Exclusive Video: Violence Inside Rikers BY JENNIFER GONNERMAN The New Yorker Magazine. May, 2010, Kalief Browder, a sixteen-year-old high-school sophomore, was arrested in the Bronx for allegedly stealing a backpack. He insisted that he was innocent, but he was taken to Rikers Island, New York City’s four-hundred-acre jail complex. Browder spent the next three years at Rikers, awaiting trial while his case was repeatedly delayed by the courts. In May, 2013, the case against him was dismissed. (Last fall, I wrote about Browder for the magazine.) This week, The New Yorker obtained two surveillance-camera video clips that depict the dual horrors of Browder’s years in jail: abuse by a guard … [Read more...]
Should a Criminal Record Be a Life Sentence to Poverty?
New legislation in the Senate is a first step to giving the more than 70 million Americans with criminal records a second chance. Rebecca Vallas March 11, 2015 The Nation At a time of historic polarization in Washington, one issue has garnered strong bipartisan support: criminal-justice reform. Exhibit A is the list of strange bedfellows who have recently joined forces through the “transpartisan” Coalition for Public Safety. This new effort has brought together leading progressive organizations such as the Center for American Progress and the ACLU and left-leaning funders such as George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, alongside influential conservative groups such as Grover Norquist’s Americans … [Read more...]
Why This Work Calls Me To Do It
By Reverend Marilyn B. Kendrix The Justice Imperative: How Hyper-Incarceration Hijacked the American Dream is a book written by committee – the Malta Justice Initiative – and the writing committee is an eclectic group of folks. Since the book is aimed at three communities – the business community, the academic community and the faith community – all three of those communities are represented on the writing team and I represented the faith community among this outstanding group of impassioned people. As an ordained minister, I was moved to doing something about our nation’s broken criminal justice system after reading Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow. As one who came to ministry late in life, … [Read more...]
