“Why are they doing women like this? Are we the weaker sex?” Mishunda Davis told Truthout in a call from Logan Correctional Center, Illinois’s largest women’s prison. In 2022, the state passed legislation making menstrual products free for anyone incarcerated in Illinois prisons. Despite the law, Davis and others run out each month. Menstrual care — or the lack of it — gets little attention…
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The Trump administration announced Tuesday that former private prison executive David Venturella will lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an acting capacity after the agency’s current director departs at the end of the month. Venturella has been a senior adviser to ICE since February 2025 and previously worked at the private prison giant GEO Group for more than a decade…
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New Orleans — As the Louisiana state Senate debated what the National Homelessness Law Center says is “one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country,” more than 50 mainly Black unhoused people sat and lay on the sidewalk in New Orleans’ Central City neighborhood. The bill, which already passed overwhelmingly through the state’s Republican-dominated House of Representatives…
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When news of the Epstein files first broke, I watched it unfold on a television I do not own, in a room I cannot leave, on a TV channel I did not choose. The framing I received about Jeffrey Epstein — the financier convicted of soliciting sex from a minor and who was later found dead in jail following his arrest on charges of prolific child sex trafficking — came from Fox News. This…
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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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The first bill that Tarra Simmons passed restored voting rights to formerly incarcerated Washingtonians. That was in 2021, the year after she was elected Washington’s first formerly incarcerated state representative. “That was my freshman bill,” she told Truthout. The following year, the state passed her bill to expand housing assistance vouchers from three to six months for people…
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