Should We Re-Consider Giving Juvenile Offenders Gentler Treatment?

The arrest of three runaway boys for a horrific rape shines light on New York City’s latest program for troubled youth.

From Pacific Standard

In 2013, New York City began an experiment in how to more safely and effectively deal with children with minor criminal records: house them in small group homes close to their own neighborhoods; provide 24-hour supervision; and create two levels of oversight, involving both city and state officials.

Problems surfaced quickly. That first year, children ran off from the “non-secure” homes some 740 times. One child wound up stabbing someone to death in Queens. In 2014, the number of arrests of young residents of the homes totaled 177.

And then last week, three boys left a home in Brooklyn, made their way to Chinatown in Manhattan, and allegedly robbed and raped a 33-year-old woman in the staircase of an apartment building on Eldridge Street. The woman was hospitalized and the boys were arraigned in Manhattan Superior Court on Wednesday. The home, run by the Nebraska-based non-profit Boys Town, has been temporarily closed pending further investigation.

The alleged crime will doubtless draw attention to the city’s experiment, a program called Close to Home that is directly overseen by the Administration for Children’s Services. The idea was born of disaster: the secure upstate facilities that long housed juveniles convicted of crimes had for years been rampant with violence and sexual abuse, eventually becoming the target of federal investigators. But Close to Home was also born with a model in mind: an alternative-to-incarceration program for troubled youth in Missouri that has significantly reduced the number of repeat offenders in that state....

...Read the rest here.

Solving Crimes With Pollen, One Grain Of Evidence At A Time

From NPR

Some murder cases are harder to solve than others. The investigation into the killing of Mellory Manning — a 27-year-old woman who was assaulted and murdered in 2008 while working as a prostitute in Christchurch, New Zealand — confounded police.

They conducted an investigation and interviewed hundreds of people, but months later, they still had no solid leads.

To crack the case, the police required the expertise of an unusual specialist. Dallas Mildenhall, a white-haired scientist in his 70s, is a forensic palynologist – a pollen and spores expert who helps solve crimes. One of only a handful of such experts in the world, he has helped solve cases of murder, arson and art forgery all over the globe. He once traced counterfeit malaria drugs to the border of China and Vietnam by identifying pollen in the capsules....

...Read and Listen to the rest here.

A New Era for Victims of Crime

From The Crime Report

With federal crime victim funding expected to nearly quadruple in the next fiscal year, states have begun to plan how to spend what amounts to an unexpected windfall.

Under the 1984 Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), all fines paid in federal criminal cases are set aside to help crime victims, but access to the funds every year was tightly limited until last December— when, as part of the federal budget deal, Congress approved a nearly fourfold increase from the most recent spending cap of $745 million to $2.36 billion.

That was good news for advocates, who have been fighting for years to get the full amount of available funds permissible under VOCA to help severely strapped crime victim organizations, such as domestic violence shelters, child abuse centers, as well as court-appointed sexual advocates, and organizations that assist homeless youth.

About $3.5 billion was paid into the VOCA fund in the last year, but victims could benefit from only a small fraction of that because of the cap....

...Read the rest here.

Partisan Politics Could Mean Jail Time for Innocent People

Research shows that Republican-leaning states are less likely to pass laws to protect against wrongful convictions.

From Pacific Standard

Wrongful convictions are a serious problem in the United States. There are approximately two million convicted felons behind bars. By some estimates, as many as 100,000 of them could be innocent.

The rise of DNA technology in the 1980s led to the exoneration of hundreds of wrongly imprisoned individuals, according to the Innocence Project, a public policy organization working to absolve wrongfully convicted people. In response, many states have adopted laws that would allow inmates to access and re-test their DNA evidence. But, as Cleveland State University sociologist Stephanie Kent noticed, far fewer states mandated that DNA evidence be saved after a conviction.

“It's kind of a nasty way for these inmates to find out that even though they have the ability to test [the DNA evidence], it’s not there when they go to do it,” says Kent, who started digging into other legislative safeguards against wrongful convictions and found that few were universally adopted....

...Read the rest here.

The dirty secret of our criminal justice system

From The Age

...So what is it about our society, and so many others, that it should have turned a blind eye to the systematic misuse of power in the Catholic Church and the brutal abuse of children by the Ridsdales and Westons of the world? Where were the elders of the Church, those preaching against the inhumanity of communism and atheism and the immorality of sex outside marriage, when these disciples of god were indulging themselves? Addressing the injustice, even a lifetime after the damage has been done, is important, but we can hardly be proud that it has taken so long or that no one acted when it mattered.

And we should not forget this: while the abuse of children within the Church was being hidden away, violence against women too was also being ignored or covered-up. Imagine if the hundreds of women raped in the 1960s and '70s came forward and told their stories. Imagine if we opened up the court records from that era and gave an honest appraisal of why so many "wife killers" walked from the Supreme Court of Victoria with manslaughter verdicts....

Read the rest here.

The Questionability of Forensic Science

A recent study on the reliability of hair analysis is only the latest to shake public confidence.

From Pacific Standard

With the introduction of DNA analysis three decades ago, criminal investigations and prosecutions gained a powerful tool to link suspects to crimes through biological evidence. This field has also exposed scores of wrongful convictions, and raised serious questions about the forensic science used in building cases.

Last week, the Washington Post reported the first results from a sweeping study of the FBI forensic hair comparison unit, finding that 26 of 28 examiners in the unit gave flawed testimony in more than 200 cases during the 1980s and '90s. Examiners overstated the accuracy of their analysis in ways that aided prosecutors. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project are conducting the study with the cooperation of the United States Justice Department.

The development is only the latest to shake public faith in what police and prosecutors have often cited as scientific proof. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published an exhaustive review of the forensic sciences, concluding that only nuclear DNA analysis has a foundation in research. "Although research has been done in some disciplines," the report states, "there is a notable dearth of peer-reviewed, published studies establishing the scientific bases and validity of many forensic methods."

Fields based on matching patterns in fingerprints and hair have unknown error rates. Other methods are believed to be even more dubious, most notably the analysis of bite-mark injuries on victims' bodies. Still, while the forensic sciences are under scrutiny, unproven practices, both old and new, continue to be used in courtrooms....

Read the rest here.

Both Parties Are Over the Death Penalty

Years of polling show that Democrats and Republicans are increasingly turning away from the death penalty.

From Pacific Standard

The conviction of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has renewed debate about the death penalty. Convicted on all 30 charges in one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks in American history, Tsarnaev would certainly meet the criteria for the death penalty. The question, then, is whether most Americans want Tsarnaev to die at the hands of the state.

"My heart goes out to the families here, but I don't support the death penalty," Senator Elizabeth Warren said last week, per the Boston Globe. "I think that he should spend his life in jail. No possibility for parole. He should die in prison."

While Warren may be a polarizing figure, on the death penalty, an increasing number of Americans—both Democratic and Republican—agree with her. Since 1994, Gallup finds that death penalty support among Democrats has tanked 26 points; just 49 percent of Democrats support the death penalty today, compared to 75 percent in 1994. Republican support has even dropped by nine points (76 percent support today vs. 85 percent in 1994)....

Read the rest here.

In HIV-riddled town, addiction 'the lifestyle'

From The Courier Journal

AUSTIN, Ind. – Two miles from a new HIV testing clinic and needle exchange, a 26-year-old woman in dark sunglasses sat in a city park next to a neighborhood of dilapidated homes with peeling paint and boarded-up windows.

Long addicted to crushing and shooting up pain pills — and sometimes trading sex for drugs — she said last week that she'd recently been diagnosed with HIV, part of an epidemic in Scott County that has reached 142 cases.

But she doesn't plan to stop using drugs, she said, flicking a cigarette into the grass with pink-painted fingernails and climbing into an SUV. There, she mixed powdered heroin and water in the bottom of an energy drink can, drawing the brownish liquid into a well-used needle and injecting it into a hand pocked by drug use.

"Anything bad that can happen has already happened. So why stop now?" she said.

To spend time with drug users and those with HIV in this isolated, impoverished town of 4,200, including the 26-year-old who asked not to be named, is to understand the depth of the problem as Austin battles a drug-fueled HIV epidemic unprecedented in rural America in recent years....

Read the rest here.

The Social Worker in the Patrol Car

From The Crime Report

At the Houston Police Department, a licensed clinical social worker or caseworker rides along when police answer an emergency call regarding a person presumed to be mentally ill. Some 30 of those ride-along professionals now work out of that department’s relatively new Mental Health Division.

In Wisconsin, the Madison Police Department Mental Health Liaison Program has similar pairings of health clinicians and cops, otherwise known as crisis intervention response teams.

The teams in those two cities reflect an innovative approach to handling police encounters with mentally ill persons that is picking up traction around the country.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), which supports the Houston and Madison initiatives, is also monitoring other BJA-supported “specialized police response” demonstration sites in Los Angeles; Portland, Maine; Salt Lake City, Utah; and the University of Florida. Together, the six pilot programs are expected to provide new law enforcement tools and techniques aimed at steering mentally ill persons suspected to be lawbreakers toward medical treatment whenever that’s deemed more appropriate than locking them up.

“It starts with … training police officers to better understand individuals who are suffering from mental disorders, (to develop) ways to approach them and to resolve calls to service … that population,” Gerard Murphy, deputy director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center National Initiatives division, told The Crime Report...

...Read the rest here.

Life After Prison: No Helping Hand

From The Crime Report

On June 10, 2014, Kevin Monteiro stepped onto a prison van at the Sterling Correctional Facility in northeast Colorado. He traveled south for a couple of hours to downtown Denver. He was let off at the Greyhound Bus station at 19th and Curtis.

It was the 56-year-old's first day of freedom since the 1980s—nearly three decades ago—and, to Monteiro, the world looked bizarre.

"Everything is out of place," Monteiro says. "I know where I’m at but everything is really, like, people had moved the furniture around."

Monteiro was convicted of 2nd degree murder in the 1980s for his part in a stabbing in Aurora, Colorado—what he says was a drug deal gone bad. He also says others were involved, but no one else was ever apprehended.

The downtown Greyhound station is one of several drop-off points for inmates after release. Along with the ride from prison, Monteiro had been given a prison-issued debit card; but, he says, that's about it.

“I had a hundred dollars in my pocket and a box of books," he says about that first day. "No family,  nobody.”

Monteiro's lonely journey on his first day of freedom is typical for Colorado inmates who leave prison without family or friends to turn to: a bus trip, a bit of money, and no one to turn to for guidance or support....

...Read the rest here.

The Children of the Prison Boom

Some argue that taking parents who have committed a crime out of the family might be good for children, but the data is in. It’s not.

From Pacific Standard

The United States imprisons more people than any other country. This is true whether you measure by percentage of the population or by sheer, raw numbers. If the phrase mass incarceration applies anywhere, it applies in the good ol’ U. S. of A. 

It wasn’t always this way. Rates of incarceration began rising as a result of President Reagan’s “war on drugs” in the 1980s (marijuana, for example), whereby the number of people imprisoned for non-violent crimes began climbing at an alarming rate. Today, about one-in-31 adults are in prison. his is a human rights crisis for the people that are incarcerated, but its impact also echoes through the job sector, communities, families, and the hearts of children. One-in-28 school-age children—2.7 million—have a parent in prison.

In a new book, Children of the Prison Boom, sociologists Christopher Wildeman and Sara Wakefield describe the impact of parental imprisonment on children: an increase in poverty, homelessness, depression, anxiety, learning disorders, behavioral problems, and interpersonal aggression. Some argue that taking parents who have committed a crime out of the family might be good for children, but the data is in. It’s not....

...Read the rest here.

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.

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

From The Crime Report

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Should we be sending the elderly to prison?

From the New Statesman

With more old people behind bars than ever before, British prisons are slowly turning into dysfunctional nursing homes with a few visitors and a crippling sense of despair. While research suggests that the cognitive abilities of a child are comparable to those of the elderly, should there be an upper age limit for criminal responsibility akin to the infancy defence?

Thanks to our ageing population and the surge in harsher sentences, over 60s are the fastest growing group within our prison population. Over the last decade, their numbers increased by more than double, and by March last year, there were 102 prisoners aged over 80 and 5 who were 90 or older.

The problem lies in the fact that the majority of the older prisoners, particularly those over 60, suffer chronic illness or disability. Yet most prison estates are designed for the young and able. Norwich prison has Britain’s only elderly ward, and it mainly accommodates lifers. The multi-storey wards, narrow doors and the tough regime make for a particularly intimidating and inaccessible environment for elderly prisoners...

Read the rest here.

College courses creep back into prisons: A RAND study suggests the privately funded programs reduce the rate of reoffending.

From the Portland Press Herald

SEATTLE — Every week, they slide books through the metal detectors — novels by Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, copies of the U.S. Constitution, texts on sociology, psychology and comparative religion.

Then dozens of professors and instructors from Washington state’s public and private colleges surrender their driver’s licenses and car keys to an armed guard, walk through the detector themselves and pass through a perimeter fence topped by coils of gleaming razor wire.

They have come to teach some of the state’s most unlikely college students: men and women serving time for felonies such as rape, robbery and murder.

Many think inmates don’t deserve the kind of higher education that law-abiding citizens must pay tens of thousands of dollars to get, a view that led lawmakers, as part of a get-tough-on-crime push in the 1990s, to bar federal and state money from supporting college classes in prison.

But now, such classes are starting to creep back, operating on shoestring budgets with private money, in the belief that they will more than pay for themselves by giving felons skills that can help them get jobs, reducing the recidivism rate...

...Read the rest here.

'Fairness for All': Cuomo Seeks Criminal Justice and Prison Reform

From The New York Observer

Responding to the ongoing controversies over the non-indictment of a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, Gov. Andrew Cuomo laid out a seven-point plan to change the way cops and communities interact and to reform legal proceedings involving police-related fatalities.

Mr. Cuomo, speaking today during his State of the State address, asserted his proposals would help heal the deep wounds formed in the months after Officer Daniel Pantaleo applied a lethal chokehold to Garner, a black man, and after Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan did not convince a grand jury to indict Mr. Pantaleo for murder.

“The promise of equal justice is a New York promise and it is an American promise. We are currently in the midst of a national problem where people are questioning our justice system,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, told the Albany audience, alluding to similar controversies like the one surrounding the death of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. “And they’re questioning whether the justice system really is fairness for all. And whether the justice system really is colorblind. And that’s not just New York, it’s a problem all across the country.”

...Read the rest here.

Obama Calls For Criminal Justice Reform In State Of The Union

From The Huffington Post

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama used part of his State on the Union address on Tuesday to call for bipartisan criminal justice reform.

Obama referenced the protests over the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York last year, and said that while people may have differing opinions on those tragedies, there is room for agreement on criminal justice reform more broadly.

"We may have different takes on the events of Ferguson and New York. But surely we can understand a father who fears his son can’t walk home without being harassed. Surely we can understand the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the front door at the end of his shift," Obama said.

"Surely we can agree it’s a good thing that for the first time in 40 years, the crime rate and the incarceration rate have come down together, and use that as a starting point for Democrats and Republicans, community leaders and law enforcement, to reform America’s criminal justice system so that it protects and serves us all," he continued.

In the wake of unrest in Ferguson and protests across the country this fall, Obama formed a presidential commission to look at policing issues. The commission is expected to offer recommendations in March.

Watch the video here.

The End of Gangs

From Pacific Standard

Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on Southern California’s streets they have been vanishing. Has L.A. figured out how to stop the epidemic it set loose on the world? 

In 2007, when housing prices were still heated, factory worker Simon Tejada put his home on the market. It was a well maintained three-bedroom in the Glassell Park district of Northeast Los Angeles, and the structure was appraised at $350,000. (Tejada had bought it for $85,000 in 1985.) But only one offer came in: $150,000. “Your house is fine,” the guy told Tejada. “The neighborhood’s awful.”

I met Tejada a few months later. I had been writing about gangs in Los Angeles since 2004, when, after 10 years as a writer in Mexico, I’d returned home to take a job with the Los Angeles Times. My reporting took me into scores of working-class neighborhoods and cities within Southern California, places like Pacoima, Watts, Azusa, Hawaiian Gardens, Florence-Firestone, and Harbor Gateway. 

Gangs ravaged all these locales. Walls were covered with graffiti. Shootings were constant. In many of these neighborhoods, Latino gangs had taken to attacking and killing random black civilians, turning themselves into the leading regional perpetrators of race-hate crime...

...Read the rest here.