August 23 roundup of criminal justice news, commentary, media and reports

Top reads: The Connecticut miracle;  Jamelle Bouie on why billionaires backed Hanania; Sentenced to life as boys; know your seasons; most police spending goes to fruitless traffic stops, not calls for service.

Media 

• Mehdi Hasan breaks down what the backlash against progressive prosecutors is really about. 

• The Freedom Reads project got a nice little writeup in Surface Magazine. This fantastic organization has already built 172 libraries at 30 prisons. 

• Clementine Jacoby, founder and ED of Recidiviz, went on the Freakonomics podcast to talk about using data analysis to shrink jail and prison populations.  Systems keep such poor data that thousands of people are being held past their release dates, while others are being revoked to prison by overworked parole and probation officers with little guidance. 

• The Marshall Project reviews recent exhibitions of artwork by people who have lived in prison.

• NowThis has a new short explainer video on why prosecutors matter. 

• The NYTimes featured video interviews with prisoners serving extreme sentences in Louisiana. 

Solutions and Wins

• Over the past 15 years, Connecticut has cut its incarceration in half (from 20,000 to 10,000) while cutting violent crime by over 40%. The turning point was new elected leadership in 2011, when a new Democratic governor worked with the legislature to overhaul the state’s approach, with pressure and support from sophisticated advocates, organizers, and funders.

• A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Mississippi secretary of state to stop disenfranchising people convicted of specific crimes, including forgery and bigamy. The constitutional disenfranchisement provision was included in the 1890 constitution for the explicit purpose of disenfranchising Black voters - the comments from legislators are on the record, yet this is the first time the court has struck it down. The case will likely be appealed en banc, which many worry will reverse the decision. 

• An appellate court has ruled that Measure J, the L.A. County measure (passed in 2019) that requires the county to allocate at least 10% of discretionary funds to housing, mental health, and other non-criminalized social welfare interventions, is constitutional. Given the size of the county, the impact of the decision may be as much as $900 million per year. The case to strike down Measure J was financed and pushed by the sheriff’s association. 

• Massachusetts has voted to remove charges for phone calls from prison. 

• In the months since California stopped charging prisoners and their families extravagant rates for phone calls, prisoners have been building new bonds and reconnecting with family, a key step in rehabilitation, healing, and a safe return to society. 

• States are working to figure out how to spend billions of dollars in opioid settlement money. This is a fantastic source of funding for programs that will both save lives and break cycles of punishment and harm. More advocates and organizers need to be aware of these funding streams. 

• Dallas elected DA John Creuzot has directed his office to significantly reduce the number of children being held in detention – where parents and kids have alleged outrageous conditions – while awaiting adjudication on delinquency offenses. 

• A woman sentenced to life in prison for second degree murder after feeding her baby cow’s milk, leading to his death from malnutrition, has finally been recommended for parole after 17 years. 

Commentary and Analysis

• Some members of the NYC City Council recently asserted that Rikers was a ‘compassionate’ place, which is one of the more grotesque and ludicrous lies in politics lately. Tiffany Cabán responds.

• Morgan Godvin parses the nuances of drug decriminalization in Oregon, which is being wrongly blamed for problems stemming from skyrocketing housing prices. 

• Amanda Knox, who was exonerated after being famously prosecuted for murder in Italy, wrote about the cognitive bias that shaped the case against her.

Politics

• Atlanta Democrats are dead set on preventing the referendum on ‘cop city’ from reaching the ballot. Their latest move is announcing an elaborate signature verification program to check the 104,000 signatures collected. This form of verification has been denounced by some of those very same officials in the past, on the grounds that it suppresses votes. 

• Police in multiple cities have shared the tactic of telling the public that they “can’t” investigate crimes because, they claim, the elected prosecutor won’t charge the case. No matter if it’s a lie and the DA charges almost all the cases that come to them, the public tends to believe the police. In Portland, this has become such a major issue that the police chief himself told his officers to stop saying it.

• People are significantly more likely to say that ‘crime is up’ in their local area if they are a Democrat or a Republican and the other political party is in power. There’s been a huge rise in the percentage of Republicans who say that crime is up locally since Biden took office. My explanation for this is that anxiety about the direction of the country gets channeled into anxiety about crime, based on news and other cultural narratives about acceptable expressions of fear. 

• Former public defender Leon Roché is running for judge in New Orleans, after narrowly losing a race for another judicial seat this past spring. I hear that community groups are excited about him! His opponent is a real blast from the past; her big vision is to lock up 9-10% of the population.

• Law professor and former public defender Matthew Ahn is challenging incumbent Michael O’Mally (a leader in death penalty prosecutions nationwide) for District Attorney in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland). He’s raised $180,000 so far. 

• Governor DeSantis expelled elected prosecutor Monique Worrell, the only Black woman DA in Florida, from her position in Orlando. This is wildly undemocratic; can he remove whoever he wants because they are enacting different policies than he would like?

Reports and investigations

• A recent report from Catalyst and ACLU of SoCal found that “more of the departments’ budgets go toward fruitless traffic stops than responses to service calls -- essentially wasting millions of public dollars.” That summary is from this succinct Reuters article about the report. 

• Insider magazine published a deep investigation into the use of police dogs to terrorize prisoners in the U.S., with many accounts of guards yelling racial slurs while setting dogs on people. Remember the international outrage at the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq? Those practices were imported from the U.S., and they are continuing here. 

• Long sentences, which don’t increase public safety, are driving intergenerational poverty in NY, according to a report from earlier this year. Sentencing reform could produce major benefits. 

• NPR fought for years to obtain records of the harrowing and deadly conditions at ICE detention facilities. Here is their report. 

• ProPublica took a deep dive in Mississippi, where people needing mental health treatment are held in jail for days or weeks with no formal process, with no allegations of any crime. 

Wall of Shame

• You can’t make this up - Houston plans to eliminate 28 librarians this coming year and will turn library spaces into detention centers for children. 

• Prosecutors are charging pregnant and postpartum women with “chemical endangerment” of their children, even if babies were born healthy, leading to horrific outcomes for families. It’s one of the most nauseating expressions of the ‘prosecutor ego trip’ that I can imagine. 

• Summarizing the worst of America in one headline, USA Today reports that Texas prisoners are making the razor wire used by Operation Lone Star, the deadly and likely illegal operation to keep people from crossing the Rio Grande.  

• Not only do police defer too much to unreliable facial recognition tech, but they also ignore the evidence in front of them. Case in point: Detroit police arrested a woman who was 8 months pregnant, trusting their facial recognition system, even though the suspect they were looking for was not pregnant.  

• Children in multiple states are being housed in detention centers and jails due to a shortage of foster homes.