criminal justice 
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SOURCE: The New Republic
4/21/2022
How the Public Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Wiretapping
by Andrew Lanham
Brian Hochman shows that the white backlash to civil rights and racial justice protests helped to undermine longstanding civil libertarian opposition to electronic surveillance and normalize the idea of the government spying on Americans.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
4/19/2022
T. Thomas Fortune: The Forgotten Founder of Abolition Democracy
by Robin D.G. Kelley
T. Thomas Fortune's critique of Reconstruction is a radical intellectual document that has valuable lessons for the activists and scholars associated with the prison abolition movement.
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SOURCE: The Metropole
12/14/2021
Introducing “Disciplining The Nation”
by Matt Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen
"Rooted in racial slavery, settler colonialism, and U.S. empire, policing and incarceration in the United States were slowly and meticulously built over time for the purpose of subordinating, punishing, and exploiting populations –and historians have the documents to prove it."
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SOURCE: Public Books
11/30/2021
Facial Surveillance Has Always Been Flawed
by Amanda Levendowski
Today, artificial intelligence startups are scraping the web to build massive face-recognition databases, without any pretense of consent by the public. The technology may be new, but the intrusive assertion of surveillance has a long history.
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SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
12/15/2021
Philadelphia DA: Prosecutors Hid Evidence for Years in a 2003 Murder Case
Prosecutors in Philadelphia are accused of withholding evidence that undermined the credibility of key witnesses in the case, a pattern that critics argue has been widespread.
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11/14/2021
Kyle Rittenhouse's Trial Will End in a Verdict. The Nation's Trial By Ordeal Won't
by Thomas Lecaque
"A trial by ordeal was not about miracles or superstition. It was, in effect, about the community making a decision on the innocence or guilt of the party, and then bringing it about." Kyle Rittenhouse's trial prompts an uncomfortable reckoning with the continuity of some medieval practices of justice.
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11/7/2021
Historically, Black Distrust of Police is About More than Acts of Violence
by Christopher Hayes
The Harlem rebellion against the NYPD in July 1964 was sparked by a police killing of a teenager (and a grand jury's refusal to indict him), but reflected the role of the police in maintaining a profoundly unequal social order that affected everyday life in Black neighborhoods, a situation that has changed little.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/23/2021
Let the Punishment Fit the Crime
by Ben Austen and Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Tough-on-crime laws that forbid discretionary parole emerged in the 1970s. A historical perspective suggests they've failed, keeping people in prison long after doing so protects society.
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SOURCE: NPR
8/31/2021
The Martinsville Seven, Executed for an Alleged Rape, Pardoned by Virginia Governor 70 Years Later
"Northam granted the pardons after a meeting with the descendants of the Martinsville Seven. He said the pardons do not address whether the men were guilty, but rather serve "as recognition from the Commonwealth" that they were tried without adequate due process."
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SOURCE: Public Books
8/18/2021
Prison Tech Comes Home: Tenants and Residents in the Surveillance State
by Erin McElroy, Meredith Whittaker and Nicole E. Weber
Landlords have combined technologies developed for screening tenants in the 1970s with more recent digital surveillance and facial recognition systems developed in prisons to dramatically increase control over their tenants during an affordable housing crisis.
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SOURCE: WNYC
7/28/2021
Fifty Years Since the War on Drugs
"This summer marks 50 years since the war on drugs began under President Richard Nixon. But the opioid overdose epidemic continues to ravage the country, and incarceration—especially of Black people—has skyrocketed over the past 5 decades."
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SOURCE: New York Times
6/14/2021
Supreme Court Rejects Sentence Reductions for Minor Crack Offenses
Justices disagreed about what lessons to draw from the history of the 1986 Crime Bill that created the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine offenses. Does the fact that some Black organizations at the time supported the law excuse its racist impact?
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SOURCE: The New Republic
5/27/2021
The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops
by Stuart Schrader
"The core of policing is not safety. It is social control. All the other lies obfuscate this function."
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SOURCE: Vox
5/20/2021
Why Firing Squads are Making a Comeback in 21st-Century America
South Carolina's proposed return to execution by firing squad reflects the facts that, while the Roberts Court is very protective of capital punishment, it is increasingly difficult for states to acquire the drugs needed to perform lethal injections. It remains to be seen if firing squads will turn public opinion against capital punishment.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
5/3/2021
An Artist on How He Survived the Chain Gang
Winfred Rembert spent seven years on a chain gang in Georgia for his civil rights activism. His art commemorates the experience.
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SOURCE: NBC News
4/14/2021
Virginia Police, Army Lt. Caron Nazario and America's Bloody Traffic Stop Catch-22
by Matthew Guariglia
The incident of Lt. Caron Nazario illustrates the argument of 1960s Black radical activist Robert Williams that violence against Black people has always been part of maintaining the social order; recognizing nonviolence as a tactic of civil rights activism should not obscure the constancy of violence from the other side.
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2/28/2021
Is Virginia's Move to Abolish the Beginning of the End of the Death Penalty in America?
by Rick Halperin
Virginia's move to abolish capital punishment is long overdue, and other states and the federal government should follow suit to restore American legitimacy on global human rights.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/12/2021
Criminal Justice Reform Won’t Work Until it Focuses on Black Women
by Talitha L. LeFlouria
The history of mass incarceration is also the history of control and exploitation of Black women through the criminal justice system. Reforms need to recognize the impacts of the system on women to advance justice.
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SOURCE: The Marshall Project
5/14/2021
I Survived Prison During The AIDS Epidemic. Here’s What It Taught Me About Coronavirus
by Richard Rivera
Like the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, imprisoned people at risk of COVID-19 find that suspicion, paranoia and isolation have taken the place of meaningful support.
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SOURCE: The Nation
12/14/2020
Unequal Before the Law
Sara Mayeux's history of public defenders shows how the liberal reform movement that established a system to provide counsel to the poor buttressed the systemic slant of the justice system against them.
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