It’s #NewstodonFriday — such a shame it’s been a slow news week! Just to refresh your memories, this is a day to feature work from newsrooms with an active presence in the #Fediverse. If you like what you see in the (long!) thread below, follow the profiles and boost their stories. If you’re a journo or newsroom that we don’t know about or if there’s a newsroom you’d love to put on our radar, please let us know in the comments below.
Solitary confinement is classified as torture by the UN and is a war crime under the Geneva Convention, yet more than 500 people have endured this for a decade or longer in Texas. Damascus James created “Texas Letters,” an anthology and book series featuring the unedited writings of people who have spent months, years and sometimes decades in isolation. @TexasObserver has extracts from the second volume here.
A damning indictment of British social policy and a blindness towards the need to treat the causes of criminality and rehabilitation/reducing reoffending. Anyone might think that US private companies who do so much damage in the US have a hand in government policy…
We send books only to people incarcerated in the United States. Fortunately, there are similar groups in other countries. This article describes a group collecting books for prisoners in Manitoba, Canada. (Unlike us, the group provides books only to prison libraries. We mostly serve individuals behind bars, although we also send books to prison libraries from time to time.)
"What is crystal clear is the prison spaces crisis is a consequence of the government’s approach to justice including over a decade of underfunding of our criminal justice system, which also sees chronic shortages of judges and lawyers, huge backlogs of cases and crumbling courts.”
Nick Emmerson, President, The Law Society
At 5 a.m. #Russian forces tried to break through #Ukraine defensive line in #Kharkiv region using armored vehicles, the first attempt to invade this area in 2 years.
#Ukraines Justice Minister told BBC Ukraine, that to ease overcrowding in Ukraine's #prisons Ukraine could put 20,000 convicted criminals into the #army
Ukraine already amended a law in 2014 which allows criminal case proceedings to be paused until the end of military service.
This is the final article in Simon Hattenstone's excellent series on prisoners serving indefinite IPP sentences. They were abolished in 2012 but that wasn't retrospective. 3000 prisoners are still affected. 90 have committed suicide so far.
after #abolition many Black people who had nowhere to go, were charged rents by their former plantation owners if they didn't leave. if they didn't pay, they were either re-enslaved thru prison OR indentured into financial servitude.
when the numbers of indentured Black servants weren't enough, that's when poor migrant workers became key to this new form of renter slavery.
this is what GOP fascists want to bring back with #prisons & #farms
April 27, 2024 is Independent Bookstore Day! In celebration of this event, a generous donor will match books purchased from two of our wish lists April 27 - May 14, 2024:
Indeterminate Public Protection (IPP) sentences were introduced by Labour in 2003 and abolished in 2012 as a breach of human rights. There are still 2,852 people in UK prisons serving IPP sentences. Many of them now have severe mental health problems and have lost hope because they don’t know when, or if, they will be released. In the 19 years since IPP was introduced, 90 prisoners serving the sentence are known to have killed themselves. #Prisons#IPP#HumanRights#UK
Les #prisons sont la honte de la République. Cette phrase répétée depuis cinquante ans a fini par sonner creux. L’injonction à punir, à punir fermement, ne nourrit-elle pas cette spirale infernale? Comment pourrait-on faire autrement, si on le voulait vraiment? Débat dans «À l’air libre».
Les #prisons sont la honte de la République. Cette phrase répétée depuis cinquante ans a fini par sonner creux. L’injonction à punir, à punir fermement, ne nourrit-elle pas cette spirale infernale? Comment pourrait-on faire autrement, si on le voulait vraiment? Débat dans «À l’air libre».
Even the BBC is increasing its pejorative reports on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Israel currently holds more than 9,300 security prisoners, the vast majority of whom are Palestinians according to the Israeli rights group HaMoked, including more than 3,600 people in administrative detention. The headline belies the severe beatings and torture.