Latest criminal justice news, reports and commentary 10.24.23

Top reads:   The St. Louis police officer who sabotaged his own cases because he didn’t like the DA; a pregnant woman jailed to “protect” her unborn child; Minneapolis’s police protection racket. 

Media

• Safer Cities, the group researching solutions that are being implemented around the country and sharing that information with local policy makers, published an interactive map compiling their full coverage on programs so far, from mobile crisis response to Narcan access and more. Note that it’s not a comprehensive survey of all such programs, but rather a way to see all of their past coverage and polling on public support for these programs. It’s pretty exciting to see all in one place!

• Listen to this discussion on KQED with Emily Galvin-Almanza and Jamir Graham from Partners for Justice about the work to adopt a wholistic defense model. Emily does a brilliant job of explaining the public safety element of restorative work, tackling tough questions from San Francisco callers.

• Keri Blakinger’s profile on the dungeons and dragons players on death row was a Sunday read on The Daily. 

• Vinny Schiraldi, the former commissioner of probation for NYC, spoke recently about how keeping people under supervision on probation or parole is counterproductive. The constraints and surveillance make it much harder for people to function well in their communities, jobs, and families. This is important stuff because it seems so “obvious” to many that there should be some form of supervision after a person comes out of jail or prison. Yet in real life, as it plays out, this creates real harm and increases the risk of future crime.

• Bernard Jemison, who is currently imprisoned in a notoriously dangerous Alabama prison facility, has taken to Tiktok to expose the awful conditions inside. Historically, one of the greatest challenges of working on this issue has been that the greatest abuses are hidden behind prison walls. That is changing now with cell phones.

Solutions and Wins

• Former public defender Leon Roché won his election for a New Orleans judgeship, defeating a candidate notorious for withholding evidence. Leon’s candidacy and leadership are extremely heartening as a signal of progress towards a more fair and equitable system.

• The Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) of Illinois, a new law cutting the requirement for defendants to pay cash bail to get released before trial, which had kept poor people sitting in jail on misdemeanors without any way to get out, was just recently implemented. As a result, the population of Cook County (Chicago) jail has dipped below 5000 people for the second time in nearly 40 years. Under the PFA, according to an analysis from Loyola, potentially 100,000 more Illinois residents every year will remain in their communities and retain stability, rather than undergoing life-destroying jail stays. 

• Emily Galvin Almanza’s work to reenvision public defense was profiled in The New Yorker.   

• A combative and abusive judge in the Bronx is facing calls for removal. Why is that a win? Because the increased attention and scrutiny brought to bear on Judge Fabrizio is thanks to work by Oded Oren, founder of Scrutinize, who has identified this judge as one of the worst in NY. Thanks to data compiled and analyzed by Oded and his team, the political fortunes of some of the worst judges in the city are beginning to fall.

Reports

• ProPublica delved deeply into a shocking story of a police detective who sabotaged his own cases in order to undermine the prosecutor, who he didn’t like because they are progressive. 

• Recent research finds that becoming homeless makes people start using drugs (such as meth, staying awake to avoid being assaulted or robbed on the street), not the other way around. This report, “Towards a New Understanding: The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness” is comprehensive and has a ton of interesting and accessible data.

• Parole grants have plummeted in many states since the pandemic, find the Prison Policy Initiative. Boards often deny people based on the facts of the underlying crime, refusing to consider how a person may have changed, which is the whole point of parole.  

• Police agencies tend to fight the installation of civilian review boards, even though they are very popular with the public. But recent research found that police executives are influenced by peer adoption, suggesting that “advocacy through professional associations and policy diffusion through major cities may serve as viable inroads for reform.”

Wall of Shame

• A pregnant woman was accused of drug use and jailed to "protect her unborn child." She gave birth in the jail shower after officers refused to take her to the hospital, leaving her to labor alone for 12 hours. She nearly died.

• Alabama is about to spend $1billion to build a 4000-bed prison facility. Imagine what else you could do with a billion dollars to make Alabama a safer, more stable, more healthy place? 

• There’s so much juicy and ridiculous stuff in this wild story out of Baton Rouge. I can’t summarize it, but here’s just one detail - the owner of a consulting agency called Armor Consulting Group, which offers workshops and trainings around the country on police reform, is implicated in a police torture center scandal. 

• A Phoenix-area prosecutor who was fired after working with police to falsely charge protesters as gang members, having made up a fake gang, told a panel of state disciplinary judges that she stands by her actions.

Politics

• Republicans around the country are using impeachment and removal to get rid of electeds whose politics and policies they simply don’t like. This AP article connects what’s been happening to DAs to the larger pattern that is directly threatening democracy in America. 

• Jeff Landry, the reactionary Attorney General of Louisiana, won his bid to be governor. It’s going to be rough there for the next few years (hopefully not longer than that). 

• GOP operatives are going to the mat in Pittsburgh to reelect the incumbent DA, a registered Democrat, on the Republican line. They’re striving to defeat challenger Mike Dugan, who has campaigned as a criminal justice reformer.