From Centro de Periodismo Investigativo:
The question came to my mind five years ago: how many Puerto Ricans are incarcerated in the United States? At the time, in 2018, I was investigating the Government of Puerto Rico’s failed attempt to transfer incarcerated people from the custody of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to a private prison in Mississippi.
But it wasn’t until 2020, when I moved to Philadelphia, during the pandemic and the racial protests over the murder of George Floyd, that I began to investigate the matter. First, I did a light search on the internet which returned no results. Then I made some calls. And so, I began to explore a subject that turned out to be extremely more complicated than I expected.
On Friday, August 21, 2020, I called Jan Susler, a Chicago attorney who defended political prisoner Oscar López Rivera. I wanted to know if she thought it was possible to get data on Puerto Ricans in US prisons. She told me that “on the federal issue, the Department of Justice has a data department, but I don’t know if it includes a separate category for Puerto Ricans.” Continue reading >>>
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