#mass-incarceration

#mass-incarceration

In a penal system that legalises slavery, who is the real criminal? That question lies at the heart of Danny Lyon's landmark 1971 monograph, Conversations with the Dead, a masterwork of New Journalism chronicling crime and punishment in the United States. After his work in the Civil Rights Movement and with the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club , Lyon gained unprecedented access to seven penitentiaries inside the Texas Department of Corrections over 14 months in 1967-68 to create a Dostoevskyian journey into the belly of the beast.

We reject the outdated view that criminal justice is a zero-sum game that pits safety versus justice against one another. Moreover, history - and countless studies, data, and lived experiences - tells us reactive policymaking driven by politics and fear in response to a specific incident, no matter how awful, leads to poor legislation that serves neither justice nor safety.

As a young man, Seth Ferranti ran a drug-dealing operation distributing vast volumes of cannabis and LSD across college campuses in the United States. It was the 1980s and US President Ronald Reagan had proclaimed that marijuana pot, grass, whatever you want to call it is probably the most dangerous drug in the United States. I didn't believe them, says Seth Ferranti, now a documentary filmmaker and director of Tortured Mind: The Reality of Post Incarceration Syndrome.

As summer ends, masked, badgeless ICE thugs and red-state National Guard militias stalk an unnaturally quiet Washington, DC. Five years ago, the city was different. After the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, massive multiracial demonstrations filled the streets. While these protests were constant, there was one we should be remembering this week. It started downtown at the Capitol One Arena, home of the NBA's Washington Wizards and was led, bullhorn in hand, by Wizards captain John Wall.

What they're talking about here is incarcerating millions of people, not 100,000 people. Right? Not 50,000, not 40,000 something people, which is what they've got now.

California's recent Proposition 36 has challenged Democrats' progressive criminal justice reforms, emphasizing a shift towards harsher penalties for certain crimes.