Lester Mason is the victim of what many now consider an ill-conceived and racist “three strikes and you’re out law” that almost exclusively targets Black men. He was released from prison the day before Thanksgiving after an incarceration of nearly…
Lester Bobby Mason, 76, has been asking for a sentencing review and clemency for nearly 40 years. He now has that opportunity. He was sentenced to natural life in prison with no chance for parole under the now-widely discredited three-strikes…
Research and nearly half a century of precedent have widely disproven the value of three-strikes-and-you’re-out, but change may be too slow in coming for Lester Mason. The three-strikes legislation was supposed to act as a deterrent to violent crime. Instead,…
Lester Bobby Mason chopped cotton in Mississippi as a youth along with 11 brothers and sisters. But when 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally beaten to death in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman, Mason’s mother decided in order…
Once again, Peoria tops a nationwide list –– this time for harsh sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Many in the judicial system contend these disproportionally harsh sentences do not make society safer but only serve to feed mass incarceration. Federal…
Montgomery is a city of contradictions. It is known as the Cradle of the Confederacy as well as the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement that was born from the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The city has markers throughout the town…
BY PAM ADAMS The average cost of an enslaved Black man in the 1800s was about $750. At $15,000 in today’s dollars, that’s not that much less than the average annual cost per inmate at many Illinois prisons. It’s a…
Michelle Alexander has called some uses of electronic ankle monitors the newest Jim Crow and “e-carceration.” The cost of some monitors can be $300 a month, and people ordered to wear a monitor can easily fall into arrears and face…
