Latest criminal justice news, updates and commentary 11.15.23
Top reads/listens: The Māori party has a plan to abolish prison in New Zealand; the Guardian’s harrowing investigation into sexual assault by guards in CA women’s prisons; any episode of the A New Legacy podcast.
Media
Send words of hope to a survivor who’s in prison with the Just Detention inreach program.
Tarra Simmons, a state legislator in Washington State who is formerly incarcerated, was featured in this PBS Newshour episode in the “Searching for Justice” series.
KQED spoke with reporter Sam Levin about his investigation into rampant sexual abuse in California prisons.
The Laura Flanders Show featured a discussion with Andrea Ritchie on police reform after 2020.
Listen to Professor Ruha Benjamin’s recent TED talk on tech, imagination, and justice.
In January this year, a group of donors and formerly incarcerated leaders visited Pelican Bay Prison. Kim Kardashian was with us, and the episode is now out.
Morgan Godvin, a leading Oregon advocate for drug policy reform, who is formerly incarcerated, was profiled in this episode at iHeart radio, as part of their series on the drug war.
Football player CJ Stroud, a leading contender for rookie of the year, has started to speak out at postgame press conferences about the need for criminal justice reform. With the exception of Colin Kaepernick, this is unprecedented in the NFL.
Sonya Shah spoke about restorative justice with the sisters of Polly Klaas, whose brutal murder as a child sparked the state of California to pass incredibly harsh sentencing laws. Jess and Anne Nicol produced this podcast as part of their project, A New Legacy, created in order to honor their sister Polly with a vision of justice rather than retribution.
Solutions and Wins
Representatives from multiple U.S. groups representing people impacted by incarceration traveled to Geneva to petition the U.N. As a result, the U.N. committee recommended a moratorium on life without parole (aka ‘death by incarceration’) sentences.
Ohio voters approved of a ballot measure to legalize marijuana in the state, which is huge! Ohio is the 24th state to do this. There will now be a big fight over how the revenues are spent.
Security ambassador programs are thriving in multiple cities! And here’s a Los Angeles city council person explaining the transit ambassador program’s success. What are these programs? Trained, unarmed people in bright vests serve as eyes on the street (or train) and offer help – directions, carrying packages, connecting people to services they need. This increases safety and makes people more comfortable using the covered area. The public loves ambassadors.
The statute of limitations was recently extended for adult victims of sexual abuse in NY state, which has opened the spigot on claims by hundreds of women who were sexually assaulted by guards in NY jails and prison. These women have already filed 400 lawsuits, finally getting a chance to say what happened to them, be acknowledged, and receive compensation.
How did Illinois organizers pull off their win, ending the discriminatory practice of wealth-based detention? Here’s an account from someone close to the action.
The DA of Travis County (Austin), TX has launched a program to offer alternatives to jail for children who are involved in incidents of family violence, which the DA’s office found was the most frequent offense driving children into the system.
Aventiv Technologies, which is the new structure that Platinum Equity created to hold their infamous prison phone call company Securus, just had its debt downgraded to the lowest level possible, making it much harder for them to raise cash for the business. This bodes well for efforts to make it much harder for companies to succeed in predatory prison markets.
The new Los Angeles County rules eliminating the requirement for people to pay cash bail, put in place after the court found that the prior system was not constitutional, are working! A number of cities are suing to avoid implementing the rules, claiming crime will go up, but a recent study shows the opposite. There are significant safety benefits.
After years of political obstacles, the United States Sentencing Commission (including 7 new commissioners appointed by Biden) adopted amendments earlier this year that went into effect last week. A policy breakdown can be found here, but in summary: as many as twenty thousand people serving time in federal prisons could have their sentences reduced by around 14-15 months. Moreover, federal courts may now resentence people who are serving extreme sentences that wouldn’t be handed down today. Congratulations to FAMM and FWD.us for their smart and persistent work that will bring lifesaving relief to thousands of people!
Commentary
Paul Krugman bemoaned how divergent public opinion has become from real facts about crime.
Hunter Biden wrote movingly of his path from addiction to recovery and lambasted those who, by mocking him, have made it harder for others to make that choice.
Lenore Anderson makes a passionate case for really listening to crime victims, who rarely receive any kind of support yet still overwhelmingly prefer rehabilitation and reform over prisons and punishment.
Formerly incarcerated writer Jeff Noland described some of the daily indignities of parole supervision after release. Restrictions on travel, searches of his home, and more have made the hard task of finding work, housing, and healing far more difficult.
Richie Reseda, a brilliant organizer and now culture maker out of Los Angeles, shared his thoughts on how to make change with OkayPlayer magazine.
Politics
Democratic Governor Andy Beshear held his seat in Kentucky despite major, misleading efforts to characterize him as weak and dangerous on crime. In Virginia, Dems held the Senate and retook the house even though Republicans, desperate to distract voters from their unpopular abortion policies, hit audiences again and again with crime ads.
The Māori Party in New Zealand is proposing to abolish prison, and shift the whole system to the already-growing alternatives that grow out of indigenous practices.
Matt Dugan lost his bid for Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) DA by 2 points. Dugan beat the regressive and horrible incumbent in the primary, but the incumbent switched parties and then pulled ahead in the general. There are reasons for it (local organizers were really focused on the county executive race, the republicans really prioritized this race, etc), but it stings badly. We can now expect to see the office continue its racist and harmful policies.
Durham elected DA Satanna Deberry, who’s quite popular in her district and has led on some great reforms, announced she’s seeking the nomination for Attorney General of North Carolina.
One of the defendants in the Georgia RICO case against 61 people who participated in some way in protests against the ‘cop city’ project described the extremely dangerous implications of these prosecutions. Also, activists are facing very poor conditions in the Atlanta jail.
Nashville is looking to build its own version of the ‘cop city’ complex that has drawn so much criticism and outcry from Atlanta residents.
The governor of Colorado is getting involved – some say interfering – in a state run commission to shape criminal justice policy recommendations to the legislature. Advocates in Colorado, especially the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition (led by Christie Donner), have worked diligently (and mostly without notice from the rest of the country) for years to pass and implement a ton of policy reforms. The article above has a good rundown of the posture.
NYC
The New York City Council reappointed the Rikers Commission, breathing fresh life into efforts to close the notoriously dangerous and inhumane jail complex.
Mayor Adams, who’s made a show of his antipathy to criminal justice reform, appears to be in the cross hairs of a criminal investigation himself. The FBI recently pulled him into a car to confiscate all of his devices, which they returned some days later.
Yusef Salaam won a seat on the New York City Council, more than thirty years after he was wrongfully accused and convicted as a teenager as one of the “Central Park Five.”
NYC Commissioner Molina, who was until recently in charge of Rikers, has been reassigned.
As part of the larger plan to close Rikers and build smaller jails around the city, New York City has finally closed “the barge” an infamous five story floating jail that many people previously housed there refer to as a ‘slave ship.’
Reports
The newsletter Notes on Persuasion covers polling and other research findings relevant to persuading the public, consumers, voters, and other audiences. They regularly feature findings on criminal justice. They recently did a roundup of all their recent posts, in helpful categories. Check it out - there’s some useful stuff in there!
The Private Equity Stakeholder project has a new and impressive report, “From Dawn ‘Til Dust,” on the role of private equity in perpetuating incarceration.
Life Comes From It put out an uplifting impact report covering its first five years serving as an intermediary fund for restorative justice, transformative justice, indigenous peacemaking, and land based healing.
The Prison Policy Initiative has a new report on the negative effects of probation and parole conditions that forbid people under supervision from associating with people who have criminal convictions. This is harmful and isolates people from family and other support networks.
Retail chains are pointing to theft claims to explain failing business strategies in an attempt to mask other failings, according to a recent industry report. Meanwhile, these claims have led states to consider extremely harsh sentencing bills to supposedly deter these thefts, which will produce only misery.
Wall of Shame
The incoming Louisiana governor is threatening to withhold desperately needed water infrastructure repairs in New Orleans if they don’t prosecute women for having abortions.
The Guardian published a lengthy investigation into persistent and terrifying sexual assaults by guards in California prisons, who are almost never held accountable.
The family of an Alabama man who came to the hospital on life support after a so-called “drug overdose” found that instead he had been horrifically assaulted, and it looks like the prison lied about it. They are searching for answers
A deep investigation found that Pennsylvania jails have been systematically undercounting jail deaths, transferring people out of the jail into hospitals where their death doesn’t count, and marking deaths as ‘natural’ when they were preventable. Most go undiscovered, because the costs of obtaining records is so high.
ProPublica found that one of Louisiana’s courts of appeals had decided some years ago, in secret, to systematically deny “pro se” petitions (filed without a lawyer) by prisoners claiming that they had been unjustly convicted. They estimated that roughly 5000 petitions had been tossed without consideration.
The Louisiana prison system has been ignoring a 2019 law that required many changes to solitary confinement practices.