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Lauryn Hill Goes To Minimum Security Prison In Connecticut
By
Jen Chung
Published Jul 8, 2013
Modified Jul 8, 2013
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By
Jen Chung
Published Jul 8, 2013
Modified Jul 8, 2013
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After being charged with tax evasion between 2005 and 2007, singer Lauryn Hill made a deal to pay back some of the taxes and go to prison for three months. Today, she started her prison sentence.
TMZ reports that she went to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut at 11:15 AM EST: "We're told the FCI is a 'minimum security type facility' where inmates live in 'barracks type' housing. We're also told 38-year-old Hill will not be isolated in the facility -- and will be housed with the general population."
Hill had claimed that she didn't pay taxes because she faces "danger" so she went "underground." She owes nearly $1 million to the government and has paid about half that. Last week, Hill posted over 1500 words about racism and slavery on her Tumblr. Here's an excerpt:
I shuddered during sentencing when I kept hearing the term ‘make the IRS whole’… make the IRS whole, knowing that I got into these very circumstances having to deal with the very energies of inequity and resistance that created and perpetuated these savage inequalities. The entire time, I thought, who has made black people whole?! Who has made recompense for stealing, imposing, lying, murdering, criminalizing the traumatized, taking them against their wills, destroying their homes, dividing their communities, ‘trying’ to steal their destinies, their time, stagnating their development, I could go on and on. Has America, or any of the nations of the world guilty of these atrocities, ever made black people or Africa whole or do they continue to sit on them, control them, manipulate them, cage them, rob them, brutalize them, subject them to rules that don’t apply to all? Use language, veiled coercion, and psychological torment like invisible fences to keep them locked into a pattern of limitation and therefore control by others. You have to remain focused to cease from rage.
Hill released a single in May as part of her deal with Sony to help pay off her taxes.
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Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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