It sounds like a radical idea. Stop incarcerating women, and close down women’s prisons. But in the UK, there is a growing movement, sponsored by a peer in the House of Lords, to do just that.

The argument is actually quite straightforward: there are many fewer women in prison than men to start with – women make up just 7% of the total prison population. This means that these women are disproportionately affected by a system designed for men.

Join California Prison Focus and the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition to investigate prison conditions in California’s supermax facilities

Saturday, October 25, 2014

11:30am – 3:30pm

1904 Franklin Street, 3rd floor conference room

Oakland, CA 94612

Snacks will be provided

June Patti had a hunger to be heard.

A large woman with scarlet-dyed hair and a loud, raspy voice, Patti was a known drug addict who presented herself as a paralegal. Raised in the Redondo Beach area, she moved to northwest Washington state in the 1990s and soon became a local fixture, quick to phone law enforcement. One year she called 800 times, recalled Skagit County Sheriff Will Reichardt.

Who says the government can’t do anything anymore?

Even as Ronald Reagan argued that “government is the problem” throughout the 1980s, the state imprisoned twice the percentage of Americans previously incarcerated. As Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government” over in the 1990s, incarcerations skyrocketed to almost five times their rate in the 1970s—a rate that had been stable across the twentieth century. How did this happen?

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina inmate with mental illness who died of thirst was held in solitary confinement for 35 days and cited twice for flooding his cell, according to prison records.

PRESS RELEASE
 
Human Rights Defense Center
For Immediate Release 
September 25, 2014 – For Immediate Release

FCC Takes Further Action to Reduce Exorbitant Prison Phone Rates

A report released today raises concerns about inmate cancers and other serious health ailments at a state prison that sits next to a massive Fayette County coal waste dump full of toxic fly ash.

The preliminary report on the ongoing investigation by two human rights organizations into prisoner health at the State Correctional Institution Fayette in LaBelle [PA], found 11 prisoners died from cancer between January 2010 and December 2013, another six have been diagnosed with cancer and eight more have undiagnosed tumors or lumps.

The Netflix series "Orange is the New Black" isn't funny to the women who served time in Danbury Federal Prison. I know because I am one of those women.

The day after Monday's Emmy Awards, a television morning show invited viewers to tweet about their favorite part of the awards ceremony. I don't tweet. But if I did, I would have said that my favorite part was that "Orange is the New Black" didn't win an award for best comedy. And it shouldn't have.

LUMBERTON, N.C. — Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here

The officers got the wrong man, but charged him anyway—with getting his blood on their uniforms.  How the Ferguson PD ran the town where Michael Brown was gunned down.

Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him.