Latest criminal justice news, reports, and commentary 10.4.23

Hi all, I’m here again with the best links I found on the internet over the past few weeks. If I’ve missed something important or interesting, I hope you’ll share that in the comments. Thank you for reading!

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Top reads: the Silencing of Dissent in Atlanta; everything you need to know about retail theft; Protect and Serve’s weekly report on police misconduct and the expensive fallout.   

Politics

• A police-union endorsed candidate has lost yet another race, this time for Nashville mayor. The winner was endorsed by the Nashville Justice League.  

• Louisiana AG and leading gubernatorial candidate Jeff Landry convened a ‘violent crime task force.’ Landry is campaigning hard on a promise of locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible. He’s not betting on people most impacted by his decision fighting back, but Voters Organized to Educate, a formerly incarcerated led power building group, is running a field campaign to defeat him and elect Shawn Wilson as governor. 

• Georgia has used the indictments against ‘cop city’ protestors to try to crush a movement. This is one of the most important things in America to stay up to speed on if you care about democracy. 

• Olayemi Olurin went all-out with a new longform video about NYC Mayor Eric Adams and his litany of incompetent and dangerous actions as mayor. Olayemi isn’t the only one finding a lot to critique. Hell Gate has a helpful breakdown on the many avenues along which the Adams administration is failing. 

Reports

• Kansas City, Missouri, does not need a new jail, according to a report prepared for Decarcerate Kansas City. The report notes that most arrests are for minor offenses that could be handled without jail, more than one in six beds in the current jail were vacant at the time of the report, and that there has been no community consultation. The Prison Policy Initiative put together tools for regular people to challenge these new jails assessments here, and other tools here. 

• The Promise of Justice Initiative, a brilliant and very competent advocacy group in New Orleans, published “Punitive by Design,” a report on forced labor in Louisiana prisons. The largest prison in Louisiana – Angola penitentiary – is quite literally a plantation prison, housed on the site of the former Angola plantation. It’s an excellent report, well worth reading. 

• Public defenders are working far too many cases per year to provide competent representation, a new report shows. The St. Louis dispatch has in-depth coverage, including stories of people whose lives have been upended by this reckless lack of representation. 

• The Prison Policy Initiative shared an annual update of its research over the past year. There are so many useful resources noted here. Check it out, and consider supporting the organization!

Solutions and Wins

• The Alliance for Safety and Justice recently published the National Crime Victims Agenda: Stopping Cycles of Community and Gun Violence, which lays out a seven point plan for major progress on gun violence. 

• The Washington Post editorial board agrees with the Biden administration that marijuana should be rescheduled. 

• The Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act finally went into effect; in most cases, it will prohibit jailing people for being too poor to post bail. Bolts Magazine shared the story of groups preparing to make sure the courts follow the law. 

• NPR profiled the Peacemakers group, a violence interruption group in Miami that does holistic community engagement in order to build trust before violence happens. 

• Courts are catching up to the idea that ‘shaken baby syndrome’ is junk science. New Jersey courts recently ruled that evidence on this ‘syndrome’ is inadmissible. Thousands of parents and caregivers have been prosecuted under this false theory over the years.    

Commentary and Analysis

• Michigan’s prison sentences are extremely long, well out of step with the country. Jacqueline Williams wrote about the gut wrenching experience of watching her friend be sentenced to prison for 17 years for transporting 56 grams of cocaine, and how the lack of credit for good behavior sows despair and violence in the prison.    

• Vinny Schiraldi argues that we should get rid of probation and parole, which are pointless supervision systems that cause a lot of harm. Evidence from a few states that have massively reduced supervision shows that it’s good policy to do so.

• Naomi Murakawa, author of the definitive book on how liberals built the modern prison system, offered her analysis on how a victimhood story has constrained solutions post George Floyd. 

• The LA Times editorial board called out the extremely anti democratic nature of efforts to remove elected prosecutors.

Wall of Shame

• A Seattle Police Department union leader was caught on tape joking that a young woman who had just died after being struck and killed by a police car had a life of ‘limited value.’

• Under Mayor Adams, the NYPD has massively stepped up the number of criminal summonses it’s issuing for low level offenses like drinking in public. A criminal summons requires a person to appear in court, may result in a fine, and if the person misses court they can get a warrant. It’s an ineffective policy that aims to create the appearance that the mayor is “doing something” about disorder.  

• Jails often contract the same vendor for food services and commissary. Since they're guaranteed a daily rate for food, these vendors are encouraged to serve disgusting or inadequate food that forces people to purchase from the commissary. It’s a racket. 

• Prisoners forced to do backbreaking work in the blazing fields of Angola penitentiary in Louisiana – which is a literal former plantation – have sued the state over dangerous conditions.

• New York State requires agencies and municipalities to purchase office supplies made by prison labor, which gives the company a monopoly, with predictably bad results. 

• Prisoners have endured dangerous, extreme heat inside Texas prisons this summer.

Misc

• In San Diego this summer, the county managed to provide new housing to 800 people. But 1200 people became newly homeless. This story is showing up all around California and is likely to spread around the country. County and state officials are accomplishing a lot, actually, with massive investments, but the problem is growing quicker than they can manage.  

• Fatal overdoses are up in the state of Oregon, and local outlets and leaders have rushed to blame Measure 110, which removed criminal penalties for drug possession. However, researchers compared the data and found that Oregon’s overdose rates were in line with the rest of the country, suggesting that decriminalization did not increase deaths. 

• Teen Vogue put together a short, helpful syllabus on solitary confinement.