Posts by: Bridget Conley

On November 17, 2023, Jorge L. Zerquera reportedly committed suicide while being held inside a Behavioral Adjustment Unit (BAU), at Massachusetts’ medium security prison, MCI-Norfolk. The BAU houses, according to the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC), “individuals removed from general population due to unacceptable risk to facility safety and operations” (3). As covered […]

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In this video, WPF’s Bridget Conley speaks with Stephenie Young, curator of Disappearing Worlds: The photographs of Evgenia Arbugaeva and Natela Grigalashvili, a new photography show at Greg Cranna’s Bridge Gallery in Cambridge, MA, open from September 9 to October 14, 2023. The two photographers whose work is being shown, Evgenia Arbugaeva and […]

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Around the world, societies struggle over what to do with abandoned structures where violence and injustices once took place. Prisons often loom large within these memory-struggles. In some locations, like the Robben Island (South Africa), Tuol Sleng (Cambodia), or the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory (Argentina), memorial activists transformed abandoned detention centers […]

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Writing in 2005, Erik Luna contributed an apt characterization of American mass incarceration: “the escalation of ‘law and order’ politics in recent years has created a one-way ratchet in U.S. governance, churning out an ever-increasing number of crimes and severity of punishments” (pg. 719). This approach to criminal justice dominated for decades, beginning in […]

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Democratic societies need prisons – so the argument goes — as the harsh side of rule of law. No one is equal before the law, a key premise of democracy, if rules are broken without consequences. In this way, equality tempers freedom, allowing a justification for incarceration.

But prisons do not protect rule of […]

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As cited in a New York Times article this week, the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project recently announced that is releasing a “comprehensive public resource documenting prison deaths nationwide.” Already, their research demonstrates a devastating impact of COVID on incarcerated people:

In 2020, at least 6,182 people died in U.S. prisons.  This […]

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