This Map Shows How Radically Trump Has Changed Immigration Detention
A guard escorts an immigrant detainee at the Adelanto Detention Facility in California.John Moore/Getty In 2016, Donald Trump ran for president on an immigration platform that promised to close the southern border, end the “catch and release” policy, and implement a “zero tolerance” approach to anyone crossing the border illegally. While the current immigration detention…
What Happens When Incarcerated People Get a World-Class Education?
Bard Prison Initiative students conjugate Spanish verbs at Eastern New York Correctional Facility.Skiff Mountain Films In the fall of 2015, a maximum-security prison in New York invited Harvard’s debate team to compete against a squad of three incarcerated men. The men, all convicted of violent crimes, knew they faced tough odds: Unlike their Harvard opponents,…
A Judge Says Thousands of Detainees May Sue a Prison Company for Using Them as a “Captive Labor Force”
John Moore/Getty Early one morning, Abdiaziz Karim was sleeping in his new dorm in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center when an officer woke him up. The guard pointed out graffiti on the wall and a light fixture smeared with toothpaste, and demanded that Karim, a Somali waiting for an asylum hearing, clean…
Books Have the Power to Rehabilitate. But Prisons Are Blocking Access to Them.
Behind the walls of California State Prison, Sacramento, six inmates gather in the library for their weekly short-story club. The librarian introduces the day’s pick, Doris Lessing’s A Sunrise on the Veld, and the men take turns reading it aloud. Some of them lean forward in their chairs as they listen; one traces the words…
A California Prisoner Ripped Out Her Eye and Ate It. It’s a Sign of a Bigger Crisis That the State Tried to Downplay.
A patient is moved after a session with a psychologist at the the mental health unit at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California, in 2014. Rich Pedroncelli/AP In July 2018, Dr. Michael Golding, the chief psychiatrist for California’s correctional department, visited a maximum-security prison near Sacramento to shadow a couple of psychiatrists there. At…
Inside the US Marshals’ Secretive, Deadly Detention Empire
A large rectangle of red dirt on the flat expanse of West Texas’ Permian Basin reminds Sadrac Garcia every day of what his family has lost. A few months ago, he could stand on the small porch of his brother Juan’s double-wide and peer into the window of their parents’ trailer a few meters away.…