The Black Commentator’s Margaret Kimberly notes that Halliburton has won yet another multi-million dollar government contract—this one to build “temporary detention facilities” in case of an “immigration emergency.” The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a [...]
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Before Katrina: Modern Day Debtors’ Prison In Gulfport, MS
Gulfport, MS was in the news over the weekend with a jaw-dropping story. Saturday’s US News & World Report told of a class action suit against the city, concerning what amounted to a debtors’ prison before Hurricane Katrina: Last July, a homeless man named Hubert Lindsey was stopped by police officers in Gulfport, Miss., for [...]
Miscounting Prisoners Hurts Rural Communities As Well As Urban Ones
Peter Wagner has a fascinating new piece on Prisoners of the Census. If you’re new to what Peter does, his organization, the Prison Policy Initiative, does innovative research and advocacy on the problems that ensue from counting mostly urban Black and Latino prisoners as residents of the predominantly white rural communities where many are imprisoned. [...]
Some Information On Locating Louisiana Prisoners Post Katrina
Critical Resistance has a fact sheet with much of the available information. Unfortunately, there is not a simple way to plug a person’s name into a database and come up with his or her present location. Here are some resources from the fact sheet that may be helpful with some persistence: HOW TO FIND AND [...]
Heartbreak
My writing for this blog has been lighter for a little while now. That’s not the reason for my title, but in case you were wondering, these are some of the things I’ve been doing instead of writing lengthy posts: three weeks of work on that article in In These Times a follow up piece, [...]
Hear Peter Wagner Speak About Prison Policy
I received the following announcement from Peter Wagner’s Prisoners of the Census email list: Tomorrow, Saturday Dec. 3 in Providence RI, I’ll be giving the keynote lecture at the “U.S. Prison System: Community and Political Impacts” conference. My lecture will be at 1pm in Starr Auditorium, MacMillian 117 at Brown University. This conference is organized [...]
Sheriff Illegally Withholding Records on Orleans Parish Prison, ACLU Lawsuit Charges
Sheriff Illegally Withholding Records on Orleans Parish Prison, ACLU Lawsuit Charges ACLU of Louisiana to Testify Before New Orleans City Council on Wednesday FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 10, 2005 BATON ROUGE, LA — The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana today filed a lawsuit charging that Orleans Parish Prison officials are violating state law by [...]
What’s That Quote From Faulkner Again?
Quote of note: “Our results suggest that the death penalty has become a sort of legal replacement for the lynchings in the past…” DEATH SENTENCES LINKED TO HISTORY OF LYNCHING IN STATES COLUMBUS , Ohio – States that sentence the most criminals to death also tend to be the states that had the most [...]
More On the Coleman 900
Last night, I posted on my volunteer work to help identify the approximately 900 prisoners form Orleans Parish Prison who were evacuated to the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Coleman, Florida. After I and the other volunteers entered the essential data from the “Katrina Master Listing” of OPP inmates into our spreadsheets, there was an [...]
Rights? What Rights?
On Thursday night, I volunteered in a project to identify prisoners who had been in Orleans Parish Prison before Hurricane Katrina and were then evacuated to a federal penitentiary in Coleman, Florida. Angela Wessels, an attorney in Boston, who works for the Southern Center for Human Rights (based in Atlanta), is doing an amazing job [...]
Slave Wages
Last week, Jeanne said, Poor people can’t get back to their lives on a promise of a job and a home. They need a guarantee and help getting back. Today, she’s got some of the reasons why. On the one hand she’s found a rare instance of a local, NOLA company that got a contract [...]
Prisons Create The Conditions For Crime
Abstract Concept High levels of incarceration concentrated in impoverished communities have a destabilizing effect on community life, so that the most basic underpinnings of informal social control are damaged. This, in turn, reproduces the very dynamics that sustain crime. (William Raspberry, quoting Todd Clear (via Racism Ain’t Over)) Concrete Example The greatest economic drain to [...]
Obligatory Listening – Malik Rahim and Scott Crow Talk About Common Ground
Almost ten days ago, Common Ground posted three audio files of Rahim and Crow talking about the founding of the Common Ground Collective, what it has faced so far, and what it plans for the future. For those unfamiliar, Common Ground “is a local, community-run organization offering assistance, mutual aid and support to New Orleans [...]
Prison Policy Initiative
Yesterday evening I was one of the co-hosts of a reception for the Prison Policy Initiative. It was a great event with Executive Director Peter Wagner speaking alongside Joseph “Jazz” Hayden and Mark Dubnoff. Wagner spoke about his innovative work on census policy and felony disenfranchisement. Hayden spoke about his 15 years of work to [...]
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- St. Petersburg Police Bind Hands And Feet Of 5-Year-Old African-American Girl
- Lynching In Tuskegee —blog this now!!
- More On The Prisoners From Orleans Parish Prison
- Edgar Ray Killen Says God Will Get You (If You Helped Put Him Away)
