by Alessandro De Giorgi* The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and street crime. In 2011, with the agreement of […]
Month: May 2014
Reentry to Nothing: Urban Survival after Mass Incarceration
by Alessandro De Giorgi* You know, being in prison and not actually knowing how hard it is out here on the streets…. I remember when I got out. I kicked it with my wife for a few hours before I made it to the halfway house. So she took me through my neighborhood, and I […]
Why We Need Whistleblowers–Then and Now
by John Raines* On March 8, 1971, a group calling itself the “Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI” broke into the FBI agency in Media, Pennsylvania, and removed all the files. I was part of that group. We sorted the cases into criminal (40 percent) and political (60 percent) and, a few weeks later, we […]