Before the break of dawn on May 3, the families of incarcerated individuals begin gathering around the processing trailer at the bottom of the concrete steps leading up to New York’s Elmira Correctional Facility. After being denied the opportunity to visit for over a month due to a wildcat strike by New York State Correctional Officers, family members, longing to embrace their loved ones…
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“I don’t fuck with none of y’all cops,” rapped Julius Smith, aka Prince Jooveh, on the song “Hands Up.” “Eighty percent of y’all are cowards, y’all stay up in our business.” In one hand, he held a phone to hear the trap beat. In the other, he held a second phone to fire off lyrics. He had 30 minutes to get it right before time ran out — he was recording behind bars as a person incarcerated by the…
About a decade ago, Richard Trumka, then president of the AFL-CIO, told a crowd gathered at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles that “the theme of this event is mass employment, not mass incarceration.”
A year earlier, the AFL-CIO had committed to addressing mass incarceration as a labor issue. In his speech at the jobs and reentry organization, where he was introduced by labor leader María Elena Durazo, Trumka described why: “When some people are forced to work for close to nothing, all workers’ living standards are pushed down.”
Then, Trumka repeated the refrain “it’s a labor issue because,” followed by explanations about mass incarceration’s impact on families, communities, the economy and voting, among others, until finally: “because labor rights and social justice and civil rights are intertwined.”
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On Friday, April 4, a Federal District Judge ordered that Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran man who was erroneously and illegally sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, be returned home by midnight on Monday, April 7, 2025. During a hearing in the lawsuit filed to demand his return, the judge discussed with the Justice Department attorney many ways in which Abrego García’s arrest and deportation were unlawful. She also reached the resounding conclusion that the US government still has effective custody over him and can restore him “to status quo”—meaning living with his family and working legally in Maryland.
The post Ruling To Return Kilmar Abrego Garcia Gives Clues About How to Fight Back appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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At 18, Jack Morris was convicted of murdering a man in South Los Angeles and sent to prison for life. It was 1979, and America was entering the era of mass incarceration, with tough sentencing laws ballooning the criminal justice system. As California’s prison population surged, so did prison violence.
“You learn that in order to survive, you yourself then have to become predatorial,” Morris says. “And then, you then expose somebody else to that, and it’s a vicious cycle.”
When California started aggressively targeting prison gangs, Morris was accused of associating with one of the groups. The punishment was severe: He was sent to a special supermax unit at the state’s highest-security prison, Pelican Bay.
The facility was designed to isolate men deemed the “worst of the worst.” Like Morris, most lived in near-total isolation. No phone calls, no meaningful physical contact with another human, no educational classes, no glimpses of the outside world. The only regular time out of a cell was for a shower and solo exercise in another concrete room.
Decades later, prisoners at Pelican Bay, including Morris, started a dialogue through coded messages and other covert communication. They decided to protest long-term solitary confinement by organizing a hunger strike. It would become the largest in US history and helped push California to implement reforms.
This week on Reveal, we team up with the PBS film The Strike to tell the inside story of a group of men who overcame bitter divisions and harsh conditions to build an improbable prison resistance movement.
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March 11 marks the fifth anniversary of the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, urging countries to “double down” on protective actions. But for incarcerated people, many of those protections remained out of reach. When COVID-19 hit the United States, the millions of people incarcerated here were dealt structural blows from every direction. From the virus’s rapid spread…
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A strike wave has spread throughout New York State prisons. Since February 17, 14,000 guards in 40 of the state’s 42 facilities have joined wildcat walkouts, neglecting and endangering incarcerated people throughout the state. Since February 19, National Guard troops have been deployed to replace striking guards. These actions are illegal under New York State’s Taylor Law…
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We speak with Jose Saldaña, director of Release Aging People in Prison, about a wildcat strike by New York prison guards who claim limits on solitary confinement have made their work more dangerous. “The people who are living in a dangerous environment are the incarcerated men and women,” says Saldaña, who notes the strike began the same week murder charges were announced against six of the guards…
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This Black History Month, Peoples Dispatch is exploring the history of the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, the site of centuries of Black struggle—first against slavery, then convict leasing, and now the US prison system, which some label as slavery in the modern day.
At the helm of the US’s notorious system of mass incarceration sits Louisiana State Penitentiary. Apart from being the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, this prison, nicknamed “Angola” after the former plantation site that it sits on, is an example of the conditions of modern-day slavery that the US prison system inflicts upon its disproportionately Black incarcerated population.
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I was arrested on Easter Sunday in 1999 while driving through the small town of Lemoore, California. I was held in a local county jail for seven years while fighting my case. In 2006, l was convicted of murders I did not commit, then was promptly hauled off to San Quentin’s notorious death row. Though I have never been a stranger to societal injustices, there’s something about being Black and…
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On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.” That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a…
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Joe Biden has set a record-breaking number of clemencies and commutations into motion as his presidency comes to an end. On December 12, Biden commuted the sentences of 1,499 people who had committed nonviolent crimes and had “been serving their sentences at home for at least one year under the COVID-era CARES Act.” Less than two weeks later, he commuted the death sentences of 37 out of 40 people…
Like old soldiers around the country, a group of former service members gathered in Crest Hill, Illinois to remember fallen comrades on Memorial Day, 2024. Several months later, The Veteran, a newspaper published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ran a photo of the event they attended. It shows a multi-generational group of men — white, Black and Latino — lined up proudly between two flags.
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Like old soldiers around the country, a group of former service members gathered in Crest Hill, Illinois to remember fallen comrades on Memorial Day, 2024. Several months later, The Veteran, a newspaper published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ran a photo of the event they attended. It shows a multi-generational group of men–white, Black and Latino—lined up proudly between two flags.
In his dispatch to the newspaper, African-American Navy veteran Robert Maury explained why everyone in the Stateville Veterans Group was wearing government issued clothing of a non-military sort.
The post The Military To Prison Pipeline appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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In every election cycle since 1992, more than 30,000 people in Illinois have been denied the right to vote due to being confined in prison. Until 2019, an additional 19,000 were disenfranchised because they were in county jails. That year, however, Illinois passed two significant pieces of legislation that strengthened citizens’ access to vote. The “Voting in Jail” bill ensured that people…
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A few months ago, I logged into my online Securus account to send an electronic message to a friend in a Washington State prison. To my shock, I found the word “blocked” on my account and I was not able to send any messages. The block came just a few weeks after I had published an article with Truthout on censorship inside of prisons and had sent the finished article to some of my sources over the…
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The year 2024 is coming to a close, and the celebration of Christmas is here. Posters, billboards, the news media and magazines are all proclaiming, “Merry Christmas!” “Happy Holidays!” and “Season’s Greetings!” Many people are buying gifts for their loved ones; decorating and lighting Christmas trees; putting together prayer affirmations, meals, and other joyful activities to celebrate either…
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Around the holiday season, seeing my name on the prison’s “Package-Room List” always invokes feelings of being loved, familial connectedness and gratitude. When I saw saltwater taffy in my food package, I knew my mom had visited Virginia Beach, where her parents lived and where I spent most of my summers swimming in my grandparents’ backyard lake. When she sent Junior’s cheesecake…
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A New York City jury on Monday found Daniel Penny not guilty of the crime of killing Jordan Neely in a New York subway car in 2023. Prosecutors attempted to convict Penny on the charge of reckless endangerment for using a fatal chokehold to subdue Neely. Penny, a military veteran, claimed that Neely’s death was inadvertent and unintentional. Mayor Eric Adams, who previously defended Penny’s…
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President Joe Biden on Thursday announced that he is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 Americans and pardoning 39 people convicted of nonviolent crimes, a move the White House described as “the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.” But the president’s sweeping use of his clemency power as his term nears its conclusion did not appear to extend to any of the 40 men…
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Antoine Davis’ incarceration has cost more than his freedom. One window to the outside world is his tablet, made by Securus Technologies. But the expense of using it to communicate with others far exceeds what limited money he earns while inside. In a given month, Davis, an incarcerated writer in Washington state, said he spends over $300 on his tablet, a budget that mostly goes toward…
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As the media drag out the political drama over President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden, one of the right-wing media’s favorite boogeymen, thousands of families ripped apart by the U.S.’s giant system of mass incarceration are also asking for relief. Despite howls from frustrated fellow Democrats, Biden said he reneged on his pledge not to pardon Hunter because, as a father…
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Amid the onslaught of dismal news on Election Day, Californians passed a “tough-on-crime” ballot initiative that will lengthen sentences for some theft and drug crimes — a policy that equity-focused advocates warn will vastly increase incarceration rates in the state. Proposition 36 — also known as the Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act — passed overwhelmingly 70-30 at the…
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The following piece is an excerpt from the forthcoming anthology, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, which I edited in collaboration with Kim Wilson. Our book explores the ways in which parenting, caregiving and struggles for liberation intertwine. In this cataclysmic moment of looming fascism, we have much to learn from people who are putting a politics of care into practice.
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In February, a prosecutor from a rural area outside Baton Rouge asked members of Louisiana’s Senate judiciary committee to imagine a frightening scene: You are home with your wife at 4 a.m. when suddenly a 17-year-old with a gun appears. The teenager won’t hesitate, District Attorney Tony Clayton said. “He will kill you and your wife.” According to Clayton, teenagers were terrorizing the…
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I felt it birth in my core and sneak its way up my windpipe. It slithered over my vocal cords and caught in my throat just for a second. Its rancid flavor morphed into an unfamiliar word and settled on my tongue, disgusting my taste buds. It escaped my clenched teeth and forced its way through my tightly pursed lips before finding its place in my unwelcoming ears — “numb.” This was my body’s…
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Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville gave a warning about the United States. “While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty,” Tocqueville said, “the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism.” Tocqueville’s words still hold true to this day — the prison is a cruel place and the extensions of it…
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Police and prison abolitionists often emphasize how community care and providing resources for one another can both stave off harm and — if and when harm does occur — help us meet it with accountability as opposed to punishment, violence, and social exile. So, it makes sense that abolition and parenting might be symbiotic and have something to offer one another in their shared goals of shaping new…
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Vermont plans to build four new carceral facilities over the next decade — a project that could cost as much as half a billion dollars. Belying the state’s reputation as a progressive haven, Vermont’s prison-building boom is part of a national pattern. Across the country, state governments and corporations are justifying their expansion of mass incarceration by claiming they are constructing…
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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted in July to implement tighter price caps on phone and video call services in prisons and jails. The $1.4 billion industry of prison communications will now attempt to continue to squeeze a profit under these restrictions. The FCC decision was the result of 2022 legislation signed by President Joe Biden, entitled the Martha Wright-Reed Just and…
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