ACLU Report to reduce IL incarceration rate:
Illinois has 40,922 people in prison, We can reduce that number. If Illinois were to follow these and other reforms in this Smart Justice 50-State Blueprint, by 2025 it could have 24,898 fewer people in its prison system, saving over $1.5 billion that could be invested in schools, services, and other resources that would strengthen communities. Read More
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From defendant to top prosecutor, this tattooed Texas DA represents a new wave in criminal justice reform
Washington Post by Justin Jouvenal November 19, 2018 ...The nation’s 2,400 district attorneys wield significant power in the criminal-justice system, with wide discretion over charging and sentencing and influence over which defendants are granted bond. This new breed of prosecutors is upending a traditional tough-on-crime focus by emphasizing a holistic approach over conviction rates and long sentences. ... Read More NAACP - Sherrilyn Ifill
Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, issued the following statement on the First Step Act criminal justice reform bill: “The revised First Step Act, S. 3649 is the latest modest step on the path to true criminal justice reform. We are gratified that this bill now includes two measures we identified early-on as essential to its legitimacy – some meaningful sentencing reform and the retroactive application of the provisions of the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA), the 2010 law that reduced the obscene and racist powder and crack cocaine sentencing disparity. LDF has long argued, including in litigation, that the FSA must be applied retroactively. “However, there are still provisions that deeply trouble us. We have long opposed using risk assessment instruments to determine eligibility for supervised release of prisoners. These tools often produce racially disparate results that cannot be scientifically justified. We hope that the measures included in this bill to address risk assessments will be sufficient to relieve those concerns, and we will closely monitor the development and use of these instruments by the Bureau of Prisons. Additionally, we are disappointed that two of the sentencing provisions will not apply to persons who are currently incarcerated. It is unfortunate that Congress would determine that a sentencing scheme, such as the three strikes law that results in a life sentence for drug offenses, is unfair, but not allow persons who are currently incarcerated to benefit from changes to the law. “It is vital that as this bill moves forward we set the historical record straight. There has been bipartisan support for comprehensive criminal justice reform for years, and proposed legislation designed to accomplish that goal. This effort did not begin with this administration, nor with any individual aligned with this particular bill. We take nothing away from their efforts to move this process forward. But the strength of this bill – the inclusion of sentencing reform, retroactivity and curbs on mandatory minimums – is the result of the hard line taken by the coalition led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which refused to endorse or accept earlier iterations of this bill by those who pushed to “get something done,” rather than to do the right thing. We are proud of the pressure we applied to make this bill stronger not only for those who are incarcerated, but for those facing harsh mandatory minimum sentences, and we laud the principled stance taken by Senators Booker, Durbin, Harris and Grassley – each of whom stood resolute in their demand for sentencing reform as part of this bill. “Finally, it is imperative that we take seriously the words “first step.” True criminal justice reform must start first and foremost with policing reform and changes to law enforcement practices that result in mass incarceration. It must include bail reform, and measures that strengthen our public defender system. Meaningful criminal justice reform must include a return to a “Smart on Crime” approach to prosecution by U.S. and district Attorneys. Criminal justice reform must include prison reforms to address the inhumane conditions of incarceration in many of our nation’s prisons, and must allow for a private right of action for violations of the Prison Rape Elimination Act. “We have a great deal of work to do to make our criminal justice system truly just. Those of us who have spent decades defending those who have had their lives crushed by the injustices in the system, will continue to work to move forward meaningful and long-lasting transformation in our criminal justice system.” On the NAACP site ### Founded in 1940, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) is the nation’s first civil and human rights law organization and has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957—although LDF was originally founded by the NAACP and shares its commitment to equal rights. LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute is a multi-disciplinary and collaborative hub within LDF that launches targeted campaigns and undertakes innovative research to shape the civil rights narrative. In media attributions, please refer to us as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or LDF. What's Really in the First Step Act
Marshall Project by Justin George Nov 16, 2018 Hailed by supporters as a pivotal moment in the movement to create a more fair justice system, endorsed by an unlikely alliance that includes President Donald Trump and the American Civil Liberties Union, the First Step Act is a bundle of compromises. As it makes its way through Congress it faces resistance from some Republicans who regard it as a menace to public safety and from some Democrats who view it as more cosmetic than consequential Read more ******** What the Latest Bipartisan Prison Reform Gets Wrong and Why It Matters Truth Out by Dan Berger Nov 16, 2018 ...Passage of the bill would be a major victory for Trump. A number of liberal and progressive commentators have gone all in on the legislation, which has been heavily shaped by Jared Kushner and Koch Industries attorney Mark Holden. CNN commentator and Cut50 cofounder Van Jones praised Trump. “Give the man his due,” Jones tweeted, saying the president is “on his way to becoming the uniter-in-Chief on an issue that has divided America for generations.” Yet, regardless of who is “uniting” around its passage, the bill itself is both weak and dangerous. While it offers a few token reforms — some of them, like the end of shackling for pregnant and post-partum women in federal custody, necessary and long overdue — it leaves many of the most pressing issues off the table. It barely makes a dent in terms of reducing the length of prison sentences or reducing the number of people in prison. Meanwhile, it heightens the use of racist and classist assessment mechanisms and expands the net of surveillance. Read More ******** A Real Chance at Criminal Justice Reform New York Times - the editorial board Nov 14, 2018 Perhaps it’s a coincidence that a new criminal justice reform proposal has emerged in the Senate less than a week after the departure of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Read More ******** Bipartisam Sentencing Overhaul Moves Forward, but Rests on Trump New York Times - Nicholas Fandos and Maggie Haberman Nov 12, 2018 The latest compromise was crafted by Senators Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa; Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois; and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, in conjunction with Mr. Kushner. Those senators won a promise from Mr. Trump in August that he would consider backing a bill during the lame-duck session. Mr. Grassley, the Judiciary Committee chairman, and another senior Republican on that committee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have lobbied Mr. Trump in the months since. Read More ******** Congress's prison reform bill, explained The First Step Act has Trump's support - but faces some Democratic opposition Vox by German Lopez May 22, 2018 ... The bill would not reform or reduce how long people are sentenced to prison for, which has been the prime target of criminal justice reformers over the past few years. Instead, the bill focuses on rehabilitating people once they’re already in prison by incentivizing them, with the possibility of earlier release, to partake in rehabilitation programs. As Kushner explained at the White House summit, “The single biggest thing we want to do is really define what the purpose of a prison is. Is the purpose to punish, is the purpose to warehouse, or is the purpose to rehabilitate?” Read More The Long Term, Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom,
Edited by Alice Kim, Erica R. Meiners, Audrey Petty, Jill Petty, Beth E. Richie, and Sarah Ross. The editors have worked in Illinois prisons and cover the broad range of issues comprising the the title, including a section on abolition politics. One of the chapters is by Monica Cosby, "On Leaving Prison: A Reflection on Entering and Exiting Communities" The voices of those experiencing life in the long term are often not heard. This collection of essays and personal stories from the people most impacted by long-term incarceration in Stateville Prison bring light to the crisis of mass incarceration and the human cost of excessive sentencing. Compelling, moving narratives from those most affected by the prison industrial complex make a compelling case that death by incarceration is cruel and unusual punishment. Implemented in the 1990’s and 2000’s harsh sentencing policies, commonly labeled “tough on crime,” became a bipartisan political agenda. These policies had real impacts on families and communities, particularly as they caused the removal of many non-white and poor individuals from cities like Chicago. The Long Term brings into the light what has previously been hidden, a counter-narrative to the tough on crime agenda and an urgent plea for a more humane criminal justice system. The book is a critical contribution to the current debate around challenging the mass incarceration and ending mandatory sentencing, especially for non-violent offenders. Purchase to read more Haymarket Books America's Other Family-Separation Crisis
The New Yorker by Sarah Stillman November 5 ... America imprisons women in astonishing numbers. The population of women in state prisons has increased by more than eight hundred per cent in the past four decades. The number of women in local jails is fourteen times higher than it was in the nineteen-seventies; most of these women haven’t been convicted of a crime but are too poor to post bail while awaiting trial. The majority have been charged with low-level, nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession, shoplifting, and parole violations. The result is that more than a quarter of a million children in the U.S. have a mother in jail. One in nine black children has a parent who is, or has been, incarcerated. ... Read More Watch more Larry Krasners's Campaign to end mass incarceration
The New Yorker by Jennifer Gonnerman October 29, 2018 Issue (this may require signing up) ntil Larry Krasner entered the race for District Attorney of Philadelphia last year, he had never prosecuted a case. He began his career as a public defender, and spent three decades as a defense attorney. In the legal world, there is an image, however cartoonish, of prosecutors as conservative and unsparing, and of defense attorneys as righteous and perpetually outraged. Krasner, who had a long ponytail until he was forty, seemed to fit the mold. As he and his colleagues engaged in daily combat with the D.A.’s office, they routinely complained about prosecutors who, they believed, withheld evidence that they were legally required to give to the defense; about police who lied under oath on the witness stand; and about the D.A. Lynne Abraham, a Democrat whose successful prosecutions, over nearly twenty years, sent more people to death row than those of any other D.A. in modern Philadelphia history. In 1993, Krasner opened his own law firm, and went on to file more than seventy-five lawsuits against the police, alleging brutality and misconduct. In 2013, he represented Askia Sabur, who had been charged with robbing and assaulting a police officer. A cell-phone video of the incident, which had gone viral, showed that it was the police who had beaten Sabur, on a West Philadelphia sidewalk. Daniel Denvir, a former criminal-justice reporter at the Philadelphia City Paper and a friend of Krasner’s, recalled that, at the trial, Krasner revealed the unreliability of the officers’ testimony, “methodically unspooling their lies in front of the jury.” In dealing with such cases, Denvir said, Krasner sought to illustrate “prosecutors’ and judges’ typical credulity with regard to anything that a police officer said, no matter how improbable.” (Krasner later filed a civil lawsuit on Sabur’s behalf, which was settled for eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The police officers were never charged with lying on the witness stand.) In Krasner’s spare time, he worked pro bono, representing members of act up, Occupy Philadelphia, and Black Lives Matter. In 2001, his wife, Lisa Rau, decided to run for state-court judge. Krasner asked some of the activists he had represented, including Kate Sorensen, of act up, for help. “We were involved with a whole community of anarchist activists—folks who generally don’t vote,” Sorensen said, “but we got hundreds and hundreds of lawn signs up all over the city.” Rau won, and later earned a reputation for challenging questionable testimony from the police. In early 2017, when Krasner told the six-person staff of his firm that he was running for D.A., they erupted in laughter. On February 8th, he announced his candidacy with a speech in which he attacked the culture of the D.A.’s office, accusing prosecutors of embracing “bigger, meaner mandatory sentencing.” He accused the office, too, of casting a “very wide net,” which had “brought black and brown people from less prosperous neighborhoods into the system when that was in fact unnecessary and destructive.” The president of the police union pronounced Krasner’s candidacy “hilarious.” Krasner received no mainstream-newspaper endorsements and, at first, was supported by only a few Democratic elected officials. He seemed to please almost no one in power––certainly not those in the office he hoped to lead, which has had its troubles in recent years. In 2017, the D.A. at the time, Seth Williams, was accused of accepting gifts, including a trip to a resort in Punta Cana, and later pleaded guilty to bribery, and was sent to federal prison. But few people saw Krasner as the solution. Twelve former prosecutors, nearly all of whom had worked under Williams, wrote a letter that was published in the Philadelphia Citizen: “While it might be demoralizing to work for someone who is federally indicted, imagine working for someone who has openly demonized what you do every day,” it read. “Why work for someone that reviles a career you are passionate about?” Krasner, who is fifty-seven, is a compact man with an intense, slightly mischievous demeanor. He likes to say that he wrote his campaign platform—eliminate cash bail, address police misconduct, end mass incarceration—on a napkin. “Some of us had been in court four and five days a week in Philadelphia County for thirty years,” he said. “We had watched this car crash happen in slow motion.” Krasner often talks about how, running as a defense attorney, his opponents, most of whom had worked as prosecutors in the D.A.’s office, frequently attacked him for having no experience. At one event, they were “beating the tar out of me because I have not been a prosecutor. ‘Oh, my God! He’s never been a prosecutor!’ ” But the line of attack worked to his advantage. “You could hear people saying, ‘that’s good!’ ” Brandon Evans, a thirty-five-year-old political organizer, said. “I remember people nodding profusely, rolling their eyes, and shrugging their shoulders.” In 2015, Philadelphia had the highest incarceration rate of America’s ten largest cities. As its population grew more racially diverse and a new generation became politically active, its “tough on crime” policies fell further out of synch with its residents’ views. During Krasner’s campaign, hundreds of people—activists he had represented, supporters of Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter leaders, former prisoners—knocked on tens of thousands of doors on his behalf. Michael Coard, a left-wing critic of the city’s criminal-justice system, wrote in the Philadelphia Tribune that Krasner was the “blackest white guy I know.” The composer and musician John Legend, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, tweeted an endorsement. In the three weeks before the primary, a pac funded by the liberal billionaire George Soros spent $1.65 million on pro-Krasner mailers and television ads. Strangers started recognizing him on the street. He trounced his six opponents in the primary, and went on to win the general election, on November 7, 2017, with seventy-five per cent of the vote. He was sworn in on January 1, 2018, by his wife. In the past ten years, violent crime across the country has fallen, but, according to polls, many people continue to believe that it has increased. President Trump’s campaign exploited the fear of “American carnage,” and the criminal-justice system of the United States, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, seems built on this misinformation. And yet, at a local level, there are signs of change. Krasner is one of about two dozen “progressive prosecutors,” many of them backed by Soros, who have won recent district-attorney races. In 2016, Aramis Ayala got early support from Shaquille O’Neal and won a state’s attorney race in Florida, and Mark Gonzalez, a defense attorney with “not guilty” tattooed on his chest, became the D.A. in Corpus Christi, Texas. Last month, Rachael Rollins, a former federal prosecutor, became the first African-American woman to win in a Democratic primary for D.A. in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, having promised to stop prosecuting drug possession, shoplifting, and driving with a suspended license, among other crimes. Instead, she said, she would handle the cases she didn’t dismiss in other ways, by sending defendants to community-service or education programs, for example. On September 7th, President Barack Obama delivered a speech to students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in which he referred to Krasner and Rollins: “If you are really concerned about how the criminal-justice system treats African-Americans, the best way to protest is to vote,” he said. “Do what they just did in Philadelphia and Boston and elect state attorneys and district attorneys who are looking at issues in a new light.” Read more In Iowa, A Commitment to make prison work better for women
NPR by Joseph Shapiro October 17, 2018 The warden at the women's prison in Iowa recently instructed her corrections officers to stop giving out so many disciplinary tickets for minor violations of prison rules, like when a woman wears her sweatshirt inside out or rolls up her sleeves. It's a small thing. But it's also part of a growing movement to reconsider the way women are treated in prison. Called "gender-responsive corrections," the movement is built on a simple idea: that prison rules created to control men, particularly violent ones, often don't work well for women. That women come to prison with different histories from men — they're more likely to be victims of violence, for example — and they need different rules. Read and listen Former Logan inmate sues over alleged sexual assault
State Capitol Bureau By Doug Finke September 21, 2018 A former inmate at the Logan Correctional Center says she was sexually assaulted by a prison employee and that prison staff knew of the assaults but did nothing to stop them. The allegations are laid out in a federal lawsuit filed Monday in Springfield. Read more New Bruce Norris play 'Downstate' argues that sex offenders are people, too : Chicago Tribune10/2/2018 New Bruce Norris play 'Downstate' argues that sex offenders are people, too
Chicago Tribune by Chris Jones September 30, 2018 ...“Downstate,” which is a co-production with the National Theatre in London and is blisteringly acted under the direction of Pam MacKinnon, dares to do something that even Norris has not done before: to ask an audience to gather and debate the not-so-gentle proposition that sex-offenders are people too. ... Read more |
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