[Tlc] TLC-Roxanna Brown

[Kate Gillogly]

Telling this story to my partner, an older African-American man, he was far
less shocked than I was.  He's heard too many of these types of stories over
the years.  While prisoners have a constitutional right to medical care, in
fact they often receive grossly inadequate care.  There is little funding of
prison medical care - the neo-con argument is that prisoners should not get
better medical care than "ordinary" hard-working citizens get.   

The everyday conditions of people in prisons, justly or unjustly, have now
impinged on "our" world, and I suspect that the vehicle for that has been
the expansion of the powers of the U.S. judiciary system post-9/11.  On what
grounds could an older woman who was disabled and highly respected in her
community have been considered a flight risk?  Why keep Dr. Brown in prison
for so long without access to legal counsel or to friends and family?  What
happened to habeus corpus?  What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Dr. Brown's case has really brought home to me that I've been ignoring the
extent to which fundamental civil rights in the U.S. have been abrogated
under the current political regime.  I've been doing what Martin Niemuller
argued against.  

I hope that we can help Dr. Brown's family find answers and forgiveness.
But I also hope that cases like this will serve as a wedge for opening up
and exposing the inherent injustices in the current justice system.  What
can we do to make this known and to try to make sure it does not happen
again?

Best,

Kate Gillogly
Visiting Faculty (Anthropology), Chicago State University
Geography, Sociology, Economics, and Anthropology
Program Coordinator, National Association for the Practice of Anthropology

-----Original Message-----
From: tlc-bounces at lists.ucr.edu [mailto:tlc-bounces at lists.ucr.edu] On Behalf
Of justinm at ucr.edu
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2008 1:07 AM
To: tlc at lists.ucr.edu
Subject: [Tlc] TLC-Roxanna Brown

Here is a link to an article that may be of interest to those following Dr.
Roxanna Brown's tragic case. I forward it from Doug Padgett.
Thanks,
justin

I'm sure other people have pointed this out to you, but the  
Washington Post just ran a series by Dana Priest on medical care in  
INS prisons.

See:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/ 
immigration/index.html

The facility Roxanna Brown does not seem to have been run by INS; it  
was a Justice Dept. facility run by the Bureau of Prisons.  But it  
seems the horrific problems run right through....


______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
3046 INTN
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu
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