by Ed Lyon
Among the few organizations intrepid enough to reach out to prisoners is a group called the Worker Writers School (WWS). From its beginning as a poetry workshop for traumatized prisoners in the aftermath of the slaughter of prisoners at New York’s Attica prison in 1971, WWS is ...
by Ed Lyon
The year 2020 has been rife with unpleasant surprises. The planet has contended with the coronavirus pandemic — the worst since the Spanish flu — and protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. Even the weather chose to join in the fray. August saw two ...
by Ed Lyon
On June 16, 2020, North Carolina’s Wake County Superior Court ordered the state Department of Public Safety (DPS) temporarily to cease the majority of prisoner transfers. Except for medical emergencies or cases of life endangerment, ordered Judge Vinston Rozier, Jr., DPS may not move prisoners unless they ...
by Ed Lyon
On August 7, 2020, Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) announced that a prisoner at the Oahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC) had tested positive for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Until then, Hawaii’s state prison system had been the country’s only one to claim complete success ...
by Ed Lyon
here is one word that rarely, if ever, is used to describe anything that occurs in prisons. That word is fair. For example, study after study of prison demographics all conclude that although Black citizens are the minority of the U.S. population, they comprise the majority of ...
by Ed Lyon
Born in 1972, Tennessean Nicholas Sutton suffered a life straight out of a 5-star horror movie. His father was a mentally ill drug abuser and his mother abandoned him to the notso-tender mercies of daddy dearest. Regularly beaten by his father, the boy’s arm was broken, he ...
by Ed Lyon
By some standards, Kansas has a relatively small prison system. Numbering only around 10,000 beds, it is dwarfed by California’s and Texas’ penal institutions, which have 134,000 and 142,000 beds, respectively. Regardless of size, however, the aging of the system’s prison population is roughly the same ...
by Ed Lyon
Until February 18, 2020, it cost pre- and post-trial detainees in the Dallas County, Texas jails .24¢ per minute to speak to their families on the phone. Urged by criminal justice reform groups and the citizenry, the Dallas County Commissioners Court voted unanimously to forgo any and ...
by Ed Lyon
Nearly every resident of a prison will quickly tell anyone who asks that what passes for food there leaves a lot to be desired. It is a good bet that the moniker “mystery meat” originated in a prison chow hall somewhere.
In the early 2000s, the Texas ...
by Ed Lyon
I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”That’s a famous quote from Luke Skywalker, a character in 1977’s Star Wars, as his Millennium Falcon spacecraft emerges from faster-than-light speed only to find Alderaan, its destination planet, has been destroyed. But this phrase of foreboding was also recently ...
