Co-authored by Sarah Solon, communications strategist at the ACLU. “CCA” has become a dirty word. Kanye West cited it when rapping about America’s class of “New Slaves.” Anonymous invoked it to describe a bad financial investment that undermines justice. And for state after state, the word represents a failed approach

  Co-authored by Sarah Solon, communications strategist at the ACLU. Leon and Mary Adams had been living in their Philadelphia home for nearly five decades. They were eating breakfast one morning last year when armed cops streamed out of a bunch of vans and said the couple had 10 minutes

Eric Amparan likes the system the way it is now. As a bail bondsman, he’s part of an industry that pulls in $2 billion in revenue every year. Eric lays out how he profits off of financial desperation in our latest video in the Prison Profiteers series: Here’s how it

Next week, it will be 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. He railed then against “the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination,” contending that the African-American was “an exile in his own land.” Yet he could not have imagined that

If you were to make a list of things that a sitting judge should not believe, I suspect one item would be that some racial groups are inherently inclined to be guilty. Yet federal judge Edith Jones of Texas seems to have revealed precisely that belief. Attendees of a recent speech of

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) says federal aid to his home state after the tornado should be offset by spending cuts elsewhere. We’ll see how well the ideological integrity holds up if offsets aren’t quickly found, but nevertheless, the question of how to fund disaster relief is increasingly urgent. It

By now you’ve probably heard about Kiera Wilmot, the 16-year-old Florida girl who botched a science experiment with a plastic bottle and toilet cleaner. The bottle ended up exploding, and though no one was hurt and no property damaged, Kiera was expelled from high school and is now being prosecuted

The debate over Florida Atlantic University’s decision to name a football stadium after a notorious private prison company has descended into deception. Today, student activists confronted FAU President Mary Jane Saunders at a public forum to denounce the fact that the school is taking $6 million from the GEO Group

Word came out this week that Florida Atlantic University had sold the naming rights to its new football stadium to the GEO Group, which is the second largest private prison company in America. Beyond Bars has a petition to stop this move, which has generated an outpouring of criticism. Video