Criminal justice roundup: news, media, and commentary 11.7.22

Top reads: Jamelle Bouie on reconstruction; two brothers held on Rikers, one dead, and the family forbidden to visit the other; TNR’s deep dive on reactionary tech voice David Sachs, who has fought hard to increase incarceration.

Media and culture

• The Laura Flanders show, always a great watch, covered the ferocious effort by MAGA Republicans in Pennsylvania to overturn the will of Philadelphia voters and throw out DA Larry Krasner. 

• Check out the trailer for Angola Do You Hear Us? Voices From a Plantation Prison, soon to be on MTV and Paramount, which tells the story of playwright Liza Jessie Peterson, whose acclaimed play "The Peculiar Patriot" was shut down mid-performance at Angola Prison.

• In my last memo I recommended investment in Designing Justice, Designing Spaces, an architecture firm dedicated to ending mass incarceration. Here is founder Deanna Van Buren on a podcast explaining how she had to set aside her assumptions and listen, in order to build spaces that people really needed and would use.  

• John Oliver delivered a passionate episode on bail reform, nearly breaking into tears when discussing the story of Kalif Browder. 

• Olayemi Olurin and Alec Karakatsanis teamed up to appear on the Breakfast Club, breaking down some complex justice topics for a radio audience. I’m excited to see more like this! 

• Slate interviewed former Pennsylvania prisoner David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez, whose podcast Suave won a 2022 Pulitzer prize. 

• Check out this fantastic short video profile of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. 

Politics and campaigns

• Mother Jones profiled four key DA races being decided this week: Hennepin (Minneapolis); Maricopa (Phoenix); San Francisco, and Alameda (Oakland). I’m noting with a smile that they refer to these races as “insanely important,” a description that would have been inconceivable eight years ago, when there were rarely challengers in these races and if there were, the options were both terrible in similar ways, and no one paid attention. Times have changed!

• In Alameda, Pamela Price is running for DA with a message fusing racial and gender justice. Bolts digs into the history of carceral feminism and Price’s effort to stand against it.

• Voters in five states are voting this week on whether to maintain an exception to the prohibition on slavery for people who have been convicted of crimes. 

• There’s been plenty of ongoing coverage of what’s happening to DA Krasner in Pennsylvania, but not enough concern about the implications of a Republican state government overturning the votes in a Democratic city. Where does it end? Here are 3 pieces worth checking out: 

  • Creeping Desantism in Talking Points Memo; 

  • A detailed article in Mother Jones refuting the Republicans’ claim that Krasner is to blame for gun violence, pointing to considerable data that policies of progressive prosecutors are making people more safe (not that data matters in politics, sadly);

  • Slate’s rundown of places where the Republicans are targeting reform-minded prosecutors. Republicans certainly seem to understand the power of these offices and the importance of retaining them; will Democrats figure that out in time? 

Solutions and wins

• Organizers with the Central Texas group Mano Amiga gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot this year that would end citations and arrests for possession of up to four ounces of marijuana in the city of San Marcos, a university town. They’ve also been active in the DA race – see this great rundown in Bolts. This group gives me hope! 

• Bolts covered efforts by several groups in North Carolina to register voters with convictions ahead of the midterms; the votes of 56,000 people were restored through recent litigation, led in part by Forward Justice, which was recently featured on MSNBC.

  • See also this NPR story with new analysis from the Sentencing Project on the millions of people still disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. 

• If you have been looking for a concise introduction to restorative justice, listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with the wonderful sujatha baliga, a national expert on restorative justice and longtime practitioner. sujatha has been at the forefront of work to center the real needs of crime survivors, from innovating trauma recovery centers to advocating against punitive laws that do not actually help survivors. sujatha won the 2019 MacArthur genius award and has been working on her forthcoming book centering forgiveness. 

• Professor Ruha Benjamin wrote for Time magazine on a concept of “viral justice,” (the title of her new book), where infectious acts of local transformative justice bridge together to transform the culture at large. After writing of her brother’s struggles with mental illness that landed him in an incredibly traumatizing jail in Los Angeles, she discussed her experience at the Free Her national conference in Detroit, where the National Council convened many hundreds of leaders to talk about ending incarceration for women and girls. 

• The site of a closed prison in Indiana is up for redevelopment. Who will have a say?

Reports

• The Center for American Progress did an exhaustive study on DAs and found that homicides increased less in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with harsh DAs. It also found no real differences between cities in the trends for larceny and robbery. 

• Worth Rises published its 5-year impact report, a super impressive summary of their many efforts to make phone calls from prison cost-free, among other campaigns. 

• The Center for Just Journalism released its issue brief on retail theft to help journalists better report on the issue. It may seem niche, but it’s been driving news cycles so it’s worth it.  

• The CHAT Project (Collective Healing and Transformation) is a community-based, non-law enforcement restorative justice project addressing domestic and sexual violence based in Contra Costa county, California. CHAT conducted a pilot project with 9 organizations from 2018 to 2021. Here’s a summary of findings, and the full report.  

• One Voice, founded by corrections guard Andy Potter, formed a Blue Ribbon Commission on correctional staff wellness. Here is their report, the bulk of which is a transcription of commission presentations. Many detail a lot of trauma and mental unwellness among guards.

• Researchers dissecting a large data set found that exclusionary school discipline and school policing (aka school-to-prison pipeline practices) are predictors of adolescent substance use.

Wall of shame

• I knew that domestic assault by cops was higher than the general population, but I never knew that it was 15 times as high. Moreover, abuse by police officers is more likely to be ignored, as it was for months in this particularly heinous former NYPD officer's act of murder by neglect. 

• Heavy-handed policing in Arkansas, with an assist from the Trump and Biden DOJs, put local racial justice organizer Dawn Jeffrey in jail where she remains today, and left her fellow protesters demoralized and demobilized.

• Adding a huge number of police to the NYC subway hasn’t reduced violent crime, but has led to a lot more low-level arrests (landing people in brutal jail conditions).  

• Two researchers dug into the question of why deaths are surging at the Harris county jail. 

• The horrific story of a survivor put on trial for killing her abuser in Kern Co., California, embodies a lot about what is wrong with our present system.