Rikers Island Prisoners: "Locked Up & Left Behind" -- What you should do now
Take Action for Rikers Island Prisoners! Demand the City Create an Emergency Evacuation Plan New York City Mayor Bloomberg has announced that in the event of a hurricane, that he will not evacuate prisoners at Rikers’ Island, claiming instead to have a “contingency plan” in place. The experience of prisoners in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina shows that city authorities will abandon the basic rights of prisoners in the face of disaster.
We can’t let Bloomberg get away with this!
(1.) Demand the city create an emergency evacuation plan by 5pm today to evacuate prisoners at Rikers Island in the event that other areas in Zone B or C around Rikers Island are evacuated.
Call NYC Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs at (212) 788-2485
lgibbs@cityhall.nyc.gov
Twitter: @NYCMayorsOffice
(2.) Call on NY1 to investigate the status of the “contingency plan” for Rikers Island prisoners:
http://www.ny1.com/content/contact_us/
Tel.: 212-691-6397
(3.) Submit evacuation plan demand to city’s website:
-Go to http://nycsevereweather.crowdmap.com/reports/submit/ --this is a website set up by the city for people to submit weather-related service problems. Locate Rikers Island on the map and drag the red marker there.
-Copy and paste this text (or write your own!):
Title: Evacuation plan needed
The city has no evacuation plan for Rikers Island, despite its low elevation and its nearly 13,000 prisoners. Please do not let these individuals, or the ones at the nearby floating Vernon C. Bain Correction Center, suffer.
(4.) Please repost:
http://solitarywatch.com/2011/08/26/locked-up-and-left-behind-new-yorks-prisoners-and-hurricane-irene/
Locked Up and Left Behind: New York's Prisoners and Hurricane Irene
by James Ridgeway and Jean Casella
We can’t let Bloomberg get away with this!
(1.) Demand the city create an emergency evacuation plan by 5pm today to evacuate prisoners at Rikers Island in the event that other areas in Zone B or C around Rikers Island are evacuated.
Call NYC Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs at (212) 788-2485
lgibbs@cityhall.nyc.gov
Twitter: @NYCMayorsOffice
(2.) Call on NY1 to investigate the status of the “contingency plan” for Rikers Island prisoners:
http://www.ny1.com/content/contact_us/
Tel.: 212-691-6397
(3.) Submit evacuation plan demand to city’s website:
-Go to http://nycsevereweather.crowdmap.com/reports/submit/ --this is a website set up by the city for people to submit weather-related service problems. Locate Rikers Island on the map and drag the red marker there.
-Copy and paste this text (or write your own!):
Title: Evacuation plan needed
The city has no evacuation plan for Rikers Island, despite its low elevation and its nearly 13,000 prisoners. Please do not let these individuals, or the ones at the nearby floating Vernon C. Bain Correction Center, suffer.
(4.) Please repost:
http://solitarywatch.com/2011/08/26/locked-up-and-left-behind-new-yorks-prisoners-and-hurricane-irene/
Locked Up and Left Behind: New York's Prisoners and Hurricane Irene
by James Ridgeway and Jean Casella
Labels: Bloomberg, evacuation, Hurricane Irene, Katrina, prisoner, Rikers Island
1 Comments:
One of the most problematic and disturbing realities in today's globalized war time, is that we are all now complicit participants in the degradation of humanity.
While the european illumination brought us a contract with society that privileges human dignity, it is also true that the history of the world after the illumination was still full of torture and the most appalling conditions in which a human being can survive. But in the modern democratic-capitalist systems it was well hidden.
Now with the beacon of democracy openly engaged in the torturing of individuals as well as the allowance for the most callous treatment of the imprisoned population by private corporations, there exists not only here, but all over the world an Estate of Exception.
The State of Law that was much touted by the atomic nations, and under which torture and grievous mistreatment of prisoners was hidden from the public eye, is now, in the time of global war and with the excuse of an imperial and repugnant discourse on democracy, transformed into the State of Exception.
Under this concept, torture and the mistreatment of imprisoned people does not have to be hidden anymore, the most brutal is farmed out (hidden) to other less scrupulous nations. but the rest; torture, mistreatment, enslavement (or close to it), administrative solitary confinements, the list goes on and on, Abu Grahib, Guantanamo.
By unmasking the torturer, by removing the pointy hat of the executioner, by becoming the State of Exception, the contract that was the center piece of the illumination, the respect for human dignity —egalite, Liberte and Fraternite— lays completely in the trash bin. We are now witnesses of the open and cynical mistreatment and torture of the imprisoned population by governments that spouse a democratic discourse that barely masks the emerging fascism taking hold in the atomic nations.
This transformation, this emergence of the State of Exception, the fact that the mayor of NYC can dismiss, in the middle of the hysteria that possesses the colonized minds of TV watchers, an entire Island population, this and all the rest makes us now, all of us, torturer and tortured.
9/6/11, 6:10 AM
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