mass incarceration – The News Desk

June 15th should have been one of the best days of Mohammed Sanogo’s life. An honors student with a perfect G.P.A., he had just walked across the stage at his high-school graduation, in Delaware, and was looking forward to attending the University of Maryland Honors College to study aerospace engineering. Before he left the parking lot at the University of Delaware, where the ceremony was held, Sanogo, a Muslim, stopped to pray with a few friends. For reasons that are in dispute, a few minutes later, as Sanogo was driving away, campus police stopped his vehicle, demanded that he get out of the car, and, after he did, picked him up and threw him to the ground. Video shot by students at the scene shows officers kneeling on his back to cuff him, as Sanogo struggles to get out of their grip a...

When the government of El Salvador declared a “state of exception” in March of last year, after a sudden spike in gang killings, it was supposed to be temporary. Soldiers and police officers could arrest anyone they considered suspicious. No one was entitled to a legal defense. Each month, the country’s Assembly would have to vote to extend this state of affairs. But the party in power, called Nuevas Ideas, held a super-majority. Their fealty to the President, Nayib Bukele, was total, as was his commitment to an indefinite campaign of law and order based on mass arrests.The state of exception has now been renewed eighteen times. As one journalist put it to me, el régimen de excepción has become la normalidad excepcional, the exceptional norm. In the past year and a half, the government ha...

Tag: mass incarceration

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