A deadly riot in a privately-run Mississippi detention center was sparked in protest of poor food and medical care, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit. The riot, which killed one guard in May, was at the time chalked up to gang violence. But the group of Mexican immigrants leading the riot, called the Paisas, had no ties to gangs and reportedly ordered other inmates to disobey orders from prison staff until their list of grievances had been addressed.

The protest soon got out of control, with inmates taking hostages and inflicting more than $1.3 million worth of damage on the prison. Correction officer Catlin Carithers was beaten to death, while 20 others were injured.

The prison, Adams County Correctional Facility in Natchez, Mississippi, is run by Corrections Corporations of America (CCA), one of the biggest for-profit incarceration companies in the nation. CCA is notorious for cutting corners by understaffing facilities, charging inmates $5 a minute for phone calls, and using prison labor as a maintenance staff for $1 a day. The Adams County detention center, according to its inmates, was no different.

On the day of the riot, an inmate called the local news channel, explaining:

They always beat us and hit us. We just pay them back. … We’re trying to get better food, medical [care], programs, clothes, and we’re trying to get some respect from the officers and lieutenants.

Another inmate emailed the Jackson Free Press with the same message:

The guard that died yesterday was a sad tragedy, but the situation is simple: If you treat a human as an animal for over two years, the response will be as an animal. … Most of the correctional officers were not harmed. … Most of them that were taken hostage were shaken and afraid, but none of them was harmed.

Meanwhile, the Adams County Sheriff told reporters the riot stemmed from a gang fight. But the FBI affidavit, filed last week in the U.S. District Court in Jackson, confirms the inmates’ motive was their alleged mistreatment in the prison.

This was hardly the first riot in a CCA prison. Inmates at a different CCA prison in Mississippi started a fire in 2004. In Tennessee, CCA inmates were hit with chemical grenades after refusing to return to their cells.

Unlike a state-run prison, CCA and other private prisons have an incentive to cut corners in order to pad their profit margins. The private prison industry also invested millions in lobbying for policies that increase sentences and incarcerate more people. And it’s paid off; CCA, which lawsuits pushed to the brink of bankruptcy in 2000, reported $37.3 million in second quarter profits last week.

East Longmeadow Select­man Enrique John “Jack” Villamaino III (R), a candidate for the Massachusetts state legislature, is reportedly being investigated for voter fraud. The Boston Globe reported today that the county’s District Attorney is looking into a possible “illegal scheme to cast absentee ballots on behalf of hundreds of voters in hope of winning a primary election.” The paper notes that:

A friend of Villamaino’s who works in the East Longmeadow town clerk’s office is suspected of having changed the registrations in the office computers ­after work hours, according to one investigator who asked not to be named because the investigation is confidential.

Republicans have attempted to mislead voters into believing that voter fraud is a widespread problem — and used the issue to push suppression laws requiring voters to show government-issued identification in order to vote in-person.

These photo identification laws would, of course, do absolutely nothing to prevent this sort of election fraud. And while the Secretary of State of Massachusetts note that this sort of fraud is highly unusual, those involved will face criminal prosecution under the robust existing laws, if the investigation determines they are guilty.

As rare as election fraud is, many of the rare cases where it has been reported of late have ironically involved Republican candidates.

The now-deceased gunman who killed two and injured three in a shootout with police near Texas A&M University on Monday possessed a stockpile of firearms and, according to his mother, was having mental “difficulties. ”

Reached for a phone interview by the Huffington Post, mother of gunman Thomas A. Caffall said, “The minute I saw the TV I knew it was him. …I’ve been that worried about him.” Caffall’s stepfather agreed in an interview with a local Texas station, where he called the man a “ticking time bomb.”

If Caffall’s Facebook page offers any evidence of the man’s thinking, it is in the photographs of an array of firearms. The gunman posted several pictures of guns in the weeks prior to the shooting. One set of images features a Czech VZ-58, a gun that resembles an AK-47. One shows a Russian Mosin Nagant with a bayonet attachment. And next to another image, which Caffall does not identify, the gunman writes “I won an auction. This will be coming to me soon. I can’t wait to try it out”:

Caffall’s Facebook also lists “inspirational people” including the gun designers Eugene Stoner, Mikhail Kalashnikov, John Garand, Samuel Colt and John Browning

Police have still not released any details on whether Caffall’s firearms were legally obtained, or whether he had any documented history of mental illness that would have disqualified him from being able to purchase such weapons. However, firearm laws in Texas are some of the most lax in the country.

The Arkansas Chapter of the Commission on Religion and Racism (CORR) is calling for the resignation of Jonesboro Police Chief Michael Yates in light of the death of 21-year-old Chavis Carter, who police said shot himself in the head while handcuffed in the back of a squad car. CORR is leading a protest at the Jonesboro City Hall today at 11:30 am.

Yates, who recently claimed it would have been “quite easy” for Carter to shoot himself with his hands double-locked behind his back, has a murky history in race relations. Yates came to the Jonesboro Police Department after his controversial resignation as police chief in Americus, Georgia. The local NAACP chapter launched a campaign to get Yates fired after he conducted an illegal background check on the NAACP vice president, who publicly complained about Americus police brutality at city council meetings. Yates stepped down voluntarily in 2004.

But Yates continued to stir up controversy upon moving to Arkansas. He made headlines again during the “Obama Riot” of 2008, an altercation between police and a predominantly black crowd of students celebrating Obama’s election at Arkansas State University. According to two female witnesses, about 30 officers arrested several of the 60 or 70 celebrating students, threw them to the ground, and repeatedly kicked one man in the stomach and head. Yates told a different version of events, in which there were 200-250 students who set fire to a fence, fired weapons and attacked officers.

Scrutiny on the Jonesboro Police Department, which is 98 percent white, has grown as the investigation into Carter’s death has remained underwraps. Yates has said the dashboard camera and eyewitness accounts back up the officers’ claims that Carter shot himself, though the camera did not capture the moment of the shooting. Black community leaders have urged patience, but the lack of information has tensions running high.

Samuel Wurzlbacher — known to most as Joe the Plumber — made an appearance at a fundraiser for a Republican Arizona State Senator candidate over the weekend, and told the audience that the way to solve the country’s immigration problem is to station troops along the border and have them “start shooting.”

The comment was first made at a Friday evening fundraising dinner for Lori Klein, the Republican candidate for her state senate district:

“For years I’ve said, you know, put a damn fence on the border going to Mexico and start shooting. I’m running for Congress and that should be a bad thing to say. But you know what, it’s how I feel…I want my borders protected, I’m very very adamant about that.”

The dinner attracted both Wurzelbacher, who is running for Congress in Ohio, and infamous conspiracy theorist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, along with 125 supporters. His comment was met with nervous laughter, as seen in a video shot by local news outlet Prescott eNews.

Lest anyone think that Wurzelbacher somehow misspoke, he repeated the outrageous comment the following morning at another campaign event for Klein, an outdoor “Patriot rally” in Prescott:

“I’m running for Congress. How many congressmen or people running for Congress have you heard, put a fence up and start shooting? None? Well you heard it here first. Put troops on the border and start shooting, I bet that solves our immigration problem real quick.”

Wurzelbacher’s comments were swiftly condemned by his Democratic opponent, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH). “Joe the Plumber’s comments have no place in a civil society…He should take back his words and apologize to everyone who respects life, the Constitution and the rule of law,” she said in a statement obtained by the Huffington Post.

Watch it:

In spite of the NYPD’s aggressive stop-and-frisk program, the number of guns seized off the street has dropped, DNAinfo reports. The controversial practice of randomly stopping and searching people — often black and Latino young men — has increased 600 percent since 2002, while the number of guns seized during these searches has steadily fallen.

DNAinfo’s analysis of NYPD data found:

During the past two years alone, the number of firearms seized by police has fallen 13.5 percent from 3,908 in 2009 with 510,742 frisks, to 3,443 last year, when the NYPD stopped and frisked a record-busting 685,724 New Yorkers. And last week the NYPD reported that during the first half of this year, firearm seizures continues to fall to 1,613, compared to 1,705 during the first six months of last year. The downturn came as the NYPD conducted 337,434 stops-and-frisks — a figure that keeps the NYPD on pace to match last year’s record-busting total.

By comparison, during Bloomberg’s first year in office in 2002, the NYPD recovered 4,069 guns — but the police stop-and-frisked only 96,000 people that year, according to NYPD data.

The NYPD justifies its stop-and-frisk program with this same data, attributing the fact that people are carrying fewer guns to a fear of getting stopped. But an earlier DNAinfo report also found the practice has had little impact on gun violence in New York, which has hovered around 1,800 for the past decade. The drop in gun seizures and almost unchanged shooting rates suggests stop-and-frisk has been ineffective even as it becomes more common.

The most noticeable effect the program has produced is the massive number of arrests for low-level marijuana possession — 50,684 in 2011, more than for any other offense. The police have continued to stop, frisk, and arrest young black and Latino men for marijuana possession, in spite of New York’s decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana possession and Commissioner Ray Kelly’s directive explicitly telling officers not to make misdemeanor arrests for marijuana possession.

As a result, the ramped up stop-and-frisk program has damaged minority communities’ trust in the police. In 2011, the NYPD stopped young black men more times than the total number of young black men in the entire city.