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by Eli Hager and Weihua Li
"The president of Minneapolis’s police union called George Floyd a “violent criminal” and those protesting his killing by a police officer a “terrorist movement.” A union chief in Baltimore once said Black Lives Matter activists were a “lynch mob”; one in Philadelphia referred to them as “a pack of rabid animals.” Another has labeled St. Louis’s democratically elected prosecutor, who is black and supports police reform, a “menace to society” who must be removed “by force” if necessary.All of these union leaders also have this in common: They are white." Read more
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by Abbie VanSickle
The Marshall Project The coronavirus-stricken prisoners kept off the books. Officials in Santa Barbara County faced a dilemma weeks ago. They desperately wanted permission from California authorities to “reopen” their local economy as the coronavirus ebbed in the state. But a major outbreak of COVID-19 at FCI Lompoc, the federal prison there, had skewed the metrics. Santa Barbara resolved its problem by lobbying state officials to exclude prisoners from relevant public health analyses. “It’s a fiction,” says a justice reform advocate. It’s also a scenario likely to be repeated in other counties across the country where prisons are COVID-19 hotspots. Read more... My mom was by my side the first time I went away. The second time was just too much.
by Daniel McCann, The Marshall Project Life Inside Series May 21, 2020 "In silence, all I could think about was the time my mom had told me that a broken heart would be her demise. I knew that it would only be a matter of time now before the disappointment I had caused would also make me guilty of murder. My weapon? Heartache." Read more... by Madison Alder
Judges are interpreting the law on the fly as they face an unprecedented spike in requests for “compassionate release” from prison, coming to different conclusions about what can be done in the context of a pandemic. The swell of requests for what’s known as compassionate release come after the passage of a law, written before the Covid-19 outbreak, that made it easier for those requests to be filed with the courts. Read more... by Alex Ortiz
My Suburban Life "Parole Illinois, a coalition of activists in and out of prison working “toward a more just and humane legal system” organized the demonstration. The group described Stateville as the “epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Illinois carceral system.” The Rev. Jason Lydon, a Unitarian Universalist minister at the Second Unitarian Church in Chicago, described the group of family members, advocates and faith leaders as “people of conscience coming together” to raise awareness of the situation in Illinois prisons and jails. He said the demonstration was an effort to “remind everybody that those inside the prison are not alone.” “We are fighting hard to get them out,” Lydon said. “And to ensure that they have the care that they need.” Read More... Reason
by C.J. Ciaramella "The numbers and dire news stories underscore what civil liberties groups and correctional officer unions have been trying to warn local, state, and federal agencies about since COVID-19 reached the country: that jails and prisons were woefully unprepared to handle an epidemic, and that those institutions would inevitably spread the virus into nearby communities unless drastic measures were taken." Read more NBC News
by Nick Charles "Coronavirus outbreaks have transformed prisons into hot spots of infection, and among the societal inequalities the pandemic is exposing along the fault lines of race, class, and gender are some of the lesser known realities of mass incarceration, particularly those facing black women. The vast majority of female inmates come from 'marginalized communities where the health care was subpar at best, and it’s even worse whatever their fragilities are, and you layer on mental illness and autoimmune diseases among women,' Donna Hylton, a prison reform activist and author, who served 27 years in an upstate New York prison, told NBC News." Read more... Chicago Tribune
by Megan Crepeau "Jeffrey Pendleton spent much of his adult life in a cell...Warren and his surviving brother, Donnell Todd, have sued Cook County in federal court, alleging that the sheriff’s office violated his rights by shackling him to his hospital bed in his final days. 'You should not even leave a dog chained up all day, not even animals should be chained up all day. He was chained up for days. And sick,' Pendleton said. 'That was an injustice to my brother. First of all he wasn’t convicted, he was a detainee. Awaiting trial, he couldn’t even go to trial because they shut the court system down," he said. "Nobody, incarcerated or detainee, they should not be dying in there. Nobody should die in there.'" Read more... Op-ed from Amanda Klonsky and Dan Cooper
Chicago Sun-Times "African Americans are jailed disproportionately..., and this crisis is further heightening racial inequality... [R]eleases have not risen to the level required to prevent mass deaths." Now four people have died in the jail since this was written. Read more... Clips of UUPMI Steering Committee Members Monica Cosby and the Rev. Jason Lydon in this news report about yesterday’s decarceration caravan:
"A noisy protest outside Cook County Jail occurred Tuesday as activists demand the release of all 4,500 detainees during the COVID-19 pandemic." https://www.fox32chicago.com/video/671607 |
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