Jennifer Gonnerman

The San Francisco District Attorney, whose father is an elderly member of the prison population, is urging politicians and criminal-justice leaders to protect incarcerated individuals who are vulnerable to the disease.

At the moment, he was rereading John Grisham’s “The Testament.” “Have you ever read that?” he asked. “It’s a really good book.” As it happens, Springs is a writer, too. In the nineteen-eighties and early nineties, during a stint in the New Jersey prison system, where he was incarcerated for armed robbery, he published five novels. His publisher was Holloway House, which put out the legendary black pulp-fiction writers Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim. Springs, who grew up in the Stella Wright Home…

The stresses of COVID-19 have revealed fissures and weaknesses in all kinds of systems, including New York’s parole practices, training a spotlight on the question of why New York imprisons so many people for violating parole in the first place. Individuals on parole must follow a long list of rules—report to their parole officer, obey a curfew, avoid police contact—or they risk being incarcerated again. But, nearly twenty years ago, the former executive director of the state’s Division of Parol…

Torres has two offices—one near City Hall, one in his district—but these days he works from a desk in his living room. His workday begins at about 8 A.M. and usually lasts until midnight. When he peers outside his living-room window, Torres sees empty sidewalks. “I feel like I’m living in a ghost town,” he said. He hardly ever leaves his apartment except to visit a bodega nearby. Meals seem to be an afterthought. On April 15th, two empty pizza boxes sat atop a trash can in his kitchen; the refri…

Driving a New York City bus during a pandemic and an uprising.

For years, employees of the Pierre enjoyed some of the most enviable union jobs in New York City. How much of that will survive the pandemic?

Sara Nelson, the head of the largest flight attendants’ union, leads her members through turbulent times and mounts a major organizing drive at Delta.

UPS and the Package Wars

The phone call came early that morning from a friend from her home town—Springfield, Oregon. He stammered something about having bad news and hung up. Soon afterward, another friend called and told her that there had been a shooting at Thurston High School, where Kristin had gone and where her brother, Kip, was in ninth grade. “Is Kip hurt?” she asked. She didn’t get an answer. Then a third friend phoned and blurted out what nobody else wanted to say: Kip was the one who had opened fire at Thurs…

She thought that this fact might prevent her from being picked, but it did not, and on July 6, 1987, she was seated in the jury box for the opening of the trial, the People of the State of New York v. Eric Smokes and David Warren. That year, nearly seventeen hundred people were killed in New York City. The murder at the center of this trial had occurred on January 1st, just after the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square had ended, when a group of young men approached a French tourist who w…