"With additional decarceral efforts, many further infections can be prevented in the... cities analyzed and many others."
If the work of abolition is not only about stopping prisons, but also about imagining a future in which we win, then people cannot be released from prisons only to be put on the streets or to premature disability at the poultry factory.
The coronavirus pandemic is leading to “an explosion in the use of solitary confinement in prisons, jails, and detention centers.” Punitive isolation under the pretext of public health is worsening the crisis of mass incarceration.
Prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers can expect to see a largely “uncontrolled, unflattened curve” relating to the coronavirus outbreak, an epidemiology professor said.
As communities across the world are confronting the serious toll of COVID-19..., we at Critical Resistance want to amplify the grave concerns facing the imprisoned population, which is one of the most vulnerable groups in this time.
“Although we’re here because we committed crimes, it’s hard to say that there aren’t parallels with slavery.” Lenox Ramsay, 30
More prisoners have died at Guantánamo than have been convicted by the military commissions. 2019 was a bad year for justice for former and present Guantánamo prisoners, and not just prisoners subject to the military commission process.
The history of Rikers is a warning about putting the onus of reform on infrastructure rather than the systems that lead to incarceration. If new prisons are built to replace it, it won't be long before they too will be judged inhumane.
To save the planet, a Green New Deal has to transform our entire society. Part of that transformation must include the deconstruction of our system of mass incarceration.
Prisons are uniquely closed and inaccessible parts of our government. When you combine that secrecy, lack of oversight and lack of transparency with an unpopular, politically powerless and literally captive population, it’s a recipe for bad outcomes
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