Posts Tagged ‘prison’
Wrongfully Accused: The Exoneration of Black People
By Noah A. McGee, The Root.com Experts explain why we ‘re seeing so many high-profile exonerations of Black people in the United States during the last few decades. In 2021, a total of 132 people received exonerations: 81 of them were Black. Just a decade ago in 2011, only 40 Black people were exonerated. Since 1989 there’s…
Read MoreToo Many of Them Have Been Wrong’: Black Ex-Prosecutor Exposes Misdeeds of Los Angeles Legal System In Volume of Online Stories
A former LA proscecutor’s online memoir details his “good fight” against an “assembly-line of incarceration.”
Read MoreLawmakers Sponsor Bill to Give Federal Prisoners a Chance for “Second Look” at Their Sentences
Senator Cory Booker and Representative Karen Bass produced a bill as an effort to reform the prison system, titled the Matthew Charles and William Underwood Second Look Act. It provides this country a chance to change the prison system and focus on the rehabilitation of convicts rather than punishment.
Read MoreFirst Step – One of the Biggest Criminal Justice Reforms in Decades
This week from TheRoot.com, journalist Anne Branigin heralds the First Step criminal justice legislation that was heartily passed by the United States Senate on Tuesday night in an 87-12 vote. Due to the high numbers of incarcerated African Americans throughout the country, First Step may have a disproportionate
effect on those communities. But despite the bill’s limitations and caveats, many advocates for criminal justice reform expect it to be a tremendous blessing, especially in that it may move state legislatures in similar directions.
The Origins of Prison Slavery
The real origin of prison slavery is found in the 13th amendment which allows forced labor “as punishment for a crime.”
Read More3 Black U.S. Senators Introduce Bill to Make Lynching a Federal Hate Crime
3 Black senators introduce bill to make lynching a federal hate crime. Representative Leonidas Dyer of Missouri sponsored an anti-lynching bill that was thwarted by Southern Democrats in the 1920s.
Read MoreNAACP sues Connecticut over ‘prison gerrymandering’
The suit coming from the NAACP is part of larger effort to fight practices that the NAACP argues are attempts to suppress minority voting via prison-based gerrymandering.
Read MoreCanadian lawyers are pushing courts to consider systemic racism
Defense lawyers in Ontario want to start pushing judges to consider how systemic racism may have contributed to the criminal activity of black offenders they are sentencing.
Read MoreU.S. spending on prisons grew at three times rate of school spending: report
U.S. state and local spending on prisons and jails grew at three times the rate of spending on schools over the last 33 years as the number of Americans behind bars ballooned under a spate of harsh sentencing laws
Read MoreSuit Alleges ‘Scheme’ in Criminal Costs Borne by New Orleans’s Poor
A lawsuit filed against New Orleans criminal district court alleges that it runs a “scheme” in which the poor are jailed if they fall behind paying fines. “The extent to which every actor in the local New Orleans legal system depends on this money for their own survival is shocking,” said Alec Karakatsanis, a founder of Equal Justice Under Law, a civil rights group, and one of the lawyers who filed the suit….
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