August 11, 2022 -
As climate change-fueled heat waves become more frequent and intense, many incarcerated people endure dangerous triple-digit temperatures for long periods. Efforts are underway in some states to bring relief from the heat — and to challenge the underlying constitutional provisions that allow prisoners to be treated as subhuman.
April 20, 2020 -
With the COVID-19 pandemic raging through correctional facilities, many states have ordered the release of nonviolent offenders in local jails or prison inmates at greater risk from the virus. But states in the Deep South have been slow to act. Meanwhile, Louisiana is moving its COVID-19-stricken prisoners to the notorious Angola penitentiary — an hour's drive from a hospital with a ventilator.
February 26, 2016 -
With millions of Americans disqualified for good-paying jobs because of criminal pasts, a growing number of states and local governments across the South are joining the movement to end the practice of asking about convictions on job applications.
May 7, 2015 -
There's a growing national movement to end the discriminatory practice of requiring job applicants to check off a box if they have a criminal record. Last month, Virginia became the most recent state to "Ban the Box."
March 27, 2015 -
Looming over today's mass incarceration crisis are the shadows of slavery and of the brutal and profitable convict lease system that arose after slavery's end.
October 21, 2014 -
A lack of upward mobility for young people is a bigger problem in the South than in any other U.S. region, according to a new report from MDC, a North Carolina-based research nonprofit that focuses on reducing poverty and addressing structural inequity.
September 26, 2014 -
New numbers on the prison population in 2013 indicate that the South is making progress on reducing its prison population. But with a history of high incarceration rates and over-capacity prisons, the South still has a long road ahead.
December 17, 2013 -
The private prison industry is fueling high incarceration rates in Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States. It's a way to keep an indentured class in a state and nation built on slavery.
September 20, 2013 -
As U.S. incarceration rates fall, private prison companies are taking steps to guarantee profits with contracts requiring states to either meet prison occupancy quotas or pay for empty beds. Louisiana and Virginia are among the states locked into the highest occupancy guarantee requirements.
August 29, 2013 -
If we're going to claim New Orleans has made progress since the unnatural disaster of Katrina eight years ago, perhaps we should first define what we mean by "progress."
