Tag: childhood abuse

We are writing to ask you to join with California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) in our statewide campaign to DROP LWOP and secure sentence commutations for all those serving Life Without the Possibility of Parole (LWOP). LWOP is an inhumane sentence which denies people the possibility to rehabilitate and change. We are asking Governor Brown to use his executive powers to commute the almost 5,000 people serving LWOP sentences to parole-eligible sentences.

From expressing spirituality and identity to creating a meditative focus, art takes on a heightened value inside prison. In the U.S., art has become a new weapon in the battle for hearts and minds over the justness of the death penalty – an increasingly heated and polarizing issue touching on not just the ethics and morality of state-sponsored killing but prison reform, class and the inequities of the justice system.

Voting against Proposition 34 means I want the state to continue to actively kill people by shooting poison in their veins. Voting for it means I want the state to sentence more people to the slow, excruciating, grinding form of the death penalty that is life without parole. In the end, I really have no choice but to abstain.