"His relatives recounted stories he’d told them about being starved and beaten by guards on Rikers. They spoke about his paranoia, about how he often suspected that the cops or some other authority figures were after him. His mother explained that the night before he told her, “Ma, I can’t take it anymore.” “Kalief, you’ve got a lot of people in your corner,” she told him.
Maya Schenwar is Editor-in-Chief of Truthout, an independent social justice news website. She has written about the prison-industrial complex for The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Jersey Star-Ledger, Ms. Magazine, Prison Legal News, and other publications. She is the recipient of a Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Chi Award and a Lannan Residency Fellowship, both for her writing on prisons. Prior to her work at Truthout, Maya was Contributing Editor at Punk Planet magazine…
Previously: Cook County Schools, Cook County Jails. B0124. Until last year, Illinois operated a $20-million-a-year super maximum security prison (“Supermax”) in the remote southern city of Tamms. There were only two hundred inmates, making it one of the most expensive prisons per capita of any in the country. It was also among the few prisons to practice complete, utter social isolation. Inmates were kept in miniscule chambers with thick metal doors and plexiglass windows…
We boarded the metro at Chilpancingo and exited at the Tlatelolco stop. We headed to Plaza de las tres Culturas, Plaza of the Three Cultures. A ten-minute walk through a rougher-than-we-were-used-to Mexico City neighborhood, then up a stairway and left onto the overpass. From there we stopped to take pictures and gaze at the scarred and scavenged ruins of Tlatelolco. Our guidebooks seemed to downplay its value as a destination, and yet the archaeological site…
In the summer of 2011, I had two jobs. One was in the Cook County Jail’s drug treatment facility, Division VI; the other was at a summer school on the South Side for Chicago public schools. The similarities were chilling. The inmates of both places were delivered the same bland, partially frozen food: Bologna in tiny tortillas, waxy apples, and milk that had solidified. Go-gurt, for some reason.
