IRTF News

Mass incarceration in the United States is a crime against humanity. It disproportionately ruins the lives of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. It wastes human potential. It destabilizes neighborhoods and destroys communities. We all pay dearly for it, in human as well as economic terms. Both at its roots and in its practices and policies, mass incarceration as practiced by the United States is an egregious abuse of human rights. If you are Black, Brown or Indigenous in the U.S., jail and prison are traps targeted at you and waiting to spring shut. You have a high likelihood of being incarcerated. Race and class play a critical role in who is arrested, who is tried and convicted, who receives the harshest sentences – and who is able to successfully navigate the challenges of post-incarceration life. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, and Latinx people are 2.5 times as likely. For Black men in their thirties, about 1 in every 12 is in prison or jail on any given day. In 2019, the imprisonment rate for African American women (83 per 100,000) was over 1.7 times the rate of imprisonment for white women (48 per 100,000). Latinx women were imprisoned at 1.3 times the rate of white women (63 vs. 48 per 100,000).

There is little respite to the human rights crisis impacting communities across Colombia. November was another very violent month. According to national human rights groups, by the end of November at least 43 former FARC guerrillas and 159 social activists had been killed since the start of 2021. Here is Justice for Colombia’s monthly update on cases of human rights abuses in the country.

On December 21, 2021, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador approved a Water Resources Law that had been widely criticized by environmental and popular movement organizations on the grounds that it includes various privatizing aspects and excludes community efforts to guarantee the right to water for the most vulnerable populations. The government introduced the bill on June 18, 2021, shelving the previously proposed General Water Law, which had been under discussion for three years in the Environmental Commission. and thus erasing more than a decade of debate and consensus among social and environmental organizations. After new the bill was introduced, the majority party, New Ideas, formed an ad-hoc commission ostensibly to study it; however, none of the proposals from environmental or social movement organizations were incorporated into the bill. These organizations have thus denounced the government's bill, arguing that it establishes mechanisms to monopolize water use and institutionalizes water injustice.