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:
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)