America Stories

ON MONDAY 25 April, Montgomery was a ghost town. The streets were deserted and the banks and shops closed. Alabama celebrates Confederate Memorial Day every third Monday of April, a day when the soldiers who died fighting for the confederate states in the civil war are honoured. Senior WJP journalist Ruth Hopkins is spending two and a half months in the United States with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery and the Marshall Project in New York, investigating the similarities between issues facing both the American … Read more

Senior WJP journalist Ruth Hopkins is spending two and a half months in the United States with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery and the Marshall Project in New York, investigating the similarities between issues facing both the American and South African criminal justice systems. Ruth will be detailing her journey through weekly blog posts published every Friday. Angola prison, formally known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is built on 18,000 acres of land in a river basin nestled in between the Mississippi river … Read more

MY FRIEND and New York attorney Beena Ahmad – who worked for nearly a year with the Wits Justice Project – had a quirky habit. In her neighborhood in Brooklyn she picked up books that people left out on the street with great enthusiasm (an aside: you can furnish your entire house with the stuff people discard; from baby shoes, to antique cupboards, to electronics). Sometimes I would share her joy, like when she picked up a battered copy of ‘Long Walk to Freedom’, … Read more

IT IS A natural human reaction to look away when confronted with injury or suffering. I grab a cushion or duck away behind the closest body when there is blood and gore on television. In this era of mass media where drowned refugee children wash up ashore and onto your screen and where ISIS decapitations flood the internet, this reflex can translate into ‘misery fatigue’, the feeling one wants a break from the constant stream of human misery the media … Read more

A FEW DAYS after I arrived in New York, to start a criminal justice reporting fellowship, I emailed Johnny Perez, who works at the Urban Justice Center. Johnny is an advocate for their mental health project. Not only does he do a lot of work at the troubled Rikers Island prison complex in New York, he also spent a fair amount of time in prison himself. He spoke about the three years he spent in solitary confinement at an event I … Read more