Pre-Trial Algorithms Deserve a Fresh Look, Study Suggests
"What if a predictive tool used at the moment of arraignment could simultaneously reduce the number of people sent to jail before trial, reduce crime, and also reduce racial disparities in incarceration? Such a tool could be a game changer in criminal justice reform. There’s good reason to be skeptical, however: Several high-profile analyses of COMPAS — a popular, commercially available “risk assessment” tool — have claimed that the tool unfairly labels black defendants as higher risk, and it does so more often than it overestimates the risk posed by white defendants.

But a new large scale study — Human Decisions and Machine Predictions —  demonstrates that it’s possible to build a predictive tool that simultaneously accomplishes three desirable goals: reducing pre-trial detention rates, reducing re-arrest rates of those released pending trial, and reducing racial disparities in which defendants are jailed. Policymakers across the ideological spectrum should be interested in this result and encourage further study."

The Failed Promise of Legal Pot
"The dream of legal marijuana as it is being sold to the American public is that it will not only give states a chance to reap a tax windfall off of a drug millions of Americans already use; it will end the back-and-forth tussle among cops, users, and dealers, and shift police resources to more serious crimes. Most compellingly, advocates hold out the promise of a major step toward dismantling one of the pillars of racially biased policing—the war on drugs—and finally reeling in a legal net that has long entangled black men at vastly disproportionate rates.

One-half of the dream is coming true. In the first two states to go legal, arrests for marijuana possession have dropped dramatically—by 98 percent in Washington and 95 percent in Colorado as of last year—and high taxes in both states are generating tens of millions of dollars a year for education and public health. At the same time, legal markets in Washington and Colorado along with loosening medical-marijuana laws around the country have together exerted enough downward pressure on street prices that Central American cartels have reportedly begun to shift production away from marijuana, toward more profitable drugs like heroin.

But the other half of the dream is faltering....

As legalization efforts proceed apace, the risk is that even as possession arrests taper off, black markets will continue entangling young black men..."

What the GOP and Donald Sterling Have in Common

Those of the ilk of rancher Cliven Bundy and billionaire Donald Sterling believe there’s a place for African-Americans. And, Sterling said in a taped conversation, that place certainly is not in photographs with his girlfriend posted on Instagram.

 

Bundy, who stiffed the federal government for $1 million in grazing fees, suggested the best place for African-Americans is in cotton picking trade schools, where they’d be taught a skill that would enable them to secure positions as slaves.

 

For Sterling, Bundy and their amoral company, the good old days were pre-emancipation, when white men like them were men, and federal law said black men were, well, only three-fifths human. Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, told his girlfriend she should not bring black people to his team’s basketball games. Bundy told a reporter he thought black people were “better off” as slaves. Crucial to this bigot-think is reduction of some people to subhuman status. That’s how Republicans see poor people: subhuman, three-fifths people. And that is the primary reason that the GOP last week blocked a measure to raise the minimum wage.

 

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Released After Decades of Incarceration, Elders of Color Have No Safety Net

 

 This article originally appeared at New America Media, and is reprinted here with their permission.

After devoting over 20 years as a prison social worker, Fordham University researcher Tina Maschi, PhD, declared, “There’s something wrong with society when in some ways staying in prison is better than getting out. The people who are older have a much greater struggle, because they have special needs that a younger population doesn’t.”

Current efforts to release prisoners from the nation’s overcrowded and increasingly costly prisons, such as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s new initiative to let out more nonviolent federal inmates, barely touching on the needs of older inmates, which Maschi and other researchers say will be more likely to be paroled because of their high health care costs and low recidivism rates.

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How The Criminal Justice System Is Racializing Our Democracy

The United States imprisons a higher percentage of its black population than apartheid South Africa did. Black men have a one-in-three chance of being incarcerated at one point in their lives, and receive sentences 20 percent longer than whites on-average when they are.

That this state of affairs is manifestly unfair should be obvious. But the unfairnesses may be deeper and more devastating than you think: the criminal justice system may well be undermining black Americans’ access to political power and life altogether.

At least, that’s what Vesla Weaver believes. A professor of political science at Yale, Weaver and her colleague, philosopher Jason Stanley, argued that the disproportionate targeting of black Americans by police is undermining their faith in the democratic system, turning our nation into a “racial democracy” where only some groups of people feel free to engage in political life. For instance, Weaver’s research finds that Americans who were incarcerated even for a short spell are a whopping 22 percent less likely to vote, even after accounting for the millions of people barred from voting after a felony conviction. The high rate of black incarceration, then, directly undermines the ability of black communities to elect leaders willing to fight for racial equality.

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In 2013, Death Penalty Rarely Doled Out To Those Whose Crimes Include Minority Victims

Of the 39 executions performed in 2013, the overwhelming majority involved a crime with a white victim. The statistics from the Death Penalty Information Center show the continued racial bias of death penalty imposition, even as it becomes a decreasingly common punishment. While 32 of the 39 executions involved a white victim, just one white person was executed for killing only a black man. This defendant, Robert Gleason, was one of just four people who “volunteered” to be executed by waiving his appeals. Here’s how it breaks down:

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5 of 2013's Most Enraging Moments in Drug War Racism

The drug war is full of  racism and hypocrisy. It's hard to argue against that reality. People intoxicate themselves, both illegally and legally, at much the same rates across racial lines. Similarly, the drug trade is an equal opportunity employer and the demographic breakdown for sellers is more or less racially balanced. So, why do the vast majority of people who are arrested, punished and incarcerated for drugs happen to be black or Latino?

 

From their inception, anti-drug laws were created and enforced in ways that deliberately targeted minorities and marginalized people.  Michelle Alexander has done an excellent job of breaking down racism and the drug war in her seminal book, "The New Jim Crow." 

 

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Rochester Teens Arrested For Obstructing The Sidewalk While Waiting For School Bus

Three teen boys waiting for a school bus in Rochester, N.Y., were arrested Wednesday, after police claimed they obstructed pedestrian traffic by standing on the sidewalk.

The 16 and 17-year-old boys were charged with disorderly conduct, a catch-all that is often used to criminalize conduct of the homeless, or to punish those who are perceived as simply uncooperative, including school children.

A police report obtained by WROC in Rochester said the students were obstructing “pedestrian traffic while standing on a public sidewalk…preventing free passage of citizens walking by and attempting to enter and exit a store…Your complainant gave several lawful clear and concise orders for the group to disperse and leave the area without compliance.”

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Racism, the U. S. Justice System, and the Trayvon Martin Verdict

What happens when African Americans don’t get a jury of their peers?

While the unquestionably unfair verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, rendered in Florida by five whites and one Latina, should be deeply troubling to persons of all races who care about racial justice, U. S. history, as well as the current racial reality in this country, teaches that it should not come as a surprise.

The jury, simply put, decided that a white police wannabe could justifiably profile an unarmed African-American 17-year-old as a criminal, hunt him down, and fatally shoot him.

Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump likened the case to that of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy who was kidnapped and brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Others have posited the question: What would the result have been if the accused was African-American and the victim was white? The Scottsboro case—nine black boys wrongfully accused of raping a white woman in Alabama in the 1930s—comes to mind. In both cases all-white juries delivered clearly racist verdicts, acquitting Till’s murderers and convicting the Scottsboro Boys.

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In Colorado, Blacks Make Up 4 Percent Of The Population And 100 Percent Of Death Row

In March, Colorado came close to becoming the 19th state to abolish the death penalty, but the bill failed after Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) voiced opposition and suggested a possible veto. A few months later, Colorado’s death penalty is still firmly in place, and the state is poised to complete what would be only the second execution in 45 years (the last was in 1997). Few dispute that Nathan Dunlap committed a horrific crime and murdered several people at a Chuck E. Cheese. But judges, university professors, and other prominent state leaders are urging Gov. Hickenlooper to commute Dunlap’s sentence, both because crucial errors that defined his trial may have led him to get a harsher sentence than others, and because killing anyone under the perverted state system would be a miscarriage of justice. According to letters filed with Hickenlooper’s office:

• All three people on death row are black men. In a state that is only 4.3% African American, Colorado’s death row is 100% African American.
• All three men on death are from the same one county, out of Colorado’s 64.
• All three men committed their crime when they were under the age of 21.

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Unequal Justice: Aboriginals caught in the justice system trap

Aboriginal men and especially women are overrepresented in Ontario jails, often after minor crimes lead to deeper trouble. A number of programs including special courts are trying to help.

Jill Buckshot, a former Miss Algonquin Nation, stole steaks from an Ottawa grocery store and sold them to support her addictio

As Jill Buckshot describes the addiction that helped put her in prison, her words sometimes slur together over the phone, so that she has to spell out “dope sick” and “Dilaudid.”

“Dope sick” refers to the violent physical reaction that occurs when an addict goes a day without drugs. The second term is the narcotic she would steal for.

Buckshot, who became addicted at 25 after having surgery and taking a prescribed narcotic for the pain, would steal steaks from an Ottawa grocery store by hiding them under large packages of toilet paper. Then she’d sell them for half-price.

The thefts kicked off a cycle of incarceration, a revolving door that spun her in and out of jail every two weeks one summer.

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Ontario’s justice system in a ‘crisis’ for aboriginals: Frank Iacobucci report

Ontario’s justice system is in a “crisis” concerning First Nations people who are overrepresented in prisons yet cut out of participating in juries, says a hard-hitting independent review released Tuesday.

Former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci spent more than a year leading an investigation into the lack of native people participating on jury trials and inquests.

In the course of his probe, he found he could not ignore “systemic racism” in the courts, prison and jury process including mistreatment of First Nations inmates in penitentiaries, general disrespect by police and “discriminatory public reaction to First Nations complaints.”

Iacobucci urged the Ontario government to implement 17 recommendations to fix the courts, prison and jury process, saying the problem “warrants urgent response.”

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Prison Nation: A Young Black Man With No Diploma Is More Likely to Be in Jail Than Find a Job

The shocking statistic comes in a New York Times article shedding new light on an old topic: how prison keeps people in poverty.

A New York Times article is shedding new light on an old topic: how prison keeps people in poverty. And the article, written by John Tierney as part of a series on the social science of incarceration, contains a shocking statistic: “For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.”

The article follows the ordeal of Carl Harris and Charlene Hamilton, who exemplify how poverty is perpetuated by the prison system. Harris was a crack dealer in Washington, D.C., and made a lot of money before being arrested and incarcerated for assault. As a result of Harris’ imprisonment, his partner Charlene ended up homeless.
Hamilton “went on welfare and turned to relatives to care for their daughters while she visited him at prisons in Tennessee, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico,” Tierney writes.

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Stand your ground or circular firing squad?

Here's an interesting little factoid:

“[Stand Your Ground] states have a higher percentage of black population, more likely to have a Republican governor, higher incarceration rates and more police officers. These states also tend to be more urban, and have a higher poverty rate.”

and yet:

Using homicide data from 2006 to 2008, the years after a wave of legislatures passed such laws in 2006, the researchers found that “Stand Your Ground” laws, which provide protection for deadly use of force in self-defense in a public place, results in a “significant increase in the number of homicides among whites, especially white males.” The results are found to be specific to “Stand Your Ground” laws and the effect doesn’t extend to other laws passed in the interest of self-defense.

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Tale of Two Cities: NYPD's Racist Arrests Create Class War in New York

For the NYPD's stats to add up, they'd have to have stopped every young, black man living in the city once--and then some.

 This Saturday, May 12, in New York City, an alliance of more than 100 community activists, mothers, city councilmembers and religious leaders marched from Foley Square to One Police Plaza, demanding an end to police tactics they say have resulted in two New Yorks -- or as the action was appropriately titled, “A Tale of Two Cities.

-New York, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the Drug Policy Alliance, and other groups organized the event to demand an end to the racial segregation they say Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly actively enforce. The demonstration hinged tightly on the power of a united New York. Nine white New Yorkers attempted civil disobedience at the police headquarters, but were (ironically) not arrested.

Fearing for their children’s futures, many mothers in the crowd considered the action -- a day before Mother’s Day -- a timely mechanism to defend their children from injustice at the hands of the NYPD.

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5 Wildly Destructive Myths About Crime and Race

A lot of stereotypes about African-Americans and crime are plain wrong -- and very harmful.

In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, we’ve seen a lot of discussion of the larger societal issues that play into how and when people are perceived as criminals. There were hoodies, there were marches, and there were frank talks from parent to child about how to minimize the danger of being a young person of color. On the other side, there were justifications of George Zimmerman’s actions: a smear campaign against Martin’s character, and plenty of writers explaining that statistically, blacks are simply more dangerous to be around.

That framing ignores the realities behind the numbers. Here are five myths about crime and people of color.

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Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the US Criminal Justice System

by Bill Quigley

The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.

Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.

The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?

Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system – from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.

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