Prisons

Victory For Palestinian Hunger Striker After 113 Days Without Food

November 14, 2021 Tamara Nassar, The Electronic Intifada. Resist! Hunger Strike, Israeli Apartheid, Palestinian rights, Prisons

Israel agreed on Thursday to release a hunger-striking prisoner in four months after lengthy negotiations. Miqdad Qawasmeh suspended his hunger strike on Thursday after refusing food for 113 days to protest his detention without charge or trial after Israel agreed to release him in February 2022. His victory came after lengthy and arduous negotiations between the leadership of the Hamas prisoners’ group and Israeli authorities. The 24-year-old was the youngest of six Palestinian men who have been refusing food for weeks and months in protest of Israel’s detention of them without charge or trial. Five others are still fighting for their freedom on empty stomachs.

Stand With Palestinian Prisoners’ Uprising

September 9, 2021 Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Struggle La Lucha. Resist! Israel, Palestine, Prisons, Resistance

In Megiddo prison, Ramon prison, and the Negev desert prison, Palestinian political prisoners burned their rooms in resistance to the prison administration’s attempt to transfer the prisoners affiliated with Islamic Jihad. The Handala Center for Prisoners and Former Prisoners in occupied Palestine reported that 7 rooms in Megiddo prison, 4 rooms in the Negev prison and 4 rooms in sections 4 and 5 of Ramon prison have been burned, and that the prisoners’ movement leadership has affirmed that any section that is invaded to transfer detainees will be met with fire. Palestinians throughout occupied Palestine are rallying in support of the six self-liberated prisoners, whose “Freedom Tunnel,” dug through lengthy months of perseverance with only kitchen utensils for tools, has become a symbol of hope for freedom as well as an example that the technological and military might of the Israeli colonial power has been unable to suppress Palestinian resistance.

Scheer Intelligence: Prisons Enable America’s Obscene Wealth

August 13, 2021 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. Educate! Podcast, Prison Labor, Prisons, Worker Rights

The story of Marshall “Eddie” Conway, a military veteran and former Black Panther who was imprisoned for 43 years for a crime he didn’t commit, is one that gets to the heart of systemic racism in the United States. Despite grueling conditions, in prison Conway pursued three college degrees, and was considered an “exemplary” prisoner for starting a prison literacy program and organizing the prison library. On the other hand, his efforts to organize a union among his fellow convict laborers was crushed by the authorities. After being released in 2014 following an appellate court judgment that his jury had been given improper instructions, Conway has become executive producer of The Real News Network (TRNN), a progressive media organization based in Baltimore, MD, with his own show, “Rattling the Bars” that focuses on the many social justice issues that intersect with mass incarceration in the U.S.

Palestinians Calling For International Support For Those Arrested In May

August 11, 2021 Tom Anderson, The Canary. Resist! Israel, Palestine, Prisons, Solidarity

Marshood explained that the arrests were not confined to those demonstrating, but also to those who were aiming to document the repression: Mass waves of arrests were done, either in protests or even to people who were just passing by, people were arrested from their cars. People were arrested from their homes. Even those who were documenting arrests got arrested.[These arrests] included very brutal and violent physical and mental assaults on the detainees. Whether inside the police cars or inside the police station. A report released in June by Israeli human rights organisation Adalah documented the use of torture against Palestinian-Israelis who were arrested after the uprising.

Organizers Calling To Close Loophole That Enables Prison Slavery

July 12, 2021 Tamar Sarai Davis, Port Side Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Law, Prisons, Worker Rights

While the 13th Amendment abolished chattel slavery, an often ignored clause still allows for slavery and involuntary servitude as “punishment for a crime.” This “slavery clause” is now the target of #EndTheException, a new campaign launched this year on Juneteenth weekend. #EndTheException is pushing for the passage of the Abolition Amendment, a joint resolution cosponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley and Rep. Nikema Williams, which would strike the slavery clause from the 13th Amendment making it so that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude may be imposed as a punishment for a crime.” On Saturday, June 19, as communities across the country celebrated Juneteenth—a long celebrated holiday by Black Americans, particularly Black Texans—Merkley and Williams joined advocates from groups including WorthRises, LatinoJustice PRLDF, JustLeadershipUSA, and the Anti-Recidivism Coalition for an online discussion about the #EndTheException campaign and to explain how the promise of freedom has yet to be unfulfilled.

Thirteen Facts About American Prisons That Will Blow Your Mind

May 12, 2021 Lee Camp, ScheerPost.com. Educate! Capitalism, Mass Incarceration, Prisons, Racism

In a few minutes time you’ll want to abolish prisons. If you’re not ready for that intellectual and emotional transformation, then please stop reading now. Or put on your thunder shirt. If you grew up in the United States, like I did, then you probably think prisons are a fact of life. We just go through our day-to-day assuming that a huge chunk our population must be hardened criminals (which is very different from hard criminals: scalawags involved in burgling while aroused) and that without prisons these delinquents would be running everywhere, breaking things, kicking squirrels in the face, and urinating in your car window while you’re at a stoplight. We just assume prisons have been around forever — as if back in caveman times they had one of the caves walled off with sticks and vines where they kept Blartho because he was a real a-hole.

Our Biggest Jails Are Frontline Environmental Justice Communities

May 9, 2021 Adam Mahoney, Grist. Educate! Environmental Justice, health, pollution, Prisons

For more than half a century, 441 Bauchet Street has been the address where Los Angeles’ most stark social and environmental inequalities converge. It’s the location of L.A.’s Men’s Central Jail, the largest facility in the most populated county jail system in the country. On any given day, about 5,000 people are incarcerated there. A block south from the jail is the 101 freeway, one of the most traveled highways in America, which generates dangerous levels of air pollution linked to a slew of birth defects. A block east is the L.A. River, home to at least 20 different pollutants, from feces to oil, at levels that violate federal standards. Another 100 yards east is the SP Railyard and Union Pacific Transportation Center, which operate at all hours, receiving big rig diesel trucks that spew an estimated 40 tons of particulate matter into the air annually.

Whatever Happened To Americans’ Moral Compasss

May 1, 2021 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. Educate! Anti-war Movement, Prisons, Vietnam War, Wars and Militarism

The Vietnam War is one of many heinous stains on American history that to this day often is told through a revisionist lens or outright ignored. Yet the truth remains beneath the layers of whitewashing that the U.S. government sent thousands of Americans to slaughter and be slaughtered over a conflict that had everything to do with Cold War ideologies and nothing to do with justice or freedom. The death tolls are still shocking to read: it is estimated that 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed during the war, along with 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters and 58,220 American soldiers. The conflict also inspired an anti-war movement described as “one of the largest and most successful youth-led resistance movements in American history” in the 2020 film “The Boys Who Said NO!”

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

March 30, 2021 Alexi Jones and Wendy Sawyer, Prison Policy Initiative. Educate! COVID-19, health, Mass Incarceration, Prisons

This month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released two reports with updates on city and county jail populations nationwide: Jail Inmates in 2019 and Impact of COVID-19 on the Local Jail Population, January-June 2020. After a year of upheaval due to the pandemic, the first report is already out-of-date and mainly useful as a historical document. The second report, however, answers some important questions about the decisions local officials made when the high stakes of jail incarceration – for individual and public health – were put into stark relief by the pandemic. Their decisions, and the resulting jail population changes in the first half of 2020, hold important lessons for ongoing and future decarceration efforts; here we outline some of those lessons – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Lessons From Mariame Kaba’s “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us”

March 2, 2021 Micah Herskind, Medium. Educate! Book Review, Prison abolition, Prison Industrial Complex, Prisons

We can and must collectively build a world without policing, prisons, surveillance, punishment, and capitalism––a world in which all are equipped with the tools to prevent and transform harm, one in which everyone has what they need to thrive in community with others. This is the through line of Mariame Kaba’s powerful new book, an expansive and instructive collection of essays and interviews drawn from Kaba’s decades of work building toward abolition — work that has focused particularly on the experiences of Black women and girls and criminalized survivors of sexual violence. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice is seamlessly accessible yet deeply demanding.

On Contact: The Power Of Classics

February 21, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. Resistance Report Classic literature, Education, incarceration, Prisons

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses with Emily Allen-Hornblower and Marquis McCray the power of the classics, such as Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, to elucidate mass incarceration. Emily Allen-Hornblower is a professor of Classics at Rutgers University and is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation grant to foster dialogues about the classics with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men and women. Marquis McCray is a social justice advocate. He spent 28 years in prison, during which time he studied the classics through the prison college program offered by Rutgers University.

Demand Mass Clemency On ‘National Freedom Day’

February 1, 2021 Antistasis. Resist! COVID-19, health, Prisoners, Prisons

As supporters of the #CagingCOVID campaign, the Antistasis Project is calling for decentralized actions on February 1st across the so-called United States, and internationally, in support of mass clemency for people held in jails, prisons and detention centers. Reports updated as of Jan. 19, show at least 355,957 prisoners have gotten the virus, and more than 2,232 died as a result of it. . The pandemic has resulted in prisons and jails abusing isolation more than ever before. Social distance is necessary but solitary confinement is torture. Crowded quarters, a lack of PPE, inadequate medical care, an aging population, and unsanitary conditions have contributed to an infection rate 5.5 times higher than the already ballooned average in the U.S.

Hunger Strikes At Three New Jersey Prisons

January 9, 2021 Sara Flounders, Workers.org. Resist! Hunger Strike, ICE, Prisoner rights, Prisons

The filthy conditions, indefinite incarceration and escalating COVID infections have touched off desperate hunger strikes at three New Jersey county jails. Each jail operates as a prison-for-profit, renting space at $120 a day for ICE to jail out-of-state migrant detainees. The N.J. counties use the contracts to generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue annually. Immigrant detention has become a moneymaking “cash cow” raising more than $87 million in revenue. There are four immigration detention facilities in New Jersey — Bergen, Essex, and Hudson County jails, and the Elizabeth Detention Center, run by CoreCivic, the private prison-for-profit company.

Prisons And Jails Are COVID-19 Super-Spreaders

January 1, 2021 Marc Norton, Popular Resistance. Create! California, COVID-19, Pandemic, Prisons

One in five prisoners in the U.S. has been reported to have had COVID-19. That’s 20% of people behind bars. And that is likely a “vast undercount,” according to Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex. If compassion for prisoners does not move policy makers or the general public, then eyes should turn to a pair of recent studies, one by the Prison Policy Initiative and the other by the Marshall Project, focused on prisons and jails in the U.S. According to data in these two reports: Prisons and jails are “super-spreaders” of the virus, not only among prisoners, but also among people in the communities where prisons and jails are located.

Why A 58-day vigil Is Going On Outside The Governor’s House

November 18, 2020 Sophie Kasakove, The News and Observer. Resist! COVID-19, North Carolina, Prisoner rights, Prisons

Demonstrators gathered outside the Executive Mansion on Sunday to demand that Gov. Roy Cooper use his powers of pardon and clemency to protect people who are incarcerated during the pandemic. Members of Decarcerate Now NC, a coalition of organizations which say they’re working to end to mass incarceration, have been holding daily vigils outside the governor’s mansion since Election Day and plan to continue through Jan. 1, when Cooper begins his second term. That’s a total of 58 days. “We stand vigil to bring attention to your Administration’s ongoing failure to prioritize and appropriately protect Black lives — indeed, any lives incarcerated in state prisons — from Covid-19.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

Daily movement news and resources