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.
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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