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Saturday, February 25th, 2023

Poor People’s Campaign, Families Demand DOJ Probe of Over 100 West Virginia Jail Deaths

Author:     Brett Wilkins
Source:     Common Dreams
Publication Date:     Feb 23, 2023
 Link: Poor People’s Campaign, Families Demand DOJ Probe of Over 100 West Virginia Jail Deaths
Stephan:  

West Virginia is another failed state controlled by Republicans. Not quite as bad as Mississippi, but with social outcome data notably and glaringly inferior to its neighbors Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Even Red state Ohio puts West Virginia to shame. And once again it is not that the state is so impoverished that it can't create programs that foster wellbeing, it is that the White Republicans who control West Virginia just don't care about fostering wellbeing; they care only about rich Whites, and the corporations they control. Look at Joe Manchin a pseudo-Democrat as one example of what I mean. This business of prison deaths also is an example of America's growing new slavery movement -- the functional enslavement and brutality aimed at prisoners, particularly in Red states.

A handcuffed prisoner languishes in a prison cell. 
Credit: Doug Berry / Getty

Activists with the Poor People’s Campaign and relatives of some of the 13 inmates who died at West Virginia’s Southern Regional Jail last year held a press conference Thursday to implore the Biden administration to investigate conditions at the notorious lockup, as well as the deaths of more than 100 prisoners in the state during the last 10 years.

“We’re doing this on behalf of the 13 people who have died senselessly, we believe, at the Southern Regional Jail… and on behalf of over 100 more who have died within West Virginia regional jails over the last decade,” Bishop William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, said at the online conference.

Speaking to Common Dreams by phone after the press conference, Barber said that “we need a full, independent investigation by the Justice Department. We’re talking about basic civil rights and human dignity. Give us the truth. Give us justice.”

“There are too many unanswered questions here,” he added. “We’re talking […]

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