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Articles on Jails

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Many women who are incarcerated were just trying to make ends meet for their families. Here an image from a rally to demand the release of people held in jails, outside the Riverside Correctional Facility in Philadelphia, May 2020. Joe Piette/Flickr

More than 60 per cent of incarcerated women are mothers — Listen

For Mother’s Day, we look at the fastest growing prison population in Canada — racialized women, many of whom are mothers. Experts connect the trend to rising poverty and the attempts to cope with it.
A Texas woman shows a picture of her 21-year-old son, who has been incarcerated during the pandemic. AP Photo/LM Otero

No visits and barely any calls – pandemic makes separation even scarier for people with a family member in prison

For the 6.5 million Americans who have an incarcerated family member, COVID-19 has made an already stressful situation much worse by drastically limiting communication and raising fears of death.
Inmates work in the laundry room at Las Colinas Women’s Detention Facility in Santee, California, on April 22, 2020. Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images

What the coronavirus crisis reveals about vulnerable populations behind bars and on the streets

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, missteps in transitioning the incarcerated back to their communities places this already vulnerable populace at greater risk of getting and transmitting the virus.
Calls for help at Chicago’s Cook County jail, where hundreds of inmates and staff have COVID-19, April 9, 2020. Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images

Prisons and jails are coronavirus epicenters – but they were once designed to prevent disease outbreaks

In the 1790s, penal reformers rebuilt America’s squalid jails as airy, hygienic places meant to keep residents – and by extension society – healthy. Now they’re hotbeds of COVID-19. What went wrong?
Is it ethical to use former prisons, with long histories of death, suffering and wrongful incarcerations, as entertainment venues? Rockin' the Big House

A prison is no place for a party

What does it mean to hold a party in a place with a long history of death and suffering?
Terri-Lynne McClintic, convicted in the death of an eight-year-old girl, is escorted into court in Kitchener, Ont., in September 2012. News that McClintic was transferred to an Indigenous ‘healing lodge’ has stoked outrage. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Geoff Robins

The folly of writing legislation in response to sensational crimes

The politically and emotionally charged court of public opinion is not the place to make policy changes in areas as complex as corrections.
Inmates at the California Institution for Men state prison in Chino, California in 2011. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

What’s hidden behind the walls of America’s prisons

The University of Michigan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson explains why Americans must demand better access to the nation’s prisons.

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