I’ve had plenty to say about the Texas and Alabama prison systems, which have earned every bit of scrutiny they get. But Tennessee’s death‑penalty system has now stepped into that same conversation, and it did so in the most catastrophic way possible. Last week I mentioned the scheduled execution of Christa Pike. Nobody was prepared… Continue reading Tennessee Has Joined the Conversation
Tag: systemic failure
Still Not Done: On Executing Someone Under a Law the State Has Since Abandoned
I thought I was done talking about Alabama. Last year, I wrote a series about the carceral systems in Alabama and Texas. I spent a lot of time looking at the ways those systems operate, the people caught inside them, and the policies that can have consequences far beyond the words written in a statute.I… Continue reading Still Not Done: On Executing Someone Under a Law the State Has Since Abandoned
When Innocence Competes with Survival
She told me from day one she didn’t do it. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a “let me convince you” way. Just a quiet, steady truth she carried every time we talked. And then the seizures started coming harder. More frequent. More violent. More unpredictable. By the time we reached the point where… Continue reading When Innocence Competes with Survival
A System Working as Designed
How America Turned Jails Into Psychiatric Facilities — and Called the Deaths Inevitable When the largest psychiatric facility in Texas is a jail, the deaths stop looking like anomalies and start looking like the system working exactly as designed. Another person died in the Harris County Jail this month. Another headline. Another set of familiar… Continue reading A System Working as Designed
A Jail, Not a Graveyard
There are some things a community should never grow used to. Death inside a county jail is one of them. Yet here we are — watching the same headlines cycle through our feeds, hearing the same recycled explanations from officials, witnessing the same failures repeat year after year. If this were once or twice, maybe… Continue reading A Jail, Not a Graveyard
