Criminal justice roundup: news, commentary, and other media
Hi all! Here is my roundup of news, commentary, and media from the past month. I read a ton and give you only the best!
Top reads: interview with L.A. organizer Lex Steppling; Bloomberg piece on a major new bail study; prizewinning essays by Colette Payne and Kwaneta Harris.
Media
I joined The Great Battlefield podcast for a discussion on strategic funding in criminal justice.
The Visiting Room Project has launched, with numerous video interviews of people in prison. Please take the time to watch a few of them; it’s a stunning piece of work. And here’s a thread telling the story of its creation by David Menschel, a brilliant funder and a key supporter of this project.
If you haven’t yet checked out the “leadership and organizational seasons” training at Ayni School, I highly recommend it. It’s an incredibly helpful framework for understanding one’s shifting energy and capacity over time. Also, Ayni is offering a virtual 2 day session on movement ecology that I expect will be excellent. Learn more and register here.
David Axelrod interviewed John Legend, who spoke eloquently about crime and justice reform (at around the 40 minute mark).
L.A. District Attorney George Gascón appeared on the L.A. Taco show to discuss the recent failed recall effort, his thoughts on police accountability, and other important cases.
Read these personal testimonies by Colette Payne, who stole to feed her family and went to prison, and Kwaneta Harris about brutal life in a Texas prison.
Wins
Aramis Ayala, previously the elected prosecutor of Orlando, won the Dem primary for Attorney General in Florida. The stakes in this race are extremely high, and go far beyond justice reform. The AG’s power to hold a governor accountable are considerable.
Sarah George, the DA of Vermont’s largest county, who faced heavy opposition from police unions that attacked her reforms, won her election. Background here.
A multi-million dollar effort to recall L.A. DA George Gascón failed to qualify for the ballot. For more on the corruption and incompetence of the campaign, see here.
In Chicago, police unions attempted to unseat legislators who had passed important reforms, and dumped money into several races. Organizers defeated them handily.
In Chicago, elected DA Kim Foxx recently asked for eight murder convictions to be dismissed, the latest cases connected to a disgraced former police officer. See also here.
Solutions
In Seattle, a homelessness initiative called JustCare has successfully moved people off the street into housing, without violent police crackdowns. As reported in the NYTimes: “The work begins with no-strings offerings of items like food, water and clean needles. These regular visits help demonstrate trustworthiness and defuse fear about coercion. Workers neutralize tense situations with humor and compassion and by recognizing that often bizarre behavior is driven by fundamental needs like hunger, thirst and exhaustion.” After building trust with local homeless people, the workers move them into housing without strict abstinence requirements and then help clean up the site. The police are contacted only as a last resort.
Years ago, I co-authored a research paper called Healthcare not Handcuffs, identifying the major justice implications of the expansion of medicaid under the ACA. Now there is research documenting the very positive results of that expansion. Turns out we were right! Bottom line: more healthcare means more safety, less jailing, and less suffering.
“Medicaid expansion produced a 20–32% negative difference in overall arrests rates in the first three years. We observe the largest negative differences for drug arrests: we find a 25–41% negative difference in drug arrests in the three years following Medicaid expansion, compared to non-expansion counties. We observe a 19–29% negative difference in arrests for violence in the three years after Medicaid expansion, and a decrease in low-level arrests between 24–28% in expansion counties compared to non-expansion counties.”
For more research showing that investments in health are some of the best safety investments we can do, see this recent article in Time.
A large research study has found that bail reform in Houston resulted in a 13% increase in people released within the first 24 hours of a misdemeanor arrest and a 6% decrease in new prosecutions over the three years following arrest, and was a huge money saver for the county. The study also found a 15% reduction in guilty pleas, suggesting that many innocent people had been pleading guilty before to get out of jail and go home to their families.
There’s a bill sitting on Gov. Newsom’s desk to increase the amount of “gate money” given to people upon release from prison from $200 to $1500. The first few days out of prison are the most dicey, and if people have enough money to buy some clothes, food, and a place to stay for long enough till they get a job, they can succeed. Without that, failure is all but guaranteed.
Commentary and Analysis
Paula and Mark Engler interviewed Lex Steppling, one of the lead organizers responsible for outstanding progress in Los Angeles. Just as important as winning is figuring out why the wins happen. This illuminating interview provides great guidance.
Keri Blakinger investigated the shifting attitudes of small towns towards prison construction in Nebraska. Whereas previously they welcomed prisons, now they are rejecting them.
I was moved by this commentary on the power of public mourning. How much of the violence we are seeing today could be averted if we had a healthy culture of processing grief?
There’s no such thing as a “feminist jail.”
Mariame Kaba and Andrea Richie were interviewed about their new book, No More Police. See also their essay in Inquest magazine.
This L.A. Times column runs through the data: republican-controlled counties have the highest murder rates in California. The same goes for Louisiana.
Research
Researchers reported on their findings regarding police funding: increasing the number of police officers leads directly to more misdemeanor arrests, which have enormous negative impacts on peoples’ lives, increase distrust, and do not reduce crime.
I previously missed this 2021 study finding that the effects of ankle monitoring mirror the effects of detention: physical harm, mental trauma, social isolation, financial hardship, and destabilized families and communities. This is important to understand now, as many jurisdictions are vastly increasing its electronic monitoring of people on release, spelling enormous profits for monitoring companies and continued misery for people who do not need to be surveilled.
The National Institute of Justice produced the “Hidden Consequences” report, summarizing the research on the negative impact of incarceration on dependent children. No shock, kids suffer terribly under our present system.
The Prison Policy Initiative also produced a report on the impact of mass incarceration on families and children. They find that roughly half of people in prison are parents to children under 18. Meanwhile, consultants in MA have recommended expanding prison nurseries, without considering non-prison options for mothers with young children. This supposedly positive development for families misses the point that if the mother of a young child is safe enough to be with her child, they should not be sitting in a prison.
Wall of shame
In a lawsuit brought by (mostly white) residents of Susanville, CA against the CA correctional authority about whether the state may close the prison (housing mostly men of color), the judge refused to consider a brief drafted by people in the prison, but did accept a brief from the SEIU arguing that people whose wealth and home values depended on keeping the prison open would suffer irreparable harm if it closed.
Under the Adams Administration, misdemeanor arrests jumped 25% (mostly for turnstile jumping and petty theft), arrests of Black New Yorkers are rising especially quickly, the NYC jail population has risen by almost 50%, average lengths of stays have risen to 125 days, and 13 people have died.
Because people with convictions were shut out of Pell grants, they weren’t eligible for the recent student debt relief. Here is a great explanatory thread, and the AP article.
Slate covered the recent outrage by Florida Governor DeSantis, who has persecuted people with felony convictions for voting, even after Florida’s own officials had approved their voter registrations (improperly, it turns out, as they did not qualify).
Right wing nationalists are recruiting sheriffs, who have vast stores of military equipment and substantial local power, and who could dangerously interfere in elections.
Federal dollars meant to support long term employment for people with checkered work histories, many of them formerly incarcerated, have instead been flowing to temp agencies that offer no stable employment. ProPublica investigated.
The ACLU asked for an emergency court order to address “medieval” conditions in the L.A. jail’s inmate reception area. Problems include the growing number of mentally ill inmates who are chained to chairs for days or left to sleep on a concrete floor without bedding.