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RSVP Now for this Sunday: Dismantling the U.S. Prison-Industrial Complex

Mar 31, 2023 | PDA News

Join us as We Stand for Justice on our Sunday Online Town Hall, 4pm ET/1pm PT. RSVP Now

 

While we welcome the news of the long-overdue Trump indictment, the U.S. prison-industrial complex as a whole, which continually warehouses over two million people, represents one of, if not the, greatest on-going human rights violation in the world.

Yet, as a society, we tacitly accept this reality. At PDA, we are different. We view the dismantling of our racist prison system as a top political and social priority. Join us this Sunday as we discuss how to achieve this necessary and humane goal. RSVP now!

On this Sunday’s PDA Town Hall, at 4pm ET/1pm PT, we will be joined by longtime prisoner rights activist James Kilgore to address the all-too-often-overlooked realities of our prison system, and just what it would take to end our brutally inhumane and fundamentally racist mass incarceration system.

James Kilgore is a visiting lecturer in global studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a scholar, author, and activist specializing in transforming the criminal justice system, challenging E-carceration of migrants and formerly incarcerated persons, and breaking the hold of racist underpinnings in the prison-industrial complex. Author of numerous books (including Freedom Never Rests and most recently, Understanding E-Carceration) and articles—which have been published in The Chronicle of Higher EducationTruthoutCounterpunchDissentRadical Teacher, and Critical Criminology—James has also founded organizations to support formerly incarcerated persons re-enter society and to curtail expansion of local jail projects.

No other country in the world comes close to locking up as many people as the United States of America—and the per person rate of incarceration is by orders of magnitude greater than any other prosperous, industrialized country.

While our political leaders and the mainstream press regularly condemn the human rights abuses of countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, they conveniently turn a blind eye to the atrocity that is the most extensive penal system ever developed in human history.

Of course, dismantling it will be no easy task—and, of course, we understand that no effort to do so will succeed if it fails to maintain and improve upon public safety. We look forward to discussing all the dimensions of this complex issue with James Kilgore on Sunday.

RSVP Now!

See you on Sunday!

Alan Minsky for the PDA National Team

P.S. We’ll also have updates on the hugely important elections in Wisconsin, Chicago, and across the country on Tuesday, and how you can involved to help deliver progressive victories.

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