Bring a protest sign that you can throw away or fold up in your bag as these are not allowed in the courtroom
You will need to show your driver's license to get inside. Dress respectfully as the media will be present, although you need not speak to the media directly if you are too afraid to do so. We have plenty of UNION moms whose sons and daughters are dying who have plenty to say.
We have a block of rooms with an affordable rate.-- Some of the rides available from various points in California are free rides.
Email now, the rally is but a few days away.
Dear Activists for Change:
It has been ten long, lean, grueling years and still the state of California has violated more than 77 orders issued by the judges to stop the inhumane and unconstitutional practices in the prisons.
It feels to me as if were fifty years after all we witnessed and personally endured as complaints still flow in from 33 prisons by the hundreds, and the bodies continue to stack up at my feet.
Our UNION families have worked 24/7 for a decade to end abuse of the mentally ill and expose what is nothing less than a humanitarian crisis of great magnitude, happening in the prisons because nobody cared enough to fix the problems. Video cameras in all areas would have helped tremendously and saved a fortune in lawsuits, but a profit is not made on the inmates unless medical care, rehab, a proper diet and education are denied.
Thousands of people died during these era of occupation and death right under everyone's noses.
The prisoners are still dying preventable deaths in taxpayer-financed institutions where the media is banned from being able to interview specific inmates. This ban is to cover up the extent of the crisis in my very qualified opinion..
There are four journalists with loved ones in prison who are communicating. It isn't the same as being able to do one on one interviews, but we know there is a crisis that shouldn't be happening in our country, let alone progressive California. This media ban is why the public is largely unaware of third world conditions that exist due to extreme overcrowding- in the prisons.
Thanks to our UNION members who are also active in the Prop 5 campaign, the public was able to see graphic images on television because millions were spent that should have been raised years ago. We are all indebted to the Drug Policy Alliance and the 25,000 members nationally who raised $8 million to do long-needed public education.
Thanks to the many teachers in the UNION who have loved ones in prison themselves, we were finally able to get the California Teachers to come out against more harsh conveyor belt laws such as Prop 6 and Prop 9 and to at last understand that our precious education dollars are spent on hiring prison guards instead. "Hire a prison guard, fire a teacher" - that's where we are and have been for many years as more than one third of our budget is wasted on a failed prison system.
Prop 6 was defeated, but Prop 9 was passed by uninformed electorate, which only intensifies the prison overcrowding and will cost billions of our human services and education dollars to implement.
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