Virginia becomes first southern state to abolish the death penalty. Become a powerful force for change Virginia became the first southern state to abolish the death penalty.
It was the “moral thing to do” said Governor Ralph Northam. The democratic lawmaker signed the bill into law making it the twenty-third state in the U.S. to abolish the practice. Life in the Gulag: A Harrowing Account of Stalin’s Prison Camps. Vera Golubeva spent more than six years in one of Joseph Stalin’s gulag camps.
Parole Is a Mass-Supervision Crisis. On a sunny November morning in 2018, Kelly Savage rode in a van to the public parking lot of the Central California Women’s Facility, the state prison from which she had just been released.
She was clutching her possessions—pictures of her son and daughter, letters from family and friends, $200, and the various knickknacks she had acquired during 23 years of imprisonment. Christy Harper, Savage’s pro bono attorney, and Colby Lenz, a friend and an advocate for the rights of women in prison, had been waiting for her for several hours in the Central Valley sun. Jail where ‘Whitey’ Bulger was killed has little accounting for deaths. Nine years later, James “Whitey” Bulger, who was 89 and in a wheelchair, was transferred to Hazelton, where he was beaten to death in his cell by fellow inmates under remarkably similar circumstances.
Just like Little, Bulger was transferred to Hazelton from another prison and placed in general population with inmates who had clear motive to do him harm. Just like Little, he was attacked the morning after he arrived. Get Metro Headlines in your inboxThe 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Now one year later, authorities have not brought criminal charges or explained why the notorious South Boston gangster and longtime FBI informant was put within reach of organized crime figures from Massachusetts — a move one former Bulger lawyer equated to a death sentence. Nearly five years later, Crawford said she still has no idea who killed her son or why.
Leaked videos show Florida prison in all its squalor, violence. Scott Whitney, inmate No.
U21924, filmed a documentary on the Florida prison system and nobody knew. At least the guards didn’t. Over a period of years, the convicted drug trafficker used specially rigged, almost cartoonishly oversize eyeglasses fitted with hidden cameras and a hollowed-out Bible with a lens peeking through the O in HOLY to capture the gritty, ugly, violent world inside Martin Correctional Institution, one of Florida’s more notoriously dangerous prisons.
The video was smuggled out of the prison and given to the Miami Herald. Untitled. — from ColorLines There are nearly 100,000 people being held in solitary confinement today in America’s prisons.
They are locked up in cramped, often windowless cells for nearly 24 hours a day. They eat alone. They exercise alone in small fenced-in areas known as cages or dog runs. Can we reduce the US prison population by half? Over five years ago, a colleague and I began a conversation that eventually led to the development of the Smart Decarceration Initiative.
The aim of this initiative is to advance policy and practice innovations in order to substantially reduce incarceration rates, while simultaneously addressing racial and behavioral health disparities in the criminal justice system and maximizing public safety and well-being. What is meant by “substantially” reducing incarceration rates is a reduction by about a million people over the next 10-20 years, which would essentially cut the US incarcerated population in half. This is a very ambitious goal. What motivated this goal was not merely naïve optimism, but rather our accounting of growing evidence that the era of mass incarceration might be coming to an end, or at least hovering at a tipping point. The emerging era of decarceration is facing a formidable political challenge. Archaeologists Finally Know What Happened at This Brutal Reform School.
Mental health care for prisoners could prevent rearrest, but prisons aren’t designed for rehabilitation. Mental health conditions are more common among prisoners than in the general population.
Estimates suggest that as many as 26 percent of state and federal prisoners suffer from at least one mental illness, compared with nine percent or less in the general population. And prisoners with untreated mental illness are more likely to be arrested again after they are released. But prisoners’ access to health care, including mental health care, varies from prison to prison. America's Horrifying Mass-Incarceration System, In 1 Chart. Death By Lethal Injection: A Reading Guide. The stunningly simple idea that could change solitary confinement as we know it. An inmate at the Washington Corrections Center, in Shelton, Wash. in August watches a video of an underwater reef scene while seated in the facility’s “Blue Room.”
The room was based on an Oregon project. After 2 Killers Fled, New York Prisoners Say, Beatings Were Next. Night had fallen at the Clinton Correctional Facility in far northern New York when the prison guards came for Patrick Alexander.
They handcuffed him and took him into a broom closet for questioning. Then, Mr. Alexander said in an interview last week, the beatings began.