https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/10/20/wisconsin-voting-districts-skew-power-small-prison-towns/8536983002/
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Since the coronavirus pandemic began, New York State has granted early release to 1400 inmates, all of them non-violent offenders. But thousands of elderly prisoners aren’t being considered for release, because they are in for violent crimes - even if they’ve served decades of their sentence and studies show that they are unlikely to re-offend. For now, it appears that advocating for the early release of these inmates is a stance even liberal politicians like Governor Andrew Cuomo are reluctant to take.
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New York's Department of Corrections and Community Supervision outlined what it calls its "reopening" plans for the state prison system at the end of May. In four pages, it goes into the process for phasing staff in, and how visits are still suspended. But one little bullet point in those four pages has become a flashpoint: the announcement that it would transfer around one hundred elderly inmates out of other prisons and up to a prison in the Adirondacks.
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While the number of people testing positive or being hospitalized for COVID-19 continues to fall around the state, those numbers are going up inside New York prisons, where nearly two thousand staff and inmates have gotten sick. Inmate Stanley Jamel Bellamy describes his experience of the crisis thus far.
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The results of the 2020 federal census will have a huge impact on the country over the next ten years - but in Wisconsin, mass incarceration of African-Americans is skewing the count. In a practice known as “prison gerrymandering”, inmates are counted in the district where they are imprisoned instead of the place they call home. This has the effect of shifting political power away from urban black communities and giving disproportionate representation to certain rural white populations.
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If someone in prison has a terminal illness and poses no risk to society, they should be allowed to die at home — that's the idea behind what's called "compassionate release." So far, 49 states have adopted the policy. Any day now, the first prisoner in the Massachusetts correctional system to apply for compassionate release is due a final answer.
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Half a century ago, a team of inmates in a Massachusetts prison held an outstanding record on the academic debate circuit. By 1966 the Norfolk Prison Debating Society boasted 144 wins and only eight losses. They won and lost against Harvard, MIT, Princeton and the like. But when a more punitive approach to prisons swept across the U.S., the debate team dissolved. Until now.
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Many jails are turning to video chats as a way for inmates to connect with loved ones on the outside. For families, there are financial and emotional costs.
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Level 6 of New Mexico's state penitentiary in Santa Fe is a dense complex of prison cells, stacked tight. As the gate opens, men's faces press against narrow glass windows. They spend 23 hours a day in solitary.
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Across the country, it's common practice to handcuff a pregnant prisoner to her hospital bed while she gives birth.
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Aaron Hinton says the 40-year drug war in Brownsville has almost made spending time behind bars normal. “It’s subliminally attacking out minds and making us believe that socially this is acceptable.” One out of every 50 men in New York’s prisons comes from Brownsville. The state of New York spends $40 million a year – and this has been going on for generations — locking up black and Hispanic men from this one neighborhood. What does that do to a community?
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Over the last four decades, New York’s prison population has soared, with many people serving long mandatory sentences for low-level crimes. As a result, the number of elderly inmates is surging—growing by almost eighty percent from 2000 through 2009.
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The number of women in American prisons has gone up by 800 percent over the past thirty years, according to the Federal Bureau of Justice. Most of these women are mothers, and about one in twenty of them are pregnant. In New York State, a woman who gives birth while serving time has the chance to stay with her baby in a prison nursery for up to one year, or eighteen months if the mother is eligible for parole by then.
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Two years ago, Moriah Shock Prison near Port Henry was next on the list of correctional facilities New York State wanted to close. Camp Gabriels near Saranac Lake and the Summit Shock Prison near Albany had already been shut down, and the prisons in Lyon Mountain and Ogdensburg were also on the chopping block. But the local community and Essex County officials rallied enough support to keep Moriah open. Today, 188 men live on the spartan campus, set in a former mining facility at the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.
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