Photo Credit: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2018/08/02/members-of-congress-trump-administrations-prison-policy-could-lead-to-significant-discrimination-for-trans-people/ Incarceration rates for women in the United States have grown at twice the rate of men in recent decades. Perhaps unsurprisingly, rates are particularly disproportionate among Black and LGBTQI+ communities. Despite this explosion in incarceration, prison and jail systems often fail to effectively grappl

Courtesy of Drug Policy Alliance On June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation in what would become known as the War on Drugs Speech. Labeling drug abuse as “America’s public enemy number one,” President Nixon called on Congress to “defeat this enemy” in a new, all-out offensive. To fight Nixon’s “war,” governments at all levels passed draconian laws, calling for the police to increase enforcement and for judges to pass down harsher sentences. In the decades

Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/05/29/compassionate-release/ In July, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a research letter asserting that inmates are five and a half times more likely to contract coronavirus and three times more likely to die from coronavirus than the general population. Jails and prisons are like nursing homes and cruises, all of which have experienced outbreaks due to the infeasibility of social distancing; these facili

The disproportionate impact of mass incarceration on black communities has been widely recognized for years. Various causes of racial disparities in the criminal justice system have been evaluated, including “socioeconomic disadvantage and its consequences, disproportionate offending in certain categories of crime, and discriminatory treatment in the criminal justice system”. Research by the Sentencing Project found that “higher crime rates in black communities explain about

Otis Boone insisted that he was innocent after being accused of two robberies in 2011. He was nineteen at the time, and two separate victims who had their cellphones snatched by a knife-wielding man picked Boone out of separate police lineups. Although there was no physical evidence, he was convicted largely because of the victims’ eyewitness identification. Boone, the Brooklyn, N.Y. native, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He took his appeal to New York’s highes