Latest criminal justice news, updates, and commentary 2.6.24

Top reads/listens:  Major U.S. food suppliers rely heavily on prison labor; the #metoo movement was very impactful; Georgia is about to make it impossible for charitable bail funds to work. 

I’ve begun reading City of Inmates, by Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, investigating the history of incarceration in Los Angeles, stretching back to the Spanish missions, including the rebellions sparked by oppressive jailing. It’s an energetic book and is a very readable length. Recommended for some great perspective on who gets jailed for what in America and what the history of resistance looks like. 

Media

• Songs from the Hole, a film featuring the story of a man’s California prison experience through song and magical realism, will premiere at SXSW this year. 

• Two AP journalists discussed their deep investigation into the American prison labor that built major business empires. 

• Florida leader Desmond Meade, who led the effort to return the ability to vote to over a million people with felony convictions in 2018, appeared on the Kelly Clarkson show. 

• The final episode of Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart podcast makes the case for abolishing the U.S. child welfare system. Roberts, a longtime scholar on this issue (here’s her book), speaks with two guests on the inherent harms of the current system and how COVID showed us ways to change. 

• The Art for Justice fund, which wound down after pouring tens of millions of dollars into criminal justice reform and arts for social change, has archived various materials on this site. 

• 60 Minutes toured a federal women’s prison and produced this report, in which the federal director of the Bureau of Prisons said that the severe problems inside won’t get better until we send “fewer people to prison for shorter periods of time” (transcript here).  

 Solutions and Wins

• The MA supreme court has retroactively banned ‘life without the possibility of parole’ sentences for young people up to age 21, ruling that youth up to age 21 are never beyond redemption. Congratulations to the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth! 

• The Michigan supreme court made a previous ban on life without parole sentences for people 18 years old and younger retroactive, making 250 people eligible for resentencing.  

• The L.A. Times editorial board endorsed DA George Gascón for reelection. Gascón now has the trifecta of the local labor federation, the Times, and the county Democratic party. 

• The new Virginia house of delegates, which flipped to the Democrats in November, elected Don Scott as the first Black speaker of the house. Scott is formerly incarcerated, a national first!

• A Colorado bill proposes to give $3000 in ‘gate money’, or in this case called ‘stimulus’ money, to people coming out of prison. The Center for Employment Opportunities has been successfully piloting this approach. Unsurprisingly, people with money are more likely to stay out of prison.  

• Yet another guaranteed income pilot shows that giving people money is very impactful and cost effective. Austin gave poor families $1000 a month and saw great outcomes. 

Commentary and Analysis

• Paul and Mark Engler interviewed Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce about their new book, Practical Radicals. They argue that we must invest much more in the strategic capacity of organizers and movement leaders across multiple issues.    

• Journalist Radley Balko published a wonderful tribute to Craig Watkins, the first Black district attorney elected in Texas, who recently passed away. Elected in 2006, Waktins was the first DA in the country to set up a conviction integrity unit, which overturned 35 wrongful convictions in Dallas and inspired dozens of other offices around the country to follow suit. 

• This is an older piece (from last October), but I’m sharing it as it shows an important trend. The L.A. Times editorial board wrote of its outrage at the huge number of deaths in L.A. County jail facilities. These deaths have traditionally gone unnoticed in jails around the country. But that is starting to change. 

• It’s often said of movements while the moment is still happening that ‘nothing is changing’ as a result. But when we look back some years later, we see that everything changed. Too often though, we fail to look back! Happily, the Engler brothers wrote to set the record straight on #metoo, showing how impactful it has been. 

Reports and investigations

• The Quattrone Center at UPenn Law published a major study on the unreliability of drug field tests, used by police to see if a substance is an illegal drug. They found that of 770,000 arrests based on these tests, at least 30,000 arrests (and maybe a lot more!) were based on false positives, with Black Americans being falsely arrested at 3x the rate of white people. 

• The Marshall Project gives the rundown on the dangerously high number of people kept in prison compared to the number of people who actually want to work in prisons. Half of GA’s corrections jobs went unfilled last year. The budget isn’t the problem; people do not want these dangerous, traumatizing jobs. It’s especially maddening since even conventional (non-abolitionist) analyses say that 40% of people in prison are there absolutely unnecessarily. 

• Edgeworth Economics produced a detailed report calculating the value to society of abolishing slavery in prisons and paying incarcerated workers real wages. Bottom line, the return on investment is good! States should adopt this policy.  

• In New York state, whether or not your criminal appeal will be heard by the highest court is super dependent on which judge gets randomly selected to review your case first. 

• A study out of Europe finds that liberal parties are wrong to think adopting right wing policies (on immigration, for example) will win them back votes on the right. It doesn’t work, and it alienates their base. Seems relevant for our own politics here. 

Wall of Shame

• The Sheriff’s union forced San Francisco to rehire a deputy at the jail who was previously charged with running a fight club at the jail, putting the city on the hook for $280k in settlements. The DA had to drop the charges against him after the sheriff’s destroyed evidence.

• The Georgia legislature is advancing a bill to criminalize charitable bail funds, by preventing any single person or entity for paying bail for another person more than 3 times a year. The bill will also slow down bond hearings (keeping people in jail for longer), and is adding a lot of protest-related charges to those that require a money bond amount be set. It’s bleak. 

• Louisiana’s new governor is very keen to send lots of people to prison. 

• The Alabama Department of Corrections has been returning bodies of prisoners who died in prison to their families with multiple missing organs.