The Atlantic advises us about a disturbingly striking project to document prison geography. See more for yourself here.
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A number of groups are devoted to reforming youth sentencing. But in the realm of criminal justice activism, life sentences have not been a focus (indeed, many opponents of the death penalty have pushed life without parole as the best alternative to executions). “A good deal of [advocacy] focuses on removing low-level, nonviolent offenders from jails and prisons because they comprise such a large proportion of the incarcerated population,” says Ashley Nellis, an analyst with the Sentencing Project. Whereas the obvious excesses of the drug war have met resistance, when it comes to violent crimes, even young defendants have comparatively few advocates in their corner.
From The Nation’s recent article on juvenile life without parole. Read here.
The Yale Law Journal is having an awesome writing contest for people who are or recently have been in jail or prison. Submit a short essay about your experiences with the law, and you might be eligible for a cash prize and/or publication. Learn more here.
Just as New York’s highest court holds that expert testimony regarding false confessions may be presented in criminal cases, Cambridge’s own Brattle Theater is presenting Scenes of a Crime this Monday. The documentary looks to be a compelling real-life exploration of “a nearly 10-hour interrogation that culminates in a disputed confession, and an intense, high-profile murder trial in New York state.” Learn more, including showtimes, here.
Photo via Todd Heisler/The New York Time.
“Dementia in prison is an underreported but fast-growing phenomenon, one that many prisons are desperately unprepared to handle. It is an unforeseen consequence of get-tough-on-crime policies — long sentences that have created a large population of aging prisoners. About 10 percent of the 1.6 million inmates in America’s prisons are serving life sentences; another 11 percent are serving over 20 years.”
This week’s New York Times features an amazing story of compassion, caretaking and humanity in California’s prisons. Read the story here and explore the heart-breaking photographs from inside the state’s DOC here.
Tamms Correctional Center- AP
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has proposed closing Tamms Correctional Center, the state’s only supermax prison. Even if driven by economic efficiency concerns, this action could put an end to prison conditions that have caused a mental health crisis, precipitated, among other reasons, by the fact that the 200 inmates held at Tamms have lived in almost continuous solitary confinement. Read more here.
Illinois residents can support this proposal and the Tamms Year Ten Committee’s work by following this link and making a call.
This week, the U.S. Sentencing Commission held a hearing in Washington, D.C. on federal sentencing after U.S. v. Booker, the Supreme Court decision that made the sentencing guidelines advisory instead of mandatory. Families Against Mandatory Minimum’s VP Mary Price testified that judges are using their discretion wisely and need to be able to continue to give individualized sentences. You can read her testimony here.
FAMM released this statement on President Obama’s new budget proposal, which endorsed the idea of expanding good time credit and compassionate release.
HLS professor and former judge of the U.S. District Court for Mass. Nancy Gertner was counsel of record in an amicus brief (PDF) submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in Dorsey v. U.S. and Corey Hill v. U.S. These decisions will determine whether the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 applies to defendants sentenced after the law was enacted, but whose crimes were committed beforehand. Gertner co-wrote the brief, which argues that denying such application will further “damage the legitimacy of the sentencing process,” with another former federal judge, Paul Cassell. Both authors sentenced defendants under the mandatory-minimum provisions of the 1986 Act, and have written previously to express their deep concerns about the damaging effects and racism of mandatory-minimum penalties for non-violent drug offenders.
Finally, FAMM President Julie Stewart recently published this op-ed in the Huffington Post last week. At a time when some Congress members argue that more prosecutorial discretion will reduce racial disparity, it calls attention to a powerful new study that suggests that much responsibility lies with prosecutors, not judges, for the disparity in sentences between black and white offenders.
The Vera Institute of Justice has released a report entitled “The Price of Prisons,” outlining a new methodology to calculate the real cost of prisons for taxpayers. The Center on Sentencing and Corrections and Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit studied 40 states, finding significant costs not included in the corrections budgets but directly affecting taxpayers nonetheless. For more, see their report and state fact sheets here.
I hope you’ll all read Adam Gopnik’s recent article in the New Yorker, which addresses how “[m]ass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today.” In his attempt to answer the question, “how did we get here?” he describes two different ideas: one, elaborated by the late, beloved Bill Stuntz, that conceiving of justice as procedure and process rather than principles results in a system that is essentially impersonal and insulated from its human effects; the second, put forth by Michelle Alexander among others, that the prison is an institution of white supremacy that functions in the service of racial domination as social control.
This long and thoughtful piece opens with a nice meditation on time in the context of incarceration– the “timeless time” of death row, and the way that in prison, time becomes something being done to you, not something you do things with. It also offers some sobering facts: six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S., more than were in Stalin’s gulags; Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teenagers to life imprisonment; during the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. There is more– a discussion of the relationship between crime and such punishment, and of stop and frisk programs, some Shakespeare and a little hope– and more than that too, that makes it worth your while to take a look.
The former commander of America’s most notorious detention facility describes his experiences at Guantanamo and offers an opinion on its usefulness here.
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