Police State

GCHQ spies on webcams of Yahoo users, capturing sexually explicit images.

Police shoot dead unarmed and unthreatening homeless man, go free.

Government's Smithsonian Institute slams US for surge in solitary confinement.

"Although the practice has been largely discontinued in most countries, it's become increasingly routine over the past few decades within the American prison system. Once employed largely as a short-term punishment, it's now regularly used as way of disciplining prisoners indefinitely, isolating them during ongoing investigations, coercing them into cooperating with interrogations and even separating them from perceived threats within the prison population at their request.
As the number of prisoners in solitary has exploded, psychologists and neuroscientists have attempted to understand the ways in which a complete lack of human contact changes us over the long term. According to a panel of scientists that recently spoke at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Chicago, research tells us that solitary is both ineffective as a rehabilitation technique and indelibly harmful to the mental health of those detained."

But I bet its effective in getting confessions and revenge.

""The United States, in many ways, is an outlier in the world," said Craig Haney, a psychologist at UC Santa Cruz who's spent the last few decades studying the mental effects of the prison system, especially solitary confinement. "We really are the only country that resorts regularly, and on a long-term basis, to this form of punitive confinement. Ironically, we spend very little time analyzing the effects of it.""

That makes sense for far away the world's leading prison state.

"A majority of those surveyed experienced symptoms such as dizziness, heart palpitations, chronic depression, while 41 percent reported hallucinations, and 27 percent had suicidal thoughts—all levels significantly higher than those of the overall prison populations. An unrelated study published last week found that isolated inmates are seven times more likely to hurt or kill themselves than inmates at large.
These effects, Haney says, don't only show how isolation harms inmates—they tell us that it achieves the opposite of the supposed goal of rehabilitating them for re-entry into society."

I like how they say supposed goal.

San Francisco police officers must have made somebody powerful mad to get prosecuted for typical police corruption.

"Five San Francisco police officers and one former officer were indicted Thursday on an array of federal law and civil rights violations, including extortion, drug dealing, stealing and conspiring to oppress low-income residents living in single-occupancy hotel rooms."

Better a handful than none.