EP #64 Prisons and COVID-19 with Alan Mills & Melanie Newport

Today, we have a discussion of COVID-19, prisons, and incarcerated people with  Alan Mills and Melanie Newport.

Alan Mills is the Executive Director of Uptown People’s Law Center–a nonprofit community legal clinic located on the North Side of Chicago. UPLC is a legal organization that fights for justice for tenants, the disabled, and prisoners in Illinois.

Alan has tried dozens of individual cases on behalf of prisoners in state and federal court during the last 40 years. UPLC is currently lead counsel in six class action cases alleging that Illinois prisons violate the constitutional rights of the people who are kept there. These include challenges to Illinois supermax prison known as Tamms, a claim that the medical care provided to prisoners violates the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual treatment, and the state’s failure to accommodate the communication needs of deaf and hard of hearing prisoners, as well as a recently filed case challenging the IDOC’s failure to protect prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Melanie Newport is assistant professor of History at U CONN. Melanie’s research focuses on the policies and institutions of urban criminal justice systems in the United States since the 1950s. She is currently working on a book that is tentatively titled Community of the Condemned: Chicago and the Transformation of American Jails, under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press. Looking to America’s largest jail, she explores how contests over reform, human rights, and race shaped everyday experiences of state violence among marginalized people in American cities.

As a graduate student, Melanie worked as a preceptor in African American Studies at Princeton University and taught at Temple University, Community College of Philadelphia, and Garden State Youth Correctional Facility in New Jersey. She has trained with the Inside-Out Prison Education exchange.