Cress Welsing: The Definition of Racism White Supremacy
Dr. Blynd: The Definition of Racism
Anon: What is Racism/White Supremacy?
Dr. Bobby Wright: The Psychopathic Racial Personality
The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy)
What is the First Step in Counter Racism?
Genocide: a system of white survival
'Racism is a behavioral system for survival'
Fear of annihilation drives white racism
Dr. Blynd: The Definition of Caucasian
Where are all the Black Jurors?
The War Against Black Males: Black on Black Violence Caused by White Supremacy/Racism
Brazen Police Officers and the Forfeiture of Freedom
White Domination, Black Criminality
Fear of a Colored Planet Fuels Racism: Global White Population Shrinking, Less than 10%
Race is Not Real but Racism is
Chomsky on "Reserving the Right to Bomb Niggers."
A Goal of the Media is to Make White Dominance and Control Over Everything Seem Natural
Spike Lee's Mike Tyson and Don King
Black Power in a White Supremacy System
The Image and the Christian Concept of God as a White Man
Why do White Americans need to criminalize significant segments of the African American population?
Who Told You that you were Black or Latino or Hispanic or Asian? White People Did
Malcolm X: "We Have a Common Enemy"
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 01:46PM The US is not committed to spreading democracy and freedom in the world. "Freedom" and "democracy" are concepts it exploits to undermine regimes that refuse to serve its interests. Indeed, there is virtually an inverse relationship between how democratic a country is in the Muslim world and how closely allied the US is to it.
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:59AM 
RUSH: The people that own Mickey D's don't just have piles of money in the back that they're hoarding and trying to keep away from their employees because they're mean and they don't like their employees and they really hope their employees have miserable lives. They're trying to stay in business. Across the street's a Burger King or something else that's trying to sell for lower prices than what they have.
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:51AM Louisiana is among the 27 states plus Washington, D.C. that has a compensation law for the wrongly convicted, but several Louisiana exonerees said it doesn’t make up for the injustice of being locked up and everything that comes with it, reported The Advocate.
Louisiana’s compensation statute provides $25,000 per year of wrongful incarceration with a cap of $250,000 plus up to $80,000 for loss of life opportunities for exonerees who have proved factual innocence. For John Thompson, who was wrongfully convicted of a 1985 murder and sent to death row, the money can’t give him back the 18 years he lost while behind bars.
“It was like hell. It was worse than hell,” said Thompson, now 50, of the 14 years he spent on Death Row. “If that is not cruel and unusual punishment, not only to you but to your whole family, then I don’t know what is.”
While facing his seventh execution date, a private investigator hired by his appellate attorneys discovered scientific evidence of Thompson’s innocence that had been concealed for 15 years by the New Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office. When he released and exonerated in 2003, the state of Louisiana gave him $10 and a bus ticket. He sued the District Attorney’s Office. A jury awarded him $14 million, one for each year on death row. When Louisiana appealed, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2011, Justice Clarence Thomas issued the majority 5-4 decision in Connick v. Thompson that the prosecutor’s office could not be held liable.
Thompson and other exonerees like Rickie Johnson, who served more than a decade in prison, are shortchanged by the law that only entitles them compensation for 10 years.
“I don’t think exonerees like myself that spent a quarter century in prison for a crime they didn’t commit should be scuffling as hard as we’re scuffling,” said Johnson, who learned leather work at Angola and opened a shop in Leesville after winning his freedom. “I’ve been out since 2008, and I still can’t afford to buy my home as every grown-up should have at my age.”
Rep. Herbert B. Dixon (D-Alexandria) plans to reintroduce a bill next legislative session that would double the current compensation rate. He would also like establish a court cost dedicated to fund the state’s Innocence Compensation Fund.
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:49AM Illinois police will have to record more interrogations of criminal suspects under legislation Gov. Pat Quinn signed Monday that aims to prevent false confessions and wrongful convictions.
The law expands on legislation passed in 2003 mandating the recording of homicide interrogations. The new requirements will take effect in phases over the next three years, and by June 2016, police will have to record interrogations of people suspected in any of eight violent felonies, including aggravated criminal sexual assault, aggravated battery with a gun and armed robbery.
Rep. Scott Drury, D-Highwood, had originally proposed earlier this year that police record interrogations in all felonies, a measure some law enforcement authorities, including the Cook County state's attorney's office, opposed.
Advocates of recording and prosecutors praised the narrower measure's passage, saying it would shield police from bogus allegations of coercion while protecting suspects from overly aggressive interrogation methods that have produced false confessions.
"I think (the law) will go a long way toward preventing wrongful convictions," said Thomas Sullivan, a Chicago attorney and recording proponent who helped draft the legislation.
Under the new law, courts will presume inadmissible any statement a suspect in one of the specified felonies makes unless the interrogation is either audio- or video-recorded. The first incremental expansion of felonies that must be recorded will happen next June.
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:48AM Dunkin’ Donuts has apologized and pulled advertising for its campaign in Thailand that shows a model with blackface makeup and the caption, “Break every rule of deliciousness.”
The Thailand branch of Dunkin’ Donuts initially responded that the outrage amounted to “paranoid American thinking.” In fact, Dunkin’s Thailand CEO Nadim Salhani noted, their sales have been up.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” Salhani said.. “We’re not allowed to use black to promote our doughnuts? I don’t get it. What’s the big fuss? What if the product was white and I painted someone white, would that be racist?”
But Human Rights Watch said it is unacceptable that an international brand adopt this line of marketing.
“It’s both bizarre and racist that Dunkin’ Donuts thinks that it must color a woman’s skin black and accentuate her lips with bright pink lipstick to sell a chocolate doughnut,” said Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “Dunkin’ Donuts should immediately withdraw this ad, publicly apologize to those it’s offended and ensure this never happens again.”
The corporate office responded more apologetically than the Thailand franchise and announced it would end the campaign. “Dunkin’ Donuts recognizes the insensitivity of this spot,” Chief Communications Officer Karen Raskopf said. “On behalf of our Thailand franchisee and our company, we apologize for any offense it caused.”
Other major companies in the U.S. have crossed the line before. For its 2012 Super Bowl ad, Acura sought a “not too dark” car dealer. Meanwhile, Mountain Dew, owned by Pepsi, was responsible for a commercial dubbed “arguably the most racist” in history, which promoted a series of stereotypes about black men and violence.
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:45AM The hosts of the nation’s leading political talk shows pressed Secretary of State John Kerry on the administration’s decision to seek Congressional authorization for a military strike against Syria, arguing that delaying military action undermined America’s resolve and weakened President Obama.
Though Kerry, who appeared on all five political programs, insisted that Obama’s decision would allow for the proper constitutional process and permit the administration “time to reach out to allies, friends around the world, build support on an international basis,” the hosts appeared to dismiss any need for Congressional deliberations or public debate about the administration’s evidence or the potential consequences of a military attack. NBC’s David Gregory, Fox’s Chris Wallace, CBS’s Major Garrett, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, and CNN’s Gloria Borger went beyond inquiring about the political timing of Obama’s decision to consult with Congress on Saturday. They repeatedly claimed that Obama’s decision to hold off on immediate military action emboldened America’s adversaries and undermined the nation’s “credibility”:
– GREGORY: “Do you feel undermined, do you think the United States has undermined its leverage in the world, its credibility having ramped up the specter of military action as being imminent and then saying, now we’re going to go to Congress first?”
– WALLACE: “He’s going to wait nine days for Congress to come back before he takes any action, and then he goes off an plays golf? … Haven’t you handed Syria and Iran at least a temporary victory?”
– BORGER: “But if Congress was to vote no and then the president was to strike, wouldn’t that set up a Constitutional crisis?” [MORE]
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:44AM NPR pushed the myth that increasing the minimum wage would result in job losses. However, a wealth of economic evidence disputes the claim that minimum wage hikes are job killers.
In an August 29 post on the nationwide fast-food workers' strike, NPR gave credence to the myth that increasing the minimum wage forces businesses to cut jobs. Rather than turning to economists, the piece, which described the plight of fast food workers, quoted a restaurant industry lobbyist who claimed that increasing the minimum wage would kill jobs:
Industry officials say a sharp increase in the minimum wage would kill jobs.
"Doubling the minimum wage is absolutely, positively going to reduce the number of jobs," says Scott DeFife, executive vice president of policy and government affairs at the National Restaurant Association. He says the industry is proud that one-third of all American adults got their start in restaurant jobs. Part-time work and flexible schedules are a big attraction for many, he says, and he points out that half of those making the minimum wage are teenagers.
Above all, DeFife says, the restaurant industry offers opportunity. "It's there for people who have had economic difficulties in the past, or who may not have finished four years of a college or university program," he says.
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:36AM Bowing to Tea Party pressure, Alabama State Senator Bill Holtzclaw said this week that he thinks The Bluest Eye, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison's novel about a little black girl who wishes for blue eyes, should be banned in schools. He only made this statement after GOP members criticized him for opposing a repeal of the federal Common Core standards. The Bluest Eye is on the 11th grade reading list for the Common Core, a set of standards that has been adapted by more than 40 states.
Hotzclaw told the Alabama Media Group, "The book is just completely objectionable, from language to the content."
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:12AM I've previously written about the cognitive bias problem in state crime labs. This is the bias that can creep into the work of crime lab analysts when they report to, say, a state police agency, or the state attorney general. If they're considered part of the state's "team" -- if performance reviews and job assessments are done by police or prosecutors -- even the most honest and conscientious of analysts are at risk of cognitive bias. Hence, the countless and continuing crime lab scandals we've seen over the last couple decades. And this of course doesn't even touch on the more blatant examples of outright corruption.
In a new paper for the journal Criminal Justice Ethics, Roger Koppl and Meghan Sacks look at how the criminal justice system actually incentivizes wrongful convictions. In their section on state crime labs, they discover some astonishing new information about how many of these labs are funded.
Funding crime labs through court-assessed fees creates another channel for bias to enter crime lab analyses. In jurisdictions with this practice the crime lab receives a sum of money for each conviction of a given type. Ray Wickenheiser says, ‘‘Collection of court costs is the only stable source of funding for the Acadiana Crime Lab. $10 is received for each guilty plea or verdict from each speeding ticket, and $50 from each DWI (Driving While Impaired) and drug offense.’’
In Broward County, Florida, ‘‘Monies deposited in the Trust Fund are principally court costs assessed upon conviction of driving or boating under the influence ($50) or selling, manufacturing, delivery, or possession of a controlled substance ($100).’’
Several state statutory schemes require defendants to pay crime laboratory fees upon conviction. North Carolina General Statutes require, ‘‘[f]or the services of’’ the state or local crime lab, that judges in criminal cases assess a $600 fee to be charged ‘‘upon conviction’’ and remitted to the law enforcement agency containing the lab whenever that lab ‘‘performed DNA analysis of the crime, tests of bodily fluids of the defendant for the presence of alcohol or controlled substances, or analysis of any controlled substance possessed by the defendant or the defendant’s agent.’’
Illinois crime labs receive fees upon convictions for sex offenses, controlled substance offenses, and those involving driving under the influence. Mississippi crime labs require crime laboratory fees for various conviction types, including arson, aiding suicide, and driving while intoxicated.
Similar provisions exist in Alabama, New Mexico, Kentucky, New Jersey, Virginia, and, until recently, Michigan. Other states have broadened the scope even further. Washington statutes require a $100 crime lab fee for any conviction that involves lab analysis. Kansas statutes require offenders ‘‘to pay a separate court cost of $400 for every individual offense if forensic science or laboratory services or forensic computer examination services are provided in connection with the investigation.’’
In addition to those already listed, the following states also require crime lab fees in connection with various conviction types: Arizona, California, Missouri, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.
Think about how these fee structures play out in the day-to-day work in these labs. Every analyst knows that a test result implicating a suspect will result in a fee paid to the lab. Every result that clears a suspect means no fee. They're literally being paid to provide the analysis to win convictions. Their findings are then presented to juries as the careful, meticulous work of an objective scientist.
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:10AM And so, in December 2001, the Tribune published our five-part series, “Cops and Confessions,” Daniel’s case was the subject of an entire installment. We had uncovered strong evidence of Daniel’s innocence—evidence that he was actually in jail at the time of the crime and that his confession was false.
I had never been so confident of a convicted defendant’s innocence. And I never imagined nearly 12 years would pass before Cook County prosecutors would admit the truth and dismiss his conviction. But it finally happened. On June 28, 2013, Daniel, who was arrested at age 17, was released at age 38, having spent more than 20 years behind bars.
***
Steve and I first met Daniel at Stateville where he showed us the voluminous files he had gathered on his case. These files, his most valuable possessions, left with us that day. The only physical record of that meeting is a photograph taken of Steve, Daniel, and me. I framed a copy and kept it on my wall at home to remind me where Daniel was and that until he was free, an injustice remained.
The story of Daniel’s wrongful conviction begins with the gunshot murders of Jeffrey Lassiter and Sharon Haugabook in an apartment on Chicago’s North Side on November 16, 1992. A neighbor heard the shots, looked out the window, and saw four men leaving, one of whom noticed her and pointed a finger in warning. The witness soon identified Dennis Mixon, a West Side cocaine dealer, as one of the men, but police couldn’t find him.
Two weeks later, police picked up 15-year-old Lewis Gardner and 19-year-old Akia Phillips for selling marijuana on a street corner near the scene of the shooting. Gardner, who had an IQ of 70, told police he got his drugs from Deon Patrick and implicated Patrick in the shooting. Police said Gardner and Phillips confessed to being lookouts for the gunmen and said they also implicated Daniel Taylor, Joseph Brown, Phillips’ brother Paul, and Rodney Mathews.
Daniel, who had been declared a ward of the state at age 11 because his mother was a cocaine addict, had lived in a dozen foster homes over the ensuing years. At that time, he was living in a state facility. He was picked up in December and taken to a police station, where detectives said he confessed almost immediately. His statement was transcribed by a court reporter.
Daniel told us a different version. He said he was smacked in the head with a flashlight and was told that he had been implicated by others. He said the detectives told him if he gave a statement, he would be released, so he told them what they wanted to hear: that he, Mathews, Patrick, and Mixon went to the apartment to collect a drug debt owed to Mixon. According to the statement, when Lassiter said he couldn’t pay, Patrick shot him dead. Taylor and Mixon then held Haugabook’s arms and Patrick shot her as well.
The woman who had identified Mixon viewed a lineup and said she recognized Daniel from the neighborhood, but that he was not one of the four men she saw the night of the murders.
After the lineup, when detectives told Daniel he was being charged with murder, Daniel realized he was not being released. So he told the detectives the truth: He had been in jail on the night of the murders. A check showed that, in fact, Daniel had been arrested for fighting in a park that night at about 6:45 p.m., and jail records showed he was released about 10 p.m. and the murders occurred at 8:43 p.m.
But Daniel was not released.
Instead, detectives went about constructing a case to support his confession. They found Adrian Grimes, a drug dealer who frequented the same park where Daniel was arrested that night. Grimes said he had seen Daniel in the park at 7:30 p.m. that night. They found two police officers who, weeks after the murders, filed a report saying they’d seen Daniel in an alley near the shooting around 9:30 p.m. [MORE]
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:06AM [JURIST]
A class of plaintiffs consisting of around 1,200 African-American financial advisers have reached a $160 million settlement with Merrill Lynch [corporate website] in a racial discrimination lawsuit, according to a plaintiffs' attorney on Wednesday. The settlement [WP report] has to be approved by the Judge Robert Gettleman for the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois [official website], which would close an almost decade-long case. The lawsuit was filed in 2005 alleging that Merrill Lynch prevented its black brokers from obtaining lucrative businesses, thereby reducing their pay and causing them to earn less than their white coworkers. The plaintiffs claimed that they made almost 50 percent less on average in 2006 alone and that they were shielded from career opportunities. An approval may take months, and a status hearing is scheduled for September 3.
Gettleman had previously refused to give the case a class-action status. However, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit [official website] reversed the ruling in 2012 thereby reopening the case. Discrimination is an ongoing issue. Earlier this month a judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of California [official website] rejected [JURIST report] a potential gender discrimination class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart [corporate website]. That lawsuit, which aimed to represent 150,000 female Wal-Mart employees, was an attempt to file a smaller representative version of an earlier gender discrimination class action lawsuit estimated to include more than 1.5 million women.
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:04AM Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says Israel may have conducted 'false flag' operation. 04 May 2013 Retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who once served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, believes that the chemical weapons used in Syria may have been an Israeli "false flag" operation aimed at implicating Bashar Assad's government. Wilkerson said that the evidence that it was Assad's government that had used the chemical weapons was "flaky" and that it could very well have been the 'rebels' or Israel who were the perpetrators. Asked why Israel would do such a thing, Wilkerson said: "I think we've got a basically geostrategically, geopolitical inept regime in Tel Aviv right now."
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:03AM F.B.I. agents are expected to interview hundreds of Syrians in the coming days. 01 Sep 2013 The F.B.I. has increased its surveillance of Syrians inside the United States in response to concerns that a military strike against the government of President Bashar al-Assad could lead to terrorist attacks here or against American allies and interests abroad, according to current and former senior United States officials. The government has also taken the unusual step of warning federal agencies and private companies that American military action in Syria could spur cyberattacks, the officials said. The Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. have also sent out a classified bulletin alerting federal, state and local law enforcement officials of potential threats created by the Syria conflict, the officials said.
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 03:01AM In 2009 - the same year former French foreign minister Dumas alleges the British began planning operations in Syria - Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter's North field, contiguous with Iran's South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets - albeit crucially bypassing Russia. Assad's rationale was "to protect the interests of [his] Russian ally, which is Europe's top supplier of natural gas." Instead, the following year, Assad pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran, across Iraq to Syria, that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe from its South Pars field shared with Qatar. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the project was signed in July 2012 - just as Syria's civil war was spreading to Damascus and Aleppo - and earlier this year Iraq signed a framework agreement for construction of the gas pipelines.
Monday, August 12, 2013 at 03:11PM Think racism is just a flaw of uneducated, unwashed hicks? Think again. A study by Geoffrey Wodtke, a doctoral candidate in sociology from the University of Michigan, suggests that "high-ability whites" are simply better at hiding their prejudices about African-American people than "lower-ability whites." The white people who scored higher on cognitive tests were more likely to say they support racial integration and acknowledge racial discrimination in the workplace. But that didn't make them any more likely to support policies that actually redress racial discrimination. Wodtke says the study backs up his theory that racism doesn't stem from lack of intelligence, but from the need of a "dominant group" to protect its privileged social position. [Source]
Neely Fuller has informed us that the operating system of white supremacy is carried out through deception and/or indirect or direct violence. [MORE] Of course there is nothing "smart" about practicing racism/white supremacy - as it is based on ignorance and wrong perception, the root of all evil.
Monday, August 12, 2013 at 11:55AM When Cecile Kyenge became the first black government minister in Italian history, the appointment was hailed as a landmark for diversity. But since Kyenge became integration minister, she has been the target of death threats and vicious racial slurs.
The debate highlights growing intolerance and what Prime Minister Enrico Letta has called a shameful chapter for Italy.
When he presented his Cabinet, Letta described Kyenge as a bridge between diverse communities. The 49-year old ophthalmologist, long an activist in local politics for immigrant rights, was elected to Parliament on the Democratic Party slate.
In a campaign ad, she said her dream is that "Italy will become a cosmopolitan country." But after her appointment to the Cabinet, the mood of racial progress was quickly replaced by insults directed against her from xenophobic and ultra-right-wing parties.
The crescendo started with a senior official of the anti-immigrant Northern League who accused her of trying to impose tribal traditions on Italian society. Then, a Northern League councilor, a woman, posted a photo of Kyenge on Facebook and called for her to be raped "so that she could understand what victims feel."
Monday, August 12, 2013 at 11:53AM It’s been quite a week for anti-Obama racism. At the Missouri State Fair Sunday, rodeo fans cheered to see a “clown” in an Obama mask get run down by a bull. On Friday in Florida the president faced a gaggle of protesters on the way to address a disabled veterans’ group; one carried a sign reading “Kenyan Go Home.” Three days earlier, Arizonans protested Obama’s visit by singing “Bye Bye Black Sheep.” One man mocked him by calling him “47 percent Negro;” another held a sign that read, “Impeach the Half-White Muslim!”
Also on Sunday, the same day as the Missouri State Fair incident, ABC’s “This Week” hosted the birther-in-chief, Donald Trump, who was fresh from a visit to the right wing Family Leadership Summit in Iowa and a golf outing with GOP House Speaker John Boehner. When Jon Karl asked him “you don’t still question [Barack Obama] was born in the United States, do you?” Trump let loose his tiresome birther spew. “I have no idea,” Trump replied. “Was there a birth certificate? You tell me. You know, some people say that was not his birth certificate. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows and you don’t know either, Jonathan.”
With Republicans like Boehner and Iowa’s Family Leader embracing Trump as a loyal and treasured party figure, and mainstream media figures like Karl treating him like a legitimate newsmaker, it’s clear that the party, and some of the media, learned nothing from its 2012 drubbing. Reince Priebus’s infamous “autopsy” has itself gone wherever it is that fraudulent ideas go to die. Calling for more “inclusion,” the report didn’t outline policy change but rather better communication strategies to avoid repelling young voters, women, African Americans and Latinos. “Our policies are sound, but I think in many ways the way we communicate can be a real problem,” Priebus said in March.
But now they’ve given up even on changing the way they communicate.
Monday, August 12, 2013 at 11:50AM The Ascension Parish School System is investigating a Donaldsonville, LA middle school teacher for allegedly making inappropriate comments to her class on the first day of school.
Lois Polite, a Social Studies teacher at Lowery Middle School, is accused of using racial slurs and her status with the school system to threaten students.
At least one parent, Shemika Landry, has filed a formal complaint.
"My son came home very upset," Landry said.
Landry said her son told her his sixth grade Social Studies teacher, Polite, talked down to the class and repeatedly used racial slurs to address her students.
"She frequently called the kids the "N" word in the classroom, belittling them, calling them stupid," Landry said.
Landry said she believes Polite also threatened the students to keep them from talking.
"She told them they can call their maw and sent them to the school with their booty shorts on and their high heels but it wasn't going to change anything because she was the only social studies teacher there and they needed her," Landry said.
"I was shocked. I was appalled that she would actually say those things to ten and 11 year old kids," Landry said.
Spokesman for the Ascension Parish School System, Johnnie Balfantz, said school administrators are looking into the allegations.
Sunday, August 11, 2013 at 05:52PM ON MONDAY, D.C. corrections officials announced the death of Mike Johnson, 53, who’d been charged with two counts of sexual abuse and who was discovered hanging in his cell. Mr. Johnson’s death is the fourth apparent suicide in the D.C. jail in the past year, a troubling fact that warrants immediate attention and action.
In the wake of a suicide earlier this summer, at the time the second in less than two weeks, Corrections Director Thomas N. Faust announced changes aimed at reducing suicide risks. Except in cases of extreme security concerns, every prisoner now shares a cell, and the frequency of security checks has been increased from every 30 minutes to every 15 minutes. Officials have also begun paying particular attention to mental assessments and sharing information about individuals prior to incarceration.
Both changes emerged as issues in the June 18 death of Paul Mannina, a Labor Department lawyer who was charged with the sexual assault of a co-worker. Hours before Mr. Mannina was found with his throat slashed, he appeared at a hearing in D.C. Superior Court in which issues about his mental state were raised. That information apparently was not shared with jail officials, and somehow Mr. Mannina had access to a razor. Why prisoners were issued disposable razors in their first week at the jail remains unclear, but shaving equipment is no longer distributed until jail workers have collected all the necessary mental health information on inmates. As Mr. Faust told The Post’s Keith Alexander, “If the worst thing that happens for the first five or seven days is that they have a beard, then so be it.”
It’s commendable that D.C. corrections officials have taken steps to guard against suicide at the D.C. jail. But we have to wonder why it took so many tragedies before officials awoke to the need for increased protections. And now, even after implementation of Mr. Faust’s reforms, there is another death. That has to raise questions of whether the changes are sufficient or on point.
Although some progress may have already been made, Mr. Johnson’s death should spur a deeper review of what the jail is doing and how it can better equip its staff to deal with the risk of suicide when someone is placed in a cell. Corrections leadership can’t possibly need any more prodding.
