Just before his release, Robert Taliaferro writes about the lack of resources for prisoners who leave prison. “They are left to their own devices to find housing, transportation, and jobs, even after decades of confinement. When they fail, the logistics of incarceration fire up again in lockstep to gladly welcome them back to the fold.”
Robert Taliaferro denounces the exacerbated inequalities of capitalism in the U.S.: while, in a Midwestern prison, hundreds of pounds of organically grown vegetables and fruits were allowed to rot, one out of five Black families face food insecurity.
Readers’ Views on: Solidarity with Palestinians; Attacks on Democracy; Iranian Revolt; Musicians’ Labor; Damage to Homeless; Covid-19 Killers; Trump and Taliban; Far Right in Portland; Critical Race Theory; Prisoners under Fire; Voices from Behind Bars; Only the Dialectic Can Save Us
Not a month goes by when we don’t hear of some city, state or country challenging corporate monopolies, acting as the guardians of citizens’ rights to avoid corporate abuses. But companies are awarded monopoly status to sell inferior products for inflated prices to the prisoner market, exploiting prisoners and their loved ones.
Black prisoner Robert Taliaferro critiques the attack on critical race theory, which he sees as helping “a nation to understand how far it has come, and how far it needs to grow, when it comes to issues of racial equality.”
Readers’ Views on: Atlanta Racist Femicide; Women Rise in Australia; Chauvin and Racist Usa: Guilty!; Attacks on Civil Liberties; Black Lives Matter; Amazon Workers Resist; Berta Presente!; Burmese Masses Revolt; The Empire Strikes Out; Maâti Monjib Released!
Readers’ Views on: A Colombian View: What Is Socialism?; Trevor Wins!; Detroit School Fight; Suez Accident; What Prisoners Want; Voices From Behind Bars
Now that the jury has delivered Derek Chauvin’s verdict, we are faced with the question of how we got here in the first place. Why is it that 156 years after the end of slavery and 245 years into our national existence we are still discussing and witnessing the institutional and social lynching of Black folks?
A prisoner who got COVID-19 writes about how prisons have reprehensibly mismanaged the COVID-19 crisis, harming prisoners, line staff, their families, and the community at large.
A prisoner who got COVID-19 writes about how prisons have reprehensibly mismanaged the COVID-19 crisis, harming prisoners, line staff, their families, and the community at large.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro explores what it is like to argue with white racists immersed in Trumpist propaganda.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro gives his view of the Trump Administrations legacy and hopes for the Joseph Biden Kamala Harris Presidency.
John Lewis, today’s struggles, and the needed philosophic dialogue; Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Putin: an opposing view; Amy Barrett’s fanaticism; Torture at Soledad; Pipeline battles.
Mass incarceration, and disproportionate treatment by all aspects of the Prison Industrial Complex, is a cultural knee on the neck of the Black community as a whole.
Prisoner columnist Robert Taliaferro explores how George Floyd’s death sparked a delayed discussion of race. Will such discussions be sustained once the cameras are turned off and the reporters leave, or will they once again fall short of needed reforms and honest solutions?
Depending on the state and their prison system, healthcare inside is marginal during the best of times. Some prisons in Wisconsin are better than in most states, but that care is not consistent throughout Wisconsin’s facilities.
Readers’ views on The dialectic in thought and in liberation; labor and pandemic; pandemic and ecology; pandemic and school; women’s liberation; and voices from behind bars.
In prison here in Wisconsin, the guys are not as engaged as people in the community simply because of the nature of where we are. We are still in a relatively sterile environment which would change dramatically if someone comes in from the world and is a carrier. Healthcare inside is marginal during the best of times.
Readers’ views on climate struggles; labor struggles; racist politics; election contradictions; Modi’s Kristallnacht?; anti-abortion terror; rewriting history; and women and culture.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro’s column on the meaning of the Senate’s impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro reflects critically on the myth of democracy in the U.S., revealed by Trump’s impeachment.
Robert Taliaferro takes up the high rate of incarceration in the U.S., focused on its effects on children whose parents are in prison.
Readers’ Views on: Youth revolt, from China to climate strikes; Gunning for immigrants; Circling the abyss; Queer Notes; A prisoner responds; 1619 and today; Reading ‘N & L’; Elena Grigorieva; and Deborah Morris
A prisoner’s critique of Wisconsin’s Governor Tony Evers’s broken promise of reducing prison population in the state to half.
Over the past several years there has been a heated debate in the U.S. regarding socialism. These same issues are discussed nationwide within its prisons, with an interesting level of diversity which rivals opinions beyond the prison walls.
Robert Taliaferro writes of the harm done to prisoners by then Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson’s actions in the 1990s to keep prisoners behind bars despite the laws for mandatory release.
In Madison, Wisc., during the 1980s, a solitary Black woman roamed the hallways of the Dane County Courthouse for the purpose of attending trials of Black defendants. Her goal was to ensure that every Black woman, man, and child would see at least one Black face in the courtroom other than their own.
Review of Robert Taliaferro’s wonderfully illustrated book, “Always Color Outside the Lines: Freedom for the Artist Within”–a book that shows his philosophy of art and his expertise with different media and techniques.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro looks forward to what a new governor in Wisconsin may mean for prisoners, especially prisoners of color, who have suffered under Governors Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro discusses how racism and xenophobia are alive and well in the U.S., and take many forms, both blatant and subtle.
Readers’ Views on: Fighting Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Hysteria; Women’s Liberation; Attacks on Gays; Support Restaurant Workers; Swords into Plowshares; Human Rights Struggles in Iraq…; …And in Russia; Arthur Gursch in Memoriam
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro writes of how the predatory company ACCESS/KEEFE is now the most expensive, convoluted and ONLY way Wisconsin prisoners can receive funds from external sources.
Prisoners Faruq and Robert Taliaferro write about the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that allowed for prisoners to be enslaved, taking up different aspects of slavery as it appears in prison, in the U.S. and the world.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro writes of his hopes for the 2018 U.S. midterm elections to send a message that youth, the true middle-class, women and the LGBTQI community, people of all colors will take their country back.
Readers’ Views on: Puerto Rico:Trump’s Katrina; LGBTQ in Australia; Transgender in Texas; Women’s Liberation; Racism in Canada; Detroit and “Detroit”; Labor and Robots; Haitian Revolt; Why Read N&L?; and a Correction.
Readers’ Views: facing far right’s threat; don’t scapegoat; Canadian strike; Transgender troops; women’s liberation; homeless in Los Angeles; defend dissidents; why read N&L.
Among the reasons U.S. prisoners die in prison or are unable to reintegrate into society upon release are: lengthy incarceration, especially for minor crimes; lack of mental and physical healthcare; lack of effective rehabilitation.
Wisconsin Gov. Walker’s plan to replace the state Parole Commission with a Director of Parole would reduce the likelihood of parole in order to save a mere $1.8 million a year, while spending $200 million a year to keep aging parole-eligible prisoners locked up.
Readers’ Views on The Dialectic of History Vs. Retrogression; Prisoners, Supporters Speak.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro tells of how a Wisconsin prison destroyed all library books that had been damaged in any way, thus depriving prisoners of their rights and adding “fuel to the fires of revolution.”
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro writes of the Wisconsin maximum security facility prisoners’ hunger strike to end the inhumane practice of long-term solitary confinement and for improved medical care for prisoners with mental illness in segregation.
Readers’ Views on: Racism and Revolt Put U.S. on Trial; Life and Death Under the Class Divide; Environmental Struggles; War and Atrocities; and Women’s Lives at Stake.
Readers’ Views on Needed New Beginnings in Philosophy and Revolution; Making One Year Count; Subjugated Knowledge; Free Syria/May Day; and Voices From Behind the Bars.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro discusses the profit made from prisoners by the prison industrial complex and the shame of supposed rehabilitative programs that in reality are required, not for rehabilitation but for continued punishment of prisoners and profit for the prisons.
Readers’ Views on Women as Reason; Harriet Tubman; Racism and Internationalism; Bisexual Health; Trans Liberation and Feminism; Chinese State vs. Workers; Nuclear Arms Threaten All; Ireland’s Red Banner; Remembering Olga Domanski; Haggard but Not Tired; Voices from Behind the Bars.
Article by prisoner comparing the U.S. prison system–which commits extortion, assault, theft, substandard medical care, racism and a host of other crimes–to an erupting volcano whose magma destroys all it touches.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro remembers Olga Domanski as a pillar of News and Letters Committees who helped define the organization for decades and wrote a remarkable letter to his parole board.
California prisoners battle barbaric ‘justice’ system; Against ISIS attacks; Women under attack; Support Maati Monjib; The Burmese Way; Race, class & politics.
A Black prisoner looks at the meaning of U.S. racism and the struggle to remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds of South Carolina.
In reading Charles Denby’s “Continuing Magnolia Jungle terror exposes reality of ‘Great Society,’” one is struck by how poignant and presciently modern Denby’s thoughts were and how very little has changed today.
