Elms Progressive Media

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime." So goes the old saying. Yet conditions in some American facilities are so obscene that they amount to a form of extrajudicial punishment. Doing time is not supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These, however, are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money. The United States boasts the world's highest incarceration rate, with close to 2.3 million people locked away in some 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Most are nasty places by design, aimed at punishment and exclusion rather than rehabilitation; while reliable numbers are hard to come by, at  last count  81,622 prisoners were being held in some form of isolation in state and federal prisons. Thousands more are being held...

PERMALINK Republican governors back Walker By: CNN's Gabriella Schwarz (CNN) - The Republican Governors Association is showing its support for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker with a new website amid extensive protests in the state. The website, StandWithScott.com that launched Tuesday provides a forum for individuals to watch the governor's televised chat Tuesday and offer their support through links to his Facebook page and twitter account. In a statement, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, the association's vice chairman, thanked Walker for his leadership. "Governor Scott Walker is taking the tough, but necessary, steps to balance the books in Wisconsin and get the state's fiscal house in order, and I applaud him for it," McDonnell said. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the group's policy chairman, said "It's good to know Governor Walker is watching out for the whole state, especially the people stuc...