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Inmates are taking part in brutal Fight Club-style bouts sparked by an epidemic of phones being smuggled into UK prisons .

Footage from jails in the Midlands shows a series of bloody arranged contests between prisoners as others cheer them on.

And the violent craze is being blamed on the number of mobile phones being smuggled into the country's jails.

Figures show at least 15,000 mobiles or SIM cards were confiscated in prisons last year - the equivalent of one for every six inmates.

Prisoners are now using the phones to take footage of the contests, named "fight clubs" after the hit Brad Pitt film, and posting them online.

In one shocking video from HMP Redwell in Redditch, Worcestershire, two men take each other on in a bathroom brawl.

One grabs the other in a choke-hold before punching him in the back of the neck and drawing blood with a bite to the shoulder.

There is also footage of an illegal boxing match at HMP Featherstone in Wolverhampton where an inmate knocks down a fellow prisoner while prisoners film it and cheer.

The inmate shows no mercy, continuing to kick and punch his opponent even after he has fallen to the floor in defeat.

The Prison Officers' Association has previously warned that mobiles are endangering public safety by being used to run organised crime operations and order drugs from behind bars.

Spokesman Glyn Travis said: "We have seen escapes being planned with the use of mobile phones and we have seen the use of drones to drop mobile phones, drugs and other items into prisons.

"They are a means to access the outside world to breach the perimeters of prisons and thereby endanger the health and safety of staff in prisons and more importantly the public."

A Prison Service spokeswoman said: "The Prison Service does not tolerate contraband in prisons.

"It is a criminal offence to smuggle mobile phones or drugs into prisons, and we will always take action where there is evidence of misconduct."

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Brutal prison 'Fight Club' craze sparks bloody, arranged bouts between inmates

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Inmates are taking part in brutal Fight Club-style bouts sparked by an epidemic of phones being smuggled into UK prisons . Footage from jails in the Midlands shows a series of bloody arranged contests between prisoners as others cheer them on.

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People usually try to break out of jail, not into it.

But earlier this year, Gregory Alan O'Brien, 32, of Blackett, in Sydney's west, tried to break into the Goulburn Correctional Centre to deliver drugs and other contraband.

Gregory Alan O'Brien tried to break into Goulburn Correctional Centre, by jumping the boundary fence, to deliver contraband.
Photo: Janie Barrett

He was captured while fleeing from the facility after the botched break-in and, on Wednesday, pleaded guilty in Goulburn Local Court to entering land with intent to commit an indictable offence, unlawfully entering a place of detention, possessing a prohibited drug, bringing a prohibited drug into a place of detention and supplying a prohibited drug.

O'Brien was jailed for a maximum of two years for his efforts.

Police facts tendered in court said that, on February 10 at 11.44pm, on a tip-off, Corrective Services staff observed a Toyota Camry station wagon driven by O'Brien park at the rear of the Goulburn jail near X Wing.

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Sydney drug addict jailed for trying to break into jail

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People usually try to break out of jail, not into it. But earlier this year, Gregory Alan O'Brien, 32, of Blackett, in Sydney's west, tried to break into the Goulburn Correctional Centre to deliver drugs and other contraband.

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Much like sanitary wear itself, the stigma attached to, and taboo surrounding periods comes in all shapes and sizes. At the most banal end of the spectrum are awkward jokes about "that time of the month", the expeditions to the toilet unnecessarily armed with a whole makeup case, or devious dashes with a tampon up the sleeve, despite it already being designed to look like a sweetie.

At the starkest end of the spectrum are the 42 per cent of American women found to have experienced period shaming, and the dozens of women and girls who have died in Nepal in recent years because of an ancient tradition that banishes menstruating women to outside huts .

UK prison conditions: in pictures

All of the above demonstrates why the new guidelines for police treatment of female detainees on their periods , as proposed by the Home Office, are so welcome. In case it passed you by, ministers are consulting over how to make sure women in custody are treated with "dignity".

Under government proposals, police forces will be required to ask female detainees at the earliest opportunity if they are likely to need sanitary products in custody. Police will also have to make detainees aware such items will be provided free, and ensure all such detainees can speak to a female member of staff, if requested.

While the proposed guidelines are most certainly a positive - let's face it, you would have to be a tyrannical maniac, or maybe just a surly prison guard, to dispute women in custody should be entitled to the aforementioned - it is somewhat staggering that they are needed in 2018.

It is also imperative we look at what prompted the proposals to emerge. This year, the Independent Custody Visiting Association (ICVA) suggested police detention conditions could contravene human rights and equality laws . The watchdog - which monitors the treatment of detainees - said people are often held in police cells without access to hygienic sanitary protection or provisions for washing and changing.

The watchdog told of how one woman had her clothes removed and was dressed in a paper suit. In spite of being on her period, her underwear was removed and she was refused sanitary protection. "She was left in a state of vulnerability sufficient to cause concern for her wellbeing, bleeding in a paper suit, alone in a cell," the ICVA said.

The organisation also found many women were not able to speak to a female police officer, and police were "routinely ignoring" the needs of menstruating women. Sherry Ralph, the organisation's chief operating officer, said a senior officer described the sanitary products available as "woeful", and said custody suites "typically only have one absorbency of tampon and towel available". More than 85 years have passed since Dr Earle Haas patented the first modern tampon , and time obviously moves slowly in the British prison system.

It goes without saying offering women a basic level of dignity while they are on periods in custody is the very least that can be done. Just as toilet paper is essential for all prisoners, sanitary products are indispensable for menstruating detainees. In the same way that many women have zero choice about whether their womb lining sheds each month, if detained in custody, they obviously have no option to nip to the shops and buy sanitary products.

New police rules proposed for treatment of female detainees on periods

What's more, being curled up in bed with period pains is grim enough, without having to do it within a cell with no hot water bottle or slab of chocolate in sight. It is also worth remembering that asking for a tampon can be embarrassing enough when it is from a colleague, let alone a male prison officer.

The horrific treatment female detainees on their periods have endured is ultimately symptomatic of the broader taboo surrounding periods. Women have long been conditioned to be ashamed of menstruating, from the first time they see a spot of blood in their knickers. Sanitary products in this country might be classed a "luxury, non-essential item" and taxed at 5 per cent - the average lifetime cost of sanitary products is estimated at £4,800 - but periods are in no way considered a luxury by women who use such items.

Instead, from a young age, girls are taught to manage periods as unobtrusively and discreetly as possible. From having to cart round sanitary products in my bag for a year before my period started - because of the tacit but widely established understanding it would have been too mortifying to ask a teacher for a pad - to the tampons in my bag burned by fellow pupils on a Bunsen burner during science classes, or stuck to desks, periods were a perennial source of shame for me in school days. And they still are in wider society.

The Independent has launched its #FinalSay campaign to demand that voters are given a voice on the final Brexit deal.

Sign our petition here

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'New guidelines on managing periods for female detainees are great - but in 2018, we shouldn't need them'

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Much like sanitary wear itself, the stigma attached to, and taboo surrounding periods comes in all shapes and sizes. At the most banal end of the spectrum are awkward jokes about "that time of the month", the expeditions to the toilet unnecessarily armed with a whole makeup case, or devious dashes with a tampon up the sleeve, despite it already being designed to look like a sweetie.

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Shocking footage has been played to a coronial inquest of the lead-up to the death of an Indigenous man who died after being restrained while on remand in a South Australian jail.

Wayne Fella Morrison, 29, died at Royal Adelaide hospital on 26 September 2016, three days after the altercation with corrections staff at Adelaide's Yatala prison left him braindead. At one point during the incident he was restrained by more than 14 officers.

The footage made public on Monday shows the incident leading up to Morrison's transfer in the prison van. At one stage, more than 16 officers crowd the hallway where Morrison is being restrained, face-down. It is almost impossible to see him beneath them.

Counsel assisting the coroner, Anthony Crocker, told the court Morrison "became violent towards prison staff" and "was restrained with handcuffs, flexicuffs and a spit mask".

Once restrained, he was carried outside and placed face-down in the rear of a prison escort van to transfer him into Yatala prison.

Eight prison staff, including the driver of the escort vehicle, accompanied Morrison on the journey in the van.

There is no footage of what happened inside the van, but Crocker told the court that "when the van arrived at G Division, Morrison was found to be blue and unresponsive".

The journey took a little under three minutes.

"Precisely what occurred in the van is unknown as seven of the eight prison staff who accompanied Mr Morrison on the journey have declined to provide police with statements," Crocker said.

A second lot of footage, showing resuscitation attempts, was deemed too sensitive to release.

Morrison's sister, Latoya Aroha Rule, told Guardian Australia it was difficult to watch.

"It was distressing to witness the footage today of the final moments of my brother's time on remand and to count the number of correctional officers involved in his restraint and in the transport van," she said.

"It also saddens me to know that he was wearing a spithood at the time of his death - similar to that shown in the restraint of Dylan Voller in images that shocked Australia [from Don Dale prison in Darwin]."

Morrison died two months after footage of Voller wearing a spithood was shown on Four Corners. Many prisons have since banned or heavily restricted their use.

"Our family has placed our trust in the coroner to ensure that there is justice in this process, that those who are responsible for Wayne's death are held accountable, and that reforms are implemented to ensure the future safety of all prisoners," Rule said. "My heart cries out for just one more moment with my brother."

This was Morrison's first time in custody. He had no recorded criminal convictions.

The inquest is set down for five weeks.

* Additional reporting by Calla Wahlquist
Topics

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Indigenous prisoner restrained by 14 officers before death in custody, footage shows

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Shocking footage has been played to a coronial inquest of the lead-up to the death of an Indigenous man who died after being restrained while on remand in a South Australian jail. Wayne Fella Morrison, 29, died at Royal Adelaide hospital on 26 September 2016, three days after the altercation with corrections staff at Adelaide's Yatala prison left him braindead.

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Do you believe in giving people a second chance? Many US employers say they do: in a recent nationwide study, about half the managers and half the human resources (HR) professionals expressed a willingness to employ someone with a criminal record.

Perhaps more surprisingly, two-thirds of those HR professionals - and more than 80% of the managers - said they thought workers with a criminal record were of equal or better quality than workers who hadn't had a brush with the law.

It's an important issue because in many countries people with a criminal record now make up a sizeable segment of the population - and there's a general consensus that employment is one of the best ways to discourage them from returning to crime.

Historically, people with a criminal history have found it hard to find work. UK government figures released earlier this year suggest only 17% are employed in steady work i.e. on the payroll, in the year following release from prison.

John is struggling to find a job in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has been in and out of prison several times. But during his last spell inside - which ended in February 2016 - he engaged with a charity called LifeLine (now called Change, Grow, Live) and began turning his life around. He is dealing with his problems with alcohol for instance, through cognitive behavioural therapy, and is committed to using his experiences to help others. "I was going to be a support worker, I volunteered for two years," he says.

But John says he simply can't escape his past: whenever he applies for jobs, potential employers are sent reports detailing his earlier criminal history and issues with mental health. John says he has been sober for 900 days. "I've done an awful lot - you'd think they would give me a little bit of leeway to move on with my life. But they won't."

Many employers worry about hiring ex-offenders. A 2006 survey of companies in the northwest of England found about 90% of them were concerned that an ex-offender might pose a risk either to staff or customers - and 60% of employers thought that hiring ex-offenders could generate bad publicity for their firm.

Jonathan Spencer, director of the Criminal Justice Research Unit at the University of Manchester, led the survey. He says sex offenders were a particular worry for participants. "The view was that if they re-offended there would be reputational harm to the company," he says.

On the flip side, Spencer and his colleagues found that about 60% of employers who had actually taken on ex-offenders reported that the experience was mainly positive. But, he says, that's a message which is hard to spread to other employers who haven't hired people with a criminal history.

What this means is that companies have no blueprint to follow when it comes to hiring people with convictions. UK-based Virgin Trains first began employing such people in 2013, urged on by company founder Richard Branson. "I don't think we had a business plan or many expectations, we were just giving it a try," says Damien Henderson, Scottish Affairs and Media Manager at Virgin Trains.

Employers really want to hire right now and you have this amazing pool of people out there who are looking for jobs - Reddy

But the experimental recruitment process has been largely successful. Virgin Trains now employs 30 people with convictions and holds regular recruitment fairs in prisons, where potential employees can discuss their criminal history and demonstrate their desire to enter the work force.

"I don't want to give the impression everything is perfect," says Henderson. Virgin Trains has had to part company with some employees with convictions, generally for the attendance and punctuality issues that can be an issue for any new employee. "But we haven't had any problems relating to re-offending," he says. In fact, many of the recruits with criminal records have flourished. "We've seen some absolutely fantastic people" says Henderson.

This experience gels with the second finding in the US study - that some employers appear to believe that a well-trained ex-offender can outperform a well-trained candidate with a clean record. There is some evidence that backs this up.

As a general rule the US Army won't consider employing ex-offenders. But at various points in the past when it has failed to meet its recruitment targets it has taken on people with criminal records.

In a paper published earlier this year, Jennifer Lundquist, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and her colleagues used Freedom of Information Act-requested data to examine how these ex-offenders fared compared to their non-offending peers.

If this is the one employer who has invested in you, you might feel a degree of loyalty - Lundquist

Army recruits with a previous conviction for a serious crime, or felony as its often described in the US, were far more likely than non-felons to secure promotions to higher ranks. Most strikingly, the researchers found that ex-felons were 32% more likely than non-felons to be promoted to the rank of sergeant - a promotion based largely on meritocratic performance.

Lundquist says the research team went into the study expecting that non-offenders and ex-offenders would probably perform at similar levels once variables like education and age had been factored out. "We were surprised to find a positive effect - that ex-offenders actually did better," she says.

One widely held belief is that it comes down to a lack of other opportunities. "If this is the one employer who has invested in you, you might feel a degree of loyalty," says Lundquist. There are, indeed, several studies suggesting that ex-offenders entering a range of professions remain in their jobs for longer than non-offenders do.

Lundquist suspects how a company or institution recruits may also play a part in the extent to which ex-offenders succeed in employment. She thinks in the case of the US Army its screening of potential recruits with a criminal history plays an important role. It operates something called a "whole person" selection process that might be so strict it picks the very best ex-offenders: the candidates with the skills and motivation to succeed.

Lundquist and her colleagues point out that many employers automatically reject job applicants with a criminal record at an early stage in the application process - but doing so may mean they are missing the opportunity to hire some outstanding workers.

Henderson agrees that there are plenty of exceptional candidates who also have criminal convictions. Virgin Trains is part of an initiative called Release Scotland, which launched earlier this year to encourage more companies to take on ex-offenders. "The aim is to promote some of the experiences that employers have had recruiting people with criminal convictions," says Henderson.

There are other initiatives in place to try to help ex-offenders overcome knee-jerk rejections. The most well known is the "Ban the Box" campaign originally started in the US, which encourages employers not to ask job candidates to tick a box on the application form if they have a criminal history. The idea is that this gives ex-offenders an opportunity to get a foot in the door and impress employers before their past is revealed, making the candidate more likely to be offered a job.

But perhaps an equivalent to the US army's 'whole person' review could complement those initiatives. Such a system might help ex-offenders signal their ability and willingness to work in a format that employers could learn to trust. "We just need to get some really good minds together and come up with some templates," says Lundquist.

Henderson says a review system along those lines would be welcomed by organisations, like Release Scotland, that seek to emphasise the merits of recruiting ex-offenders. "Everyone tends to focus on the risk of employing people with convictions," he says. "But it's not just about risk: it's also about benefit."

So is the recent survey of US employers - carried out by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and the Charles Koch Institute (CKI) - evidence that these sorts of efforts are finally leading to attitudinal shifts among employers?

"I'd want to see more surveys before I'd think there's been a real change in the way employers look at the formerly incarcerated," cautions Lundquist.

But there are economic reasons why employers in the US and the UK really might be softening their attitudes towards employing ex-offenders according to Vikrant Reddy, a senior research fellow for criminal justice reform at CKI.

Unemployment rates are lower in both countries than they have been for decades, leaving employers scrambling to find candidates to fill jobs. For pragmatic reasons, it might make sense for them to consider employing ex-offenders.

"It's hard to know for sure but it seems like a reasonable inference," says Reddy. "Employers really want to hire right now and you have this amazing pool of people out there who are looking for jobs."

--

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Why more ex-offenders may be about to get a second chance

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Do you believe in giving people a second chance? Many US employers say they do: in a recent nationwide study, about half the managers and half the human resources (HR) professionals expressed a willingness to employ someone with a criminal record.

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Michael Flournoy attempted to murder someone just a few blocks away from the cafe where we're now eating brunch. That's what his records say, anyway. In 1996, aged 21, Flournoy was involved in a shooting which left Carolyn Jones, an innocent bystander, with a bullet in the brain.

Jones was a devoted mother and pious churchgoer who worked as a 911 operator and spent her free time volunteering. She'd just finished counseling teenage girls at a church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, when she was shot in the head - collateral damage in a dispute between rival drug dealers. The bullet didn't kill Jones, but life as she knew it came to an end that night: it wasn't clear if she'd ever be able to walk or talk again.

"This is one of them crimes, that if you saw it on the news, you'd say whoever did it deserves to be in prison," Flournoy tells me between bites of waffles.

The police decided that Flournoy, who they knew was dealing drugs in the neighbourhood, was the guy who did it. There was no physical evidence, but the crime's intended target, Ronald "Boo" Ashby, had shot Flournoy's friend just hoursbefore. There were also eyewitnesses identifying Flournoy as the triggerman.

Flournoy pled not guilty, saying he was at his girlfriend's house when everything went down, but the jury sided with the prosecution. He was sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison for attempted murder in the second degree, assault and criminal possession of a weapon.

In 2003, one of the eyewitnesses signed an affidavit admitting she and the other eyewitness had falsely pointed the finger at Flournoy in exchange for a deal getting them off the hook for unrelated drug arrests. "I found religion in prison and learned that I suffer from MS. I do not want to die with this sin on my soul," she wrote. By then, however, Flournoy had exhausted his appeals, so even the witness recanting didn't help his case. It was possible he wouldn't be free until he was in his 70s.

But Flournoy is now 43 and out of prison, thanks to an ambitious clemency initiative recently established by New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

The man who is eating in front of me has been out for just a few weeks before in early 2018. He has spent 21 years locked up and is still coming to terms with what freedom feels like. "For the first five years of my incarceration I remembered every day how it felt to be free," he says. "But as time goes on that fades away." He's also catching up with just how much the world has changed. He's amazed by autocorrect, he mentions while sending a text to his wife.

Clemency, a broad term which can mean either a sentence reduction or a pardon, is a way to correct wrongs in the criminal justice system. These could be errors in individual cases or systemic injustices, such as excessively harsh sentencing doled out under previous laws. It's also a way to bring more compassion and efficiency into the justice system, by identifying people who have demonstrated they are rehabilitated and for whom incarceration no longer serves any purpose.

It's not hard to see why Flournoy was granted clemency. "Prison," he notes, "can be an incubator or a casket" - a place "where you learn to be a better criminal or a place where you transform your thinking, transform your behavior". He chose the latter path, using his time inside to earn associate's and bachelor's degrees from Bard College, a master of arts from the New York Theological Seminary, and certification as an Aids/HIV counselor.

Max Kenner, the founder and executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a program that provides higher education to prisoners, explains that "nothing has been proven to go further in reducing recidivism than education, particularly college education". Indeed, according to BPI statistics, 97.5% of their graduates who leave prison never go back.

Nothing has been proven to go further in reducing recidivism than education, particularly college education

Max Kenner, founder of the Bard Prison Initiative

Notably, one of the people who advocated for Flournoy's release was Carolyn Jones, the shooting victim. The pair corresponded during Flournoy's incarceration and Jones attended his graduation ceremony and helped with his clemency application, stating in it that she didn't want to see him rot in prison and would rather he came "home to his family and put to use all the things that he has done with his education".

Since Flournoy has come home he's been doing just that - tutoring college students in writing at Brooklyn Public Library. He's currently reading Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women with his students. It's funny, he says, how much the book speaks to contemporary times.

An underused tool to chip away at mass incarceration

America's incarceration rate is going down for the first time in decades, but the US still has more people in prison than anywhere else in the developed world.

Recently, clemency has gained support among both conservatives and liberals as a tool to alleviate America's incarceration problem. While it may seem incongruent that conservatives want to release prisoners early, the appeal is largely clemency's cost-saving. Mass incarceration is expensive: a recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative estimates it costs the US $182bn a year.

The major problem with clemency is that it is notoriously opaque and something of a lottery. As Kathrina Szymborski, a lawyer who helped Flournoy with his application pro bono, explains, clemency is often "perceived as being available arbitrarily, or only to those who are politically connected or have caught the attention of the media".

Last August, however, Cuomo announced a "first-in-the-nation partnership" between state and national legal organizations which significantly expanded access to pro bono lawyers for qualified clemency candidates. This, Szymborski says, was groundbreaking. An established system like this, "in which every potential applicant has a pro bono attorney, could finally give clemency some legs and allow it to be used as it should be: to advance mercy and fairness".

But now, a year on from Cuomo's announcement, it is starting to look like his supposedly groundbreaking initiative might have been an empty gesture - designed to score points with liberals, but not really to be implemented. Since the partnership was put in place, the governor has only granted two sentence reductions: one to Flournoy and the other to Dominic Dupont, nephew of The Wire actor Michael K Williams.

Cuomo hasn't granted any in 2018 so far.

Mass incarceration is expensive: a recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative estimates it costs the US $182bn​ a year

As Szymborski acknowledges, "shortening sentences and releasing people from prison is perceived as politically risky". The spectre of Willie Horton still haunts lawmakers. Horton, who was serving life for murder, raped a woman in 1986 after he was released for the weekend under a furlough program backed by then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. The furlough program had nothing to do with clemency, but "Willie Horton" became shorthand for "soft on crime"; the incident fatally wounded Dukakis's presidential ambitions and cast a long shadow on future sentencing reform initiatives.

Releasing people from prison early is particularly risky when it comes to violent offenders. Most of the conversation around clemency - and enthusiasm for it - tends to focus on non-violent offenders, in particular people who are still in prison due to the inequitable, and racist, 100-1 crack-versus-cocaine sentencing disparities handed out during the heyday of the US "war on drugs".

Obama, for example, granted 1,715 commutations (sentence reductions) during his presidency, mostly for nonviolent drug offenses. But the case for clemency grows more difficult when you talk about violent offenders.

What do you do when it comes to people who are unequivocally guilty of murder?

Should a confirmed killer get a second chance?

In 1997, when he was 17 years old, Michael Crawford shot a man point-blank. A group of older guys he sometimes hung out with stole concert tickets from him and he was trying to get them back. "It wasn't like it was a planned-out assassination type thing," Crawford, now 37, tells me over the phone from a correctional facility in upstate New York. "We had a standoff. I was just trying to get out of the situation."

The only time he'd ever shot a gun before, he says, was into a phonebook, messing around. But that night, he closed his eyes, pulled the trigger, and the man in front of him, Akai Block, crumpled to the ground.

As a kid, Crawford's favourite game used to be "playing church". But when he was 13 his mother died and his life started going off-kilter. His dad wasn't in the picture and he bounced around various houses, eventually being taken in by a local Christian pastor who repeatedly sexually abused him. (The pastor, Troy Brown, is now in prison for molesting multiple vulnerable young men.) Crawford fled the abuse and ended up on the streets.

After the shooting, Crawford panicked. He had no one to really turn to and was afraid to turn himself in, so he went on the run. "For money, I committed little crimes here and there," he says. Some of those crimes weren't so little. Once the police left him alone in a car while they searched a suspected drug house. The police had left the keys in the ignition, so Crawford, a skinny kid, crawled through the partition and drove off the car. "I got the idea from a movie, I think. "

He got away with that but was finally arrested after trying to carjack someone outside a nightclub and getting into a high-speed chase. "That's when everything else came up," Crawford said. He was charged with the murder of Block a few months later.

Here he is talking about realizing what his action caused:

When the case eventually came to trial he was found guilty of felony murder and armed robbery. He was given a sentence of 22 years to life. Crawford was only 17 at the time of his crimes but was tried as an adult; his age wasn't something the sentencing judge had to consider. If he committed the same crime today it is likely he would receive more lenient treatment.

"I had no idea what 22 years looked like," Crawford says. "I had never seen that in experience." The sentence was longer than the time he'd spent on earth.

'You have a fraction of society who feel you should be ostracized and nothing good can come out of you'

Michael Crawford, serving 22 years to life

Crawford has now been in prison for over 19 years. When he entered the system he was a high school drop-out. Now he has a GED and, like Flournoy, he has earned an associate's degree and a bachelor's degree through the Bard Prison Initiative and a master's degree from the New York Theological Seminary. Funding for prison education programs was cut in the 1990s and it's not that easy to get an education while incarcerated. Programs like Bard Prison Initiative are the exception, not the rule, and Crawford had to transfer to a different facility five hours away in order to take part.

As well as pursuing educational opportunities, Crawford is a certified HIV/AIDS peer counselor, a sighted guide for blind prisoners, and coaches other inmates on anger management. And he crochets: Crawford is part of Needle Wizards, a group that knits clothes and teddy bears for cancer patients and homeless shelters. "Being in prison, you have a fraction of society who feel you should be ostracized and nothing good can come out of you," he says. Crocheting "affords us a chance to shed a different light on what a prisoner can do with their time if they're allowed the opportunity".

Crawford is actually one of the reasons Michael Flournoy is a free man today. The two struck up a friendship when Flournoy was facilitating a course on AIDS education Crawford was attending.

At that time Flournoy had resigned himself to the fact that he was in prison for at least 25 years and shouldn't even bother trying to shorten his sentence. Crawford, however, had filed for clemency and convinced Flournoy to do the same. Seeing Flournoy get clemency was bittersweet for Crawford, who has a job offer waiting f or him when he gets out, at the church he attended in early childhood. He was happy for his friend but it was hard not to feel left behind.

An uncertain future for clemency

The purpose of clemency is not to open the prison gates and let people out, but ensure, as Alexander Hamilton put it back in 1788, that justice doesn't "wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel".

When Cuomo first announced his clemency initiative, he had a chance to significantly change the arbitrary way in which clemency has always been implemented in America. He had an opportunity to transition clemency from an unpredictable gift bestowed by a governor in a good mood to an ingrained part of the legal system. Politicians across the country watched carefully to see what Cuomo would do.

Cuomo has done very little. While lawyers like Szymborski have worked hard to identify over 1,700 potential applicants for clemency, Cuomo's office seems to just be sitting on these applications. "I know [Cuomo] has many extremely qualified candidates in front of him who pose no risk to public safety," Szymborski says. "By reducing their sentences, the governor will be saving taxpayers $60,000 per year per person released ... [and will] set an example for governors around the country who are interested in addressing mass incarceration."

As Cuomo prevaricates, tough-on-crime politicians look to set the clock back on criminal justice reform, despite an embarrassment of evidence that mass incarceration doesn't make America safer. During a speech in Nashville earlier this year, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, criticized the fact that the federal prison population has dropped in recent years, adding: "We've got some space to put some people. We need to reverse a trend that suggested that criminals won't be confronted seriously with their crimes."

It is unclear if or how Cuomo plans to move his clemency initiative forward. (The governor's office refused several requests for comment.) His office is expected to grant the next round of pardons and sentence reductions in November. What he does then could move the needle on clemency forward, or back.

Like Crawford, we must simply wait and see.
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The case for releasing violent offenders early

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Michael Flournoy attempted to murder someone just a few blocks away from the cafe where we're now eating brunch. That's what his records say, anyway. In 1996, aged 21, Flournoy was involved in a shooting which left Carolyn Jones, an innocent bystander, with a bullet in the brain.

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The Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, says he is "disappointed" that only two of Australia's states and territories have accepted the federal government's offer to fund a lifesaving custody notification service, two years after he made the offer.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory have agreed to create the custody notification service (CNS), a 24-hour legal advice and RU OK phone line for Aboriginal people taken into police custody.

New South Wales, which has had the service since 2000, remains the only jurisdiction to have the legislated obligation in place.

Under NSW law, police must contact Aboriginal Legal Service as soon as possible whenever an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person is taken into custody for any reason, even if they are not charged with a crime.

The NSW service takes about 15,000 calls a year, and only oneIndigenous person has died in police custody since it was implemented 18 years ago.

Scullion wrote to the relevant ministers of every state and territory in Australia i n 2016 offering three years' funding, provided that service followed the NSW model.

The Australian Law Reform Commission has also recommended a national roll-out of the CNS. The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service (Natsils) also called for a mandatory national roll-out, after the launch of Deaths Inside on Tuesday.

"With the flick of a pen, governments could easily save lives with this simple solution," Natsils co-chair Cheryl Axleby said. "Yet this political handball continues to cost Aboriginal people's lives. All governments must step up to fund and implement mandatory custody notification services across Australia in partnership with Atsils."

But the response from the states and territories has been mixed.

"I am disappointed that only the WA and NT governments have accepted my offer and I am optimistic that a Custody Notification Service (CNS) will be operating in those jurisdictions as soon as possible," Scullion told Guardian Australia.

"A mandatory legislated Custody Notification Service is a critical first step in preventing needless Indigenous deaths in police custody. I urge all other states to take up my offer for the sake of the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in custody."

Despite not accepting the funding offer, Victoria is likely to be the next state to put a CNS into law. Police procedures in that state already require officers to contact the Victorian Legal Service within 60 minutes, or as soon as practicable, of an Indigenous person being taken into custody for any reason.

Legislation before the Victorian parliament will make that mandatory, and the attorney general, Martin Pakula, said he expected it to pass "as quickly as possible."

Pakula said the legislation "reaffirms our commitment to access to justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who face disadvantage and over-representation in the criminal justice system."

In WA, the Barnett government - which was in power when Ms Dhu died, in circumstances that the coroner found may have been avoided had a CNS been in place - denied the need for the scheme, saying that existing police protocols around contacting the Aboriginal Legal Service were sufficient.

The McGowan government, which took power in March 2017, said the CNS would be in place before the end of 2018.

In a statement to Guardian Australia, the WA attorney general, John Quigley, said that the legislation establishing the CNS had been drafted, but could not be enacted until the supporting mechanism, which is a 24-hour hotline run by the Aboriginal Legal Service of WA (ALSWA), is in place. Negotiations for a funding agreement between the federal government and ALSWA are ongoing.

ALSWA does not currently have enough lawyers to staff a 24/7 service, and Guardian Australia understands negotiations have slowed over projected operating costs with include some additional staff.

"The state government hopes the Aboriginal Legal Service will soon be in a position to operate this lifesaving service," Quigley said.

Negotiations in other states have stalled. The former Labor government in South Australia was in discussion with Scullion's office, but the Liberal government, which took power in March, is not.

"South Australia currently has an administrative arrangement in place to ensure South Australian police notify the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement of any Indigenous person taken into police custody, at the first instance," the SA attorney general, Vickie Chapman, said. "Broader work exploring legislating for such a scheme is continuing."

Queensland has said that a CNS would duplicate "reliable and robust current measures" that Queensland Police Service (QPS) already has in place.

A spokesman for the Queensland police minister, Mark Ryan, said introducing a mandatory CNS "would require significant information technology systems modification by the QPS and a substantial human resource and financial impost to [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service Queensland]."

"QPS regularly assesses the current system and, during its recent evaluation, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service Queensland indicated their support for the model currently in place."

A spokeswoman from the Tasmanian government said the proposal was also under consideration in that state, with no decisions yet made.

It also said there is an existing arrangement in place with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Community Legal Service to ensure it is notified "in every case where an Aboriginal person is in custody."

The Northern Territory government did not respond to requests for comment.
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States failing to take up lifesaving phone service for Indigenous prisoners

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The Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, says he is "disappointed" that only two of Australia's states and territories have accepted the federal government's offer to fund a lifesaving custody notification service, two years after he made the offer.

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Some of the most high profile findings in social sciences of the past decade do not stand up to replication, a major investigation has found.

The project, which aimed to repeat 21 experiments that had been published in Science or Nature - science's two preeminent journals - found that only 13 of the original findings could be reproduced.

The research, which follows similar efforts in psychology and biomedical science, raises fresh concerns over the reliability of the scientific literature. However, the project's leaders say their results do not reflect a "crisis" in the social sciences.

Prof Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science and a professor at the University of Virginia, said: "I don't think it's a crisis, it's a reformation. We're in the midst of a dramatic increase in the rigour and transparency of research in the social sciences."

Nosek said that, while some previous replication efforts had been viewed with hostility, this effort had been collaborative. Authors from nearly all of the papers under scrutiny engaged with the project to help ensure the repeat experiments were close replicas of the originals - and several of these scientists published responses that ran alongside the latest paper.

"It's not recriminations about who is a bad researcher or otherwise," said Nosek. "That's something that has completely changed over the last five years. Replication in 2012 felt like an attack because it was so rare in science at the time. Now it's become normal."

Findings that failed to replicate included a study suggesting that viewing a picture of Rodin's sculpture The Thinker led to people reporting weaker religious beliefs (a possible explanation being that analytical thought, as represented by the sculpture, counteracted religious beliefs). The finding that the physical act of washing your hands leads to less muddled thinking (a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance) also failed the replication test.

"That doesn't mean it's unreplicable, no study is definitive," said Nosek. "Science is really a process of uncertainty reduction."

In total, the team tried to replicate one main finding from each of the 21 social science papers published between 2010 and 2015 in Science or Nature, widely regarded as the two most prestigious scientific journals.

They found evidence to back the original conclusions in 13 of the 21 (62%) studies. But, on average, the sizes of the effects recorded were about 75% as big in the replication studies, despite these using sample sizes that were on average five times as big.

"These results show that 'statistically significant' scientific findings need to be interpreted very cautiously until they have been replicated even if published in the most prestigious journals," said Magnus Johannesson of the Stockholm School of Economics, another of the project leaders.

The latest work revealed scientists were also uncannily accurate at predicting which studies would later succeed or fail to replicate. About 200 scientists were recruited and on average predicted the replication outcomes for 18 out of the 21 papers under scrutiny.

Prof Malcolm Macleod, a neurologist at the University of Edinburgh who has previously investigated reproducibility in biomedical science, said there was a need to prioritise the quality of science as well as the novelty of findings. "We need to wean ourselves off the nectar and the crack cocaine of highly exciting results and work out what we can do to maximise the quality" he said. "That's becoming much more of a thing now."

Nosek agreed, saying that the growing trend for pre-registering the aims of a study and the increasing number of journals to have adopted policies promoting transparency were encouraging.

"With these reforms, we should be able to increase the speed of finding cures, solutions, and new knowledge," he said. "Of course, like everything else in science, we have to test whether the reforms actually deliver on that promise. If they don't, then science will try something else to keep improving."

The findings are published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
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Attempt to replicate major social scientific findings of past decade fails

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Some of the most high profile findings in social sciences of the past decade do not stand up to replication, a major investigation has found. The project, which aimed to repeat 21 experiments that had been published in Science or Nature - science's two preeminent journals - found that only 13 of the original findings could be reproduced.

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Major prison strike spreads across US and Canada as inmates refuse food

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Prisoners stand against forced labor and other indignities amid reports of action in California, Washington state and Nova Scotia

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The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has been forced to take immediate control of HMP Birmingham from its contractor G4S, after a damning inspection found that prisoners used drink, drugs and violence with impunity and corridors were littered with cockroaches, blood and vomit.

The government is having to take the unprecedented step of seizing control of the failing prison, removing its governor and sweeping out hundreds of prisoners on Monday, just hours before an extraordinarily critical report is released by the prisons inspectorate.

The state of the category B prison is likely to raise significant questions in the coming days about private sector involvement in the prison system. G4S was awarded a 15-year contract to run the prison in 2011.

The chief inspector of prisons, Peter Clarke, said there had been "dramatic deterioration" since the last inspection in early 2017 and the government should launch an urgent inquiry into the appalling state of the prison, the most violent in England and Wales and the site of riots in 2016.

Prison gangs perpetrating the violence "could do so with near impunity", he said. Inspectors saw prisoners who were evidently under the influence of drink or drugs, which went unchallenged, including widespread use of the psychoactive drug spice.

Staff were fearful and experienced widespread bullying, the report said, and inspectors witnessed an arson attack on a supposedly secure staff car park during their inspection.

Prison officers often had little grasp of where prisoners were, the report found. Communal areas were filthy, with cockroaches, vermin, blood and vomit left uncleaned, and wings that had virtually every window damaged or missing.

Clarke said the report contained "some of the most disturbing evidence that inspectors ... have seen in any prison."

In his letter to the justice secretary, David Gauke, Clarke said there was an "urgent and pressing need to address the squalor, violence, prevalence of drugs and looming lack of control".

Clarke said he was "astounded that HMP Birmingham had been allowed to deteriorate so dramatically".

He said he had no confidence in the ability of the prison to make improvements. "There has clearly been an abject failure of contract management and delivery ... the inertia that seems to have gripped both those monitoring the contract and delivering it on the ground has led to one of Britain's leading jails slipping into a state of crisis."

Clarke has invoked an "urgent notification protocol", a device that puts the justice secretary on notice that urgent action is needed to address significant concerns at a jail.

The MoJ said it had instigated an intensive period of improvement measures with little success, forcing it to take the prison back under government control. HM Prison and Probation Service will run the prison for an initial six months, before assessing whether control can be returned to G4S.

The "step in" process is not technically nationalisation, but a process allowed when a provider is deemed to have breached its contract to run the prison safely, meaning there is no liability to the taxpayer.

No staff redundancies will take place, though the MoJ said it would send in an additional 30 members of experienced prison staff as well as a new governor, Paul Newton, formally of HMP Swaleside. More than 300 prisoners will be moved from the prison while the jail is overhauled.

The prisons minister, Rory Stewart, said the conditions in the prison were clearly unacceptable. "It has become clear that drastic action is required to bring about the improvements we require," he said. "This 'step in' means that we can provide additional resources to the prison while insulating the taxpayer from the inevitable cost this entails.

"We have good, privately run prisons across the country and while Birmingham faces its own particular set of challenges, I am absolutely clear that it must start to live up to the standards seen elsewhere."

However, MoJ sources have been keen to stress the government does not believe privatisation was at the root of the prison's troubles, pointing out that other G4S prisons including HMP Oakwood had recently received good inspection reports.

Stewart has staked his own reputation on dramatic improvements to the prison system, telling the BBC he would resign in a year if he has not managed to reduce the level of drugs and violence in 10 target jails, although Birmingham was not among them.

The MoJ said it was clear that the prison was still suffering significant effects following the 2016 riots involving more than 600 prisoners, the worst since the infamous Strangeways riots in 1990. The government was forced to send in specially trained Tornado Squad officers, who battled prisoners for more than 12 hours.

A report by the independent monitoring board ahead of the riots had warned of the dangers posed by prisoners under the influence of psychoactive drugs including spice and black mamba. Assaults on staff at HMP Birmingham rose 84% to a record high of 164 incidents last year, according to MoJ figures.

The "step in" to take control in Birmingham is the first time such drastic measures have been used mid-contract. In 2016, the government stepped in at the end of its contract with G4S to run Medway Secure Training Centre, after undercover reporters filmed staff apparently mistreating children.

Jimmy Mubenga, 46, an Angolan deportee, dies after being restrained and held down by three G4S guards on a British Airways flight due to depart from Heathrow airport. The guards are later cleared of manslaughter.

The Serious Fraud Office investigates G4S for alleged overcharging for tagging criminals in England and Wales, claiming it charged for tagging people who were still in prison, out of the country or dead. The firm is later cleared of fraud but agrees to pay a settlement of £109m.

Six members of staff are dismissed for gross misconduct at the G4S-operated Rainsbrook secure training centre for children in Rugby. An Ofsted inspection found some staff were on drugs while on duty, colluded with detainees and behaved "extremely inappropriately". G4S loses the contract later that year.

Eleven members of staff at Medway secure training centre are suspended or sacked after a BBC documentary alleges staff inappropriately restrained inmates and falsified statistics to improve the facility's record. At least 10 arrests are made.

Later in the same year, hundreds of prisoners at the G4S-run HMP Birmingham take part in a riot, blaming poor staffing levels, food and medical care and being kept on lockdown in their cells all day.

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The security giant also lost its contract in 2015 to run Rainsbrook STC after prison inspectors graded it inadequate, reporting that some staff behaved "extremely inappropriately" with young people.

Jerry Petherick, G4S's managing director of custody and detention services, said: "HMP Birmingham is an inner-city remand prison which faces exceptional challenges including increasingly high levels of prisoner violence towards staff and fellow prisoners.

"The wellbeing and safety of prisoners and prison staff is our key priority and we welcome the six-month step-in and the opportunity to work with the Ministry of Justice to urgently address the issues faced at the prison."

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MoJ seizes control of Birmingham prison from G4S

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The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has been forced to take immediate control of HMP Birmingham from its contractor G4S, after a damning inspection found that prisoners used drink, drugs and violence with impunity and corridors were littered with cockroaches, blood and vomit.

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Beijing bets on facial recognition in a big drive for total surveillance

For 40-year-old Mao Ya, the facial recognition camera that allows access to her apartment house is simply a useful convenience.

"If I am carrying shopping bags in both hands, I just have to look ahead and the door swings open," she said. "And my 5-year-old daughter can just look up at the camera and get in. It's good for kids because they often lose their keys."

But for the police, the cameras that replaced the residents' old entry cards serve quite a different purpose.

Now they can see who's coming and going, and by combining artificial intelligence with a huge national bank of photos, the system in this pilot project should enable police to identify what one police report, shared with The Washington Post, called the "bad guys" who once might have slipped by.

Facial recognition is the new hot tech topic in China. Banks, airports, hotels and even public toilets are all trying to verify people's identities by analyzing their faces. But the police and security state have been the most enthusiastic about embracing this new technology.

The pilot in Chongqing forms one tiny part of an ambitious plan, known as "Xue Liang," which can be translated as "Sharp Eyes." The intent is to connect the security cameras that already scan roads, shopping malls and transport hubs with private cameras on compounds and buildings, and integrate them into one nationwide surveillance and data-sharing platform.

It will use facial recognition and artificial intelligence to analyze and understand the mountain of incoming video evidence; to track suspects, spot suspicious behaviors and even predict crime; to coordinate the work of emergency services; and to monitor the comings and goings of the country's 1.4 billion people, official documents and security industry reports show.

At the back end, these efforts merge with a vast database of information on every citizen, a "Police Cloud" that aims to scoop up such data as criminal and medical records, travel bookings, online purchase and even social media comments - and link it to everyone's identity card and face.

A goal of all of these interlocking efforts: to track where people are, what they are up to, what they believe and who they associate with - and ultimately even to assign them a single "social credit" score based on whether the government and their fellow citizens consider them trustworthy.

At this housing complex in Chongqing, "90 percent of the crime is caused by the 10 percent of people who are not registered residents," the police report said. "With facial recognition we can recognize strangers, analyze their entry and exit times, see who spends the night here, and how many times. We can identify suspicious people from among the population."

Adrian Zenz, a German academic who has researched ethnic policy and the security state in China's western province of Xinjiang, said the government craves omnipotence over a vast, complex and restive population.

"Surveillance technologies are giving the government a sense that it can finally achieve the level of control over people's lives that it aspires to," he said.

In this effort, the Chinese government is working hand-in-glove with the country's tech industry, from established giants to plucky start-ups staffed by graduates from top American universities and former employees of companies like Google and Microsoft, who seem cheerfully oblivious to concerns they might be empowering a modern surveillance state.

The name of the video project is taken from the Communist slogan "the masses have sharp eyes," and is a throwback to Mao Zedong's attempt to get every citizen spying on one another. The goal, according to tech industry executives working on the project, is to shine a light into every dark corner of China, to eliminate the shadows where crime thrives.

The Sharp Eyes project also aims to mobilize the neighborhood committees and snoopy residents who have long been key informers: now, state media reports, some can turn on their televisions or mobile phones to see security camera footage, and report any suspicious activity - a car without a license plate, an argument turning violent - directly to the police.

To the eyes of the masses, in other words, add the brains of the country's fast-growing tech industry.

By 2020, China's government aims to make the video surveillance network "omnipresent, fully networked, always working and fully controllable," combining data mining with sophisticated video and image analysis, official documents show.

China is not alone in experimenting with these new technologies. The FBI's Next Generation Identification System uses facial recognition to compare images from crime scenes with a national database of mug shots. Police forces across the United States have been using algorithm-based techniques for several years to predict where crimes are likely to occur.

Chicago police identified and a court convicted a thief using facial-recognition technology in 2014, and Britain used a Japanese program called NeoFace Watch to spot a wanted man in a crowd in May.

The United States, with around 62 million surveillance cameras in 2016, actually has higher per capita penetration rate than China, with around 172 million, according to Monica Wang, a senior analyst in video surveillance and security at research consultants IHS Markit in Shanghai.

Yet it is China's ambition that sets it apart. Western law enforcement agencies tend to use facial recognition to identify criminal suspects, not to track social activists and dissidents, or to monitor entire ethnic groups. China seeks to achieve several interlocking goals: to dominate the global artificial-intelligence industry, to apply big data to tighten its grip on every aspect of society, and to maintain surveillance of its population more effectively than ever before.

"Deep learning is poised to revolutionize the video surveillance industry," Wang wrote in a recent report. "Demand in China will grow quickly, providing the engine for future market growth."

In the showrooms of three facial-recognition start-ups in Chongqing and Beijing, video feeds roll past on big screens, with faces picked out from crowds and matched to images of wanted men and women. Street cameras automatically classify passersby according to gender, clothes and even hair length, and software allows people to be tracked from one surveillance camera to the next, by their faces alone.

"The bigger picture is to track routine movement, and after you get this information, to investigate problematic behavior," said Li Xiafeng, director of research and development at Cloudwalk, a Chongqing-based firm. "If you know gambling takes place in a location, and someone goes there frequently, they become suspicious."

Gradually, a model of people's behavior takes shape. "Once you identify a criminal or a suspect, then you look at their connections with other people," he said. "If another person has multiple connections, they also become suspicious."

The start-ups also showcase more consumer-friendly applications of their technology. Companies like SenseTime, Megvii and Cloudwalk provide the software that powers mobile apps allowing people to alter, "beautify" or transform their faces for fun.

Much of their business also comes from banks and financial companies that are using facial recognition to check identities, at ATMs or on phones. Some airports in China already employ facial recognition in security checks, and hotels are doing the same at check-in; a Chinese version of Airbnb promises to use it to verify guests' identities, while China's version of Uber, Didi Chuxing, is using it to verify those of its drivers.

Some of the applications have a slightly gimmicky feel. A lecturer at a Beijing university was said to be using a face scanner to check if his students were bored; a toilet roll dispenser at a public facility outside the Temple of Heaven in Beijing reportedly scans faces to keep people from stealing too much paper, while a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Hangzhou allows customers to simply "smile to pay."

Other ideas are struggling to move beyond the pilot stage: a plan to identify jaywalkers in Chongqing has already been abandoned, while residents have responded to facial-recognition gates on some apartment buildings in Chongqing and Beijing by propping the doors open.

Yet facial recognition is not going away, and it promises to become a potent tool for maintaining control of Chinese society.

So far, the technology doesn't quite match the ambition: It is not foolproof.

"There will be false positives for the foreseeable future," said Jim Dempsey, executive director of UC Berkeley's Center for Law and Technology. This raises two critical questions, he said: Does a country's due process system protect people from being falsely convicted on the basis of facial-recognition technology? And are the false positives disproportionately skewed toward certain minority groups, such as Chinese Muslims?

In China, the tech companies claim many times greater accuracy rates than, for instance, the FBI, and probably justifiably so, experts say: after all, they have been able to draw on a huge pool of photos from government records to improve their algorithms, without any pesky concerns about privacy.

More than anything else, experts say, deep learning technologies need huge amounts of data to come up with accurate algorithms. China has more data than anywhere else in the world and fewer constraints about mining it from its citizens.

"Now we are purely data driven," said Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime. "It's easier in China to collect sufficient training data. If we want to do new innovations, China will have advantages in data collection in a legal way."

Smart technology backed by artificial intelligence will be a tool to assist the police forces of the future. Chinese IT and telecoms giant Huawei says its Safe Cities technology has already helped Kenya bring down urban crime rates.

But who's a criminal? In China, documents for the Police Cloud project unearthed by Human Rights Watch list " petitioners " - people who complain to the government about perceived injustices - as potential targets of surveillance, along with anyone who "undermines stability" or has "extreme thoughts." Other documents cite members of ethnic minorities, specifically Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang, as subjects of scrutiny.

Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said what sets China apart is "a complete lack of effective privacy protections," combined with a system that is explicitly designed to target individuals seen as "politically threatening."

"In other countries, we are often concerned about the use of big data for deepening existing policing bias - for example, for targeting historically disadvantaged groups like African Americans in the U.S. context - but for the Chinese systems, the targeting of people of certain ethnicity is a fundamental function of the system," she added.

In Muslim-majority Xinjiang, where a spate of violent incidents has been blamed on separatists or Islamist radicals, facial-recognition cameras have become ubiquitous at roadblocks, outside gas stations, airports, railway and bus stations, and at residential and university compounds and entrances to Muslim neighborhoods, experts say. DNA collection and iris scanning add extra layers of sophistication.

At Megvii, marketing manager Zhang Xin boasts that the company's Face++ program helped police arrest 4,000 people since the start of 2016, including about 1,000 in Hangzhou, where a major deployment of cameras in hotels, subways and train stations preceded that year's G-20 summit.

Very likely among that number: some of the dozens of dissidents, petitioners and citizen journalists who were detained in and around the city at that time.

Frances Eve, a researcher for Chinese Human Rights Defenders in Hong Kong, argues that China's tech companies are complicit in human rights abuses.

"It's basically a crime in China to advocate for human rights protection," she said. "The government treats human rights activists, lawyers and ethnic Uighurs and Tibetans as criminals, and these people are being caught, jailed and possibly tortured as a result of this technology."
Shirley Feng contributed to this report. Read more China's plan to organize its society relies on 'big data' to rate everyone In China, Big Brother isn't just watching your every move. He's selling your personal data. The walls are closing in: China finds new ways to tighten Internet controls Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

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partner-exclude; china facial; facial recognition; sharp eyes; china surveillance

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China bets on facial recognition in big drive for total surveillance

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Facial recognition is the new hot tech topic in China. Banks, airports, hotels and even public toilets are all trying to verify people's identities by analyzing their faces. But the police and security state have been the most enthusiastic about embracing this new technology.

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Mary Pershall dared to hope. Her daughter, Anna, had agreed to go to rehab, to tackle her dependence on alcohol, synthetic cannabis and ice. In return, Mary had put aside her scruples and driven to an adult store so that Anna could buy synthetic cannabis. It's not an uncommon bargaining chip used by despairing parents. It would keep Anna's withdrawals at bay until she was safely under medical supervision, but also - hopefully - secure her cooperation.

Not long after, Mary was chopping vegetables in their comfortable home in Oak Park, a northern suburb of Melbourne, when she spotted Anna walking briskly off down the driveway. She dropped the knife and ran after her.

"Where are you going?" she asked desperately.

Anna was unfriendly. "For a walk."

"I'll come with you."

Striding ahead, Anna detoured into a McDonald's and ordered two large Big Mac meals. As Mary scrambled to pay, Anna started dismantling her food, smearing it on the table.

"I'm going outside for a smoke," she said.

After a few minutes of clearing up the mess, the penny dropped for Mary. She rushed outside. But Anna was gone.

It's a typically frantic scene from Gorgeous Girl, Pershall's book about years spent herding a child with severe mental health and addiction issues - a child who is now in jail for murder. She uses it to illustrate that the window of opportunity for someone like Anna to be open to treatment is small - too small for the waiting lists of government-funded facilities. As Pershall says, 10 days might as well be 10 years.

Over the next two years, Anna's troubles escalated. She habitually befriended strange men and brought them back to the family home to take drugs; was often covered in bruises and cigarette burns; and was found naked in a service station in Footscray. Then, in November 2015, she fatally stabbed her housemate, Zvonimir "Johnnie" Petrovski, in a row over cigarette money. Anna was 28 years old and pregnant. She was sentenced to 17 years.

Gorgeous Girl is Pershall's first book of non-fiction, but she was already a renowned children's fiction author, even penning a young-adult trilogy with Anna. She meets with Guardian Australia at a Melbourne cafe, accompanied by her other daughter, Katie Horneshaw, for moral support. As a freelance writer herself, published in News.com.au, Ten Daily and Mamamia, Katie covers social issues, including articles about how Anna fell through the cracks of the Victorian mental health system. She says they have been amazed at the "mental gymnastics" the public has performed, "to accept that Anna did this terrible thing and yet ... doesn't deserve to be put down as a monster".

"There were failings that happened into the lead up to it, but both Anna and us as a family absolutely believe that she deserves to be punished and she got a fair sentence."

Frequently, Pershall ponders in the book, "Was this the moment we went wrong?" - whether it be not seeking a diagnosis when Anna was a child (she was eventually diagnosed with a personality disorder and a schizoid-type illness), or not shelling out $30,000 for private rehab, which Anna would very likely have walked out of.

Anna's struggles were apparent the moment she started school. She would make screeching animal noises in class and talked at children - who began to target her - rather than to them. She first ran away at the age of six. Persistently, she suffered auditory hallucinations, which Pershall explored in her Ruby Clair series of books, in which a 12-year-old girl tries to integrate ghosts into her everyday life.

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'Trying to fix Anna was a huge focus of all our lives. Towards the end, she didn't want to stay alive,' says Anna's older sister Katie.

As a teenager she developed anorexia, reflected in a book she co-wrote with her mother - Escape from Year Eight - which touches on her fixation with food. At 15, she kicked in an estate agent window, and a year later, went train surfing. It was a relief to her family when she met a nice boy and moved in with him. But she wasn't able to hold down a job and started drinking during the day out of frustration. The relationship didn't last.

During one of Anna's long stints back at the family home, Mary Pershall created The Saving Anna Project in a ring-binder. There's little she didn't try, from getting a priest to bless Anna's room - of which her daughter was frightened - to calling the police. Needing some respite for themselves, the family utilised a charity that provided a carer for 25 hours a week. That carer - a much older man - abused his trust and pursued a romantic relationship with Anna, who was now in her 20s.

She was this beautiful young white woman, so people didn't take her seriously when she was being violent

Katie Horneshaw

As medical professionals are painfully aware, the most vulnerable, low-functioning members of society fall between the cracks because of the way that medical services are siloed. Frequently, Anna couldn't get help at a rehab because her mental health issues were too complex; nor could she get help at a mental health facility because she was still addicted to drugs. On one hospital visit, it took nine medical professionals to wrestle Anna into a bed, with one nurse copping a bite. Anna was still sent home. A Crisis Assessment and Treatment (CAT) team advised Pershall to simply draw up boundaries for Anna. "A sheet of A4 paper was too flimsy a thing to hold between my daughter and a band of howling wraiths from the underworld," Pershall writes.

One problem, says Katie, was that Anna never stuck around long enough to get a definitive diagnosis. "Doctors have speculated that she's got everything under the sun." If there had been a shared database for hospitals and doctors, they might have registered Anna's pattern of escalation. Instead, each hospitalisation was taken as if it was one singular incident, even when the family protested that it was not. As Katie points out, that database is now available through My Health Record, but she cautions that the service should be voluntary and only accessed with the patient's consent. Still, "In Anna's case, she wanted this record to exist," she says.

At first, Anna was fearful of seeking treatment, but on two occasions requested she be held longer in hospital. This requires sign-off from two psychiatrists, but she could only get one to agree. "She was worried that she was a danger to herself and others," says Katie, "but she was this beautiful young white woman, so people didn't take her seriously when she was being violent."

Katie, who now cares for Anna's son, is used to taking a stewarding role with her younger sister, who began to think her parents were "literally possessed by demons". "Trying to fix Anna was a huge focus of all our lives. Towards the end, she didn't want to stay alive. It wasn't gaps, it was minute to minute. You might go from trying to pull her away from the wall she's bashing her head against, to trying to argue that no you shouldn't have any more to drink, to lying beside her to check she's still breathing."

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Anna and her godmother Gill, on Anna's 18th birthday.

The family calls the murder "Black Sunday". It's easier than the actual word. Prior to the book coming out they had to decide how to tell friends, family and acquaintances about what Anna had done - or not. Those outside of the ever-diminishing circle of friends who were privy to Anna's struggles have certain expectations of grief and distress that they project onto the family. "It's hard to deal with those expectations," Pershall allows. "I have to divide my mind between what happened to Johnnie, which is the most unimaginable horror, and what's happened to Anna, which is the best thing for her."

The proceeds of Gorgeous Girl will go to Prison Network and Uniting ReGen, and Anna has written to her mother and sister, saying, "I'm proud of you for trying to help other people in my story". In prison, Anna takes part in the theatre group Somebody's Daughter and has started a book group. She's shown fellow inmates the cover of Gorgeous Girl, although she doesn't think she'll bring herself to read it. Her meals and medication are organised. She sleeps well. She's drug-free.

"We tried as a family to do that for her but it was impossible," Katie says. "Now her social skills have improved, her outlook on life has improved. This amazing woman has emerged. I can be her friend now."
* Gorgeous Girl, by Mary K Pershall, is out in Australia on 20 August through Penguin Random House. It is available globally as an audiobook through Audible Topics

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My daughter, the murderer: a mother's desperate journey through the mental health crisis

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Mary Pershall dared to hope. Her daughter, Anna, had agreed to go to rehab, to tackle her dependence on alcohol, synthetic cannabis and ice. In return, Mary had put aside her scruples and driven to an adult store so that Anna could buy synthetic cannabis. It's not an uncommon bargaining chip used by despairing parents.