Beyond Prisons: Taylar Neuvelle on Knitting in Prison
ShadowProof
3/22/19

Taylar Nuevelle joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to talk about her experiences with knitting while incarcerated. In particular, we talk about her love of knitting, the space it created for her in prison, as well as how it was used to punish her.

Ms. Nuevelle is a writer and advocate for justice-involved women. In 2017 she created a writing program at the Central Treatment Facility (CTF), the women’s jail in DC, “Sharing Our Stories to Reclaim Our Lives.” She is credited for creating the concept of the “Trauma-to-Prison Pipeline” for women and girls.
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While incarcerated at the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA/CTF) D.C. and in the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 2010 to 2015, Ms. Nuevelle volunteered by providing legal advocacy for fellow incarcerated women. Ms. Nuevelle’s writings have appeared in The Washington Post, Talk Poverty, The Nation, the Vera Institute for Justice Blog and Ms. Magazine online. Ms. Nuevelle holds a B.A. in Literature.

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First-of-Its-Kind Study Fills in Decades-Long Blank About Pregnancy in Prison
Rewire News by Victoria Law
5/21/19

In a new study published this week, researchers are filling in the blanks left by outdated, decades-old data about pregnancy behind bars. This is a black hole that government agencies have failed to fill since 2004—even though the growth of women’s incarceration continues to outpace that of men.

Four percent of the world’s women live in the United States—but more than 30 percent of the world’s incarcerated women live here. Despite this dramatic disproportion, little remains known about the gender-specific health conditions among incarcerated women.

On Thursday, the Pregnancy in Prison Statistics (PIPS) project—the only systematic study of pregnancy outcomes in prisons across the United States—published its first set of findings in the American Journal of Public Health. PIPS was launched by Advocacy and Research on Reproductive Wellness of Incarcerated People (ARRWIP), a group of researchers examining the intersections of reproductive justice and criminal justice. While the researchers conducted a pilot study in 2015, they collected the data for their new study from 2016 to 2017.

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Woman, 51, dies while being held at Cook County Jail
Chicago Sun Times by David Struett
3/3/19

A 51-year-old woman died Saturday while being held at the Cook County Jail on a drug possession charge.
Lavera Scott was pronounced dead at 5:28 a.m. at the jail, located in the 2600 block of South California Avenue, Cook County sheriff’s office spokeswoman Sophia Ansari said.
The circumstances of her death did not appear suspicious, Ansari said.
Autopsy results were still pending on Sunday, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
A spokeswoman for the Cook County Dept. of Public Health on Saturday said the jail’s hospital, Cermak Health Services, does not comment on the health conditions or care that inmates receive.

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Program allows inmates to see their kids outside prison
CNN by Poppy Harlow

CNN's Poppy Harlow takes you inside the notorious Rikers Island prison in New York to meet the mothers locked up there -- and into an innovative new program through the Children's Museum of Manhattan that allows a select group of female inmates to spend a few precious hours outside of jail with their children.

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Incarcerated people have a lot to teach us about preventing crime and violence. I listened, and you can, too.
NBC News by Jeffrey Wright
3/5/19

The transition from incarceration to reintegration into society is very much at the center of what our story is about in "O.G.": I play a man who's been incarcerated for 24 years, who is in the final weeks of his sentence. As a result, I had many conversations with folks on the inside, since we filmed in a working facility, and largely worked with men who are incarcerated in the roles of the other incarcerated men.
Almost to a man, they described what they feel is a universal period of anxiousness — of confusion — about what lies on the other side of the wall because, in many ways, time has stood still for them while they've been incarcerated, and the world outside has become foreign. But it's also because they've lived within an institution that has made every day-to-day social choice for them, and so their decision-making skills have really atrophied.
That's a real danger to someone who's reintegrating into society after having committed a serious crime, as the men that I worked with have. Reintegrating into society with your social skills having atrophied, but with your survival skills having been honed in a dangerous setting, is not necessarily the best combination for the general public, let alone for them.

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Opening Minds Behind Bars
NPR-IL by Dusty Rhodes
3/6/19

Ro’Derick Zavala grew up in Chicago at 21st and State Street — the northern tip of a four-mile corridor lined with 8,000 units of public housing. His mother worked three jobs, including one at Walgreens, where she would pick up the Disney and Hanna Barbera books that inspired Zavala to fall in love with reading at a young age.

That passion should’ve made him a successful student. But on Chicago’s south side, in the 1980s, it was hard to find a safe place to go to school.
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“My mother was always trying to get me out of the neighborhood I grew up in, so we constantly moved a lot. I was never in a school longer than a year," he says. "So you take me from one neighborhood to another school … to her, the school seems like a better place to go. But there still is a neighborhood around it that I have to operate in. So I continued to get in trouble in school and get kicked out of school.
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Cory Booker: It’s time for the next step in criminal justice reform
Washington Post
3/10/19

Edward Douglas woke up on Jan. 10, 2019, in a federal penitentiary in Pekin, Ill., where he had spent every morning of the past 15 years of his life. He was serving a lifetime sentence for selling 140 grams of crack cocaine — an amount about the size of a baseball.

It seemed like any other day until, at 10:30 a.m., a guard came into Douglas’s cell and told him he needed to call his lawyer. A few minutes later, he reached his lawyer, who informed him that, thanks to a new law, he would be a free man in a matter of hours. Douglas started sobbing.
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“I don’t know what to say,” Douglas said through tears. “I’ll be glad to see my mom and my kids.”

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Poor people often can’t afford to pay bail — even when they’re innocent. An app developed in Chicago offers help using your spare change
Chicago Tribune by Darcel Rockett
3/7/19

Devoureaux Wolf was getting a ride home with friends in the spring of 2016 when they were pulled over by police for not wearing seat belts. A friend in the front seat recorded on a cellphone as Wolf was taken out of the car and wrestled to the ground by the officers. Wolf was charged with three counts of aggravated battery to an officer and two counts of resisting arrest.
“I wound up getting assaulted by an officer, and somehow I end up getting charged for assaulting him,” Wolf says in a promotional video for the Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF), which also shows cellphone clips from the incident. The nonprofit pays bail for imprisoned people in Cook County.
Wolf, now 27, spent 3 ½ months in Cook County Jail because he couldn’t come up with 10 percent of his $30,000 bond. He eventually came across CCBF’s phone number and, within a week of his mother calling the organization, was released.

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Reckoning With Violence
The New York Times by Michelle Alexander
March 3, 2019

We must face violent crime honestly and courageously if we are ever to end mass incarceration and provide survivors what they truly want and need to heal.

When Chicago’s police chief, Eddie Johnson, looked out at the sea of journalists to share the breaking news that Jussie Smollett, a well-known and beloved actor, had allegedly staged a violent racist and homophobic attack against himself, he said with great emotion: “Guys, I look out into the crowd, I just wish that the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention.”

Chicago is besieged by horrific levels of violence, including thousands of shootings and hundreds of homicides each year. More than 500 people were killed in 2018, down from 664 in 2017. This ongoing tragedy cannot be blamed on any lack of aggressiveness on the part of law enforcement. Indeed, if wars on crime and drugs, militarized policing, “get tough” sentencing policies, torture of suspects, and perpetual monitoring and surveillance of the poorest, most crime-ridden communities actually worked to keep people safe, Chicago would be one of the safest cities in the world.
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Despite the abysmal failure of “get tough” strategies to break cycles of violence in cities like Chicago, reformers of our criminal justice system in recent years have largely avoided the subject of violence, instead focusing their energy and resources on overhauling our nation’s drug laws and reducing penalties for nonviolent offenses.

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Behind bars: four teens in prison tell their stories
L.A. Youth by Nicholas Williams
4/20/18

When I arrived at Central Juvenile Hall, I was expecting guards, watch towers, basically the setting of the Shawshank Redemption. I was told to wait in a small lobby room, which separated the prison from the outside world. While waiting, I saw a few inmates getting on a bus. They wore handcuffs and carried brown paper bags behind their backs. I wondered what these kids did. I looked at each one, trying to guess his crime. "Maybe he robbed a store, maybe he killed somebody, maybe he was selling drugs." Some people might ask, why would I want to write a story about juveniles in prison? Why would anyone want to read what these criminals have to say? Who cares? It’s easy to judge juvenile criminals as bad kids, but not so easy when you’re looking into the eyes of a teenager who is going to spend life in jail.
I know there are victims of violent crimes whose voices go unheard. But recognize that some people who commit crimes have many reasons behind their actions. It’s a cycle. This is what happens to kids who didn’t have direction or anybody who cared, who had to learn about life the hard way. They were brought up this way so that’s how they’re going to treat others. Sometimes, it’s okay to give a voice to the "villains." They have been victims too.

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