It’s been almost eight months since a prisoner in Missouri’s Jefferson City Correctional Center (JCCC) frantically phoned Oriel Moore to let her know that guards had killed Moore’s 38-year-old brother, Othel, during a routine drug sweep. But this was no routine death, it was murder. Those charged were members of a special unit contracted from another Missouri prison two hours away in Potosi.
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I first encountered Ivan Kilgore in the spring of 2020. He was fighting a prison transfer, and the organization I was working for at the time, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), was assisting in his legal case. As a content strategist, I put out a call for members of the organization’s grassroots branch, All of Us or None, to write letters to the warden and governor demanding…
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What would you do with 900 million dollars? People incarcerated at two maximum-security prisons in Illinois are brimming with ideas about how to spend that sum: Ending poverty via a guaranteed minimum income. Offering free public post-secondary education nationwide. Providing accessible, free and affirming mental health care for all. Creating programs to work with boys and men to end gender…
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The case against the United States prison system is overwhelming. Numerous studies have revealed inexhaustibly that prisons do not provide public safety by decreasing recidivism but instead fuel racial and economic injustice, place enormous strain on communities impacted by incarceration, undermine real accountability for harm and inflict further trauma. Carceral environments are detrimental…
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As I write this, I am sitting in a tiny, unventilated cell five stories high at Stateville Correctional Center, a prison located about 30 miles southwest of Chicago. It is a decrepit, 100-year-old prison deemed unfit for human habitation. When the temperatures outside rise into the mid-90s, which has been occurring repeatedly this summer, the heat index in my cell rises to at least 110 degrees…
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A prison volunteer named Janet Wolf opened her first meeting with 12 incarcerated men like this: “As we begin our circle this morning, let us go around and say one word that describes our state of mind.” As one of the 12 men, I found myself scrambling for a word. It had been years since anyone cared about my state of mind. It was strange. This free-world lady, obviously highly educated from her…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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When the clock strikes 10:00 pm, I’ll be sitting in the darkness gazing out a grimy, metal barred window. Miles away, the starlit sky will explode with cheerful colors. Two seconds after each rocket reaches its apex point, the blast will resonate through the walls. The city of Talladega, Alabama, will be celebrating, and in 10 minutes it will be all over. The illuminating colors will turn into an…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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When the clock strikes 10:00 pm, I’ll be sitting in the darkness gazing out a grimy, metal barred window. Miles away, the starlit sky will explode with cheerful colors. Two seconds after each rocket reaches its apex point, the blast will resonate through the walls. The city of Talladega, Alabama, will be celebrating, and in 10 minutes it will be all over. The illuminating colors will turn into an…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has quietly but steadily been implementing a nationwide policy that silences the voices of people incarcerated in federal prisons by preventing them from sharing the same email and phone contacts for people on the outside, also known as a “double contact ban.” The policy, which gives prison authorities wide leeway to censor communications, appears to have gone…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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I was walking to the grocery store on Thursday when an elated driver yelled out their car window at me, “Trump is guilty!” That is how I learned that former president Donald Trump had been convicted of 34 felony charges. As I continued to walk down the street, I was greeted by a woman who was raising an American flag outside her home. “Trump’s a felon!” she declared. “So, I’ve heard,” I said.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In mid-April, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) announced the immediate closure of FCI Dublin, a federal women’s prison in California that had long been plagued by staff-perpetrated sexual abuse and retaliation. Eight employees had been criminally charged with sexually abusing people in custody; seven were found guilty and sentenced to prison. Sixty-three lawsuits, as well as a class action lawsuit…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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On May 19, Building Freedom Ohio (BFO), a division of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, will host a convening of formerly incarcerated persons in Cleveland focused on building political power and educating directly impacted individuals about political, legislative and voting strategies. As a returning citizen and BFO fellow, I’ll be attending the gathering with a sense of urgency.
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“We have a long way to go to bring justice to all the individuals who were harmed by the ‘tough on crime,’ zero-tolerance legislation passed in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” says Amy Povah, founder and director of CAN-DO Justice through Clemency, which advocates for people imprisoned on federal drug sentences. “Many people we are advocating for have served over 25 years and many are elderly and…
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In Body and Soul, a pathbreaking examination of the Black Panther Party’s abiding commitment to health activism, Alondra Nelson recounts how Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and other party leaders came to prioritize the pursuit of health and healing as vital to their survival — in more ways than one. As the Panthers’ reputation for armed resistance to police violence and demands for a society that left…
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One of the most common misconceptions about prison abolition is that it’s “unrealistic.” However, in Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché’s new book, How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment, they show not only that abolition is an eminently practical project, but also that it is already happening. Organizers are practicing abolition in large and small ways, every day…
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The sudden April 15 announcement that FCI Dublin, the federal women’s prison in California dubbed “the rape club,” is slated to be closed came as a shock to those inside — as well as to their attorneys, a federal judge and the monitor she recently appointed for independent oversight. For the women who have been raising an alarm for decades about the widespread and systemic sexual abuse committed…
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Janice Parker walked into the medical ward at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola several years back, looking for her son, Kentrell Parker. He should have been easy to find. The 45-year-old New Orleans native had been bedridden since an injury in a prison football game left him paralyzed from the neck down more than a decade earlier. His bed was usually positioned near a window by the…
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Can openly transphobic and homophobic jailers be relied upon to enforce nondiscrimination settlements? Can disabled and injured youth, especially young Black men, depend upon legal settlements to end abuse in our jails? These are the dilemmas incarcerated people and their families face following recent court victories against sheriffs, jailers and jail administrators, and county governments.
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“It was horrific,” Michelle Wells recalls of the morning when the “Orange Crush,” a notorious band of prison guards, stormed through her cellblock at Lincoln Correctional Center, in central Illinois, to conduct a mass shakedown. “They’re not friendly,” she told Truthout in an interview. “When they come in, they come in trashing everything.” Wells was taken out of her cell, ordered to stand in the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Every morning, Mary Frances Barbee wakes up and experiences a “microsecond of happiness before the terror sets in.” Barbee had a heart attack, transient ischemic attack and then a stroke after her sons were incarcerated. She puts on a brave front when they call. “I wonder what they are going through, will they be able to call today, and how long until they are out of lockdown again,” Barbee, 71…
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Since my incarceration began in 2004, I have been housed at three different women’s facilities in Georgia. During the first 15 years, I have often been pat-searched as I leave dining halls to ensure I’m not in possession of any food from my tray. At the end of each shift, kitchen workers were formerly required to throw away pans and pans of unserved food. Knowing that food was being intentionally…
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What do successful alternatives to policing, prosecution and prison actually look like? And how would they work? A group of Chicago’s leading public safety, health and justice innovators gathered at the DePaul Art Museum last summer to provide much-needed clarity on these crucial questions. Artists, survivors of violence, entrepreneurs and business leaders, public defenders, policy experts…
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The body is precarious. That is, as embodied people, we are all precarious, interdependent, fragile, vulnerable. As much as neoliberalism would like us to believe otherwise, we are not totally independent and asocial. My body is aging as I write this sentence. Indeed, none of us are impervious to growing old. In doing so, we will need to confront the adverse conditions that come with aging: loss…
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Many times, throughout the day, I forget that I am human. After 27 years of confinement in a concrete box looking out a sliver of a window, it’s easy to forget. When I try to remember, prison staff won’t let me forget that I’m just another number. For the most part, I’m used to it. I’m like a worn-out penny. People don’t stoop over to pick me up. A penny costs more to print than its actual value…
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In 1992, formerly incarcerated women created Sisters Inside to advocate for the rights of women and girls behind bars in Queensland, Australia. While other grassroots groups and ad hoc campaigns had formed to work with incarcerated women, Sisters Inside remains the country’s first organization founded and run by formerly incarcerated women. Over the last 31 years, the organization has provided…
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The morning quietly waits for the public address system to emit its familiar message. I am laying on my top bunk, eyes half-open, while an opaque light is streaming through a small, barred window, brightening the pale cinderblock walls, paint-chipped metal table, rusted basin and blue metal door of a room I’ve learned to call my home. In the amplified quiet, I can hear my cell-mate breathing as he…
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I board the transport in an orange jumpsuit, shackled and cuffed at the waist, one of many prisoners in exodus from the Washington State Reformatory. The rattling of our chains fills the cabin as we find places to sit. I slide into a seat with a small window high on the wall next to me — the coveted seat with a “view.” Nervous chatter ensues as we wait to be shipped to the next prison. In 2021…
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Nearing age 50, Eric Watkins has spent more than half of his life in prison. He has missed watching his siblings grow up, caring for his aging mother, his two daughters’ childhoods and the birth of his three grandchildren. Now, he is hoping that clemency will keep him from missing more milestones and memories. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic threatened, then caused…
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On October 14, 2023, Louisiana elected far right candidate Jeff Landry to the governor’s mansion. As the state’s current attorney general, Landry (a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy) has made headlines for his creation of an anti-crime policing task force for New Orleans, suing the state to block clemency appeals by those on death row, and advocating to make public the criminal records…
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So far in 2023, three people incarcerated on drug offenses — Dustin Montanez, Patrick Miller and Giles Gerhart — have died in the Onondaga County Justice Center, a jail located in Syracuse, New York. Syracuse is the county seat of Onondaga County, which has maintained an incarcerated population of approximately 500 people. Forty-year-old Montanez was first arrested in 2015 for third-degree…
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