Incarceration

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• 6/18/2023
  

  What to the Incarcerated Is Juneteenth?

  by Antoine Davis and Darrell Jackson

  "We prisoners who are left to deteriorate inside one of America's most inhumane systems are able to find joy in celebrating Juneteenth, but not without indignities."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  3/13/2023
  

  Eric Adams's Involuntary Commitment Plan for Mentally Ill has a Long, Cruel History (and Won't Help)

  by Jeremy Peschard

  The history of involuntary hospitalization is one of the removal of the most marginalized and vulnerable people from society, in increasingly cruel and inhumane conditions, with treatment and reintegration to society an afterthought. It's unclear the New York mayor's plans will be different. 

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• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  12/16/2022
  

  Was Emancipation Intended to Perpetuate Slavery by Other Means?

  by Sean Wilentz

  Protests movements have latched on to a misguided interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment that argues it allowed and even encouraged the system of mass incarceration as an extension of slavery. A new global history extends that critique to the age of emancipation in general.

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• SOURCE: The Baffler
  8/16/2022
  

  Smuggled Recordings Revealed the Harshness of British Internment Policies in Northern Ireland

  by Jack Sheehan

  Tapes secretly recorded in the Long Kesh internment facility, where suspected IRA militants were detained without trial, revealed the degree to which the British government discarded human rights in its crackdown and speak to today's "states of exception."

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  8/10/2022
  

  Life Sentences for Arbery's Killers Nothing to Celebrate

  by Joseph Margulies

  A defense attorney and legal expert warns that the harsh sentences imposed on perpetrators of a racist killing help to validate a punitive system of incarceration that overwhelmingly harms people of color. 

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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: Made by History at The Washington Post
  10/21/2020
  

  Disenfranchisement in Jails Weakens our Democracy

  by Charlotte Rosen

  Because the pretrial population is disproportionately non-White, this kind of “de facto disenfranchisement” constitutes an abhorrent form of racist voter suppression, despite rarely gaining the headlines and outrage that long voting lines do. 

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  8/19/2020
  

  Online Forum: The Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition (August 24-28)

  Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), will host an online forum in honor of Black August on the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition organized by incarcerated writer, activist and intellectual Stephen Wilson and historian and professor Garrett Felber. 

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• SOURCE: The Intercept
  9/17/19
  

  How Joe Biden has Historically Played a Role in Mass Incarceration in the United States

  by David Stein

  The Intercept reveals the untold story of how Joe Biden pushed Ronald Reagan to ramp up incarceration — not the other way around.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/22/19
  

  It’s time to get rid of reform schools

  by Amber Armstrong

  We need to seize the opportunity to rethink our juvenile justice system.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  5-22-18
  

  Prison records from 1800s Georgia show mass incarceration’s racially charged beginnings

  by Barry Godfrey and Steven Soper

  A study of nearly 25,000 prison register entries shows how connections between race and imprisonment started in the 1860s.

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• SOURCE: NYT
  4-28-18
  

  Heather Ann Thompson exposes what how a South Carolina prison riot really went down

  by Heather Ann Thompson

  In an article in the NYT she shared the stories inmates risked their lives to tell her about riot at Lee Correctional Institution that left seven dead.

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• SOURCE: The Marshall Project
  11-3-17
  

  What About the "Lost Children" (and Mothers) of America?

  by Rheann Kelly, Natalie Medley and Christina Kovats

  It’s time for their voices to be heard.

• 
• SOURCE: The Washington Post
  9-8-17
  

  America must listen to its prisoners before we make a major mistake

  by Heather Ann Thompson

  We’re in danger of repeating the mistake we made after Attica when we let prison reforms fizzle.

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• SOURCE: The Marshall Project
  7-26-17
  

  Our Long, Troubling History of Sterilizing the Incarcerated

  by David M. Perry

  State-sanctioned efforts to keep the incarcerated from reproducing began in the early 20th century and continue today.

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• SOURCE: The Washington Post
  4-19-17
  

  The age of mass incarceration may actually be abating

  by Charles Lane

  The most recent evidence indicates that the age of mass incarceration is abating; it has been, oddly enough, since just prior to the publication of “The New Jim Crow.”

• 
• SOURCE: The Daily Show
  1-25-17
  

  Heather Ann Thompson tells the story of the Attica prison uprising on The Daily Show

  Trevor Noah says the prison officials hid the truth for decades.

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• SOURCE: AHA Today
  10-13-15
  

  How We Became the “Jailhouse Nation”: Historians Discuss Mass Incarceration in the US

  by Dane Kennedy

  The statistics on the subject are staggering: the United States currently incarcerates 2.3 million people, a larger proportion of our population than any other nation on earth.