Latest criminal justice news and commentary 4.21.25
Top reads: From Norway to Connecticut and Pennsylvania, a new vision of prison conditions; Calling for an anti-carceral labor movement; the incomparable Sarah Stillman asks for the New Yorker, why are incarcerated people dying from lack of food and water?
Media
What’s next after a prison closure in rural Virginia? Correspondents for the Laura Flanders and Friends show interviewed locals to talk about how the economy should rebuild.
The Just Trust now has 6 episodes out in its When it Clicked series, featuring “business leaders, advocates, actors, artists, and unexpected changemakers” talking about their evolution on work to cut incarceration and increase safety.
Visualizing Abolition is a public scholarship initiative at UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences designed to foster creative research and to shift the social attachment to prisons through art and education.
Watch peacekeepers in Chicago tell stories about their experiences here.
The Community Justice Exchange hosted an in-depth discussion on the need to build international solidarity in prison work. While proponents of mass incarceration have a global vision, U.S. work is extremely domestically focused.
Veterans are demanding justice for a deported veteran, Marlon Parris, who served three tours in Iraq and has been living in the U.S. as a permanent resident for 20 years. In 2011, Parris pleaded guilty to a nonviolent drug offense. This year, ICE agents seized him outside his home and have held him since January 22nd.
Saleem Holbrook reflected on his efforts to reclaim his life and freedom through education.
In March, PPI hosted a webinar about pushing back against unproductive and inaccurate uses of recidivism stories and statistics. You can watch the recording of this conversation and access PPI’s recidivism training in their Toolkit.
Amidst the increasing talk about revenue generation and independence from philanthropy, I was interested to revisit this 2014 Jessica Gordon Nembhard interview from the Laura Flanders show about cooperative economics playing a crucial economic role in sustaining the civil rights movement.
Solutions and Wins
A bond measure that would have sent more kids to adult prisons in Louisiana failed badly.
The Michigan Supreme Court held, in a 5-2 ruling, that mandatory life without parole sentences for people convicted of murder at the age of 19 or 20 are unconstitutional, given that the brain is still in heavy development at that age (one justice said he’d extend the ruling to age 25). This opens up hundreds of cases for resentencing.
A multi-billion dollar case against the insurers that back the bail bonds industry is moving ahead. The case, brought by the creative impact law firm Justice Catalyst, alleges that insurers and bail bondsmen colluded to keep bail amounts artificially high. Bail bond buyers in CA alone have likely overpaid by $2 billion in the last 20 years. Once this case starts settling with the major players, it’s going to send tidal waves around the country.
A Connecticut prison with a prevalence of mentally ill prisoners is working with the organization Amend to implement Norwegian-inspired practices to treat prisoners more humanely and to improve mental health for guards as well.
Philadelphia saw a “remarkable” decrease in violent crime in 2024, and the largest homicide drop in city history. DA Larry Krasner was proud of the progress. This follows the national trend.
The Oklahoma House passed a bill eliminating several fees (for electronic monitoring, indigent defense application, fees for mental health education, and more). Without knowing the full list of fees assessed, it’s hard to know how much progress this is, but it seems promising.
Maryland’s Attorney General and the state Public Defender have formed an unusual partnership to recommend practical justice reforms. Lawmakers aren’t buying it yet.
Journalist Radley Balko interviewed five ‘peer advocates’ at the New Orleans public defender’s office, all formerly incarcerated, who work with clients facing serious charges to help guide them.
A Pennsylvania prison, inspired by the Norway model, has between testing an approach that gives incarcerated people more autonomy and encourages guards to actually speak with prisoners. The goals are to make prison conditions safer and to treat people in a way that makes a healthy return to society after prison more possible. Things have gone well enough that the program is expanding to three prisons. Arnold Ventures is supporting this work.
Commentary and Analysis
Two members of the teachers union call for an anti-prison labor movement. Their commentary lays out some useful history and shows how guards’ unions have worked aggressively against the common interest by thwarting prison reform.
Greisa Martínez Rosas wrote for the NYTimes telling Democrats how they should think about and message on immigration. Drop the language of racial oppression (which is easily countered with fear mongering about crime), and talk about lifting wages, countering corporate exploitation and creating economic prosperity for all.
The Wren Collective identified multiple ways in which the Trump administration is fostering the conditions for an increase in violent crime, which may then justify ramping up a cycle of punitive incarceration, which will in turn make crime worse. Their analysis is succinct and worth reading.
DA Mary Moriarty of Minneapolis made the case for her solutions-oriented approach to justice that does not prioritize incarceration.
Emma Tai, a veteran Chicago organizer, urged readers to reject the politics of “anti politics.”
Cristine Soto DeBerry wrote about the DOJ attacking prosecutors who charged Trump.
The conservative Pelican Institute did an oped in favor of reform in Louisiana. The language here is very dated – this could have been written 10 years ago – but it’s still useful as a check on Governor Landry, who is also very retro in his obsession with imprisoning people.
Did you know that after the Civil War, a large number of plantation owners decamped to Brazil, to try to resume slavery operations there? I’ve always been interested in Brazil’s prison system and I’d be curious how its development relates to this time period.
Baz Dreisinger, who has written extensively about prisons around the world, gave a recent interview where she reflected on international trends and whence the urge for punishment.
Mission Local has some interesting data and charts showing the relationship between police department staffing and the crime rate. The bottom line is that crime is dropping significantly even as police staffing remains at historic lows. But the overtime fees are enormous.
Wall of Shame
Eric Adams has invited ICE to have an office on Rikers Island (for the first time in 10 years), ostensibly to help with international drug crime prosecutions. NY’s sanctuary law would prevent ICE from seizing undocumented immigrants from the jail for deportation. But will they follow it?
The new DA of Chicago, who won her primary by a meager 2500 votes last year, has instituted a new policy allowing police in Chicago’s South Side to charge various gun crimes without a prosecutor’s approval. The point of felony review is to avoid people rotting in jail for weeks before a prosecutor can determine that charges won’t hold up. The police assigned to this ‘pilot’ program have a ton of misconduct violations on their record. This will cause a lot of harm.
The newly elected DA of Los Angeles is relaunching death penalty prosecutions, after George Gascón had stopped them. In addition to being arbitrarily applied and often faulty (with hundreds of exonerations from death row over the past several years), the death penalty is extraordinarily expensive and sends the message that killing is acceptable.