by Jayson Hawkins
On the night of January 20, 2021, as the nation was buckling beneath the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a cascade of violence was unfolding inside a women’s prison in New Jersey.
Prisons are not immune to the social stresses playing out across the rest of ...
Tiffany Reeves, a mother of three, was arrested in October 2018 on two outstanding warrants and detained at the Sussex Correctional Institution, an all-male facility, to await hearings before two judges. One of the warrants stemmed from Reeves’ attempt to purchase heroin a year earlier in New Castle County, Delaware ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Marvin David Scott III was far from what most people would consider a criminal. The 26-year-old played football in high school, made straight As, and was described by friends and family as “generous to everyone around him.”
It is doubtful that police in Allen, Texas, a suburb ...
by Jayson Hawkins
The New Jersey Department of Corrections had a policy of housing prisoners according to their gender assignment at birth, regardless of whether they are transgendered or of any non-binary sexual orientation. As a result, when Sonia Doe (not her real name) was sentenced to prison, she was ...
by Jayson Hawkins
In July 2020, Judge Consuelo Marshall of the U.S. District Court for Central California granted class certification to a group of prisoners at Lompoc federal prison, granting in part and denying in part their motion for preliminary injunction.
The group of prisoners at Lompoc filed a complaint ...
by Jayson Hawkins and Panagioti Tsolkas
The fantasy of those who profit off the Prison Industrial Complex has long been perpetual incarceration. This dream has seeped into reality in recent decades as many states began adopting LWOP (life without parole) sentences. Yet another means of warehousing people without a release ...
by Jayson Hawkins
The use of DNA testing to overturn hundreds of wrongful convictions in the U.S. has revealed deep racial inequalities in the criminal justice system. Emboldened by victories at the polls in 2018 and 2020, Democrats are calling for the end of capital punishment in many states. In ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Progressive criminal justice reform has been slow to make it into the political mainstream, but one area where it is getting increased traction is around the use of private prisons. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and 2020 presidential candidate, recently opened an investigation into the American ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Early in the pandemic, safety watchdogs called for state and federal prisoners to be released in order to reduce the spread of the coronavirus in cramped lockups. Social distancing is simply not possible in most prisons, and alleviating the crowded conditions was intended to reduce the potential ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Former President Donald Trump announced 143 pardons and commutations in the final hours of his term. While end-of-term pardons are the norm for outgoing presidents, the huge batch of last-minute announcements from the White House seemed to highlight the growing frustrations of those who believe the federal ...
