The Changing Racial Dynamics of Women’s Incarceration

In the first decade of the 21st century the United States began to experience a shift in the 30 - year buildup to a world record prison system. Although the decade ended with an increased number of people in prison, the rate of growth overall was considerably below that of previous decades and since 2008 the overall number of people in state prisons has declined slightly each year.

Scholars are beginning to analyze the relative contributions of changes in crime rates, criminal justice policies, economics, and demographics to the slowing growth rate of the prison system, but one area that has gone largely unexplored is the impact of such changes on racial disparities in imprisonment. As is well known black/white disparities in the use of incarceration have been profound for quite some time. Since the 1980s a series of analyses have documented these trends at the national level as

well as examining variation in disparity among the states.

1

As prison populations fluctuate, though, the relative rate of incarceration among racial groups may or may not reflect prevailing patterns. Further, as the prospect of a declining prison population has now become a distinct possibility for the next decade, it will become increasingly important to monitor whether reduced incarceration is experienced in similar ways across racial/ethnic groups. 

Read on...

This is from the Sentencing Project.  Tom

Ohio Is Illegally Throwing Poor People in Jail For Owing Money

A new report shines a light on a harrowing “debtors’ prison” system in Ohio — one that violates both the United States’ and the Ohio constitution.

The Americans Civil Liberties Union on Friday revealed that courts in Ohio are illegally throwing poor people in jail for being unable to pay off a debt.

In a report titled, “ The Outskirts of Hope,” (PDF) the ACLU shines a light on a harrowing “debtors’ prison” system in Ohio — one that violates both the United States’ and the Ohio constitution. Ohioans are being jailed for “as small as a few hundred dollars,” despite the constitutional violation, and the economic evidence that it costs the state more to pay for their jail sentence than the amount of the debt.

In its report, the ACLU details the stories of several people sent to debtors’ prison. Jack Dawley owed $1,500 in “fines and costs in the Norwalk Municipal Court,” and was behind on child support payments, leading the Ohio courts to send him to prison in Wisconsin for 3 and a half years. He still struggles with trying to repay the fines. Another victim of the system, single mother Tricia Metcalf, was taken to jail each and every time she wasn’t able to make her $50-a-month payments on fines for writing bad checks. Megan Sharp, whose husband is currently in jail on overdue fines, was unable to pay $300 in fines for driving on a suspended license and went to jail for 10 days. When she got out, she owed $200 more on top of the original amount. Both she and her husband are unemployed.

Read on...

Crime legislation: Focus on facts, not fear

Knee-jerk reactions often lead to flawed criminal justice laws. Calm deliberation would be better.

California already had what were arguably the nation's toughest sex offender laws in 2006 when voters, spurred on nightly by fear-mongering television hosts such as Nancy Grace and Bill O'Reilly, adopted this state's version of Jessica's Law. Proposition 83 required all convicted sex felons, whether violent or not, whether still on parole or not, and whether at high or low risk of reoffending, to wear electronic monitoring devices for the rest of their lives. Drafters ignored the fact that there was virtually no evidence that global positioning satellite tracking reduces the number or severity of sex crimes, and they didn't consider whether to allocate the high costs of perpetual monitoring to the state or to county governments. They didn't think through how to penalize parolees and post-parole registrants who cut off or disabled their ankle monitors.

A proposal that might have made for an instructive pilot program that revealed flaws and allowed for course corrections was instead rushed onto the ballot and then onto the books, and California has been dealing with the consequences ever since.

Read on....

This is an LATimes op-ed.  Tom

 

The 1922 Straw Hat Riot Was One of the Weirdest Crime Sprees in American History

A straw boater hat lays on the grass on the first day of the Henley Royal Regatta at Henley-on-Thames on June 28, 2006 in Oxfordshire, England.
Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Though I’ve covered a lot in my time at the helm of Slate’s crime blog, I haven’t yet delved into crimes against fashion. I’m not talking about wearing white tube socks with a business suit, although people who do that certainly merit the harshest punishments imaginable. No, I’m here to discuss those times when violent gangs of hoodlums take to the streets in great numbers, viciously attacking all those whose apparel is out of season. I’m talking about the Straw Hat Riot of 1922.

There’s nothing particularly old-fashioned about violent youth gangs tearing through city streets, assaulting hapless passerby—it happened just last weekend in Chicago. But it has been a very long time since those gangs were motivated by an intense dislike of the straw boater hats favored by garden party attendees and members of barbershop quartets. Back in the day before hooded sweatshirts were deemed acceptable boardroom attire and men’s brimmed hats were worn exclusively by swing-dance revivalists and nerds with neckbeards, hat fashion was serious business—and it hewed to a rigorous seasonal etiquette. The most important rule: absolutely no straw hats after September 15. If you ignored that deadline, then your hat was fair game for any urchin who wanted to snatch it off your head and stomp it to pieces.

Read on...

NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly 'wanted to instil fear' in black and Latino men

At stop-and-frisk trial, New York state senator and former police captain Eric Adams testifies about 2010 conversation with Kelly
 

Demonstrators protest the NYPD's stop-and-frisk police outside of Manhattan federal court last month. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

 

The commissioner of the New York City police department views the controversial practice of stop, question and frisk as a means to instil fear in young African American and Latino men, a New York state senator testified in a federal court on Monday.

State senator Eric Adams, who retired from the NYPD after rising to the rank of captain during a 22-year career, said commissioner Ray Kelly described his views on stop and frisk during a July 2010 meeting in the office of then-governor David Patterson.

Adams had traveled to Albany for a meeting on 10 July 2010 with the governor to give his support for a bill that would prohibit the NYPD from maintaining a database that would include the personal information of individuals stopped by the police but released without a charge or summons. In discussing the bill, which ultimately passed, Adams said he raised the issue of police stops disproportionately targeting young African American and Latino men.

Read on...
 

Georgia Town Passes Mandatory Gun Bill

Late Monday, Nelson, Georgia passed a law called the “Family Protection Ordinance” that requires every adult in the 1,300-person town to own a gun “for purposes of emergency management and general safety of the city.”

The town’s Police Chief, Heath Mitchell, told the AP that he hopes “having a gun would help residents take their protection into their own hands,” since the town has an understaffed police department and slow response time to 911 calls.

One councilman even used the National Rifle Association’s call for arming all Americans to defend the law, saying “I really felt like this ordinance was a security sign for our city. Basically it was a deterrent ordinance to tell potential criminals they might want to go on down the road a little bit.” Overall, the measure signals that government officials believe residents, not police departments, should be responsible for their own protection and rejects state and federal governments’ efforts to reduce gun violence through increased regulation of firearms.

Read on...

Rate Of Mental Illness Exceeds Gang Membership In Texas’ Juvenile Detention

In Texas juvenile detention facilities, the rate of mental illness now exceeds the rates of those affiliated with a gang, according to an Associated Press analysis. Substance abuse and dependency are particularly rampant, affecting almost 1,100 of the current 1,411 inmates. The Texas Juvenile Justice Department’s director said last month that the percentage of mentally ill incarcerated youths spiked from 39 percent in 2007 to 56 percent in 2013, demonstrating that the problem of criminalizing mental health problems is not isolated to adult jails and prisons.

Read on...

STUDY: States With Loose Gun Laws Have Higher Rates Of Gun Violence

The National Rifle Association (NRA) and its allies in Congress frequently claim that gun violence is highest in places with the toughest crime laws. But a new study from the Center for American Progress (CAP) suggests something closer to the opposite is true — the states with laxer gun laws tend to be the ones contributing the highest shares of national gun deaths and injuries.

The authors of the report, called “America Under The Gun,” developed a list of ten indices of gun violence, ranging from gun homicide levels to firearm assaults to crime gun export rate (the number of guns sold in that state used in crimes around the country), and ranked each state from 1-50 along each index. They then took the average of each state’s ranking to determine its overall level of gun violence relative to other states. Lousiana was the highest, with an average of fifth-worst across all ten indices, while Hawaii’s 45.4 ranking was the best.

A statistical regression comparing these rankings with strength of gun law found a correlation between weak gun laws and violence levels as measured by the 10-index average. Comparing a state’s relative ranking in strength of gun law (as judged by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence) to a state’s relative gun violence ranking yielded clear evidence that states with looser gun laws contributed more to the national gun violence epidemic:

Read on...

Taibbi: Politicians and Law Enforcement Have Trapped Too Many People in Jail for Life with Extreme Three Strikes Laws

A parade of politicians and law enforcement officials has created a Pandora’s box that’s trapped countless low-income offenders.

 

California’s colossal calamity known as the Three Strikes sentencing law was made less  strident by voters last fall. But according to a  profile by Matt Taibbi in  Rolling Stone, the wreckage from 16 years of putting people away for life continues to extract an absurd toll in which thousands of petty criminals and mentally ill people are jailed for no good reason.  

California passed its law after the brutal kidnapping and murder of a 12-year-old  girl in a small northern California town in 1993. But as Taibbi chronicles, a parade of Democratic and Republican politicians, law enforcement officials and get-tough-on-crime activists has created a Pandora’s box that’s trapped more low-rent offenders than anyone else, ruining lives and costing taxpayers multiple millions.

The law imposing life for anyone convicted of a third felony took effect on March 8, 1994. Nine hours later it found its first victim, Taibbi notes, “a homeless schizophrenic named Lester Wallace, with two nonviolent burglaries on his sheet, who attempted to steal a car radio near the University of Southern California campus.”

Read on...