
Prisoners have made furniture, license plates and government uniforms during the pandemic. In a factory, social distancing is almost impossible. By Cary Aspinwall, Keri Blakinger and Joseph Neff, The Marshall…
Prisoners have made furniture, license plates and government uniforms during the pandemic. In a factory, social distancing is almost impossible. By Cary Aspinwall, Keri Blakinger and Joseph Neff, The Marshall…
No other state is thought to have taken such sweeping action to reduce its jail population in response to the pandemic. By Tracey Tully, NYT — New Jersey will release as many as 1,000 people from its jails in what is believed to be the nation’s broadest effort to address the risks of the highly contagious coronavirus spreading among the incarcerated. New Jersey’s chief justice, Stuart Rabner, signed an order late Sunday authorizing the…
By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA — Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Chair Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) held an emergency telephone town hall on Friday, March 20, to discuss the coronavirus and…
By John L. Micek, The Philadelphia Tribune — State Rep. Chris Rabb wants the state to pay reparations to people who are wrongfully sent to prison. In a memo seeking co-sponsors for his proposal, Rabb, D-Philadelphia, notes that Pennsylvania is one of 15 states without a law mandating compensation for innocent people for the years they lose behind bars. “Without a state compensation law, the only option for exonerees to…
All of them returned to the South’s frontline struggle for racial justice. By R. Drew Smith — In 2020, January remembrances of Martin Luther King Jr. are occurring against the backdrop of two high-profile films emphasizing sacrificial servant leadership. First, the film Harriet provided a renewed focus on celebrated abolitionist Harriet Tubman. This biopic chronicles her mid-19th century enslavement in Maryland, her daring escape to a hard-won freedom in Philadelphia, and her…
By Dr. Julianne Malveaux — As 2019 ticked to a close, the screamingly outrageous headlines have not slowed. Every day there is something, whether it is a flurry of presidential…
By Gabriel Sayegh, Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice — The fight to close Rikers is reaching a boiling point again. Next week, the New York City Council will…
By Julianne Malveaux — Twenty-one-year-old Deandre Sullivan overslept one morning. Selected to serve on a jury, he was supposed to report by 9 a.m. He didn’t awaken until 11 and…
By John W. Whitehead, CounterPunch — “The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can ‘pay their debt to society,’ make themselves useful, and not contaminate others with…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — The Central Park 5 has been the textbook poster case for the one thing that has consistently and horribly racially disfigured America’s criminal justice system….
But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. Connie Hassett-Walker, The Conversation — Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new. There are many precedents to the Ferguson,…
By Julianne Malveaux — Many know them as the Central Park Five, but filmmaker Ava DuVernay forces to us see the five wrongfully convicted men as individuals. Their names are…