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)....

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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....

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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...

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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....

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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....

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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....

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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....

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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....

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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....

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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....

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