P. Diddy is responsible for breaking a lot of artists. However, those shitty deals that were worked out between Puff and those artists never puts them in the best position. From Black Rob, Loon, to Shyne, the Bad Boy roster has seen their share of prison cells due to their stagnant music careers and ambitious attempts that fail to get their brands back to where they once were. Most recently, G. Dep, the artist responsible for the hit, “Let’s Get It,” the track that resulted in the production of a video featuring the introduction of the “Harlem Shake,” has placed his bid to live in one of the many luxurious prison cells in the US.

More specifically, G. Dep aka “Ghetto Dependent” and who’s known to the judge and jury as Trevell Gerald Coleman, has admitted to another murder while on trial for murder. This is unfortunate because his career seemed so promising almost a decade ago but then he (Dep) fell into the “where is he now” category, as most artists with sucky ass deals usually do. Apparently, the murder he’s confessed to committing took place almost 20 years ago. Some things should just stay in the past, but is murder one of those things?

Check out MTV for more on this developing story…

Mumia Abu Jamal will not be executed. I repeat, Mumia Abu Jamal will not be executed! The former Black Panther turned prisoner whose name has rang bells for 30 years due to the death of a police officer, is being granted LIFE over DEATH. This is extraordinary news for the many that have followed this case and cases alike and since Troy Davis couldn’t be pardoned, the worse was expected.

Read Full Story HERE

Damn, he was a Panther not a monster! But I understand her sentiment.

It’s not what you think. See, King Uncaged isn’t an album title but something that supposedly just happened. While some of the music industry’s biggest artists are releasing their latest albums, this is T.I.’s latest physical release from prison. It sucks and it would be a good look if he never invested in this particular timeshare ever again!

Update:

Feels great to be back where I belong…Back in the arms of those who need me the most. The storm is over & da sun back out. IT’S OUR TIME TO SHINE SHAWTY!!!!!! Welcome to the beginning of our Happy Ending!!!!

I didn’t now they were still scaring kids with prison. Thats what’s up but is it working? Hopefully so!

I called it a few days ago when I put up the DMX Out Of Prison post.

Now here it is, DMX’s Latest Prayer

DMX, an artist known for incorporating a prayer on all his albums, just might need one to stay out of prison. X has been in more jails than TI these last few years and he lets us down more and more each time he’s released… are we letting him down?

Do we still have love for Mr. Simmons?

Prison is not supposed to be equivalent to your stay at a five-star hotel but at least treat the inmates that occupy the space as human beings. Even animals are treated better than the inmates in more than a dozen California prisons which is why they’re participating in a hunger strike that has lasted more than a week, risking death in the process.

For more on this story, Continue HERE

Reggae star Buju Banton was convicted in February on drug conspiracy and just recently lost his battle with the justice system, igniting a possible 10-year prison bid.

Below, the sentiment from celebrities that represent three different perspectives. Some say it wasn’t enough and couldn’t match the Cochran approach that once was available but now is a memory. Where is Johnnie when you need him?

Danny Glover said, Banton’s music “addresses every aspect of life and feeds the heart, mind, body and soul, bringing a message of hope.”

Stephen Marley, son of reggae legend Bob Marley, wrote, “Please consider the great things that he has done during his career as a musician.”

NBA player Etan Thomas said, “His songs have guided and inspired me since I was in middle school.”

At the end of the day, the judge wasn’t having it and said, “This is not about Buju Banton, the reggae singer, this is about Mark Myrie, the drug defendant.” And that pretty much settles it.

We should ask ourselves a couple questions but one may be more important than the other. Does the Hip Hop Police really exist and are we that hooked on the Hood Life that we can’t straighten up and fly right when we’ve been blessed with the means to do so???

This is a real record over an Ice Cube track which was recorded on a good day. But obviously, you can hear the pain in the lyrics, referencing his mother, who just recently passed away under some harsh circumstances.

“Wiz turned the kids into some grass hypes, the only thing higher is the gas price”….”Once again, you see how high gas is, I done seen it all, thats why they call me Glasses”

#GasIsTooDamnHigh

Besides further establishing himself in the rap industry, G. Malone is now on a mission to speak up and acquire rights for those currently incarcerated in the California prison system. According to XXLMAG, the L.A. based lyricist has teamed up with Matt Gray, a lobbyist in the state of California, to go before the Assembly and the Senate and advocate for prisoners’ [health] rights. Hmmmm….I wonder how he feels about their voting rights when they’re released back in to society.

See Story in Full HERE

Torrence Hatch misses being Lil Boosie. He expresses his frustration below:

“Some days I’m maintaining, but I’m missing my family and the life I had out there. My first seven months I was in population, but since June I’ve been on 23-hour lockdown.They said they’re trying to protect me because of who I am. They got people get stabbed here, killed here. Pretty rough people here. A lot of rats here, snitches.

“[I'm here] ’cause of the songs I made, before I was indicted, about the police in Baton Rouge and what’s going on here. There’s a lot with our record label, that the system don’t like… They took my hard drive out of my house after I got arrested. I have albums for days in there. They still haven’t returned it. They’ve had it for damn near a year now. I need that music.”

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When times get hard and budgets are tight, some groups (both conservative and liberal) are advocating for cutting prison funding in exchange for increasing education funding. These groups claim that it is a better economic investment to focus on education and sentencing reform to decrease crime across the country. This could mean placing non-violent offenders in more rehabilitative programs rather than incarcerating them.

The Washington Post reports that “state spending on prisons has grown at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20 years.”

However, not everybody is on board.  The executive director of the National District Attorneys Association was quick to respond with: “It is very hard to earn your way into prison in the United States…These aren’t people who just had a baggie of marijuana or shoplifted.”

It’s fascinating to see that one of the main spokesmen for district attorneys is not interested in correcting a corrections system that is currently dysfunctional. When it boils down to it, violent crimes may be good reasoning for being locked up. But, when we’re talking about young people committing non-violent crimes, does locking them up serve a greater purpose than educating them?

Lil Wayne is a big deal in Riker’s so much that they had to confuse inmates and fans on the date and time of his departure so that their wouldn’t be a riot. Not to worry, Remy Ma is still in there and would love all your support….

Maybach Music 2 featuring Lil Wayne

Have people truly lost their minds? It seems that people find more and more pleasure in the suffering of others. If it was not for mean spirited jokes, there might not be any comedy at all. I am no different than anyone else, I have certainly laughed at a friend that took a spill (after I helped them up of course), but I wouldn’t try to record it and profit off of a low point in someone else’s life. Unfortunately for people who get locked up in Franklin County, everyone does not feel the same.

There is a weekly publication in my city called Slammer which displays anyone who has been jailed in the county in the previous seven days. For only $1, anyone who has the whim can pick up a copy of Slammer and know who is in jail and for what. There are even stories in it that highlight popular cases and they are often written in a humorous tone.  So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to walk in any corner store in the ghetto and see some young brothers laughing about one of their boys having his face on the front page; each of them knowing that it could be either of them in next weeks.

I guess the problem is not the paper but the trend that makes the paper possible. The question is how to get those young brothers to start getting angry about their friend being arrested for whatever reason. What they do not realize is that they are the ones that can turn this entire thing around, my only question is how to get them to realize it.

Harris County in Houston, Texas is in the process of establishing a Public Defenders office. This is a great step for the county seeing that it is the only large major county left in America without some type of Public Defender System.  This new system would replace the county’s current system of dealing with indigent cases where defendants who are unable to afford a lawyer must have the judges appoint the council.

So, the county has agreed to establish a Public Defender’s office through a pilot initiative that is considered to be very weak. Their proposal establishes the office but allows the judges and county commissioners to select the head Public Defender. Hummmm – hum. If the judges and county are able to select the public defender then the office will lack independence which is needed to ensure that individuals are given legal representation that focuses on the indigent person who needs counsel.

Also, the county  is only proposing to address juvenile, mentally ill and low level felonies. This is a problem because the cases that really need attention are the high level felonies where individuals face long periods of jail time or could face the death penalty. The county has a proposal that does not include high level felonies. High level felonies are representative of cases that need to be covered in a county like Harris seeing that the county incarcerates so many and sentences so many to death by lethal injection.’

Even worse, officials from Harris County have said that even  though the pilot program will be available for the judges to use – judges have the option to use the Public Defender or not. In fact,  the county has shared that even if judges opt for using a public defender in their courts they can decide which cases they want to use it and can limit use to a certain percentage of those selected cases. The county is referring to the plan as a hybrid plan where half will use a public defender and half will not.

This is a shame that a system of injustice such as a judge appointed defense system is used in 2010. If the county does not beef up the proposal to include more details and propose better defense the could possibly miss out on a opportunity to be get a $4.4 million grant from the Texas Task Force on Indigent Defense.

99 problems and Harris County Houston, Texas will have 4.4 million more if they don’t get it together for transparency in the delivery of justice.

Prisons in Texas are said to be “big business”.  We have many rural towns that have large prisons that serve as the major economic drivers for the schools, hospitals and jobs in this little know places. But as we engage in our decennial census count we must examine how these prison populations are being counted for the purpose of delivering services to Texas communities.

The Census Bureau requires that individuals are counted at the address where they reside as of April 1^st . The Houston Chronicle reported that Harris, Bexar and three other large urban communities will lose about 67,000 residents to rural Texas because prison inmates are counted where they are in prison.

The problem then becomes that the prisoners who were convicted will not lend needed resources back to their home counties. Thus, urban areas that need more schools, jobs and programs will lose out due to how the count is taken at the national level.

What’s more, rural legislators are open to possibly gain seats that belong to inner city folks during reapportionment – 99 problems and it looks like the hood gets one more…

Not much goes on in Wampum, Pennsylvania. Located about 50 miles outside of Pittsburgh, the Lawrence County borough is home to less than 1,000 people, over 17% of which live below poverty level. In 2009, 11 year old resident Jordan Brown (pictured here, in a photo provided by Lawrence County Prison) was described as a normal “all-American boy”. He enjoyed local leisure activities such as football, riding bikes, reading Harry Potter books and hunting. A year later, Jordan, now 12, faces grown up charges with a possibility of life in prison without parole.

On February 20, 2009, 26-year-old Kenzie Houk was found lifeless in bed with a bullet from a 20-gauge shotgun through her head. She was eight months pregnant with a baby boy and a mother to two girls. Her boyfriend’s son, 11-year-old Jordan, was identified as the murder suspect and faces two counts of homicide, one including the unborn child.

Because the state of Pennsylvania offers no reprieve in convictions due to age, it’s no surprise that it has the highest total number of juvenile lifers. This means that Jordan could very well spend the rest of his life behind bars for a crime committed when he was a child. According to the University of Pittsburgh, if kept in criminal court and convicted, Jordan will be the youngest person in the world serving a life sentence.

While Jordan’s defense attorney requested a decertification hearing to determine whether or not he will be tried as an adult or in juvenile court, it could be months before a decision is made. In the meantime, friends and family have started a trust fund in his name for his defense. Jordan’s attorney claims that the boy is open and readily able to comply with juvenile rehabilitation, and that it should be offered as an alternative to an adult sentence.

When the Supreme Court decided in 2005 that the barbaric practice of sentencing minors to death was cruel and unusual punishment, it was one step in a promising direction. However, life sentences need to be reexamined as well. According to studies reported on MSNBC, at least 2,381 people are serving life without parole in U.S. prisons for crimes when they were 17 or younger.

One aspect of this case does not fit the common racial component; Jordan being Caucasian while the majority of juvenile lifers are minorities. However, the bottom line is juvenile justice sees no race or economic status. When you peel back the layers and think logically about what’s happening in our society, the answers are multi-dimensional.

Particularly in the case of Jordan Brown, 11-years-old is a confusing, uncertain and impressionable age. There are too few studies that exist that prove that sentencing children to life in prison without a chance of parole is a better means of punishment over rehabilitation and counseling. In fact, Connie de la Vegas, a law professor at University of San Francisco School of Law insists that for juveniles, life in prison without a chance of parole is exactly the wrong thing to do, and that juvenile offenders should be given a chance to rehabilitate themselves and apply for parole, even if it’s after 10 or 15 years.

Are we going give up and let another one of our children become a statistic? Or are we going to challenge the system, demand better treatment, accountability and commitment of rehabilitation for our children?

Check this out folks … this is crazy moving:

This video is based on the writings of Massachusetts inmate Darrell Jones. Since his incarceration, Mr. Jones has maintained his innocence and spent the last 23 years fighting to stop the devastating cycle of violence and incarceration he is witnessing. This video is about hope and responsibility on an individual and government level . If the men and women behind bars think that no one expects more of them, if they believe that this great “change” Obama spoke of meant everyone else but them, the results are disastrous. Without hope, the prisons are currently breeding violence, racism and anger to be released back into our streets (97% of men come back out) fueling this endless cycle of violence and incarceration. If Obama is able to address terrorists and school children alike, then why not this prison system when it is holding so many of our people?

Here’s one excerpt from Darrell’s letter, to show its resonance and unique perspective:

Mr. President, I once read in a news article that listed the top music artists you had on your iPod. Among them, it listed Jay Z. Well, with 24 years in prison, I’ve never seen an iPod, and neither have many of the men around me, but I do know that daily I see many very young males walking around me with “Spiritual iPods” that are playing in their ears, the songs of Notorious B.I.G. singing the words “You’re nobody unless somebody kills you”. Yet two things are clear, sadly, Biggie did become bigger in death, and that many of these kids who have never seen their families together during a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner meet them for the first time in a casket with their eyes closed at a funeral. So, what troubles me is not so much that they’re willing to die, but that they don’t even want to leave here (prison) and get back to living.

For more information and to read the full letter or to contact Darrell directly, please go to www.obamaanswerthis.com.

Being a teen is hard enough. Being a teenage mother is infinitely harder—and according to a study by John Santelli of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, there are more and more teens who are becoming moms. Nearly 4 in 10 American teens will be preggers by age 20, and a whopping 445 000 of them will give birth. At those rates, America is the teenage pregnancy capital of the Western World.

Having a baby is a wonderful, beautiful act—but there is a time and a place for it. When a teenager gives birth, the odds of her or her baby having a fulfilling life are significantly lower than if she had waited until she was in her twenties. Teen moms are more likely to drop out of school, receive welfare, and have more children within a couple of years. In turn, the children of teen moms will statistically have poorer health and inferior results in school than their peers who had parents who gave birth later on. Children from teen pregnancies are also more likely to end up in prison (if they’re sons) or giving birth while still teenagers (if they’re daughters).

Which is why Santelli’s study is so disturbing. It shows that teenagers are having kids at a higher rate, not necessarily because they desire children at that stage in life but because they are not taking simple precautions to prevent it. The use of contraceptives is going down, leaving health educators wondering where the f*%# they went wrong. Because, instead of using a condom, youth are trying the “withdrawal method,” and even the “let’s not use anything” approach—otherwise known as the “I’m playing Russian Roulette with my girlfriend’s future” approach. Hell, the guys should be worried too, because STIs tend to spread a lot faster when there’s no condom to stop them (and by “tend to” I mean DO).

And while the need to place blame is both understandable and widespread—everything from teenage celebrities such as Jamie Lynn Spears who glorify pregnancies to sexual education programs that promote abstinence only and forbid any mention of prevention—placing blame only detracts from the real issue, which is how to reverse the trend.

Ultimately, the potential for improvement lies within each and every one of us. . . When it comes down to it, the only way these statistics will improve is if you use a condom next time you’re “gettin’ jiggy with it.”

I’m going to tell you all a secret: Reality TV makes me really angry.

Ever since the first season of The Real World in 1992, more and more television has been composed of reality programs because they are cheap to produce, draw in a good audience and.. well, let’s face it.. the old adage goes, real life is stranger than fiction. And it bores me. I don’t care about Jon and Kate or Survivor and frankly, as much as I love P.E., thinking about Flavor Flav getting down with any of the girls on Flavor of Love gives me nightmares.

But while going through some daily blogs, I saw a piece that stopped me in my tracks. Michael Santos, prisoner and author of the book Inside: Life Behind Bars in America presents an interesting question: Can Reality TV Advance Prison Reform?

Let’s get into it after the jump!

Much of Santos argument has to do with the fact that two out of three prisoners is reincarcerated within a few years. The facts that they lack resources to rejuvenate their lives or return to “communities that reject them” are absolutely dead on. Santos establishes that, “few find employment opportunities that will allow them to earn sufficient incomes for shelter, clothing, and the basic necessities of life. The prison system seems a perfect design to foster high recidivism rates, and taxpayers suffer the consequences.”

The high cost of prisons – both in financial and personal means – are drastic. Maybe exposing the brutal lifestyles inside prisons will make people more aware of the realities of the prison system, as Santos argues. However, it might create more of a divide between people who are locked up and people who watch people get locked up, dehumanizing them in a sense. It’s hard to say. What do you think?