prison authorities defend the cells on the grounds that they make ordinary prisons safer for their inmates and create a secure working environment for the warders. They have the generally enthusiastic backing of the guards’ unions.

“I feel very strongly that we are achieving our mission,” the Ohio warden [governor], Todd Ishee, told this week’s trial. “First is always security. We’ve had no escapes and no serious assaults.”

But in the rush to lock up America’s most wanted, far more supermax cells were built than needed for true psychopaths – Ohio has 450 – and they have become a dumping ground for convicts unwanted by the country’s overcrowded jails: those from minority populations, the maladjusted and the mentally ill.

“They say they put purported gang members in there, but who’s a gang member becomes a whole political discussion. In some states it’s Asians, in others it’s native Americans,” Ms Kerness said.

“We also found a lot of mentally ill in these prisons. They don’t know what to do with them so the response is to put them in isolation.”

Some who are relatively stable when they arrive lose their grip on reality in the constant solitary confinement. At the Ohio state penitentiary, (OSP), psychotherapy is available, but the patients are shackled to a pole during the sessions.

After the opening arguments were heard in one of the cell blocks, the trial moved to a courtroom in nearby Akron. One by one, inmates in bright orange overalls were ushered in with shackles on their ankles and chains around their stomach, connected by a short leash to their cuffed wrists.

Keith Garner, a 44-year-old convicted murderer, told Judge James Gwin that he had been in jail since the age of 19, but his worst moment came when the OSP authorities decided to put metal strips around the steel doors of the cells, making them virtually airtight, to prevent disturbed prisoners throwing faeces or urine at the guards.

“Once they sealed it up, it’s like being in a tomb,” Garner said, explaining that it cut off the possibility of yelled conversations with other inmates.

Like Hannibal Lecter

Edward Tilley, serving time for attempted murder, was consigned to a 10x10ft (three metres square) isolation cell for stabbing another inmate who, he claimed, was trying to force him to have sex. Since then he has hardly seen the sky.

“I didn’t even know what time of day it was for those nine months,” he said.

David Clark, sent to the supermax because of a record of escape attempts, complained about the use of the black box. “It cuts my skin and my wrist swells up. Your family has to look at you chained up like Hannibal Lecter or something. They have to look at you in pain, squirming around.”

Human Rights Watch says that the conditions in supermax prisons violate the international covenant on civil and political rights and the convention against torture, both ratified by the US.

Prisoners have legally challenged the system in Wisconsin, Illinois and Virginia. Some cases focused on the constitutionality of their treatment, arguing it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The Ohio prisoners, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, say they are denied due process, because the decisions to place them in supermax and keep them there are arbitrary.

For example, most of the prisoners giving evidence were sent to the OSP for acts of violence against other prisoners. But Daryl Heard was transferred for smuggling marijuana into his cell.

Review boards are meant to assess the prisoners’ behaviour according to an honour points system, with a view to returning them to lower-security prisons better equipped to prepare them for eventual release into the outside world. But their recommendations are commonly overruled by the warden.

Lawyers for the warden argued that he and his officers should be given the discretion to judge when inmates had earned the right to be reclassified. But civil rights lawyers believe that other factors, political and economic, are in play.

“Obviously there’s a pressure, once you build one of these places, to use the beds for prisoners from other overcrowded prisons,” said Jules Lobel, from the Centre for Constitutional Rights. “They have to justify it.”

Rules and practices

Inmates can have four books each, two of which must be religious, and six photographs

They spend 23 hours a day in their cells, and one hour alone in an exercise room

On leaving the cell block they are strip-searched, shackled and accompanied by at least two guards

Supermax prisons hold 20,000 people, 2% of the total prison population

There are supermaxes in 42 states and the District of Columbia, and a federal supermax in Florence, Colorado

Other notorious supermaxes include:

Boscobel, Wisconsin – successfully sued by inmates for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, and forced to stop taking mentally ill prisoners.

Wallens Ridge, Virginia – found last year to be taking overspill prisoners from Connecticut.

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