Category Archive for:

Prison


Stick-up on Rikers Island

David Campbell

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It started with the phones. A few minutes before 9:30 on Saturday morning, mid-conversation with wives, children, friends, and lawyers, the lines all went dead. This was March 22nd. Visits had been suspended a week prior, ...

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“When Your Home Turns into a Prison”: Former Prisoner Reflects on Life Under Coronavirus Lockdown

Hard Crackers Editors

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Ronald Owens, aka โ€œCornbread,โ€ lives in Lynn, Massachusetts. He spent 13 years in a Massachusetts maximum security prison, where he and Noel Ignatiev met in 1996 as pen pals. They remained close friends ever since. What ...

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Angola Prisoners Say: โ€œThis is a war โ€“ and weโ€™re in itโ€

CJ LeBlanc

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CJ LeBlanc is a journalist who writes primarily about issues related to criminal justice in the Deep South and seeks opportunities to amplify marginalized voices. In this short piece, CJ LeBlanc shares with us the communiques ...

My Experience

Andrea Portillo

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Out of fear I took the advice of my lawyer and signed a plea of second-degree murder. Websterโ€™s Dictionary describes murder as โ€œthe unlawful and malicious or premeditated killing of a person.โ€ That is not me. ...

The Crucifixion of Rikers Ysland

Jarrod Shanahan

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In February of 1965 Salvador Dalรญ was invited to visit a Rikers Island prisoner art program by longtime correction commissioner Anna M. Kross. The wily reform commissioner appealed to the artistโ€™s thirst for publicity by promising ...

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This Place is Poisoning Our Loved Ones

Curtis Price

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Below is a post from the โ€œLook Out For One Anotherโ€ FB group in Huntsville, Alabama. Most of the responses gave specific information about who to contact, but a few made larger points such as the ...

Some Reflections on Prison Labor

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: A popular notion in some progressive circles holds that US prisons are a chain of sweatshops and plantations where hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people labor under excruciating conditions to generate profits for ...

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Morbid Symptoms, Part II: Attack on Rikers Island

Noel Ignatiev

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This is the second of six reviews chronicling the pseudonymous Fred S. Kreiderโ€™s Rikers Island Series, a horror franchise set on present-day Rikers Island. In the first installment we met narrator Nicholas Billings, a rookie guard ...

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Storm on Rikers Island

Morbid Symptoms, Part I: Storm on Rikers Island

Jarrod Shanahan

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โ€œI feel a sickness deep in my stomach every time the buildingโ€™s alarm goes off,โ€ confesses rookie jail guard Nicholas Billings. โ€œItโ€™s always the same feeling. I donโ€™t care what anyone says, how tough they think ...

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Google User Reviews of US Jails and Prisons

Erin Cully

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People across the US are taking to Google user reviews with grievances about the jails and prisons where they and their loved ones are held.

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