By Sharon White-Harrigan, Michelle Feldman, Zachary Katznelson, Dana Kaplan, Michael Rempel and Joanna Weill

On Rikers Island, the widespread violence, dysfunction, and lack of access to basic services mean no one leaves better off than when they went in. The roughly 300 women and gender-expansive people incarcerated at Rikers are uniquely vulnerable.* They face an elevated risk of sexual abuse and retraumatization.1 Over 80 percent are being treated for mental illness and 27 percent have a serious mental illness. Many are victims of domestic violence. Seventy percent are caregivers, and incarceration has profoundly negative consequences for their children and families. Almost 90 percent are held before trial, mostly due to unaffordable bail. Last fiscal year, the city spent over $550,000 to keep a single person locked up at Rikers for a year.2 New York City is legally required to close Rikers by August 2027. The city is on track to replace the Rikers jail complex with four borough-based facilities closer to courthouses, lawyers, families, and service providers. Women and gender-expansive people, most of whom are currently housed at the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers (“Rosie’s”), are slated to be relocated to a new facility in Kew Gardens, Queens (see box below). The deaths of 31-year-old Mary Yehudah and the other eight people incarcerated at Rikers who have died this year—underscore the importance of shutting the jails as soon as possible.3

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New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2022. 40p.

By Karina Garcia.

Dominant scholarly approaches to drug trafficking violence (DTV) in Mexico generally explain its onset and escalation by focusing on one of four issues: a) the democratisation process in the 1990s and 2000s; b) the systemic corruption of the judicial and legislative institutions; c) a weak rule of law across the country; and d) the ‘war on drugs’ launched by former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012). These approaches, however, fail to account for the discursive conditions that enable the perpetrators to engage in DTV. This thesis, therefore, proposes a new critical approach to our understanding of DTV by examining the life stories of thirty-three former narcos collected in Mexico between October 2014 and January 2015. Using a discourse analytical approach, I identify a set of meaning production regularities, uncovered through detailed interviews, which I conceptualise as narco discourse. In this discourse, informed by a neoliberal ethos, poverty is understood as a fixed condition, ‘poor people have no future’ and have ‘nothing to lose’. Under this logic, the ‘only’ way for them to enjoy life is to engage in illegal activities conceived as ‘la vida fácil’ [the easy life] which guarantee them ‘dinero fácil’ [easy money]. The narco discourse also produces the idea that ‘un hombre de verdad’ [a true man] embodies the normative characteristics of machismo. This masculinity, in turn, justifies male violence as ‘necessary’ in order to ‘survive’ in contexts of poverty. These three intertwined discourses of poverty, masculinity and violence enable the construction of DTV in instrumental terms, e.g. as ‘un negocio’ [a business’], as something ‘exciting’ and even as a source of empowerment. In this way, I demonstrate how DTV is discursively made possible by and for former narcos. This is a starting point for rethinking DTV not only as the result of corruption, or failed policies, but also as the product of the interplay between pre-existing social conditions and discourses produced and reproduced by perpetrators of DTV.

Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2018. 179p.

Edited by CALS (Coalition of African Lesbians) and AMSHeR.

Violence against sexual minorities in Africa is rife. Persons belonging to or perceived to be members of the broad grouping ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI)’ are often victim of violence in African states. This violence is sometimes perpetrated by state actors, such as the members of the Police force, and more often by ordinary persons (non-state actors). By condoning violence by state actors, and by failing to diligently investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators of these acts, states fail to respect the basic right to security of some of its citizens. By condoning these actions, or by failing to act effectively, the state also violates its human rights obligations. The argument of this report is not that sexual minorities deserve special protection, but that they are entitled to the rights all other citizens have – the right to security, liberty, life, dignity, and a fair trial.

As members of the African Union, states are party to and should abide by their obligations under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter). Like several other regional and international human rights instruments, the African Charter guarantees freedom from discrimination, and equal protection and equality of individuals and peoples’ before the law (articles 2, 3 and 19). The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Commission), the body monitoring compliance with the African Charter, has in various communications presented to it denounced acts of discrimination on several of the listed grounds of discrimination and has clearly established that ‘other status’ (in article 2 of the Charter) can be broadly interpreted to include grounds other than those explicitly listed under that provision of the African Charter. The Commission made its first pronouncement on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues in its Concluding Observations on Cameroon’s periodic report of 2005 by expressing concern about the upsurge in intolerance towards sexual minorities. Most recently, the Chairperson of the Commission issued a statement on in April 2013 stating that the he Commission ‘equally denounces violence committed against individuals based on their sexual orientation as part of its mandate to protect individuals from all forms of violence’.

Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press, 2013. 57p.