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:
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)