Tag
Incarceration
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Criminalizing Black Migrants
“These two laws are inseparable. Together, they form a ‘prison-to-deportation pipeline’ that subjects Black migrants to a ‘double jeopardy’ of systemic racism.”
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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 road between Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi. Meredith hoped to inspire black men to exercise their voting rights, or at least to join him in…
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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 Guantanamo-aspirant black-site detention facility, Homan Square, the city that has perfected machine politics, election fraud, felony embezzlement, and the pork that…
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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 …
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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 the color of the blood itself, from the almost translucent, still glistening red of those recently massacred, to the blackening…
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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. Since its inception in 1894, the school saw the rise and fall of variously strict, benevolent, neglectful, and sadistic regimes, all engaged in…
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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, The Sopranos, True Detective—the list goes on). And in broad outline, this Sundance Channel (now SundanceTV) original about a recently released death…
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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 representation of race, gender, sexuality, incarceration, and the women-in-prison genre. —Heather Love: Made For TV —Megan Comfort: The Two Pipers…
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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 apprenticeship and certifying him as a master in his own right. Over the next four decades, Frantz would hang, behead, or otherwise kill 394 people,…
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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 colloquial gusto: “The ACLU grabbed the case and 976 days later they were in front of the court that never…
