In commemoration of the Attica Uprising 47 years earlier, incarcerated organizers chose yesterday as the final day of the nearly three-week-long National Prison Strike that began on August 21. The strike eventually extended to federal prisons, state prisons, immigration detention centers, and local jails across at least fourteen states, with actions ranging from work stoppages […]
• According to the Trentonian, James Covington, a physically and mentally disabled man held at the Doylestown detention center in Pennsylvania for unpaid fines, claims that he suffered an unprovoked racist attack when three white corrections officers picked on him for his height, called him the N-word, assaulted him to the point of breaking his […]
A piece by California inmate and jailhouse legal advisor Richard Gilliam appeared earlier this month on “The Informant,” KALW public radio’s excellent blog on “Cops, Courts, and Communities in the Bay Area.” Gilliam describes the complex system for filing grievances within California prisons–a system in which complaints against prison administration are handled by none other than the prison administration. […]
Guest Post by Jennifer Wedekind Editor’s Note: Jennifer Wedekind is a journalist whose work has appeared in Mother Jones, In These Times, and the Multinational Monitor. She is a 2011 JD Candidate at Georgetown Law. The public comment period for the PREA regulations extends through April 4, 2011. To submit a comment or read the […]
Back in May, we wrote about the case of a woman prisoner named Michelle Ortiz, who was first chastised and then shackled and sent to solitary confinement as punishment for reporting her molestation and subsequent rape by a male guard. As the Columbus Dispatch reported: When Ortiz reported the first assault to prison official Paula […]
Guest Post by Alan CYA #65085 Editors’ Note: We’ve written before about two laws from the 1990s that make it close to impossible for prisoners to challenge any injustices and abuses they encounter in various part of the American criminal justice system—whether in the courts or in prison itself. This guest post on the subject […]
Since late last night, when we published our post about Albert Woodfox’s appeal, several readers have written to us about the grim legacy of the AEDPA–the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. That’s because the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals cited the AEDPA extensively in ruling that Woodfox’s conviction should not be overturned, and he should not receive a […]
Veteran New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse has an opinion piece today on Clarence Thomas’s “silent but sure” stance on prisons, and “specifically the meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’” Thomas’s position is highly relevant to the issue of solitary confinement, since critics of long-term lockdown argue that it violates […]
In an earlier post, we wrote about what the so-called War on Terror of the last ten years owes to the longstanding War on Crime, in terms of how the United States treats its prisoner or detainees, and how willing we are to compromise their Constitutional and human rights. (In fact, UC psychology professor Craig Haney has suggested that […]