Top reads: The algorithmic school to prison pipeline; Really big pressing problems benefit from having a ‘general manager’ in charge of coordinating the solution; Researchers found that police body cameras in NC cut Black incarceration rates by 10.5% because prosecutors learned that police constantly lie.
Announcements
Congratulations to Dana Kaplan, who was appointed to be New York City’s “Rikers Czar.”
Several prison education projects are co-hosting an upcoming webinar showcasing long-form civic essays written by incarcerated youth at the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center.
The Whirlwind Institute has officially launched its website! This team has done extraordinary work for decades to develop the intellectual foundation for modern movement strategies, and now it’s all compiled and organized for accessibility on the site.
Media
The Inside Literary Prize, a literary award judged by incarcerated people, announced its 2026 shortlist. Freedom Reads is currently doing a 6-state prison tour in connection with the prize. Check out this post from the Carnegie foundation about why they are honoring their great library legacy by supporting prison libraries.
Beauty Behind Bars curates exhibits by current and formerly incarcerated artists in D.C. Here you can read a conversation between the project’s founders about the power of art in advocacy.
Here’s a podcast worth your time: a conversation with Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie about how we should understand the spectacular violence of Trump’s ICE surges as an extension of the violence of everyday policing, plus lessons in resisting proposed “reforms” that would actually give more power to ICE.
True crime podcasts are doing crucial work to educate listeners about the extreme problems in how the criminal legal system functions and who it targets, according to Frank Racioppi for Forbes. Would you agree?
Solutions and Wins
The combined pressure of excellent litigation and the exquisitely devastating Alabama Solution film have succeeded in pressuring the Alabama legislature to pass three key parole reform bills.
The PA Supreme Court banned life without parole for felony murder (which is when the defendant wasn’t the person to kill the victim). This could lead to the largest resentencing effort in state history, with ~1000 people at stake. Congratulations to the Abolitionist Law Center!
Wisconsin Governor Evers issued an execute order to appoint a commutations board to advise him on commutations he can make before he leaves office in December of this year. That’s a very very brisk timeline to get something going, but he could potentially make a sizable dent in the state’s 23,000 prison population if he focuses on this.
The Center for American Progress identified 17 cities that have seen a 50%+ reduction in gun violence victimization since 2021. Crucially, they found that every one of these cities has prioritized launching or scaling up local community violence prevention programs.
Congratulations to this Colorado alliance on their work to pass a new law regarding positive roadside drug tests (on a ‘suspicious’ baggie in a car, for example), which are notoriously unreliable! The new law says they cannot be arrested on the spot, but may only receive a summons. Every year, 750,000 people in the U.S. are arrested based on results of these field tests. The Quattrone Center found in 2023 that these tests are the “largest known contributing factor to wrongful arrests and convictions in the U.S.”
San Francisco is expanding a street ambassador program credited with cutting the number of 911 calls in half.
California’s prison population has dropped by 48% in the last 20 years.
Keeping in line with her promise to hold federal agents accountable through the Fight Against Federal Overreach network, DA Mary Moriarty charged an ICE agent with assault.
Reports, tools, and research
A fascinating study done by researchers at UVA and Harvard found that the introduction of body worn cameras in NC had major positive effects on reducing prosecution disparities. Prosecutors who previously treated police reports as the ground truth came to understand that police accounts are often biased and unreliable. The researchers found that, as a result, the racial disparities in incarceration was cut by 14% and Black incarceration cut by 10%.
The Prison Policy Initiative compiled all the data on incarceration, probation, and parole to get a full picture of mass punishment across the country. Even though probation may be less devastating than prison, it’s still an extreme disruption that can lead to job loss, financial ruin, and even return to prison if very specific requirements aren’t met.
Vera has compiled a ton of data to give us the “Incarceration and Inequality Data Explorer.” Here is the overview, and you can click over to the map to start seeing the patterns in the data.
The California Coalition for Women Prisoners released “No Time to Wait,” a case for releasing elders from California’s two women’s prisons.
A new report, Safe Roads for All, highlights the costs and dangers of addressing road safety via policing of individual drivers. Instead, they lift up structural reforms like traffic calming.
The libertarian litigation group Institute for Justice has updated their giant report on asset forfeiture, where the government seizes money upon the mere assertion that it was used in a crime, without having to prove that crime. It’s an outrageous practice!
The Sentencing Project did an in-depth study of reentry to society after long-time incarceration, conducting deep interviews with 33 formerly incarcerated people.
Just Safe (f/k/a the Alliance for Safety and Justice) published a survey of police officers to test assumptions about policy preferences and perspectives about crime. They found that police strongly agree their jobs would be made safer and easier by neighborhood programs like violence interruption that help “prevent crises from becoming crime.”
Shame
Louisiana has done two extremely shameful things of late:
After New Orleans voters selected Calvin Duncan, who was exonerated after 30 years in prison, to be the next clerk of criminal court, Gov. Landry signed a law to eliminate that office entirely.
They’re close to passing a law to criminalize public camping, aka criminalize homelessness. Convictions could be overturned later if the person completes treatment, but they must pay for it, or else be put to forced labor.
Taxpayers in Chicago, New Jersey, and Boston will be digging deep to pay settlements of $9.5million, $12million, and $12million (in that order) for wrongful convictions after police misconduct. This is a tiny sampling of cases like this. Does everyone know that police departments aren’t required to pay out their own settlements, so they basically operate without any accountability when they cause immense and costly harm? My father Andrew Cockburn’s piece Blood Money is a great article in Harpers about this in the context of police brutality, but it pertains to wrongful convictions too!