by Daniel A. Rosen | Like most holidays in prison, Thanksgiving isn’t much to write home about. Just another day on the calendar you want to see pass to bring you closer to your release date – albeit one where you get fed decently. In the free world, the holiday means family, friends, gratitude, and … Continue reading Just Another Day on the Calendar? My First Post-Prison Thanksgiving
by Daniel A. Rosen | So, this is my first post from outside the walls, and I’ve been away from writing for a few months. This was written on a real laptop, from a real house (and a coffeeshop, and a hotel patio, and so on) in the real world. Everything in my life changed, … Continue reading Reentry, Revisited
by Daniel A. Rosen | Out there in the real world, time is the one thing no one has enough of. You can't buy or create more. In here, time is all you have. It's considered the enemy, the thing you dread, the commodity you find ways to kill, to waste, to purposefully squander. People … Continue reading Change of Plans: Thoughts on Six Years Behind Bars
by Daniel A. Rosen | Everywhere you look, signs say: "Now Hiring" and "Apply Within." News reports air nightly about businesses that can't reopen because they're understaffed. Teenagers and college kids are getting good jobs that they'd normally never be considered for. But if you've got a felony record, that sign out front often says: … Continue reading Short-Handed? Have I Got a Guy For You.
by Daniel A. Rosen | Bill Cosby surely celebrated his new-found independence this 4th of July at his Philadelphia mansion - the same place where he raped dozens of women over the years. Unfortunately, 2.3 million other Americans - about half of them black, and the vast majority of them poor - marked the holiday … Continue reading Undue Process: Thoughts on Bill Cosby’s Overturned Conviction
by Daniel A. Rosen | "America loves a crime story, because America is a crime story" - Promo for a recent season of Fargo.Sure, it's just a clever marketing campaign to get you to binge-watch more streaming television, but it also has the ring of deeper truth to it. Violence was part of our nation's … Continue reading True Crime
by Daniel A. Rosen | Sitting here in my prison cell tonight, I'm wondering: What will it take to end America's addiction to mass incarceration? For decades, too many powerless people were stuffed down the yawning maw of this greedy beast until 2.3 million of our fellow citizens languished in its distended belly. Millions more … Continue reading Mass Incarceration Is Not Inevitable
by Daniel A. Rosen | "This is an industry that profits from human suffering."-- David Fathi, Director, ACLU National Prison ProjectStarting with math may be a bad idea, but numbers help tell this story: In Virginia, keeping the average prisoner behind bars costs taxpayers about $30,000 per year; in some states like New York or … Continue reading The Punishment Economy: Winners and Losers in the Business of Mass Incarceration (May 2021 PLN Cover)
by Daniel A. Rosen | The PBS Newshour's excellent series "Searching for Justice" aired a piece recently about how difficult it can be for returning citizens to secure valid photo identification ("How Obtaining ID Can Complicate the Road From Prison," February 16, 2021). As one longtime inmate and recent parolee said of the state bureaucracy, … Continue reading The 3 R’s: Reentry, Recidivism, and Reality
by Daniel A. Rosen | Maybe starting with math is a bad idea, but here goes: In Virginia, keeping the average inmate in prison costs the state about $30,000 per year; in some states like New York and California, it's twice that much. Inmates over 50 years old with chronic health conditions often cost taxpayers … Continue reading The Punishment Economy: Who Wins, Who Loses
by Daniel A. Rosen | Meghan McCain, the Republican Party's resident Marie Antoinette, casually said this on "The View" recently: "He's a criminal - he should eat dog food!" She was talking about Jake Angeli, the so-called "Q-Anon Shaman" who hails from her home state of Arizona, and was arrested after leading the siege of … Continue reading “Let Them Eat Dog Food”: Nutrition and Health Behind Bars
by Daniel A. Rosen | Recent news reports have informed those of us incarcerated in Virginia that the COVID-19 vaccine is coming soon - we'll be part of Group 1B sometime in January, apparently. According to those same reports, some Virginians are angry that inmates would be put in line ahead of the general public. … Continue reading What Early Vaccinations Mean to Prison Inmates
by Daniel A. Rosen | I had a dream recently, one I'll remember for a long while. It was so vivid that I woke up with a start at 4am in my prison cell and wrote it down. Don't mistake this for some embellished morality tale or apocryphal fable - it really went just like … Continue reading Then I Woke Up: “PEP Talk” From a Prison Cell
by Daniel A. Rosen | I don't know if I'm the only one of Joe Biden's former interns serving time in prison, but I'm sure it's not a long list. During my junior year of college at UCLA, I took off school for a quarter to intern in Joe Biden's Senate office in Washington, D.C. … Continue reading On the Election of Joe Biden: Impressions of a Former Senate Intern
by Daniel A. Rosen | A young black man named Vincent Lamont Martin killed a white police officer named Michael Patrick Connors in November of 1979. Martin served 37 years in prison as a result. He was supposed to walk out of the Nottoway Correctional Center on May 11, after being granted parole on Good … Continue reading The Murder of Mercy: Attacking Virginia’s Parole Board
by Daniel A. Rosen | 2020 is suddenly looking a lot like 1972. Admittedly, back then we weren't warring against a global pandemic. But then, as now, a Republican president sought re-election in the midst of divisive societal turbulence, instead with a contentious foreign war as a backdrop. Then, as now, police violence against Black … Continue reading What Year Is It, Anyway?
by Daniel A. Rosen | "This moment calls for structural change and transformative change." -Patrice Cullors, BLM Co-founder | As the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism came to a head in 2020, the Trump Administration had an opportunity in an election year to provide real leadership and demonstrate that people's lives mattered. They … Continue reading Tear Down These Walls: A Justice Reform Agenda for the Biden Administration
by Daniel A. Rosen | I'm here at Virginia's largest facility, the Greensville Correctional Center in southern VA. This place holds up to 3000 inmates, and I've heard it's the largest state prison on the East Coast. On August 7th, we went on lockdown for the second time in four months. There were just too … Continue reading COVID-19 Update from Greensville Correctional Center, Virginia
by Daniel A. Rosen | On August 18, Virginia's State Assembly will hold a special legislative session that's likely to be historic. Originally scheduled to take up budget issues related to the coronavirus pandemic, it now will focus on a range of other public safety issues, given the recent social unrest following George Floyd's murder. … Continue reading Virginia’s Special Legislative Session Must Address Real Justice Reform
by Daniel A. Rosen | When I watched the video of George Floyd's murder from my prison cell, my first instinct was sheer outrage, like people of conscience everywhere. My second thought: If cameras were as prevalent in prison as on the street, the public might see many more men of color who can't breathe, … Continue reading Public Safety Can’t Be Purchased With Police and Prisons
by Daniel A. Rosen | The people "want law and order. They need law and order. They may not say it, but they want it." That's not a quote from Mussolini or Putin. It's from Donald Trump's June press conference on police reform. Apparently, Trump knows what people want better than they do. This is … Continue reading What the People Want
by Daniel A. Rosen | The theme song is catchy and instantly recognizable - and it’s part of the problem. The criminals are the "bad boys," and the hero cops are coming for them. After 33 seasons, "Cops" was temporarily pulled off the air in late May when protests about George Floyd's death gained momentum. … Continue reading Defund the Police Shows: “Cops” Is Gone and “Law and Order” Should Be Next
by Daniel A. Rosen | I'm sitting here in my prison cell, watching the protests on TV and doing some quick math. Every year in this country, according to the Washington Post, roughly a thousand men and women die at the hands of police. About half of them - 500 people - are unarmed. And … Continue reading The ‘Blue Normal’: Doing the Math on Policing and Justice in America
by Daniel A. Rosen | The fictional LA homicide detective Harry Bosch, penned by Michael Connelly, had a simple credo - as all good heroes do: "Either everyone matters, or no one does." And the gut-wrenching events of late keep bringing to mind that hard-boiled noirish wisdom. This isn't claiming "everyone matters" in the usual … Continue reading Do Any Lives Still Matter?
by Daniel A. Rosen | I'm an inmate at the Greensville Correctional Center in southern Virginia, the state's largest prison with over 3,000 inmates. Until now, we'd been spared much of the chaos engulfing other prisons - no inmates were reported positive for COVID-19 and only a handful of guards had been confirmed cases. All … Continue reading COVID Status: Code Red – Report from a Prison Cell
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