Humanizing Justice

Journalists, social scientists, and data gurus such as Hans Rosling are using Geographic Information Systems and other visualization tools to move from “boring” statistics to eye-catching and intuitive images. For example, the New York Times and the Guardian regularly communicate complicated social issues and trends using attractive maps, tables, and graphs. Our task here is to visualize the story of mass incarceration, illustrating shifts in punishment over time, space, and the populations most affected by its rise.

The United States has a massive problem in the form of a runaway prison system. Since you've had your ears open at some point in the past five years, you'll know that prisons fuel their own vicious cycles of prisoner aggregation and retention. If we don't do something, it's going to continue to get worse. Education reform within prisons would dramatically reduce prisoner relapse, the prison population as a whole, and the prison system's cost to taxpayers. I mean this in every way: We'd be stupid not to do it.

The first time someone called Karen Garrison an activist, she looked up the definition to see if it fit.“I never thought of it like that,” she said. “I just thought it’s what mothers do." A mother, she thought, would fight back if her sons were sent to prison for more than a decade, found guilty of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and crack cocaine without prior records and without physical evidence linking them to any crime.

Actor-director Tim Robbins and guitarist Wayne Kramer were among a handful of local cultural leaders to voice their support on Friday for programs that bring the arts to prisons and other correctional facilities around the country.

"Doing time is not supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These, however, are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money."

The Messages Project is looking for volunteers to assist in filming personalized messages from incarcerated parents, which are then sent home to their children.

"Whether it be for shoplifting (food), or writing a bad check (for something better than the sneakers with holes you’re wearing), or trespassing in an abandoned house (to get out of the cold wind), you’re not succumbing to let society beat you down, you’re fighting back for your own dignity and survival."

New Hampshire officials rejected all four bids to privatize its prisons, citing prison operators’ insufficient understanding of court-mandated standards of inmate care, and proposed wages that are half what prison security staff now earn.

"In one circle, students discussed racism. In another, a girl confided that she had been molested as a child. “Those boys who looked scary wrapped their arms around this girl...That’s what’s missing for our kids. It’s harder to fight people you feel a closeness to.”

Rocketing school suspensions may feed the school-to-prison pipeline – and even violate civil rights.

A huge thanks to Detroit-based hip hop artist and activist Invincible who took some time to share their response to CCA's 30th anniversary, and to help connect the dots of the for-profit private prison industry.

The American Prison Writing Archive will be a place where incarcerated people can bear witness to the conditions in which they live, to what is working and what is not inside American prisons, and where they can contribute to public debate about the American prison crisis. The American Prison Writing Archive site will also be open to contributions by correctional officers, prison staff, and prison administrators, thus creating a true meeting place and venue for comparative expression by and study of all of those who live and work inside American prisons. In creating a resource that can be accessed online, by a wide diversity of people, I hope that Hamilton can serve as the host for a public conversation that will include all of the members of a notably unheard population, increase awareness, and improve the ease with which all citizens — prisoners, students, scholars and the general public — can better educate themselves about one of America's most powerful and most problematic institutions.

A new effort announced in Brooklyn will allow a carefully chosen group of women who plead guilty to felonies to remain in their own homes instead of serving their sentences in jail.

The site best known for restaurant reviews has also become a place to report serious abuse.

An inaugural class of about 40 female inmates at an alternative high school at Rikers participated in Tribeca Teaches, a program that instructs young people in schools how to make movies.

Our anthology, "Too Cruel, Not Unusual Enough," will raise awareness nationwide that life without parole sentences are the death penalty and must be abolished.

BleakHouse Review is an online literary magazine that provides a venue for studies in human liberty, both its deprivation and its achievement. Some people find freedom behind prison walls; others, ostensibly free, build prisons for themselves in their everyday lives. The interplay of persons and settings, limits and possibilities, form the palette on which our artists work, examining daily life with imagination and care.

"...Researchers and those who advocate on behalf of ex-convicts hail the change as monumental, saying it will help address the generally poor health of ex-offenders, reduce medical costs and possibly keep them from sliding back into crime."

"Kids aren’t just bad.  There’s always a reason.  When you throw a youth in adult jail you are not making them better, you are making them worse.  In the adult system no one took the time to talk to me to see what was wrong.  We need to know someone is there for us."