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All in Criminal Justice News
Since it began in 2000, the Miami-Dade Circuit Court Criminal Mental Health Project(or CMHP) has steered thousands of mentally ill offenders into treatment while deeply reducing the county’s jail population, from nearly 7,000 prisoners a decade ago to just over 4,000 last year. That in turn has allowed officials to close a detention center while saving the county $12 million a year.
Attempts to reform the way criminals are sentenced and how much time they spend behind bars have made little headway in the Florida legislature in recent years.
But following the passage of federal criminal justice reform in December, it seems state legislators from both parties may be ready to take a new look at reforming the state’s prison system.
A $533 million new consolidated criminal justice complex for Wayne County is being built by Dan Gilbert's Bedrock LLC as part of a March deal for a key downtown Detroit property.
The transgender woman described feeling like a "sex slave" while incarcerated at several men's prisons across Illinois, claiming repeated abuse and sexual assaults involving guards and inmates, according to court documents.
The United States detains more citizens in prison than in any other country in the world, as well as more people under correctional control than any given moment in American history.
At the University of Michigan, a team of five professors — Heather Ann Thompson, Matt Lassiter, Ruby Tapia, Ashley Lucas and Amanda Alexander — are working together to combat mass incarceration within academia.
Citing the war on drugs’ disproportionate impact on people of color, judges in Seattle have agreed to vacate the marijuana convictions of hundreds of people who were punished for pot possession before the state made weed legal.
U.S. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) introduced on Sept. 13, 2018, the Beyond the Box for Higher Education Act, new legislation that would encourage colleges and universities to remove criminal and juvenile justice questions from their admissions applications and give more Americans a chance to earn a higher education.
For companies like JPay, the business model is simple: Whatever it costs to send a message, prisoners and their families will find a way to pay it.
Since 2014, a nonprofit called The Last Mile has taught coding and entrepreneurship classes inside San Quentin and other prisons in hopes of helping incarcerated people develop marketable skills for when they get out.
Austin high school student Elijah Corpus spent one month behind bars for drug possession when he was 17. An alternative school, though, had the bigger impact, he said.
Now 18, he's helping lawmakers, advocates and other students push the state to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 17 to 18. Under state law, 17-year-olds are treated as adults in criminal cases. Supporters say 17-year-olds are minors and that throwing them in lockups with adults can put them in harm's way, cause mental anguish and usher them toward a life of crime. Treatment, in the juvenile justice system, is the better answer, they say.
BOSTON (WWLP) – State lawmakers are looking at changes to the Massachusetts criminal justice system, which could keep teenagers away from adult prisons.
The proposal could make Massachusetts the first state in the country to raise the age of juvenile court past 18. Four state lawmakers have filed a bill to include young adults in the juvenile justice system, rather than sending them to adult prisons.
Supporters say the proposal would reduce crime, save taxpayer dollars, and give 18 to 21 year-olds a second chance.
The cost of imprisonment — including who benefits and who pays — is a major part of the national discussion around criminal justice policy. But prisons and jails are just one piece of the criminal justice system and the amount of media and policy attention that the various players get is not necessarily proportional to their influence.
PORTLAND, Maine – The nation's juvenile detention centers are largely ill-equipped to handle transgender teens, leaving them vulnerable to bullying, sexual assault, depression and suicide, advocates say.
Young transgender people are too often sent to girls' or boys' lockups based on their anatomy, not their gender identity, and can end up suffering psychologically and getting picked on by other inmates or staff members, according to advocacy groups. Even when they are assigned to detention centers that correspond to their gender identity, they are often victimized.
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Next month, Tennessee lawmakers will consider changing the way juveniles are prosecuted. A juvenile justice task force has come up six tentative recommendations that would help rehabilitate juvenile offenders.
We got a copy of the suggestions from State Senator Mark Norris's office. He's the chairman of that task force.
Over 5 million kids in the United States currently have or have had a parent in prison. That works out to about one in 14 American children—a majority of whom are under age 10. Broken down by state, children with incarcerated parents can represent 3 to 13 percent of the population, according to “A Shared Sentence,” a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The unusually intense stress that these children face has been well documented and studied. That’s mostly due to researchers’ emphasis on the parent-child relationship when analyzing incarcerated populations—and how little support is available for those left-behind children who are forced to stand by as their primary role models, caregivers, and providers are put behind bars.
But incarceration also affects a separate number of children who have been isolated from another profound relationship: They are the children with siblings in jail or prison—and much less is known about them. It isn’t even clear how many of them there are.
California voters handed a decisive victory to Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday in his effort to reshape the state’s criminal justice system, approving a ballot measure to offer a new chance at prison release for thousands of prisoners.
Few California voters likely know much, if anything, about the state Board of Parole Hearings — from the qualifications of the 12 commissioners to their success in opening the prison gates for only those who can safely return to the streets.
And yet Gov. Jerry Brown’s sweeping overhaul of prison parole, Proposition 57, is squarely a question of whether those parole officials should be given additional latitude to offer early release to potentially thousands of prisoners over the next few years.
