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…
Source
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…
Source
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…
Source
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…
Source
When a Maryland domestic violence shelter launched a new hotline last year, staffer Lashell Mack found it “a bit jarring” at first. She and her co-workers had been initially skeptical of the idea. “We all had concerns,” Mack said. That’s because this hotline isn’t for survivors of domestic violence — it’s for their partners, who use violence in their relationships. When House of Ruth…
Source
“There’s nothing wrong with him. If there were, it would say so in his file.” I heard a licensed mental health counselor say those words to a correctional officer as they stood side by side, watching a man through a large plexiglass window that took up most of the wall of an observation cell, a cell used for people deemed a threat to themselves or others. Inside, the man was visibly…
Source