Writing for The Daily Beast, commentator David R. Dow says last week's landmark ruling on a racist application of the death penalty in North Carolina indicates "we’re finally beginning to have an honest discussion about how we justify legally killing people." In the first invocation of North Carolina's Racial Justice Act, a judge ordered that a death-row inmate’s sentence be reduced to life in prison, after finding that his trial had been so irreversibly tainted by racism that executing him would violate the Constitution.
Twenty-one years ago, Marcus Robinson shot and killed 17-year-old Erik Tornblom. He stole Tornblom’s car and took $27 from his wallet. But Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks concluded that despite Robinson’s horrendous crime, there was no doubt that racism infected the state’s criminal-justice system—specifically, that prosecutors intentionally kept blacks off of capital juries—and that this same racism presumptively infected Robinson’s trial too. He ruled that even abhorrent crimes do not nullify the Constitution’s guarantee of racial equality.
Read full entry »Black males face significantly longer federal sentencing than white males due to prosecutorial charging decisions, found researchers in a new study.
Read full entry »Joe Arpaio, the outspoken sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., has been sued by the U.S. Justice Department for refusing to cooperate with a civil-rights probe into police practices and jail operations, reports USA Today. Arpaio said the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, is disappointing given that he and his office were cooperating on the federal probe. "I thought we were really close to getting this resolved," the sheriff said. He said his deputies do not target Hispanic citizens because of their race, and said if the Justice Department had any evidence of racial profiling, they wouldn't be suing him to get records to prove that deputies profile.
The lawsuit comes after weeks of back-and-forth letters between the agencies, threats to strip the county of federal funding, and a meeting in Washington last week among attorneys to discuss the investigation. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department has said this is the first time in the last 30 years that a police or sheriff's agency has refused to cooperate with a Title VI investigation. Thursday's action marks the first time the agency is suing to compel access to documents and facilities. The investigation is being conducted under the authority of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination related to programs that receive federal funds.
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Mass incarceration policies have taken a heavy toll on American families, neighborhoods and society. In an essay for The Crime Report, in advance of publication of a major American Academy of Arts and Sciences project, Prof. Glenn Loury of Brown University, calls for a profound change.
Over the past four decades, the United States has, by any measure, become a vastly more punitive society. This expansion, and transformation, of U.S. penal institutions—which has taken place at every level of government, and in all regions of the country―is without historical precedent or international parallel.
With roughly five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. currently confines about 25 percent of the world’s prison inmates. The American prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history.
This is not merely law enforcement and punishment policy. It is also social policy, writ large, and a uniquely American form of social policy at that.
The present American regime of hyper-incarceration is said to be necessary in order to secure public safety. This is not a compelling argument. First, the notion that crime can be prevented by incapacitating criminals is overly simplistic. It ignores the fact that for many crimes―selling drugs, for instance—those who are incapacitated are simply replaced by others, there being no shortage of contenders vying to enter the illicit trade.
What is more, almost everyone who goes to prison is eventually released, most after just two or three years. For these hundreds of thousands of ex-offenders released each year, time behind bars will most likely have actually diminished, not enhanced, their odds of living crime-free lives: by lowering their employability, severing their ties to communal supports, and hardening their attitudes. That is, sometimes mass imprisonment actually undermines public safety.
One reason for this anomalous outcome is that incarceration in American cities is highly concentrated spatially. The ill effects for individuals of having spent time behind bars can reduce social opportunities for others who reside in the most heavily impacted communities and who themselves have done nothing wrong.
Some urban neighborhoods have as many as one in five of their adult men locked-up on any given day. Such spatially concentrated imprisonment fosters criminality because it undermines the informal social processes of order maintenance, which are the primary means of sustaining law-abiding behavior in all communities. Families living in areas of hyper-incarceration have been rendered less effective at inculcating in their children the delinquency-resistant self controls and pro-social attitudes that typically insulate youths against law-breaking.
The impact of high incarceration rates on the sustainable level of public safety over the long term is therefore ambiguous, because what happens in San Quentin need not stay in San Quentin.
The Role of Race
The role of race in this drama is subtle and important. More African American male high school dropouts are held in prisons than belong to unions or are enrolled in any (other) state or federal social welfare programs. It has been estimated that nearly 70% of African American male dropouts born between 1975 and 1979 had spent at least one year in prison before reaching the age of thirty-five.
These racial disparities in the incidence of incarceration are not accounted for solely by overt discriminatory practices (though such practices surely exist.) Rather, what might be called “tacit racism” ―malign racial neglect—seems to be the culprit. America’s punishment institutions have garnered public support at times because of, and at other times despite, this massive racial disparity.
They would never have been allowed to expand to such an extent if those subject to their depredations had not mainly been people of color. Moreover, we punish for expressive, not merely instrumental, reasons. We have wanted to send a message to the “thugs” about law and order, and have done so with a vengeance. In the midst of such dramaturgy―necessarily so in America—lurks a potent racial subplot.
Defenders of the current regime put the onus on law-breakers. “If they didn’t do the crimes, they wouldn’t have to do the time,” it is said. Yet, this pure ethic of personal responsibility could never justify the current situation. Missing from such an argument is any acknowledgement of social responsibility―even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons.
In saying this I am not making a “root causes” argument: “he did the crime, but only because he had no choice.” Rather, I am arguing that the larger society is implicated in his choices because we have acquiesced in arrangements which work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, choices which we must condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him. Put simply, the structure of our cities with their massive racial ghettos is a causal factor in the production of deviancy amongst those living there.
Here’s a “narrative defining’ question for the reader: should we understand the racial disparity of punishment in America as an accidental accretion of neutral state action applied to a racially divergent social flux—the chips having fallen as they may, so to speak?
Or, alternatively, is this powerfully salient feature of contemporary American social life better understood as the residual effect of our history of enslavement, violent domination, disenfranchisement and discrimination?
In other words, is the massive racial inequality in the incidence of punishment in this country a necessary evil, given our need for order maintenance? Or, is it an abhorrent expression of who Americans have become as a people at the dawn of the 21st century?
As an African American male, a baby boomer born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, I incline toward the latter view.
Glenn C. Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, Brown University, is co-project leader, with Prof. Bruce Western of Harvard University, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences project, “The Challenge of Mass Incarceration in America,” which is published in a forthcoming special issue of Daedalus.
Read the Daedalus issue here.
Photo by Andy Callahan via Flickr.
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On October 22, 2010, journalists from across Kentucky gathered at University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications, for a reporting seminar co-sponsored by the Pew Center on the States and John Jay College of Justice’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice.
“The Future of Sentencing, Corrections and Crime Reduction in Kentucky: A Conversation between Journalists and Policymakers” featured panelists including Chief Justice John Minton, Supreme Court of Kentucky, Senate President David Williams (R), Kentucky Legislature, and Rhonda Henry, Executive Director, Bluegrass Rape Crisis Center.
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Racial discrimination in jury selection is rampant across a wide swath of Southern States found the Alabama based staff of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in a new report, " Illegal Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection: A Continuing Legacy."
They looked closely at jury selection procedures in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee and found that racially discrimatory practices continue especially in serious criminal and capital cases.
Read the report here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on racial discrimination.
Read full entry »Author and history professor David Oshinsky reviews the new biography of convicted killer Wilbert Rideau for the New York Times. Convicted of the murder of a white bank teller in 1961, Rideau spent 44 years in prison, most of them at Angola in Louisiana, before being released. Oshinsky writes, "His painfully candid memoir, 'In the Place of Justice,' is indeed, as its subtitle promises, 'a story of punishment and deliverance,' told by a high school dropout who escaped Angola’s electric chair to become an award-winning prison journalist. As such, Rideau is the rarest of American commodities — a man who exited a penitentiary in better shape than when he arrived.'"
While in prison, Rideau became a national celebrity, appearing on TV and radio and winning journalism’s coveted George Polk Award. In 2005, the man Life magazine had featured as “The Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America” was granted yet another trial. This time, the jury convicted Rideau of manslaughter, not first-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to a term of 21 years, the maximum. “Because I had served more than double that,” he explains, “I was freed on the spot.” In the final chapter, Rideau writes poignantly of the simple blessings that await him each day. But it’s clear that bitter memories linger as well. Looking back, he accuses the black community of abandoning him.
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Several states have embraced ‘justice reinvestment’ as a way of reducing prison populations. But it still causes jitters among many legislators.
With most American prison cells full and state budgets hurting, “justice reinvestment” seems like an attractive concept. Why not spend taxpayer dollars on rehabilitation programs that may break the cycle of re-imprisonment instead of on expensive housing for criminals behind bars?
Indeed, the reinvestment idea has made good headway. A dozen states have adopted or at least are seriously considering its principles. A bill is making its way through Congress that would provide more federal funding to test it in other states.
The idea started in 2003 in Connecticut, where state leaders were disturbed about being asked to spend increasing sums on prison building and maintenance while many released inmates committed new crimes. “They wanted to know what taxpayers were paying and what they were getting for it,” says Marshall Clement of the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center, which provides states with advice on governance and has been a leader in promoting the justice reinvestment concept.
As logical as the reinvestment idea may sound, political leaders who try to put it into practice must contend with a “tough on crime” sentencing approach that has a decades-old history in many states. As crime rates rose between the 1970s and the early 1990s, the basic response of state legislators was to enact mandatory minimum penalties and to rachet up other terms. Congress offered aid for prison building in the 1990s to states that required inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their terms, so that became the standard in many places.
The result: average length of stay behind bars increased, and prisons took up a larger share of state expenditures. The National Council of State Legislatures says such expenditures now amount to an average of six percent of state spending, or $36 billion each year nationally.
Dealing with Recidivism
The problem of recidivism that worried Connecticut legislators persists across the country. Studies over the years have shown varying results, but anywhere from one-half to two-thirds of former inmates get in some kind of new trouble.
In the past, those who were rearrested, or who violated parole rules, tended almost automatically to be returned to custody. It’s not surprising that prison populations ballooned, rising from about 320,000 in 1980 to more than 1.6 million this year, according to a new survey by the Pew Center on the States.
In the reinvestment process, the Council of State Governments is invited to conduct a preliminary study of state sentencing policies by key leaders in a state, who must include the governor and major legislative leaders. Such an arrangement doesn’t guarantee the passage of reform legislation, but goes a long way toward insuring that some progress will be made once the study’s recommendations are in.
To come up with recommendations for Connecticut, the first state in the process, CSG convened meetings that involved a variety of experts, including corrections consultant James Austin; Michael Jacobson, now president of the Vera Institute of Justice; Susan Tucker and Eric Cadora, then of the Open Society Institute, as well as criminal-justice practitioners from around the nation.
A major goal is to provide options to state leaders. The study might suggest what kinds of inmates can be supervised outside of prison without compromising public safety, based on modern methods of risk assessment. Focus groups are convened of key players in the justice system like prosecutors, judges, criminal-defense lawyers, and crime victim advocates.
Once a study of feasible options for the state is done, the policy makers attempt to enact solutions, whether legislative or policy changes, that will save money by reducing imprisonment. Since each state has a different sentencing structure, there is no cookie-cutter formula. The general idea is that money saved by not housing so many convicts can be spent on services such as drug treatment and on assistance with job placement and housing for ex-offenders.
How has justice reinvestment fared? Before the recession struck nationwide, it generally worked as intended.
Streamlining the Parole Process
In Connecticut, the first test site, legislators streamlined the parole process for low-risk offenders and developed a comprehensive strategy to reduce recidivism. CSG says that nearly $13 million of the $30 million saved was reinvested in community-based pilot projects. The number of probationers who were reincarcerated for minor violations fell 20 percent in the two years between 2003 and 2005., and the prison population experienced a steep drop.
Kansas was another early success story. In 2006, state officials estimated that the prison population was expected to rise by 22 percent, necessitating $500 million to build and operate 1,300 prison beds. Analysis showed that probation and parole violators, many of them needing drug or mental-health treatment, accounted for 65 percent of prison admissions. In 2007, the state legislature passed a series of reforms that sent more probationers and parolees to treatment instead of prison. The state ended up with fewer prisoners, although the count has started to creep up again during the last year.
The most dramatic changes have come in Texas which, along with California, has long led the nation in incarceration rates. In 2007, if current trends were to continue, Texas faced the need for 17,000 more prison cells by 2010, a $2 billion expenditure it couldn’t afford.
Like in Kansas, key Texas leaders brought in CSG for analysis and found that the problem was mainly a lack of drug and mental-health treatment. Legislators boosted services for nearly 10,000 convicts, costing $241 million but saving $444 million in prison construction and operation. “The same people who said we would need 17,000 prison beds now say we don’t need any,” State Rep. Jerry Madden told a national conference on reinvestment in the U..S. Capitol Visitor Center in January.
One important component to the reforms in various states is changing how parole officers do their jobs: steering them toward helping their clients succeed rather than the traditional practice of “trail’em, nail’em and jail’em,” says Marc Levin of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank that supports the reinvestment strategy.
Just finding parolees jobs helps a lot. Levin notes that “employed ex-offenders are far less likely to-reoffend, and 65 percent of Texas parolees are working.”
The latest state to take up reinvestment is New Hampshire, where state leaders in January came up with a plan they hope will reduce recidivism by 20 percent. Its two major planks are focusing community-based parole and probation resources on high-risk offenders and using “short, swift and certain sanctions, including jail time,” to cut crime and revocation rates among probationers. In addition to major political leaders, the proposal has the strong backing of the state’s Chief Justice, John Broderick, Jr.
State Holdouts
As promising as the justice reinvestment concept is, there is no assurance that it will sweep the nation. CSG is working in a dozen states but that doesn’t include some of those with large numbers in prison, such as California and Georgia. Several other states have asked for aid, but it is not clear how many can be added unless Congress provides funding. The cost of the investment process is not high compared with the billions states spend on prisons and other corrections programs. CSG’s Michael Thompson estimates that it costs between $500,000 and $1 million per state, stretched out over as long as three years. Much of the money so far has been provided by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Pew Center on the States. A Senate-committee-approved version of the bill that would create a federal account for justice reinvestment would authorize $25 million per year for five years; the money is spent largely on commissioning studies by experts and convening meetings with officials.
Another major challenge is making sure that the “reinvestment” part of the basic concept really occurs. The risk is that policy makers will focus only on saving money by having inmates serve slightly shorter terms---and then decide to spend the proceeds on items other than services for ex-offenders, such as schools or road building.
Some states are trying to institutionalize the spending shifts rather than leave them to an annual appropriations process that can change radically from year to year. Arizona, for instance, is offering incentives to counties that can cut the rate of probationers’ being re-admitted to prison. By doing that, counties can be paid up to half of the imprisonment costs averted by the state.
The most striking cautionary example of the justice reinvestment process may be the experience of Kansas. The Kansas City Star reported in early April that severe budget pressures have forced a $25 million cut in state corrections spending in the last two years; treatment and education problems lost more than half their funding.
Kansas Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz told the newspaper, “For ‘Joe the Parolee,’ it means no longer having access to substance-abuse treatment through the Department of Corrections. Joe is going to be lining up and competing for the same treatment slots as any law-abiding Kansan needing the help” but unable to afford it,” he said, adding. “It’s going to be harder for him, harder for everybody, to get that treatment slot.”
State Rep. Pat Colloton, a Republican who heads the committee dealing with prisons, told the Star, “Just like that, the national model we created no longer exists.” Still, Kansas is expected to preserve many of the initial reinvestment concepts.
Justice reinvestment may ultimately rise or fall on whether state policy makers buy into the idea underlying evidence-based anticrime policy. That is: the notion that penalties for crimes should be based on how well they actually work, not on how good they sound to politicians and crime victims. Evidence-based policy making is gaining a foothold around the U.S., but it is far from clear that it will become a standard way of policymaking.
Just now catching on is the point that the swiftness and certainty of punishment may be just as important as the severity—and often cost a lot less. As Judge Steven Alm of Hawaii, whose Project HOPE for probationers embodies many justice reinvestment concepts, told the national justice reinvestment summit in January, “It’s a simple idea but it’s hard to put into practice.”
Ted Gest is president of Criminal Justice Journalists and a contributing editor to The Crime Report
Map Graphic via www.justicereinvestment.org
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Way back in 1988, the federal government recognized that minority youths were more likely to be incarcerated than white youths for the same offense, and mandated that states "access and address" the issue. So how are we doing? A new, interactive data set and map from the W. Haywood Burns Institute breaks the information down by state, and further by offense, race and more. The site includes graphs on the state's one-day incarceration count, and provides contact information for local decision makers and advocates.
Click here for the map.
Photo courtesy of The Burns Institute.
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A new North Carolina law bans executions if racial bias is proven
When a judge in Greensboro, N.C., held in 2007 that Tony Summers was eligible for the death penalty if convicted of murder, it was not an unexpected decision. Summers, a convicted sex offender, is accused of raping and killing Lavell Williams and stabbing her two young daughters in Nov. 2006.
But Summers’ lawyers are now asking the judge to reconsider, not because of new evidence in the case, but because of alleged racial bias in how the death penalty is imposed in North Carolina.
Their request, citing statistics and examples of what they call the “plague of racism” in mostly urban Guilford County, is one of the first of what lawyers in North Carolina expect will be a wave of legal challenges under the state’s newly enacted Racial Justice Act, which bars executions “on the basis of race.”
“Race matters. When you walk into the courtroom and the only African-American face in the room is the defendant, that matters,” said David Clark, an attorney for Summers, who is black.
The Act allows judges to stop executions based on local or statewide statistics or other evidence that suggests a pattern of racial bias in the imposition of the death penalty. Defendants must show that, at the time of their trial, the death penalty was sought or imposed “significantly more frequently” in the county, judicial district or state against members of one race or as punishment for crimes against members of a particular race. That evidence can be rebutted by statistics or other evidence that race did not play a role in any specific case.
But, with several studies already finding evidence of racial disparities in who is sentenced to death, the Act could open the door to challenges from many of the state’s 161 death row inmates – and could make North Carolina a bellwether for how states handle the delicate interaction between race and the death penalty.
“It’s a very large change; we’ve really never seen anything like it,” said Professor David Baldus of the University of Iowa College of Law, one of the nation’s leading experts on race and the death penalty. “Nothing comes close to it anywhere else in the country.”
It’s well known that death sentences are handed down unevenly. Blacks make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population, but more than 40 percent of the nation’s death rows. A 2001 University of North Carolina study found that killing a white victim is 3.5 times more likely to lead to a death sentence than killing a black victim. Studies in several other states have found similar results.
But those statistics are rarely discussed in the courtroom. In its 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court refused to strike down the death penalty based on statistical evidence of racial disparities in Georgia’s justice system. Justice Lewis Powell, writing for a 5-4 majority, said defendants must prove that individuals in their cases, such as prosecutors or jurors, were motivated by racism.
Powell later said that McCleskey was the one decision he regretted. “McCleskey put the imprimatur of the Supreme Court on a racist system,” said Baldus, who conducted the study that was the basis of McCleskey’s legal challenge.
At the end of his opinion, Powell invited the states to address the issue. So far, only Kentucky and North Carolina have done so, and only North Carolina’s law applies retroactively.
The use of statistical evidence of racial bias to challenge death penalty cases has met with intense opposition from conservatives and many prosecutors. North Carolina prosecutors argue that the Act will be burdensome and unnecessary -- and could lead to years of litigation over statistics while removing the focus from the facts of the case.
“In over 20 years in the criminal justice system I’ve never felt that race was a factor that prosecutors considered,” said Jim Woodall, the Orange County District Attorney and president of the state Conference of District Attorneys. “You’re going to be able to hire statisticians on both sides to say whatever you want them to say.”
Prosecutors have already received lengthy requests from defense lawyers for information about every murder case in their districts since 1990. “It’s going to take tremendous amount of resources to go back and reconstruct cases from years and years ago,” Woodall said.
The result, prosecutors say, will be a de facto end to the death penalty. “This has nothing to do with making the death penalty fair,” said William Clark Everett, the Pitt County District Attorney. “It’s just a way to do away with the death penalty by making it so cumbersome and expensive that we’ll all just throw up our hands and walk away.”
But defense lawyers say that, without statistical evidence, it is often nearly impossible to prove that jurors or prosecutors acted with racial bias in any particular case. The few cases with direct evidence of apparent racism, they say, are emblematic of a much larger problem.
Kenneth Rouse, a black man, was sent to death row in 1992 by an all-white jury for the attempted rape and murder of a white woman. His lawyers later discovered that a juror at Rouse’s trial allegedly said that black people, whom the juror called “niggers,” cared less about life than white people and that black men rape white women to brag to their friends.
Rouse’s bid to overturn his death sentence based on the juror’s comments was rejected by the state and federal courts. His lawyer, Gordon Widenhouse, plans to file a new appeal under the Racial Justice Act.
Other cases, though, are not as clear. Tony Summers is accused of breaking into Williams’ house early in the morning in Nov. 2006 and binding and raping her before repeatedly stabbing her. Both Summers and Williams are black, and Clark, Summers’ lawyer, said he did not have direct evidence that anyone involved in the case was motivated by race.
Though he has asked for more information from prosecutors, Summers’ motion is based on statistics and other examples of racism in the Greensboro area. Clark said it was unclear if that would be enough to bar prosecutors from seeking the death penalty. “No one really know what the heck this Act means,” he said.
The Act comes as some opinion polls show waning support in the state for the death penalty. The last execution in North Carolina was in 2006, and several death row inmates recently have been exonerated. So far this year, two people have been sentenced to death.
“This will cause more serious reflection about when we seek to impose [the death penalty] and make sure we’re more just in its application,” said State Sen. Floyd McKissick, one of the Act’s sponsors. “If the result is we more sparingly use it, then that’s an appropriate outcome.”
Any broader influence outside North Carolina remains to be seen. Kentucky’s law, passed in 1998, has had a limited impact in the state, and did not spark other states to pass similar laws. Many lawyers in North Carolina are awaiting the results of a new statewide study on race and the death penalty, which will largely determine how strong a case their clients have, said Ken Rose, an attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham.
It could take years to litigate and fully understand the law’s impact, attorneys said. Until then, other states will be watching.
“If someone wins a challenge under this law, that’s clearly bigger than one case,” said Richard Dieter, the director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. “That’s going to have reverberations in other states.”
Scott Michels is a freelance writer in New York City.
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On Sept. 25 and Sept. 26th, 2009, 22 journalism fellows joined policymakers, advocates, judges and criminal justice practioners for a discussion on sentencing and corrections in Illinois.
Here's what you can find on this page: resource materials and sources, agendas from this CMCJ conference; multimedia reports and blogs; reporting by Fellows; online forum; podcasts of conference.
Speakers included: Ted Chung, General Counsel, State of Illinois, Michael P. Randle, Director, Illinois Department of Corrections, Michael Jacobson, Director, Vera Institute of Justice, and Leslie Balonick, Senior Vice President, West Care.
Access the full program here.
See a list of panelist contact and biographies here.
Source Materials
Media and Corrections-Memo From Paula Wolff (2 pp)
Illinois Crime Reduction Act-A Strategic Corrections Initiative (7 pp)
Audit of the Illinois State Police Forensic Lab (210 pp)
Stories from Fellows
"Anatomy of a Prison" by Joe Domanick, Los Angeles Magazine
"Benefits outweigh risks of early prison release" by the Chicago Sun-Times
"Prisoner Count: Should US Census tabulations include those incarcerated in the community?" by Jessica Pupovac
"County probation cuts threaten public safety," by Matt Kiefer, Pioneer Local
"Overworked officers often double as life coaches," by Matt Kiefer, Pioneer Local
"State funding for probation drying up," by Matt Kiefer, Pioneer Local
"Editorial: Cuts to probation services endanger public safety," by Matt Kiefer, Pioneer Local
The following articles on teen suicides in Illinois youth centers were produced under the direction of Pew Panelist George Papajohn.
"Suicides Exposed Safety Breakdown" by Steve Mills and Louise Kiernan, Chicago Tribune
"Few Questions, Fewer Answer" by Steve Mills and Louise Kiernan, Chicago Tribune
Podcasts from Conference
Sept. 25
Part 1
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On April 24th and April 25, 2009, an Advanced Journalism Seminar took place at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Conducted by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice and Pew Center on the States, 21 regional journalism fellows gathered for two days to discuss sentencing, corrections and re-entry in the State of Wisconsin.
Fellows continue your conversation.
Speakers included, Hon. Michael Malmstadt, Retired Judge, Milwaukee Children's Court, Senator Lena Taylor, Chair, Wisconsin Senate Judiciary Committee and mary Kay Kollat, Re-entry Director, Wisconsin Department of Corrections.
Access the program and speaker list here.
A comprehensive guide of available resources was compiled for the journalism symposium. Research includes:
Access the complete resource guide here.
Read articles from journalism fellows
"Doyle budget would let judges expunge low-level convictions of young offenders"
by Gina Barton
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
"Debating an Early Release "Will it hurt to let inmates go early?"
by Dee J. Hall
Wisconsin State Journal
"Advocates: Key Prison Reforms Struck from Final Wisconsin"
By Gil Halsted
Wisconsin Public Radio
"Wisconsin proposal would give parole violators time off for good behavior"
By Gil Halsted
Wisconsin Public Radio
"Remove Criminal Record Expungement from the Budget Bill"
By The Daily Cardinal
THE DAILY CARDINAL
"Prison is revolving door for mentally ill, who don't get needed meds"
By Jessica Van Egeren
The Capital Times
"Prison population, corrections budget spike during truth in sentencing"
By Jessica Van Egeren
The Capital Times
"A Media Conference on Sentencing, Punishment, and Re-Entry"
By Jake Woehlke
The Voice (University of Wisconsin)
It's been seven years since Congress tied purse strings to the issue of disproportionate contact between non-white youths and the criminal justice system, but according to the newest bulletin on the subject, disparities are still stark. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Deliquency Prevention reports that African-American youth are still arrested at twice the rate of white youth, while white youth are seven times more likely to live in a neighborhood with an alternative detention program.
Click here to read the full report. Click here to read the accompanying manual.
Use The Crime Report for more information on Race and Sentencing, Juvenile Justice and Race and Gender in Prison.
Read full entry »The North Carolina General Assembly has approved a landmark bill that will allow death-row inmates to challenge the death penalty by arguing that there is systemic racial bias in the way that capital punishment has been applied, reports the Winston-Salem Journal. Under the bill, called the Racial Justice Act, an inmate will be able to present statistical evidence showing racial disparities in how the death penalty has been used. If a judge finds the evidence convincing, the judge can overturn that inmate's death sentence and convert it to a sentence of life in prison.
The bill is seen by its supporters as a long-overdue solution to a history of discrimination that they say permeates the criminal-justice system and the system of capital punishment. In both legislative chambers, Republicans opposed the bill, and most Democrats supported it. Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, is expected to sign it into law. Only Kentucky has a similar state law.
Read full entry »Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby takes on The Sentencing Project for its recent report, “No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America,’’ which was sharply critical of the nation's incarceration trends. Jacoby writes, "'No Exit' brims over with information and statistics, but only those that reinforce its sponsor’s preconceived views."
Jacoby says the organization glosses over the decline in crime that has been concurrent with the increase in incarceration in America. And he says the report "devotes almost obsessive attention" to racial disparities among lifers. He writes, "Nearly 97 percent of inmates serving life terms are men. If it is noteworthy that blacks, who account for 12 percent of the general population, make up 48 percent of lifers, shouldn’t it be even more significant that men, who comprise less than half the population at large, represent nearly all those sentenced to life? The explanation, of course, is that men commit the vast majority of serious crime; that fact, not sexism, explains the disproportionate incarceration rate."
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