Blog by Tony Platt* “There have been commissions before, there have been task forces, there have been conversations, and nothing happens,” said President Obama when he announced in December the creation of a blue-ribbon Task Force on 21st Century Policing to come up with solutions to the “simmering distrust that exists between too many police […]
Month: February 2015
The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement
by Ruth Wilson Gilmore* After declining for three consecutive years, the US prison and jail population increased in 2013. The widely declared victory over mass incarceration was premature at best. Below I raise four areas of particular concern about the state of the anti-prison movement. (1) A tendency to cozy up to the right wing, […]
Reentry to Nothing #3 — Home, Sweet Home
by Alessandro De Giorgi* The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and street crime. In 2011, with the agreement of […]