prison reform

Formerly incarcerated women gathered outside the courthouse in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday to recount the horrors of sexual abuse they say they endured during their time in New York state prisons. Mia Wheeler, a former inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the largest women’s prison in the state, says she was raped numerous times on numerous occasions by a...

They say the abuse happened inside dozens of facilities, such as Bayview, Bedford Hills, and Rikers Island, Erica Byfield reports.

Voters in five states went to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to ban slavery and forced prison labor.

The United States’ ongoing labor shortage is bad for employers but presents an opportunity for workers who often could not find jobs in rosier economic times: ex-prisoners.

Between 1986 and 2010, the U.S. justice system punished crack cocaine 100 times more than powder cocaine, despite them being two forms of the same drug. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was part of a group that worked to address the disparity.

Dozens of women at Rikers Island jail signed a petition opposing the recent decision to temporarily move them to state facilities, NBC New York has learned, claiming that the move is “silencing us, hiding us, abusing your power.”
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/women-at-rikers-sign-petition-against-moving-them-to-state-facilities/3326744/

A male corrections officer at New Jersey’s long-troubled and only women’s prison has been charged with sexually assaulting an inmate and official misconduct, the state’s top law enforcement official said Wednesday.

Nearly all female and transgender inmates at NYC’s Rikers Island jail complex will be temporarily transferred to state lockups, a move touted as a way to relieve strain on the city’s failing jails but one that advocates slammed as a “rushed”

“They didn’t know what to do with us,” says Jermaine Archer, who caught COVID while incarcerated at Rikers Island. The New York City jail holds people pretrial and has faced criticism for deaths and crowded conditions. NBC New York’s Kay Angrum was live outside after 2 counter-protesting groups spoke on behalf of corrections workers and the incarcerated.

The NYC correction commissioner appointed a former top NYPD chief to advise him on operational changes at Rikers Island, according to a department memo obtained by NBC New York.

Lawmakers are joining in on the chorus calling for Rikers Island to be shut down. Erica Byfield reports.