Incarceration

Barack Obama’s understanding of

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Barack Obama’s understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also … Read more

During my incarceration Mother

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During my incarceration Mother visited me. She had in some way managed to leave the workhouse and was making an effort to establish a home for us. Her presence was like a bouquet of flowers; she looked so fresh and lovely that I felt ashamed of my unkempt appearance and my shaved iodined head.’You must … Read more

When you talk about

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When you talk about white privilege, you’re talking about something systemic. When you’re talking about black privilege it’s something spiritual because we as black people tap into a divine system that a lot of other cultures and races can’t tap into and that system allows us to prosper in spite of everything that’s been thrown … Read more

We are all implicated

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We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as … Read more

The Democratic leadership has

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The Democratic leadership has expressed great concern for the incarceration rate in the commonwealth in the last few years. Now they want to fill the prisons up with people who would violate the merit law, a law that’s been proven to be ambiguous at best and impossible to understand at worst. Bill Vaughan

Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of

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Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awareness, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers-settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing-to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat … Read more