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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In late March, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court issued a momentous ruling overturning mandatory life sentences for people convicted of felony murder, also known as second-degree murder. Activists and advocates hailed the ruling as a victory that was years in the making and has the potential to impact the lives of more than a thousand people in the state, a majority of whom are Black.
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Thirty years ago, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) deported my father. He came to the U.S. from the ghettos of Trinidad to the ghettos of Boston and did what he did to survive. For him, that meant selling weed. INS and its successor, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), also deported two of my uncles. Previous presidential administrations called them “felons.
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Under Donald Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has started appearing ever more like a private militia, unleashing brutal violence against families and displaying sycophantic loyalty to Trump as he mandates the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants. In the days since January, when federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti and 37…
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