cdnt give a XXXX 4 lst ordrs? Vote labour on thrsdy 4 xtra time
A Christmas “elf” was grappled to the floor by police using batons and pepper spray after he was caught selling mistletoe without a licence.Hat Tip The Argus
Ex-Royal Marine Paul Douglas, 46, rolled on the ground in a tussle with a uniformed officer in front of dozens of horrified shoppers on Christmas Eve last year, a court was told.
He had been selling sprigs of mistletoe and holly dressed in fluffy red trousers and a Christmas pudding hat in Eastbourne.
Council enforcement officer Mark Jobling called 999 after Douglas refused to give his name and address when asked to show his pedlar’s licence.
PC Stephen Kimber, who was on foot patrol, arrived at the scene and asked Douglas for his details.
Eastbourne magistrates was told how Douglas pushed him and a struggle ensued.
PC Kimber used his nightstick and captor spray to bring Douglas under control. The officer was unhurt, but Douglas, of Manor Road, Hampden Park, Eastbourne, claimed he was left covered in bruises.
He was arrested at the scene and spent nine hours in the cells.
He denied obstructing a police officer but was convicted following a one-day trial.
Magistrates fined him £200 and ordered him to pay £100 court costs but Douglas is now appealing against his conviction.
He said: "All I was doing was selling holly for £3.50 and mistletoe for £1.50. It was Christmas Eve, everyone was out doing their last minute shopping and I was having a bit of fun.
“Lots of people were buying from me and I was doing my best to make them feel festive.
“But it was not nice for them to see me being bashed with a police baton and pepper sprayed. What a sight for children on Christmas Eve, Santa’s little helper in a dust up with a police officer.
“I wasn’t a threat, I was just arguing that I wasn’t doing any harm. The police reaction was well over the top.”
At Lewes Crown Court, Judge Richard Hayward adjourned the appeal until February – but branded the case "a waste of money".
In Britain, concerns over drunkenness go back a long way. The first Licensing Act, passed in 1552, required alehouse-keepers to acquire a licence from local justices on the grounds that ‘intolerable hurts and troubles’ arose from drunkenness in ‘common alehouses’. The following year rules were introduced strictly limiting the number of wine taverns that could open in any one town. This legislative distinction between common alehouses and more exclusive wine taverns reflected a long-standing social stratification of drinks in Britain. Lack of native viticulture made imported wine an elite drink,while ale, and later beer (made with hops,which were only widely used from the 15th century),were associated with more popular drinking cultures.The full article can be read here
“It would be nice if we could get more access to therapy after the guards rape us.”
This is not the answer I expected to hear. Part of a “judicial envoy” touring a correctional facility for women, I had the opportunity to speak with a few of the women in the special section for mentally ill inmates. I asked them what else they needed to succeed. The first woman I spoke to wanted to know if I was a judge. Although disappointed to hear I am a professor, she did express the wish that I try to get my students to see her as a neighbor and as someone’s mother, not just as a monster. She described herself as a single mother who got carried away in trying to keep up appearances, and began to write bad checks to pay for the latest video games for her sons. She said she didn’t need anything to succeed, she had learned her lesson and would do fine once released.
It was the second woman who shocked me, as much with her matter-of-fact delivery as with the content. In her thirties and the mother of two teenage boys, she appeared thin and anxious, but offered a ready smile. When I asked if there was anything she needed, she immediately asked for more help for women sexually assaulted by guards. She said that when she was raped, all they did was move her to this ward. “When he was zipping up, he told me if I said anything he’d have me put in solitary. That’s my biggest fear. But I’m proud of myself for speaking up; I’ve found that everything is changing for me now that I’ve spoken.” In the time remaining before they called us away, we chatted about going to college and being mothers.
I quickly put aside her comments after leaving the facility, which was actually a lovely campus that could as easily have been a prep school as a prison. I told myself that since I was touring the ward for the mentally ill, it was likely that her comments were the product of her delusions. But the story she told lingered in my mind.
Later that same week, a civil rights activist came to speak to my introduction to criminal justice class. She spoke of the letters from inmates she receives, and told some gruesome stories to illustrate the limits of our current laws. In particular, she emphasized how difficult it is to address harms caused to people in prison. The main mechanism for recognizing prison problems is through lawsuits filed under the eighth amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But since the passage of a law in the 1990s called the Prison Litigation Reform Act, few harms meet the threshold. For example, courts have determined that being raped by a guard is not a violation of a person’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. She proceeded to tell the story of the woman I had spoken with. Afterwards, I checked, and, indeed, the young mother I spoke with is part of a lawsuit being filed against the prison for a pattern of allowing sexual assaults.
This is why I study punishment. This is why I teach in a department of sociology and criminal justice. This is why I am on the board of the Sexual Abuse Treatment Alliance. Within ten miles of my home, women are being terrorized and tortured in my name. When we delegate the power to punish to our state authorities, the actions they take are on behalf of all of us and are paid for with out tax dollars. It’s still not clear to me what I can do, aside from telling the story. In this cultural moment, when we think of sex crime, we think of the angelic child victims of sexual homicide that dominate the news. We are much less apt to think of adult victims, let alone women who cannot be valorized as blameless and holy martyrs to the beastly desires of bad men. Neither do we care much about people behind bars; instead we choose to view them as deserving of whatever they get. We may have more sympathy for female offenders than for male; this may create an opening for hearing this story. But beyond just hearing this story and others, we must consider what we can do to recognize the humanity of people who have been convicted of criminal offenses. How can we better support the work of the many good people in the justice system and in community and social services who care for them and support them as they re-enter society? How can we move beyond our limited understanding of what sexual violence is and who it affects?
Addressing these issues are practical as well as moral imperatives. As we enter a new decade, I resolve to draw as many others into reasoned debate and passionate inquiry on these subjects as possible, with the hope that some will create the changes we desperately need.
Molefe Makiti, political prisoner, 1963: "The biggest thing in prison is sex. The way that the cell bosses would entice young men to have sex with them was by giving them better food."What I have found so very sad about South Africa in recent years is that despite the experience of imprisonment of so many leading figures in the ruling ANC they have allowed South Africa to develop a brutal and extensive prison system targeted at the poorest and most powerless sections of the black community.
Molefe Pheto, political prisoner, 1975: "Supper was a mixture of old rotten boiled fish whose stink would reach us, permeating from the prison's kitchens, long before the fish itself had arrived; and when it did so, it was hardly recognisable as fish, with hundreds of thin bones which made it difficult to eat, quite apart from the disgusting smell of it. On the day it was pig skins, the fat had long curdled … with the pieces of skins sticking out of the mess like shark fins."
Alex La Guma, political prisoner, 1956: "The tin plates … were unwashed and encrusted with layers of dried food accumulated over months, well mixed with rust … One of the reasons for my disease [typhoid] is found in this jail. Filth. The mats are filthy, the blankets are filthy, the latrines are filthy, the food is filthy, the utensils are filthy, the convicts' clothes are filthy. The latrines overflowed and made a stench."
Indres Naidoo, political prisoner, 1963: "'Strip!' We took off our clothes and stood stark naked in the yard … The warders mocked us for the nakedness they had ordered. 'Tausa!' We refused, we had seen other prisoners doing the tausa and we were not going to do it. The naked person leapt in the air, spinning around and opening his legs wide while clapping his hands overhead, and then in the same moment, coming down, making clicking sounds with the mouth and bending his body right forward so as to expose his open rectum to the warders' inspection."
Henry Nxumalo, pass offender, 1954: "I didn't know how it was done … I didn't jump and clap my hands. The white warder conducting the search hit me with his fist on my left jaw, threw my clothes at me and went on searching others."
Martin 'Panyaza' Shabangu, prison warder, 1973-80: "Some of these people grew up with me and as a warder I did not like to make them open their anus. Sometimes it was an old man in his 50s, a respectable somebody. White warders wouldn't have done it to their own people. But it was a duty that we were forced to do … The prisoners were cleverer than us. When they came from court or work, they were carrying things like blades and money which they could hide up their anus."
Samuel Nthute, political prisoner, 1963: "It was wrong, it was not nice. For us, the children of the Basotho nation, we respect elderly people. A man can never undress in front of me. But in this place they don't care. You undress, the older men in front of the younger men. But we could do nothing about it, absolutely nothing."
Prema Naidoo, political prisoner, 1982: "After we arrived in Number Four we did not have a shower for three or four months. Because of interaction of our lawyers, tackling the authorities, threatening them with interdict, they allowed us out to shower. It was cold water, but at least it was a shower. It was quite a relief. Then we were allowed to shower about once a week."
Godfrey Moloi, prisoner, 1956: "The bosses again. If they felt a man seemed to enjoy the shower, he was assaulted. One of the bosses would stand at the gate with a dish full of soft soap better known as 'sop-sop'. He would scoop it with his hand and paste it on to our heads as we rushed past him."
Molefe Pheto, political prisoner, 1975: "To add insult to injury, that unbelievably shameless, most degenerate species of human degradation, the white warders, would actually stand at the entrances of the toilets and watch us squatting over the floor toilet-pails trying to shit the slimes out of our bodies. I could not believe that type of indignity, it was beyond me to comprehend their nonchalance at their own debasement."
