Mercedes Maradiaga sat across from her 19-year-old son in the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles in complete devastation. Her son had at that point been incarcerated at the prison for two years and she had visited him every weekend. But that day in September 2024 was especially hard because it was their first visit since he had been beaten by officers earlier that week in a space in the…
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As abolitionists across the United States push for decarceration, a backlash has emerged in the form of new prison construction, demonstrating the resiliency of mass incarceration. Several new women’s prisons are being built despite a growing chorus of voices arguing that prisons only inflict more harm on women who have already endured abuse and trauma. Last year, a new prison to hold nearly…
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Echoing activists across the country, the global human rights watchdog Amnesty International has called on the United States government to abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Emerging from the #Not1More campaign organized by undocumented activists and groups like Puente and Juntos in 2014, and gaining momentum with concerted organizing by grassroots groups such as Mijente…
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Ibanged my head on the bars. It was 2:00 am. I was in a Brooklyn jail. Under the fluorescent light, other men slept on the bench. Each one of us was arrested for so-called quality-of-life crimes like drinking a beer on a stoop, blasting a radio, or being unhoused. I shook the bars again. The walls closed in on me. I had a hard time breathing. When I got out the next day…
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In the recent U.K. elections, voters widely rejected the currently ruling Labour Party. Commentator Aditya Chakrabortty credited Labour’s resounding loss to three things: “Gaza … racist [anti-Muslim] Home Office policies, and then finally housing and cost of living.” Some voters swung their support to the far right Reform Party, led by Donald Trump ally Nigel Farage. But the U.K. Green Party…
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During my incarceration in the U.S., since I had little else to do, I focused on reading, on becoming an expert on the prison-industrial complex in which I lived. People sent me books and articles on this topic, but when I tried to share them with the other men in the prison, they ran up against a wall of accessibility. I vowed that when I got out, I would write materials that would be about them…
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