While most critics of the American criminal justice system condemn mass incarceration, fewer have ...
Tag: Incarceration
Painting while Shackled to a Floor
What does it mean to make art with limited resources, under constant surveillance, when incarcerated in some of the most restrictive and punitive institutions in the modern American prison system ...
The Big Picture: Criminalizing Immigrants
Peering out the windows of John F. Kennedy Airport in the early morning hours of January 29, 2017, I had hope for this country’s future on immigration policy. Hundreds of ordinary New Yorkers were ...
The Big Picture: Violence and Criminal Justice
On a rainy day in December of 2013, I visited the Heritage Foundation, one of the country’s most prominent conservative think tanks, to talk about how to reform the criminal justice system. I sat at ...
Virtual Roundtable on Engaged Scholarship and Teaching
With political divisiveness and gaps in access to higher education intensifying, the imperative for universities to interact meaningfully with local and global communities has perhaps never been greater ...
Teaching Kids to Resist
Do you know who Fred Korematsu is? He is not yet a household name like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr., despite the integral role he played in protesting the incarceration of Japanese Americans ...
Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of “The 13th”
When prisoners in Alabama last spring proposed a national strike to protest “prison slavery,” they called out ...
“The Night Of” and the Didactic Procedural
Within a few minutes of starting the HBO mini-series The Night Of, any experienced television viewer knows that they are embarking on a crime procedural. The show’s credit ...
From The War On Poverty To The War On Crime
Lethal police encounters between black Americans and law enforcement authorities have been a source of protest and resistance historically ...
A Black Power Method
A half-century ago this week, “Black Power” entered America’s mass consciousness. In early June 1966, James Meredith launched his “March Against Fear,” a one-man demonstration down the 220 miles of ...
Chicago Law
Baltimore has The Wire, Newark, The Sopranos, and for seven seasons Chicago has had The Good Wife. The city with North America’s highest number of annual civilian deaths by cop and its very own ...
An Interview with Former Black Panther Lynn French
Lynn French was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1968–1973, working in Chicago, Berkeley, and Oakland. In the Party, she worked in newspaper circulation, labor ...
Impunity
Human skin turns the color of lead as the body loses blood. It’s one of the physical signs, perceivable at plain sight in a homicide victim, marking the boundary between life and death. Another is ...
Kids in Cages
In June 2011, the State of California permanently shut down the Preston Youth Correctional Facility, a reform school for orphans and juvenile offenders that had been in operation for over a century ...
Return to the Fold
At first glance, Rectify may seem like another variation on that favorite TV conceit of recent years: a damaged, asocial male struggles to reconcile with the modern world (see Breaking Bad, Mad Men ...
Virtual Roundtable on “Orange Is the New Black”
In advance of the second season of Netflix’s original series, Orange Is the New Black, which will be released on Friday, June 6, we asked Public Books contributors to share their views on the show’s ...
Progress and Execution
Frantz Schmidt hanged his first thief when he was 19, on a June day in 1573. Either his father or another master executioner pronounced the hanging “executed adroitly,” concluding Frantz’s ...
Dudes, Bodies, and Criminals
For those accustomed to the dry wit of judicial opinions, there is an undeniable charm to a novel that, within its first ten pages, paraphrases the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona US Supreme Court case with ...