While relief for “non-violent” offenders remains a staple of talking points and campaign platforms, several candidates are also beginning to wrestle publicly with the question of what to do about [...]
This past week organizers, activists, students, professors, reformists and abolitionists from across the spectrum convened at the University of Mississippi’s Oxford campus to discuss the status [...]
In La Casa Azul, “The Blue House” in East Point, Atlanta, organizers with the Racial Justice Action Center meet in what they call “the war room;" a room where they discuss political strategy, [...]
Oklahoma voters' approval of a referendum in 2016 allowed for nearly 500 inmates to walk free on Monday from the state's massive prison system—the largest single-day commutation in U.S. history. [...]
By Yolanda Huang, Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. -
Prisoners inside Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, CA are staging a one-day hunger strike and work stoppage to protest widespread institutional neglect and abuse, including unsanitary living conditions, [...]
The Close the Workhouse campaign aims to attack mass incarceration, without legitimizing or justifying the continued caging of people as punishment. We call for the closure of the Medium Security [...]
The United States locks up more of its people than any other nation in the world. A whopping 2.2 million people are living behind bars in this country on any given day. Our national incarceration [...]
The most popular statistic regarding the United States’ prison system is that there are 2.5 million people incarcerated. However, this figure significantly under-represents the number of people [...]
Kimberly King woke up at 5 a.m. on a February morning in 1997 to her phone ringing. Her mother was on the other end, calling to tell her that her brother, Damani Carter, had been shot in the head [...]
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has ignited a firestorm of criticism, from both the left and the right as well as the mainstream media, for calling US immigrant detention centers [...]
By Emily Nagisa Keehn and Dana Walters, Theconversation.com -
In a country with mass incarceration, horrific prison conditions and a penal system suffused with racism, some American prison reform activists wistfully look to Scandinavian [...]
My fellow college graduates: Integrity is not an inherited trait. It is not conferred by privilege or status or wealth. It cannot be bequeathed by elite schools or institutions. It is not a [...]
Prison reform is now in vogue, but police power remains as brutal as ever. Policing in the US continues to include the power to cage as well as the power to kill — a reality that is spectacularly [...]
This summer we witnessed a prisoner-led struggle for justice on a scale never seen before. Catalyzed by a massacre at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina that took the lives of at [...]
By Ruth Delaney, Ram Subramanian, Alison Shames, and Nicholas Turner, Vera.org -
This document—unlike anything we have ever produced at the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera)—is about the possibility of radical change. It asserts a dramatic reconsideration of the most severe [...]
