Prison articles
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Prison Calls Are Increasingly Free, but Prisoners Still Aren’t
I recently saw the face of a friend whom I had never met before. In a video call to a California state prison facility, I was finally face-to-face—albeit via video chat—with Dominic Williams, who is serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole and who has spent the majority of his life More
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How prison officials manufactured gangs and gang wars in Virginia’s prisons
by Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson No Virginia prison gangs before 2004 With the prevalence of youth lumpen organizations (so called street gangs) in Virginia today, it’s hard to believe that there were actually no gangs (especially no Black ones) in Virginia’s prisons prior to 2004. The culture never took root because Virginia’s own culture of prisoner […]
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Bureau of Prisons to close California women’s prison where inmates have been subjected to sex abuse
The beleaguered federal Bureau of Prisons says it is planning to close a women’s prison in California known as the “rape club” despite attempts to reform the troubled facility after an Associated Press investigation exposed rampant staff-on-inmate sexual abuse. Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters said in a statement to the AP that the agency had “taken unprecedented steps and provided a tremendous amount of resources to address culture, recruitment and retention, aging infrastructure - and...