Hi all, I hope you’ve been having a great summer. I took a little time off and am now coming back with another round of updates. If you find this useful, please leave a heart. Feel free to let me know in the comments if there are areas you’d like me to pay more attention to, and I’ll see what I can find. Thank you for reading!
Top reads: Learn about the prisoner hunger strike at Delaney Hall detention center; ICE is spending millions on electric shock gloves, which are also already in use in Omaha public schools; a new resource, We Are Safety, dissects the administration’s false “safety” rationale for occupying cities, massively cutting public budgets, and power grabs. If you’ve been thinking about this but weren’t sure how to talk about it, We Are Safety may be helpful!
Media
Here’s a great photo essay and article about watching the Knicks games on Rikers Island.
The American criminal legal system is riddled with wrongful convictions. In her powerful documentary When A Witness Recants, director Dawn Porter (with executive producer Ta-Nehisi Coates) explores the case of the “Harlem Park 3,” and explains how this kind of catastrophic miscarriage of justice happens, and what’s the aftermath.
Vidal Guzman describes his campaign to get exploitative reality TV programs like Love After Lockup and 60 days In off the air. Learn more in his interview.
Listen to the incomparable Michelle Alexander in conversation about how we must forge spiritual communities right now in order to forge the courage for the fights ahead.
Check out this 16-min documentary about the Participatory Defense Network, whose hubs have documented saving over 40,000 years of prison.
I somehow missed the 2024 podcast Empire City, which tells the story of the New York Police Department. The New York Times profiled it in 2024.
The San Quentin film festival is coming up this October 22-23.
The Marshall Project has a series featuring musicians in prison.
Eating Behind Bars is a new book that delves into low quality food in prison as punishment. The book won a James Beard media award.
John Oliver did a recent episode on police surveillance tech. Here’s a clip about Flock cameras, which have an “astonishingly high error rate,” leading to terrifying and dangerous police stops.
The Marshall Project asked filmmaker Lynn Novack to comment on 10 photographs showing the history of incarceration in the U.S. The photos are really striking. So many of them feature children.
Solutions and Wins
Decarcerate KC (a mostly volunteer, scrappy local org) reported on its hard-fought campaign to stop the opening of a $25million ‘world cup jail’ in the city. While the city did manage to build the jail, it never opened, missing its world cup purpose, which garnered international press.
With beautiful photographs and quotes, the New York Times profiled leaders and participants in community violence interruption programs in cities across the U.S.
After a long, drawn out fight, the infamous Alligator Alcatraz detention camp is finally closed. Here is a wonderful in-depth essay detailing the successful environmental litigation strategy by the Miccosukee tribe that caused a judge to order its closure. The essay includes gorgeous photographs of the wetlands around the camp that the tribe fought so hard to protect.
A unit in London’s Wandsworth prison has been transformed using methods from Sweden and Norway that emphasize the dignity and humanity of prisoners. Violence dropped by 45% and disorderly events dropped by 62% in a trial of these reforms.
Jeff Asher calculates that in 2026, the United States will have the fewest murders since the mid-1960s despite having about 150 million more people. Moreover, lethality (aka whether an assault is fatal), has dropped over 20%. Why is crime falling so much? John Roman points to the $300 billion in pandemic relief money.
A study found that Baltimore’s “Safe Streets” community violence intervention program was associated with a 42% reduction in homicides involving youth aged 15 to 24. In one of the Safe Streets areas, there were zero homicides this past year.
Community Violence Intervention has seen so much success where applied, but there is so much more ground to cover to ensure that communities can benefit from it. To that end, the Gifford’s Center created a new guide with practical steps to creating a community violence intervention program. One of the leading CVI practitioners in the country told me it’s excellent.
Minneapolis is piloting a program to send civilian responders instead of police to document crash sites. This is a much bigger deal than it seems - police spend an extraordinary amount of their time doing traffic and crash work. I’m told roughly 25-40% of police time is spent on traffic and crash incidents, maybe more; it’s a difficult topic to research, and this number is a summation of a number of studies.
Reports, tools, and research
The Fines and Fees Justice Center released a report on the impact of their work to cut fines and fees. They find that by far the most impactful work in this area was the Free to Drive coalition’s past work to restore drivers licenses to people with overdue fines and fees payment plus preventing licenses from being taken in the first place (estimated $34.3 billion in earnings retained plus $465 million in reinstatement fees waived or prevented).
MAPS released Relocating the Root, a scoping literature review that documents the psychological effects of the War on Drugs and explores how these effects may complicate psychedelic treatment for people who’ve been through the system. Impacted people need to co-design treatments rather than validating approaches that may have worked for other groups.
Alabama Appleseed produced an extensive report on people serving life sentences in Alabama, of which there are 6,250 total. The report is fascinating and maddening, as you learn the various ways people end up buried in prison for decades.
Radley Balko put together an enormous compilation of studies on racism in the criminal legal system.
The Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center launched Constitutional Workloads, a tool to help public defender offices determine how many attorneys they need to provide constitutionally effective representation for their caseload. The Center’s policy director previously co-authored the 2023 National Public Defense Workload Study. This new tool translates that research in a way that lets defenders make the policy and professional case to increase staffing.
The Center for Just Journalism, CCR, and Public Justice released For the Record, a guide to help journalists find the data they need to report on the criminal legal system. CJ data is notoriously difficult to deal with, as it’s decentralized and often out of date, so this will be really helpful.
The number of ‘registries’ in the U.S. (making information about people convicted of certain crimes publicly available) is growing at an alarming rate. The Prison Policy Initiative explains why this is super counterproductive.
The DC Justice Lab put together this report with a lot of statistics on the impacts of the National Guard “surge” on DC. Spoiler: it was a very bad deal for the city, especially economically.
Commentary and Analysis
Alec Karakatsanis is doing a series debunking several wrong assumptions made about the criminal justice system in the current political discourse. In the first, he shows that reducing the size of police and prisons systems is very popular, counter to what we’re told by pundits.
Dissent Magazine offers some reflections on the history of the “worst of the worst” language used to justify mass immigrant detention and targeting of dissidents, among other things.
Professor Anna Teriel, political theorist and author of Prison Abolition for Realists, discussed her thoughts on abolition in a recent interview.
Kwaneta Harris writes about what it’s like to find sisterhood inside a prison cell, and how that has sustained her during her years of incarceration.
Beyond the Bars published a very interesting essay on how the construction industry shifted away from being a labor union stronghold. In short, unions refused to let marginalized workers (aka Black workers and immigrants) join unions, so companies pitted those excluded workers against them. The same thing is happening today with temp work, where many formerly incarcerated people seek employment. The whole essay is illuminating and I recommend it!
Policy, Litigation, Campaigns
Bolts has a fascinating article on the implication of the Readmission Acts, which allowed states back into the union after the Civil War. These acts put strict limitations on the crimes subject to felony disenfranchisement, but states totally ignored these rules. A Virginia court now says the state has to get in compliance and restore voting rights.
In an 8-1 decision, SCOTUS ruled that a defendant could appeal his case even though he had signed an “appeal waiver” as part of his plea deal. Slate has a great rundown that nicely explains the technicalities here. This is a hugely consequential area of law, as 97% of criminal cases end in a plea deal, not a jury trial. Prosecutors have overwhelming bargaining power in these cases, which is why it matters so much who the elected prosecutors are.
Trump’s DOJ is suing Evanston, IL, to stop its reparations program that gives Black families $25,000 for housing costs to compensate for decades of redlining.
Organizers and advocates in Atlanta have worked for years to hold off construction on a massive new jail facility. In These Times has a really interesting account of what’s happened so far.
The 9th and 5th circuits both issued rulings requiring the government to give immigration detainees hearings that could lead to their release.
Wall of Shame
Oklahoma City prosecutors very often reject the use of a pretrial diversion program, instead insisting that people who can’t pay bail stay locked up while awaiting trial. This cruel and destructive policy, which breaks up families and causes people to lose their jobs over misdemeanors and worthless cases that never get prosecuted, should be a scandal.
The Supreme Court recently held that certain categories of people who have been released under the First Step Act must be sent back to prison, no matter if they have been living and working productively on the outside. It’s a nightmare scenario.
Bolts Magazine reports that immigrants caught in Trump’s mass-deportation dragnet are being detained for increasingly long periods. Where do they find the beds? Often in horrible local jails trying to make a buck.
NPR listened to earnings calls with private prison companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group and found that they have made simply enormous profits this year through their contracts to build detention camps for ICE. CEO Patrick Swindle (yes, that’s his real name) reported that they are charging the government $307,000 per bed.
Trump has said he will deny federal funding to any jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate on immigration enforcement. Recently, DOJ doubled down with a statement that cities refusing to cooperate will lose money for essential services like rape kit processing. What’s at stake in this pressure to ‘cooperate’? Ultimately, the administration appears to seek the fusion of ICE and the police. Why? Because without that local cooperation, the administration doesn’t have manpower to implement their mass deportation agenda, among other things. Mechanisms of this policy include: COPS, Byrne JAG, the Office of Justice Programs, Office on Violence Against Women, the new Model Cities initiative (which will steer $300 million in DOJ grant funding toward cities that “align” with “DOJ priorities”) and at least another billion dollars in DOJ grants. In the cooperative cities, expect militarized policing to reach new heights: grant money will be funneled to a lot of new surveillance and things like electric shock gloves.