Monday, October 22, 2012

Cagney got a rough start in life, but thanks to the ASPCA Humane Law Enforcement department, things have changed for her. Once starved and terrified, Cagney is now healthy and waiting to be adopted at our NYC Adoption Center.

And while Cagney spends her days getting all sorts of enrichment, affection and tasty treats in our care, ASPCA lawyers are helping prosecute the woman who starved Cagney when she was just a puppy. We’re sure Cagney’s happy ending—and justice for her abuser—is just around the corner.

Because of people like you, the ASPCA is able to rescue animals across the country from abuse, natural disasters and more. We’re fighting for animals on the streets, in the courtroom and in the halls of Congress, all because we believe every animal’s life matters.

If you can, please consider giving to our cause. We’re leading the charge on animal abuse, and we welcome you to join us.

Thank you for your compassion.

Changing hearts and minds in Washington, D.C.

Image Available on Flickr

AFSC’s tradition of bringing constituents to meet face-to-face with lawmakers is providing a beacon of hope for change within a frustrating political climate in Washington, D.C.
“Amid all the powerful influences on a member of Congress—moneyed special interests, party politics, media spin—the final cards are held by their voters. Money doesn’t vote,” says Aura Kanegis, director of AFSC’s Office of Public Policy and Advocacy in Washington. “At the end of the day, policymakers work for their constituents, and the direct voice of constituent experience has unrivaled power to cut through political noise.”
And the emotional impact of their testimonies is undeniable.
“While change doesn’t happen in one conversation, face-to face sharing of the real-life implications of policy decisions can help to break the grip of slick special interests and pat political talking points,” Aura explains. “Over the long run, those voices of direct experience can impact the perceptions, assumptions, and motivations that drive a policymaker's decision process.”

Families split by immigration speak truth to power in D.C.

Seventy men, women, and children visited Washington, D.C., seeking justice for families divided by immigration. They described the impact of deportation and detention to an audience of 90 people in a briefing on Capitol Hill and during personal visits to lawmakers’ offices.

Upper Big Branch families plead for Congressional action on mine safety

Carrying enlarged photographs of their lost loved ones, family members of three of the 29 miners killed in the 2010 explosion at West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine spent June 6-7 in Washington, D.C., pleading with lawmakers to take action to improve mine safety and to stiffen penalties for mining companies that knowingly, willingly, and recklessly place miners’ lives at risk.

Infographic: Creating jobs

Bringing sustainable farming, farmers together in China

Five farm managers from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and one U.S. farmer—Don Bustos of AFSC’s New Mexico program—joined AFSC staff and partners in northeast China in August, where they visited research facilities as well as conventional and organic farms to explore sustainable farming techniques that could be adapted on their own farms.
Linda Lewis, AFSC’s country representative for China and the DPRK and Zhang Jin, program assistant for training, coordinated and accompanied the tour.
They worked with the farm managers to decide where to visit.
“We discussed with them what it is they'd like to see,” says Linda. “They requested to learn a little about soil erosion and planting on sloping land, and they wanted to learn more about greenhouse construction and vegetable cultivation in greenhouses and outside greenhouses.”

Pictured: Farm managers take notes on simple weed-control methods used in a low-tech, free-standing greenhouse in the Jinzhou district, a farming area near Dalian, China, famous for its acres of greenhouses that supply produce for the city.

State-of-the-art techniques

Before visiting the countryside and urban cooperatives, the group stopped at Shenyang Agriculture University to talk with Chinese experts on greenhouses. It gave the farm managers a chance to see and understand ways that sustainable technologies are developing and consider how they can replicate them on different scales.

Pictured: Korean farm managers look at cultivation experiments conducted in the new high-tech greenhouse research center of the university’s College of Horticulture. The waffle walls are specially designed for efficient storage of solar energy.

For growing produce, bigger isn’t always better

Zhang Jin says Don changed some perspectives on U.S. farming. “Don gave a general idea about what American agriculture is. Usually people in North Korea think the United States is a modern country, so it should have modern agriculture with big machinery. Don showed us pictures of his small farm. They were really surprised.”

Pictured: Zhang Jin (center) translates as Don (right) talks with Professor Huang Yi from Shenyang Agriculture University College of Land and Environment during a tour of the university's soil erosion research center.
Don works with traditional farmers in New Mexico. This was his first trip to Chinese farms and first time meeting Korean farmers. “It’s amazing to see the similarities in the ways farmers act. It’s about the land, it’s about growing food. You see some of the same passion in some of the stuff that we did,” he says.
Pictured: Zhang Jin translates as the manager of Green Sunshine, an organic farm, discusses tomato cultivation with Don during a tour of the farm's solar greenhouses near Shenyang, China.

Harnessing the sun’s heat

Using plastic sheeting to cover greenhouses and crops for cultivation in cold climates is something that the U.S., Chinese, and Korean farmers were surprised to learn they have in common. Last year’s tour helped the farmers learn how to construct greenhouses so as to get the maximum benefit from solar energy.

Pictured: Korean farm managers examine a typical Chinese-style solar greenhouse constructed by the Jintian Greenhouse Company for a commercial vegetable farm near Dalian. Unlike a free-standing greenhouse, a solar greenhouse is constructed with a wall that retains heat. The farm managers were particularly interested in how to calculate the proper angle and location for this type of greenhouse.

A family-run farm

“The Korean farmers are always surprised that people do things by hand [on Chinese and American farms],” says Linda. “They assume everything in China will be mechanized. They are surprised when an older couple manages the farm and just hires a few laborers to help with transplanting.”

Pictured: Zhang Jin talks with a farmer in front of his greenhouse in the Jinzhou district near Dalian. The farmer and his wife manage the simple, free-standing greenhouse constructed with cement posts and plastic sheeting by themselves, with no machines and little equipment. The produce is sold to middle-men for marketing in Dalian.

Finding value in being chemical-free

The visit to an organic farm was revealing to the Korean farmers, who generally wish that they had more chemical fertilizers. “They are inadvertent organic farmers and now they see that there is a value to that,” says Linda. “They are proud of the quality of their produce. It tastes good. Coming to China helped them value their food.”

Pictured: A worker at Green Sunshine offers a Korean farm manager some tomatoes during a tour of the farm's greenhouses.
Zhang Jin, who is Chinese, says the organic farm was her favorite stop on the tour. The cellophane and digital scale used by the farm owners to prepare their goods for shipment to the city were new sights for the Koreans. “The DPRK farmers looked at every detail about the vegetables … they looked carefully at how they packaged their food,” she says.

Pictured: Korean farm managers pose for photos holding produce packaged for market at the Shenyang Green Sunshine Company, which produces organic vegetables on contract for restaurants and affluent private customers.

The reality of for-profit prisons

Photo:

Lance Page/t r u t h o u t

While New Hampshire’s corrections department reviews proposals from private companies seeking to build and operate its prisons, the state’s residents are learning how prison privatization has played out elsewhere—namely, in Arizona.
Arizona has embraced prison privatization. Currently, five state prisons are run by private companies, housing 13% of the prison population, and the state recently signed a contract for an additional 1,500 beds. Arizona is also home to six prisons run by the Corrections Corporation of America, which imports prisoners from other states and from the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But Arizona’s track record with for-profit prison companies shows problems with accountability and public safety—not to mention that they don’t save the state money, says Caroline Isaacs, program director for AFSC’s Tucson office.
Caroline has worked on criminal justice reform in her state since the mid-1990s. Her research and mobilization against for-profit prisons has put her at the forefront of the movement to stop prison privatization.
At a series of public presentations in New Hampshire in early September, she shared insight from her work in Arizona, which has included publishing a report on private prisons and suing Arizona to uphold its statute to compare the performance of public and private prisons.
Three companies bidding for contracts in New Hampshire—GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut), the Management and Training Corporation, and the Corrections Corporation of America—currently run prisons in Arizona.
Arnie Alpert, program coordinator with AFSC in New Hampshire, organized the speaking tour so that his state could learn firsthand from Arizona’s experience.
“The record these corporations have created is the best way to predict what would happen if any of them gained control of prisons here,” he says.
Caroline visited regions of the state that one company is considering as potential prison sites. A diverse audience came out to hear the presentations; attendees included religious leaders, corrections workers, elected officials, candidates for public office, college students, and community activists.
In addition to walking her audience through a litany of documented problems, incidents, and contradictions that reveal why private prisons are hurting—not helping—the criminal justice system in Arizona, Caroline stressed the moral issue at hand.
“Is it right for a for-profit corporation to make money from incarceration?” she asked. “How does the profit motive affect a company’s incentive to rehabilitate offenders? Is privatization an abdication of a fundamental state government responsibility?”
The fact that Arizona has not comprehensively analyzed the performance of its private prisons is significant—there are no data to measure recidivism rates or quality of rehabilitation programs, and little knowledge of safety issues. For their part, the prison corporations are accountable to their shareholders, not to the public, even though their funding comes from taxpayers, she pointed out.
Caroline authored the AFSC report that filled this gap in analysis where data were available, identifying serious problems stemming from staffing and security practices.
What the state has analyzed itself are costs—and what it found is that private prisons cost more to operate than state-run prisons.
“The bottom line is we were losing money,” Caroline says. In three years covered by the state’s own analysis, Arizona overpaid more than $10 million to the private prison companies.
“Caroline Isaacs was right on target,” says Peg Fargo of the League of Women Voters, who organized a presentation at a Concord retirement community. “Having facts about the current situation in Arizona clarifies the issues we face in New Hampshire.”
MGT of America, the consulting firm helping New Hampshire review the private prison bids, is expected to submit a report to the Department of Administrative Services by Oct. 5. By mid-November, the department will produce another report, which would become the basis for public discussion. Any contract with a private prison company would have to be approved by the governor and the Executive Council.