Our Story — New Earth. The Third Reconstruction and the Carceral State. On Mass Incarceration, We Have Reached a Tipping Point Watch video highlights from the related event "Unlocking Communities: Ending Mass Incarceration in America.
" The Aspen Forum for Community Solutions, the Center for Community Change, the My Brother's Keeper Alliance, and the Vera Institute of Justice recently held an event called "Unlocking Communities: Ending Mass Incarceration in America" featuring in-depth conversation on the mass incarceration crisis (watch our YouTube playlist of the videos from this event). Below, My Brother's Keeper Alliance members Scott Budnick and Shawn Dove explain why now is the time to address the incarceration crisis.
The path to prison does not begin the moment a crime is committed. For boys and young men of color, the risk of incarceration exists at nearly every stage of life. Nearly 2.3 million Americans are currently in prison, and the Prison Policy Initiative reports that nearly 80 percent of them are black and Latino males -- despite making up only 15 percent of the U.S. population. Activist spends a day in Anniston City Jail - by choice. Ed Moore III stepped out into the sunshine of Saturday afternoon from the Anniston City Jail.
After spending 24 hours there, he said he was grateful for freedom. But Moore wasn't just another inmate. The civil rights activist, founder of the Justice & Civil Rights Initiative, spent the night in jail by choice as part of a "mock inmate project," to get an idea of what it's like behind bars. Working with the City of Anniston, City Manager Brian Johnson and Police Chief Shane Denham, Moore asked for permission to spend 24 hours in the city jail. Obama administration may soon announce experimental access to Pell Grants for incarcerated students.
The U.S.
Department of Education is poised to announce a limited exemption to the federal ban on prisoners receiving Pell Grants to attend college while they are incarcerated. Correctional education experts and other sources said they expect the department to issue a waiver under the experimental sites program, which allows the feds to lift certain rules that govern aid programs in the spirit of experimentation. Names Do Hurt: The Case Against Using Derogatory Language to Describe People in Prison.
Too often, news stories about people in prison or jail use dehumanizing language to describe those under government control.
California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Amy Preasmyer’s powerful article was just published in the SF Bayview.
CCWP has visited Amy for several years and supported her when she wanted to write about her recent terrible experience with Administrative Segregation at CCWF. A strategy meant to break me fuels my passion for human rights October 16, 2013. When a Cartoonist Landed in L.A. County Jail, She Drew What She Saw, Using Only a Golf Pencil - Los Angeles. In June 2014, I was arrested for violating a court order.
I bailed out on July 3. But because I had no money and an overworked public defender, I knew I’d have to serve time for my violation. That’s when my mentor, animator-director Ralph Bakshi, advised me to “document my exploits.” Jailed in the women’s division of the Los Angeles County jail system for two months, I was sent first to Century Regional Detention Facility (CRDF) in Lynwood and then to Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles for my final three weeks.
Armed with nothing more than a golf pencil and whatever paper I could get my hands on, I drew the strange world into which I’d been dropped. From Prison to NYU. The Only Man Who Can Fix Mass Incarceration Is Barack Obama. Waiting for Congress or the courts or a popular movement to fix America's prison crisis is a waste of time.
Lauren Giordano/The Atlantic Today, like any other day, there are around 2.4 million people incarcerated in America’s federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Together, the nation’s inmates would constitute the fourth biggest city in the United States, knocking Houston down a notch. Expand that grouping to everyone under correctional control, including probation and parole, and you’d have a metropolis of nearly 7 million, second only to New York. Finally, reunite the number of people that see the inside of a jail cell in a given year, and you’d have a prison city with a population as big as New York and Los Angeles combined (11.6 million). For writers in juvenile hall, sentences can be liberating - LA Times. Eminem's "The Monster" ricocheted off the cinder-block walls and worn linoleum floor at Sylmar's Juvenile Hall.
I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed Get along with the voices inside of my head You're trying to save me, stop holding your breath And you think I'm crazy, yeah, you think I'm crazy Ten teenagers, some of them awaiting trial on charges of murder, attempted rape or armed robbery, sat around a makeshift table in a hallway near the guard station, eyes closed, heads nodding to the beat.
Gonzalez.pdf. William James Association. What is the Prison Arts Project?
The major program of the William James Association is the Prison Arts Project (PAP), created through the vision and efforts of Eloise Smith. A pilot project was set up in 1977 at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, with funding provided by the San Francisco Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Eloise Smith’s vision was based simply on the value of providing all individuals with the most meaningful art experience possible; in her words, “that mysterious life-enhancing process we call the arts, a realm in which patient application and vivid imagination so often produce magic.”
Documentaries: Watch The University of Sing Sing videos including trailers, previews & clips on HBO.com. Education. California Death Penalty System Is Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Rules. LA QUINTA, Calif. — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that California’s death penalty system is so arbitrary and plagued with delay that it is unconstitutional, a decision that is expected to inspire similar arguments in death penalty appeals around the country.
The state has placed hundreds of people on death row, but has not executed a prisoner since 2006. The result, wrote Judge Cormac J. Carney of United States District Court, is a sentence that “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.” That sense of uncertainty and delay, he wrote, “violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.” Www.safestreetsarts.org/uploads/Art_on_the_Inside. Arts in Corrections. Arts in Corrections A Glowing Hope By Boston Woodard Since the eighteenth-century, prisoners of every ilk develop methods to survive in the tumultuous and violent insanity inherent throughout the history of the prison system.
It was a consuming struggle just to find a meal each day in the early days of confinement, as the authorities made little or no provision for the support of prisoners. It took more than a hundred years for society to figure out that those who meticulously manufactured the U.S. Www.justiceaction.org.au/cms/images/stories/CmpgnPDFs/artinprison130613.pdf. Historic Prison Tours. Being Poor Has Never Been A Crime In Our Country. Until Now. Arts In Corrections – Pilot Project. The WJA Prison Arts Project, in collaboration with the California Lawyers for the Arts, is undertaking a $65,000 arts-in-corrections initiative testing the benefits of arts programs for incarcerated persons. It has been launched at several state prisons with funding support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and several private foundations. With this seed funding we are coordinating a series of 8 to 12-week courses at five California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) sites across the state.
Lawrence G. Brewster, Professor of Public Administration at the University of San Francisco School of Management, is leading a formal evaluation of the demonstration project. “These art programs offer inmates an opportunity to develop discipline and work skills, while learning to express themselves in constructive ways. Www.calawyersforthearts.org/Resources/Documents/Arts-in-Corrections Update 8.29.13.pdf. Developing accredited training programmes for delivering arts in prisons. PRISON ARTS PROGRAMS – Adult Population.
The Prison Performance Network This is a networking/storytelling site for people who facilitate performance work with prison inmates. The purpose of this site is to share information about our work, so that we may learn from and support each other as practitioners, and so that we can serve as a resource for others who are interested in this work. Something Extraordinary Is Happening at Ironwood State Prison I know a good movie when I see one, but recently I had a day that was more fascinating, inspiring and compelling than the greatest of films. And every minute of it was real. Picture driving on a desolate two-lane road, past one low flat building after another, before seeing the tall steel fences and razor wire that signal your destination: a maximum security prison, blazing hot, in the middle of the desert, not far from the border between California and Arizona, an hour past the sunny vacation destination of Palm Springs.
After several checks of your identification and passing through multiple sets of sliding steel gates, you're directed down a long sidewalk with an empty yard on one side and concrete buildings on the other. It's eerily quiet, though you know 3,280 men live here in a space built for 2,200. But inside these concrete buildings, something extraordinary is happening.
The National Academies Press. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. End Mass Incarceration Now. A blog about women, prisons, the arts, and activism. Buy the book! The Bard Prison Initiative: Bringing Hope to a Broken System / News / Higher Education for Social Justice / Educational Opportunity and Scholarship. 1 April 2014. New Pittsburgh Courier. Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo cancelled his innovative plan to offer basic college education programs to state prisoners. Words Within the Walls - A Journal for Youth in Jail. Exactly Where America's Prison System Went Wrong, in One Simple Video. Faculty Focus: Lori Pompa. Search/node?keys=incarceration. Workshops look at transforming Pa. inmates. Women in Prison. New York State in Deal to Limit Solitary Confinement. Study: Nearly Half of Black Men Arrested by Age 23. The Coalition for Juvenile Justice. This World Map Shows The Enormity Of America's Prison Problem.
About 2.4 million people live behind bars in America — the highest number in the world. Rights When The Cops Pull You Over. Tim Robbins uses acting classes to help prisoners ‘create new truths for themselves’ By David FergusonMonday, September 2, 2013 14:43 EDT. Officials open Security Housing Unit at Corcoran prison to reporters. Bringing Community Collaborations Together to Support Sucessful Reentry. California Reentry Council Network. Watch The March @50 Online. L.A. County literacy initiative reaches juvenile offenders. Reforming America's Criminal Justice System. New York City Spends More Than $167,000 Per Inmate Every Year. Journal of Educational Controversy - Article: Feeding the School-to-Prison Pipeline: The Convergence of Neoliberalism, Conservativism, and Penal Populism. Restorative Justice Is on the Rise. University of San Francisco (USF) - Restorative Justice. Tim Robbins and Wayne Kramer show support for arts in prisons.
Joint Committee on the Arts: Undereducate/Overincarcerate - Can the arts help turn this around?on Assembly Access. Edited by Stephen John Hartnett, Eleanor Novek, and Jennifer K. Wood. Lyrics on Lockdown: Art and Transformation from the Inside Out. The Prison Industrial Complex. Sociation Today Fall 2006, Volume 4, Number 2. Safe Communities, Fair Sentences. Mandatory Sentences Face Growing Skepticism. Long Prison Terms Eyed as Contributing to Poverty. Harvard's Bruce Western advocates new prison, rehabilitation policies. Incarceration rate for African-Americans now six times the national average. Rd_Changing Racial Dynamics 2013.pdf.
US: A nation of inmates? - Inside Story Americas. Equal Justice Initiative. Doc/publications/inc_Trends_in_Corrections_Fact_sheet.pdf. Dangerous Worlds: Teaching Film in Prison. Prison Town, USA. Chicagopiccollective.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/introduction_to_the_prison_industrial_complex-curriculum-final.pdf. Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society.
Sally Lee: Teaching in Prison's Shadow. California Coalition for Women Prisoners. How Corporations Make Money from Prison Labor: They’re Happy to Have More Inmates. Pell Grant Fact Sheet.pdf. Prisoners in 2011. Research « Art Therapy In Prisons. INTERVIEW + VIDEO: Angela Davis. Mandatory Sentences Face Growing Skepticism. Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society. New Documentary, ‘Broken on All Sides,’ Calls Mass Incarceration of Blacks the ‘New Jim Crow’ SoundCloud. Shining our spotlight on: Auburn Correctional Facility » Correctional Association of New York: Correctional Association of New York: A Force for Progressive Change in the Criminal Justice System Since 1844. The true cost of Extreme Isolation in New York's prisons. Juvenile In Justice. Youth 4 Justice » Mission and History.
Curbprisonspending.org. Essential PIC Reading. Humanizing Justice.