Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Why Juvenile Justice Should Start—and Stay—at Home

Texas A&M researchers explain how community-based programs rehabilitate juvenile offenders better, and for less money, than correctional facilities.


From Pacific Standard

In 2007, Texas’ state-run juvenile justice corrections system was plagued by scandal. Investigative reports uncovered evidence of widespread physical and sexual abuse in the correctional facilities, horrifying parents and policymakers alike. As a result of these revelations, judges became hesitant to send offenders to facilities they saw as unsafe, and legislators set into motion a set of reforms for the state juvenile justice system.

These reforms included a reduced reliance on secure facilities, and an increased use (and funding) of smaller, local programs that could act as alternatives to incarceration—especially for younger, and non-violent, offenders. The population being held in secure confinement shrank; many facilities closed down.

Austin Clemens and Miner P. Marchbanks III, associate research scientists at the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University, recently worked with a group at the Council of State Governments Justice Center to assess the impact that these reforms have had on juvenile recidivism in the years since. Among their findings was the fact that, even when they controlled for all kinds of variables—like race, gender, gang affiliation, and prior offenses—recidivism was lower for kids who went through community-based alternative programs than for those who had been locked up in state facilities....

...Read the rest here.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

A New Focus on Lockups at the Justice System's Front End

Amid increasing attention to crowded U.S. prisons, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation is trying to shift the focus to local jails that house many more people for much shorter periods, often in poor conditions.

The foundation assembled criminal justice leaders from around the U.S. in Washington, D.C., yesterday to outline a plan to spend $75 million over five years to promote reforms that could reduce jail populations and hold down crime rates at the same time.

Reformers usually have paid relatively little heed to jails because most defendants spend little time in them, either awaiting the disposition of their cases or serving short sentences for minor crimes. Critics have instead targeted long prison terms being served under laws like "three strikes and you're out," mandating life sentences for repeat offenses.

MacArthur contends that short jail stints jails matter, citing research suggesting that criminals can get started on long lawbreaking careers while they are held in local lockups. A 2013 study funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation found that defendants who were jailed for 8 to 14 days were 56 percent more likely than those held for no more than 24 hours to be rearrested before trial and 51 percent more likely to commit new crimes after completion of their sentences.

"Jails are where our nation's incarceration problem begins," declares MacArthur's new Safety + Justice Challenge....

...Read the rest here.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Lethal Rejection: Will the Supreme Court's Lethal Injection Review Kill the Death Penalty?

The Supreme Court is reviewing lethal injection for the first time in seven years. Here’s what it means for the death penalty.


From Pacific Standard

The Supreme Court recently put three executions in Oklahoma on hold as it reviews the constitutionality of the state's death penalty protocol.

If the nation's top court strikes down Oklahoma's lethal injection procedure, what would it mean for the death penalty? We've asked the experts what you need to know.

WHAT EXACTLY IS THE SUPREME COURT REVIEWING?


The court is assessing Oklahoma's use of the drug midazolam, a sedative used in its three-drug lethal injection protocol. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, five states have used midazolam for their executions, and at least five other states have proposed using it.

In the wake of several botched executions in 2014 involving the drug, a group of death row inmates in Oklahoma filed a petition challenging the efficacy of midazolam to mitigate pain, which they claim would render the state's executions in violation of the Eighth Amendment's protection against "cruel and unusual" punishment....

Read the rest here.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Groups call on Texas to cut use of solitary confinement

From the Houston Chronicle

Texas' long-standing practice of holding thousands of prison inmates in solitary confinement is a costly failure because it victimizes the mentally ill and does little to improve public safety, according to a study released Thursday by a pair of civil rights groups.

The findings by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project mirror earlier criticisms by other advocacy groups that the Lone Star State keeps too many convicts confined in small cells for too long, even after they no longer pose a threat to security. They also said the practice is dangerous because more than 1,200 prisoners have been returned to the community with no treatment after spending years in isolation.

"By overusing solitary confinement, (the Texas Department of Criminal Justice) increases crime, wastes taxpayer money, increases violence in prison and causes thousands of mentally ill people to further deteriorate before returning to Texas communities," states the 56-page report that is expected to become part of an ongoing legislative debate on how to further reduce the number of convicts in solitary, commonly referred to by TDCJ officials as "ad seg," short for "administrative segregation."

For a state that has received kudos in recent years for its innovative treatment and rehabilitation programs, the report focuses on prison operations that have remained a focus of continuing criticism, even as prison officials have reduced the numbers of inmates in solitary by a third since 2006. With just under 150,000 offenders locked in 108 state prisons and jails on Thursday, however, that number still is just over 6,100 - about 4.4 percent of the total prison population....

Read the rest here.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Prosecutors shouldn't have immunity from their unethical – or unlawful – acts

Law enforcement officers only receive qualified immunity against legal liability for their actions on the job. But getting lawyers to amend the law isn’t easy

From The Guardian

It’s a tough thing to keep prosecutors accountable to the public, but some people are trying very hard to do just that in the aftermath of Ferguson. One of the grand jurors who failed to indict former police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, for example, wants to make public what happened in the grand jury room. But grand jury proceedings are secret, under both federal and state law, including in Missouri. So last month that juror took legal action seeking to break his silence. Meanwhile, an advocacy group filed a bar complaint against St Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch for alleged misconduct committed in that same process.

These attempts expose just how difficult it can be to hold prosecutors to any standard of conduct. Most misbehaving prosecutors are never brought to justice, thanks in large part to the law of prosecutorial immunity, which holds that prosecutors cannot be sued for violating citizens’ rights in the courtroom. Until we change that law, courts need to open grand jury records at the request of people like the Ferguson juror “John Doe”.

Prosecutors are totally in control, to an almost dictatorial degree, of key judicial processes – including, as we saw in Ferguson, the grand jury process. Your average citizen on a grand jury usually doesn’t understand the state’s criminal laws, so they rely heavily on the prosecutor to guide their decision, and jurors decide cases only by way of the facts that the prosecutor chooses to reveal. When indictments aren’t handed down – as in the grand jury proceedings of Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Eric Garner – it is the prosecutors who areresponsible....

Read the rest here.

Friday, February 6, 2015

Public Defenders: Heroes, but Human

The debate about how to alleviate excessive caseloads continues.

From Pacific Standard

Gary Spence, a trial lawyer best known for his victory in the Karen Silkwood case against the Kerr-McGee plutonium production plant, gave a fiery speech last November at his Trial Lawyers College. Spence has an impressive record—he never lost a case as a criminal defense attorney in his entire career. But, he said, that’s because he and other private attorneys like him can spend months or years on each case; public defenders are in a different category altogether.

“I have great respect for public defenders, but what if the public defender has a hundred cases—what if the public defender is only a public defender in name?” Spence asked the audience. “Let me tell you something. If I had a hundred cases, I’d have to plead him guilty! I’d have to make the best deal that I could make! If I had a hundred cases, I couldn’t see my client until I walked into the courtroom.” Then Spence pounded his fist on the podium, and condemned what he saw as “a system that is defrauding America out of its Constitutional rights.”

This lecture caught the attention of several members of that same system. In particular, two defense attorneys responded with blog posts on the National Association for Public Defense (NAPD) website...

Read the rest here.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Black teens who commit a few crimes go to jail as often as white teens who commit dozens

From The Washington Post

Boys are less likely to commit crimes but they are more likely to be placed in a correctional facility than they were three decades ago, according to a new study that shows the justice system for juvenile offenders has become much more punitive. The trends are particularly pronounced among boys from racial minorities, according to the paper by Tia Stevens Andersen of the University of South Carolina and Michigan State University's Merry Morash.

Although there were negligible differences among the racial groups in how frequently boys committed crimes, white boys were less likely to spend time in a facility than black and Hispanic boys who said they'd committed crimes just as frequently, as shown in the chart above. A black boy who told pollsters he had committed just five crimes in the past year was as likely to have been placed in a facility as a white boy who said he'd committed 40.

More recent statistics from the Department of Justice show that the juvenile justice system has continued to treat black boys more harshly. Although the overall number of cases in juvenile court has declined sharply since 2008, blacks still account for a third of cases in juvenile court, far more than their share of the population.

Advocates for children have long protested against what they describe as a "school-to-prison pipeline," in which strict discipline and arrests in classrooms damage children's long-term prospects, making them less likely to succeed in life and more likely to run afoul of the law in the future. A year ago, the Obama administration urged schools to reconsider zero-tolerance policies, which Attorney General Eric Holder said "have significant and lasting negative effects on the long-term well-being of our young people, increasing their likelihood of future contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems."

Read the rest here.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Utah considers major criminal justice reform, reduced drug offense charges

From St. George News

The Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice unanimously approved a series of proposed criminal justice reforms during a prison relocation meeting in November 2014 with the intended purpose of reducing prison population growth by changing the way Utah prosecutes drug offenses.

Upon request of Gov. Gary Herbert in January 2014, the “Justice Reinvestment Initiative” report was created over an eight month span with the help of the Pew Charitable Trusts public safety performance project, and has gained momentum as lawmakers consider moving the Utah State Prison in Draper.

With the intent to ensure prison beds are reserved for serious and violent offenders while breaking the cycle of recidivism by focusing on treatment for substance abusers and mental health issues, the report contains 18 recommendations, including revising the penalties for drug offenders.

One of the most significant changes in the proposal would be reducing simple drug possession from a third-degree felony, to a class A misdemeanor. The proposal also includes reclassifying drug dealing to a third-degree felony, as well as reworking drug-free zones to focus more on drug offenses where children are more tangentially tied to the drug exposure.

Under the initiative, the restructuring of sentencing guidelines for certain lower-level crimes would mean nonviolent offenders would see two to four months off their sentences where guideline recommendations is not prison, while some class B misdemeanors would be reclassified as class C misdemeanors, and more efforts would be focused on treatment and community-based resources.

Additional recommendations include improving and expanding treatment and services for offenders returning to their communities and strengthening probation and parole supervision...

Read the rest here.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

In Search of an Impartial Jury

Mass media is just the latest challenge for courts in an ongoing quest for impartial jurors—a goal that might be nearly impossible to achieve.

From Pacific Standard

Who should decide the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 21-year-old behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing? The same question can be asked in Colorado, where James Holmes, the troubled gunman who opened fire on a crowded Colorado movie theater in 2012, awaits trial. In both cases, the search for jurors has begun.

The 6th Amendment guarantees these men the right to an impartial jury—one that is without pre-existing knowledge of the case or biases against the defendant, and will come to a decision based only on the information presented during trial. Both the Tsarnaev and Holmes cases are high-profile ones. They received widespread media attention, raising questions about court's ability to deliver an impartial jury. But the truth is, mass media is just the latest challenge courts have faced in an ongoing quest for impartial jurors.

While jury selection is arguably the most important aspect of any trial, the process has never been scientific. Lawyers and judges have always relied on intuition to weed out jurors with explicit biases—the ones people readily admit to having—and implicit ones, the perceptions and stereotypes that reside in our subconscious....

...Read the rest here.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Prison bus initiative helps bring inmates, family together | Inmates who stay connected with family have a better chance of turning their lives around

From CBC News
A prison inmate who stays connected with family and gets to see them while in jail has a better chance of turning their life around once they get out, but for some whose loved-ones are incarcerated, significant challenges stand in the way of visits.
Research has shown that getting to see family can be very beneficial for prisoners. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, for example, says the chances of an inmate re-offending dropped 31 per cent among those who received visits during the year prior to their release.
The number of visits also had a notable impact - each visit reduced their odds of re-offending after release by about 4 per cent.
"People outside, they probably just see us as criminals,” says Nathan Trudeau, who is serving time in Ontario’s Warkworth institution for armed robbery.
“They don't look at us like human beings. They think that our lives don't matter and we change as soon as the door's locked, but we're people too. We're convicts, we've done bad things, but some of us plan to change."
And while visits can help bolster that desire to change, they can also help the families of inmates in return...
...Read the rest here.