One of Chicago’s newer museums is also its most frightening. It’s the museum of Medieval Torture, located just North of the loop. It displays a wide variety of torture equipment used in the Middle Ages. For example, an upright metal cylinder large enough for a person to stand inside. The inside walls are barbed with …
What should be done with a man in his 80s or 90s who way back when they were a teenager committed a crime? On Feb. 27th 83 year old Joe Ligon was released from Pennsylvania prison. He had been incarcerated since 1953, for a total of 68 years, for involvement in a robbery …
difference between a 15-year-old stabber and 19-year-old Holocaust Guard? Read More »
Last week I attended a panel titled ‘Reentry: Ready or Not’ organized by Milwaukee’s Community Advocates Public Policy Institute, the Milwaukee Turners, and other local community partners. Wisconsin currently imprisons 23,755 people, more than twice as many as neighboring Minnesota. The focus was on ways to reduce Wisconsin’s prison population, along with how to better …
Wisconsin’s Enormous Prison Count and Mistreatment of Prisoners Read More »
Imagine being imprisoned because you can’t pay $656 that you owe. That can happen today in Mississippi, where poor people who cannot afford court ordered fines, fees, and other payments are put into restitution center prisons where they are forced to work until they pay off their debt. The Marshall Project, a non-profit that investigates …
Mississippi Restitution Centers Are an Unwelcome Throwback to slavery Read More »
Michael Bloomberg, billionaire late entrant to the presidential race, was recently found using prison labor to make campaign calls. When this was discovered by The Intercept, Bloomberg said he was unaware and immediately stopped. What happened is that Bloomberg contracted with a New Jersey based call center service called ProCom. ProCom then used women incarcerated …
The United States has 5% of the world’s population, but houses approximately 25% of the world’s prisoners. The confinement of such a vast number of citizens would raise important moral, legal, and social questions even if these people were held in conditions that are safe, provide needed treatment for addiction and other medical concerns, are …
Alabama prison Conditions Are A Human Rights Disaster Read More »
ACLU Justice Tour This weekend I attended an event called ‘The Justice tour’ sponsored by the ACLU of Wisconsin. There were a number of informative panels, including one which focused on mass incarceration. The statistics regarding incarceration, and how Wisconsin evidently has the highest percentage of incarcerated black men in the nation, are staggering. …
The Importance of Restoring Voting Rights to Felons Read More »
A recently filed lawsuit has brought to light allegations that visitors to Rikers Island prison in New York are subjected to frightening, invasive, demeaning, and against the rules searches. A number of women visiting male relatives at the prison claim that before being given access to the prison they were forced to strip naked, have …
Visitor Strip-Searches at Rikers Island Show How Vulnerable Inmates Are to Abuse Read More »
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