Over these past several years, jail and prison advocates and activists have called for the ending of “solitary confinement,” a practice that has subjected generations of incarcerated men and women to inhumane punishment in segregated confinement with little to no human interaction for extended periods of time.
American prisons house more than 1.5 million individuals, an increase of over 390% since 1978. This growth persisted even in the face of an overarching decline in crime rates since the 1990s and the longest terms of incarceration since we began to collect accurate data.
Recently Congress presented a stimulus package that included significant changes to higher-education law, including the resumption of Federal financial aid to people in prison that was banned in the 1994 crime bill championed by then-Sen. Joe Biden. The restoration of Pell grants for incarcerated students is a watershed moment for the criminal justice overhaul movement as it unwinds decades of punitive practices in favor of finding avenues to reintegrate incarcerated people into society.
In this episode of Both Sides of the Bars, host Andre Ward takes a look to 2020 along with his guest, gabriel sayegh, the co-founder of Katal Center for Equity, Health and Justice. They talk about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemia on the criminal justice system, the work done by Katal Center in response to the war on drugs, mass incarceration and police reform.
Americans are aging in prison. But what needs to be done about reducing that elderly population and what to do with them once they are released is still being studied and debated. On this episode, host Andre Ward talks about this issue with Jose Hamza Saldana, director of RAPP (Release Aging People in Prison).
When tempers reached a boiling point on September 9, 1971, the prisoners filling the cells of New York State's Attica prison erupted in a full-fledged rebellion, taking over the prison and holding it for four days, along with several guards who had been taken hostage. By the time state troopers and police forces retook Attica by force, 10 hostages and 29 inmates had died. The repercussions of that uprising are still being felt today according to the two guests of today's "Both Sides of the...