Lawrence Bartley // If there’s one thing people who spent a long time in prison have acquired, it’s the ability to adapt. Originally published in The Marshall Project on April 7, 2020. Republished with permission from the author. When I need to go to my local supermarket, I suit up with latex gloves I got…

Martha Balaguera[1] // The COVID-19 pandemic has shed new light on the paradoxes of our time. Consider the great vulnerabilities of so-called “essential” workers in farms, factories, hospitals, schools, daycares, slaughterhouses, delivery warehouses, as well as in marginalized “hot-spot” neighborhoods of segregated urban areas. At the same time, vulnerable groups with essential needs of international…

Sara Bennett // More than 200,000 people in the United States are serving life sentences, a punishment that barely exists in other Western countries. I’ve long believed that if judges, prosecutors, and legislators could see people convicted of serious crimes as individual human beings, they would rethink the policies that lock them away forever. Before…

Boudicca // This essay was originally published in Scalawag and is reprinted here courtesy of Exchange for Change. Several similar first-person accounts of COVID-19 in prison will appear in the forthcoming anthology Hear Us. We watched the inexorable spread of COVID-19 on World News Tonight. Still, it did not make much of an impression on the…

Khalil A. Cumberbatch // More than a year after the coronavirus began extending its deadly reach around the globe, we have begun to take stock of lessons learned. From the proper use of masks to testing standards, social distancing norms, and vaccination distribution, our society has adapted well to the necessary realities of surviving a…

Khaleel Grant // About Doctors for Defunding Police Doctors for Defunding Police started as an initiative by a few doctors concerned about the toll anti-Black and anti-Indigenous policing was taking on the health of residents in the City of Toronto. As a group of concerned physicians working in Toronto and beyond, they came together to…

In the age of big data, machine learning, smart bombs, and facial recognition, that mathematical science plays an immeasurable—and political—role in shaping our world is uncontestable. Academically speaking, mathematics is somewhat artificially divided into two camps: applied and pure. It would be reasonable to believe that it is the applied mathematicians who are responsible for…

C. Brandon Ogbunu // The notion that drivers of COVID-19 disparities are not only historical, but contemporary, came to light in the tragedy involving Susan Moore, a black woman family physician who had circulated a video on social media in early December 2020 that explained her racially biased treatment in the hospital. She died of…

Michael Ralph and Maya Singhal // In the Marvel comic series by the same name,  Luke Cage becomes the unfortunate victim of sinister prison science. Incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, Cage is targeted by a racist corrections officer when he is recruited for a prison experiment. When the doctor conducting this operation…