Poor people often can’t afford to pay bail — even when they’re innocent. An app developed in Chicago offers help using your spare change
Chicago Tribune by Darcel Rockett 3/7/19 Devoureaux Wolf was getting a ride home with friends in the spring of 2016 when they were pulled over by police for not wearing seat belts. A friend in the front seat recorded on a cellphone as Wolf was taken out of the car and wrestled to the ground by the officers. Wolf was charged with three counts of aggravated battery to an officer and two counts of resisting arrest. “I wound up getting assaulted by an officer, and somehow I end up getting charged for assaulting him,” Wolf says in a promotional video for the Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF), which also shows cellphone clips from the incident. The nonprofit pays bail for imprisoned people in Cook County. Wolf, now 27, spent 3 ½ months in Cook County Jail because he couldn’t come up with 10 percent of his $30,000 bond. He eventually came across CCBF’s phone number and, within a week of his mother calling the organization, was released. Read More
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Reckoning With Violence
The New York Times by Michelle Alexander March 3, 2019 We must face violent crime honestly and courageously if we are ever to end mass incarceration and provide survivors what they truly want and need to heal. When Chicago’s police chief, Eddie Johnson, looked out at the sea of journalists to share the breaking news that Jussie Smollett, a well-known and beloved actor, had allegedly staged a violent racist and homophobic attack against himself, he said with great emotion: “Guys, I look out into the crowd, I just wish that the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention.” Chicago is besieged by horrific levels of violence, including thousands of shootings and hundreds of homicides each year. More than 500 people were killed in 2018, down from 664 in 2017. This ongoing tragedy cannot be blamed on any lack of aggressiveness on the part of law enforcement. Indeed, if wars on crime and drugs, militarized policing, “get tough” sentencing policies, torture of suspects, and perpetual monitoring and surveillance of the poorest, most crime-ridden communities actually worked to keep people safe, Chicago would be one of the safest cities in the world. Despite the abysmal failure of “get tough” strategies to break cycles of violence in cities like Chicago, reformers of our criminal justice system in recent years have largely avoided the subject of violence, instead focusing their energy and resources on overhauling our nation’s drug laws and reducing penalties for nonviolent offenses. Read More Behind bars: four teens in prison tell their stories
L.A. Youth by Nicholas Williams 4/20/18 When I arrived at Central Juvenile Hall, I was expecting guards, watch towers, basically the setting of the Shawshank Redemption. I was told to wait in a small lobby room, which separated the prison from the outside world. While waiting, I saw a few inmates getting on a bus. They wore handcuffs and carried brown paper bags behind their backs. I wondered what these kids did. I looked at each one, trying to guess his crime. "Maybe he robbed a store, maybe he killed somebody, maybe he was selling drugs." Some people might ask, why would I want to write a story about juveniles in prison? Why would anyone want to read what these criminals have to say? Who cares? It’s easy to judge juvenile criminals as bad kids, but not so easy when you’re looking into the eyes of a teenager who is going to spend life in jail. I know there are victims of violent crimes whose voices go unheard. But recognize that some people who commit crimes have many reasons behind their actions. It’s a cycle. This is what happens to kids who didn’t have direction or anybody who cared, who had to learn about life the hard way. They were brought up this way so that’s how they’re going to treat others. Sometimes, it’s okay to give a voice to the "villains." They have been victims too. Read More In 2016, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx was elected in a landslide victory that was widely seen as a referendum on Cook County’s criminal justice system. Voters rejected the “tough on crime” stance of Anita Alvarez as well as her cover-up of the police murder of Laquan McDonald. Voters chose, instead, a candidate who ran on a platform of holding police accountable and reversing some of the policies that led to massive increases in the number of African American and Latinx people incarcerated in Cook County.
Changing practices in such a large criminal justice system is a big order. The People’s Lobby and Reclaim Chicago – which organized a significant portion of Kim Foxx’s electoral operation – have been working with Chicago Appleseed to report regularly on Foxx’s progress to reduce incarceration. The following is a report on the first nine months of 2018 data released by the State’s Attorney’s Office. It includes key recommendations for how Foxx can strengthen her decarceration efforts and be a leader in rolling back the failed policies of over-policing and mass incarceration. In this report we evaluate the performance of Foxx’s State’s Attorney Office on four major criteria we believe are vital to the advancement of criminal justice reform and overturning decades of systematic racism in the Cook County court system. We look at the role of felony charging by the prosecutor’s office and highlight limited successes in a context of rising felony charging by Foxx’s office. How people are charged within the criminal justice system has far reaching consequences not just for sentencing, but also for people’s ability to avoid pre-trial detention. We analyze how wealth and class effect pre-trial detention in light of recent reforms by Chief Judge Evans and attempts by Foxx to find alternatives to incarceration. This type of research and evaluation is only possible with regular, detailed access to data from the court system, so we evaluate Foxx’s efforts at transparency in a court system renowned for antiquated and incomplete record keeping. The most recent data release also provides a clearer window into how gun crimes are charged and adjudicated. The data suggest that a “war on guns” is now adding to the “war on drugs” with equally disastrous results. Read the full report Read more Virginia prison officials say they eliminated solitary confinement. Inmates say they just gave it a new name. 'It's all very Hannibal Lecter-ish'
Virginia Mercury by Ned Oliver January 14, 2019 Virginia prison officials say they’re on the leading edge of corrections reform for “operating without the use of solitary confinement.” But Derek Cornelison, a 34-year-old inmate at Red Onion, one of the state’s two supermax prisons in Wise County, says he and dozens of other prisoners have remained isolated in tiny cells for 22 to 24 hours a day for years — a level of confinement increasingly viewed as cruel, inhumane and a violation of international human rights standards. Read More Supreme Court Concludes That Snatching a Necklace Is a Violent Felony
New York Times by Adam Liptak January 15, 2019 Purse snatching and pickpocketing can amount to violent felonies for purposes of a federal law, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday in a 5-to-4 decision featuring unusual alliances. The case concerned the Armed Career Criminal Act, a federal law that is a kind of three-strikes statute. It requires mandatory 15-year sentences for people convicted of possessing firearms if they have earlier been found guilty of three violent felonies or serious drug charges. Figuring out what qualifies as one of those earlier offenses is not always easy. Tuesday’s decision considered a part of the law that defined violent felonies to include offenses involving the use or threat of physical force. The question in the case was whether minimal force, as in a purse snatching, is enough. Read More I'm Honestly Fed Up With all the Bad News So I Illustrated the Best News of 2017
Bored Panda by Mauro Gatti I'm honestly fed up with all the bad news everywhere. I am not a journalist or an influencer, but I want to use my art to spread some positivity. I wanted to create something positive as an anti-venom to the vitriolic rhetoric that pervades our media. That's why I want to share some of this year's positive news from around the world in the hope that it brings you some happiness and inspires you to spread some good news yourself! Art, technology, food, science, animal rights, human rights... we have progressed in so many categories and it's necessary to let the world know that, despite having much more to do, we've accomplished some amazing things in 2018. #18 Dutch prison population is the lowest in Europe and its prisons are being turned into homes for refugees. But read the rest of them for some potentially needed inspiration... Read More Education Opportunities in Prison Are Key to Reducing Crime
Center for American Progress Kathleen Bender Education can be a gateway to social and economic mobility. This vital opportunity, however, is currently being denied to a significant portion of the more than 2.3 million individuals currently incarcerated in the United States. Compared with 18 percent of the general population, approximately 41 percent of incarcerated individuals do not hold a high school diploma. Similarly, while 48 percent of general population has received any postsecondary or college education, only 24 percent of people in federal prisons have received the same level of education. In 2016, the Vera Institute of Justice reported that only 35 percent of state prisons provide college-level courses, and these programs only serve 6 percent of incarcerated individuals nationwide. In 2015, the Obama administration announced the Second Chance Pell Pilot program—an experimental program allowing 12,000 qualifying incarcerated students to take college-level courses while in prison. The future of this program is uncertain as Congress decides whether to include Pell Grants for prisons—which currently receives less than 1 percent of total Pell program funding—in their reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Receiving a quality education continues to be out of reach for much of the prison population due to a lack of funding for, and access to, the materials needed for the success of these programs. Read More Transgender inmate gets rare transfer to female prison
ABC News Michael Tarm A transgender woman serving a 10-year sentence in Illinois for burglary has been moved from a men's to a women's prison in what could be a first for the state, her lawyers announced Thursday. Deon "Strawberry" Hampton , 27, was moved after a yearlong legal battle and resistance from the Illinois Department of Corrections. Hampton, of Chicago, requested the transfer in 2017 on grounds she'd be less vulnerable to the sexual assault, taunting and beatings she was subjected to in male prisons, according to federal lawsuits filed on her behalf by the MacArthur Justice Center and the Uptown People's Law Center in Chicago. She was moved within the past week from an all-male prison in Dixon, in northern Illinois, to the women's Logan Correctional Center more than 100 miles away in central Illinois, her lawyers said. Read More #NoMoreShackles: Why Electronic Monitoring Devices Are Another Form of Prison [OP-ED]
Colorlines Myaisha Hayes In his recent New York Times video essay “Prisoners Deserve a New Set of Rights,” rapper Meek Mill lists the many ways that the criminal legal system fails to protect and uphold the rights of the accused—from arrest, through sentencing and all the way up to release. Mill says, “We had the right to be silent. Now it’s our right to speak up,” as he goes on to describe how formerly incarcerated people are systemically barred from a range of resources. One thing to add to Mill’s powerful set of demands though is the right to return home freely without being digitally imprisoned. It is well known that the United States has the highest prison population in the world, however our system of mass incarceration extends beyond the lives of those who are locked away. At this time, there are 5 million people under some version of correctional control—usually within the form of probation or parole. This expansion of parole in particular is ushering in a new wave of technological incarceration with a heavy reliance on electronic monitors. Read More |
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