According to a recent report from the Brennan Center, Florida is one of only three states with a lifetime voting ban for people with felony convictions. That means disenfranchisement for 1.6 million citizens, including 21 percent of the state’s voting-age African Americans.

The report comes as Florida’s Supreme Court considers a grass-roots initiative to put a measure on the 2018 ballot that would restore most of those voting rights. That initiative has surprising support from many in law-enforcement and corrections – evidence from Florida suggests that voting makes criminal behavior less likely.

The report also documents the extent of change in disenfranchisement laws across the country. Over the last two decades, more than 20 states have allowed more people with past convictions to vote, to vote sooner, or to access that right more easily. In 2016, Maryland’s legislature enfranchised more than 40,000 people, Delaware removed financial barriers to rights restoration, and Virginia’s governor committed to restoring voting rights for over 200,000 citizens.

The NY Times reports on winemaking programs in an Italian prison – Lecce Penitentiary, where inmates can learn to be sommeliers. The course is part of a program to teach prisoners new professional skills, as well as to help them develop a connection with the region, Apulia, which is known for its wine made from negroamaro grapes, the DOC Leverano Negroamaro Rosato.

There are other innovative rehabilitation programs, including  a restaurant inside a medium-security prison near Milan in which the waiters and cooks are inmates. But the sommelier class at the Lecce prison is believed to be unique in Italy.

“Of course, sommelier courses can’t be considered a treatment,” said Georgia Zara, the head of a program at the University of Turin that offers a master’s degree in criminological and forensic psychology. “But they do educate inmates and create social interaction, which is very important.”

The classes also offer a “bridge between the jail context and the world outside, so it’s a small investment to reduce the risk of recidivism,” Ms. Zara said.

President Obama addresses criminal justice reform in detail today in a Harvard Law Review commentary, “The President’s Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform” (130 Harv. L. Rev. 811). The President says: “We simply cannot afford to spend $80 billion annually on incarceration, to write off the 70 million Americans – that’s almost one in three adults – with a criminal record, to release 600,000 inmates each year without a better program to reintegrate them into society, or to ignore the humanity of 2.2 million men and women currently incarcerated in the United States…”

The commentary addresses the issue of criminal justice reform in 4 parts:

• Part I details the current criminal justice landscape and emphasizes the urgent need for reform. focussing on the seventy million Americans — almost one in three adults — with some form of criminal record.
• Part II covers the Obama administration efforts, including changes to federal charging policies and practices, the administration of federal prisons, and federal policies relating to reentry.
• Part III details the approaches that Presidents can take to promote change at the state and local level, recognizing that the state and local justice systems have a far broader and more pervasive impact than the federal justice system.
• Part IV discusses reforms that Obama feels are supported by broad consensus and could be completed in the near term. These include
  • passing bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation in Congress,
  • adopting commonsense measures to keep firearms out of the hands of those who are a threat to others or themselves,
  • finding better ways to address the opioid abuse,
  • implementing critical reforms to forensic science,
  • improving criminal justice data, and
  • using technology to enhance trust in and the effectiveness of law enforcement.

NBC News looks at the practice of “No Contest” pleas required by prosecutors in cases of wrongful conviction: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/end-decades-death-row-inmate-makes-agonizing-choice-n699561. The story focusses on James Dennis, who spent 25 years on death row in a case that was eventually thrown out in part because the prosecution had withheld evidence of innocence from the defense. The prosecutor required Miller to plead no contest to the original charge as a condition not to retry the case. As NBC news reports, the practice is not uncommon in claims of wrongful conviction. It allows prosecutors to keep a conviction without a new trial. The defendant, meanwhile, acknowledges there may be enough evidence for another guilty verdict but can still maintain their innocence.

Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor who runs The National Registry of Exonerations, said the offer of a no-contest plea puts defendants in an agonizing bind. “Typically, when someone has been on death row or general prison population for most of his adult life and is now offered an opportunity to leave prison right away, their family and friends and lawyers … urge them to take the plea and not take a chance,” Gross said. “Quite a few refuse.”

The NY Times reports that the US correctional population decreased in 2015 to the lowest level since 2002, while the overall crime rate continued to drop.  (Data for 2016 will not be available until next year).  The decline is attributable to the federal prison system releasing thousands of nonviolent drug offenders and states reducing prison populations as a cost-saving measure.

In California, for example, Proposition 47 — approved by voters in 2014 — retroactively reduced some drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Other states have offered expanded substance abuse treatment programs, established specialty courts and spent more money on re-entry programs aimed at reducing recidivism.

According to Pew research, while the nation’s imprisonment rate fell by more than 8 percent from 2010 to 2015, violent and property crimes dropped a combined 14.6 percent. In the 10 states with the largest declines in imprisonment (including California, Texas and New Jersey), crime fell by an average of 14.4 percent.

The Washington Post publishes an in-depth examination of search warrant procedure in Washington DC that argues warrants based solely on officers’ “training and experience” were ineffective – that is, the police discovered nothing illegal – 40% of the time. In comparison, warrants for which police do more investigative work appeared to bring better results.

Attorney Alec Karakatsanis, of the nonprofit group D.C.-based Equal Justice Under Law, said warrants that rely on training and experience as justification for a search subject the black community to abusive police intrusion based on flimsy investigative work. In the past two years, he has filed seven civil rights lawsuits in federal court challenging D.C. police’s practice of seeking search warrants based solely on an officer’s training and experience.

“They have turned any arrest anywhere in the city into an automatic search of a home, and that simply cannot be,” said Karakatsanis, who spent three years studying the issue, starting when he worked at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. “It would work a fundamental change in the balance of power in our society between government agents and individual rights.”

Read “Degrees of Freedom” – a 154-page report from the Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at Berkeley and the Stanford Criminal Justice Center Law on higher education opportunities for current and former prisoners in California. The report profiles existing programs and identifies recommendations for growth and sustainability, highlights challenges and successful strategies, and makes concrete recommendations for future programs.

A former lobbyist convicted of bribery, Richard Lipsky served a 3 month sentence and then became an advocate of criminal justice reform, particularly focussed on barriers to employment for former prisoners.

But when a labor union expressed interest in retaining him as a consultant on such issues, he found himself blocked by one of those barriers: a law barring people convicted of certain crimes, including bribery, from advising unions until 13 years after their release.

The story is here:

The Justice Policy Institute has published a study, “Improving Approaches to Serving Young Adults in the Justice System,” addressing the needs of the 18-24 year old population in America’s prisons – 20% of that total, compared to 10% of the total population. The study calls for more community-based and collaborative approaches, largely outside the formal justice system:

“The approach should be developmentally appropriate, individually tailored, and seek to reduce individuals’ justice system involvement and the collateral consequences that typically flow from contact with the justice system – all philosophical goals of the juvenile justice system. Convening participants also called for increased system and interagency collaboration to leverage public dollars so that young adults can get the schooling, housing, job training, and health care they need.”

The Washington Post story “It Does Not Have To Be This Way” covers a report by the Council for Court Excellence, a nonprofit that advocates for improvements to the city’s criminal justice system. According to the report, 1 in 22 adults in the District are “under some form of correctional control,” including jail or probation. Prisoners are often housed in federal facilities as far away as the West Coast, and those  returning face a variety of challenges that returning citizens elsewhere simply do not confront, particularly given the situation on the ground in DC, an expensive city where many jobs require a college education. More than 1 in 5 employed returning citizens lack stable housing when they return to the community, and those who were unemployed were even more likely to stay in homeless shelters or on the street.

The recommendations in the report include establishing an ombudsman position focused on D.C. correctional issues, limiting halfway houses charges for “subsistence fees,”having correctional facilities help returning citizens apply for housing up to 90 days before release, and passing legislation preventing landlords from discriminating against those with criminal records.

The District’s “ban the box” law, which prevents employers from screening out job applicants based on criminal convictions, isn’t sufficient, the report says.”You can ‘Ban the Box,’ but you can’t ban Google,” said one returning citizen.