stillness is a lie, my dear
When Netflix came out with the new season of Orange is the New Black in June, I watched progressives eagerly marathon it and produce a slew of thinkpieces about the show and how original and funny and sharp and insightful it is — and how progressive it is, to include a trans woman in the cast, to […]
There are two important things to understand about the prison system in the United States: it’s based on retributive justice, and it’s a for-profit enterprise. There’s a reason they refer to it as the ‘prison-industrial complex,’ because the whole system is designed to generate massive amounts of money for power players, including not just private […]
Among the scores of sneaky trends popping up across the United States to refuse reproductive autonomy and suggest that a developing fetus has the full rights of a human being are the laws in some states allowing officials to detain pregnant women ‘for the health of the baby.’ Essentially, the argument is that some situations […]
When I get into conversations with people about prisoner rights, the conditions in US prison, and specific prison reform issues—like getting rid of solitary confinement and addressing the health care gap in prisons—there’s always a significant elephant in the room. On the surface, many self-identified progressives support prisoner rights, at the very least opposing the […]
For one of the starkest illustrations of the retributive model of justice adopted in the United States, look to the way we continue to punish felons after they’ve already served their sentences. In a curious state of affairs, despite the fact that the court officially deems time served once a sentence has been completed, people […]
One day when I was in second grade, I cut myself in class. I can’t remember how I did it; probably, it was a papercut from a book or a project I was working on. What I do remember is the brief spark of pain followed by the brightly-beading red blood, raising my hand patiently […]
Mississippi is, honestly, not the state I would look to for radical reforms, as a general rule. Yet, earlier this year, the state did something rather important and unique: it took concrete steps to close the school-to-prison pipeline, though of course it only did so under pressure from government regulators, the Department of Justice, and […]
Being the sort of person who follows major civil suits coming out of prisons, my morning reading is often a bit grim and spattered with stories that might seem utterly bizarre to people who aren’t familiar with the abuses of the prison system. Prisoners are suing across the United States for the right to access […]
Something rather astounding happened in 2011: prisoners went on strike, and people paid attention. A hunger strike over conditions in California prisons that started at Pelican Bay, the state’s notorious supermax facility infamous for its use of solitary confinement, spread across the state, attracting headlines and attention across the country. Not just in prison media, […]
Incarcerating anyone shouldn’t be a for-profit business, strictly speaking, but the rising market in youth incarceration is particularly disturbing. As the Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out in investigations conducted last year, there are some special concerns with incarcerated youth, and it’s disturbing to see the number of youth in prison on the rise. Particularly […]