Search Results for: Prison

The Fixer

Longreads Pick

Meet Marie Henein, the high-profile female defense attorney fighting to keep Jian Ghomeshi out of prison.

Source: Toronto Life
Published: Oct 20, 2015
Length: 32 minutes (8,040 words)

Meet the Honey Badgers: The Women For Men’s Rights

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” wrote Mark Twain, and he’s not wrong. Case in point: the coterie of outspoken women who believe men’s rights are being trampled. They call themselves the Honey Badger Brigade, and they have podcasts, conventions and vlogs. At Marie Claire, Jen Ortiz interviews these rabid defenders of men and subtly refutes their every point in her investigation:

Just over a year ago, some of these women assembled in a hall at the Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, as part of an inaugural international conference on human rights. (They were supposed to meet at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Downtown Detroit, but plans changed last-minute because of reported threats by critics.) It was the first-annual International Conference on Men’s Issues. “It was really fantastic for all of us to be in the same room together,” says Janet Bloomfield, 36, one of the most prominent female faces of the men’s rights movement. “The idea that the movement is comprised of a lot of angry white men who can’t get laid is just simply not true—there were so many women!”

Bloomfield, a former bank productivity analyst, juggles being a stay-at-home mom of three “deep in the woods in Northern Ontario” with her work as a writer and unofficial MRA spokesperson. She grew up on a farm, in a family organized by traditional gender roles, where she “could never buy that this was oppression or bad.” A difficult relationship with her mother showed her that women are human—in other words, a woman has the capability to be just as terrible (or presumably, as not-terrible) as a man. Three years ago, she began her blog as a sort of inside joke with a close friend, but it quickly landed her in the manosphere with her take-no-prisoners style of writing about gender and culture. See: “The moment I knew feminism was a crock of shit.”

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Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels

Longreads Pick

Barrett Brown reviews books from inside a federal prison.

Source: The Intercept
Published: Oct 7, 2015
Length: 10 minutes (2,554 words)

Valerie Bozeman Is Pardoned by Obama as America Wrestles With Fallout From the War on Drugs

Longreads Pick

Caught up in a cycle of drug use and abuse when she was sentenced to life in prison, Valerie Bozeman was no kingpin; she was just a woman struggling with addiction, dealing to further her own habit. President Obama commuted Valerie’s sentence in May, and she was free to go after serving twenty-three years. Since then, she has been struggling to adjust to life on the outside, and to understand the no-mercy laws that put her in prison in the first place.

Published: Sep 22, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,660 words)

A Murder in Hawaii: The Two Trials of Maryann Acker

In 1982, mere weeks before leaving Hawaii, author Linda Spalding had been summoned to serve as a juror on the murder trial of Maryann Acker. She ran five minutes late on the day the jury convened to reach a verdict; the judge promptly dismissed her and an alternate took her spot. Acker was found guilty and has spent the next 30 years in prison.

In this piece from Brick Magazine, Spalding reflects on memory, her own quixotic quest to help reverse Maryann’s conviction, and the outsized effect complete strangers can have on each other’s life.

A few months later, I spent three afternoons with Maryann behind the razor wire and chain-link fence at the California Institution for Women,where she had spent twenty-two years of her life. Because of the murder conviction in Hawaii, the California parole board considered her a serial killer, and with a life sentence they could hold her indefinitely. During those first visits I told her she had seemed frozen as she sat in our courtroom all those years before, never shaking her head or wiping her eyes. Never shouting. Never bursting into tears or insisting on her innocence. Even so, I had identified with her then, and now I watched her closely, trying to decide if my belief in her innocence had been justified.

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High Desert Suicide

Longreads Pick

Was a guard at one of the country’s most dangerous prisons hazed to death by his fellow correctional officers?

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Aug 31, 2015
Length: 25 minutes (6,446 words)

The Wandering Years

Lawrence Ferlinghetti | The American Scholar | Summer 2015 | 23 minutes (4,685 words)

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a series of travel journal entries adapted from poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s forthcoming book, Writing Across the LandscapeIt first appeared in The American Scholar’s Summer 2015 issue (subscribe here!).

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I was part of that Greatest Generation that came of age at the beginning of the Second World War. As I worked in San Francisco, the days and years fell away into the great maw of time. America went through a sea change after that. San Francisco, which had been a small provincial capital, grew up. So did I, and I started voyaging. I was usually traveling to some literary or political event or tracking down some author whose undiscovered masterpiece I could publish at City Lights Books. I didn’t keep journals consistently, so some literary capers went unrecorded, such as when I visited Paul Bowles in Tangier to pry from him his Moroccan tales in A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. This was agreed to, and then we sat dully in his high-rise apartment near the American Embassy. And when Jane Bowles suggested we turn-on, Paul said he didn’t have any hash. I was clean-shaven in a white suit, and I imagine he thought I was a narc. Paranoia, the doper’s constant companion! I wrote these peripatetic pages for myself, never thinking to publish them. It is as if much of my life were a continuation of my youthful Wanderjahr, my walk-about in the world. Rereading them now, I see a wandering figure in momentous times. …The war ends, decades whir by, there is a rumble in the wings, the scene darkens, and Camelot lost! Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Liz West

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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A Commercial Surrogacy Gone Wrong in Thailand

It seems as if everyone is a victim in this story: The commissioning parents, the surrogate mother and the baby, too. Maneenuchanert disagrees. “I don’t feel sad for them,” she says. “Patidta is the only victim here, because they don’t allow her to see the baby. They see the baby as a product that comes from the supermarket. They’re only sad because their product has been damaged. And now they’re trying to intimidate her, tell her she’ll end up in prison if she doesn’t honor her contract.”

Bud Lake and Manuel Santos deny all of this. They’re getting ready to fight for Carmen the only place they can—in a Thai court. They hope to show that they’re better parents to Carmen than Kusongsaang would be, more financially and emotionally stable. Lake gives the example of a post on Kusongsaang’s Facebook page where she’s cradling a pistol. He says he’s been encouraged by the meetings he’s held with Thai Social Services who seem sympathetic. Still, Lake says all the lawyers they’ve talked to say their chances of winning in a Thai court are less than ten percent.

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And the thing that gets lost here—because of the Baby Gammy case and that of the Japanese Johnny Appleseed too—is that commercial surrogacy in Thailand has worked for many people, people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to have children or afford to hire a surrogate. And it has worked for many surrogates too. Better regulation here—any regulation here—might have helped prevent both the Baby Gammy case and that of the Japanese Johnny Appleseed. But instead of regulation there’s now prohibition.

—from Michael Sullivan’s recent story “Outside the Womb,” part of the podcast series “Life of the Law.” Sullivan tells the nuanced tale of a gay couple whose surrogate mother reneged on her contract in Thailand, where the military-led government banned commercial surrogacy for international couples earlier this year. The Atlantic’s “The Hidden Costs of International Surrogacy,” by Darlena Cunha, dug into the industry last year.

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The Missing History of Ravensbrück, The Nazi Concentration Camp for Women

Longreads Pick

The story of the Nazis’ only concentration camp for women has long been obscured—partly by chance, but also by historians’ apathy towards women’s history. Sarah Helm writes about the camp, where the “cream of Europe’s women” were interned alongside its prostitutes, and members of the French resistance perished alongside Red Army prisoners of war.

Author: Sarah Helm
Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 14, 2015
Length: 52 minutes (13,071 words)