by Ed Lyon
When Minnesota state prisoner C. Fausto Cabrera was transferred to the Rush City Correctional Facility (RCCF), he came across a photo by acclaimed photographer Alec Soth on a book cover of a poetry collection. It was of a rusted, homemade knife that had been wired together.
Thus ...
by Ed Lyon
What happens when a state prisoner or jail detainee dies in Hawaii’s custody? Few people know because prison officials do not tell anyone. Well, hardly anyone. A heavily redacted report goes to the state’s governor, who supposedly runs the Department of Public Safety (DPS), the state’s prison ...
by Ed Lyon
Haywood County, North Carolina is a conservative, rural political entity located in a mountainous region in the state’s west. Trump won his 2020 reelection bid there by 30 points with staunch republican Madison Cawthorn being sent to Congress as their federal representative. Heavily traditional values, law ...
by Ed Lyon
A dozen immigrant asylum seekers who had tested positive for COVID-19 were released from a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center into the surrounding community of Calexico, California, in March 2021—the same month ICE was given a deadline to address deficiencies at the facility revealed ...
by Ed Lyon
Hardly a summer passes that prisoners do not die from heat illnesses of one variety or another. This is especially true in the southern part of the country where retributive attitudes prevail along with an enslavement mentality that continues to linger from the antebellum era. This manifests ...
by Ed Lyon
As early as February 2020, medical and corrections experts warned criminal justice officials across the U.S. of the danger COVID-19 posed to crowded prison populations, encouraging them to parole as many prisoners as feasible. By late 2020, though, officials with the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (MADOC) were ...
by Ed Lyon
While problematic at any other time, prison overcrowding has proven deadly during the global COVID-19 pandemic because social distancing is one of the main weapons epidemiologists recommend to combat the spread of this highly contagious, often fatal disease. COVID-19 had infected nearly one in five U.S. prisoners ...
by Ed Lyon
Kentucky in December 2020 reopened Otter Creek Correctional Center (OCCC), leasing it from CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), but staffing it with state employed Department of Corrections (DOC) staff. Its new name is the Southeast State Correctional Complex (SSCC) and it’s now a ...
by Ed Lyon
Jennifer Bowen Hicks wandered the United States for many years freelancing for literary magazines and teaching writing classes before making her home in Minnesota. In 2011, she decided to share her unique writing skill with state prisoners, thinking of her own incarcerated relatives and friends.
Of the ...
by Ed Lyon
"Watch out for the kids, he’s here,” was one of the hurtful comments Dion Harrell often overheard whenever he attended a neighborhood barbecue or get-together. In 1992, 22-year-old Harrell, an African American man, was wrongfully convicted of raping a 17-year-old girl, based on flawed eyewitness testimony.
This ...
