March 8 Criminal justice updates and commentary roundup
Happy early spring to all! Here are links to news, media etc. from the past month. If there are other key updates that you’ve been reading about, please share in the comments.
Top reads: The Meaning of African-American studies, in the New Yorker; Wesley Lowery on the unfinished business of reckoning with police violence; a Newsweek report on a jail in Arkansas that starved a man to death, among other horrors; red states are stripping prosecutor powers.
Democracy
Across the country, Republicans are working feverishly to leverage crime fears to strip urban Democrats of the power to democratically elect their local officials and run their own criminal legal systems. Here’s a fierce critique by the LA Times Editorial board, and here’s coverage in the Intercept.
In Mississippi, a state bill would empower a bunch of white officials to appoint new judges, prosecutors and police for Jackson, MS, a heavily majority Black city. The mayor of Jackson referred to this as “plantation politics.” See also here.
In Missouri, the Attorney General is trying to remove DA Kim Gardner from office. And the legislature just passed a bill that would allow for a special prosecutor to be appointed in St. Louis, with broad discretion to strip authority over entire categories of offenses from the locally elected DA. St. Louis is a majority Black city represented by Black lawmakers.
A comprehensive code revision bill stretching thousands of pages, which attempted to clean up a huge number of statutes across the code, and which was passed unanimously by the D.C. City Council, became the first D.C. law in decades to be blocked by the Congress (which has oversight powers). The main reason cited was that it reduced the sentence for carjacking from 40 years to 24 years (to ensure that carjacking would not be punished more severely than murder).
Media
The Mellon Foundation is gearing up its investments in this space, recently announcing its Imagining Freedom initiative, a $125 million, multiyear grantmaking effort supporting arts and humanities organizations “that engage the knowledge, critical thinking, and creativity of millions of people and communities with lived experience of the US criminal legal system and its pervasive forces of dehumanization, stereotyping, and silencing.”
Many of you have heard about the conflict over building “cop city,” a large police training ground planned in Atlanta, which was approved despite massive community opposition. If you’d like to learn more deeply, here is a recent presentation on the issue. You may have heard that the police recently raided the forest after families gathered there for a music festival; coverage here.
I’ve been thinking recently about the brilliant 2012 documentary The House I Live In, which has been too quickly forgotten. It’s a sharp and very insightful look at the carnage of the drug war. If you haven’t seen it, check it out! Also good to recommend to friends. Trailer here.
The Media Justice Center recently did a 101 presentation on electronic monitoring. Spend about an hour to get smart on this issue here.
Here’s a short explainer video by Zealous about court watching. Fiona Apple is on a roll!
I was excited to find this 2022 podcast featuring Richie Reseda and Mannie Thomas, founders of a fantastic personal transformation program for men in prison called Success Stories.
Solutions and Wins
Minnesota is restoring voting rights to about 50,000 people with criminal convictions. Wow!
Lamar Johnson is coming home to St. Louis after spending 28 years in prison on a wrongful conviction. Mr. Johnson’s case had languished for years until DA Kim Gardner’s conviction integrity unit uncovered misconduct by the police investigator at Mr. Johnons’s trial. Congratulations to Mr. Johnson, his family, his attorneys and support networks, and the Midwest Innocence Project!
Progressives swept races in Chicago in the newly-created police oversight districts, notwithstanding aggressive work by the Chicago police union.
Pamela Price, the newly elected DA of Alameda County (Oakland), has instituted a policy of not seeking sentencing enhancements in a wide range of cases. These enhancements add years upon years to sentences without any evidence that they increase safety.
The New York Times Editorial Board emphatically called for implementing health-based drug policies instead of the longstanding ‘criminalize and shame’ policy that has failed miserably. I have a lot of gripes with the Times but I’m very happy to see them embrace harm reduction.
If you’re interested in prison reentry, you should definitely be tracking the SAFE housing network, founded by the CA organization A New Way of Life. It's a network of homes for women coming home from prison. Here’s an article about one of the network houses in Nebraska.
The New Yorker covered ACS, the Albuquerque Community Safety department, a city agency that is not part of the police department and that is authorized to respond to a range of calls that are handled by police in other cities. While there are various ‘alternative 911’ programs around the country, this one is special in that it’s an agency, not a nonprofit. That means its workers are city employees, can join public sector unions, etc. This affects the politics!
A colleague recently shared this Urban Institute report, finding in a randomly controlled trial that Denver’s “housing first” model was highly impactful. For example, participants had: 40% fewer shelter stays, a 40% reduction in arrests, and a 27% reduction in days spent in jail.
Financiers of Aventiv (fka Securus), the prison phone company that charges outrageous rates for phone calls and is owned by Tom Gores’ private equity fund Platinum Equity, are tapping experts on how to handle their distressed debt. This is a good sign that Aventiv is in trouble. Congratulations to Worth Rises, which has done so much to bird dog this terrible company!
Commentary
Eric Reinhart for the New England Journal of Medicine on the urgency of forging a public health policy to end mass incarceration.
Saleem Holbrook on the abolitionist community organizing that defeated the red wave in PA
Emily Galvin Almanza on the need to rethink safety in USA Today.
Reports
The Cooperative Impact Lab published a new report with findings about how organizations can most strategically communicate using social media platforms like TikTok. And they did a briefing! Here’s the video and the transcript.
Partners for Justice has a fabulous new page for its collection of super useful reports on a range of topics, such as what really works to lower crime, how access to education increases safety, how strong social ties increase safety, and the intersection of criminalization and homelessness.
The Prison Policy Initiative released its 2023 report on the status of incarceration of women in America. Striking data: “58% of women in state prisons are parents to minor children, and of those, most are single mothers who were living with their children prior to imprisonment — making it likely that incarceration uprooted their children and led to the termination of their parental rights, permanently breaking up their families.” Capital B covered the release.
Fwd.us released a report on the policy success of New York’s reform of its bail laws.
Emily Galvin Almanza cited a lot of useful research in a twitter thread on the terrible effect of policing on education.
Wall of shame
The first comprehensive data shows that with COVID, prison deaths rose an astonishing and horrifying 50%.
El Salvador is building a prison to house 40,000 people. A recent Human Rights Watch report found that authorities have been arresting Salvadorans with “no apparent connections to gangs’ abusive activity,” sometimes acting merely on “appearance or social background.”
The fabulous Keri Blakinger has swiftly gotten to work at her new job at the L.A. Times, covering the Sheriff. Here’s her recent piece on sheriff’s deputy gangs.
“The U.S. Department of Justice is reviewing information about the death of Larry Eugene Price, Jr., who died of starvation after over a year in an Arkansas county jail.” He was held because he could not pay a $100 bail.
Also in Arkansas, women may soon be arrested for ‘causing’ miscarriages.