Josh Page

Detainees at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” are on a hunger strike over what they call inhumane, dangerous conditions.

Some haven’t eaten in 10 days. One of them, Pedro Hernández, was hospitalized and still refuses food until they are treated with dignity.

📣 2025 book publication!

Professor Josh Page co-authored a recent book with Joe Soss titled "Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice."

Check out the details here: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

5 Ways that Trump Rapidly Ramped Up Immigration Detention Through threats and incentives, the administration conscripted local jails, federal prisons and private companies to detain immigrants.

In the last six months, a gargantuan network of American prisons and jails has been redeployed to accomplish Trump’s immigration goals.

Here's how the administration enlisted this criminal justice infrastructure to detain immigrants.

It's remarkable how much national crime and violence and murder debates go on with no grasp of the history of crime/violence in the USA. Deep South/Gulf coast states have always had highest murder/gun violence in the country. Always. In general the South has higher rates of crime/violence ....

Devastated. Now headed to Chicago for the service at Old Saint Patrick’s for the passionate, inspiring, moral exemplar, critical theorist and theologian, comrade in arms, and advocate for the damned, Tom Durkin. The New York Times fittingly printed his tribute yesterday in their pages.

expanding the police state via tech contracts is graft example 1 billion

“Thorpe is part of an experimental program in the Maine state prison system that allows incarcerated people to work remote jobs from custody. Though unconventional, these opportunities have proven immensely rehabilitative.” Way to go, Maine! 👏🏾

The Abuses at ICE Detention Centers Fulfill a Trump Campaign Promise Mass detention isn’t merely a step along the way to achieving Trump’s goal of mass deportation. Mass detention is also the goal.

great piece by @melissagiragrant.com
newrepublic.com/article/1982...

These Scholarly Topics Are Hotly Debated. So Why Don’t Syllabi Reflect That? A new working paper suggests that many students are given only one viewpoint to consider.

Just read this paper discussed in @chronicle.com reported by
@EmmaJanePettit. It purports to show ideology in the classroom but is itself ideology masquerading as objective 1/11

www.chronicle.com/article/thes...

Great news!

Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave’ Data does not support claims that the United States is experiencing a surge in crime caused by immigrants.

Some politicians and pundits are pushing the idea that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes. Not only is that claim false, the opposite is true.
bit.ly/4dTGTlv

Graph showing that ICE now regularly surveils and detains well over 200,000 people on any given day – more than 4x as many as it did in 2015

ICE's use of electronic monitoring has rapidly expanded.

Now, more than 200,000 people on any given day are regularly surveilled & detained by ICE – over 4x as many as a decade ago.

JFC!

Sounds ideal!

100% I've proudly single-handedly depleted our department's stock of bluebooks. Many students have never seen blue books before taking a class with me. It's like having them make calls with rotary phones.

That's wonderful! Some much needed good news.

This is so powerful, especially in showing how incarcerated people help each other survive. The fascism unleashed by Trump and the targeting of Rümeysa Öztürk are new & horrifying but this account will be very familiar to anyone familiar with US prisons, which have long been dehumanizing hellholes.

Well played!

The secret to Baltimore's extraordinary year This April, Baltimore saw five homicides.

1. We interrupt this programming for some LEGITIMATELY GOOD NEWS

Violent crime in Baltimore has PLUMMETED to historic lows

How did the city do it?

Baltimore adopted a comprehensive set of "woke" policies, treating violence as a public health issue

Well, if you were at a lower park, you'd be victimized immediately. Just ask Mr. Miller. Stay on high ground, my friend.

Wow, thank you so much, Faith! @joesoss.bsky.social and I haven't received our copies yet. You'll have to let us know if it's worth reading. #LegalPlunder

Geo Group extends executive chairman contract, raises bonuses for top officers By Investing.com Geo Group extends executive chairman contract, raises bonuses for top officers

The executives at the nation’s largest private prison operator, GEO Group, are wasting no time in upping compensation and cashing in on the immigration detention and deportation boom.

www.investing.com/news/sec-fil...

Criminally underrated and under the radar.

LOVE Halt and Catch Fire!

Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor

Thanks for the shout out!

A party flyer with a reddish-orange background and two strips of white barbed wire running vertically down its right-hand side reads: Book Party. Palmer's Bar. 4-8pm. 500 Cedar Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN. Monday August 25. "Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice."

Into books about social (in)justice and saying goodbye to landmark bars of Minneapolis's West Bank? Join me to celebrate the release of @joshpage.bsky.social and @joesoss.bsky.social's book Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice at ‪@palmersman.bsky.social! #sociology #booksky

John Fabricius, executive director of the Praxis Initiative, spent 15 years incarcerated in the ADCRR, and since his release in 2018, he's worked with other criminal justice advocacy groups to get a law passed in Arizona to bring some sort of transparency to state prisons. He says he realized while behind bars that the ADCRR had "total narrative control" over information, and what was really happening wasn't getting out to anyone—reporters, lawmakers, and even prison administrators. "I watched people die," Fabricius says. "I watched a guy lose a leg. I watched my friend go blind. It was crazy. It was insane in there." In the case of his friend, Fabricius says the man went permanently blind in one eye after waiting three months for an outside appointment and then nine months for surgery to treat a detached retina. Fabricius says that, while his friend was putting in requests to see a doctor, prison medical staff offered him Visine for his occluded eye.

Of all the things I write about, medical neglect in prisons and jails is the one that just drives me nuts.

"I watched people die. I watched a guy lose a leg. I watched my friend go blind. It was crazy. It was insane in there." reason.com/2025/07/11/a...

Thanks for posting this -- and the book shout out. The FCC's actions are infuriating.

Great piece illustrating just how awful prison charges for calls are (see also the recent book by @joesoss.bsky.social & @joshpage.bsky.social - Legal Plunder).