Free Your Art Overview

Free Your Art is Deaf Child’s fundraiser to have a heart and fight mass incarceration locally by donating to Orleans Public Defenders.

The concept of Free Your Art as a blog series started as a way to provide research into the inner workings of how criminalization impacts society, factors influencing a safe community, along with ways to break the cycle of unnecessary detainment.

This then turned into ongoing research on how a select privileged few deprive impoverished masses of resources in order to control them.

After a little over a year the series has become a culmination of information shared in New Orleans online communities regarding police use of force, corruption, and discrimination in order to make money off of keeping people locked up.

So much is happening so quickly in the user pay justice system that at this point it is not about explaining the existence of mass incarceration, but rather fighting for an end.

This issue includes twenty four links: Seven reasons criminalizing immigrants exacerbates mass incarceration, nine warnings for-profit prison systems violate human rights locally, plus eight criminal justice updates.

Visit noladeafchild.com/free-your-art for an overview of the Free Your Art blog series, fundraiser, and how Orleans Public Defenders works on behalf of human rights.

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Seven reasons criminalizing immigrants exacerbates mass incarceration:

1. Thousands of immigrant children said they were sexually abused in US detention centers, report says

2. Girl, 10, 6th known child to die after US border detention

3. The feds - yes, lost - 1,475 immigrant children

4. Nearly 900 migrants found at Texas facility with 125-person capacity

5. ICE New Orleans field office arrests 33 undocumented immigrants across multiple states

6. Asylum seekers are being “disappeared” in private Louisiana jails

7. As fewer inmates fill Louisiana jails, wardens turn to immigration officials to fill bunks, budgets

Eight warnings for-profit prison systems violate human rights locally:

1. Letters: Plan to experiment on inmates is disturbing; implants not approved by FDA

2. New Orleans police appear to use surveillance to initiate investigations

3. Judge steered defendants to campaign contributor’s ankle-monitor company, report says

4. As juvenile crime spikes in New Orleans, officials initiate curfew and plan to use more detention

5. State NAACP backs plan to study why inmates aren’t being released in a timely manner

6. New Orleans prosecutors routinely violate defendants’ right to counsel to keep them in jail

7. Report: New Orleans criminal court drug testing methods unconfirmed, may lead to false positives

8. Louisiana law turning pipeline protests into felonies violates constitution, new lawsuit alleges

Seven criminal justice updates:

1. ACLU, Public Defender’s office praise crime camera ruling

2. From defendant to defender: Theo Shaw, once almost railroaded by the justice system as one of the Jena 6, is now officially a lawyer

4. South Florida felons owe a billion dollars in fines - and that will affect their ability to vote

5. Pa. judge sentenced to 28 years in massive juvenile justice bribery scandal

6. After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100k in fines

7. Federal judge rules people can secretly record police in public spaces

8. Indianapolis cuts out for-profit prison company in hopes of improving criminal justice system