Watch the culminating event to the Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation Inquiry “What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns?” livestreamed from Susanville, CA and read the Takeaway …
When your town’s biggest business is punishment, how do you fight back when you’re being punished unfairly?
That’s the predicament facing Susanville, a small town that is the seat of Lassen County in northeast California.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is righteously trying to close prisons, a historical reversal and acknowledgment that the state has incarcerated …
I learned Johnny Cash songs because of my own frequent imprisonment in the backseat of the family station wagon. Dad played all the Man in Black’s hits on the Chevy’s 8-track. “A Boy Named Sue” probably made the most lasting impression on me, but I also learned, among other lessons, that there is no despair quite so dark as being stuck in Folsom Prison.
Otherwise, I never gave much thought to the place until the day my parents announced we were moving from the Bay Area to Folsom.
“The place with the prison?” I half-asked, half-accused. It was a refrain I’d …
Just before I started graduate school, I was arrested and spent a night in jail. I wrote in my journal about the experience, but I put it behind me and finished my first year of graduate study in sociology without further incident.
At the start of my second year, however, I was arrested and jailed twice more.
During that fall quarter, while my peers attended graduate seminars and held discussions about this theorist or that method, my life descended …
For better or worse, by the time it opened in 1989, Pelican Bay had already saved Del Norte, giving the community its largest single employer and an economically stable base. Crescent City, which just a few years prior had removed a stoplight from its deserted downtown business district, was now building elementary schools.
But as the ‘90s progressed, life inside, for both prisoners and staff, became more and …
Over recent years, though, a connection has been slowly forged between Corcoran and some of its resident maximum security inmates. The rather benign force responsible?
Food sales and charity fundraisers.
Local vendors, C-yard’s administration, and the Inmate Advisory Council (IAC)—an elected body of inmates, by inmates, and for inmates—have partnered to make food sales to the inmate population regular events over the last four years. The food sales provide major payouts for the vendors and also benefit local community organizations. Every sale has a designated charitable recipient, which receives a percentage of the money raised. …
