Overcrowded. Despairing. Inhumane.
The deplorable conditions of American jails and prisons are beyond what many people can imagine. Today, over 2 million Americans spend each night behind bars. Colorado incarcerates 635 per 100,000 people divided between prisons, jails, immigration detention and juvenile detention facilities. In addition, the penal system continues to incarcerate Black, Latino and Indigenous communities at increasing and disproportionate rates.
Today there are hundreds of active COVID-19 cases in Colorado correctional facilities. This pandemic has proven that the systems of punishment that we rely on to keep us safe do not work. Jails and prisons are not service providers and are not safe places for the people inside them or the community. Without the ability to follow social-distancing guidelines, medically vulnerable and elderly incarcerated people face a serious risk of dying from the pandemic.
Join us for a four-part webinar series where we explore how the remnants of slavery evolved into a racialized carceral system fraught with economic and physical abuses. Understand today’s exploding rates of mass incarceration in the United States, and ways that the system impacts segments of vulnerable communities — from prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities, to immigration detention and those who seek reproductive services while incarcerated.
We must urgently and safely depopulate our state’s correctional facilities by decreasing the number of people who languish in these inhumane conditions. The time to act and save lives is now.
These events are virtual and free to the public. Register on Zoom:
March 18 at 4 p.m.: Juvenile Detention Decarceration - https://aclu.zoom.us/.../register/WN_Dt5MZQAPQxCYzQHVeXhl2g
March 30 at 12 p.m.: Reproductive Rights - https://aclu.zoom.us/.../register/WN_1u7wWJWQR4CYlshWxvLX-w
