40 Reasons Our Jails and Prisons Are Full of Black and Poor People – Bill Quigley

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) reports 2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one of every 35 adults.  We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail.  Most of the people inside are poor and Black.  …

More than a quarter of Chicago county jail inmates suffer severe mental illness By George Marlowe

Recent reports have highlighted the fact that at least a quarter of the prison population at Chicago’s Cook County Jail suffer from serious mental health illnesses. Speaking to the Chicago Tribune, the new head of the jail noted that out of the jail’s approximately 8,000 detainees, some 1,900 have been identified as suffering from mental illness. Dr. Nneka Jones, a 37-year-old …

Psychiatric Hospitals: On Being Sane In ‘Insane Places” – Dr. Gary G. Kohls

In 1973, D. L. Rosenhan published a ground-breaking psychiatric study in January 19 issue of Science magazine. The article exposed a serious short-coming in the psychiatric hospitals at the time, and therefore it became very controversial. Dr. Rosenhan, a professor of psychology and law at Stanford University, designed the study to try to answer the title question: “If sanity and insanity …

‘Profiting From Misery’: Private Prison Corporations Driving Harsh Immigration Policies – Sarah Lazare

Private prison companies are spending millions of dollars to lobby the U.S. government for harsher immigration laws that, in turn, spike corporate profits by driving up incarceration levels, a new report from the national social justice organization Grassroots Leadership reveals. Entitled Payoff: How Congress Ensures Private Prison Profit with an Immigrant Detention Quota, the report’s release on Wednesday coincided with a renewed …

Boycott, Divest and Sanction Corporations That Feed on Prisons

By Chris Hedges, Truth Dig   NEWARK, N.J.—All attempts to reform mass incarceration through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics, the courts and state and federal legislatures are useless. Corporations, which have turned mass incarceration into a huge revenue stream and which have unchecked political and economic power, have no intention of diminishing their profits. And in a system where …

San Francisco jail inmates allegedly forced into ‘gladiator-style’ fights

County public defender asks the US Department of Justice to investigate claims of ‘sadistic’ treatment including threats of violence if inmates did not comply The Department of Justice has been asked to investigate after prison guards allegedly forced inmates to engage in gladiator-style fights for “sadistic pleasure” and betting, in scenes the authorities said evoked Game of Thrones. An inmate …

What Are They Hiding? UN Official Slams US for Limiting Access to Prisons

A United Nations investigator has accused the U.S. of blocking access to prisons—including state and federal facilities where an estimated 80,000 people are in solitary confinement and the military prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba—leading civil liberties experts to wonder, “Is the United States hiding something?” Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday that for …

US jails are warehouses of sick, poor and low-risk people

Jail is not supposed to be where you put the mentally ill or those too poor to pay bail. Nor is it supposed to be where African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians go for crimes that don’t land white people behind bars. But that is what they are increasingly becoming. The primary purpose of jails, unlike prisons, is to …