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.
Typically taking the form of ankle bands and house arrest, monitors are gaining lots of traction in reform packages. Although the immediate financial arguments for EM might make sense, these moves ignore the impact of the monitors on people's lives and the implications of their expanded use for the future of mass incarceration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Our history of racial terror casts a shadow across the U.S. landscape. We must engage it more honestly.
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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