Las graves of the cemeteries located in the prisons of New York, for decades marked only with the number of the deceased inmate, have begun to be identified with the names of the dead, in addition to their dates of birth and death.
He changecarried out discreetly, thus follows a directive applied during the pandemic in which prisoners buried as of April 2020 were ordered to be properly identified, but nothing was said of the thousands of graves preexisting.
Now, and according to the Gothamist portal, some prisons have begun to insert plaques into the old stone headstones, starting with the Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Dutchess County, which houses one of the oldest populations of prisoners.
Los cemeteries of the prisons they are reserved for those prisoners with no known relatives or whose relatives go bankrupt in order to pay for a transfer and burial in a chosen cemetery, and are in part reminiscent of the cemeteries of war, with dozens of similar tombstones lined up regularly.
The portal points out that none of this would have been known if it were not for the fact that a former prisoner, Mathew Hahn, who identifies himself on his Twitter account as a collaborator of an organization called Conscious Prisonsrecounted last February that he had observed new plaques with the names of the prisoners inserted in the tombstones.
Hahn, who had thousands of “likes” in a thread he wrote after his visit, wrote then that a cemetery with no names reminded those who still remain in the United States from the slave era, “as if the Power did not want them to be remembered (…) in an attempt to depersonalize them.”
So far there has been no official directive, at least publicly, and the process is being done discreetlywithout knowing what the scope of this initiative has been up to now.
2023-05-16 00:11:00
#prisons #identify #inmate #graves
