Tag: Mass incarceration
The Invisible Labor of Women Who Love Incarcerated People
Society
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February 19, 2024
There are few things more important for people in prison than keeping links with the outside world. That task falls overwhelmingly to women.
A Father’s Day visit to the Joe Kegans State Jail, Sunday, June 17, 2012, in Houston, Tex.
(Michael Paulsen / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
Cassandra Butler, 43, starts her day at five in the morning, the only time when it’s quiet at her house in Puyallup, Washington. As she
It’s Known as “Death by Incarceration.” These People Want to End It.
“My life is either going to be a testimony or a warning,” said Derek Lee.
Lee was speaking on a video chat from behind the walls of SCI Smithfield in central Pennsylvania. Now 35 years old, Lee has been imprisoned since he was 29. If nothing changes, he will grow old and die in prison.
In 2016, a Pennsylvania court sentenced Lee to life without parole for a burglary two years earlier that ended with his accomplice fatally shooting the … Read more
The Key to Unlocking Prison Reform
From the standpoint of many on the left, former President Donald Trump did exactly two good things in office. He supported Operation Warp Speed, which facilitated the development and production of the first COVID-19 vaccines. And in 2018, he signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal-justice bill that shortened federal prison terms, gave judges more latitude in sentencing, and provided educational programming to ease prisoners’ eventual return to the outside world.
The best account of how Democrats and
The Twisted History of the American Crime Anxiety Industry
You had to watch your back on the grimy cobblestone streets of Victorian Era London. Ever since the explosion of the Industrial Revolution, crime had become a constant source of anxiety. Even with the installation of a new network of gaslit lamps and the implementation of what would become some of the first modern policing practices, the poorest slums of the city were still seen by the upper classes as virtual pits of hell. Racialized minorities, immigrants, poor women, queer … Read more
The War on Drugs Is 50 Years Old
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