Latest criminal justice news and updates 10.8.24

Hi all! Welcome to new readers. I’m happy to share this month’s updates from around the country. I read a lot of stuff and pick things that I think indicate the way things are going, and curate it for you here. If you have suggestions for articles I should be including or angles I’m missing, please share those! And please feel free to share feedback and other ideas. I will be sharing a longer post on three major elections to watch in California next week.

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Top reads:  The Marshall Project has some deep and rich reporting on the hope and challenge of importing humane prison practices; Pennsylvania leader Saleem Holbrook’s message to the Biden administration; prop 47 delivered massive good to Californians, including almost $1billion into communities. Prop 36 is trying to end that this fall.

Media

• The Marshall Project collaborated with Tradeoffs on a podcast series exploring the impacts of a new approach to crisis response in Durham, NC, that focuses on care rather than criminalization. 

• Journalist Josie Duffy Rice teamed up with Vera to produce a mini podcast series reflecting on the legacy of the 1994 crime bill.  

• Incarcerated men at Sing Sing prison will judge New York’s first film festival to take place in a prison. 

Solutions and Wins

• A recent policy brief by the Sentencing Project found that youth incarceration nationwide has dropped by 75% between 2000 and 2022 (from 108,800 to 27,600 young people).   

• The end of cash bail in Illinois looks like a big success one year later. Opponents insisted there would be a major crime wave after passage of the Pretrial Fairness Act; on the contrary, violent crime and property crime are down. Why is this different from other major reforms that have been implemented in recent years? I believe that it’s all in the timing. Crime isn’t affected by these reforms one way or another, and the IL law just happened to go into effect at the time when crime was falling nationally. If it had been implemented two years prior, it might be called a disaster, even though the actual impact of the law would have been the same.   

• Kamala Harris endorsed full marijuana legalization. 

• The Center for American Progress dug into gun violence stats, finding that the annual summer surge in gun violence was lower in 2024 than any year since 2018. 

• Chicago’s mental health emergency response program will now operate solely under the Chicago Department of Public Health and will not include police officers or fire department personnel. 

• After serving nearly 24 years in prison before being granted clemency and starring in last year’s movie “ Sing Sing,” Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez has been exonerated.

• A federal jury in Chicago awarded Marcel Brown $50 million for the 10 years he spent in prison after being wrongfully convicted via a coerced confession. There are growing calls to find a solution to the massive, high-dollar liability created by the sheer volume of police misconduct in the city. One promising solution is to require officers to pay for individual liability insurance. 

• Crime continues to fall at the fastest rate ever, according to the most recent FBI crime data. Here’s an overview, where Jeff Asher goes into the details on murder from a data perspective. The New York Times compiled Asher’s data to produce some striking charts, pictured here. Meanwhile, the Republican House Judiciary Committee wants us to think we are living in a war zone.

  

• The New Jersey AG is forcing big internal changes in the state police after confidential interviews of 150 officers found pervasive bias in the department. The AG is taking over HR functions. 

• The Wichita Police Department’s “gang list” that targeted young Black and Latino residents based on where they lived, the clothes they wore and funerals they attended will be overhauled after a federal judge approved a settlement in a class-action lawsuit.

• Overdose deaths are dropping nationally for the first time, down about 10% this year, and in some places over 30%. There is no clear answer as to why it’s happening. 

Politics

• Bolts Magazine has the 2024 elections cheat sheet, tracking high-stakes races around the country, up and down the ballot (including state leg, courts, referendums, local races, etc). 

• The Austin Statesman reports that Elon Musk personally contributed $650,000 to a PAC that tried to unseat Austin DA José Garza in his primary this year. Garza won handily, and is expected to win in the general. Garza is not only a smart leader and a strong campaigner, but also he previously led the Workers Defense Project, and deeply understands organizing. The failure of Musk’s money shows that it is possible to build resilient reform leadership, even in Texas.  

• A recent update from FWD.us included this chart, which I found pretty striking. A significant majority of Americans say they’re more likely to vote for criminal justice reform candidates. So why are we seeing major reforms under threat in places like California? I think it has a lot to do with the years-long branding and messaging campaigns by opponents of reform. Just as some love the ACA but hate Obamacare (the same law), others love criminal justice reform but dislike “prop 47” or “progressive prosecutor X,” etc. 

Reports and Research

• A University of Toronto report investigated whether progressive prosecutors were responsible for crime increases during the pandemic, and they found that “Major changes in crime are not explained by prosecution or the system of criminal justice.” The Center for American Progress did a really helpful report summarizing and contextualizing these findings.  This is consistent with dozens of studies finding that investments in health, cash payments, housing, and other quality of life improvements are the strongest crime reduction strategies.    

• PPI put together a useful guide for tackling claims often made by politicians about what works to address drug use, homelessness, and bad jail conditions. 

• The Prison Journalism Project gathered first hand accounts from men in prison in dozens of states about the debilitating impacts of extreme heat in prisons. 

• The Alliance for Safety and Justice put out a new national survey of crime survivors. Large majorities of crime survivors in the study want social service interventions, not more punishment. They also published a national crime survivors policy platform. 

Wall of Shame

• Rolling Stone brought attention to the horrific practice of removing children from mothers who test positive for marijuana. 

• A judge ruled the federal government can hide findings about whether a person who dies in federal prison had received proper medical care, on the basis that such information could be used to critique prison officials.  

• After concerted advocacy by NPAP, ACLU, and others, the DOJ investigated the town of Lexington, Mississippi, whose law enforcement have been terrorizing Black residents. 

• The outrageously corrupt Adams administration was apparently in the business of shaking down business owners, saying that with some cash payoffs, they would get their approvals. 

• The SF Chronicle found that at least 163 police agencies across California let police charged with misconduct step down quietly in exchange for burying the case. These same police are then hired for other police jobs. These secret deals are all written by the same police lobby group.

• NYC’s “law and order” major was indicted for corruption – as usual, the Philly Inquirer has a great take. The NYC police commissioner Edward Caban resigned last month after being investigated for other crimes, and the new one was recently subject to a search warrant. Meanwhile, the NYPD has been tossing out civilian complaints without investigating them. 

• Missouri executed a probably innocent man, Marcellus Williams, despite calls to spare his life from the victim’s family, the DA, and over half a million petition signers. The Missouri AG aggressively pursued the execution, arguing that the State’s interest in “finality” outweighed everything else.