Tag: mass incarceration
Of the 2.3 million Americans currently confined to the U.S. prison system, most of them barely have access to phones or the internet. But former inmate Frederick Hutson thought up a way to give convicts and their families the ability to use internet-like services while he was serving time for a weed offense. His website, Pigeon.ly, provides a […]
In three instances where inmates on Rikers Island were beat to death, none of the guards responsible are facing criminal charges reports the AP. The families of victims Angel Ramirez, Clarence Mobley and Ronald Spear have all sued the prison and two have settled, but it’s proven almost impossible to charge correctional officers criminally, according to lawyers […]
Earlier this year, we noted that mentally ill people at Rikers Island would no longer be put in solitary confinement. Today, the New York Times exposed a massive culture of violence at the jail complex, largely directed at the mentally ill. The article details hideous abuses. There were several incidents of multiple guards ganging up against one prisoner […]
Today, season two of the critically acclaimed Netflix show Orange Is The New Black is available to stream in full online. To coincide with this date, activist groups have launched a campaign to highlight the real life problems at some of the prisons where the show filmed. One of these is Suffolk County Jail, in Riverhead, Long […]
We wrote a few weeks ago about an eerily dystopian fake town in the UK where riot police carry out simulated confrontations, complete with fake molotov cocktails. It turns out something quite similar happens here in the U.S., at a prison in West Virgina. Al Jazeera America‘s Evan Hill reported from the Mock Prison Riot, […]
