Actor, Omar Epps, and voting rights activist, Desmond Meade, demand prison reform and call out the corruption that has made incarceration a for-profit game in the new short film, Unbreaking America: Justice for Sale produced by RepresentUs. NEW YORK – America locks up more people than any nation in the world: a horrifying 2.3 million. […]
Dogon Village Books Celebrates Drug Sentencing Reform with Release of Ebook Version Urban Saga “SnitchCraft”
Atlanta, GA – When author Edrea Davis debuted her fictional saga, “SnitchCraft” in hardcover back in 2007, everyone from readers to activists to academics took note of this creative approach to advocacy. Davis cunningly fused hip-hop with a civil rights agenda to offer a glimpse into the corrupt environment created by the use of informants […]
In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights
By Michelle Alexander (NYTimes.com) – The legal scholar Derrick A. Bell foresaw that mass incarceration, like earlier systems of racial control, would continue to exist as long as it served the perceived interests of white elites. Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug […]
Unlikely Allies Call for Shifting Spending from Prisons to Schools
By Nirvi Shah (Edweek.org) – The NAACP has joined forces with fiscally conservative groups, former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, and others to persuade legislators and policymakers to shift the growing amount of money spent on prisons to education. In a new report called “Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate,” the NAACP compiled research […]
The Root: We Can’t Afford To Not Fix Justice System
By Benjamin Todd Jealous and Lateefah Simon (NPR.com) – Reforming the nation’s criminal-justice system is one of the most urgent civil rights issues of our time. One shocking fact illustrates why: More African-American men are entangled in the criminal-justice system today than were enslaved in 1850. How did we get here? The rise in America’s […]
GOP Leaders Speak Out for Prison Reform: First Rev. Pat Robertson and Now Newt Gingrich
By Tony Newman, AlterNet – At a time when Democrats and Republicans are having a difficult time agreeing on anything, let’s hope that we can come together to help end America’s longest, unwinnable war. For the second time in less than a month, a major conservative leader has spoken out for prison reform. First there […]
‘Lockdown for liberty!’ exposes prison conditions
By Charlene Muhammad, FinalCall.com – Fed up with bad food, unjust treatment, poor education and inadequate health care, thousands of inmates in Georgia’s prison system staged “Lockdown for Liberty,” a peaceful protest on Dec. 9, according to activists. The Black, White, and Latino inmates from Augusta, Baldwin, Hancock, Hays, Macon, Smith, and Telfair State Prisons […]