June 6 Criminal justice updates and commentary roundup

Top reads:  Chris Blackwell on the horrors of county jail; Ruthie Gilmore’s latest interview; Read six stories and poems written by mothers in prison; this joint oped by the fire, police, and community safety chiefs in Albuquerque.  

Media 

• Listen to Ruthie Gilmore’s recent interview, or read the transcript. She ties together so many important themes in this work. Engaging with Gilmore is one of the best things you can do to really immerse yourself in this issue. 

• John Legend produced a new short documentary, Home Free, profiling three people returning home from prison. 

• Over half of women inside prison are mothers. On Mother’s Day, the Prison Journalism Project published six stories and poems from incarcerated mothers. 

• Olayemi Olurin has been producing engaging informational videos on Youtube for a growing audience. Here’s one of her recent episodes on abolition.  

Solutions and Wins

• The Albuquerque fire, police, and office of community safety chiefs joined together on an op-ed celebrating their collaboration and calling out a local politician for rehashing inaccurate tropes about public safety funding. It’s quite extraordinary what Albuquerque is accomplishing right now – more of us should be paying attention! Check out this shift in budget allocation over time:

• In its famously productive session this year, the Minnesota legislature voted to make phone calls from prisons free, enabling families and loved ones to connect without extravagant costs. They also: made it easier to grant clemency; abolished life without parole sentences for children;  created an Office of Restorative Practices; caps probation at 5 years; decriminalized needle exchange; made it much easier to clear criminal records; and allowed prosecutors to initiate resentencing (a huge power for reform DAs!), among other things. 

• Truck driving is a lucrative job, often paying 6 figures, that’s generally accessible to people with criminal records. Free World, led by Jason Wang, has jumped on this opportunity by developing a program to get people from the prison gate to full time trucking employment within 45 days, including licensing, updating documents, the whole works. They have already graduated thousands of people in their first few years and they are looking to scale significantly. And the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls has recently started its own commercial drivers license (CDL) licensing program. 

• The Office of Diversion and Reentry in Los Angeles has built a really strong track record of success. The key is to get it properly funded. Organizers on the ground are urging this. 

• An energized conviction review unit in the Westchester DA’s office (led by Mimi Rocah, who took office in 2021), has recommended vacating 26 convictions associated with a corrupt narcotics unit investigation. 

• New York State has recently begun adding names to tombstones belonging to prisoners who have died inside. Previously, they were marked only with numbers. 

• A bill that would allow 300 Alabama prisoners who are serving life without the possibility of parole (a sentence most of the world thinks is de facto inhumane for any crime) to seek resentencing if their crime didn’t cause serious physical injury is slowly proceeding. 

• A community freedom school in Mississippi is disrupting the school to prison pipeline by centering healing. 

• The Health and Reentry Project is working to implement a new medicaid rule that puts people back on medicaid 30 days before release, instead of having to wait until release. 

• Bolts Magazine, which so brilliantly covers issues of criminal justice reform at the local level, was recognized by the Washington Post as one of seven outstanding sources of political journalism. 

Commentary and Analysis

• Commentary from an organizer on the ground about the Atlanta City Council’s 11-4 vote to approve $67 million in funding for ‘cop city.’ The vote was very disappointing, but the momentum is strong.

• Shannon Grieggo lambasted the Atlanta Mayor for exploiting the tragic shooting of social justice activist and donor Amy St. Pierre to promote the much-hated ‘cop city’ project. Amy would have called for gun control, not more policing. 

• Olayemi Olurin contextualized and mourned the murder of Jordan Neely by an unemployed former Marine on the NYC subway for Teen Vogue. 

• Alex Vitale took a hard stance against the notion, pushed by a Harvard professor team, that it’s a good idea to add 500,000 people to American police forces. 

• The L.A. Times urged California to grant parole to Leslie Van Houten, taking a stance against perpetual punishment. 

• Professor Erin Hatton wrote an introduction to a new series on ‘labor and the carceral state’ for Inquest. 

• Morgan Godvin chronicles a century of history in five Hawaiian prison newspapers. This is part of a larger project to digitize and chronicle decades of incarcerated people's illuminating writing in prison newspapers - which are in many cases the best and only record of what has happened in America's prisons.

• Emily Galvin Almanza argues in a recent law journal article that well-funded public defenders protect public safety by connecting their clients with services like housing and social workers, which put people on the path to success and away from recidivism. 

• Felony arrest data is extremely misleading and shouldn’t be the basis of public policy, argues Scott Hechinger. 

Reports

• Scrutinize, a new judicial oversight group in New York, issued a report identifying 14 New York City judges that are outliers, being far more likely to order defendants to be held in jail while they wait for trial compared to other judges. From 2020-22, these judges cost city taxpayers $77 million over the baseline.

• The Ahimsa Collective released a report calling for a new standard of “People First Reentry,” identifying key principles that reentry organizations should adopt in order to be effective. 

• Berkeley University researchers found that bad policies, not individual bias, are largely what’s driving the huge racial disparities between who is released and who is held in jail awaiting trial. 

• The Prison Policy Initiative issued its 2023 report on Punishment Beyond Prisons, breaking down state data on the number of people under parole and probation supervision, which often comes with heavy fines and onerous requirements (like restricting travel, housing, work, and personal and family associations). To get a sense of the stakes, read this first hand account of how parole conditions can force people into homelessness. 

• In Carceral Carousel, Detention Watch Network cataloged instances where communities successfully closed jails and prisons, only to watch them open again as immigration detention centers. 

• In Crimes Against Humanity, the organization Human Rights for Kids compiled data and recommendations regarding the mass incarceration of children in America, an atrocity by international standards.