Ending mass incarceration: News and updates 4.6.22
Solutions and Wins
Miami-Dade County’s board of commissioners just voted 9-2 to make communications from jail free, which will return millions of dollars to the poorest residents of Miami-Dade, and ensure that families can stay in contact. Congratulations to Worth Rises and Beyond the Bars who collaborated on this!
New Jersey is closing its only women’s prison amid allegations of serious assault and abuse. This creates a major opportunity to organize for deeper shifts in how the state criminalizes women, and opposing construction of new facilities.
Since June 2020, Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) sent medical and behavioral health clinicians (instead of police) to over 2,200 low-risk calls reporting trespassing, intoxication, or mental health crises involving poverty, homelessness or addiction. They have never called for police back-up due to a safety issue. The city is expanding the program.
A recent community survey of 62,000 NYC residents asked respondents to pick their three public safety priorities. Adults picked affordable housing and reducing homelessness most often, followed by sending “trained mental health first responders instead of police” to those experiencing a mental health crisis. Increasing the number of police came in third.
Keri Blakinger called attention to a little-known ruling last year in Scotland, where a judge refused to extradite a suspect to Texas, on the grounds that the prisons are so awful as to constitute an international human rights violation.
Practical thinking
Currently incarcerated advocate Christopher Blackwell wrote about his years of advocacy from within the prison to change policies in Washington State. He walks through the many challenges around tradeoffs and compromises that he and his fellow policy advocates had to contemplate. A really instructive article! Look2Justice is the organization he co-founded to hold this work.
The Engler brothers have some new articles out: one on co-governance, and one on the choice between disrupting parties or taking them over.
Meditating on abolition
Author J.D. Dickey has a new book out, Republic of Violence, about early abolitionists in America during the Jacksonian era. I highly recommend you read this riveting excerpt in Time Magazine. Dickey also published some recommendations on forgotten abolitionist writers to read.
Here’s a fascinating and timely interview with Harlem’s new city councilwoman, Kristin Richardson Jordan, who came under intense media fire when she publicly shared condolences for a man who shot a police officer along with the officer killed. So much of the politics of the moment are reflected here.
The New Yorker published a sensitive portrayal of Katie Kitchen’s successful effort to free Joseff Deon White, who was sentenced to life in prison for shooting and killing her father in a robbery. A key line: “it’s a mistake to assume that survivors should feel a certain way.”
In 2018, Colorado voters approved a ballot measure abolishing involuntary servitude (aka slavery) in prisons. Yet prisoners are alleging in a lawsuit that the Colorado DOC is ignoring the law and forcing people to work for pittance wages or penalizing them with solitary confinement and additional time in prison if they refuse.
Read this thorough new report by the Community Justice Exchange on the use of data and surveillance for criminalization, from an explicitly abolitionist lens.
I often return to this article from the Irish Times about how, as part of its peace process in the 90s, Northern Ireland abolished the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a notoriously oppressive police force established by the British that had long abused Catholic residents.
Reactionary Politics
In New York, despite the fact that violent crime is at historic lows, and lower than the rest of the country, Governor Hochul is in the midst of pushing changes to the bail law in the budget, seeking political points with donor and police interests by sending more vulnerable New Yorkers to be tortured in jail by rolling back bail reforms. In an incoherent oped, Hochul first admitted that the law is not causing problems, but then said it must be perfected (by making harmful changes unsupported by evidence). Here’s an oped by Kalif Browder’s brother urging her not to do this, and here’s an informative thread by NY Communities for Change.
Journalist Nicoel Santa Cruz wrote an outstanding article for ProPublica on Steve Twist, an unelected former prosecutor in Arizona who has exercised extraordinary power over criminal justice policy in the state, repeatedly blocking humane, sensible reforms.
Josh Kalven wrote a very instructive thread on the failed policies of harsh punishment, with a close look at Anne-Marie Schubert and Amy Weirich, who are the punitive, harsh DAs of Sacramento and Memphis respectively. Schubert and Weirich are doing all the punitive things that recall proponents are demanding in SF and LA to supposedly address crime, yet murders and crime have gone up in their jurisdictions. So not only are they perpetuating mass suffering and torture in jails and prisons for primarily Black and Brown people, but they’re getting worse results. When will there be accountability for this?
Relatedly, Third Way published a report documenting that Trump-voting states accounted for 8 out of 10 of the highest murder rate states in the country in 2020, while media coverage has relentlessly suggested that crime is a blue city or blue state issue.
The L.A. Sheriff and his supporters have been attacking the public safety commissioner in West Hollywood for asking tough and detailed questions about how they are paid (with costs per deputy running ~ $300,000 per year). The sheriff has been used to receiving blank checks from area municipalities that use sheriff services.
Two researchers published an informative op-ed in the L.A. Times on the pernicious rise of ankle monitors in L.A., where there’s been a 5,250% increase over the past 6 years. Monitors are expensive, they malfunction, and they prevent people from key daily tasks like picking up children from school or going to the doctor. People do not generally need to be surveilled as a condition of staying out of jail, and we should not accept that outcome.