“I have always said that I spend most of my time either attempting to prove my innocence or preparing myself for when I do finally go home. Among the ways I work to prepare myself is to try to create new programs for the entire inmate population. You see, ODRC does not always have the educational opportunities I would need to ready myself. So, I try to create those programs just so I can take them myself. Unfortunately, there are staff members that throw roadblocks at every turn. Such as the situation I mentioned in my last post.”
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Shane Crum is Seeking Help for a Project
March 27th, 2021Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Another False Accusation — from Shane Crum
March 23rd, 2021“Many of the staff in these places act in a criminal, cruel, and negligent manner. The inmates who attempt to stand up for themselves are almost always retaliated against. Hopelessness and despair are what they learn. Imagine spending decades being treated this way? I have seen the most confident of men be reduced to a timid hand shy individual who can not make a single decision without first asking staff. I wonder what will become of such men once they are released? A caged animal without the restraints of prison staff let loose on the world. Is this what they mean by preparing inmates for their return into society?”
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Why Support Systems are Necessary-A Prison Post From Shane Crum
March 16th, 2021“I was talking with another inmate, who also claims actual innocence, when the subject of a support network came up. I watched as tears welled up in this man’s eyes, as he spoke of the few supporters he had were dying off. Literally, dying. Inmates lose family members while they are incarcerated. It is difficult enough to lose a family member, and not be able to say goodbye as it is. When that family member is the total of your support system, it has a deeper impact on the inmate. When they are lost, hope is lost with them. The possibility of a future is gone.”
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Justice Still Denied for Victims of Day Care Sex Abuse Witch Trials
March 12th, 2021
fongbeerredhot/Shutterstock.com
“But before human rights groups here and in Europe focus their attention far in the past and far afield, they would do well to seek apologies, restitution, and justice for the victims of witch hunts much closer in time and space: victims of the sex abuse in day care hysteria that in the 1980s and early ’90s swept the U.S. (and manifested itself to a much lesser extent in Canada, New Zealand, and Europe). One victim, Frank Fuster, remains in prison. He has now served 36 years of a sentence of six life terms and 165 years. (In 2014 the Florida Parole Commission sent him a letter telling him his initial parole interview was scheduled in 120 years.) All this for crimes that existed only in the fevered imagination of his accusers.”
Read the article by Rael Jean Isaac in The American Spectator.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Shane Crum – Prison Programs are Essential
March 8th, 2021“When I first came to Marion Correctional Institution, there were so many programs and things for inmates to do that I stayed busy throughout the day. I would get up at 5:30, get dressed, have a cup of coffee, brush my teeth and hair, and be out the door by 6:30. I would stay gone until count time around 10:30, and would leave again by about 11:30 for chow. I would stay gone until the next count time at around 3:30 and leave again at 4:30 for chow, and not come back to my lock until around 8:00. I would get a shower, grab a bite to eat, and get some sleep to start all over the next day.”
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest
February 27th, 2021“Detective McLaughlin skipped the logical first steps that such a letter might have set in motion. He did not consult the priest’s personnel file – which revealed nothing about his ever being in Florida. And he did not consult Monsignor John Quinn, the named originator of the story.
“Instead, armed with the explosive Florida murder-molestation letter, McLaughlin set out to interview dozens of parents and their adolescent sons who had prior contacts with MacRae. Within a week, the entire community was in a state of alarm about the murderous lecher-priest in its midst.”
Read the article by Ryan MacDonald.
The NCRJ is a longtime supporter of Gordon MacRae.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Restorative Justice and Sexual Violence
February 25th, 20212/24/21. New York Law School hosted a conversation about the role that restorative justice can play in addressing sexual violence. Professor Susan Abraham moderates the discussion between Vivianne Guevera — Director of Social Work and Mitigation at the Federal Defenders of New York — and Judith Levine — journalist, essayist, and author whose work explores the intersections of the body and the body politic. Levine most recently co-authored the book, The Feminist & the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence, with Erica Meiners in 2020.
This event was co-sponsored by the Legal Association for Women and the Criminal Law Society.
View this important event.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Addressing Sexual Violence with Restorative Justice
February 22nd, 2021Join Susan Abraham, Vivianne Guevara, and Judith Levine, this Wednesday, February 24th at 12:50 p.m.
View this poster for details:
ICPI-Impact-Conversations-Flyer-022421-v1r2-locked
Follow this link to RSVP.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Stranger Danger
February 17th, 2021Please consider joining us on March 5 (Friday) at 11:15am (EST) with historian Paul Renfro about his fascinating new book: Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020).
You can sign-up here (it only takes a minute), and a Zoom link will be sent immediately prior to the event. More details below.
Thank you so much,
Emily Horowitz
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A Conversation with Historian & Author Paul Renfro on March 5, 2021 at 11:15am
Sign-Up Here / Zoom link will be sent immediately prior to the event
Join Paul Renfro and Emily Horowitz for a conversation about Paul’s new book: Stranger Danger:
Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Beginning with Etan Patz’s disappearance in Manhattan in 1979, a spate of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children stoked anxieties about the threats of child kidnapping and exploitation. Publicized through an emerging twenty-four-hour news cycle, these cases supplied evidence of what some commentators dubbed “a national epidemic” of child abductions committed by “strangers.”
In this book, Paul M. Renfro (Assistant Professor of History, Florida State University) narrates how the bereaved parents of missing and slain children turned their grief into a mass movement and, alongside journalists and policymakers from both major political parties, propelled a moral panic. Leveraging larger cultural fears concerning familial and national decline, these child safety crusaders warned Americans of a supposedly widespread and worsening child kidnapping threat, erroneously claiming that as many as fifty thousand American children fell victim to stranger abductions annually. The actual figure was (and remains) between one hundred and three hundred, and kidnappings perpetrated by family members and acquaintances occur far more frequently. Yet such exaggerated statistics-and the emotionally resonant images and narratives deployed behind them-led to the creation of new legal and cultural instruments designed to keep children safe and to punish the “strangers” who ostensibly wished them harm. Ranging from extensive child fingerprinting drives to the milk carton campaign, from the AMBER Alerts that periodically rattle Americans’ smart phones to the nation’s sprawling system of sex offender registration, these instruments have widened the reach of the carceral state and intensified surveillance practices focused on children.
Stranger Danger reveals the transformative power of this moral panic on American politics and culture, showing how ideas and images of endangered childhood helped build a more punitive American state.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
The feminist and the sex offender
February 16th, 2021At the heart of the conspiracy theory that stirred many in the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 was the lie that a cabal of Democratic and “deep state” pedophiles are trafficking and killing thousands of children. A demented “Save the Children” campaign led to a near coup d’etat and the death of five people. This is what people fighting for fairness for “sex offenders” are up against. How can feminism help us understand the hatred of the “sex offender”? How can social justice movements work together to end personal, political, and state violence?
With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it on the other. Is it possible to confront the culture of abuse? Is it possible to hold harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible?
Drawing on interviews, extensive research, reportage, and history, The Feminist and the Sex Offender develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need.
On February 5th, Judith had a public discussion with Judith Levine about her book. (Both are Directors of the National Center for Reason and Justice.
If you missed this event, you can watch the video recording by clicking here.
