Many issues that are primary drivers of mass incarceration cannot be remedied through government solutions alone. Issues such as broken families and mental health, both forever altered by over criminalization, cannot be simply be repaired through legislation. Civil Society has the unique capability to address certain social issues that government cannot, or to address them more effectively than government can. This section also addresses issues in which over-policing attempts to fix issues that should be handled through the community.
“However important a role forgiveness played in the jury’s decision to spare Guyger decades behind bars, according to interviews with some of the jurors an even greater factor was Guyger’s expression of remorse during her trial testimony: “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I never wanted to take an innocent person’s life...I wish he was the one with the gun that killed me.”“
Gotham Gazette
October 22, 2019
Read More“Prisons have been one of the key settings for movies ever since the earliest days of cinema. Among the first prison films is Edwin Porter’s 1901 short film Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison. Its primitive structure emphasizes the spectacular nature of many prison films: starting with two panoramic views of the exterior of Auburn Prison, the camera then moves to the interior, closer to the prisoners, guards, and narrative action. “
The Brooklyn Rail
June 2, 2019
Read More“If criminal justice officials want to find ways to send fewer people to jail and prison, and to ultimately have fewer people incarcerated, then they might well consider removing the term from all aspects of the criminal justice system. The names of courtrooms, prosecutorial units, training protocols and beyond should not presuppose that everyone who touches the system will be sent to jail or prison. Words matter. It is time we stop ‘alternatives to incarceration’ and start’“responsive sentencing’.“
Next City
May 31, 2019
Read More“But Florida has no monopoly on strange events, drug addiction, or mental illness, the lifeblood of the form. What it does have is strong public records laws that make obtaining mugshots and arrest reports easier than in many other states (including California and New York, which aren’t known for their lack of eccentricity, either).“
Columbia Journalism Review
May 30, 2019
Read More“Bianca Tylek, the founder of Worth Rises, an advocacy group that tracks commercial interests in corrections, has catalogued 3,100 companies with a financial stake in mass incarceration. Her findings were released last April in a Corrections Accountability Project report and include not only the well-known, publicly traded private-prison contractors but also divisions within companies with household names like Amazon, General Electric, and Stanley Black & Decker.“
The Nation
April 30, 2019
Read More“Here is the strangest part of both the Charles predicament and the Florida mess: If people simply chose to treat the formerly incarcerated by the letter of the law, and like fellow citizens, we could avoid all of this. “
Rolling Stone
March 21, 2019
Read More“Ensuring some amount of punishment was extremely important to our participants, but when confronted with the rising price tag of those moral convictions, people are forced to think about how limited dollars are best spent, and under these conditions most of them ultimately tempered their sentencing recommendations“
Georgia State University
January 22, 2019
Read More“But six NYPD officers who reviewed the messages told The Appeal that such language is typical of the new, less explicit methods supervisors use to enforce an unofficial quota system today. “
The Appeal
December 12, 2018
Read More“That was the beginning of what became Escape at Dannemora, the Stiller-directed series starring Benicio Del Toro and Paul Dano as the Clinton convicts. It debuts November 18 on Showtime. Jensen is an actor in the series, as well as a consultant and technical adviser, working on everything from props to wardrobe to tattoos to hair and makeup. While films like The Shawshank Redemption and shows like Oz were fiction, Escape at Dannemora is based on actual events — requiring Jensen’s touch for realism. Jensen cast ex-cons and wrote scenes based off memories of real things that happened in Clinton.“
Ozy
November 2, 2018
Read More“In 2005, the World Health Organization dubbed Glasgow the “murder capital of Europe.” There had been 83 homicides the previous year in the Glasgow region, where gangs were known for their booze-and-blades culture. Exasperated police in Glasgow decided to rethink strategy. They set up a violence reduction unit (VRU) guided by the philosophy that violence is like a public health issue: Violent behavior spreads from person to person. To contain it, you need to think in terms of transmission and risk, symptoms and causes.“
Washington Post
October 27, 2018
Read More“Since Steven Pacheco returned to college three years ago, he has landed research and business fellowships, gotten elected student council president, and will join global leaders abroad to discuss human rights. That’s the kind of drive two drug-related arrests and a year behind bars has given him.“
The Today Show
October 19, 2018
Read More“Quinn has changed Cleveland.com’s policy of automatically using mugshots (‘the worst photos people will ever take’) with minor crime stories. It no longer names perpetrators of minor crimes in its stories. (If you’ve been listening to the current season of Serial, you know the criminal justice system in Cleveland is far from a perfectly fair operation.) “
Nieman Lab
October 18, 2018
Read More“We must seriously consider whether society would benefit by letting reformed offenders re-enter their community, and whether it’s economical and humane to punish solely for the sake of retribution. When I hear of all the gun violence on Chicago’s South Side, for instance, I can’t help wondering what would happen if Illinois’s many reformed old-timers, who hail from those neighborhoods, were granted parole with a mission of working to reduce the violence.“
New York Times
October 6, 2018
Read More“At first, his pencil-on-paper portraits of fellow prisoners were meant to be gifts they could give to their parents, wives and children. Eventually, Loughney realized that lining hundreds of them up on a wall would make for a dramatic comment on politics and policy.“
The Marshall Project
October 4, 2018
Read More“Becker also addressed police shootings in his newsletter. If his child were shot by police, he wrote, ‘rather than blaming the cop, I’d be blaming myself and endlessly soul searching to figure out how I failed as a parent and why my kid grew up to be a punk.’ He added, ‘Based on the evidence of what I see on television, it often times appears to me that justice was delivered to the dead punk’.“
The Appeal
September 14, 2018
Read More“The culture of the parole system is to “trail, nail and jail” people. That is devastating for people who are trying to rebuild their lives and for their families, who find themselves that much further behind the eight ball. The culture and practices of parole need to change drastically. “
Amsterdam News
September 13, 2018
Read More“We would be enraged and filing class action malpractice suits if the medical community operated hospital emergency departments like we administer criminal justice. Imagine walking into an emergency room where everyone got the same, uninformed diagnosis, and in turn the same treatment. A reasonable person would expert poor outcomes from such policies. That is precisely what we get in the criminal justice system, with tremendous social and financial cost.“
Psychology Today
September 11, 2018
Read More"What would justice look like if we recognized that violence is contextual often attaching to conditions of poverty and that victimization haunts those who have hurt other people? The anger that drips from our harshest sanctions — the death penalty, life without parole and lengthy enhancements for third-strike felonies — might be softened by mercy and compassion"
USA Today
August 9, 2018
Read More"The practice of abolitionism, therefore, is about a lot more than the bars themselves. It’s about addressing community tensions, understanding why people turn to the police, and trying to break the self-perpetuating cycle of violence and imprisonment."
The Nation
July 31, 2018
Read More"'Serving time' is a misleading expression, because it suggests that a person is only serving time when confined behind the walls of a prison. The harsh reality is that people continue to 'serve time' by being denied food benefits, professional licenses and housing, as well as being subjected daily to the social stigma attached to a criminal conviction."
Charleston Gazette-Mail
July 15, 2018
Read More