‘Servitude’
The author, who is also associate editor for the Angolite magazine, won an honorable mention for this essay in the 2024 PEN Prison Writing Awards.
Category
Criminal Justice
‘Resentment is not inevitable’
"I am not a person who came to prison and became a writer, I am a writer who happened to come to prison."
Waiting.
This story was awarded the top PEN Prison Writing Award for fiction.
Towns across Louisiana clamor to build new juvenile detention centers
Local governments request more than $500 million to build regional and local juvenile-detention facilities — and to repair and construct some adult jails.
Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice to end contract with troubled Jackson Parish jail
Invoices show that Jackson charged OJJ nearly $2 million dollars over the past year to house juveniles in the jail, despite grave allegations of abuse and mistreatment.
To prevent suicide, New Orleans daughter urges states to let people ban themselves from buying guns
Donna’s Law, which allows people to ban themselves from gun ownership, has proven one of the few areas of gun policy where Republicans and Democrats can agree. But it has made little headway in Louisiana, home of the bill’s namesake.
Licensing a troubled juvenile jail
A year ago, when Jackson Parish opened its new, unlicensed juvenile jail, kids complained of extended stints of solitary confinement, along with extensive abuse and violations. A DCFS inspection supported those claims, but the agency gave the jail a license anyway.
Louisiana sanctions use of pepper spray and mace on detained juveniles
In July, a new state law put all Louisiana pretrial juvenile detention centers under the umbrella of the state Office of Juvenile Justice. Soon after, the agency filed an ‘emergency order’ approving the use of ‘chemical agents’ in those facilities.
No longer ‘half slave, half free’
Supposedly, the Civil War dismantled the politics that pitted “slave states” against “free states.” And yet the effect of the punishment-exception clause in the Thirteenth Amendment was to not only sanction the preservation of slavery and involuntary servitude, but also to extend it nationwide.
