Alabama on Thursday night became the first U.S. state to execute a person using nitrogen gas, killing 58-year-old Kenneth Smith by depriving his body of oxygen after the nation’s Supreme Court rejected his legal team’s last-ditch appeal. The state’s notoriously incompetent executioners, who tried and failed to kill Smith via lethal injection in 2022, strapped the condemned man to a gurney and…
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams vetoed a New York City Council bill on Friday that would have banned the practice of solitary confinement in city jails. Also on Friday, Adams vetoed another bill that would have increased transparency and oversight of the New York Police Department (NYPD). However, both bills passed the council with more votes than is required to override a veto. “To recap: Police…
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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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Senior officer calls for help providing basic necessities to juvenile inmates, including food and toilet paper
A senior police officer working at the Cairns watch house says officers “cannot meet” basic expectations to care for children in custody – including supplying regular food and toilet paper – amid severe overcrowding in the far north Queensland lockup.
The Queensland government last year suspended the state’s Human Rights Act to allow the indefinite detention of children in adult police holding cells. The government said it was necessary to address “immediate capacity issues” in the state’s youth detention system.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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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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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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…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Report also calls for spit hoods to be banned and strip searches to be limited after UN visit last year
The United Nations’ anti-torture watchdog has urged Australia to curb the extraordinary number of people awaiting trial or sentencing in jails and ban the use of spit hoods.
A report, released by the UN subcommittee on the prevention of torture (SPT) this week, also called for the limiting of routine strip-searches. It comes after the body visited Australia in October last year but terminated the visit after it was prevented from entering detention facilities in New South Wales and Queensland.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Incarcerated Alabamans and labor organizations have filed a federal class action lawsuit to dismantle the forced prison labor system in the state, which rakes in $450 million annually from leasing incarcerated people to companies like McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King and Wendy’s. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, seeks compensation for incarcerated…
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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…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Derbyshire woman who bought item said she felt uneasy at find that raises concerns over possible prison labour
An ID card that appears to belong to a Chinese prisoner was found inside the lining of a coat from the British brand Regatta, raising concerns that the clothing was manufactured using prison labour.
The waterproof women’s coat was bought online by a woman in Derbyshire in the Black Friday sale. When it arrived on 22 November, she could feel a hard rectangular item in the right sleeve, which restricted the movement of her elbow.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Decades ago, most people had never even heard the term “death by incarceration,” the racially discriminatory and cruel practice commonly known as life imprisonment. Now in 2023, the United Nations has condemned it and called on the United States to abolish it. In October, as I sat facing the members of the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva, Switzerland, my mind drifted to moments during my 27…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
After the Civil War, a new form of slavery took hold in the U.S. and lasted more than 60 years. Associated Press reporters Margie Mason and Robin McDowell investigate the chilling history of how Southern states imprisoned mainly Black men, often for minor crimes, and then leased them out to private companies – for years, even decades, at a time. The team talks with the descendant of a man imprisoned in the Lone Rock stockade in Tennessee nearly 140 years ago, where people as young as 12 worked under inhumane conditions in coal mines and inferno-like ovens used to produce iron. This system of forced prison labor enriched the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. – at the cost of prisoners’ lives.
At the state park that sits on the former site of the Lone Rock stockade, relics from the hellish prison are buried beneath the soil. Archeologist Camille Westmont has found thousands of artifacts, such as utensils and the plates prisoners ate off. She has also created a database listing the names of those sent to Lone Rock. A team of volunteers are helping her, including a woman reckoning with her own ancestor’s involvement in this corrupt system and the wealth her family benefited from.
The United States Steel Corp. helped build bridges, railroads and towering skyscrapers across America. But the company also relied on forced prison labor. After U.S. Steel took over Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in 1907, the industrial giant used prison labor for at least five more years. During that time, more than 100 men died while working in its massive coal mining operation in Alabama. U.S. Steel has misrepresented this dark chapter of its history. And it has never apologized for its use of forced labor or the lives lost. The reporters push the company to answer questions about its past and engage with communities near the former mines.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in September 2022.
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Private equity firms, one of the most powerful arms of Wall Street, have become key adversaries of movements from labor rights to climate action to housing justice. With their wealthy CEOs and aggressive cost-cutting tactics aimed at delivering big returns, these firms are one of the most rapacious expressions of financial profiteering today. This makes it all the more alarming that private equity…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Boosters have promoted prison construction on abandoned mine lands as a tool of economic development throughout Appalachia. New federal funding provides the opportunity for more sustainable and socially beneficial investments.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
This fall at a concert hall in Claremont, California, a sold-out crowd of some 240 people got a call from death row. “I can hear you,” said a man the state of Ohio intends to execute on January 13, 2027. His execution date was previously set for today, November 16, until a reprieve issued in July by Gov. Mike DeWine postponed it. On the campus of Pomona College, a private school where privilege…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The 1971 Attica prison uprising — and subsequent massacre — remains the most famous prison rebellion throughout the world. Lesser known is the prison organizing — and repression — that flourished in prisons in New York state and around the country both before and after the infamous rebellion. In his new book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt…
Attorneys for an incarcerated mother in Alabama say she experienced nothing less than “torture” when she was jailed while pregnant, denied prescribed psychiatric medication and forced to give birth alone in a shower. Authorities in Gadsden, Alabama, jailed Ashley Caswell during her high-risk pregnancy, ostensibly to protect the fetus from alleged drug use. However, after seven months of alleged…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Maine is likely not the first state one thinks of as a place to investigate the impunity of the criminal legal system. That’s due to several factors, including but not limited to: 1.) the state’s whiteness, 2.) its small population, and 3.) its remoteness. Yet, the state is rife with examples of the unaccountable impunity of the criminal legal system that are worth studying for abolitionists. Take…
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Three weeks after Thanh Tran’s 18th birthday, he rang a drug dealer’s doorbell. In an instant, Tran was caught up in a gang-related attempted murder and attempted robbery case that could have landed him in a California state prison for 75 years to life. Prosecutors presented Tran with a plea bargain of 17 years in prison, even though he didn’t pull the trigger during the 2011 incident.
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Shadeed Beaver, who is 13 years into a 27-year prison sentence, was excited when he first learned about “Bridges To Life,” a restorative justice class offered at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, Washington. The class, which pairs incarcerated people with victims of crime, guides participants through conversations aimed at developing mutual understanding. It provides a rare opportunity…
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For 18 years, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch on the never-ending story of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility. And here’s my ultimate takeaway (for the moment): 21 years after that grim offshore prison of injustice was set up in Cuba in response to the 9/11 attacks and the capture of figures supposedly linked to them, and despite the expressed desire of three presidents — George W.
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October is National Domestic Violence Awareness and Prevention Month, and we look at how Black and Brown survivors of domestic abuse are further criminalized by police and prisons — and how activists have been organizing to win their freedom. In her first broadcast interview, we speak with Tracy McCarter, a nurse and grandmother who was jailed after her abusive husband, a white man, died of a stab…
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The Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism is proud to announce the winners of the third annual Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize. We were inexpressibly moved by each of the hundreds of essays we read, and wish we could have selected more than two; we hope to uplift more of these pieces in other ways throughout the year. In addition to members of the Truthout team, we are grateful to our…
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“The first time I was raped I was eleven.” Crystal did not know her first rapist. She was also raped several times by her uncle when she was fifteen. “And when I was between 18 and 22. I was raped about ten times.” Later, when she entered prison, sexual violence followed her. “Being stripped here, in prison — even though I know the outcome will not be sexual — still feels the same as being raped…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
One of the hollowest principles within the criminal legal system is the presumption of innocence until court-proven guilt. I know this firsthand. When my white husband died, I — a Black woman — was accused of his murder. The mere fact of my arrest on a second-degree murder charge set off a tsunami of consequences. Being arrested equated to being punished; “innocence” was never part of the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Unbeknownst to most protesters who gathered at the White House on the occasion of Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier’s 79th birthday, Peltier wasn’t able to celebrate, much less receive reports on how the well-attended event was progressing. That’s because Peltier, who is now spending his 48th year in captivity, was sitting on his bunk, across from his cellie, “locked down” in a…
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Not long after moving to Topeka, Kansas, in the early 1980s, community organizer Curtis Pitts learned about a hidden slice of that city’s history that would come to shape his life’s work over the next four decades. He was introduced to the Kansas Technical Institute, or KTI, a Black vocational college that had prospered throughout the early twentieth century, only to close in the mid-1950s.
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