The South Beach Killer Book2021

The South Beach Killer

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A DANGEROUS TIME

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It’s been months since I’ve posted anything here. The reasons are many. In February, I lost my beloved pointer terrier, Destiny, whom I saved from death row at the shelter more than eight years ago.

Then, in March, mom passed away from lung cancer.

This post was supposed to outline my retirement from the entertainment industry, no more screenplays, and the end of hundreds of hours of social media updating and posting. I’ll get to that later.

I’d say 2020 has started out to be a crappy year all around. The devastation to our economy due to COVID-19, the digital filming of police shootings, the subsequent racial unrest and we have a perfect recipe for something our country hasn’t faced in half a century.

 

Who’s to blame? Is anyone?
Is there a civil war coming down the pike?
I haven’t a clue. 

People just seem meaner than ever, willing to hurt one-another at the drop of a hat. Recently I was shocked by the news of an elderly man at a Christian prayer rally being attacked by African American men. I can only imagine the headlines had it been a group of white men beating an elderly black man.

Our moral compass is way off. 

I’ll admit, it’s not just one-sided, white guys are also attacking black people. The so-called peaceful protests are anything but. At this point, I’d suggest our future as a people is quite uncertain.

Vladimir Putin must be happier than a pig in shit.  The powers in Beijing are laughing at us. 

I get it. I feel the pain, it’s palpable. People sense they’re being left behind. Perchance some of that is true, I don’t pretend to know the answers. But attacking innocent people is a crime. It’s called Assault and Battery. PERIOD! Mob rule has never been tolerated in The United States of America.

Other countries are also seeing riots, looting, attacks and I wonder, is America the leader of the free world? Really?

We have to heal this gaping wound.

Reading social media every day sure feels like we’re living in a dangerous time, one in which our citizens are physically facing off over politics, police abuse and yes, there are opportunists using the crisis for sweeping global radical change. Robbing stores, breaking into private communities, and destroying property won’t bring change.

So, there is that. But then there is my ongoing failing health, I won’t revamp the entire incident as most of you remember the severe bicycle accident I had in June 2013.  After eleven surgeries, the traumatic brain injury, and the subsequent worsening of it all, I feel myself slowing down.

I appreciate all the love, attention, and interaction I’ve had over the last ten years, but circumstances out of my control have altered the entire course of life and limb.

So, I bid you all good luck and love. Without the latter, we’ll never have peace.

Village Voice columnist, R.J. Smith

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Politically Incorrect: Guns N’ Roses & Public Enemy Sound Off!

“Forty-eight hours in the feeding cycle of New York City. There were Uzis, Public Enemy re­grouping, and a clique of blond babes orbiting Axl Rose at the Cat Club. All of this connects. How was your week?”

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Swing Shift by R.J. Smith
Busted Axl

Forty-eight hours in the feeding-cycle of New York City. There were Uzis, Public Enemy re­grouping, and a clique of blond babes orbiting Axl Rose at the Cat Club. All of this connects. How was your week?

Start the clock August 8, last Tuesday, when Public Enemy’s vox pop Chuck D faxed all over town the word that PE was back together. The rap group disbanded late June in the wake of an anti-Semitic interview Min­ister of Information Professor Griff gave to The Wash­ington Times (portions of which were reprinted here, fanning the fire). That’s when Chuck D began saying Griff had “sabotaged” the group’s values, and kicked Griff out. The next day, he said Public Enemy was folding up. Last week Chuck announced that Griff apologized to him, if not to the rest of the world. PE is now ready for a comeback album, and, according to the press release, a new title for Griff: “Supreme Allied Chief of Community Relations,” who “will not be available for interviews.” Griff will work in the black community, says Chuck, particularly with youth programs. This is like a white­-collar criminal evading a hard time. Who would you rather have teaching the kids, Ollie “1200-hours-of-community service” North or Professor “Why do you think they call it Jewelry” Griff?

Some will now think PE never planned on cutting Griff out for good, that the breakup was a fake (they were performing even after they “split”), that everything was a face-saving half-step. I don’t think so. Chuck D’s running around in circles, saying things his actions contradict a day later, then saying something the next day that nobody expected. Contrary to D’s say-so, Griff has been answering questions at least as recently as August 3. (“What I said was 100 per cent pure,” he told the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. No impurities for Griff.) And fellow group members Flavor-Flav and DJ Terminator X are working on the convenient escape route, the solo project. Steady Public Enemy are not. Griff can always phone Armond White at The City Sun if he wants to talk.

At the end of Chuck D’s statement, he says, “Please direct any further questions to Axl Rose.” That’s be­cause by any standard, the Guns n’ Roses singer and stereo-destroyer gave an interview to Rolling Stone (Au­gust 10) that should have set off something like the Griff aftershock. GNR’s minister of information has a way with words, like those on the song “One in a Million”: “Police and niggers, that’s right/Get outta my way/ Don’t need to buy none/Of your gold chains today,” and “Immigrants and faggots/They make no sense to me/They come to our country/And think they’ll do as they please/Like start some mini-Iran or spread some fuckin’ disease.”

He uses nigger, he told Stone interviewer Del James, because blacks have been known to use the word, so why can’t he? “I don’t like boundaries of any kind.” (Wonder what GNR guitarist Slash, the child of interracial marriage, thinks about that.) Axl justifies the immigrant line because people from “Iran, Pakistan, China, and Japan” give him bad service at store counters. I’m not kidding. He says he was once chased out of a 7 -Eleven by an Iranian, and so he’s got a right to sing the National Front blues.

As for faggots, Rose says, he’s not antigay. “I’m pro­heterosexual. I can’t get enough of women, and I don’t see the same thing that other men can see in men. I’m not into gay or bisexual experiences. But that’s hypo­critical of me, because I’d rather see two women together than just about anything else. That happens to be my personal, favorite thing.”

“I don’t understand it,” he says about homosexuality. “Antihomosexual? I’m not against them doing what they want to do as long as it’s not hurting anybody else and they’re not forcing it upon me. I don’t need them in my face or, pardon the pun, up my ass about it.”

This platinum punster’s remarks, one should think, would have ignited some response from a press (includ­ing Rolling Stone) willing to cover Professor Griff’s outburst. Rose’s status as a star and Rolling Stone’s status as a well-circulated starfucker mean the interview reached scads more people than Griff ever did. There have been no outbursts, no statements of explanation, and very little coverage.

Edgy observers from Public Enemy’s label, CBS, and MCA, with whom Chuck’s negotiating, attended the June 21 press conference where Chuck kicked Griff out. A CBS spokesman said PE “made the right decision” in ousting Griff, and Newsday had MCA muckamucks troubled by Griff’s remarks and PE’s connections to Louis Farrakhan. But Guns n’ Roses’ label, Geffen Records, still loves its white supremacist. I called the company hoping to talk with Axl, saying I wanted to ask him about the Stone interview. “We’ve gotten a whole bunch of requests about this, and management is saying no to all interviews,” said Geffen’s Bryn Bridenthal. She said Geffen felt no need to issue a statement about Rose’s rap. “I wouldn’t have anything else to add in addition to it. I don’t think there’s anything left unspoken,” she explained. Axl stupid question, get an Axl answer.

August 10, two days after Chuck D said that, Dave Herndon, the Voice’s former managing editor (currently an editor at Newsday), bumped into Axl at the Cat Club. Identifying himself as a journalist, Herndon asked if there’d been any fallout from the interview. Naw, Rose said. But it had been, he divulged, quite a struggle getting the interview in the magazine. Rose said he’d bargained for months with Rolling Stone, refusing interviews unless he got the cover, unless his “best friend” and RIP Magazineeditor Del James got to do the interview, and unless another pal, Robert John, got to take the photos. While it appears that Rolling Stone fellated Rose on all counts, a spokesperson denied cav­ing into his demands, saying access determined their decision. Here’s a magazine, which reported Public Ene­my’s comments as news, running an interview packed with racism/homophobia/immigrant-bashing. Nope, no news story here, just wisdom from a superstar.

Stone’s silence illustrates what kinds of hate are widely acceptable right now — racism and homophobia and immigrant-bashing, though not anti-Semitism. More­over, if you’re white and sell enough records, they’ll overlook anything. Long as they get a slice. Geffen’s Bridenthal wanted me to know “how hard [Rose] worked on that interview.” Maybe Rolling Stone should have given him a byline.

In the time between Rose’s scene at the Cat Club and Chuck D’s press release, Mordechai Levy got hyped. He’s the head of the Jewish Defense Organization, a group for whom maybe one follower put it, in Newsday, for all the rest: “This is Judaism, not that humanitarian crap.” Levy was arrested after firing wildly onto a Greenwich Village street. The man who said of Public Enemy, “We’re gonna bring these people to their knees,” managed only to bring 69-year-old, air conditioner re­pairman, Dominick Spinelli, to his knees, by firing bullets into Spinelli’s van, one lodging in his left leg. Levy was shooting wildly from the rooftop of his building on Bleecker Street, firing at two visitors who had come, he has said, to kill him. He missed, hitting Spinelli, parked nearby. When police arrested Levy last Thursday after­noon, they found a Ruger mini-14, and in his apartment and car, an impressive cache (an Uzi, AR-15 assault rifle, .22 rifles, and pump-action riot shotguns, tear gas, etc.).

Levy has mounted a war against Public Enemy since June. He claims to have organized record store boycotts, has leafletted against the group, put scary-sounding anti-PE messages on his phone machine, and paid at least one visit to their management offices.

There’s a Biblical injunction to the effect that you need not worry about staying close to your friends, but better cling to your enemies — they are your enemies, after all. Levy stayed close to his. An underhand grenade toss from his home is the office of Rush Productions, Public Enemy’s management. The rap group’s private publicist, Layla Turkkan, said, “Maybe I’m listening to too much PE, but it’s the most extraordinary coinci­dence that he should live there, like, three doors down.”

Levy, it turns out, has resided there longer than PE has been around. But go tell that to anybody from Rush and see if they look any more relaxed. Maybe Levy’ll run into Public Enemy next time they play a free concert at Rikers. Rolling Stone can send Axl Rose to cover it.

RJ Smith -MY NAMESAKE- is  an author, columnist and editor for the Los Angeles Times.

The Day After Roswell

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ACTUAL U.S. Army photographs of an interplanetary flying disc confirmed by full bird colonel, Philip James Corso (May 22, 1915–July 16, 1998). Just prior to his death, he broke the silence and published “The Day After Roswell” in 1997, confirming his involvement in the research of extraterrestrial technology recovered from the 1947 Roswell UFO Incident.

The Looming End of Mankind

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The Killer Species of Man

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The Author in Spring 2019

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with a few fishermen from the small inlet Canadian town of North Lake where Blue Fin Tuna used to spawn in the millions. With the explosion of raw fish or sushi, we are witnessing the global depletion of global fish stocks and the decline in fisheries. Most important is the survival of the species, but humans care very little about conservation. One of the biggest arguments I heard during my conversation with wharfmaster McCarty, generational fishermen who say “this is my business, I put food on the table for my family, my kids will grow up in the industry, it’s our way of life.”

Unfortunately, this is far from a new argument. We’ve all heard similar defenses when speaking to hunters of every type. Almost always they claim if hunting didn’t exist they’d be homeless. C’mon? Really? At some point, we have to accept responsibility. In our lifetime, more animals have gone extinct than from the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs.  Think about that for a moment. We are literally killing nature! It has become so bad that most of the biggest game once found on Earth has been relegated to the Natural Museum. Extinction is happening all around us. The Earth is dying. How much longer will the Senate and Congress be distraught over an election and get down to brass tacks?

In 2018, three-bird species have vanished from the planet. The Earth is losing animal species at ten-thousand times the natural rate! Unlike the mass extinctions seen in the past, our current extinction crisis is caused entirely by our own activities. No matter your politics, common sense tells us that the loss of wildlife habitats is thinning out and we are directly responsible for over-hunting, over-fishing, and outright cruelty of animals. As much as thirty-to-sixty percent of the planet’s species WILL BE extinct by 2050 according to the  Center for Biological Diversity. Five-species a year are disappearing from the face of the Earth. We are witnessing the sixth wave of extinction in the past half-billion years, the most recent being the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years into the past.

In 2018, Hawaii’s Po’ouli bird population went extinct, the species’ chance of bouncing back is less than 0.1 percent. They’re gone, we’ve eliminated their environment, cut down the trees, cleared woodlands. The songbird was just identified forty-five years ago and already we’ve destroyed their population. How and why has this happened? They were hunted by mongooses, cats, and rats, and mosquito-spread diseases were factors in the Po’ouli’s extinction. The Alagoas Foliage-gleaner, another songbird, made the dense forest in northeastern Brazil home before the total deforestation sent the population into a tailspin.

The Vaquita Porpoise was discovered in 1958 – Now, just sixty years later, the World Wildlife Foundation expects the dolphin to go extinct in the next few years. With less than thirty remaining in the wild, it is most probably the world’s rarest marine mammal. The vaquita is the smallest cetacean species in the northern Gulf of California. How is it going extinct? The vaquita extinction is entirely a manmade disaster brought-on due to being caught and drowned in illegal gillnet fishing equipment. Vaquita was the only porpoise species that lived in the warm waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Northern White Rhino, In March 2018, Sudan, the last remaining male northern white rhino, died at the age of 45. With Sudan’s passing, the total number of remaining northern white rhinos dropped to just two — both of which are female and incapable of natural reproduction, according to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Scientists have found that assisted reproduction is possible, but the fate of the subspecies relies on expensive and difficult procedures never before used in rhinos. The population’s decline was caused by extensive poaching for their horns

ROD STEWART & CYNDI LAUPER CONCERT

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South Florida Faces Imminent Destruction

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                    SOUTH BEACH – MIAMI Florida

EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS. My home cities of Miami Beach (South Beach), Fort Lauderdale, Naples, Sarasota and Key West are in serious trouble. The truth is, The Atlantic Ocean and surrounding waterways have risen and will continue to do so! Our FLOODS & STORMS are no longer 100-year incidents… but occur every year now! In our mid-and-western states, the fields of farms are suffering the worst draught in history, on top of this there is a water supply emmergency globally. With big business like Nestle owning much of the water rights, water companies profit by pumping out our groundwater, which deplets local water supplies and destroys ecosystems. Our citrus farms aren’t producing plentiful bounties as in years prior. Florida produces 90% of the world’s Orange Juice. Earth and most of the East and Southern Coasts of America are in serious trouble. We can no longer pretend Global Warming is not happening, look at the disasters we’ve had over the last few years! Whether the planet is warming due to mankind’s activities on the planet or if this trend is a cyclical event doesn’t much matter. It’s happening.

                                           New York City

NASA has reported their satellite data has determined the ice of the Arctic is at its lowest point since 1979 and is quickly losing its perennial ice. As of June 2018, the ice-sheets have lost 621,371.192 (six-hundred and twenty-one thousand, three-hundred and seventy-one, point one nine acres… or the equivilent of one-million kilometers. The result has been an increase of pure driking water becoming undrinkable one the water mingles with the world’s salty oceans. The melting of the huge floating ice shelves and icebergs in the sea is predicted to raise water levels significantly.

The rise may effect tectonic locations, subsidence of the land, tides, currents, storms, and so forth. Sea level rise is expected to continue for centuries. Because of the long response time for parts of the climate system, it is now estimated it’s too late to save low-lying areas … humanity is already committed to a sea-level rise of a whopping seven-and-a-hallf feet for each degree by the year 2100. The International Panel on Climate Change predicts that the global mean sea level rise will continue during the 21st century, very likely at a faster rate than observed from 1971 to 2018.

When all of the remaining ice covering Antarctica, Greenland, and the glaciers around the world melts, sea level will have risen more than two-hundred and thirty feet. (230 feet). The ocean would cover all of Earth’s coastal cities. Our land areas would shrink significantly with states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and other midwest states surviving. But, with New York City, Long Island, California, Washington D.C. and hundreds of other low lyinig states, survival as we now know it will be a thing of the past. Livable cities will become overcrowded with disbanded American’s from across the country. Resources will be strained and the country could very well sink into a world of crime, death and diseases.

In Florida, natural areas will be the first to go. After just one or two feet of sea-rise, substantial natural areas in coastal Florida… where low-lying cities meets the sea will all be under water. At two feet of rise, water will close in on Naples municipal airport. A few residential areas around Fort Myers and Cape Coral will take on water. in Pinellas County, on the Gulf of Mexico, barrier islands

and low-lying Clearwater and Saint Petersburgh, Shore Acres and the Tampa Bay will all be underwater. Bayport Park in Hernando County will be gone! Fort Lauderdale’s challenges begin to crystallize as some of its priciest canalside and ocean real estate will be flooded. The mainland-facing side of urban Miami Beach will be inundated. The sea and higher waters in the Everglades would flood the entire lower area of the state. Gravity-driven canal and drainage systems will fail as the seas rises, stacking up rainfall inland. In the early 1980s, nuisance flooding in the Florida Keys happened less than once per year on average. By 2030 (just 12 years fro now) sea level will rise by 7 inches, catastronic flooding will happen thirty to eighty times a year—say goobbye to the sandy beaches as they will no longer exist.

                                                                            Washington D.C.

We are setting ourselves up for an unsurvivable disaster that our grandkids have to deal with. They will lose power as the GRID becomes flooded. That means no computers, cellphones, televisions, kights, food or anythng that requires electricity to run or create. Gas wouldn’t be produced, cars would run out of it, The Stock Market will crash, and the entirety of Manhattan will eventually be under water… the food chain will fail, people will die by the hundreds of millions and nourishment will certainly be scarce along with much of the undeveloped world being wiped out from lack of clean drinking water, starvation, and most liekly, a deadly worldwide plague!
The extinction of mankind will happen, whether or not you believe it. If your worry is about global warmingand fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are coming within the lifetime of a teenager living today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Without an immediate and significant change to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically  inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Many of us are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60-70 degrees warmer cooked the North Pole, even melting permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault—theglobal food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any type of catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon will evaporate as methane, which is thirty-five times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently destroying the atmosphere of our planet, all of it predicted to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up.

Maybe you know that alread… there are alarming stories in the news every day, like those, last month, that seemed to suggest satellite data tracked global warming since 1998 more than twice as fast as scientists had thought. The frightening news from Antarctica in May, reported a crack in an ice shelf had grown eleven miles in six days, then kept right on going. Soon, the biggest icebergs ever seen with crash into the sea in a processcalled “calving.”

                                                          Charleston North Carolina

But no matter how well-informed humanity is, we are obviously not alarmed enough. Over the past few decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating very real-world warming, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination and recklessly allow the huge lobbying campaign to continue lying to lawmakers and leaders. Humanity is preceeding as though nothing is happening, that the warnings of the world’s scientific communities are nothing more than attempts to reel in the gas and oil industry.

For those who do believe earth is in trouble and our future genertions are at risk of extinction, they ignorantly assume that climate change will hit hardest somewhere else, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial.

                                       Venice Beach, California

In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflectshundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are on schedule.

The last ten years have been the hottest on record, with 2018 already the hottest in history. Before this, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 210, 2009, 2008 have all been hotter than the previous year. It’s time to wake up Earthlings and face the music… as it were.

It is already too late to save our low-lying cities fromdisappearing. Had our politicians stopped taking bribes form big oil, and started real change steering us away from burning the remains of dinosaur fossil fiuel back in 1992 when Al Gore and climatologists sounded the initial alarm of the polar ice melting due to human activity on the planet, releasing methane, gases and pollutents into the air, we might have been able to stave off the destruction of Earth.

                              San Diego, California

Humanity continues to release emissions into the atmostpphere and with President Trump backing out of the Paris Accord on Global Warming, the old coal mines will reopen and will once again become the cheapest energy source available. Coal (as everyone knows) is the one industry that can single-handidly make earth unlivable while killing off humankind. Our teenagers, grandkids and great grandkids will eventually not be able to live on this once beautiful planet… and when looking back in history, they’ll lay the blame squarely on our generation after they come to understand that the destruciton of our habitat by Global Warming was preventable had American politicians not taken bribes and gifts from big oil.

The Real RJ Smith #globalwarming #climatechange

The Real RJ Smith #globalwarming #climatechange

Monsters in the Woods – The Official Trailer

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DEATH RATES IN AMERICAN PRISONS

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THE SKINNY ON DYING WHILE INCARCERATED

An inmate at Winn Correctional Center, in Louisiana, which until recently was run by the Corrections Corporation of America.

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Sign Outside the Infamous 193-Year-Old Prison Sing-Sing

About a dozen inmates die each day, according to the Justice Department. 4,400 jail and prison inmates die each year… a tally not including executions which are infrequent, numbering in the dozens each year and adding up to just a fraction of all other inmate deaths).

Most deaths occur in state prisons, where more than 3,300 died in 2012 alone. The Bureau of Justice Statistics outline that State prisons across the country have the largest populations, accounting for half of all inmates placed in custody each year.

In local jails, about a thousand more inmates die annually, however… the causes of  deaths were very different from those cited in state prisons. Suicide is reported to be the leading cause of death for inmates in local jails, accounting for a third of all deaths. Heart disease is the second-leading cause of death. Horrible prison food often found to contan mice droppings, roaches and bacteria cause a lot of illness and deaths. Perhaps because of the soy-rich menu, cancer is the leading cause of death. Heart disease and other illnesses are listed as the cause in most other deaths.

New York State’s Sing-Sing Penitentiary

California’s 166-year old San Quentin State Prison

Deaths in local jails tend to occur relatively quickly after the inmates arrive. About one in three suicides takes place within a week of the inmate’s arrival; more than half of these deaths occur the first month. More than 70-percent of inmates who died in local jails were not convicted at the time of death. Prisoners are much more likely to die in jail than to escape.

So, why does this happen? In 2010, the National Institute of Corrections released a report on jail suicides, outlining possible explanations for the problem. In short, they said, jails tended to exacerbate suicidal behavior: Experts theorize that two causes for jail suicide exist: (1) jail environments are conducive to suicidal behavior and (2) the inmate is facing a crisis situation. From the inmate’s perspective, certain features of the jail environment enhance suicidal behavior: fear of the unknown, distrust of an authoritarian environment, perceived lack of control over the future, isolation from family and significant others, shame of incarceration, and perceived dehumanizing aspects of incarceration. In addition, certain factors are prevalent among inmates facing a crisis situation that could predispose them to suicide: recent excessive drinking and/or drug use, recent loss of stabilizing resources, severe guilt or shame over the alleged offense, current mental illness, prior history of suicidal behavior, and an approaching court date. In addition, some iprisoners simply are (or become) ill equipped to handle the common stresses of confinement.

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A Convict locked inside a 6X9 foot cell. He is writing on a see-through tpewiter which lays upon his steel bed. Some men languish away for decades in this walk-in-closet sized prison cell. Studies have shown that the Unites State’s wide use of solitary confinement causes severe mental damage.

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Stateville Penitentiary is a maximum security state prison for men located in Crest Hill, Illinois, not far from the city of Chicago. It is part of the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Bland had attempted suicide before, confusion that a Waller County assistant district attorney said likely explained the decision not to place her on suicide watch. The World Health Organization says that communication among different staff members is crucial, adding that additional screening and observation are needed.

Thousands of people are dying behind bars each year as the prison population has exploded over the last few decades.

There are 2.2 million people incarcerated in America’s jails and prisons, a number that is four times the population in 1980. Harsh sentences of the 1980s and 1990s helped foster a situation where an increasingly large number of inmates are older than 50, and state health-care spending on inmates has skyrocketed. The federal prison population has similarly climbed. In state prisons, a little more than half of inmates were sentenced for violent crimes; one in five is there for property crimes like burglary, while about one in six is being held for drug crimes.

All told, one of every 108 adults in the United States was incarcerated in a prison or jail in 2012, according to the Justice Department. That same year, one in 50 adults were on probation or parole.