Latest criminal justice news, updates and commentary 5.29.24

Hi all! I hope everyone had a good holiday weekend. Here’s a roundup of things to read about what’s happening in the U.S. when it comes to the movement to end mass incarceration. I welcome any feedback and comments you’d like to share!

Top reads: The Optimism of Uncertainty, by Howard Zinn; Back to Appalachia, about a years-long battle to stop a new federal prison; California’s Prop 47 has saved millions of dollars and helped a lot of people, yet police, prosecutors, and republican donors are yet again trying to tear it down, putting forward a ballot measure this fall that will cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in new prison costs if it passes.  

Media

• Bianca Tylek, ED of Worth Rises, testified in Congress on the subject of prison slavery.

• If you’re looking for new podcasts, longtime criminal justice reporter Radley Balko shared a detailed and interesting list of recommendations.   

• Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation is a long-time restorative justice hub based in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. They have just completed a limited-run podcast where they interview participants in their Family Forward program, which focuses on the needs of mothers and families affected by violence and incarceration. 

Campaigns

• The Center for Community Alternatives, which has an excellent advocacy department that’s been at the forefront of multiple high-impact legislative efforts in New York state, has set its sights on judicial reform. They’re asking the governor not to rubber stamp judges for reappointment who have awful records. 

• Sarah Stillman wrote a haunting longform piece for the New Yorker centering a question that should be perverse to even have to ask: do children have a right to hug their parents in jail? Civil Rights Corps is litigating this question in Michigan right now. 

• Residents of Letcher County (eastern Kentucky) have been fighting for years to prevent construction on a new $500million federal prison. The devastation left by 2022 floods has pressed some in the community to support the prison as the only viable path to external investment, even though the prison will not employ locals and will be a major environmental blight. For the same price, the federal government could rebuild the area. 

Solutions and Wins

• Federal Judge Carlton Reeves just issued an opinion ruling that the doctrine of qualified immunity (shielding police who assault and kill people) is legally unsound and must be discarded. Here’s a thread explaining the case and its implications. 

• President Biden directed the Department of Justice and other agencies to take necessary steps to reschedule marijuana from Schedule I (no medical use and high potential for abuse) to Schedule III (low to moderate potential for dependence). This is a breakthrough shift in Federal drug policy after more than 50 years of inaction. When this goes through, it will be transformative for the marijuana industry, which currently has no access to banking and is in a gray zone, even in states that have legalized it, due to the federal regime. This change does not directly bear on legalization on the federal level, but certainly makes it easier to take that step. 

• A few years ago, Denver passed a ballot measure allocating a portion of tax proceeds to the Caring for Denver foundation, a nonprofit that grants out that money (roughly $48million a year) to programs that offer solutions for mental health and substance abuse. This fund operates more flexibly and consistently than other government funding or philanthropy. This is a fascinating funding model that more cities should explore!

• Thanks to brilliant work by the Abolitionist Law Center and others, Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro has joined in a petition by a man sentenced to life without parole, arguing that a mandatory life sentence for second degree murder is unconstitutional. This is the first time a governor has weighed in on this type of case. Half the people in PA prisons serving life without parole for 2nd degree murder did not themselves kill anyone, but instead participated in a crime where someone was killed. For a fantastic article on this practice, called the ‘felony murder’ rule, check out this article that just won a 2024 Pulitzer prize. 

• Chicago’s First-response Alternative Crisis Team, or FACT is a 22-member mobile team of crisis counselors, call takers and peer engagement specialists which has resolved 94% of calls without police. The team has completed more than 4,400 calls, dispatching crisis support in about a quarter of them. Their goal is to stabilize people and decrease interactions with police, and they provide 30-day follow up care. This program is part of a larger overhaul of Chicago’s mental health system championed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, which includes doubling the size of non-police emergency response programs and reopening two of the city-run mental health centers closed by past mayors. (source: Safer Cities)

• The Chicago Tribune reported favorably on the Pretrial Fairness Act, saying that it has reduced jail numbers and that courts and system actors are settling into new patterns. What a beautifully mundane article about success after a ton of fear mongering failed to destroy the law!   

Commentary

• There’s been a lot of attention lately on concerns about theft from stores. The L.A. Times editorial board published a thoughtful and smart editorial at the end of last year laying out the problems with reactionary responses to theft calling for more prison time. It doesn’t work, and it takes money away from things that do work.  

• Premal Dharia writes of a ‘crisis of purpose’ in public defense, where the leading edge of the work has focused on providing holistic defense, a slew of services to better help each individual client avoid the broad spectrum of direct and collateral consequences of criminalization. Instead, she argues, defenders should focus more on building the power of community members to challenge the structures that are criminalizing the community in the first place. 

• “What she needed was mental health treatment; what she got was a cell,” writes Nina St. Pierre about her mother’s arrest and incarceration after a mental break. 

Retro Reports and Research

• Check out ProPublica’s deep dive on junk science, honing in on 911 call ‘analysis’, where they use recordings to conclusively determine that people are lying, based on entirely subjective and baseless interpretations. 

• In case you missed it the first time, I highly recommend checking out the New Jersey comptroller’s scathing report on the horrendous state of police training. They found that popular training companies teach illegal techniques and encourage unethical behavior. 

• The SF Chronicle’s article on the impacts of incarceration on children is a classic and one I come back to often. I highly recommend you check it out if you haven’t already. 

Wall of Shame

• Prison-loving governors are gleefully signing bills that will increase incarceration without any reality check on whether there is room to house people in prisons. In many states there is currently a 20-40% vacancy rate in corrections positions, meaning that they have the budget to hire people but no one wants the jobs. So, stuffing more people into these prisons is very quickly going to lead to absolute crisis conditions.

• The relentless pace of executions in the few remaining death penalty states is exposing prison staff to extreme levels of psychological and physical stress, according to traumatized corrections officers in Oklahoma and Missouri who are appealing for help.

• A new Louisiana bill will give police the right to arrest people who document arrests. 

• The “Explorer” program, run by the Boy Scouts, helps teens ‘learn about policing.’  An investigation has found hundreds of cases of sexual abuse and assault by police officers leading these programs. Trigger warning: there are some pretty horrific stories in this article. 

• Bloomberg reports on an Alabama lawsuit alleging that people are being denied parole because prisons are making so much money selling their labor (what we used to refer to as “convict leasing”). NPR covered this in December. 

• CBS news did a big investigation finding that over 50,000 guns sold by police departments have been later found at crime scenes.