History
JDI was founded in 1980 by Russell Dan Smith as People Organized to Stop the Rape of Imprisoned Persons (POSRIP) and was soon renamed Stop Prisoner Rape. In 2008, the organization changed its name to Just Detention International, in recognition of its work in all forms of detention and beyond the United States. Two of the organization’s early leaders were Tom Cahill and Stephen Donaldson (also known as “Donny the Punk”). Like many of the people involved in the beginning days of the organization, Smith, Cahill, and Donaldson were all survivors of rape behind bars. Donaldson died in 1996 as a result of AIDS, having contracted HIV during a sexual assault in jail
Read more about this topic: Just Detention International
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
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“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
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