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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The Central California Women’s Facility, the nation’s largest women’s prison, is in Chowchilla, where temperatures reached past 90 degrees by the second week of May. The prison lacks air conditioning or any facility-wide cooling system, turning cells into saunas. “I dread going to my groups at night because we have to wait forever at the gates and we cannot bring water with us. We can’t take…
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In 2013, when I had been locked up in solitary confinement for 25 years, I wrote an essay entitled “A Sentence Worse Than Death,” which I’m told has been read by upwards of a million people to date. It describes what life was like in “the box” (the special housing unit, or SHU for short) in New York’s state prisons, and posited that if given the choice, I would have opted for a sentence of death…
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Amid growing calls from lawmakers and human rights groups to shut down the sprawling Dilley Immigration Processing Center in southern Texas, an analysis shows the number of people incarcerated at the notorious immigration jail for children and families has nearly tripled in recent months. Texas lawmakers and attorneys for immigrant families say a growing number of children at the facility are…
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Tien Mo is still awaiting a response to her 2017 clemency application. As previously reported in Truthout, at age 20, she was sentenced to life without parole in her classmate’s death. As the years pass, the 44-year-old’s hopes dwindle. Now, a proposed statute gives her renewed optimism. Clemency typically takes two forms — a pardon, which removes the consequences of a criminal conviction…
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