User:GOGHVAN195/Decarceration in the United States

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Prison abolitionists
Led predominantly by modern-day Black feminists, the prison abolition movement was inspired, in part, by former UCLA professor and activist Angela Davis, who wrote and published a book in 2003 titled Are Prisons Obsolete?, which argues that the explosion of prisons and inmate populations are due, not to escalating crime rates which have declined in the last decades, but to institutionalized racism and racial scapegoating for economic woes. Incarceration becomes a vehicle, according to Davis, for theft of civil rights, particularly voting rights as an increasing number of African Americans are denied the right to vote in prison, and even after their release if they are convicted felons.

As evidence that prison abolitionism is gaining traction as a movement, advocates point to the creation of Critical Resistance, an organization that "seeks to build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex," the 2015 National Lawyers Guild passage of a prison abolition resolution and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) solidarity with Black Lives Matter in adoption of a platform calling for participating budgeting that divests from policing to invest in community resources, such as parks and housing. In the words of the New York City DSA chapter, "The work of prison abolition is the work of building a world in which we make prisons and police obsolete." Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolitionist and prison scholar, speaking at a conference in Berlin, Germany Prison abolitionists—embracing the slogan "Stop, Shrink, Build"—challenge the use of punishment as a means of protecting society or making redress, pushing for the implementation of restorative and transformative justice programs in schools and counties to address crime prevention, justice and healing. Abolitionists, such as New York University professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007), reject the presumption that some prisoners are good but others evil, that some deserve to be freed while others spend years behind bars, that prisons and jails are here to stay forever to insulate society from bad people and incapacitate violent criminals—or that "concrete steel cages" are solutions to social problems. Most people in prison, Gilmore says, will eventually be released, so society must not abandon violent offenders if the hope is to prevent future criminal behavior. In response to skeptics who argue prisons are needed to protect society against recidivist violent criminals,Gilmore says abolitionists do not expect to bulldoze prisons tomorrow, but to work on the entire ecology—health care, education, housing—that shapes a "precarious existence".

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Prison abolitionists
Led predominantly by modern-day Black feminists, the prison abolition movement was inspired, in part, by former UCLA professor and activist Angela Davis, who wrote and published a book in 2003 titled Are Prisons Obsolete?, which argues that the explosion of prisons and inmate populations are due, not to escalating crime rates which have declined in the last decades, but to institutionalized racism and racial scapegoating for economic woes. Incarceration becomes a vehicle, according to Davis, for theft of civil rights, particularly voting rights as an increasing number of African Americans are denied the right to vote in prison, and even after their release if they are convicted felons.

As evidence that prison abolitionism is gaining traction as a movement, advocates point to the creation of Critical Resistance, an organization that "seeks to build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex," the 2015 National Lawyers Guild passage of a prison abolition resolution and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) solidarity with Black Lives Matter in adoption of a platform calling for participating budgeting that divests from policing to invest in community resources, such as parks and housing. In the words of the New York City DSA chapter, "The work of prison abolition is the work of building a world in which we make prisons and police obsolete." Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolitionist and prison scholar, speaking at a conference in Berlin, Germany Prison abolitionists—embracing the slogan "Stop, Shrink, Build"—challenge the use of punishment as a means of protecting society or making redress, pushing for the implementation of restorative and transformative justice programs in schools and counties to address crime prevention, justice and healing. Abolitionists, such as New York University professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007), reject the presumption that some prisoners are good but others evil, that some deserve to be freed while others spend years behind bars, that prisons and jails are here to stay forever to insulate society from bad people and incapacitate violent criminals—or that "concrete steel cages" are solutions to social problems. Most people in prison, Gilmore says, will eventually be released, so society must not abandon violent offenders if the hope is to prevent future criminal behavior. In response to skeptics who argue prisons are needed to protect society against recidivist violent criminals,Gilmore says abolitionists do not expect to bulldoze prisons tomorrow, but to work on the entire ecology—health care, education, housing—that shapes a "precarious existence".

United States president, Joe Biden, has also called for the shutdown of private prisons. An executive order was issued on January 26, 2021, to halt the renewal of government contracts with private prisons. It is argued that these private prisons earn additional funding from the government by incarcerating more and holding prisoners for long periods of time, which influenced President Biden to order for the shutdown of said privately owned prisons.

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Detention centers
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with thousands of immigrants locked up at 200 U.S. detention centers, Amnesty International called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to "grant humanitarian parole to immigration detainees except in the most extraordinary of circumstances requiring ongoing detention." The global human rights organization accused ICE of concealing the number of detainees who had been exposed or contracted the virus, keeping the detainees, their lawyers, family members and general public in the dark about the spread of infections.

On March 26, 2020, ProPublica, a non-profit news agency, reported a confrontation occurred between guards and detainees at the SouthTexas Processing Facility, operated by federal contractor GEO Group, in which guards shot detainees with pepper spray after the detainees protested a lack of COVID-19 screening procedures for new arrivals. When contacted, "ICE referred reporters to a fact sheet, which provides information on how the detention center processes migrants" and said the staff daily reviews recommended guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on proper detention staff protocols.

In a May 8, 2020, Washington Post opinion piece entitled "We were left to sicken and die from the coronavirus in immigration detention. Here's how I got out," Nicolas Morales, a 37-year old undocumented immigrant detained for five months in New Jersey's Elizabeth Detention Center, an ICE-contracted facility run by CoreCivic, a private for-profit corporation traded on the New York Stock Exchange, explains his five-month ordeal ended after a federal judge declared COVID-19 posed a serious health risk inside the detention center. "We shared toilets, showers, sinks, communal surfaces and breathing air. We did not have hand sanitizer or masks. We could not disinfect our shared surfaces. We could not maintain any meaningful distance among us, let alone six feet of distance. We were never permitted outside; there is no meaningful outdoor space," writes Morales who participated in a hunger strike to protest detention center conditions. As of May 8, 2020, ICE still had not halted transfers of immigrants from one detention center to another, according to a Politico article, "'Like Petri Dishes for the Virus': ICE Detention Centers Threaten the Rural South".

On May 9, 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported that 70% or 792 of the 1,162 male inmates at Lompoc Federal Prison in California had tested positive for COVID-19, surpassing the 644 cases at the federal prison on Terminal Island, with Lompoc and Terminal Island prisons accounting for 47% of all federal inmates who tested positive.

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On May 9, 2020, the Los Angeles Times reported that 70% or 792 of the 1,162 male inmates at Lompoc Federal Prison in California had tested positive for COVID-19, surpassing the 644 cases at the federal prison on Terminal Island, with Lompoc and Terminal Island prisons accounting for 47% of all federal inmates who tested positive. California has been the leading state in the number of cases, totaling 49,395, since June 25, 2021.