Advertisement
Featured Job Listing
Share your Experiences
All Events
See Full Calendar
List Your Events
Thoughts Archive
-
Multimedia reporter joins Lives in Focus
Posted on March 10, 2009 | No CommentsMaya Pope-Chappell is an Oakland, CA native who moved to New York last year to pursue a Masters' degree at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Her freelance articles have appeared in newspapers such as the Brooklyn Heights Courier, Contra Costa Times, and the Brooklyn Free Press, and online for sites like the Amsterdam News, Latina.com, and Whatchusay.com. -
Essay: When a lethal crime hits home
Posted on February 16, 2009 | No CommentsI met my cousin, Jarrett, at his funeral.Just a week out of jail, he’d taken his 4-month-old baby girl hostage, shot and killed her grandmother and wounded two others. After a six-hour standoff, Jarrett turned the shotgun on himself. I watched the whole thing—cops in visible bullet-proof vests, neighbors on their lawns, the black body bag—on the six o’ clock news. -
Rockefeller Laws: An end in sight
Posted on February 9, 2009 | No CommentsAn editorial in the New York Times notes that the New York Legislature finally seems poised to overturn the infamous Rockefeller drug laws. But after years of building support for reform, legislative leaders now have it within their power to make wholesale changes in this profoundly destructive law. -
Arts Competition Poem: Incarceration
Posted on December 15, 2008 | No Commentsi desperately want freedom. i perspire to cool myself off from the heat of being imprisoned by mental bars and walls. the correctional officers are clocks and the keys on their waists go tic…toc…tic…toc as they walk down D-block. “Who […] -
President Bush praises mentoring program for prisoners' children
Posted on December 2, 2008 | No CommentsOutgoing President George W. Bush showed his inner "community organizer" on Tuesday by praising the volunteers who mentor the children of people who are incarcerated. About 2 million children and youth in the United States have at least one parent in a Federal or State correctional facility, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics. -
Mississippi Inmate deaths from illness highest in U.S.
Posted on December 1, 2008 | No CommentsState prisoners in Mississippi are sick and dying at one of the highest rates in the nation. It's a situation that is raising legal concerns with lawmakers and moral questions with prison-reform advocates. -
Bush Issues 14 Pardons and Commutes 2 Sentences
Posted on November 25, 2008 | No CommentsMr. Bush has been relatively sparing in his use of pardons compared with past presidents, and the latest round of actions continued that pattern. -
Pushing to get the best college education prison will allow
Posted on November 24, 2008 | No CommentsIris Bowen and Cheryl Wilkins faced a tougher challenge than SAT tests and admission's applications when they decided they wanted to attend college. They were obtaining their college degrees while serving time in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Westchester County, New York. -
NJ lawmaker recounts sons' prison stint
Posted on November 21, 2008 | No CommentsDemocratic Assembly leader Bonnie Watson Coleman has long championed better services for New Jersey inmates and their families. Her advocacy is more impassioned now than ever following her personal experience with it. Coleman shares her experience of her son's time in prison. -
Democratic control of NY state senate makes reform of Rockefeller Law more likely
Posted on November 18, 2008 | No CommentsAs Democrats captured a majority in the state senate for the first time since 1964, beating out Republican incumbents in two districts, the new political landscape has many reformers anticipating a once-in-a-generation opportunity to influence longstanding legislation.