[lbo-talk] Prisons and the Left

Politicus E. epoliticus at gmail.com
Thu Apr 9 13:39:13 PDT 2009


Catron wrote: "Y'know, I have lived among them, and they really aren't that bad. This peculiar belief among some leftists, that people who do nasty things in the course of their work must, by logical consequence, be nasty people, never ceases to amaze me in its naivete."

I agree that such an inference is not strictly speaking a logical consequence, but you are the one here that is naive. The following news report is a good illustration of this.

Ex-prison guard who set up inmate beatings dies by Bob Egelko, S.F. Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, March 25, 2009 http://tinyurl.com/ck63mq

(03-24) 17:42 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A former California prison guard who was convicted in 2002 of setting up beatings and stabbings of inmates has died of cancer in federal prison, authorities said Tuesday.

Jose Ramon Garcia, 55, died March 16 in the prison hospital in Butner, N.C., the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said. A preliminary report said the cause of death was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

A federal jury in San Francisco convicted Garcia and another guard, Michael Powers, in May 2002 of conspiring to violate the civil rights of as many as eight inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison from July 1992 to August 1996.

Garcia was sentenced to more than six years in prison and Powers to seven years. They remained free on appeal, however, until September 2006.

Prosecutors said the guards offered prisoners alcohol and other privileges to attack other inmates, targeting convicted child molesters, rapists and prisoners who would not cooperate with them.

Garcia was convicted of state charges in 1998, but a judge overturned his conviction because of incompetence by his lawyer, Robert Noel.

Later, Noel and his wife, Marjorie Knoller, were convicted of manslaughter in the dog-mauling death of a San Francisco woman. Both have served their sentences, but Knoller could be sent back to prison if she loses her appeal of a judge's decision last year that reinstated her second-degree murder conviction.

"In many respects he was a decent man. He cared about people," Garcia's lawyer, Matthew Pavone, said Tuesday.

-- "In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial ... the present year of course always excepted." -- A German refugee, circa 1867 --

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