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Taking Stock of Solitary Confinement’s Mental Toll

In prisons throughout the United States, a total of somewhere around 80,000 prisoners are isolated from human contact for 22 to 24 hours a day. These prisoners are kept in very small cells—spaces of roughly 80 square feet.  In the cell is a bed, a toilet, and very little else.  Prisoners in solitary are fed three meals a day and are often allowed outside every day for an hour, with no contact with other prisoners.  The practice, commonly known as “solitary confinement” has come to be known by a number of euphemisms, including “restrictive housing” and “segregation.”

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Drug Addiction: Criminal Behavior or Public Health Crisis?

It is painfully obvious that the United States is in the midst of an epidemic of opioid abuse. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), more people died from drug overdoses in 2014 than any other recorded year, and the majority of those overdose deaths involved opioids. DHHS and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claim that an increase in the prescription of pain medication is a primary driver of the opioid epidemic. According to the CDC, the amount of prescription opioids sold in the US has nearly quadrupled since 1999. However, Americans do not report higher levels of pain than they did in 1999.

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Justice on a Conveyor Belt: The Death Penalty in Arkansas

In March and April of this year, the state of Arkansas made national headlines for its plan to execute eight prisoners over the course of 11 days.  The speed involved is striking, especially when compared with national annual execution averages; only 20 people were executed nationwide in 2016.  

The truth is, Arkansas is racing against the clock.  Like most states, the primary method of execution in Arkansas is lethal injection.  Death by lethal injection is typically accomplished using a three-drug cocktail.  In Arkansas, midazolam is used as an anesthetic, ideally ensuring that the prisoner does not experience any pain.  Vecuronium bromide is used to cause paralysis before potassium chloride is used to stop the heart.  The trouble is, the remaining midazolam that Arkansas possesses is about to reach its expiration date, and it looks like they won’t have access to more any time soon.

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Making Sense of Trump’s Wiretapping Accusations

At 3:35am on March 4, President Donald Trump tweeted an accusation that former President Barack Obama wiretapped the phones in Trump Tower prior to the election. Trump compared it to Watergate and called Obama “sick.” A spokesperson for Obama quickly and strongly denied the allegations, stating that “neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.” FBI Director James Comey asked the Justice Department to immediately reject the president’s allegations on the grounds that it falsely implies that the FBI broke the law.

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Death Row Dilemmas: The Sentencing and Execution of Ronald Smith Jr.

In the early hours of the morning, on November 8th, 1994, Casey Wilson was working his shift at a Circle K in Huntsville, Alabama.  That morning, 23-year-old Ronald Bert Smith Jr. came into the station with the intention to rob it.  He pistol-whipped Wilson and forced him to the convenience store restroom where he shot him.  Wilson died of his wounds.  To avoid detection and identification, Smith removed the store’s surveillance videotape from that night and brought it with him.

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Presidential Clemencies and the Role of Punishment

On November 22nd, President Obama reduced the prison sentences of 79 drug offenders. This is the latest in a burst of clemencies he has awarded during his last year in office. Traditionally, there is a burst of clemencies towards the end of a president’s term, when there are fewer political hurdles and relationships to maintain, but this week’s sentence reductions bring Obama past the 1,000 clemency mark – more than the past 11 presidents put together.

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Reconciling Democracy and Incarceration

The United States tends to exhibit a great nationalistic pride in its democracy. And so generally, we assume that any U.S. citizen over the age of 18 is eligible to vote. Yet this right can be taken away permanently if one is convicted of a felony, the most common of which being drug-related. Ironically, the United States, proudly deemed the “Land of the Free,” has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yet it still may be shocking to consider that “[a]pproximately 2.5 percent of the total U.S. voting age population—1 of every 40 adults—is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction.”

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Who is Getting a Fair Trial? A Problem with Ensuring the Impartiality of Juries

When you are accused of a crime, likely of chief concern will be that your jury will treat you fairly. Once the jury is presented with the facts and are briefed on how to understand the law, they go off to deliberate. How the jury deliberates from there is up to them, and you trust that they follow the judge’s instructions and don’t hold any biases they may have against you.

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In Ferguson, Divides Remain as a Community Moves Forward

Editor’s Note: This piece contains explicit language. Additional reporting by Amy Brown.

Bree, an African-American resident of Ferguson, Missouri, says he has been involved in activism for years. For the time being, that means selling buttons condemning the presidential candidates, namely Donald Trump, to passersby at a Ferguson strip mall. On a good day, he sells around 70 of the buttons, and, despite their politically charged content, he said rarely runs into any controversy – in majority black neighborhoods, at least.

“I keep myself in areas where my reception’s gonna be pretty cool,” Bree said. “Believe me, the whiter the area, the more of a problem I get.”

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Should EpiPens be as Expensive as iPhones?

The EpiPen price controversy has been in the news for over a month now. For those not aware of what I am referring to, let me give a short recap. In 2007, a single EpiPen, a device for injecting a drug that reverses severe allergic reactions, cost about $47, according to an August 25, 2016 article from NPR. By this summer the price of a single EpiPen rose to $284. What’s more is that EpiPens are no longer available as single pens, but rather only as double packs. So, the price to fill an EpiPen prescription now tops $600.

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“Broken Windows” Policing and the Role of Police

What does it take to make people feel “safe” in their communities? Proponents of police reform have struggled to find a middle ground between the legal and physical protection of the implicated and the interests of communities with high crime rates. Policies like New York City’s infamous “stop and frisk” laws have been proven to both increase arrests that become convictions as well as target people of color, while independent policing models implemented in Native American, First Nation and other Indigenous populations have enabled these people’s legal sovereignty but left internal populations at serious risk.

Continuing police reform efforts all seem to beg the question: just what do we expect of the police?

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HERO in Texas

Though it’s always the big-ticket national elections that draw the most public attention, we need to put Trump, Hillary, Carson and Sanders away for a few minutes and talk about the local elections. A number of interesting issues were put to vote this year on the local level. Some of the issues that were determined popular vote were fracking in two California cities, decriminalization of marijuana in Ohio, minimum wage in Washington state, a ban on GMOs in Benton county, Ohio and a LGBQT issue in Houston, Texas. Such measures, which affect citizens at the community and state level, would modify, pass or vote down certain policies.

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Guam’s Chemical Castration: A Just Punishment?

Recently, Guam’s Legislature passed a bill 8-7 requiring the chemical castration of convicted sex offenders before being released on parole. The Chemical Castration for Sex Offenders is a 48-month pilot program allowing for convicted sex offenders and pedophiles scheduled to be released in the next six months to undergo the castration process one week before their release, on the prisoner’s dime. These prisoners will then be monitored for progress through the remainder of the program.

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Should You Watch Samuel Dubose Die?

The articles are everywhere. Headlined by an eye-catching, caps-locked “WATCH,” they offer the reader the opportunity to watch someone die. The person in this case is Samuel Dubose, a Cincinatti resident killed by a policeman at the University of Cincinatti, Ray Tensing. The video is powerful, offering a disturbing look into police brutality in America. Its role is also central in bringing Tensing to justice, as his arrest was paralleled by the prosecutor office’s release of the video. But should you watch the video – one that graphically captures the last minutes of Dubose’s life?

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Crowdsourcing Justice

The video begins abruptly. Likely recorded on a phone, the footage is shaky and blurry, yet the subject is sickeningly unmistakeable: a crying infant being repeatedly and violently dunked into a bucket of water. First it is held by the arms, then upside down by one leg, then grasped by the face as an unidentified woman pulls it through the water. Near the end of the video, the infant falls silent, the only remaining audio the splashing of water and murmured conversation as the child is dunked again and again.

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