Tamms supermax legislation

HB 2633 was introduced by Rep. Julie Hamos and 20 co-sponsors immediately signed on. Tamms bill factsheet and learn about this bill.

Reflections

Since I didn’t get to share my reflections with the class or the surprisingly large amount of people who came for the Stateville Speaks event, I’ll post mine here. I enrolled in the Stateville Speaks class because I thought the subject material we’d learn would be interesting, the thought of working as a class to [...]

Just wanted to say…

I was amazed with the presentation yesterday and all the support and response all our hard work is getting. Congrats to all of you for your fantastic work! I received the following Facebook message yesterday from Peter Wagner, the Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative (in regards to my paper about Felony Disenfranchisement): Thanks [...]

Thanksgiving poll

Victims Voices

Victims voice’s need to be be heard too. When Jennifer Bishop came to speak in class, I was completely touched.  I have had a little experience with a victim of a crime.  My 2nd cousin’s family was murdered, and the surviving member of that family, my 2nd cousin, returns every year to Leavenworth Maximum Security [...]

Reflections From Guest Speaker Darrell Cannon

Darrell Cannon is one of the best speakers that has come to our class, and one of the best speakers that I have ever heard. He was tortured by officers of the Chicago Police Department trained by Jon Burge. Jon Burge used torture tactics such as suffocation and even attaching electrical clips to men’s testicles [...]

Response to Victim’s Websites

It was not until Jennifer Bishop Jenkins came in to speak to our class about victim’s rights did I ever really start thinking about victim’s rights at all. To me, being a victim seemed like such a passive and depressing experience, but it really isn’t. You can do a lot of things as an active [...]

Darrell Cannons’s Speech

I am honestly in awe of his strength and eloquence.  The speech was beautiful.  I actually saw him speak the Saturday before at an event at the University of Chicago against the death penalty and it was the same day he attended his sisters funeral.  I remember him saying that even though relatives were still [...]

Darrell Cannon Discussion/My interrogation training

Having Darrell speak to the class about his experiences in prison and with torture was interesting as well as depressing. The amount of physical abuse he endured accompanied with the mental torture that lasted throughout his prison sentence seems remarkable that a human being can survive and still remain a competent individual. I think Darrell’s [...]

Darrell Cannon, Rip Van Winkle and Questions of Accountability

After spending 24 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Darrell Cannon became a free man, only to find his world completely changed. Despite being tortured and wrongfully imprisoned, Cannon was most upset about having lost many of his loved ones. “I lost everything,” he said, choking back on his tears. He [...]

Response to Darrell Cannon’s Speech

Darrell was one of the best public speakers I have ever heard in my life.  Almost every part of his story was so extremely interesting from how he got to prison in the first place, to his life at Tamms, to his life now.  The one thing that really struck me was his attitude towards [...]

Coerced Confessions

Unfortunately I did not have the opportunity to hear Darrell Cannon speak in class.  However, the topic of coerced confessions has been of great interest to me since taking a course that covered issues related to Psychology and Law.  Through my internship this semester I am working with a White Paper written about this topic.  [...]

WELCOME TO THE STATEVILLE SPEAKS BLOG

Download a copy of Stateville Speaks Loyola! This is the blog for the Loyola edition of Stateville Speaks, a print publication written in collaboration with current Illinois prisoners about topics in criminal justice and prison life.  Join our facebook page! This overhead view of Stateville would never be allowed into our print publication because all aerial [...]

Darrell Cannon-”You can be anything you wanna be”

The presentation of Darrell Cannon was astonishing. Sitting there and listening to him, it was almost unimaginable to most of us how a person can go through so much and still remain sane. But not only he persevered though days of unthinkable torture (cattle-rods, fake shotgun shots, humiliation) and nine years of solitude in Tamms, [...]

Speech on Police Torture

Why are stories like these not reported until so many years later that they can not prosecute Burge or the police offcers who did this? And why would anyone need to be in Tamms solitary confinement for 9 years? Couldn’t the guards recognize that he didn’t need to be there after he was there for [...]

Darrell Cannon Presentation/Tamms

First of all, having the opportunity to listen to Darrell Cannon’s first hand experience was very beneficial.  I really value his courage to reflect on such horrible memories and speak about them to a group of people.  This was/is clearly a tragedy. No doubt about it.  Not only did he lose 24 years of his [...]

Prison Town trailer

Questions of bias

After reading all of these articles and essays from class, what I find interesting is that it usually plays up the sympathetic side of the prisoner. I find myself feeling bad for the prisoner, and yes, there is quite a lot of evidence that shows the injustice that they face. But I just wonder how I would [...]

Academia inside Prison Walls

As criminal justice students, we often have few opportunities to read work by prisoners or ever hear what prisoners have to say about prison. What we are exposed to, however, are scholarly articles, written by academics, maybe with a little input from prisoners themselves but information gathered mostly from statistics and other quantitative research. I [...]

Timothy Souders; punished to the point of death?

I just read the article about the death of 21-year-old Timothy Souders while he was incarcerated in a segregation cell at Southern Michigan Correctional.  The article horrified me because of the multiple injustices involved in the case.  First of all, TS shouldn’t have been in solitary confinement when his conditions of bipolar disorder, hyperactivity and [...]