Mass Incarceration

Putting Reentry Out Of Business

May 8, 2025 Calvin John Smiley, In These Times. Strategize! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Mass Incarceration, Prison abolition, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

About a decade ago, Richard Trumka, then president of the AFL-CIO, told a crowd gathered at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles that “the theme of this event is mass employment, not mass incarceration.” A year earlier, the AFL-CIO had committed to addressing mass incarceration as a labor issue. In his speech at the jobs and reentry organization, where he was introduced by labor leader María Elena Durazo, Trumka described why: “When some people are forced to work for close to nothing, all workers’ living standards are pushed down.” Then, Trumka repeated the refrain “it’s a labor issue because,” followed by explanations about mass incarceration’s impact on families, communities, the economy and voting, among others, until finally: “because labor rights and social justice and civil rights are intertwined.”

Ruling To Return Kilmar Abrego Garcia Gives Clues About How to Fight Back

April 4, 2025 Jill Clark-Gollub, Popular Resistance. Strategize! Constitution, Deportation, El Salvador, Immigrant Rights, Mass Incarceration, Trump Administration

On Friday, April 4, a Federal District Judge ordered that Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran man who was erroneously and illegally sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, be returned home by midnight on Monday, April 7, 2025. During a hearing in the lawsuit filed to demand his return, the judge discussed with the Justice Department attorney many ways in which Abrego García’s arrest and deportation were unlawful. She also reached the resounding conclusion that the US government still has effective custody over him and can restore him “to status quo”—meaning living with his family and working legally in Maryland.

Black Prisoners Organize For Dignity In Angola

February 24, 2025 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Educate! Black History Month, Black Liberation, convict leasing, Criminal Justice and Prisons, History, Louisiana, Mass Incarceration, Racism, Slavery, United States, US prisons

This Black History Month, Peoples Dispatch is exploring the history of the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, the site of centuries of Black struggle—first against slavery, then convict leasing, and now the US prison system, which some label as slavery in the modern day. At the helm of the US’s notorious system of mass incarceration sits Louisiana State Penitentiary. Apart from being the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, this prison, nicknamed “Angola” after the former plantation site that it sits on, is an example of the conditions of modern-day slavery that the US prison system inflicts upon its disproportionately Black incarcerated population.

The Military To Prison Pipeline

January 5, 2025 Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon, Popular Resistance. Educate! Mass Incarceration, Prisons, Racial disparities, Veterans

Like old soldiers around the country, a group of former service members gathered in Crest Hill, Illinois to remember fallen comrades on Memorial Day, 2024. Several months later, The Veteran, a newspaper published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ran a photo of the event they attended. It shows a multi-generational group of men--white, Black and Latino—lined up proudly between two flags. In his dispatch to the newspaper, African-American Navy veteran Robert Maury explained why everyone in the Stateville Veterans Group was wearing government issued clothing of a non-military sort.

The Problem With Joe And Hunter

December 7, 2024 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Mass Incarceration, Presidential Pardon

President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden was inevitable and inevitably controversial. Hunter Biden is the quintessential nepotism baby, the recipient of privileges such as being appointed to the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Burisma paid him $50,000 per month for doing nothing other than existing with the last name Biden. The younger Biden was the butt of jokes for years, a cocaine addict who somehow managed to never have any interaction with the criminal justice system and who achieved nothing without an assist from his father.

Hunter Biden’s Clemency Represents White Privilege In Overdrive

December 6, 2024 Jon Jeter, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Hunter Biden, Mass Incarceration, Presidential Pardon, White Privilege

A Chicano activist in Oakland, California, Al Osorio, said he was appalled but not surprised to hear that President Joe Biden had pardoned his son Hunter Biden on federal tax and gun charges stemming from a period when he was addicted to crack cocaine . “My first thought regarding Biden was: ‘what about Marcellus Williams?’” Osorio told Black Agenda Report in an interview, recalling the African American man executed by the state of Missouri in September despite the absence of forensic evidence linking him to the murder of a St. Louis woman. “What about Leonard Peltier?” he said of the 80-year-old Native American activist who has been imprisoned since 1976 for allegedly murdering two FBI agents.

The Biden Family Of Liars

December 6, 2024 Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News. Educate! Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Mass Incarceration, Presidential Pardon

With his shocking presidential pardon of his son Hunter, announced Thanksgiving weekend, when the maximum number of Americans would be watching football games and consuming potato chips, Joe Biden goes out just as he was the whole of his tatty career as a politician — a self-serving fiddler, indifferent to democratic process, ever going against his word. Peter Baker, that inimitable (thank goodness) clerk The New York Times posts as its chief White House correspondent, tells us in Wednesday’s editions, “We don’t really know how history will remember Joe Biden. It’s too early to say, obviously.” Actually, we really know at this point. Obviously.

Blacks And Hispanics Seeking Parole Face Widening Racial Disparity

November 20, 2024 Reuven Blau, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Mass Incarceration, New York (NY), Parole, Prisons, Racial disparities, Systemic Racism

Black and Hispanic people in New York state prisons have a much higher chance to be denied parole than whites over the past three years — a divide that’s gotten worse since being highlighted in 2016, a new study shows. New York’s Parole Board released 34.79% of people of color while letting out 48.71% of white people from January through June 2024, based on a report by New York University School of Law’s Center for Race, Inequality & the Law posted online Monday. Since Gov. Kathy Hochul took office in 2021, there would be 1,338 fewer Blacks and Hispanics behind bars if they were paroled at the same rate as whites, the report shows.

Even California Moved Right With Pro-Prison Ballot Measure

November 17, 2024 Katie Rose Quandt, Truthout. Educate! Ballot Measure, California, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Mass Incarceration, Right wing politics

Amid the onslaught of dismal news on Election Day, Californians passed a “tough-on-crime” ballot initiative that will lengthen sentences for some theft and drug crimes — a policy that equity-focused advocates warn will vastly increase incarceration rates in the state. Proposition 36 — also known as the Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act — passed overwhelmingly 70-30 at the ballot box. The measure, which was funded and supported by big box stores, prosecutors and law enforcement groups, is a response to what many perceive as triple crises.

In The US, Voting Is A Privilege, Not A Right

October 23, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Educate! 2024 US Presidential elections, Civil rights movement, Disenfranchisement, Donald Trump, Elections, Jim Crow, Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration, Racism, United States, Voter Suppression, Voting Rights

As US presidential elections approach in the coming weeks, activists and organizers are ringing the alarm bells about the broad practice of voter suppression that still exists in the United States. On October 19, a group of students and activists at the historically Black institution of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia marched in protest of election measures that they compare to Jim Crow laws that enshrined racist oppression into law for decades in the US South. A 2021 law, dubbed the Election Integrity Act, has made it illegal in Georgia for anyone to hand out water to those waiting in line to vote—polling lines which can often last for several hours in the Southern heat.

Illinois’ Elimination Of Cash Bail One Year Later

October 3, 2024 Lisel Petis, Portside. Create! Cash Bail, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Illinois, Mass Incarceration

A year ago, Illinois made headlines as the first state to eliminate cash bail. Like many, I feared such a sweeping change could compromise public safety. However, the anticipated chaos never materialized — crime rates have dropped. Now, fear should no longer prevent states from taking similar actions. The Pretrial Fairness Act introduced a system that more accurately detains those with genuine risks while allowing low-risk individuals to await trial outside of jail. No cash is required. The goal was to create a system that better balances public safety, accountability and individual liberties. The result? People can no longer buy their way out of pretrial detention.

Stop The Imminent Execution Of Innocent Prisoner Marcellus Williams

September 19, 2024 People's Dispatch. Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Death Penalty, Mass Incarceration, Racism, United States

Marcellus Williams, 55 years old, is set to be executed by lethal injection in less than a week for a crime that he did not commit. Activists and supporters are fighting tooth and nail against the Missouri court system to save the life of a man who has been proven innocent by DNA evidence. In January of 2024, prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County Wesley Bell asked to vacate Marcellus Williams’ murder conviction based on “clear and convincing evidence” of Williams’ innocence. But despite this evidence, St. Louis County Judge Bruce Hilton denied Bell’s request to vacate and the state of Missouri is set to move forward with Williams’ execution on September 24.

Multiple States Are Building New Women’s Prisons; Can They Be Stopped?

July 2, 2024 Sierra Dickey, Scheer Post. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Human Rights, Mass Incarceration, Women's Rights

Tiff Harrington spent 15 years of her life under Department of Corrections (DOC) supervision in Vermont, where she gave birth to two children while incarcerated at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility—a prison with a particularly bad reputation. In 2019, Vermont DOC came under fire when Seven Days, a local independent newspaper, reported that guards at Chittenden Regional engaged in drug use and sexually abused the incarcerated women they oversaw. Public outcry only grew when an incarcerated woman named Penny Powers filed a whistleblower complaint against former Chittenden Regional “shift supervisor of the year” Daniel Zorzi, alleging he took her and another woman offsite to engage in drug use and sex.

Incarcerated Organizers Complete Eight Weeks Of Prison Shutdown

April 3, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Resist! Alabama, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Mass Incarceration, Prison abolition

On March 30, for the eighth week in a row, a group of activists gathered outside of St. Clair Correctional Facility, near Birmingham, Alabama, to show solidarity with incarcerated organizers, who have been refusing to engage in prison labor since February 6. Organizers want to sustain the shutdown, which entails a full stoppage of all labor inside the prisons that prisoners are forced to do, for at least 90 days. The organizers, led by the Free Alabama Movement, are living under the boot of the most violent state prison system in the United States—a nation know for having the largest prison population in the world and regularly employing torture and archaic methods of execution against its prisoners.

Baltimore’s New $1 Billion Jail Will Be Most Expensive State-Funded Project

March 27, 2024 Ben Conarck and Pamela Wood, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Baltimore, Budget, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Maryland, Mass Incarceration

Nearly nine years after former Gov. Larry Hogan shuttered the old Baltimore City Detention Center, a new centerpiece facility for the city’s pretrial jail population is poised to rise from its ashes. But it’s going to cost you. The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, which has run the city’s jail system for decades, is pushing ahead with ambitious plans for the Baltimore Therapeutic Treatment Center — a sort of hybrid jail, hospital and mental health and substance use treatment facility for people facing criminal charges.

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