My name is ______ and I am 23 years old and although my past criminal record isn't at its best, at heart I'm still a great kid!
After being locked up for about six months, I suffered from something many young males would hate to speak on and that's rape. I was raped at Eastern Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian, MS. I was beat brutally and faced several facial and rectum injuries from this attack. I was raped, robbed, and assaulted by several other prisoners.
East Mississippi Correctional Facility is hyper-violent, grotesquely filthy and dangerous. Patients with severe psychiatric disabilities go without basic mental health care. Many prisoners attempt suicide. This video is the story of a young man who succeeded.
By Jesselyn McCurdy, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:20am
It's estimated that more than 80,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement or restricted housing across the United States on any given day. According to a new report released last week by the U.S. General Accounting Office, it's about time the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) started evaluating its use of solitary and monitoring its effects on those prisoners.
The GAO finally released its long-awaited report on the use of solitary confinement in the federal prison system. The report, which was requested by several members of Congress, attempts to solve the mystery surrounding how many prisoners in federal prison are subjected to solitary confinement and how BOP monitors individuals while in solitary.
By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 1:53pm
In 2008, 66 year old Baerbel Roznowski sought a protection order to keep herself safe from her estranged boyfriend, Chan Kim, who had a history of violence. A court issued the order, which said that Kim must stay away from Roznowski and her home and stop contacting her. The order included instructions for law enforcement explaining that Kim did not speak English well and would need an interpreter to fully understand what was happening, and that Kim would likely react violently against Roznowski when he received news that they would be separated. Unfortunately, the police officer who brought the order to Kim didn't bother to read these instructions. He gave the order to him at Roznowski's home, did not bring an interpreter, and left them together without ensuring that they were safely separated. Just hours later, Baerbel Roznowski was dead. Her boyfriend had stabbed her 18 times, murdering her in her own home.
By Seema Sadanandan, Organizer, ACLU of the Nation's Capital at 1:43pm
When Officer David Bailey grabbed a 10-year-old student by the back of his head and slammed it into the school cafeteria table, it is safe to say that student was not free to leave. On that afternoon, Bailey decided that his routine beat on the streets of Southeast D.C. extended into the hallways of Moten Elementary School.
Although Bailey was not a trained school resource officer contracted from the Metropolitan Police Department nor one of the three contract officers assigned to Moten at the time, his presence raised no red flags. Regular visits from the police in D.C. Public Schools had become ubiquitous.
By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 2:31pm
A detailed and harrowing first-person narrative of a prisoner's experiences in Guantánamo is available to the public for the first time: Slate today published a three-part series of excerpts from The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The excerpts were culled from a manuscript hundreds of pages in length, which Slahi provided his attorneys, a pro bono team of ACLU and other lawyers. After being classified for years, Slahi's memoirs – of arrest, rendition, torture, and imprisonment without charge or trial – are finally seeing the light of day, albeit with some redactions.
By David Sapp, ACLU of Southern California at 1:40pm
Our nation’s public schools represent the highest and most revolutionary ideal of American democracy — that through education open to all on an equal basis, every child can achieve his or her full potential as a result of merit and hard work. The California Constitution, like the constitutions of every state in the Union, accordingly entitles the children of this state to a free and equal education. But, as an investigation by the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU/SC) released Friday has found, there’s no system of truly free public education in California. Public schools throughout the state openly ignore this constitutional right by requiring students to pay fees and purchase assigned materials for academic courses and for school-sponsored extracurricular activities.
The Obama Administration recently underwent its first U.N. treaty body review, and the resulting concluding observations made public yesterday should be a cause for alarm. The observations, issued by independent U.N. experts tasked with monitoring compliance with the international treaty on the rights of children in armed conflict (formally known as the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict or "OPAC"), paint a dark picture of the treatment of juveniles by the U.S. military in Afghanistan: one where hundreds of children have been killed in attacks and air strikes by U.S. military forces, and those responsible for the killings have not been held to account even as the number of children killed doubled from 2010 to 2011; where children under 18 languish in detention facilities without access to legal or full humanitarian assistance, or adequate resources to aid in their recovery and reintegration as required under international law. Some children were abused in U.S. detention facilities, and others are faced with the prospect of torture and ill-treatment if they are transferred to Afghan custody.
By Ian Kysel, Aryeh Neier Fellow, ACLU Human Rights Program at 5:07pm
There are more than 80,000 people in solitary confinement in the United States. Last week, the widespread misuse and abuse of solitary confinement in jails and prisons across the country drew international condemnation when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights criticized the United States following weeks of hearings on human rights practices across the Americas region.
Our nation’s public schools represent the highest and most revolutionary ideal of American democracy — that through education open to all on an equal basis, every child can achieve his or her full potential as a result of merit and hard work. The California Constitution, like the constitutions of every state in the Union, accordingly entitles the children of this state to a free and equal education. But, as an 
