Portside

In the fall of 2014, word got around Pendleton, in Indiana, that a crew was coming to make a film, called “O.G.” It was to feature prisoners and guards as actors and extras. No one had ever attempted anything like it.

Most people who die in US jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers remain invisible, with little and often no information shared with family, friends and the broader public. 

The wheels of justice are known for turning slowly, but they moved so sluggishly in Mr. Tigano’s case that on Tuesday, the United States Appeals Court for the Second Circuit issued a scathing opinion dismissing his indictment.

“Organizing boycotts, work stoppages inside prisons and the refusal by prisoners and their families to pay into the accounts of phone companies and commissary companies is the only weapon we have left,” said Amos Caley, who runs the Interfaith Prison Coalition, a group formed by prisoners, the formerly incarcerated, their families and religious leaders.

In the November, 2014, special issue of Socialism and Democracy, "The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor," provides a penetrating analysis of a range of the issues involved and points toward the steps that are needed to turn around these horrors. This publication couldn't be more timely and relevant, as the mighty river of the Black Lives Matter movement flows across and brings new life into the country.

The act of illegally crossing the border into the United States used to be treated as a civil offence resulting in deportation. But the decision of the federal government several years ago to treat illegal crossings as a criminal offence has led a mass incarceration of immigrants in segregated facilities.

Guantánamo is not an anomaly. Prisoners — who are on U.S. soil and not an inaccessible island military base — are routinely and systematically force-fed every day.