Loss of Privacy

The Pinal County Sheriff’s department has begun identifying inmates by iris scans and facial recognition. It has also extended the program to its 700 sex offenders registered in the county.

Pinal joins dozens of sheriff’s offices and correctional facilities across the nation using BI2 Technologies, a Massachusetts-based biometric intelligence company. The company gives local law enforcement iris-scanning capabilities and a database shared by participating agencies.

One disturbing note is how the police obtained the money to set up such a system.

The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office used $30,000 in inmate welfare funds to purchase three scanners for jail use and one to capture sex offender data.

Inmate welfare funds are supposed to be used to for the benefit, education, and welfare of the inmate population. How, exactly, is taking a person’s biometric information, storing it in a database, and tracking the person, possibly for the rest of their lives, helpful to this person?

Guards at the Los Angeles County jail complex in Castaic will start using a newfangled weapon that produces a deep burning sensation — which is not to be confused with a “warm fuzzy feeling” — in whomever it is aimed at.

The 7 1/ More..2-foot-tall “Assault Intervention Device,” which sheriff’s deputies demonstrated Friday at the Pitchess Detention Center, emits an invisible beam that causes an unbearable sensation, reported the Daily News.

The device will be mounted near the ceiling in a unit housing about 65 inmates, sheriff’s Cmdr. Bob Osborne of the sheriff’ Technology Exploration Program told the newspaper.

“We hope that this type of technology will either cause an inmate to stop an assault or lessen the severity of an assault by them being distracted by the pain as a result of the beam,” said Osborne. “So that we have fewer injuries, fewer assaults, those kinds of things.”
Deputies have tested the device on themselves and say the invisible beam is painful — especially when it’s not expected.

“I equate it to opening an oven door and feeling that blast of hot air, except instead of being all over me, it’s more focused,” said Osborne.

The pain stops when you move out of the beam’s path, which people do instinctively.

The device, developed by Raytheon, is controlled by a joystick and computer monitor and emits a beam about the size of a CD up to distances of about 100 feet.

The energy traveling at the speed of light penetrates the skin up to 1/64 of an inch deep. No one can stand being in the beam’s path for more than about three seconds, Mike Booen of Raytheon told the Daily News.

The device is being evaluated for a period of six months by the National Institute of Justice for use in jails nationwide.

Sheriff’s deputies are getting to try it out for free.

About 3,700 inmates are housed at Pitchess, where 257 inmate-on-inmate assaults occurred in the first half of the year

Despite the fact that such a move is unconstitutional, the Berkeley County Detention Center in Moncks Corner, South Carolina has banned all books and magazines for prisoners, except for the bible. The ACLU is now suing the jail on behalf of Prison Legal News, who have been attempting for some time to send materials to prisoners.

“Our inmates are only allowed to receive soft back bibles in the mail directly from the publisher,” First Sgt. K. Habersham noted in the e-mail. “They are not allowed to have magazines, newspapers, or any other type of books.”

ACLU staff attorney David Shapiro said the policy effectively bans prisoners from all books and violates a number of the magazine’s and inmates’ constitutional rights.

“The first [right it violates] is the right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, which carries with it the right to receive materials and read,” he said, adding that the policy also discriminates on the basis of religion.

The actions of the sheriff and the detention center violate the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment. They are forcing a single type of religion on prisoners and denying anything and everything else.

There is no library at the Berkeley County Detention Center, meaning that some prisoners who are incarcerated for extended periods of time have been deprived of all access to magazines, newspapers and books – other than the Bible – for months or even years on end. There is also no process through which the unconstitutional policy can be challenged.

“The Berkeley County Detention Center is totally out of step with most other jails around the country that recognize not just that censorship of this sort is clearly unconstitutional but that providing prisoners with access to books and periodicals is an important lifeline to the outside world,” said Victoria Middleton, Executive Director of the ACLU of South Carolina. “We should do as much as possible to aid prisoners’ successful transition back into society, not impede it.”

Shutting people out from the outside world and blatant censorship such as this should never be allowed. The ACLU and Prison Legal News should easily win this case.

We were told that the pain ray was going to be used in other countries. Then, we were told it could be used here for crowd control. Now, it’s being tested for use in the Castaic jail in Los Angeles.

The 7½-foot-tall Assault Intervention Device emits a focused, invisible ray that causes an unbearable heating sensation in its targets – hopefully stopping inmates from fighting or doing anything other than trying to get out of its way, sheriff’s officials said.

“We hope that this type of technology will either cause an inmate to stop an assault or lessen the severity of an assault by them being distracted by the pain as a result of the beam,” Osborne said. “So that we have fewer injuries, fewer assaults, those kinds of things.”

Deputies have tested the device on themselves and say the beam is painful – especially when it’s not expected.

Gee, ya think? After all, it says pain ray right in the product’s name.  We’re using on prisoners though, so it’s okay.

“This device will allow us to quickly intervene without having to enter the area and without incapacitating or injuring either combatant,” said Sheriff Lee Baca in a statement.

“If you got in the way, you’ll know,” said Mike Booen, vice president of advance security at Raytheon, which has been working on the device for about 20 years. “You feel the effect in less than a second. No one can stand there for more than about three seconds because it really hurts.”

“With this device, we can affect people that we need to have experience that effect and not have anything happen to other people,” Osborne said. “And there’s nothing to clean up, and no injuries.”

If there are no injuries, why was it recalled from military use and never actually used? Have the police done any research on this device to see what it actually does to an individual or did they just see it as an easy way to control people and didn’t care about the consequences?

Inmate Omar Broadway snuck a camera into Northern State Prison in Newark, New Jersey and filmed there for six months. That video is now going to be an HBO documentary. He documented cases of guard abuse, gang activity and violence.

Trailer:

Full documentary, though the French can be annoying: