Supreme Court Sees 2 Similar Death Penalty Questions Very Differently
NPR by Nina Totenberg March 30, 2019 Two Supreme Court decisions just hours before a scheduled execution. Two decisions just seven weeks apart. Two decisions on the same issue. Except that in one, a Muslim was put to death without his imam allowed with him in the execution chamber, and in the other, a Buddhist's execution was temporarily halted because his Buddhist minister was denied the same right. The two apparently conflicting decisions are so puzzling that even the lawyers are scratching their heads and offering explanations that they candidly admit are only speculative. On Feb. 7, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, ruled that Alabama could go ahead with its execution of Domineque Hakim Ray, a Muslim man convicted of murder. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had temporarily blocked the execution because the state barred the condemned man from having a Muslim imam at his side in the death chamber. Alabama said only the prison's Christian minister would be allowed in. Read More
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Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019
Prison Policy Initiative by Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner March 19, 2019 Can it really be true that most people in jail are being held before trial? And how much of mass incarceration is a result of the war on drugs? These questions are harder to answer than you might think, because our country’s systems of confinement are so fragmented. The various government agencies involved in the justice system collect a lot of critical data, but it is not designed to help policymakers or the public understand what’s going on. As public support for criminal justice reform continues to build, however, it’s more important than ever that we get the facts straight and understand the big picture. This report offers some much needed clarity by piecing together this country’s disparate systems of confinement. The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories. This report provides a detailed look at where and why people are locked up in the U.S., and dispels some modern myths to focus attention on the real drivers of mass incarceration. Read More What happened during my first visit to a prison since being released from one
Washington Post by Jason Razaian 3/26/19 On my latest trip to the Bay Area, I did something a bit different from what I usually do when I visit the area in which I grew up: I went to prison. I had the opportunity to meet with inmates at San Quentin State Prison, the California penitentiary that sits on the southeastern edge of San Rafael, the city I called home for my first 33 years. I had driven past San Quentin thousands of times. As a boy at Marin Country Day School, I looked out across the bay to see the prison’s sand-colored walls just across the water. During my childhood, my dad, his sister and a cousin all had retail businesses in an outdoor shopping mall less than a quarter of a mile from the prison. This, though, was the first time I was going inside. It was my first experience at a prison since being released from Evin in Iran, which was also eerily close to my home in Tehran. Read More 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. 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. LISTEN HERE 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. Read More 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. Read More 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. Watch More 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. Read More 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. “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. Read More 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. “I don’t know what to say,” Douglas said through tears. “I’ll be glad to see my mom and my kids.” Read More |
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