Recently we had a chance to talk with Jasmine from Southern Solidarity, a mutual aid collective distributing food and supplies to the unhoused people of New Orleans. The COVID-19 death rate in the crescent city is higher per capita than in any other area in the entire nation. New Orleans politicians and non-profits have done […]
Stick-up on Rikers Island
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, so the phones had become our only real link to the outside world. Of course, the underlying frustration had […]
“When Your Home Turns into a Prison”: Former Prisoner Reflects on Life Under Coronavirus Lockdown
Ronald Owens, aka “Cornbread,” 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 has life been like for you during this time? I used to run to Connecticut to assist Noel. I […]
Silver Lining Time
I just got off the phone with one of my daughters. She’s a math teacher in a public middle school here in New York and has to try to teach her 100 plus sixth and eighth graders “remotely”—mostly by way of links through electronic devices. Her husband is in the same boat. They’re both trying […]
Crisis on top of crisis in Kensington
During this COVID-19 crisis, probably many of us have had moments where we have thought, “Oh, shit, what’s going to happen when coronavirus spreads to (fill in the blank)? We have worried about those who fill the manifold jails and prisons of this land, and we’ve already seen those horrible potentialities begin to unfold. We’re […]
The Death President
Four presidents of the United States have been assassinated: Abraham Lincoln (1864), James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy (1963). An additional fourteen presidents are considered to have been the targets of assassination attempts. Keep in mind that there have only been 45 presidents. (On another occasion, when things are perhaps a bit less […]