Overcriminalization significantly undermines human flourishing and social well-being by harming the family, social networks, and social citizenship. Additionally, it prevents capable men and women from utilizing their creative capacities in the marketplace. This creates vast issues involving relations with family while incarcerated and reintegration into society after release. On the economic side, draconian cash bail systems undermine justice through basing someone's ability to attain pre-trial release upon their wealth, not their actual threat to society.
“Despite his rejections, Rivera never gave up. At 16, he entered prison illiterate. By the time he left, he was working toward a bachelor’s degree in sociology through Bard College’s prison initiative program.“
The Appeal
September 16, 2019
Read More“It’s that kind of resolve that inspired one of the architects of the New York grant program, Thomas Abt, to want to teach more cities how to start using—and how to stick with—the best violence-reduction strategies. His thinking breaks from political orthodoxy on both the left and the right: The main reason violence is so persistent in the United States, he believes, isn’t that gun laws are too weak (a common argument among liberals) or that police critics have hamstrung tough street-clearing tactics (an often-stated conservative belief). It’s that not enough cities, whatever their political leanings, are properly using basic strategies that are known to persuade would-be shooters not to acquire guns, and not to use them on one another, in the first place.“
The Atlantic
September 11, 2019
Read More“Sara Pratt, a civil rights lawyer and former fair housing official at HUD, said all landlords should “take the lead on being responsible on this and should take a second look at what reasonable criteria are.” But for all of the local efforts underway, she added, the answer was already on the books: the Fair Housing Act. It just needs to be enforced.“
New York Times
September 3, 2019
Read More“Across the country, more than 10,000 regulations restrict people with criminal records from obtaining occupational licenses, according to a database developed by the American Bar Association. The restrictions are defended as a way to protect the public. But Lincoln and others point out that the rules are often arbitrary and ambiguous.“
Washington Post
September 3, 2019
Read More“Over the next seven years, Sims learned the harsh economics of prison life: almost everything she needed she had to buy at the prison commissary, and price shopping wasn’t an option. Even sending and receiving email cost money. Her out-of-pocket costs didn’t end when she was released in May after serving her time for voluntary manslaughter. Prison officials gave her a debit card — loaded with her own money — that charged her a fee for every transaction.“
Atlanta Journal Constitution
August 31, 2019
Read More“Opioid withdrawal is extremely painful and in some cases fatal; people have died in jails as a result of extreme dehydration linked to withdrawal, which causes diarrhea and vomiting. Yet only three percent of state and county correctional facilities across the U.S. carry any of the three FDA approved drugs for opioid addiction treatment: methadone, naltrexone and buprenorphine. Often when the drugs are available, it’s left up to law enforcement to decide who has access.“
Vice News
August 28, 2019
Read More“Sanders said, "We have something like one out of four young black men in this country end up in the criminal justice system. They may end up in jail, they may end up on parole, they may end up on probation." We hadn’t heard a one-in-four statistic exactly how Sanders said it, so we decided to check it out.“
Politifact
August 22, 2019
Read More“For centuries, military forces have been taught to dehumanize an enemy nation’s soldiers in their minds to more easily psyche themselves up for battle, to inflict harm and death. A video feed to an arraignment judge of a defendant who resembles a cartoon character more than a real person provides an implicit psychological platform for the judge to abandon any empathy he or she might otherwise exhibit toward an arrestee regardless of evidence or a lack thereof.“
Criminal Legal News
August 21, 2019
Read More“I have felt for a while now that the modern true-crime craze has passed its prime. Obviously, people have always been interested in crime and will continue to be, but as for the most recent murder media wave — beginning with Serial and Making a Murderer and exploding from there — I, at least, am over it. Most of the new podcasts coming out are hurried facsimiles of earlier successes, and how many times can the Ted Bundy story possibly be told?“
The Cut
August 19, 2019
Read More“But Watkins’s coverage moves the goal posts and relies heavily on simplistic police narratives. She first reports on an increase in homicides in Brooklyn, but when those decrease, she narrows in on murders in North Brooklyn. When those also go down, the reporting zooms in on two precincts—all while letting pro-police voices drive the narrative that there’s a worrying “spike” in crime. These articles are a study in how not to report on crime, given that such reporting will most likely influence how authorities police Black and Latinx neighborhoods.“
The Appeal
August 16, 2019
Read More“Myriad services exist to help older people or those affected by the criminal justice system, but rarely do they overlap. The elder reentry initiative aiding Daniel is run by the Osborne Association, a criminal justice-focused services provider and advocacy group, and has served 388 New Yorkers since its inception in 2015. Its case managers help recently incarcerated people transition upon their release.“
U.S. News & World Report
August 14, 2019
Read More“The week before the shooting, 79 percent of the roughly 1,200 adults in the hospitals were court-ordered to be there, many until their competency is restored for trial, DeWine said. According to the state’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, almost a quarter of those people were facing nonviolent, misdemeanor charges.“
The Appeal
August 14, 2019
Read More“The public’s perception of crime is often significantly out of alignment with the reality. This is caused, in part, by frequently sensationalist, decontextualized media coverage. Media Frame seeks to critique journalism on issues of policing and prisons, challenge the standard media formulas for crime coverage, and push media to radically rethink how they inform the public on matters of public safety.“
The Appeal
August 9, 2019
Read More“An advocate for criminal justice reform and prison abolition who fell in love with a prisoner, Roberts opens up in her memoir The Love Prison Made and Unmade about her relationship with criminal justice reform advocate Shaka Senghor, author of Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison. Roberts, who I’ve known for many years, recently spoke with me about her book.“
Yes! Magazine
August 6, 2019
Read More“Wages and her team have just finished interviewing formerly incarcerated individuals who are now seeking job training and placement through the team's startup, Surge Employment Solutions, which aims to place people in well-paid, high-skilled trade jobs after they have served time in prison. Today Wages and Ram are planning out the next few months of their pilot program, during which they will start training their selected candidates for their future jobs. By November, the selected candidates will be working their new positions.“
Science X
August 5, 2019
Read More“Arizona’s current inmate wildfire program began with two crews in 1984. Over the last three decades, approximately 2,000 prisoners have gone through the program. At its height, following the devastating 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire, which burned more than 426,000 acres in northeastern Arizona, the program had 15 crews; today, it has 12, including one from Arizona’s women’s prison, working year-round for far below minimum wage.“
High Country News
August 5, 2019
Read More“Harassment and bullying are plaguing our online lives, but social media companies seem fresh out of solutions. This week, On the Media experiments with a radical approach for detoxifying the web. Can theories of criminal justice reform rehabilitate trolls and fix the internet?“
New York Public Radio
August 2, 2019
Read More“The back-and-forth between candidates, 15 months before the 2020 presidential election, would have been unthinkable in the Democratic debates of 1988 or 1996 or 2004 or even 2012. Unthinkable for fear that a Republican president or presidential candidate would immediately pounce on these reform ideas as being "soft on crime," and thus dangerous and unpresidential. George Bush, the elder, used Willie Horton in 1988 to successfully stir up white fear of crime about his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Donald Trump has used “American carnage” and unfounded fear of the link between immigrants and crime as a primal theme.“
The Marshall Project
August 2, 2019
Read More“During the trainings, inmates open up about their traumatic experiences, such as sexual assault, abandonment by their family and domestic violence inflicted by loved ones. Revisiting what they call this “original trauma” is an integral part of their work. It’s the experiences they had as young boys that formed the basis of their coping mechanisms and survival tactics.“
Huffington Post
July 31, 2019
Read More“Under a century-old law, Rhode Island classifies everyone serving a life sentence in the state as “civilly dead,” meaning they have absolutely no civil rights. Unlike other prisoners, they can’t sue or raise complaints in state court, even if they’ve been mistreated or abused. They can’t get married or divorced, they lose rights over their children, and they can’t own property in their name or sign a contract. In these matters, as the law puts it, they are “deemed to be dead in all respects, as if [their] natural death had taken place at the time of conviction.” It doesn’t matter if they are eligible for parole and will eventually leave prison.“
Mother Jones
July 30, 2019
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