Tag: incarceration

“I got angry, my mother cried, the addicts got high. That became a holiday theme for years to come.”

“It’s been more than a year that we haven’t been able to see him…We’re getting old. We don’t know how much time we have left.

“She continued to write me, though she presumably risked retribution: more time in solitary, more nutraloaf, additional restrictions.”

“Sing Sing was going into quarantine. Our movement was limited. No gym. Hospital and commissary runs limited to groups of ten. Staggered seating in the mess hall.”

By bringing new dimensions to an unjust process, a well-told story has the power to impact some of our most flawed systems.

Most people know prisoners can marry. Few remember the co-ed prison, the impromptu courthouse wedding and the Supreme Court ruling that allows them to do so.

How and when did prisons become one of the New York’s major providers of mental health care — and can we actually call it “care”?

When Anthony Ray Hinton was sentenced to death for two murders he didn’t commit, he used his time to create a book club for death row inmates.

When 3M, the Post-It Note manufacturer, began making electronic ankle monitors for corrections, it challenged the company’s long-heald philosophy about design and innovation.

On journeys to Rikers Island in New York City and Robben Island in South Africa, Roohi Choudhry examines issues of incarceration and racism, and envisions a day when the convicted are no longer exiled to penal colonies.

At Mother Jones, Julia Lurie reports on a rising trend: death by opioid withdrawal in jail. Read about how addict shame and silence, jail short-staffing, scant medical equipment, and a general apathy toward inmates make a deadly combination.

In minimum security, the cook-ups took place on empty top bunk beds. Mattresses were removed, and four or five prisoners would gather around the makeshift table with beef sticks, cheese sticks, squeeze cheese, turkey sticks, dried beans, rice, bags of chips, pickles, jalapenos, packs of tuna, and anything else worth wrapping up in a tortilla. […]

Three of these pieces look at what mealtime is like on the inside, from an examination of chow hall food to stories of inmates’ ad-hoc cell-made meals to an in-depth look at a commissary food that’s both dietary supplement and currency for thousands of inmates. A fourth adds a different dimension, revealing how some of the foods on our own tables are the product of prison labor.

“You have to carry your truth into reality.”