by Alessandro De Giorgi* Image by Jenna Pope (@JennaBPope). Original tweet here. • According to a recent FBI report on cases of “justifiable homicide” annually reported by a sample of police departments across the nation, between 2008 and 2012 law enforcement officers have “justifiably” killed an average of 400 civilians each year. An analysis of […]
Author: Social Justice
Reentry to Nothing #1 – Get a Job, Any Job
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 […]
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 […]
20th Anniversary of the Genocide in Rwanda: An Interview with Mathilde Mukantabana
Mathilde Mukantabana, interviewed by Tony Platt* To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda on April 7th, a survivor, activist, and now diplomat discusses its personal and political legacies. The following interview took place at Mathilde Mukantabana’s home in Sacramento on May 30, 2013. It has been edited and abbreviated for clarity. • • […]
Prison Murals in Northern Ireland: Art and Resistance
by Bill Rolston* With state prisoners in California and detained immigrants in Seattle using the hunger strike as a form of protest, what can we learn from prisoners in Northern Ireland who used hunger and art as weapons of resistance during “The Troubles”? Resistance to colonial rule in the 18th and 19th centuries ensured that […]
International Women’s Day Greeting
by Margaret Randall* International Women’s Day, March 8th, is my favorite holiday. Every year I write a brief tribute—to remind my friends and also myself how much women everywhere give to resist oppression and sustain life. Usually I’ve focused on a group of women whose ordinary heroism was particularly noteworthy since the previous March. South […]
Violence against Palestinian People: Not News
by A.J. Caro* At a Glance (Source: Amnesty International) Amnesty International documented the killing of 22 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank in 2013. At least four were children. According to the UN, more West Bank Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in 2013 than in 2011 and 2012 combined. In the last three years at […]
Remembering Bill Chambliss (1933–2014)
by Gregory Shank* William J. Chambliss was an important founder of the radical criminology movement in United States and an enduring friend of Social Justice. He is listed as a Contributing Editor on our 1974 inaugural issue, consistently offered thoughtful peer reviews of articles, and shortly before his death undertook an essay on President Obama’s […]
Making a Space for Blackness: Mourning Stuart Hall
by Andreana Clay* The Stuart Hall Project, Stuart Hall, (c) Smoking Dogs Films 2013 Phillip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose this week and I had all kinds of feelings about it: he was a brilliant actor, one of my favorites, who was very serious about craft. I immediately rented all his movies […]