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?
The annual report from Canada’s prison watchdog paints a bleak picture of a prison system where violence between and against prisoners is concerning.
(Shutterstock)
More and more district attorney candidates are running on reversing the government’s traditional approach to crime and punishment. And they’re winning.
The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other place in the world. Warehousing people in prison is costly and unsustainable.
Shutterstock
Several presidential hopefuls have offered proposals to close the racial wealth gap, from baby bonds to reparations. A simulation suggests policies short of direct aid to blacks won’t do the trick.
Evidence suggests that Muslim men in France have been disproportionately arrested and jailed for cannabis-related crimes since the drug became illegal in 1970.
Francisco Osorio/flickr
Muslims make up 9% of France’s population and half of all its prisoners – many convicted on drug charges. But social justice isn’t part of the country’s growing debate on legalization.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, right, signed the measure state lawmakers approved.
AP Photo/Steve Cannon
This state law is leaving up to a million people unable to participate in elections who might have gotten relief through an amendment voters approved. Critics call it a modern-day poll tax.
Less than one percent of state and local drug arrests involve amounts over a kilogram.
content_creator/Shutterstock.com
Kelebogile Zvobgo, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The first truth commission to research lynchings has been established in Maryland. It has the potential to educate the public about and support racial reconciliation. But it also faces obstacles.
A new slogan for an old problem.
Photo/Lynne Sladky
Through stories of redemption, a professor who oversees a Maryland prison education program says the time has come to restore federal financial aid for America’s incarcerated.
Negative statistics about black people are widely embraced in American society – even when they are wrong.
pathdoc from www.shutterstock.com
Negative statistics about black students may be prevalent, but they are often out of context, misleading or just plain wrong, a professor of counseling psychology argues.
Barbed wire surrounds the the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La.
REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
Programs that allow individuals to be supervised in the community instead of in prison are growing in a way that is not sustainable and is contributing to mass incarceration rather than relieving it.
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, front, after she signed a law that allows pay-for-success funding for projects aiming to reduce female incarceration rates.
AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki
These partnerships between investors, governments and nonprofits are a new way to pay for programs and services that help people in need and address intractable problems like mass incarceration.
Black men occupy a disproportionate share of prison cells in the U.S.
sakhorn/Shutterstock.com
Just as with so many other criminal justice policies, pretrial detention disproportionately affects African-American men and women, destabilizing black families in the process.
A Georgia penitentiary in 1911.
Library of Congress
Digitized state records help to tell the stories of African-American prisoners in the 19th and 20th century.
Families clashed with security forces outside the police station in Valencia, Venezuela, where nearly 70 prisoners died in a March 28 fire.
AP Photo/Juan Carlos Hernandez
After a fire killed 66 inmates at a Venezuelan jail in March, news stories portrayed the country’s prisons as lawless. The real backstory of this deadly riot is more complex — and maybe a bit scarier.