prisons

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• SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
  6/8/2022
  

  Inventing Solitary Confinement

  Kali Nicole Gross, Ashley Rubin, Jen Manion and Paul Takagi offer insight into the historical irony of modern incarceration's roots in Philadelphia, the nominal cradle of American liberty. 

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  4/19/2022
  

  T. Thomas Fortune: The Forgotten Founder of Abolition Democracy

  by Robin D.G. Kelley

  T. Thomas Fortune's critique of Reconstruction is a radical intellectual document that has valuable lessons for the activists and scholars associated with the prison abolition movement. 

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• SOURCE: University of Mississippi
  1/18/2022
  

  University of Mississippi Makes Available Oral Histories of Student Protesters Sent to Parchman Prison Farm

  Historian Garrett Felber and his students began a project to document the experiences of Mississippi students arrested in 1970 and sent to the notorious prison farm. 

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• SOURCE: WORT
  12/20/2021
  

  Heather Ann Thompson on Mass Incarceration

  Karma Chávez guest hosts a wide-ranging conversation with historian Heather Ann Thompson about policing, mass incarceration, and why overhauling the criminal justice system is the civil rights issue of our time.

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  11/6/2021
  

  Stanley George on Putting Viewers in the Middle of the Nation's Bloodiest Prison Rebellion

  "It’s like the window has been cracked a little bit, so that people who might never have thought to doubt law enforcement are doubting law enforcement now, and they’re thinking about their cruelty and racism in a way they might not have thought about it five years ago."

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  9/28/2021
  

  Who Owns the Legacy of a Notorious Women's Prison?

  Caitlin Davies' "Bad Girls" tells the history of London's Holloway Prison, which is now in jeopardy from a pending redevelopment plan. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  9/15/2021
  

  Dosing Arkansas Prisoners with Ivermectin Just Latest Incident of Medical Abuse

  by Lydia Crafts

  "News that an Arkansas prison doctor deceived inmates to take Ivermectin as a COVID preventative shows that nonconsensual research and the experimental use of drugs on vulnerable people remain common — despite evidence of its danger and laws designed to prevent it."

• 
• SOURCE: Gothamist
  9/9/2021
  

  What Set the Stage for Rebellion and Violence at Attica

  Tyrone Larkins, Alhajji Sharif and Akil Shaquan were incarcerated at Attica 50 years ago. Hear their story about conditions in the prison and the events of the riot and its brutal suppression. Also features an interview with historian Heather Ann Thompson.

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  9/13/2021
  

  Honoring Attica After Half a Century

  by Heather Ann Thompson

  Activists both inside and outside of prisons in the 1960s and 1970s confronted the violence of the state. Accountability for law enforcement is still an unrealized legacy of the 1971 Attica rebellion. 

• 
• SOURCE: TIME
  9/8/2021
  

  50 Years Since Attica, Will America Observe the Human Rights of Prisoners?

  by Heather Ann Thompson

  "The Attica prison uprising was historic because these men spoke directly to the public, and by doing so, they powerfully underscored to the nation that serving time did not make someone less of a human being." 

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• SOURCE: New York Post
  9/4/2021
  

  Daughter of Slain Attica Prison Guard Demands Apology from New York State

  After New York State has approved a reparation fund for the surviving prisoners of the 1971 Attica riots, is it time for similar justice for the employees caught in the violence of the state's response? 

• 
• SOURCE: Mississippi Free Press
  7/30/2021
  

  Emails Show U of Mississippi Officials Concerned that Fired Historian Criticized Private Prison Ties, Upset Donors

  "Felber drew a line between the university’s history of slavery, its hand in the creation of the slave plantation-like Parchman Prison and one celebrated instructor’s financial ties to a private-prison corporation."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Post
  7/5/2021
  

  The New York Post Would Like You to Get Mad about a Yale Course Comparing Incarceration in the US and Stalinist USSR

  Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley plan to team-teach a course examining the comparative history of mass imprisonment in the two empires. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  6/16/2021
  

  Inhumane System of Incarceration in U.S. Poses Special Danger to Women

  by Jessica L. Adler

  When politicians close single prisons after complaints of abuse, they leave untouched a cruel and dehumanizing system that poses particular risk to women. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  5/7/2021
  

  The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  Organizer Mariame Kaba is one of the leading public intellectuals behind the movement for the abolition of the institutions of policing and prisons and for a politics that imagines more humane alternatives. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  2/14/2021
  

  James Ridgeway, Hard-Hitting Investigative Journalist, Dies at 84

  The journalist James Ridgeway exposed malfeasance by corporate polluters and politicians, but dedicated his greatest energy to his last crusade, to end the practice of solitary confinement in prisons. 

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  1/18/2021
  

  When Black Humanity is Denied

  by Edna Bonhomme

  Enlightenment institutions – the prison, science, and asylums – are organized through binaries that draw boundaries between people who are and are not able to exercise freedom. Black artistic work supports Black freedom by challenging those boundaries. 

• 
• SOURCE: Places Journal
  10/15/2020
  

  “Nothing Stirred in the Air”

  by Stephen Dillon

  The architecture of the "supermax" prison targets the senses and emotions of the incarcerated as a means of control in the wake of political organizing inside and outside of prisons in the 1960s and 1970s. 

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  8/19/2020
  

  Online Forum: The Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition (August 24-28)

  Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), will host an online forum in honor of Black August on the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition organized by incarcerated writer, activist and intellectual Stephen Wilson and historian and professor Garrett Felber. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Marshall Project
  7/29/2020
  

  Will The Reckoning Over Racist Names Include These Prisons?

  Historians including Robert Perkinson and Monica Muñoz Martinez discuss the impact of having today's cruelly punitive prisons named for racist figures of the Jim Crow era.