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      The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting

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      The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting The case of Pamela Moses sparked a national outcry – but newly uncovered documents reveal the extent of its injusticeIt was the morning after Labor Day and Pamela Moses was in a rush.All summer, the outspoken activist had been feuding with election officials in Memphis, Tennessee. She wanted to get her name on the ballot for Memphis’s 2019 mayoral election, even gathering enough signatures to do so. But officials said she could not run – a prior felony conviction made her ineligible to seek office.Now, there was a new problem. In late August, the local elections commission sent her a letter saying they were going to cancel her voter registration. Moses was confused – she had been voting for years. That day, she was determined to sort it out.But what unfolded over just a few hours that day on 3 September 2019 would upend her life. It would lead to a sudden arrest months later at O’Hare airport in Chicago and culminate in a six-year prison sentence for voter fraud.Her case would go on to touch a nerve in the US and cause a national outcry. While there’s no comprehensive data on voter fraud prosecutions based on race, it was one of several recent examples in which Black defendants like Moses have faced long criminal sentences for voting errors, while white people have faced little punishment for more fraud. Long after the abolition of poll taxes and literacy tests, Black Americans still face significant scrutiny for trying to exercise their right to vote.What I learned from my interview with Pamela Moses, imprisoned for a voting errorRead moreTo make matters worse there is a byzantine bureaucracy in Tennessee and other US states, which can make it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to vote again. The system has allowed officials to block people from voting for owing small sums of money and prosecutors to bring charges against others who make good-faith mistakes about their voting eligibility.But at the center of the Moses case was a relatively simple question: should someone who makes a voting mistake face serious criminal charges?Nearly everyone in Memphis seems to know Moses, 45, or has heard of her.She’s a self-taught student of the law – the librarians in the county law library know her by name – and has sued many of the top officials in Memphis, frequently representing herself in court. She’s appeared in local papers over the years. She’s had disagreements with other local activists and founded her own non-profit.“If she sees something that she feels is unjust, she’s going to say something about it,” said Dawn Harrington, who has been friends with Moses for over two decades and is the executive director of Free Hearts, a criminal justice non-profit. “She’s not going to be afraid of the backlash that might happen.”“She’ll always take you to the limit,” said Michael Working, a criminal defense attorney in Memphis who has represented Moses and known her for a decade. “She’s willing very often to be publicly flogged by the government on principle.”In person, Moses is at times mercurial, but often charming. She can rattle off the history of Memphis neighborhoods, the names of local judges, lawyers and statutes that she’s researched, sprinkling in bits of hip-hop history (she also writes and produces her own music). She is fiercely protective of Taj, her teenage son.Few officials attracted Moses’s ire as much as Amy Weirich, a Republican who served as the district attorney in Shelby county, which includes Memphis. Several years ago, Moses made local headlines when Weirich prosecuted her for stalking and harassing a local judge, tampering with evidence and forgery.In 2015, Moses pled guilty to those charges and was sentenced to several years of probation. Years later, she would say that pleading guilty and not fighting the case “was the worst mistake of my life”. She believed she was innocent, but the conviction led people to think she was guilty.Harrington, her longtime friend, said that the case cemented her status as someone who was disliked by people in high office in Memphis. “She had been on the bad side of the powers that be there,” she said.When Moses pled guilty, there was a hearing in which a judge questioned her and made sure she understood the consequences of her decision. But there was one ramification that neither the judge nor any of the lawyers present brought up: Moses would lose the right to vote for life.To understand Moses’s case, one needs to know that America has long stripped people convicted of felonies of the vote.After constitutional amendments in the 19th century expanded the franchise to Black Americans, many states passed felon disenfranchisement laws as a way to continue to keep African Americans from the ballot box and therefore prevent them from wielding political power, said Christopher Uggen, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the topic closely. He suggested the laws have persisted because people with criminal convictions are stigmatized, and so seeking redress for them is politically fraught.Today, the laws continue to heavily affect Black Americans – 5.3% of the adult Black population is disenfranchised because of a felony, compared to 1.5% of the non-Black adult population. Overall, an estimated 4.6 million people can’t vote because of a felony conviction in the US.Bar chart comparing felony voting disenfranchisement of Black Americans to all AmericansMoses’s home state of Tennessee strips any person convicted of a felony of the right to vote. Nearly 472,000 people of voting age can’t vote in Tennessee because of a felony conviction, the vast majority of whom have completed their sentence, according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. It’s estimated that more than one in five Black people of voting age in the state can’t vote because of a felony.In Tennessee, it is also extremely difficult for these people to get their voting rights back once they complete their sentences. There are three different sets of rules, depending on when the person was convicted. A request to even just fill out the state’s required application for the restoration of voting rights can be rejected for any reason – without explanation.Tennessee’s confusing system isn’t unusual. Many US states, particularly in the south, require anyone with a felony conviction to go through a bureaucratic process if they want to vote again.In Mississippi, people with certain felony convictions have to petition the legislature to restore their voting rights individually – and hardly anyone makes it through.In Florida, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 to repeal the state’s lifetime voting ban for most people with felonies. But the Florida legislature quickly stepped in and passed a measure that said completing a sentence meant paying all outstanding fines and court fees, which put voting again out of reach for many. Even if people can afford to pay, it’s extremely difficult to figure out how much they owe since the state has no centralized way of keeping track.Bar chart of the five states with the highest estimated rates of Black felony voter disenfranchisementThat uncertainty is the point of these laws, said Nicole Porter, the senior director of advocacy at the Sentencing Project.“I think there is intentionality behind the complications,” she said. “It’s about chilling or minimizing participation in the electorate by certain constituencies. It’s the modern day manifestation of very hard policies that dominated the Jim Crow era.”This was the tangled web Moses stepped into just after Labor Day in 2019.Because she didn’t realize she had lost her voting rights, she had been voting regularly until the summer of 2019. When she was informed that her voter registration was about to be canceled, Moses called the elections commission and asked what to do. She said a staffer advised her to go through the restoration process. (The elections commission declined to say to the Guardian whether it had ever advised her to do so.)The next step Moses took was the one on which her conviction – and its reversal – rested.One of the people required to fill out the form for her voting rights restoration was a probation officer, who had to confirm that Moses’s criminal sentence had concluded. When Moses showed up at the probation office on 3 September, she met with the manager on duty, named Kristoffer Billington, who had worked for the probation office for five years. He had never filled out the form before, he would later testify in court.Moses told him her probation was finished, and he went to the back of the office to research her case. Billington called a colleague in a different office for help. They both looked at Moses’s file in the computer system.According to the information they saw, it looked like Moses had finished her probation in 2018. But there was a problem – Moses’s computer file still showed she was on unsupervised probation. Billington thought this was a bureaucratic error and believed someone had forgotten to close out her file.As he was examining the case, the receptionist repeatedly called Billington’s office to tell him Moses was growing impatient and wanted to turn in the form to the election office, he would later testify. After about an hour of research, he wrote on the form that Moses had completed her probation, signed it and returned it to her.Billington had made a mistake. Unbeknownst to him, there were more case files that showed Moses’s felony probation wouldn’t expire until the following year, 2020. In parallel, Moses had been fighting in court that summer to have a judge declare that her sentence was over because she wanted to run for mayor. In court filings, she argued that her probation had expired. But courts disagreed. Moses didn’t think those rulings were correct and thought Billington and the probation office would be able to give her a more definitive answer.It might seem hard to believe that there was a dispute about something as basic as when Moses’s sentence ended. But those kinds of ambiguities are actually quite common, Uggen said.“People who aren’t subject to supervision don’t really understand how fuzzy things like release and supervision dates are,” he said. “Anybody inside the system or across jurisdictions knows that what’s written on this piece of paper might be very different than that other piece of paper.”And these bureaucratic mistakes can land people in prison.Just 30 minutes after Moses left his office, Billington got a call from someone in the Tennessee attorney general’s office telling him he made a mistake on the form. And after Moses turned in the form, the elections office quickly caught the mistake too. A few days earlier, they had referred her to prosecutors for potential voter fraud, owing to the fact they had learned she had been regularly voting while on probation.“Isn’t whether or not she completed the required probationary period for the 2015 felonies the subject of the [ongoing court case],” Pablo Varela, an attorney for the elections commission, emailed Kirby May, a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office shortly after Moses turned in the form. “How can the Court Clerk issue this attached document stating she has been granted final release from incarceration or supervision?”‘It’s a scare tactic’: Pamela Moses, the Black woman jailed over voting error, speaks outRead moreMay responded later that afternoon and attached a copy of a July court order saying Moses was still on probation. She was still ineligible to vote, he said.Vicki Collins, a staffer at the elections commission, forwarded Moses’s application to the Tennessee secretary of state’s office to review. “The Shelby County Election Commission has been in an ongoing lawsuit with Ms. Moses. She has been denied the right to be on the ballot for Mayor because she is still on probation until 2020,” wrote Collins, who specialized in helping people with felony convictions get their voting rights back. A little over an hour later, a lawyer with the secretary of state’s office wrote back. She agreed Moses was ineligible to vote, but offered a new reason for why.In 2015, one of the crimes Moses pled guilty to was tampering with evidence, which causes a permanent loss of voting rights in Tennessee. All of the research Billington had done at the probation office was irrelevant. It didn’t matter whether she was on probation or not.The next morning, Collins, the elections staffer, appeared happy to learn Moses was permanently barred from voting. “LOOK AT HER STATUS!!! PERMANENTLY INELIGIBLE,” she wrote in an email, including a smiley face.The same day, the elections office also received a letter from the Tennessee department of corrections alerting them to Billington’s error. The letter didn’t say that Moses was to blame or that Billington was deceived.The elections office quickly wrote to Moses explaining she was permanently banned. “Absent a change in state law, future attempts to register to vote anywhere in Tennessee may be considered a class D felony,” read the letter from Linda Phillips, the election administrator in Shelby county.Later that evening, Phillips expressed concern that she hadn’t received a reply from Moses. “I am a bit concerned that Pamela Moses did not respond to my email telling her she would never be able to register to vote.” She hinted at concerns for her own safety over the issue, writing “I do have a concealed carry permit,” in an email to a member of the election commission.In a response to questions from the Guardian, Phillips said: “If incorrect information is provided to our office, intentionally or unintentionally, the state of Tennessee alerts us about the inaccuracies. That’s what happened in Ms Moses’s case.”She also defended the emails she and Collins sent after learning Moses was ineligible to vote.“Any email exchanges within [the elections commission] regarding announcements of Ms Moses’s ineligibility to vote should be perceived as urgent notice to ensure staff awareness, considering Ms Moses’s frequent and sometimes harassing visits to our offices,” she said.TimelineTimeline of Pamela Moses caseShowMarch 2014 After a felony conviction more than a decade earlier, Moses successfully has her right to vote restored.April 2015 Moses loses her voting rights again after she pleads guilty to several felonies, including tampering with evidence and perjury.July 2019 Moses is blocked from running for mayor of Memphis because of a prior felony conviction. A judge says she is still serving a probationary sentence from her 2015 conviction.August 2019 Shelby County Elections Commission tells Moses she is ineligible to vote and will be removed from voting rolls.September 2019 Probation office and local clerk fill out and approve a form saying Moses is eligible to vote. Election officials reject Moses’ request, telling her she is permanently banned from voting.November 2019 Moses is indicted for illegal registration and voting. She is arrested while traveling through customs at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. November 2021Moses is convicted of making false entries on an official registration or election document. January 2022 Moses is sentenced to six years in prison.February 2022 A judge orders a new trial for Moses, in part because of documents not turned over to her defense.April 2022 Prosecutors announce they are dropping charges against Moses.Two months later, prosecutors filed a 14-count indictment, charging Moses with illegally voting nearly a dozen times after her 2015 guilty plea. She was arrested at O’Hare airport while returning to the US from a trip abroad.Later, prosecutors offered her a deal, saying if she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge she would get six months of unsupervised probation and no additional prison time. She refused.“It was about the principle to me,” Moses said. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. All I did was try to get my right to vote back and you don’t like me,” she said. “I was okay with going to jail if people could understand what this is really about. I don’t regret making that decision.”Just before the trial began, prosecutors dropped 12 of the 14 charges, declining to prosecute her for illegally voting. There was no evidence that anyone had told Moses she was ineligible to vote, and the fact that the elections office had sent her voter information made it harder to prove she knew.The trial began on 3 November 2021 and lasted just two days. A single question remained: did Moses knowingly trick Billington to falsely say she was off probation when he filled out the form?May, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, zeroed in on the numerous times after 2015 that Moses had asked courts to declare she was off probation and judges had rejected her requests.“It’s like a child going up to both her parents, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme’ … They make the mistake and give it, even though they’d told no, no, no. It’s the same thing, she knew what she was doing on September 3rd,” he said at the trial. “She was desperate to try to get her rights restored, she wanted to run for mayor, whatever, she was desperate. She didn’t care, she was going to try anyway. This was her last stitch [sic] effort.”When Billington testified, he owned up to his mistake. But May argued Moses had deceived him, even though she was not in the room when he did his research and signed off on the form. Billington said Moses had told him she was off probation when she walked into the office and was acting impatient as he researched her case.Ferguson, Moses’s lawyer, argued that the state was punishing Moses for its own mistake. “If they can’t get it right, we can’t convict her for not getting it right,” he said in his closing argument.Ultimately the jurors found Moses guilty. In late January, W Mark Ward, the judge overseeing the case, sentenced Moses to six years in prison. Weirich, the prosecutor, said Moses had brought a trial and any harsh punishment on herself by refusing to take the plea.“I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time. She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her,” she said at the time.Local reporters had been following Moses’s case, but in early February, it started to receive national attention. The Guardian published a story highlighting Moses’s punishment. The next evening, Rachel Maddow did a segment on Moses’s case, comparing her six-year sentence to those of white Trump supporters who had received lesser sentences for intentional acts of voting fraud. The New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press, among other outlets, followed. Moses, detained in prison, didn’t know her case was getting more attention.Then, a few weeks later, new information came to light.Through a public records request, the Guardian obtained the result of an internal investigation from the Tennessee department of corrections looking into why Billington had signed off on Moses’s voting eligibility. The supervisors who had investigated squarely placed the blame on Billington for the error, undercutting the prosecution’s idea that Moses had deceived him into signing off on the form.Perhaps most significantly, Moses’s lawyers had never seen the document before – prosecutors hadn’t turned it over with all of the other evidence in the case. That lack of disclosure was potentially unconstitutional and entitled Moses to a new trial.The day after the Guardian published the document, Moses had a previously scheduled hearing to request a fresh trial. Judges rarely granted such requests – the hearing was supposed to be a formality on the way to an appeal. At any rate, that morning, Moses’s lawyer submitted the missing document to the court.Harsh punishments for Black Americans over voting errors spark outcry | The fight to voteRead moreRemarkably, Ward unexpectedly granted Moses’s request for a new trial. He said that the document should have been turned over to Moses’s lawyers before the initial trial and that he had erroneously allowed certain other evidence to be admitted. Moses, who had been in jail, broke down in tears in the courtroom.It wasn’t the first time Weirich’s office has come under fire for failing to disclose evidence to a defendant. A 2014 study by the Fair Punishment Project found her office ranked first in Tennessee in prosecutorial misconduct. Weirich sought to distance herself from the error. The department of corrections, not her office, was to blame for not turning over the missing document, she said.Two months later, Weirich announced she would drop all charges against Moses. “She has spent 82 days in custody on this case, which is sufficient,” she said in a statement, also noting Moses remained permanently barred from voting. “In the interest of judicial economy, we are dismissing her illegal registration case and her violation of probation.”Both Weirich and Ward would go on to lose their re-election bids in August.Moses’s case may have prompted a national outpouring of disapproval, but tendentious-seeming voter fraud charges have not disappeared.In August, for instance, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced the state was prosecuting 19 people with prior criminal records for voter fraud. Many of the people charged said they were confused about their eligibility and that no one had told them they couldn’t vote.Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, is still appealing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while on supervised release for a federal felony. Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible, and the ballot had even been rejected.Moses, as well as those who have followed her case, doubt that it will be one of the last.Both the Shelby county elections commission and the Tennessee department of corrections declined to say whether they had changed their processes for helping people determine their voting eligibility in the wake of Moses’s case. “Any changes in that process would be done at the state level,” Phillips said.One morning at the end of April, just after the charges were dropped against her, Moses held a press conference at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. She was there to speak publicly for the first time about Weirich’s decisions to drop the charges against her.“When it comes to Black people in the south, whatever we do, if it’s wrong, you’ve got to pay for it,” she said. “If there was a white person and I got treated the way I did, I would be just as upset. But you don’t see white people getting treated like that.”Since her case was dropped Moses has been working on an album and documentary, and she’s continued to push to be able to vote again.She’s still seeking a gubernatorial pardon from her 2015 conviction is suing Tennessee to try to get the state’s felon disenfranchisement law declared unconstitutional. She’s also suing local officials for damages in her voter fraud case. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know I will get to vote again,” she said.“I want people to take away that it’s not over just because Pamela is free,” said Dawn Harrington, Moses’s friend.” Because there are so many other Pamelas all across the state.”Brandon Dill contributed reporting from MemphisTopicsTennesseeThe fight for democracyLaw (US)US politicsUS prisonsUS voting rightsRaceMemphisfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Polly Klaas’s murder fueled the 90s crime panic. Her sisters fear ‘we’re repeating history’

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      Polly Klaas’s murder fueled the 90s crime panic. Her sisters fear ‘we’re repeating history’ Jess and Annie Nichol want to undo the harsh criminal laws passed after their sister was abducted: ‘We don’t want our pain to be used to punish anyone else’Annie Nichol was seven years old on 19 March 1994 when she was brought to the White House to talk to Bill Clinton.With a stuffed dolphin by her side, the girl spoke to the president about her 12-year-old sister, Polly Klaas, who had been abducted five months earlier from the family’s home in Petaluma, California, while Annie was sleeping nearby.Annie and Clinton watched footage showing how she’d since booby-trapped her room with bells and ropes to stop intruders.“Do you think I’m going to live to grow up?” television cameras captured her asking the president.“You’re a brave girl,” Clinton responded, adding that he was working to make sure people with “serious problems” would remain in prison.Today, Annie is tormented by the memory. Polly’s kidnapping and subsequent murder fueled a host of “tough on crime” laws and a powerful victims’ rights movement, which pushed America to have the highest reported incarceration rate in the world.The meeting at the White House, Annie said, was a reminder of how her family’s story was exploited to expand mass incarceration and racial inequality in America.What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problemRead more“I had just lost Polly and someone had given me that question to ask, and it was a message that wasn’t mine. I was a scared kid who had been through something I couldn’t even begin to process. Being put in the position of going to the White House to be on this television program and seeing Clinton start crying, the shame of that experience still overwhelms me. I was the perfect person to be used like that. What’s more compelling than seeing this scared little girl?”Annie and her older sister Jess are now on a mission to reclaim their family’s legacy and undo the harsh legislation the tragedy that befell them sparked. They say they want a different criminal justice system, one that focuses on preventing violence; accountability, treatment and rehabilitation for people who cause harm; and care and services for survivors.Their message is urgent, the sisters say, as growing concerns over crime in cities across the US since the pandemic have led to familiar calls for more punitive responses from pundits and some politicians facing midterm elections.“There’s the trauma of losing Polly and then there’s the trauma of how her death was used to punish other people,” Jess said. “We don’t want our pain to be used to punish anyone else … We’re on the precipice of repeating a really terrible history. And we don’t want people to make the same mistake.”On the evening of 1 October 1993, Polly was playing a board game at home with two friends when a stranger broke in and snatched her, leaving the two other girls behind.Jess and Annie, aged 12 and six at the time, recall fragments of the aftermath: the reporters camped outside their door, the “Polly, we love you” T-shirts worn by everyone in town, their visits with Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma.Two months after the abduction, the kidnapper led authorities to Polly’s body.Polly’s story led to panic. American media covered every twist in the investigation of the “slumber party that became a nightmare”. Commentators argued the “age of innocence had been lost” and that “the 12-year-old’s awful fate drove home the disturbing message that youngsters are not safe even in their own bedrooms”.By 1994, voters in California had approved the Three Strikes and You’re Out law, which, inspired by the extensive criminal record of Polly’s killer, established life sentences for all felonies if the defendant had two prior convictions for serious or violent offenses.Versions of the law, which also doubled the sentence length for second strikes, were adopted in 23 other states. In September 1994, Congress passed the notorious federal crime bill, sponsored by then senator Joe Biden, which included a three strikes sentencing provision.In California, Three Strikes contributed to an explosion in the state’s prison population. More than 7,500 people were sentenced to life in prison within the first decade after it passed, nearly half of them for non-serious and non-violent offenses.‘America could be truly free’: John Legend on his fight to overhaul the criminal justice systemRead moreAnnie remembers adults trying to comfort her by talking about locking people up, including an officer who held her hand to the wall of the building where the man who killed Polly was incarcerated: “He said, ‘Look how thick these walls are. Don’t you feel safe?’”Marc Klaas, Polly’s father (but not Jess and Annie’s), had advocated for three strikes laws. But as the sisters grew older, they became increasingly uncomfortable with the California legislation and their connection to it.“Since I was 13, I knew it was wrong, and it was stressful to see newspapers on the table for many years, and I kind of stopped looking,” recalled Jess, now 41, on a recent morning in Annie’s backyard. With the sensationalized media and celebrity support, she added, “It didn’t feel right getting attention for Polly’s death and being known and validated for that, and I was repulsed by my own internal identity with it.”In 2019, Jess watched 13th, Ava DuVernay’s documentary on the history of racial inequality in the US, which featured Polly’s story: “When I saw the sequence from slavery to our current mass incarceration crisis, with Polly’s face right there as one of the major reasons incarceration took off in the 90s, I was stunned.”“A lot of people see this history as something that is separate from themselves, but in our case we have a really deep connection to this crisis,” Annie, now 35, added. “It’s such an injustice that the sum of Polly’s life was turned into this harm for others. The story that was told about Polly was used to pass these incredibly terrible laws, and it always felt like a distortion of the truth.”Jess cold called the ACLU of California in 2019, telling a receptionist she and Annie wanted to talk about the law passed in their family’s name and see if there was anything they could do to help repeal it.The sisters felt some initial apprehension about speaking publicly. They had long been intensely private in part out of a desire not to feed the true crime genre obsession with Polly. They were also aware of their privilege as white survivors whose story had received intense attention and were wary of taking up space while the vast majority of victims of violence are people of color whose cases never make headlines.They also weren’t sure their voices would matter, a doubt Annie partly attributes to the way the criminal legal system operates: “There is this kind of paternalistic dynamic in the justice system, which co-opts victims’ stories and claims to represent them without actually listening to them or asking them what they want. It’s, ‘We’re going to handle this for you and solve this problem. And now we fixed it’. It leaves victims feeling disempowered. And for a while, we felt powerless.”The ACLU connected the sisters to policy experts at Stanford university, and they began to learn more about Three Strikes: that it was originally proposed as the “street sweeper” law, but was deemed too extreme until Polly’s death; that it had been disproportionately applied to defendants with disabilities and mental illness; that some people have received two strikes for the same incident; that defendants got life sentences for stealing pizza and baby shoes; and that research had repeatedly suggested there was no evidence that Three Strikes reduced crime or deterred violence. Today, 45% of people serving life sentences with three strikes in California are Black, while Black residents make up only 6.5% of the broader population.In 2020, after the uprisings sparked by George Floyd’s murder, the sisters started meeting with other crime survivors who were disenchanted with America’s criminal justice system.One of them was Tinisch Hollins, who lost two of her brothers to violence and serves as executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, a survivors’ advocacy group. Hollins grew up in San Francisco and remembered when her mother made her watch news reports about Polly so she would be aware of the potential for abductions.“The terror that my mother had when she called me to watch the news of Polly Klaas was the same kind of terror that friends and family had when they talked about loved ones who had been arrested and were potentially going away to prison forever. There was this looming possibility that you could become a victim of the system in the same way you could become a victim of crime.”The sisters came to view Three Strikes as a symptom of systemic problems and started publishing op-eds advocating for an alternative approach to justice.They also launched A New Legacy, a podcast named after their hopes to chart a different legacy for Polly; they interview people fighting to undo mass incarceration, including people previously imprisoned under Three Strikes.“There’s an underlying assumption that the thing that victims want is the harshest sentencing for the people who caused harm. And that’s really the only option,” Jess said. “It’s this revengeful ‘eye for an eye’ culture. I’ve come to realize we don’t really have a ‘department of corrections and rehabilitation’. It’s a ‘department of punishment and revenge’.”Jess and Annie’s advocacy is coming at a pivotal moment. While crime levels remain below the historic highs of the early 1990s, the pandemic has seen devastating spikes in gun violence across the US, and polls have shown that Americans report feeling less safe.Why America overlooks those most hurt by gun violence: ‘Black people are seen as expendable’Read moreSome police officials, pundits and media crime reporting have placed the blame on reform efforts, including “progressive prosecutors” who have sought to reduce incarceration, the “defund the police” movement and efforts to dismantle cash bail so people aren’t jailed because they can’t pay a fee.There’s no evidence any of these reforms have caused crime or violence to increase – and there is research suggesting the contrary – but in the lead up to the midterms, Republicans and some Democrats have argued for an increased police presence, expanded punishments and a rollback of reforms.“Hearing the kind of fear-based rhetoric that is taking over headlines and that politicians are spouting is so familiar with what we grew up with,” Annie said. “It would be so easy to fall back on all these failed solutions just because there were rising crime rates during a pandemic when people didn’t have safe places to go, school programs were shut down, and people lost their jobs and homes. These pro-incarceration agendas tend to exploit people’s fears and make people imagine really terrible things. But arguably the worst thing that could ever happen to a family happened to us. And if we can imagine a better future then I think that’s something everyone can imagine.”They’re not alone among survivors. The children of a murdered pastor in Tennessee recently opposed prosecutors’ decision to charge the 15-year-old suspects as adults, saying it’s not what her mother, an activist, would have wanted; the woman who helped create the sex offender registry after her son was abducted has since argued it has gone too far and is ineffective; and some murder victims’ relatives have argued against the death penalty and in favor of the defendants’ release after years behind bars.Jess and Annie have been talking to survivors about what they actually need and want; their family had access to financial support, but they’ve met many survivors of color who were denied victim compensation from the state, including victims of police killings, who aren’t considered eligible. Many survivors fall into financial crises amid grief and the aftermath of violence and need time off or relocation help.Survivors also want prevention. The sisters said they would like to see the US reallocate a significant portion of the estimated $180bn that the country spends on police and prisons each year toward community resources, including violence intervention, mental health care, restorative justice and services for survivors, such as faith-based programs or trauma therapy: “Unaddressed trauma is one of the major root causes of crime and violence in this society, and it absolutely supports public safety to provide these services to survivors,” Annie said.Annie said she has also heard stories of survivors finding peace in forgiving the people who hurt them. But she is not one of them: “It’s easier for me to feel hatred than compassion for the person who killed Polly. At the same time, I know that before there was a man who did unfathomable harm to our family, there was a boy who was hurt and abused and neglected and abandoned by the social structures that were supposed to help him. And I would rather have a system that would help and protect that child from becoming someone capable of murdering a little girl than one that only seeks to punish him after taking our sister’s life.”Speaking out has provided some catharsis for the sisters after years of struggling to process their trauma.“I was in hiding for so long,” Jess said. “And it has been incredibly healing to come into this work and share our story and advocate for something that matters rather than hiding from shame of the aftermath of Polly’s kidnapping. For us there’s a full-circle healing coming out. It’s wonderful to be in service.”They also hope people think more critically about the impact of true crime and media sensationalism: “There is healing in reclaiming agency over our story, because for the longest time it felt like it wasn’t ours,” Annie said.But as Polly’s name continues to be invoked, in podcasts, videos or by politicians and advocates, there’s one part of their story the sisters are keeping to themselves: their memories of Polly. It’s all they have left of her.TopicsCaliforniaUS crimeUS politicsUS prisonsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Abortion bans create ‘insurmountable barriers’ for incarcerated women in US

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      Abortion bans create ‘insurmountable barriers’ for incarcerated women in USSupreme court’s overturning of Roe will make reproductive healthcare in prisons a lot worse than it already is, experts warn When the US supreme court decided to strip away constitutional abortion protections in June, it effectively made the situation for many pregnant incarcerated women who are seeking abortions a lot worse.Conditions for reproductive healthcare in many US prison facilities are already often abysmal. With many pregnant inmates regularly facing dire circumstances including being denied abortions or being forced to give birth while shackled, experts warn that the overturn of Roe v Wade will now result in even more severe consequences for an already marginalized community.From 1980 to 2020, the number of incarcerated women across the country increased by over 475%, according to the Sentencing Project. In 2020, Idaho led the nation in the highest female state imprisonment rate at 110 per 100,000 female residents, followed by Oklahoma, South Dakota, Arizona, Wyoming, Kentucky and Montana. As of two years ago, the imprisonment rate for Black women was 1.7 times the rate of the imprisonment for white women. Meanwhile, Latinx women were imprisoned at 1.3 times the rate of white women.The Prison Policy Initiative found that an average of 58,000 people are pregnant each year when they enter local jails or prisons. In many of the states that already have the highest female state imprisonment rates, they also now have strict abortion laws ban the procedure almost entirely.As a result, the overturn of Roe v Wade is expected to make the lives of pregnant incarcerated people who are seeking abortions increasingly difficult.“People experiencing incarceration and pregnancy in states where abortion has been severely restricted or outlawed altogether, will likely face new barriers as jails and prisons seek to hide behind the supreme court’s decision to avoid their constitutional obligation to provide healthcare (including abortion) to people in custody,” Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the Reproductive Freedom Project at the American Civil Liberties Union told the Guardian.“Even where correctional staff and officials do not deliberately block access to care, the reduced availability of services and need to travel even greater distances to access legal abortion, and the greater demand for services in states where abortion is still legal, will only exacerbate all the financial and logistical obstacles that already existed,” she added.A study led by Carolyn Sufrin, the director of the Advocacy and Research on Reproductive Wellness of Incarcerated People program at Johns Hopkins University, surveyed incarcerated people’s abortion access across 22 state prison systems and six county jail systems.The study, which collected policy data for 12 months in 2016 to 2017 and was eventually published in 2021, found that there were already a myriad of obstacles such as self-payment requirements that can prevent a pregnant inmate from obtaining the care. Out of the 19 states that then permitted abortions, two-thirds required the pregnant inmate to pay.Only 11 of the 816 pregnancies in state and federal prisons that ended during the study time period were abortions, or 1.3%. 33 out of 224 pregnancies that ended at study jails were abortions, with over half of those happening during the first trimester.“There were already few abortions in prison settings…so will [the overturn of Roe] impact abortion access for an incarcerated individual? Absolutely,” Sufrin told the Guardian.For a lot of incarcerated women across the country, many remain behind bars because they are unable to afford bail. As a result, self-payment requirements for those seeking abortions are often times very difficult to fulfill.“State prison systems or jails sometimes would force pregnant people to pay for the procedure, sometimes including even the cost of transport or the time to have prison guards with them, which is problematic because normally if an incarcerated person is going off site for any other medical procedure, they wouldn’t be charged for the cost of transport or the time for the guards,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told the Guardian.“Trying to expect those people in jails to come up with the money for transport to an offsite abortion procedure when they can’t even come up with the money to make bail, to go home to their families, really creates an insurmountable barrier.”In 2017, Kei’Choura Cathey, a former inmate who discovered she was pregnant in August 2015 while awaiting trial, sued the Maury county sheriff in Tennessee, claiming that he denied her the right to an abortion because her pregnancy was not a threat to her health nor the result of rape or incest.Cathey’s only option at the time was to post bail so she could leave jail to receive the abortion. However, her bail was set at a staggering $1m. Eventually, her bond was lowered to $8,000. However, according to the lawsuit, by the time Cathey was able to post bond, she was already more than six months into her pregnancy, thus making her abortion illegal.For a lot of pregnant incarcerated women seeking abortions in a post-Roe reality, experts fear that they are likely going to face similar circumstances like Cathey.“Prisons or jails will argue…that’s an elective procedure so we are not going to cover it,” said Kendrick, which in turn will potentially force many incarcerated pregnant women who are unable to cover the procedure to carry their pregnancies to term.For a lot of pregnant inmates, birthing conditions in prison facilities are already dire. Numerous reports in recent years have emerged of inmates either being forced to deliver while shackled to their beds or having to deliver their babies on their own.While some states – and in effect, prison facilities – are seeing outright bans in abortions as a result of the supreme court’s ruling in June, others have not overhauled abortion protections just yet.In Wyoming, for example, abortion is currently legal but remains restricted as it is only allowed to be performed until fetal “viability”.In a statement to the Guardian, Wyoming’s department of corrections said that the supreme court ruling on Roe in June has not affected its policies on abortion related issues.“The WDOC has not had any change in policy or care for abortion related issues in the WDOC for inmates or offenders. The WDOC does on occasion have female inmates that are pregnant during incarnation and they are cared for at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institute in Torrington, WY. We rely upon the expertise of expert medical advice in all decisions related to the health and wellness of our inmates.”Ultimately, according to Sufrin, “There’s tremendous variability in what healthcare service deliveries look like on the ground and systems are not really set up to provide the full scope of comprehensive pregnancy and postpartum care for people.”For pregnant incarcerated people who are sent off-site for abortions, another issue that has emerged since Roe’s overturn is the hesitancy or even outright refusal from external healthcare providers to perform the abortions.“We’ve already seen instances of local hospitals turning people away and not providing medically necessary care because of ambiguities in the law, [such as] there might still be a heartbeat, those sorts of things. Then the carceral facility is left to manage dangerous bleeding or an ectopic pregnancy and they’re just very much ill-equipped to do that and don’t want to and should not,” explained Sufrin.“Even in the best of circumstances, there’s still a lot of constraints and a lot of trauma that pregnant folks experience. So now after the Dobb’s decision, we anticipate… that we’re going to have more pregnant people in our country and fewer people with access abortion. And I believe that we will see that in incarcerated settings as well,” she said.TopicsUS prisonsWomenUS politicsAbortionUS supreme courtLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      ‘It just doesn’t let up’: Alabama state prisons rife with violence, inmates say

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      ‘It just doesn’t let up’: Alabama state prisons rife with violence, inmates say State’s corrections department says things are ‘under control’ after labor strike began in September over conditions, but images and interviews say otherwiseLast Friday, five days after Alabama prisoners launched a statewide labor strike, Republican governor Kay Ivey assured reporters that the head of the state’s beleaguered corrections department had things “well under control”.But images and interviews from inside the state’s prisons show a system in disarray, with deteriorating conditions, pervasive violence, multiple deaths and little oversight from staff.The strike started on 26 September after thousands of prisoners refused to leave their dorms and cell blocks for work in mess halls, factories and trash crews. Prison administrators said they had to cut back food rations from three meals a day to two, which prisoners saw as retaliation, but officials blamed on the fact that meals are generally prepared by the incarcerated workers themselves. Guards stopped letting people out for visiting, recreation or school. Cellphone footage shared with the Marshall Project shows trash piling up in walkways and dorms in some prisons.embedThen on Saturday – less than 24 hours after the governor’s declaration – prisoners recorded grainy cellphone footage of what appears to be a fatal stabbing in an Alabama lockup. The first of the two short clips, which prisoners said was filmed at Donaldson correctional facility in Bessemer, Alabama, shows one man apparently stabbing another in a common room as others watch from a few feet away. The second video shows a man sprawled out on the floor, struggling to lift his head up, while another prisoner leans over him as if to check whether he’s alive.The Alabama department of corrections did not dispute the authenticity of the videos, and confirmed that 30-year-old Denarieya Smith was killed on Saturday at Donaldson in an “inmate-on-inmate assault involving a weapon”, which officials are investigating. The department cited security concerns and refused to answer questions about whether the unit is understaffed. In the most recent numbers made public, the department of corrections was authorized by the legislature to have 3,326 employees in 2018. This summer, it had a little more than half that many, according to a staffing report from June.“We’re not going outside except for chow,” said one man who spoke to the Marshall Project from a medium-security facility and asked not to be named for fear of retaliation from prison officials. “There’s no visitation. There’s no trade school. No laundry. No ice. The officers have been working 16 hours a day since this started, but I noticed there’s less and less of them whenever we go to chow.”The man said he’d seen videos of fights and violence, including images of Smith’s killing. The county’s medical examiner confirmed that a second prisoner at Donaldson – 29-year-old Joseph Agee – had also been stabbed to death since the strike began. The medical examiner said both deaths are being investigated as homicides.“What we saw in that video is outrageous – but it’s been outrageous in DOC for so long, and it just doesn’t let up,” said Carla Crowder, executive director of the advocacy non-profit Alabama Appleseed. “It is not unusual to have multiple homicides or drug overdoses in a week, and videos circulating of sleeping guards and open-air drug use in the dorms. That is the new normal.”She added that the governor’s claims of control are “meaningless words, not grounded in reality”, she added.The Alabama prison system has been the target of a federal investigation for years, and in late 2020, the Department of Justice sued the state over concerns about overcrowding, violence and a high risk of death for incarcerated people. Despite the added scrutiny, prisoners and advocates said conditions have not improved. And as the case is not slated for trial until 2024, some hoped a collective action would spark legislative changes to sentencing and parole practices that could free people instead.Since the justice department’s suit began, “the death toll has risen significantly”, said Diyawn Caldwell, founder of the advocacy group Both Sides of the Wall. “They’re understaffed. The officers are bringing in the drugs that are killing people. The conditions are barbaric. You have people that are committing suicide. No one is making parole. What else do we do?”The corrections department did not respond to questions this week about the extent of the work stoppage, about violence and deaths in the prisons or about Caldwell’s allegations.After months of planning, prisoners and outside advocates publicly issued a list of policy-focused demands last week. The list included a streamlined review process for medical furloughs, clearer parole guidelines, retroactive repeal of the state’s habitual offender law, an end to life-without-parole sentences and the creation of a statewide conviction integrity unit. Prisoners who spoke to the Marshall Project acknowledged that most of the demands were outside the purview of the corrections department and would instead require the legislature to act.“Maybe they have to start listening. I think they know something is wrong, but did they know we’re really tired of it? By stopping work now, we are sending this system that’s already in crisis into another crisis,” said K Shaun Traywick, an incarcerated activist who goes by “Swift Justice”.Prison strikes are not uncommon, and at least twice in recent years prisoners in Alabama have been at the forefront in launching work stoppages that spread to prisons in several states, garnering nationwide attention.Yet almost as soon as the strike began last week, people in prison said officials started retaliating, cutting back food to two paltry bagged meals a day. Pictures sent from inside show one meal made up of two hot dogs, two pieces of bread and a grapefruit. Another consisted of an unappetizing spread of coleslaw, prunes, two pieces of bread and baloney.“Meals have included slices of bread topped with some sort of sludge, uncooked hot dogs and minuscule portions of canned fruit,” a lawyer representing the prisoners wrote on the fifth day of the strike. In a court filing last week, attorney Clifford Hardy accused the corrections department of trying to starve prisoners into submission, citing as proof a memo circulated at Donaldson correctional facility “detailing that meal reductions would continue until the labor strike ended”.Prison officials have not yet responded to the allegations in court, but said in a press release that because mess hall workers had refused to come to work, the restricted feeding schedule was “logistically necessary to ensure that other critical services are being provided”.The same day the prisoners’ lawyer complained to the court, the governor held her press conference in Montgomery, calling the demands “just unreasonable” and offering assurances to the public that new prison construction would improve conditions.“Everything’s still operational,” she said. “There’s no disruption in essential services. We’ve still got our two prisons being built, so we can better provide safety for the inmates as well as the workers.”Prisoners and their advocates disputed the notion that the demands were unreasonable and scoffed at the governor’s assessment of the current state of Alabama’s lockups.It’s not clear how many prisoners are participating in the strike or how long the work stoppage might last. On Monday, the department told AL.com that some people had returned to work, but five prisons remained entirely shut down by the strike. Prisoners who spoke to the Marshall Project disputed the department’s characterization that the protest was winding down.Regardless, the collective action is attracting attention from people imprisoned in other states. In group chat messages shared with the Marshall Project, dozens of men in prisons in other southern states have begun talking about whether they could replicate Alabama’s work stoppage.“I wanna see Georgia do this,” said the man who spoke to the Marshall Project from a medium-security prison in Alabama. “I wanna see the whole south do this.”This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.TopicsAlabamaUS prisonsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem

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      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem Bill Keller, once editor of the New York Times, now with the Marshall Project, shows how the US came to imprison so many of its citizens, disproportionately Black and brown, and how such a gross injustice might yet be addressedThe statistics are familiar but remain startling: America’s incarceration rate per 100,000 is “roughly twice that of Russia’s and Iran’s, four times that of Mexico’s, five times of England’s, six times Canada’s” and nine times that of Germany. In addition, “parole and probation regulate the lives of 4.5 million Americans” – more than twice as many as are confined in prison.We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turnRead moreThese numbers come at the beginning of Bill Keller’s smart, short new book, in which he tries to explain how America became so addicted to mass incarceration, and how we might finally reform a system which houses a disproportionally Black and brown population.Keller is a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer for his first New York Times posting as a foreign correspondent, in Moscow as the Soviet Union collapsed. He went on to be executive editor and then a columnist, but in 30 years, criminal justice was never one of his specialties. That all changed when Neil Barsky, a journalist turned investor turned philanthropist, tapped Keller to be founding editor of The Marshall Project, an ambitious effort to produce great journalism about the “causes and consequences” of mass incarceration.Keller’s book highlights many of the best pieces by Marshall Project reporters, but he also uses plenty of his own reporting to illuminate this particularly dark side of American democracy.The “good news”: the incarcerated population has actually been in slow and steady decline, from a peak of 2.3 million in 2008 to 1.8 million in 2020, including an unprecedented drop of 14% spurred by early releases because of Covid.America’s unfortunate exceptionalism on this subject is actually a fairly recent development. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the rate of incarceration mostly held steady at around 110 out of every 100,000 Americans. But it is nearly 500 today.Liberals and conservatives were equally responsible. A Democratic House speaker, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, sharply overreacted to the crack cocaine overdose of Len Bias, a Boston Celtics draftee, pushing through the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, “which imposed mandatory sentences, asset forfeitures and outlandishly severe sanctions on crack cocaine” favored by Black ghetto residents, while white consumers of powdered cocaine faced much more lenient penalties.As Keller writes, “Rehabilitation was denigrated on the right as coddling”. But a Democratic Senate judiciary committee chairman, Joseph R Biden of Delaware, made everything much worse by championing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which not only spurred a prison-building boom but also eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners enrolled in college courses. President Biden has acknowledged his mistake.It was President Reagan who inserted the profit motive into the prison business, allowing the Corrections Corporation of America to pioneer “the idea of privately run, for-profit prisons”. As Keller explains, “Since the new prison owners were paid the same way as hotel proprietors, by occupancy, they had no incentive to prepare prisoners for release.” Private prisons now house about 7% of state inmates and 17% of federal.Keller makes an unintentional argument for sending more Republicans to jail, by pointing out that three of the more unlikely advocates of prison reform are Republican officials who ended up in prison.Patrick Nolan was the minority leader of the California assembly when, in 1993, he was indicted on charges of racketeering and extortion. He served 25 months in a federal prison near San Francisco. When he was paroled, he was recruited by Charles Colson, a famous Watergate felon from Nixon’s White House who found religion “shortly before serving seven months himself in a federal prison”.Colson campaigned for more humane treatment of prisoners. Nolan became director of a new Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the American Conservative Union Foundation. Meanwhile, Bernard Kerik, Rudy Giuliani’s police commissioner who then did three years in federal prison for tax fraud and other crimes, became an advocate for voting rights for ex-felons.It’s not all good news. By the end of Trump administration, Nolan had succumbed to a rightwing conspiracy theory that “billionaire George Soros was masterminding a ‘Trojan horse’ strategy to elect soft-on-crime prosecutors and bring down the entire criminal justice system”.Keller points to Norway and Germany as providing the best examples for systemic reform. While American prison guards rarely get more than a few weeks of training, Germans get two years of college courses in psychology, ethics and communication. American visitors to German jails are amazed to see unarmed guards “shooting baskets, playing chess, sharing lunch” and having conversations with prisoners.One reason Europe is so far ahead is its depoliticization of the criminal justice system: judges and district attorneys are appointed, not elected.A Fordham University professor, John Pfaff, has pointed out that in the US, during the 1990s and 2000s, “as violent crime and arrests for violent crime both declined, the number of felony cases in state courts” suddenly shot up. Because of political pressures, “tens of thousands more prosecutors” were hired, “even after the rising crime of the 1980s had stalled out”.A Question of Standing review: how the CIA undermined American authorityRead morePfaff attributed the racial inequality in numbers of prisoners to “an imbalance of political power – tough-on-crime prosecutors elected by suburban whites who see the community destruction of mass incarceration from a distance”.Keller reports the most effective ways to reduce the prison population are also the most obvious ones:
      Make low-level drug crimes “non-crimes”.
      Divert people into “mental health and addiction programs, or probation or community service”.
      “Abolish mandatory minimum sentences and encourage” judges to “apply the least severe punishment appropriate under the circumstances”.
      Give “compassionate release to old and infirm inmates” who don’t pose a real threat to the general population.
      The challenge is to get these common-sense ideas to prevail over the rhetoric of politicians who still rail against anyone who is “soft on crime” – the knee-jerk ideology which got us into this catastrophe in the first place.
      What’s Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration is published in the US by Columbia Global Reports
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      ‘Slavery by any name is wrong’: the push to end unpaid labor in prisons

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      ‘Slavery by any name is wrong’: the push to end unpaid labor in prisonsA nationwide movement hopes to close the ‘slavery loophole’ that enables the exploitation of 800,000 prisoners in the US When prison reformer Johnny Perez was incarcerated he made sheets, underwear and pillowcases working for Corcraft, a manufacturing division of New York State Correctional Services that uses prisoners to manufacture products for state and local agencies. His pay ranged between 17 cents and 36 cents an hour.“We have a system that forces people to work and not only forces them to work but does not give them an adequate living wage,” said Perez. “Slavery by any name is wrong. Slavery in any shape or form is wrong.”Perez is now part of a nationwide movement that hopes to reform what some have called the “slavery loophole” that allows incarcerated people to be paid tiny sums for jobs that – if they refuse to do them – can have dire consequences.The 13th amendment of the US constitution, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. But it contained an exception for “a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”.This exception clause has been used to exploit prisoners in the US as workers, paying them nothing to a few dollars a day to perform jobs ranging from prison services to manufacturing or working for private employers where the majority of their pay is deducted for room and board and other expenses by the jurisdictions where they are incarcerated.A report published by the American Civil Liberties Union in June 2022 found about 800,000 prisoners out of the 1.2 million in state and federal prisons are forced to work, generating a conservative estimate of $11bn annually in goods and services while average wages range from 13 cents to 52 cents per hour. Five states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas – force prisoners to work without pay. The report concluded that the labor conditions of US prisoners violate fundamental human rights to life and dignity.A campaign to amend the constitution at the federal level and end the exception of the 13th amendment is being promoted by the US representative Nikema Williams and the senator Jeff Merkley. The bill has 175 co-sponsors in the House, 170 Democrats and 5 Republicans, and 14 co-sponsors in the US Senate, but has yet to leave committee for a floor vote in either the House or Senate.In the meantime the #EndTheException coalition, consisting of more than 80 national organizations, including criminal justice reform, civil rights and labor groups, is leading efforts to pass the abolition amendment at the federal level and through ballot initiatives at the state level.In November voters will decide on whether to remove exception clauses from their state constitutions in Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont. An abolition amendment passed in the California assembly, but failed to receive a Senate vote this year so that it could be on the ballot for voters this November.“The reality is that it is 2022 and in the United States, slavery is still legal,” said Bianca Tylek, founder and executive director of the non-profit Worth Rises. “These five states would join Colorado, Utah and Nebraska, states that have already ended the exception of their state’s constitutions. And so that would be exciting, that would bring that number to eight, with five out the eight being red states and I think that bodes well for where the campaign can go at the federal level.”It is time for change, said Johnny Perez. He emphasized that in prison, individuals aren’t provided adequate basic necessities such as food, toiletries, clothing and office supplies, and that the measly wages paid by these jobs don’t cover these extra expenses.Refusing a work assignment can also have adverse consequences, he said, ranging from being placed in solitary confinement to having any work issues placed on your record which affects parole and status within a prison that determines what privileges you receive. Workers in prison do not get any paid time off and are often forced to work even when sick unless an infirmary affirms they are not able to work.Despite having five years’ full-time experience manufacturing textiles while in prison, that experience isn’t included on Perez’s résumé; incarcerated people, rather than have educational programs available to better support them upon release, are forced to do arduous manual labor jobs and often aren’t able to find work in the same industry when they are released.“It’s still continuing to happen and it disproportionately impacts Black, brown and Indigenous people in this country,” said Perez. “So long as the exception clause exists, we will always have an underclass in this society that is going to be the dumping ground for our problems and our shortcomings.”This month the #EndTheException coalition launched the Except For Me digital campaign to raise awareness of the issues, ending with the delivery of a petition to Congress in support of the abolition amendment and an art installation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.“This exception is about people and it’s about people for whom the 13th amendment doesn’t apply,” added Tylek. “We really want people to see those people and see the people that society has successfully otherwise hidden away.”Among those featured in the campaign is Britt White, who worked at a Burger King franchise in Alabama while in community status until 2014; about 60% of her wages were taken by the state of Alabama to cover fees, room and board or restitution.“Prison itself is expensive,” said White. “I can only speak for the state of Alabama where I was incarcerated, so providing hygiene, trying to supplement the lack of nourishment is very expensive, and my family had their own bills and financial responsibilities they had to take care of. I still had more support than most people did and it was still very difficult to survive in prison because everything has a cost associated with it.”White explained there were medical fees associated with received medical care and sometimes the food provided was not fit for human consumption.“I just can’t emphasize enough the lack of agency that you have,” added White. “If we are going to allow people who are incarcerated to work jobs, we need to pay them a livable wage and we need to center their dignity. We don’t need to place them in positions where there are hostile environments where they can be retaliated against and lose their agency.”Her experience in the Alabama department of corrections drove her to work as an organizer in criminal justice reform to address the corruption and despair she witnessed and experienced in the prison system.“We cannot condemn people, and then say that you deserve to be put away or you can’t come back to society, you’re not trustworthy enough to live in the community with other people, but you are still good enough for us to make a profit. That is unforgivable,” White said. “And that is the part that is still very reminiscent of slavery that my ancestors went through is that they were not good enough to be viewed as 100% as human beings, but they weren’t substantial enough to make a profit off of. That is the exception that has to be ended in our communities.”TopicsUS prisonsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Revisited: The Division: New Orleans – part four – podcast

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      The division begins to reinvestigate Kuantay Reeder’s case, discovering new evidence that could hold the key to his freedom. The Guardian’s US southern bureau chief, Oliver Laughland, interviews Harry Connick, the district attorney from 1973 to 2003, to ask how he felt about presiding over an administration accused of rights violations and disproportionately punishing the city’s poorest Black residents

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      This week we are revisiting some of our favourite episodes from the year so far. This episode was first broadcast on 9 May. The division spends six months reinvestigating Kuantay Reeder’s case. They find new evidence, and the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief, Oliver Laughland, accompanies the team to court to see whether Reeder’s conviction will be overturned. Also present are members of Mark Broxton’s family, including his mother, Mary Green, who see Reeder face to face for the first time since 1995. Oliver also visits Harry Connick, the district attorney from 1973 to 2003. Many people argue his policies – such as routine use of the habitual offender law – were one of the main reasons New Orleans became the incarceration capital of the world. Oliver questions Connick on the use of multi-billing and the issue of Brady violations – where evidence is withheld – during his tenure. In 2011 the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said a lack of training on Brady was pervasive. In many ways, Connick and the new district attorney, Jason Williams, couldn’t be much further apart. A lot of what Jason Williams is doing now is a direct response to the policies and the legacy of Connick. But there are some parallels between them. Connick was in power during the biggest crime wave New Orleans had ever seen. And when Williams took office, the crime rate was soaring too. Oliver and the producer Joshua Kelly pay a visit to Williams to ask how he is responding to the pressure of the rising crime rates and his upcoming trial for alleged tax evasion. If found guilty, there are question marks over the future of the civil-rights division. Read Oliver’s reporting on his six months with the division: Inside the division: how a small team of US prosecutors fight decades of shocking injustice Life in prison for stealing $20: how the Division is taking apart brutal criminal sentences The Visiting Room is an online project documenting interviews with over 100 inmates serving life without parole sentences at Angola prison. Kuantay Reeder was filmed as part of the project while he was incarcerated: More

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      Revisited: The Division: New Orleans – part two – podcast

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      In 1995, Kuantay Reeder is sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he says he didn’t commit. He spends years doing hard labour in the fields of the prison, and trying to have his conviction overturned. By 2020, he has exhausted almost every legal avenue available to him. But 2020 is also the year that Jason Williams is elected to be the new district attorney of New Orleans. Will the creation of a new civil rights division in his office offer hope to Reeder?

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      This week we are revisiting some of our favourite episodes from the year so far. This episode was first broadcast on 7 May. In 1995, Kuantay Reeder is convicted of a murder he says he did not commit. He is sent to Angola prison in Louisiana, the site of a former plantation, where he is forced to spend years working in the fields, work Kuantay calls “modern-day slavery”. Prof Andrea Armstrong has been going to Angola for years, documenting its history and talking to prisoners about their lives there. She talks about prison labour programmes and the indignities faced by inmates. After fighting for years to have his conviction overturned, Reeder’s case has little legal hope left. But in 2020 New Orleans elects a new district attorney, Jason Williams, who promises to reckon with the city’s history of unfair prosecutions. Williams talks to the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief, Oliver Laughland, about his election victory and his reform pledges. Read Oliver’s reporting on his six months with the division: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/06/life-in-prison-for-stealing-20-how-the-division-is-taking-apart-brutal-criminal-sentences More