A study by the Fair Punishment Project (an initiative of Harvard Law School) of death row inmates in Oregon shows two-thirds of death row inmates possess signs of serious mental illness or intellectual impairment, endured devastatingly severe childhood trauma, or were not old enough to legally purchase alcohol at the time the offense occurred.

The study of the 35 inmates in Oregon was based on  legal pleadings and opinions, trial testimony, media reports, and interviews with legal experts in Oregon  familiar with the individuals on death row.

This NY Times article, “After A Crime, The Price of a Second Chance,”  looks at adult diversion programs run by prosecutors (as opposed to drug courts or mental health courts where a judge is in charge). They put together information on the statutes and fee schedules in 225 diversion programs in 37 states and interviewed more than 150 prosecutors, defense lawyers, defendants and experts.

The conclusion: because prosecutors have wide latitude to design the programs, different jurisdictions have different rules, resulting in substantial inequities for defendants.

“Diversion is intended to relieve overburdened courts and crowded jails, and to spare low-risk offenders from the devastating consequences of a criminal record. It mostly applies to nonviolent cases that make up the vast majority of crimes — offenses like shoplifting, drug possession and theft. There are now diversion programs in almost every state.

But an examination by The New York Times found that in many places, only people with money could afford a second chance. Though diversion was introduced as a money-saving reform, some jurisdictions quickly turned it into a source of revenue.

Prosecutors exert almost total control over diversion, deciding who deserves mercy and at what price, The Times found. The prosecutors who grant diversion often benefit directly from the fees, which vary widely from town to town and can reach $5,000 for a single offense. In a country where 27 million households make less than $25,000 a year, even $500 can be prohibitive.”

From the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and The Sentencing Project, “Free The Vote“- a succinct and important summary of the felony disenfranchisement issue. The NAACP, because felony disenfranchisement laws have a disproportionate impact on African Americans at the state level. An estimated 6.1 million Americans who have been convicted of a felony are denied the right to vote, and 1 in 13 African Americans of voting age are disenfranchised because of a felony conviction, more than four times the rate of non-Black Americans. Put another way, more than 7.4% of the Black American adult population is disenfranchised compared to 1.8% of the non-Black population. Other facts and figures from the report: –

• Only Maine and Vermont do not restrict voting on the basis of a felony conviction—and allow individuals to continue to exercise the right to vote from prison by absentee ballot.

• Prison-based gerrymandering exacerbates the negative effects of felony disenfranchisement by counting incarcerated people as residents of largely white rural areas where prisons are predominately located. The racial disparities in incarceration thus result in greater political influence and increased economic resources for the largely white rural areas, and a corresponding loss of resources to the urban communities from which incarcerated people of color generally reside.

“LAARP” is network of public, community and faith-based agencies and advocates working on the successful reintegration of previously incarcerated men and women back into their communities:

“The mission of the Los Angeles Regional Reentry Partnership (LARRP) is to support the development and implementation of a comprehensive, culturally competent, and effective community reentry system, by providing a strong community voice in public policy and funding decisions; by serving as a convener of reentry service providers, advocates, and other stakeholders; and by building capacity across the county to meet the needs of the reentry community.”

In Oklahoma, the “Santa Claus Commission”  gives each of the 400 offenders in the state’s residential detention facilities and group homes a duffle bag and a holiday stocking with candy, stationery, toiletries, and a $9 gift card. Staff also distribute holiday cards and throw holiday parties.

In Louisiana, incarcerated juveniles get gift bags — with pajamas, body wash, candy and chips.

In Maryland, youths can earn a pass for good behavior to go home to celebrate Christmas. Last year, when the family of a girl who’d earned a pass could not come pick her up, a Department of Juvenile Services staff member drove her home.

According to Pew Charitable Trusts, as a result of research showing that incarceration of lower-risk teens leads to higher recidivism rates, the number of youths held in residential facilities around the country has dropped by more than half, from 108,800 in 2000 to 50,800 in 2014, according to one-day counts by the OJJDP.

LA Times reporter Jaweed Kaleem  examines Milwaukee in particular, and Wisconsin in general, as a case study of whether new rules requiring ID for voting blocked enough largely young and racial minority Democrats from casting ballots to contribute to Clinton’s defeat.

Wisconsin as a state had its lowest turnout in 20 years, and the 248,000 people who voted in Milwaukee were roughly 41,000 fewer than in the last presidential election.

“I believe it was voter suppression laws from the state government that crushed turnout,” said Milwaukee County Clerk Joe Czarnezki, one of two officials who oversees local elections. “They tend to hit hardest on people who are poor, who don’t drive and don’t have a license, who are minorities.”

The Sentencing Project reports on the range of new purposes for prisons closed due to the drops in prison population over the past 5 years. Since 2011, at least 22 states have closed or announced closures for 94 state prisons and juvenile facilities, resulting in the elimination of over 48,000 state prison beds and an estimated cost savings of over $345 million. The new uses include a movie studio (Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, New York), a distillery (Brushy Mt. State Penitentiary, Tennessee), urban redevelopment (Dawson State Jail, Texas), and a variety of reentry centers and homeless shelters in Florida, North Carolina, and elsewhere.

A coalition of newspapers examining the effects of California’s Proposition 47 – the Desert Sun, Ventura County Star, Record Searchlight and Salinas Californian – found that the law had in fact scaled back mass incarceration of drug addicts, freeing at least 13,500 inmates. The investigation also found that Prop 47 had done little to help those freed to restart their lives:

“Instead, the unprecedented release of inmates has exposed the limits of California’s neglected social service programs: Thousands of addicts and mentally ill people have traded a life behind bars for a churning cycle of homelessness, substance abuse and petty crime.”

The newspapers also found:

• California police have dramatically deprioritized drug busts in the wake of Prop 47, arresting and citing about 22,000 fewer people in 2015, a 9.5 percent decrease in the first year since the possession of meth, heroin and cocaine was downgraded to a misdemeanor.
• Nearly 200,000 felony convictions have been retroactively erased by Prop 47 as of September, according to a first-ever analysis. Government agencies were not required to track how many convictions were reduced, so journalists gathered public records from 21 counties to calculate a statewide estimate. Many former felons will be slow to take advantage of their restored rights because they are unaware their convictions have been downgrade.-
• Prop 47 earmarked millions saved in prison costs for inmate rehabilitation, but not a penny has been spent. Meanwhile, the state’s shortage of treatment programs is more glaring than ever. Expanding rehab would be expensive, but it is still a cheaper, more effective and more humane strategy for addressing addiction than locking drug abusers in prison.

New report from The Sentencing Project, “How Tough on Crime Became Tough on Kids,” discusses how the tough-on-crime era resulted in many juvenile drug cases (in addition to the more obvious serious and violent crimes) being eligible for adult court adjudication. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia permit juveniles to be tried as adults on drug charges. The report summarizes the data: from 1989 to 1992, drug offense cases were more likely to be judicially waived to adult courts than any other offense category. The conclusion:
“The ability of states to send teenagers into the adult system on nonviolent offenses, a relic of the war on drugs, threatens the futures of those teenagers who are arrested on drug charges, regardless of whether or not they are convicted (much less incarcerated) on those charges. Transfer laws have been shown to increase recidivism, particularly violent recidivism, among those convicted in adult courts. Research shows waiver laws are disproportionately used on youth of color. Moreover, an adult arrest record can carry collateral consequences that a juvenile record might not. Since very few criminal charges ever enter the trial phase, the mere threat of adult prison time contributes to some teenagers’ guilty pleas. This policy report reviews the methods by which juveniles can be tried as adults for drug offenses and the consequences of the unchecked power of some local prosecutors.”

The Boston Globe “Spotlight” team reports on the mental health care system in San Antonio, where the behavioral health care system has come to be considered a national model. In addition to improving coordination between law enforcement, the courts, and treatment providers, and improving law enforcement training, they have pursued the controversial strategy of taking decisions on treatment and medication out of the hands of the most severely ill.

San Antonio and the surrounding Bear County built a crisis center for psychiatric and substance abuse emergencies and a 22-acre campus for the homeless that resembles a community college. Thousands of emergency responders in San Antonio and Bexar County have been trained to manage mental health crises. Local judges devised an involuntary outpatient treatment program for people resistant to help and special juvenile court sessions for teens struggling with mental illness. An alliance of mental health specialists set up a transitional clinic to make sure people released from hospitals have immediate access to therapy and medication. And in May, the county opened a $2 million reentry center designed in part to help mentally ill inmates transition to society.

To date, more than 100,000 people have been diverted from jail and emergency rooms to treatment, local officials say, resulting in a savings of nearly $100 million over an eight-year period.