| Some people really activate their brains once they get locked up. The things I've seen people construct from literal garbage in prison. Tattoo guns are a popular one. Obviously half the population has a way of making some sort of device analogous to a car cigarette lighter in prison by finding staples, bits of wire, foil etc that they can stick in a 110V outlet to heat up and light their drugs from. Necessity really is the mother of invention. A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation. Knowing this would happen we'd come up with a way to communicate across the facility. We had these 5x5 grids of letters, no "K", where 11 on the grid was A, 15 was E, 55 was Z etc. They had these touchscreen commissary kiosks where you could order food. The quantity of each item allowed up to 4 digits, e.g. 9999. So that gives you two letters. 1121 = AF for instance. We'd start at the top, Beef Noodles, 1121. Chicken Noodles, 2412 etc and work through the menu. We shared our login IDs with each other. We'd place these huge orders into the cart but never checkout. Then we'd log in to each other's accts from our separate cell blocks multiple times a day, read our messages and write our replies. Got caught eventually, 10 days in the Hole. I FOIA'd their investigation and it was very amusing seeing the report from the facility "Intelligence Dept" trying to decode all the messages. |
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| ▲ | qingcharles 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, especially when it is civil rights litigation, e.g. facility conditions. They will do everything within their disposal to interfere with litigation. A lot of county facilities in the USA will retain private counsel, not government lawyers, for these kinds of cases, and it is enormously expensive. I can remember one case where they took a newspaper from a prisoner and he sued, and the jail took it to trial and lost and had to pay not only damages of $15K, but also their legal fees, which were somewhere around $1.5m, but also the plaintiff's counsel, which was another $900K IIRC. | | |
| ▲ | _DeadFred_ 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Don't forget if an inmate starts to look like they are winning all they have to do is change that one inmates conditions and the inmate no longer has standing and the case is dismissed (unless they have permeant damages and they are suing for damages), yet the system is designed for those lawsuits to be the check/balances. It seems like a good system, but in actuality the check/balance is easily negated by those in power. And the 'change' of the condition is often the inmate getting shipped to a different prison, with the transfer/shipping process having the nick name 'diesel therapy'. So if you do are challenge, you are going to get punished, your safety is going to be put at VERY high risk (you are going to have to fight, and who knows who they lock you up with at night and what might get pulled on you), and you are going to be VERY hungry (meal times/shipping times often accidentally don't work out) you don't stay anywhere long enough to purchase commissary to make up for them not feeding you, etc. Look at how upset immigration people are now that the Fed loopholes I point out are being made very public in immigration stuff (all the movement between facilities to limit court access). These are things that have happened forever, just no one cared when it was normal inmates. | | |
| ▲ | mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm aware of a businessman who did high profile pro se case, regarding some alleged white collar business license violations . They moved him to different jails 300 times in a year to sabotage his defense (SDNY, so they had unlimited amount of money to fuck with him). He miraculously still won the case. |
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| ▲ | kelseydh 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with approximately 541 to 614 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents as of 2022–2026. While representing only 5% of the global population, the US holds roughly 20% of the world's prisoners, totalling over 1.8 million people. For many crimes, the U.S. loves giving eye watering long sentences for offences that would result in a tenth of the prison time in other countries. | |
| ▲ | dnemmers 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I read ‘helping the litigation’ to mean they both may have been involved in the same crime, and they mean to stop collusion after the fact, before trial concludes? | | |
| ▲ | qingcharles 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Both ways. Mostly it is just helping with the legal process. Rarely is it a multi-plaintiff case as the courts don't like those from prisoners. It causes too many logistical nightmares. How are two plaintiffs to communicate their wishes to each other on how to proceed? How will they both appear in court together if they are in different buildings or even different institutions? I remember being on one join-plaintiff civil rights case and the government lawyer told the judge they were going to criminally charge me with impersonating a lawyer as I "must have given legal advice to the other plaintiff." The judge asked how they thought the complaint was written. "As I see it, one plaintiff must have pressed one key, then the other plaintiff pressed the next key on the keyboard. That is our belief." |
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| ▲ | _DeadFred_ 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The feds used to allow you to appeal your sentence forever. I mean if there are problems with a sentence, the government should want to fix it, right? But then they decided it was too expensive giving convicts access to the courts. So they changed it to I think 7 days. But they decided that was too short. So the compromise between forever and 7 days? 14 days. If you don't appeal within 14 days you can only appeal on a very narrow scope. Now realize, those 14 days after sentencing you are being transferred from a federal detention center (fed jail) to a prison, either via con-air or prison bus, cross country, staying in various country jails with minimal access to your lawyer or a legal library if you can't afford a lawyer. The American Justice System is designed to appear like a justice system but to in actuality be non-navigable unless you have expensive paid lawyers working for you. It is very much a multi-teared system. Have you ever tried canceling the WSJ? Imagine if every single step of a Justice system was designed to be as frustrating/stiffling/delaying (when every day counts) as the WSJ canceling process. Oh, you are being transported, and you want access to the law library? Well we can only get you that during lunch hours, so chose if you want to eat. And oh yeah sorry that the morning transfer to the bus was messed up and you happened to miss breakfast. Sure you want to skip lunch? We might ship you again any time and you might miss dinner if we do. | | |
| ▲ | qingcharles 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Also, certainly for state cases, a lot of appeal routes are not available unless you are actively in prison. Post-conviction relief, and federal habeas corpus are basically only available while you are locked in prison. If you do all your time in pre-trial detention, or your sentence is too short to fully complete your appeal then your conviction is stuck forever, even if you have meritorious claims. For instance, if your lawyer was drunk, high or not a real lawyer, there is no way to appeal that after you're released, you just have to live with the conviction for the rest of your life and all the collateral reduction in civil rights that comes with that until you die. |
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| ▲ | gruez 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | nextaccountic 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Incarcerated people have the right to sue, right? They have right to appeal. Prisons shouldn't be able to interfere with prisoner's rights, specially when it's about suing the prison itself. | | |
| ▲ | gruez 2 days ago | parent [-] | | They're not blocked from suing or appealing, only from conversing with their non-lawyer inmate friends. | | |
| ▲ | _DeadFred_ 2 days ago | parent [-] | | There is the appearance of this, but the reality isn't quite so clear. The USAs gives you a 14 day window to appeal. After that you are blocked from the majority of appeal options. It used to be unlimited time but the Feds decided that was too expensive so the right to appeal was limited to accommodate Federal financial considerations. Limiting what was a unlimited RIGHT was found to be acceptably replaced with a 14 day right (14 days in which the person is being processed into the system, shipped to prison, etc). https://federal-lawyer.com/what-is-the-time-limit-on-federal... If you sue due to conditions, should those conditions be changed, you no longer have standing and your case is dropped. If ABC facility is unfit for habitation, the check is supposed to be inmates sueing. But if you just ship any inmate who looks like they are starting to win in court to facility XYZ, their lawsuit is dropped for lack of standing (the aren't housed at ABC facility). If you make the transfer from ABC to XYZ as painful as possible, you limit the number of inmates willing to sue and get to keep things as bad as you want at ABC facility. You can't have the main check on the Feds be inmates when if the inmates exercise the check the Feds can punish them. That system is not fair and does not work. Look at how upset immigration people are now that the Fed loopholes I point out are being made very public in immigration stuff (all the movement between facilities to limit court access). These are things that have happened forever, just no one cared when it was normal inmates. |
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| ▲ | kdhaskjdhadjk 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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