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Safe Place
Reflections for Torture Awareness Month
June is Torture Awareness Month. On June 26, 1987, nations around the world, including the U.S., signed the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (often referred to as CAT), and June 26th is International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, a designation created by the United Nations.
As such, I encourage you, this month (and beyond), to support efforts and initiatives focused on ending torture. In this piece, I focus on torture inside the U.S. criminal justice system, which I have explored in various creative projects.
Those projects include: Think Ten Media Group’s short film The wHOLE, which highlights solitary confinement, an essay in Routledge Press’s What Is A Criminal?, and the creation of a community discussion guide for the award-winning short documentary film Safe Place.
Through this work, I discovered that even individuals committed to human rights and justice often accept the collective tendency to treat those in jail and prison differently. When a person is touched by the U.S. justice system (even while legally innocent, but in jail), they become…
