BY GEORGE JOSEPH
Gothamist The national bail industry is bankrolling a Facebook campaign against New York state’s new bail reform law. From December through this month, the American Bail Coalition, which represents bail bonds insurers, has spent around $8,000 on promotional posts that have generated between 965,000 and 1.1 million impressions in New York state alone. The industry group has also spent thousands more on Facebook ads across the country, a small fraction of which have generated impressions in New York. Read more...
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by Liliana Segura
The Intercept It is not unusual for the condemned to form bonds and support one another. Regular visitors to Tennessee’s death row often describe how important those relationships have become in their own lives as well — and how devastating each execution can be. On occasion, prison employees themselves will speak out against an execution, describing the ways in which the condemned person has changed and evolved over the years. Yet Sutton’s clemency petition is striking for the number of people, including prison officials, who describe him as Joyce House does, as a man who has gone out of his way to help others — and even save lives. Read more... Life Inside: The Marshall Project
By Keith Martin 2/6/2020 "When you’re in prison, outside sights and sounds can become cruel jokes... Life Inside: Perspectives from those who work and live in the criminal justice system. " Read more... By Maurice Chammah
St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Marshall Project "The chair no one wants to sit in. In jails across the country, sometimes for days or weeks at a time, prisoners are held in “restraint chairs” that they say inflict acute physical pain and lasting emotional damage. Jail officials say the chairs ensure that detainees do not harm themselves while intoxicated or suffering from mental illness. But widespread use of the chair has been linked to at least 20 deaths in the past six years, and there is little oversight or accountability. In collaboration with the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, TMP’s Maurice Chammah has this story..." Read more... by James V. Cook, Miami-Herald
Florida prisons are badly underfunded. Prisoners tell me short-staffing corrections positions allows well-organized gangs a freer hand while some prison officials turn a blind eye. Drugs flow into prison and are distributed by inmates who seem to move freely. Last I checked, there was no mandatory discipline for officers who let inmates in and out of unauthorized housing areas...Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky said, “The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” I have been there, and we are in trouble. Read More... Join the Coalition to End Money Bond in Springfield at a Lobby Feb. 25th. They are asking for us to spread the word, needing your help to educate legislators about the Pretrial Fairness Act and the need for transformative bond reform.
From their website: The Coalition to End Money Bond formed in May 2016 as a group of member organizations with the shared goal of stopping the large-scale jailing of people simply because they were unable to pay a monetary bond. In addition to ending the obvious unfairness of allowing access to money determine who is incarcerated and who is free pending trial, the Coalition is committed to reducing the overall number of people in Cook County Jail and under pretrial supervision as part of a larger fight against mass incarceration. The Coalition to End Money Bond is tackling bail reform and the abolition of money bond as part of its member organizations’ larger efforts to achieve racial and economic justice for all residents of Cook County. Learn more here... Register here... by Eli Hager
"Say you’re a teenager who has committed a serious crime, and a judge is about to sentence you to prison for a very long time. How long a sentence would the judge have to hand down for it to feel essentially the same as being sent to prison for life? States have been wrestling with this question over the past decade in the wake of multiple U.S. Supreme Court rulings that automatically sentencing juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole is unconstitutional, because kids have a unique ability to grow and change and therefore deserve a second chance down the road. That forced courts and legislatures to consider what number of years to hand down instead to the more than 2,000 current prisoners nationwide who were originally sentenced as juveniles to mandatory life without parole...." Read more... Sometimes a book comes along and, after it is absorbed into the culture, we cannot see ourselves again in quite the same way. Ten years ago, Michelle Alexander, a lawyer and civil-rights advocate, published “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” This was less than two years into Barack Obama’s first term as President, a moment when you heard a lot of euphoric talk about post-racialism and “how far we’ve come.” “The New Jim Crow” was hardly an immediate best-seller, but after a couple of years it took off and seemed to be at the center of discussion about criminal-justice reform and racism in America. The book considers not only the enormity and cruelty of the American prison system but also, as Alexander writes, the way the war on drugs and the justice system have been used as a “system of control” that shatters the lives of millions of Americans—particularly young black and Hispanic men.
As part of an hour-long examination of mass incarceration for The New Yorker Radio Hour, co-hosted this week by Kai Wright, of WNYC, I caught up with Michelle Alexander, who is now teaching at Union Theological Seminary, in New York. Read more Join Restore Justice in Springfield on February 5 to advocate for policies that would alleviate costs and other burdens for people with incarcerated loved ones. We need your help asking lawmakers to support SB 2311, which would establish a statewide contact within the Illinois Department of Corrections for family members and other visitors of inmates. Currently, those with incarcerated loved ones must rely on staff at a particular facility to address visitation issues, including conflicts, concerns with staff behavior, or questions. We will also garner support for HB 3986. This measure would create more competition for vending machine contracts and, thus, reduce the costs of food in IDOC visiting rooms. Read more...
Register here. Texas has banished hundreds of prisoners to more than a decade of solitary confinement, an extreme form of a controversial punishment likened to torture. Many of these prisoners aren’t sure how—or, in some cases, if—they will ever get out.
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