Lindsay Lohan wearing her ankle bracelet.

It’s an eschatological dream: open the prisons. Let at least nonviolent offenders out and give them a chance to build an honest life in society. Free at last, right? Well, yeah—except for the odd beepers strapped onto their ankles and the boxes on their belts, which broadcast their position (and the chemical composition of their sweat) to an office park in Indiana. The contraptions even periodically issue verbal commands at their wearers. Step away from the liquor store.

Atlantic correspondent Graeme Wood, in his new article “Prison without Walls,” is sold. The United States has one of the world’s most brutal, inhumane, and disastrous incarceration industries, with currently around 2.3 million people locked up in prisons and jails—perhaps half of whom, if ever released, will be back again within three years. The answer? A growing (private) regime of total surveillance by electronic monitoring. Emerging technologies now allow contractors to track offenders better than ever, to the point now that, in many cases, walls, bars, and a jumpsuit are becoming obsolete. Wood imagines that

if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society.

He has a point. American prisons are horrific and utterly counterproductive places, where inmates learn to live in fear of their guards and each other. Those who get out bring that logic with them into society outside. The fewer people we need to keep in prisons, without doubt, the better off we’ll all be. And the process that Wood describes, of course, is hardly radical, as already two-thirds of those being punished in this country are on probation or parole. But, like most dreams, it carries the ingredients of a nightmare.

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• Men wearing face masks of British Prime Minister David Cameron gathered in London on Friday to call for a ban on the cloning of cattle for human consumption, following the discovery of a cloned U.S. cow that was slaughtered and eaten in Britain.

• Two members of the environmental group Six Degrees climbed onto the roof of Queensland parliament house in Australia last week to display an anti-coal mining banner that read: “Don’t undermine our farms.” Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers and green activists staged a peaceful protest outside parliament.

• The “We Are Guahan” coalition in Guam gathered at a major intersection in Tamuning on Friday to protest the use of historic and ceremonial lands for military buildup.

• Some 150 protesters gathered outside a federal prison farm in Kingston, Ontario this morning to protest its closure. They say the government is ignoring the rehabilitative and healing effects that farming offers low-risk inmates.

• Up to 60 people have been camping out in front of the county government building in Santa Cruz since July Fourth to protest the city’s camping ban, which prohibits sleeping on public or private property from 11 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. But deputies rousted the homeless protest camp just after midnight Saturday, arresting five people and handing out 17 other misdemeanor citations.

• Workers who were fired by a Brooklyn kosher food producer after demanding overtime pay have been protesting outside the owner’s house and a supermarket this summer, and preparing for a return to the National Labor Relations Board this fall.

• Baristas and community supporters shut down a Starbucks in Omaha last week demanding that management reverse all cuts to healthcare, staffing, and benefits that have been imposed during the recession. The baristas claim that executives have no justification to squeeze working families with Starbucks raking in profits of $977.2 million in the past four fiscal quarters.

• Through a series of well-choreographed steps, a tiger-themed flash mob called “Freeze Tiger Trade” spearheaded by WWF-Malaysia turned heads and attracted attention on the status of our Malayan tigers here in Kuala Lumpur.

• In Turkey, nongovernmental organizations in the eastern province of Batman held a silent march and sit-in demonstration yesterday in protest of a mine explosion that claimed the lives of four people on Monday.

• On Wednesday, unionized workers of the West Indies Paper Products Limited in Jamaica walked off the job to protest against what they claimed was the failure of the management to improve wage and fringe benefits.

• More than 100 people at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in England went on hunger strike on Wednesday.

• In Azerbaijan, ten opposition activists jailed for participating in an unsanctioned rally calling for free elections in central Baku on July 31 have declared a hunger strike.

• Around 120 Chinese seasonal berry pickers in northern Sweden went on a 15-kilometre (9.3-mile) march overnight to Friday to protest their salaries

• In Malaysia, police forcefully broke up peaceful candlelight vigils held on August 1, against the Internal Security Act (ISA), and arrested 36 people in Petaling Jaya and Penang.

• This past Friday, in Bryant Park  in New York, Medicare celebrated it’s 45th birthday with a flash mob of over one hundred singing and dancing protesters that warned President Obama’s newly created Deficit Commission to keep their hands off Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

• South African government ministers met with public sector workers’ unions to try to end an open-ended wage strike by 210,000 teachers, nurses and other state employees that began last Thursday and prevent it from spreading.

• Greek truck drivers’ associations say they will continue a protest that has halted fuel supplies across the country and is hurting tourism, despite an emergency order by the government to force them back to work.

• Hundreds of hotel and restaurant employees and supporters were arrested around the US Thursday in coordinated civil disobedience against the Hyatt Corporation. Fifteen cities saw protests.

• A group of families of political prisoners gathered in front of the office of the General Prosecutor to protest the lack of information about the situation of their loved ones, especially those political prisoners who went on hunger strike in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison last week. Meanwhile, it was reported yesterday that anti-riot units and Special Forces barged into the facility  after learning of prisoners’ mass hunger strike.

• More than 200 Afghans participated in a rally in the capital Kabul on Sunday to protest the alleged NATO killing of 52 civilians on July 23, in the Sangin district of Helmand province.

• Some 800 dockers and activists staged a rally in Indonesia on Saturday to demand that a major port operator honor a negotiated agreement.

• In North Carolina, a thousand marchers from the state NAACP, local churches, student groups and civil rights organizations took to downtown Raleigh streets on Tuesday morning, rallying at the State Capitol to protest the dismantling of a Wake school diversity policy they believe will lead to de facto resegregation. Afterwards, nineteen protesters, including the leader of the North Carolina NAACP, were arrested at Wake County school headquarters in an act of civil disobedience.

• On Saturday, an estimated 2,000 farmers in Taiwan began their protest against government expropriation of their land and spent the night on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building. They turned part of the wide road into a field by rolling out patches covered with plants while also paying their respects to farming deities.

• About 150 Jordanian activists demonstrated before the Egyptian embassy in Amman on Tuesday to protest Cairo’s refusal to allow a humanitarian convoy to reach the besieged Gaza Strip.

• On Monday, hundreds of teachers, councilors and pupils have protested over the axing of England’s school rebuilding programme. Led by trade unions, the Save Our Schools lobby urged ministers to reconsider the move which led to the halting of 735 school projects.

• Former employees of the closed Amonsito factory in Cairo have ended their sit-in, following Wednesday’s tentative agreement for overdue early retirement payment to the workers from Banque Misr, the factory’s creditor.

• In Greece, 170 migrants detained in the Samos detention camp started a collective hunger strike in an effort to stop their deportation.

• Starting last Wednesday, thousands of people in eastern China protested for at least five days against local authorities which they accuse of withholding land compensation.

• In Chile, more than 20 Mapuche political prisoners began a hunger strike Monday. The prisoners, jailed in Concepción and Temuco, took note of the recent prisoner releases in Cuba and began the strike in hope that President Sebastián Piñera would take notice.

• On Thursday, activists with Rainforest Action Network staged a sit-in  at EPA Headquarters in Washington, where they occupied the lobby and used metal lock boxes to lock themselves together.  The action was to bring attention to EPA’s newly approved Pine Creek mountaintop removal permit in Logan County, West Virginia.

• Newsstands were mostly empty, Internet sites weren’t updated and the airwaves were practically news-free in Italy on Friday as journalists went on strike to protest Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s bid to restrict wiretaps, a move he says is to protect the privacy of everyday Italians while journalists claim it’s a gag law aimed at protecting him and corrupt officials.

• On Saturday, calling it a Day of Action for Civil Liberties, some 1,200 protestors marched from Queen’s Park to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to protest how police and governments are handling the G20 summit aftermath.

• Guillermo Fariñas, an opposition activist in Cuba, ended a 134-day hunger strike on Thursday, after indications that the government would make good on its promise to release 52 political prisoners.

• Defying curfew, thousands of people protested across the Valley in Kashmir for the fifth consecutive day Friday against the killing of unarmed civilians. he protesters staged a sit-in on the Cement Bridge for nearly 30 minutes.

• The National Health Service in Britain said they would immediately reinstate round-the-clock care to Angela Caviill-Burch’s quadriplegic husband after she went on hunger strike last week.

• In a protest against the unofficial ban imposed by the Sindh Government in Pakistan on the movement of wheat, flour mills across Punjab continued to observe a complete strike for the fifth continuous day on Monday.

• On Thursday four members of a group from Dalga Youth Organization were arrested as they held a flash-mob action of protest in front of the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan. The youth activists were marking the one year anniversary of the arrest of the bloggers Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli.

• In Pakistan, a shutter-down strike was observed in Quetta and southern districts of Balochistan on Thursday to protest against the rationing of electricity and increasing cases of kidnapping for ransom.

• At least 15,000 protesting garment factory workers blocked key roads in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka Wednesday, the latest in a string of protests over poor conditions and low wages, which now average $25 a month to sewing clothes for major Western brands such as Wal-Mart and H & M.

• Clashes erupted at the Puerto Rico Capitol in San Juan on Wednesday after police forcibly prevented protesters from attending a legislative session on the State budget. Officers used batons, physical force and pepper spray to block a large group that included many students seeking a voice in the Puerto Rican budget. Student organizers say over two dozen protesters were treated for injuries.

• Transport chaos again hit Madrid Wednesday as a strike by 7,500 metro workers protesting a wage cut of around 5 percent decided by the right-wing regional government entered a third day with the system totally shut down.

• A Salvadoran-born clergyman has set up a camping tent in a Chicago public park where he intends to continue the hunger strike he began 16 days ago to demand immigration reform. The protest is part of a series of fasts, hunger strikes and acts of civil disobedience organized in Illinois by groups defending undocumented immigrants to pressure Congress to enact immigration reform.

• A protest shutdown has paralysed normal life for a fourth successive day in Indian-administered Kashmir. The strike has been called in protest at the recent killing of unarmed civilians by police and paramilitary troops.

• A strike at Tianjin Mitsumi Electric Co., a Japanese-owned electronics factory in north China, crippled production on Thursday, extending the industrial unrest that has put manufacturers at odds with increasingly assertive workers.

• On Monday, four parents occupied the Dunster Fine Arts Elementary School in British Columbia to protest its impending closure.

• A large number of people in Karachi held a sit-in on the main Abdullah Haroon Road on Sunday in protest against the murder of a brother of a gang-rape victim.

• Three former detainees from Guantanamo Bay who were transferred to Slovakia in January will continue their hunger-strike in protest against the allegedly bad treatment they are receiving from Slovak authorities at a detention facility in Medvedov.

• Protesters draped large black tarps that represented oil spills over beachgoers in Miami Beach yesterday to demonstrate the negative effects of offshore drilling.

• Two thousand people gathered in front of the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti yesterday to call for the resignation of Rene Preval after his ineffective handling of the February earthquake.

• Opposition groups continue to sit-in in front of the Cairo parliament against the emergency law in Egypt, even as politicians say they will not remove the decree.

• People marched through Paris and demonstrated in front of the Iranian Embassy there on Sunday to protest the five executions in Tehran that day.

• Colombian presidential candidate Robinson Devia chained himself to a statue and declared a hunger strike in Bogotá yesterday to protest biased media coverage of his campaign.

• Laotians demonstrated in front of the embassy in DC this week for the release of political prisoners and refugees in detention.

• A hundred protesters marched from the Department of the Interior to the White House today to protest government support of fossil fuels.  They carried a banner that read, “Obama: This is your crude awakening.”

• Parent protesters succeeded in lowering the jail bond for a group of Detroit teenagers from $25,000 to $500 yesterday after picketing the courthouse.

• Four hundred California high school students walked out of class on Friday in response to announced teacher pay cuts and are now facing consequences for the protest.

• Thousands of Thai red-shirted activists began a protest on Saturday that froze downtown Bangkok and will continue to demonstrate this week, although in a different location.  The pro-democracy protesters urge Prime Minister Vejjajiva to call new elections.

• Worshipers at Dublin’s Pro Cathedral placed children’s shoes on the altar during Easter Mass on Sunday, in protest of child abuse committed by Catholic clergy.

• Cuban journalist Guillermo Fariñas, who has been hunger striking and refusing hospitalization for weeks in support of political prisoners denied medical attention in Cuban jails, was in declining health on Saturday.  Two of the prisoners also began hunger strikes.

• More than one hundred Bulgarian workers began a hunger strike on Saturday in the town of Kostenets.  They protest their paper plant’s decision to fire employees without providing compensation.

• On Saturday in Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks commenced a hunger strike to protest the arrest of an opposition presidential candidate.  The four men refused to move when confronted by police but were dispersed late Saturday night.

• In Munich on Sunday, hundreds of German activists marched in protest of the war in Afghanistan.  They call for immediate return of troops and an end to fighting, spurred by the recent deaths of German soldiers.

• Three hundred Egyptians demonstrated in front of the parliament in Cairo on Saturday, urging an increase in minimum wage.  The current level, at approximately $7 per month, has not increased in 25 years.

• Two dozen people walked through Portland, Maine without their shirts on Friday, demonstrating against the double standard of nudity for men and women.

• Thousands of red-shirted protesters in Thailand are camping out near the Government House compound in Bangkok in preparation for another massive rally on Saturday, as part of their effort to restore democracy.

• Hundreds gathered in front of the Vinoy Hotel in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida yesterday to protest President Obama’s plans to expand oil drilling into the Eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico.

• Russian police detained dozens of anti-Kremlin activists in St. Petersburg on Wednesday after 300 gathered to protest restrictions on the constitutional right to free assembly.

• More than 4,500 bus and tram drivers in Bucharest went on strike yesterday to protest wage and bonus cuts.

• Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli jail went on hunger strike yesterday, demanding a better quality of life while in the justice system, including more education and family visits.

• Farmers across the state of Assam, India staged sit-ins yesterday in response to a recent police action and upcoming construction of harmful dams.

• Australia’s Pirate Party organized a flash mob yesterday after the government censored certain politically sensitive websites.  Thirty protesters met in Sydney wearing symbolic gags.

• After the military briefly arrested Guinea-Bissau Prime Minister Carlos Gomes yesterday morning, hundreds of people gathered in protest, supporting democracy.  The West African group dispersed after the military commander threatened to kill Gomes if they did not leave.

• In Somalia, hundreds of people protested violent insurgent group Shabab in a demonstration led by Sufi clerics on Monday.  The gathering was one of the biggest in recent years.

• More than 100 tenants at the Chunping Shopping Mall in Beijing went on hunger strike Monday, asking for the return of their rent. The shop owners have protested and stopped eating for three days as of Monday in front of the shopping mall and two people were hospitalized due to the hunger strike.

• On March 26, several thousand marched in Tegucigalpa to demand an end to the escalation of repression, and against the neoliberal policies of the new government.

• On Monday, about 100 trolleybus drivers went on strike in Ukraine because they are owed back pay and are demanding immediate payment. They also protested against the liquidation of bonuses and deteriorating work conditions..

• On Monday, more than a dozen union members stood in front of the Daimler Trucks North America parts plant in Gastonia, North Carolina, holding signs in protest of manufacturing orders outsourced to the company’s Mexican plants.

• A hunger strike that began on March 18, by several Sahrawi detainees in Moroccan prisons to protest against violations of human rights in the occupied territories of Western Sahara has expanded to 10 other prisons.

• On the University of Victoria’s campus in Canada, the Food Not Lawns Collective is planning another “planting party,” after the administration moved quickly to remove unendorsed garden beds built by the protesters last week.

• French teachers are protesting violent attacks that have become all too commonplace in schools, an unintended result of budget cutbacks.

• In the Philippines, six political detainees of the Bohol District Jail (BDJ) are on hunger strike an in apparent support for “illegal arrest” of 43 health workers in Morong, Rizal recently.

• On Friday, dozens of unions joined striking Shaw’s workers to escalate the protest across New England after Shaw’s said it was beginning the process of hiring workers to permanently replace the striking employees.

• The public, including members and supporters of the ruling Frelimo Party, boycotted en masse a rally in the southern Mozambican town of Homoine at which the new governor of Inhambane province, Agostinho Trinta, was to have been presented to protest  the chronic shortage of drinking water, lack of rubbish collection, and the poor state of the roads in the town.

We come across a lot of prison actions working on this site, which almost always means a hunger strike by inmates. There is often little else that prisoners can do to protest their treatment given the circumstances.

A recent story from The Telegraph, that could literally have appeared as a spoof in The Onion, tells the story of one unnamed prisoner in Sweden who has taken a different tact. Read and enjoy:

Anders Eriksson, the prison’s warden, realised that the inmate’s repeated episodes of flatulence were “a series of concerted attacks” on staff.

[...]

The apparent motive came to light a couple of weeks ago when the prisoner was playing cards with fellow inmates.

“I had an upset stomach while I was playing cards but did not want to fart there. So I went over to the guards instead,” the 21-year-old convict told the prison authorities.

When challenged over his behaviour and summoned for questioning, the prisoner claimed that his “farts were all noise and no fragrance”.

He has been served with an official warning that future flatulent conduct towards prison guards will be punished.

Cincinnati’s Fair Hiring Campaign rallied last Thursday, February 25, to ask Mayor Mark Mallory and his appointed Civil Service Commission to end their policy of denying city jobs to qualified applicants with felony convictions.

Over fifty Cincinnati residents, myself included, arrived at Cincinnati’s City Hall for the Commission’s 9 am meeting only to find that the Commission had abruptly canceled its section for public comment.  “Ain’t council chambers the people’s house?” asked one individual in the crowd.  Leaders of the Fair Hiring Campaign negotiated for two minutes of speaking time before the Commission.

Former offenders face employment barriers both de facto and de jure even for seemingly ancient convictions that have no relevance to the job. These restrictions hinder the ability of millions of Americans (one in 99 is currently incarcerated) to reintegrate successfully after completing their sentences.

For at least three years, the City has opposed proposed changes to its no-felon hiring policy.  Frustratingly, the Mayor denies that such a policy even exists.

Ironically, by condemning rehabilitated people to unemployment and under-employment, the no-felon hiring policy ends up increasing the burden on the City’s own overloaded criminal justice and public welfare systems.

Proposed changes would allow city government to consider an applicant’s evidence of rehabilitation. “We’re not asking for guaranteed jobs,” Stephen JohnsonGrove of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center told the Commission.  “We just want fair consideration for people with old and irrelevant criminal records.”

After speaking to the Commission, the group walked to the Mayor’s office to present over 1000 letters from Cincinnatians supporting a fair hiring policy.

The no-felon hiring policy is based on fear, not evidence.  Depending on a person’s age and offense, research finds that after a certain period of time s/he is no more likely to offend than same-aged members of the general population.  For 18-year-olds arrested for robbery in 1980, that point was 7.7 years. Yet people convicted of crimes less serious than robbery still face barriers decades later.

Employment barriers don’t make us any safer.  They serve, instead, to punish people years after they have paid their debt to society.  “You can get over an addiction,” one person told me, “but a conviction stays with you for life.”

• In Evansville, Indiana, a crowd estimated at 5,000 strong poured onto the shoulder and parking lot of the Evansville plant, protesting Whirlpool’s decision to shut down and ship jobs to Mexico.

• Carrefour SA’s 116 stores in Belgium were closed Saturday because of a strike over planned job cuts, said a company spokesman who put the resulting sales loss at the company-owned outlets at 14 million euros ($19 million).

• Scores of Jordanian politicians and trade union members staged a sit-in at the Trade Unions Complex in Amman on Saturday to denounce Israel’s addition of two West Bank holy sites to a list of Jewish heritage centers.

• Syrian Catholic Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa of Mosul led over 1,000 Iraqi Catholics in a silent protest on February 28 to demand that the government act to put a stop to violence against Christians there.

• In Nepal, the 48-hour sit-in protest of the Civil Movement for Democracy and Peace (CMDP), which began from Thursday in front of the Constituent Assembly building, to urge political parties to draft the constitution within the given time frame, concluded on Saturday at 8 am.

• Several Cuban dissidents say they will refuse food in protest at the death earlier this week of a jailed government opponent. Orlando Zapata Tamayo died on Tuesday in a hospital in the capital Havana after a hunger strike of 85 days. His death triggered international protests and Cuban President Raul Castro issued an expression of regret.

• Three Chinese death-row inmates who say they were tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit have staged a hunger strike to draw attention to their case.

• Thousands of adherents of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) marched in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa Feb. 25 to protest the slaying of civil resistance leaders under what they still consider to be the “de facto regime” of President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo despite the change in government last month. The rally concluded in front of the National Congress building, where the march was blocked by a military cordon.

• Hundreds of Dutch activists have walked out of a Mass in protest at a Roman Catholic policy of denying communion to practising homosexuals.

• On Thursday, protesting Guatemalan teachers in Melchor de Mencos blocked the Melchor Bridge with their bodies to stop vehicular passage through the border between Guatemala and Belize. According to union president Zetina, who spoke on behalf of the teachers, they are demanding a 16% salary increase from their Government, in addition to proper renovation of school buildings.

• Thirty-eight Jamaican women — all of them asylum seekers, some of whom have lived in the UK for as long as 10 years — are on hunger strike in holding facilities in the United Kingdom, in protest of their imminent deportation to Jamaica.

• Tens of thousands of protesters calling themselves the Purple People took to the streets of Rome on the weekend in a sign of mounting opposition to the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The group, Il Popolo Viola, wore purple sweaters and scarves, Berlusconi masks or striped prison dress to protest against what they say is the undermining of Italian democracy by Mr Berlusconi in his battle with the country’s legal system.

• The pilots’ union of Lufthansa began a 4-day strike today after a last-ditch effort at negotiations over pay and job security failed.

• In Thailand, truck operators will stage a stoppage on roads today in protest at alleged extortion by highway police, saying incidents have doubled since last year.

• Thousands of protesters in Ivory Coast call for the resignation of President Laurent Gbagbo as clashes with security forces leave an undisclosed number of people dead and wounded.

• All 600 detainees at a prison in Iraq’s southern city of Basra have gone on hunger strike to protest conditions that are “not fit for animals,” a local politician said on Friday.

• Strikes at French refineries looked likely to spread as Exxonmobil employees Friday were called to join a protest at oil giant Total that has shut down seven plants and raised fears of supply cuts.

• Greece faces a growing fuel shortage as a customs workers’ strike halts the flow of petrol into the country. Customs workers have extended their strike against wage freezes and bonus cuts until this Wednesday, when unions across Greece will hold a general strike that is set to bring the country to a standstill.

• Dozens of Egyptian women and human rights activists staged a protest last Thursday in Cairo against a recent decision that bars women from holding judicial positions.

• Last Wednesday, Kenyans marched to vent their anger at a coalition government slowly falling apart over graft allegations and its inability to further key reforms pledged two years ago.

• Last week, A group of lawyers from the Law and Democracy Platform, an Turkish NGO working to strengthen the rule of law while respecting democratic values, protested against the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) decision to strip prosecutors conducting a probe into jailed Erzincan Chief Prosecutor İlhan Cihaner of their special authorities.