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Reviving the Asylum Is Not the Answer to Gun Violence

Anne Parsons, Michael Rembis and Liat Ben-Moshe Truthout
beds in a "group home" In this era of law-and-order politics,...we do not need more incarceration. It does not make people safer, it tears communities apart, and many people, including incarcerated people themselves, have argued that incarceration actually produces mental illness.

Too Poor to Vote: How Alabama's 'New Poll Tax' Bars Thousands of People from Voting

Connor Sheets AL.com
In nine states from Nevada to Tennessee, anyone who has lost been imprisoned and lost thier right to vote, cannot regain it until they pay off any outstanding court fines, legal fees and victim restitution. In Alabama, that requirement has fostered an underclass of thousands of people who are unable to vote because they do not have enough money.

Police Unions, Police Officers, and Police Abolition

Rosa Squillacote Portside
Abolition of the carceral state is a fundamental political goal for the Left today: specifically, abolishing the carceral state’s logic and institutions. . Abolition is both a goal and a discourse: it informs the strategies we adopt, as well as the framework we use to critique the carceral state and describe alternatives.

America's Toxic Prisons: The Environmental Injustices of Mass Incarceration

Candice Bernd, Zoe Loftus-Farren and Maureen Nandini Mitra Truthout
This collaborative feature by Truthout and Earth Island Journal is supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. It will be followed by a series of online investigative reports on the environment and mass incarceration.

What’s Hidden Behind the Walls of America’s Prisons

Heather Ann Thompsom The Conversation
It is only when there is a particularly dramatic abuse, or a death that can’t be hidden, that the public gets any glimpse of what life on the inside is like for so many Americans. When ordinary citizens learn of atrocities committed behind bars, most are appalled, but the sad reality is that the public has few tools to gain access to those behind bars. Not knowing is what makes it possible for unimaginable suffering to take place in the name of safety and security.

Friday Nite Videos -- November 18, 2016

Portside
Bruce Springsteen: This Land Is Your Land. Bernie Sanders: It's Our Revolution. RIKERS, Face to Face. President-Elect Trump: Last Week Tonight. T.I. | Warzone.

RIKERS, Face to Face

A vivid arc of life on Rikers as told by the people who experienced it — from the trauma of entry, the conflicts with other inmates and corrections officers, the stabbings and beatings, and the torture of solitary confinement to the psychological challenges of returning to the outside world

Terror Lynching in America

Our history of racial terror casts a shadow across the U.S. landscape. We must engage it more honestly.

Protesters March to Call for Close of Rikers Island

Bill Parry Times Ledger
Eighty percent of Riker's current population of 7,600 are imprisoned on the island because they are too poor to afford bail and 40 percent should be in a mental health facility instead.
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