Four companies have publicly raised concerns about how the Arkansas Department of Correction came to stockpile the drugs for its lethal injection cocktail — midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride — but only the McKesson Corporation, the drug distributor that ranks fifth on the Fortune 500 list of companies, made an explicit allegation of deception.
For decades, domestic violence survivors have been criminalized, prosecuted, and imprisoned for acts carried out by their abusive partners.
This story is the first in a new Truthout series, Severed Ties: The Human Toll of Prisons. This series will dive deeply into the impact of incarceration on families, loved ones and communities, demonstrating how the United States' incarceration of more than 2 million people also harms many millions more -- including 2.7 million children.
The exploitation of Black convict labor by the penal system and industrialists was central to southern politics and economics of the era. It was a carefully crafted answer to Black progress during Reconstruction – highly visible and widely known.
As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
According to Douglas Blackmon, author of “Slavery by Another Name,” the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the country’s accommodation, “explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.”
The prison strike didn’t merit a single mention in NYT, Washington Post, NPR, CNN or MSNBC.
The tide is beginning to turn on criminal justice. California is again setting the national tone, first by rolling back juvenile incarceration at unprecedented rates and now, through the same ballot initiative system that ushered in those extreme sentences, by passing voter-driven laws to roll back those laws and clean up the damage they created.
While the nation is gripped by new police killings, hope quietly fades in the Eric Garner case
Do police in the US keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do history and global context explain recent police killings of young Black people in the US? What alternative ways might there be to keep communities safe? These are questions explored in Truthout's first print collection, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States.
Thousands of people have reached out over the past week to connect with SURJ and find ways to move into action against police violence and for racial justice. Below is a statement from SURJ’s leadership in light of the 136 murders of Black people by police this year and the shooting in Dallas last night.
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