Recent criminal justice news and commentary 8.8.22
Hello all! Welcome to new members. In this post, I’ll share news and commentary that’s come across my desk over the past month. I hope it’s useful and interesting to you!
My favorite reads this month: Evangelicals (learn something new!), harm reduction (helpful facts to make the case), and Texas youth prisons (renewed urgency for this work).
Media/Commentary
Dwayne Betts’ Freedom Reads project, an ambitious (and very good!) effort to install world class library collections in prisons around the country, was featured on CBS.
Alec Karakatsanis appeared on the Daily Show, explaining some of the toughest concepts in our field in a handful of minutes. We hope he joins the show again to explain more!
Adam Johnson’s recent column makes the case that people feel unsafe because visible poverty is everywhere. And rather than addressing that poverty with major emergency investments, governments are choosing to ramp up punitive methods that don’t work and never have.
As reported in this excellent oped in the NYTimes, Alabama has one of the most extreme systems of wealth extraction in the country, draining its poorest residents of funds through criminal fines and fees, all while the wealthiest residents enjoy extremely low tax rates. This passage reminded me of Chris Hayes’ memorial book, A Colony in a Nation:
“Over 60 percent of the land in the Black Belt is owned by people who don’t live there. A few wealthy families and corporations own the land, pay little tax and profit off agriculture, all while roughly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. This social and economic structure is one reason Mr. Bailey calls Alabama an “internal colony,” a place where wealth and resources are continually extracted by people elsewhere.”
See also this very informative piece on predatory probation in Georgia, where lawsuits and reforms haven’t yet stopped the practice of driving poor people deeply into debt over unpaid tickets and the like.
Solutions and Wins
Victory in the Memphis DA race! Bolts has the rundown.
For the first time, there are no girls incarcerated in the state of Hawaii, after system leaders replaced punitive models with trauma-informed ones. In its reporting on this, WaPo notes that “This is part of a larger trend in juvenile justice reform: Since 2000, more than 1,000 juvenile facilities have closed, including two-thirds of the largest facilities. And between 2000 and 2018, youth incarceration rates dropped by more than half.”
The City of West Hollywood voted to reduce the number of sheriff’s officers they’re contracting from the county by 5 (saving $2million), and spend that money to hire 30 “block by block” ambassadors, who wear a uniform and stand at a cardboard podium and offer help to anyone who needs it. That could be walking you to your door at night, giving directions, or connecting people to services. See here for more information, including a discussion of the ‘sentinel effect’, where more eyes on the street improved public safety. 30 ambassadors are better than 5 armed officers for the same price.
Justice LA and the Fund for Guaranteed Income collaborated to make a very simple, lightweight, yet powerful court reminder tool for L.A. residents. Existing services are expensive and cumbersome to use, requiring defense attorneys to put in and maintain information. This tool, by contrast, automatically scrapes data from the L.A. court system and sends text reminders for people to attend their court dates. This is a really smart use of tech!
See this thread from Worth Rises, with its new national PSA on phone phone call rates, their new tool for tracking the rates, and their exciting finding that rates have dropped 36% overall in America since 2018.
Safer Cities relaunched its weekly newsletter, which will focus on highlighting solutions being implemented in communities around the country, such as civilian traffic enforcement and mental health workers responding to mental health crises. Sign up here for regular updates on things that work, and see previous updates here.
Alabama’s new draft constitution, which has been through a heavy reorganizing process, will eliminate the exception to slavery that exists in almost every state constitution and the federal constitution, whereby people who are incarcerated after a conviction may be subject to involuntary servitude. The new language reads: “That no form of slavery shall exist in this state; and there shall not be any involuntary servitude.” I don’t know the context on the ground, but this seems like a significant step forward, even if in practice it’s symbolic. True implementation would be a big deal.
Elections
The L.A. Times lamented the effort to recall DA George Gascón, saying that the county needs to let him lead the way he was elected to do. The county is currently counting recall signatures to see if the measure has qualified for the ballot. The test sample they did early on would not have qualified. There is no deadline on this answer, but we hope to know by the end of the month. I found this passage very astute:
“The D.A. has become the latest vessel into which residents wrestling with anxiety over disease, lockdowns, political turmoil, violence and societal disruption have poured their fears — and into which opponents of criminal justice reforms, and opportunists of various political stripes but most notably from the far right, have placed their hopes.”
Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police lost big in recent state legislative elections in Chicago, where they backed challengers to four legislators who had championed reform. All challengers prevailed by massive margins. Chicago is following the trend set earlier this summer in Los Angeles, where the police and sheriff-backed candidates fared very poorly.
The elected DA in Vermont’s largest county has been a champion of restorative justice. She’s defending her seat in the primary today. Read this in-depth article from Bolts on the work that goes into making restorative justice successful.
There are a lot of undecided voters in the upcoming Florida AG primary, though reform DA Aramis Ayala is doing better numbers than the competition. As the DA serving Orlando, Ayala was a courageous and principled leader who stood very firm on fairness. This is a race more people should be paying attention to, especially given the latest moves by Governor DeSantis.
Reports/Research
The Law and Justice Journalism Project recently launched. They will focus on educating and mentoring journalists to report more fairly and accurately about the criminal justice system.
An essay in the Annals of Medicine argues that the drug war has negatively impacted social determinants of health, and recommends that health care practitioners work to reduce the effects of criminalization on health.
A recent WaPo article on rising rents contains this striking fact: “Every $100 increase in median rent is associated with a 9 percent increase in the estimated homelessness rate, according to a 2020 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.” Yet another reminder that homelessness is a function of housing costs, and that criminalization will not fix it.
The Solidaire donor community published a primer for funders on efforts to reallocate funding away from policing and into social services and other community supports.
An aspect of the Dobbs ruling you may not have considered: people on probation and parole are often prohibited from leaving the state. This means they are effectively cut off from access to abortion in states with bans, even if they did have the money to travel. See also this report from the Prison Policy Initiative on the intersections between probation/parole and Dobbs.
Laws and policies
Missouri lawmaker Kimberly Ann Collins has been making surprise visits to prisons around the state, gathering evidence to support her bill to create an oversight committee to prevent abuse in the prisons.
NY Governor Kathy Hochul has been extraordinarily stingy in granting commutations and pardons while in office. Historically, governors used to issue clemency far more frequently - see this excellent report on NY state (generously shared by twitter user @n_th_n_). Note: I’ve learned that the history of clemency doesn’t appear to be well documented. NYU has a rather short collection of reports it’s gathered on the issue. It would be great to see more historical work done, including clemency practices from the deep south in the 20th century, which I understand to have been quite generous.