Just Impact Reflections, 3/1/22

The power of political incentives

A paper titled “Collateral Damage from a Targeted Recall Campaign” studied the effect of the announcement of a recall petition against the California judge in the Brock Turner case. They found that the recall petition (and media attention around it) itself triggered a significant jump in the severity of sentences handed out by judges across the board, and that “the incentive effects of the recall spilled over to defendants convicted of very different crimes from those for which Persky had sentenced Turner so leniently.” I’ve heard similar reports from New York, where a regressive campaign to reverse bail reform, highly publicized in the media, led to judges seeking to hold more people in jail across the board, regardless of whether directly affected by the law. 

This helps reveal how the political dynamics of the criminal legal system play heavily in high-discretion decisions by local elected officials and their staff. Often these proclivities for severity are summed up in the word ‘culture’, as in the ‘culture’ of the judicial system, but as we can see from these quick changes, the role of political incentives can overpower long term trends of culture and habit within these offices.

Tackling women’s incarceration on a global scale

Work across countries around the world to address and reduce the incarceration of women and girls is dramatically underfunded, argue two researcher-advocates in this recent report. It’s a timely publication – the National Council For Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls recently convened 120 women from 80 countries in a virtual gathering of their international network of formerly incarcerated women and girls, building on several years of work to cultivate cross-border connections. The work is at a key crossroads – there are less than 800,000 women and girls incarcerated worldwide, yet that number is growing quickly. Reversing this trend not only benefits women directly (who are in most cases victims of abuse prior to their convictions, in the U.S. at least), but also their children, families, and communities. [For some heart-rending stories and data on the terrible toll on children caused by their mothers being incarcerated, see this in-depth article].       

Given this vibrant and growing international network that’s laying a strong foundation for cross-national collaborative work and peer support, where brilliant leaders are already developing and connecting with each other, I suspect it would not take very much (all things considered) to ignite transformative growth of global work on this issue – something in the range of $50 million a year. I’ve always been interested in international work, but haven’t explored it deeply since so many donors are U.S. focused. How exciting would it be though to support bold international work on this?

Just Transition

Brian Kaneda argues in this L.A. Times oped that towns that boomed with prison construction (such as Susanville, CA, covered in this nauseating story in the NY Times) now have a responsibility to transform their local economies to no longer profit off of punishment. Kaneda invokes the concept of “just transition,” a theme from the environmental movement wherein new economic models are built that address and transform the heart of what’s wrong with existing practices. For example, communities reliant on coal plants must shift to green tech. 

In the prison context, what is the alternative economy that inverts the nature of prison? This is a deep question that many are thinking hard about right now. I increasingly think that healing is the central concept that, if deeply embodied, deflates the public demand for prison and puts people who are most likely to end up in prison on a different trajectory. Not only does prison traumatize everyone inside of it, but it also feeds off of the unaddressed traumas of the social body. Valuing healing, resourcing healing, and building a healing economy should be central to undoing mass incarceration.

Coda: for a fascinating and inspiring look at the fight to prevent prisons from replacing coal as the staple economy in Appalachia, read Judah Schept’s recent article, Cages in the Coalfields.