One of the biggest weaknesses of any constitutional amendment is that of the 13th Amendment, allowing for unpaid labor by prisoners. Whether its writers thought through the potential repercussions of
When your nation lacks a job policies to employ people where they live, it opens them up to making money off the worst of the United States: in this case an ethnic cleansing campaign that relies on pr
The opioid epidemic is leading to prosecutors seeking to throw everyone in prison. All this did during the crack epidemic is destroy black communities and radically increase the nation’s prison
Just last week, I profiled the 1978 Ellis Prison strike against their exploitation by the state that forced them to pick cotton on state-owned prison farms for no wages. They won that fight but the ex
Alabama Governor Robert Bentley really really really misunderstood the message of “Puttin’ People on the Moon.” Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) pointed to one of man’s greatest sci
Gary Johnson may talk about how much he loves to smoke marijuana, and there’s no doubt that’s true. But that hardly means Johnson is in any way progressive in the War on Drugs, unless you
Mississippi officials are complaining about the state’s declining prison populations. Why? Because county, state, and private funding models were all built on prison profit and losing prisoners
Given our national goal for decades of jailing as many people of color as possible for long periods of time, it’s hardly surprising that growing old in prison has become a major problem. Occasio