Biden Won’t Say If He Still Stands By His Crime Bill’s Ban on Pell Grants for Prisoners
Michael Dwyer/AP Growing up in South Philadelphia, Carl Upchurch dropped out of elementary school and was first locked up for stealing a bike when he was nine. By 13, he was involved with gangs; in his twenties, he was sent to prison for armed robbery. During his 10-year sentence, Upchurch returned to his education, earning…
Alabama Banned Abortions. Then Its Lawmakers Remembered Rapists Can Get Parental Rights.
Stock photoRyanKing999/iStock/Getty A few months after Jessica Stallings’ 13th birthday, her uncle raped her for the first time. He was 20 years old, and he lived with Stallings and her mother in their Alabama home. He kept raping her, she claimed in court documents, and by the time she was 19, she had three children…
Should Rape Victims Have to Spend Time in Jail for Not Testifying?
xijian/Getty Images In 2015, Renata Singleton, an accountant in New Orleans, arrived at court in an orange jumpsuit, shackled at her hands and feet. But unlike the other inmates she was chained to, Singleton, a mother of three, hadn’t been accused of any crime. She was still jailed five days earlier on a $100,000 bond…
Can a Prosecutor Ever Truly Be Progressive? Ferguson May Be the Ultimate Test Case.
Credit: Mother Jones; Jeff Roberson/AP On the night Wesley Bell unseated longtime St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch, Kayla Reed celebrated a progressive electoral victory and a personal promise fulfilled. Reed has been protesting and organizing in the St. Louis area ever since Darren Wilson, a white cop, shot Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, in…
We Need to Bury the Columbine Shooters
Mother Jones illustration; Getty Two of the future shooters were just infants and a third wasn’t even born yet when Columbine happened. But by the time they each attacked their schools last year, all three young men had drawn inspiration from the pair who committed suicidal mass murder at their Colorado high school on April…
Rep. Ilhan Omar Was Right: Threats Against Muslim Americans Are Rising
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.Susan Walsh/AP In March, about a week after a gunman stormed two mosques in New Zealand, killing dozens of Muslim worshipers, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) gave a speech at the banquet of a Muslim civil rights group in California. A short snippet of that speech—in which Omar referred to the 9/11 attacks…