JPI Daily News Digest 7/9/12
Published: July 9, 2012
WY: Former juvenile offenders in Wyoming can catch ‘Second Wind’ (Star-Tribune)
About 62 young adults who have been in trouble with the law will now have an opportunity to study for a career at Central Wyoming College, thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. The college in Riverton will use the $1.2 million grant over a 30-month period for the Second Wind Project. The project provides work and life skills training with the goal of keeping more teens and young adults from becoming re-offenders, according to the CWC website.
MD: Torture by another name (Baltimore Sun)
Officially, the state of Maryland does not hold any of the 22,000 inmates in its prison system in what is called "solitary confinement," a cruel form of extreme punishment that isolates certain prisoners from any contact with other human beings, sometimes for months, years or even decades at a time.
National: Debtors' prison 2.0: More people getting thrown in jail for being too poor to pay fines (MSNBC)
It used to be that debts were enforced with the threat of imprisonment. If you took out a loan and you couldn't afford to pay it back, then you would be arrested and thrown in jail. But now—in the United States, at least—debtors' prisons are supposed to be a thing of the past, a relic from a more barbaric era.
DC: We Must Teach Kids About Prison (The Root, WaPo)
Sadly, the United States has become the leader of incarceration in the world and it is incarceration that is undoing the sanctity of our communities. not books. Unfortunately, if we don’t begin to prepare children and adults for what has become the virtual inevitability of dealing the prison system, we’ll be attempting to live in a fairy tale.
UK: How US prison labour pads corporate profits at taxpayers' expense (The Guardian)
In 1979, Congress created the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (known as PIE) to establish employment opportunities for inmates "that approximate private sector work opportunities".
Posted in Criminal Justice News