(21 Mar) When Colorado Put Polling Places Inside All Its Jails, Voter Turnout Soared

A new law — the first of its kind in the U.S.—has made it much easier for detained Coloradans to cast a ballot.

https://s.faithcollapsing.com/cdcmy
Archive: ais: https://archive.md/wip/Te3jT ia: https://s.faithcollapsing.com/agqp8

#criminal-justice #elections #incarceration #jails #justice #social-justice #voting

"Charging people in prison to communicate with the outside world has long been good business."

Katya Schwenk for The Lever‬: https://longreads.com/2025/03/21/the-succession-battle-for-a-prison-empire/

Today in Labor History March 20, 2000: Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was arrested for murdering a Georgia sheriff’s deputy. Al-Amin had been a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers. He once said that “violence is as American as cherry pie.” Al-Amin denied shooting the deputy. His fingerprints were not found on the murder weapon. He had no gunshot wounds, though officers who were present at the shootout claimed that the suspect had been hit and wounded. Another man, Otis Jackson, later confessed to being the shooter, but the authorities have repeatedly denied Al-Amin’s requests for a retrial. He is now serving a life sentence. He had been at Florence supermax, under a gag order preventing interviews with journalists. In 2014, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He is now at the U.S. Penitentiary, Tucson. In April 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal from al-Amin.

Listen to this speech of mr. @georgetakei and check the links in the thread; it's happening again.

https://mastodon.social/@touaregtweet/112289297850597193

#WWII #history #America
#racism #Japan #incarceration #concentrationcamps #relocation #RohwerWarRelocationCenter #JeromeWarRelocationCenter

#Wealth and #education to be a determinant factor in #crime and #incarceration statistics. Well, blow me down. /sarc/

Here is an endorsment for the ‘separation of powers’ enjoyed in this country in full display. The lecture delivered by the #NT judge speaking truth to power.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-15/nt-judge-urges-rethink-on-how-to-reduce-crime/105015740

"Both groups were surprised that they had so much in common. The condemned women were astonished that the nuns had chosen to live a life nearly as confined as their own, in rooms that they, too, called 'cells.'"

Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker: https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/the-nuns-trying-to-save-the-women-on-texass-death-row

Canadian woman #incarcerated entering the country to go to a professional conference, despite holding all the appropriate paperwork.

And she's still there, eleven days later, in horrible conditions this country usually only reserves for the poor, the Black, and the brown.

The only upside here is that the improper #arrest of an attractive young white Canadian woman for imaginary #immigration violations might start to open some people's eyes.

#immigration #detention #Canada #resist #Ω #refugees #asylumseekers #tourists #incarceration #privateprisons #impeach47 #deportElon

https://vancouversun.com/news/bc-woman-detained-at-us-border-sent-to-arizona-detention-facility

[Edit: typos]

Prison policies in the state of New York make life worse for prisoners and prison guards alike. #incarceration #prison #strike
https://progressive.org/latest/state-of-shame-arthur-20250307/

Letters like this one from an incarcerated reader motivate us to keep sending books:

"I would like to thank you... for sending me those awesome books. I love them and I appreciate all of you and the work you do to provide for us poor indigent prisoners, books that help ease our time. I am new to this prison system, and if I live to make it out alive, I hope to be able to help others like myself inside."

#LuigiMangione shares first public statement since #incarceration

https://boingboing.net/2025/02/15/luigi-mangione-shares-first-public-statement-since-incarceration.html

Please consider buying my book for anyone facing incarceration, or for anyone interested in developing their spirituality. And then leave a review on Barnes and Noble! Thank you! #books #incarceration #prison #spirituality #jail #prisonreform #abolishprisons https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wellness-while-incarcerated-anonymous/1146356790?ean=9798988816133

The Prison Journalism Project trains incarcerated people to be writers so they can tell important stories from prison, and attain new skills before they re-enter society. Here's a first-person account by Vaughn Wright from State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, about what it was like to become part of the biggest crime story in the nation, when Luigi Mangione came to stay.

https://flip.it/A4RU0y

How people can help the incarcerated #firefighters:

The #LosAngeles -based Anti-Recidivism Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to ending mass #incarceration, started a fundraiser

Some of the $ will go to necessities — such as new boots, toiletries and other gear... Whatever money is left over after the blazes [will go] toward scholarships for formerly incarcerated firefighters or to individual prisoners’ commissary accounts
https://antirecidivism.org/donate/

"When Chrishona visited him one Sunday, his hands remained chained behind his back. The reason, Jerryon later admitted to his mother, was that he had tried to hang himself." —Elly Fishman for Chicago Magazine

https://longreads.com/2025/01/10/chrishona-hodgess-life-sentence/

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
William Faulkner

How Texas Jails Built Migrant Incarceration

https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-jails-migrant-incarceration/

In case you were wondering what the endgame of mass incarceration is, here is its purest form:

"No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.

Best Western, Bama Budweiser and Burger King are among the more than 500 businesses to lease incarcerated workers from one of the most violent, overcrowded and unruly prison systems in the U.S. in the past five years alone, The Associated Press found as part of a two-year investigation into prison labor. The cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 through money garnished from prisoners’ paychecks."

- https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-alabama-3b2c7e414c681ba545dc1d0ad30bfaf5