Criminal justice roundup: news, commentary, and media 9.27.22
I hope everyone’s doing well this week! Here’s my latest roundup. If you have suggestions for things I should include in future roundups, please leave a comment.
Top reads: L.A. Times investigation on the “secret police” unit in the sheriff’s department; profile on safe consumption sites in the Netherlands; insurers forcing police departments to change.
Media and culture
John Oliver took a refreshing critical look at the show Law and Order; THR summarized it.
Watch The Box, a short documentary from directors James Burns, who was previously incarcerated, and Shal Ngo, which follows three former inmates as they revisit their time in solitary confinement.
Lava Records announced a new podcast called Bone Valley. As one promo put it: “Is Leo Schofield an innocent man serving life in a Florida prison for his wife's death when a convicted murderer has repeatedly confessed in detail to the crime? That's what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gilbert King set out to answer on his 4-year odyssey through the swamps, courtrooms and maximum prison corridors of central Florida.”
The NYTimes profiled the emerging cadre of artists who are formerly incarcerated, whose works have been featured at MoMA PS1 and other leading galleries and institutions. Many of these artists have received a fellowship from Right of Return, founded by Jesse Krimes and Russell Craig, in partnership with Soze. For the first three years, we were the only funders of that fellowship, which is now growing with support from Mellon and Art for Justice.
Politics and campaigns
Prisoners at all major facilities in Alabama are currently on work strike, protesting inhumane laws and conditions and prison slavery. Keri Blakinger has updates.
A new poll from Fwd.us finds that Oklahoma voters want leaders to take bold actions on criminal justice reform.
The Pennsylvania House took the astonishing step of holding Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner in contempt for declining to obey a subpoena whose validity he was challenging in court. All players on the ground agree this is a political attack in the lead up to a likely impeachment proceeding in the PA Senate this fall. It’s likely that key Dems will hold the line, but these are dicey days for Krasner and for any progressive local officials who draw the ire of right-wing state legislatures and Governors. For more context on the case, see this article.
Andrew Warren is the elected DA of Tampa, FL, whom Governor DeSantis removed from office (a very scary power grab!) after Warren said he would not enforce criminal statutes against abortion. Warren sued for reinstatement, and now will get a trial on the merits after the court denied the Governor’s motion to dismiss Warren’s lawsuit.
The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has a special unit that’s been feverishly investigating elected officials who are critical of the sheriff. Within the department, the unit is referred to as the “secret police.” They invited DA Gascón to form a joint task force, but he declined, noting that they were obviously targeting political opponents and not corruption. Soon after, the sheriff became a big supporter of the recall effort.
Clergy members in Chicago are speaking out in favor of bail reforms.
Worth Rises is ramping up public education and advocacy efforts in support of a national campaign to “End the Exception” to the 13th Amendment, which stipulates that slavery is outlawed except when someone has been convicted of a crime. Lots to learn on their site, and they recently led the #exceptforme storytelling action, with first hand accounts of forced prison labor for pittance wages needed to purchase basic necessities. And note that inflation is hitting prisons as well – Chris Blackwell reported that a tube of toothpaste now costs $6.10, up from $3.85.
Solutions
Trained in principles of nonviolence, a group of teenagers in Chicago, called Peace Warriors, are showing up in school to prevent fights, break them up and to run peace circles. School leaders say it’s working.
The Oregon Health Authority recently announced that it has finished awarding the first two years of funding to nonprofits under Measure 110, the 2020 ballot measure that decriminalized possession of all drugs in Oregon, which also directed cannabis tax dollars to pay into a grant program for substance abuse treatment and services.
Overdose deaths in the U.S. are trending sharply upward, and sending people to jail and prison for drug use and distribution is not working to stop it. Bolts magazine has an in-depth piece on safe-consumption sites in the Netherlands, which offer a safe environment to use drugs while also connecting people to services and ensuring that people are not passing disease through dirty needles. Some dismiss this approach as ‘permissive.’ The thing is, it works.
Meanwhile, in Finland, the “housing first” approach to homelessness has been very successful. I was interested to read about how they have solved the logistics of providing housing in a tight market.
Whereas local governments have had a hard time reigning in reckless and deadly police departments or forcing needed policy changes, insurance companies are now stepping up to demand that departments update their practices or lose coverage. It appears to be working. See also my old favorite, Blood Money, on the woes of small cities breaking under bond debt from police misconduct settlements.
In Minnesota, veterans with certain forms of trauma can divert from prison into a treatment program and avoid a criminal record. This is a positive development, though unfortunately the language around it reinforces the validity of the punishment framework – the article uses terms like leniency and compassion – rather than acknowledging that punishment isn’t working well across the board, especially for the huge number of people suffering from trauma.
Commentary and Analysis
A fresh reminder in this very informative thread that homelessness is a function of housing costs, not a function of drug addiction/mental health/trauma/etc. The places with the most expensive housing have the most homelessness. States where there is a lot of drug addiction etc can still have low homelessness if housing costs are low - the thread digs deep on West Virginia. I frequently mention this point because calling homelessness an addiction problem makes it easier to sweep into the ‘criminal justice’ arena (even though addiction should be treated as a health matter). “At least they can get help now,” people may say as someone is hauled away to jail. In fact, the help people need is housing, not a jail cell.
Journalist Ryan Cooper laid out a position on policing that I found refreshingly different from the hundreds of others I’ve read, where he acknowledges that having an organized police force is necessary, but existing police departments in the U.S. must be abolished in order to make way for a functional, humane system to be built. It reminds me very much of the solution in Northern Ireland to abolish the British occupying police force and establish their own.
Jody Kent urges mercy and support for people sent to prison when they were children, whose reentry after long prison terms can be difficult but also has so much potential.
Amy Fettig of The Sentencing Project advocated in Time for creating a “second look” option for long sentences, requiring that any sentence be revisited after 10 years, allowing reductions where a person has shown themselves to be ready to return to society.
Research
In a recent study examining data from 35 million traffic stops, researchers found that the probability that a stopped driver is Black increased by 5.74% after a Trump rally during his 2015–2016 campaign.
Research finds that there’s an increased risk of death after release from forced drug treatment.
Wall of shame
After seven years of a court mandate to reform the troubled Rikers island facility, there has been little progress – 14 people have died already this year. Advocates are calling loudly for the jail to be placed into federal receivership. This would be an extraordinary remedy, allowing a third-party appointed administrator to bypass certain local laws that have made reforms difficult in the past. The next hearing on this question is in November.
The Marshall Project investigated how cities and states spent billions of COVID relief money on (often very overpriced) gadgets for courts, jails, and prisons, leaving programs for healthy communities without resources. By TMP’s count, localities spent 3x on the criminal legal system with ARPA funds as on health. One reason for this is that police, prisons, and courts have strong existing budget power and access to state administrators, so they were well positioned to siphon the money as it came in. Another reason why one of the key things we need in this field is more capacity for bureaucratic navigation.