Despite bi-partisan support, the JJDPA is in danger of failing reauthorization in Congress. The opposition is almost entirely the work of one Senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, whose stated objection to the bill centers on its elimination of the Valid Court Order (VCO) that allows judges to lock up juveniles for “status offenses,” transgressions like running away from home, disobeying parents, underage tobacco use, or curfew violations, behaviors that would never land an adult in jail.

For updates on the Act, subscribe at the Coalition for Juvenile Justice

The California Supreme Court today cleared the way for Gov. Brown’d criminal justice reform measure to be placed on the November ballot. The SF Chronicle story is here, the full opinion on the California Courts website.

The New York Times in an editorial today called for federal oversight of prosecutors similar to the current oversight of police departments. The Times points out:

“Prosecutors are the most powerful players in the American criminal justice system. Their decisions — like whom to charge with a crime, and what sentence to seek — have profound consequences.

So why is it so hard to keep them from breaking the law or violating the Constitution?

The short answer is that they are almost never held accountable for misconduct, even when it results in wrongful convictions. It is time for a new approach to ending this behavior: federal oversight of prosecutors’ offices that repeatedly ignore defendants’ legal and constitutional rights. There is a successful model for this in the Justice Department’s monitoring of police departments with histories of misconduct.”

“….[E]very part of the justice system bears some responsibility for not fighting prosecutorial misconduct. State courts often fail to hold prosecutors accountable, even when their wrongdoing is clear. Professional ethics boards rarely discipline them. And individual prosecutors are protected from civil lawsuits, while criminal punishment is virtually unheard of. Money damages levied against a prosecutor’s office could deter some misconduct, but the Supreme Court has made it extremely difficult for wrongfully convicted citizens to win such claims.
This maddening situation has long resisted a solution. What would make good sense is to have the federal government step in to monitor some of the worst actors, increasing the chance of catching misconduct before it ruins peoples’ lives. The Justice Department is already authorized to do this by a 1994 federal law prohibiting any “pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers” that deprives a person of legal or constitutional rights.”

The Iowa Supreme Court in a 4-3 decision last week ruled that juveniles convicted of first-degree murder cannot be sentenced to life in prison without parole. The Court said that LWOP for juveniles was “speculative” and didn’t properly consider whether a juvenile prisoner can be rehabilitated. Decisions about parole should not be made “when the juvenile character is a work in progress,” but rather on based on later determinations about “those who over time show irredeemable corruption,” Justice Brent R. Appel wrote for the majority.

There are about 2,500 people who were sentenced as juveniles to life without any chance at parole, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group advocating criminal justice reform.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that mandating life in prison without parole for juveniles convicted of homicides is unconstitutional, and earlier this year the justices expanded that decision and said it must be applied retroactively. In a 2010 ruling, the court had also said that juveniles could not be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for any crime short of a homicide.

In the next few weeks the Supreme Court will decide a major case on the fate of the 1990’s Prison Litigation Reform Act (P.L.R.A.). Prisoners’ advocates have argued for years that the P.L.R.A. makes it nearly impossible for inmates to get a fair hearing in court, and that it has crippled the federal judiciary’s ability to act as a watchdog over prison conditions. The Act is being challenged by Shaidon Blake, a gang leader convicted of second-degree murder, who was assaulted by two guards in a Baltimore city jail. From the New Yorker article on the case:

The guards, James Madigan and Michael Ross, had been ordered to move Blake to solitary after a supervising officer complained that he was starting trouble—“commandeering” the television and using the phone out of turn. According to court documents, Madigan and Ross walked Blake from his cell to a nearby corridor, where they pressed him up against a concrete wall. Ross held Blake, whose hands were cuffed, while Madigan punched him in the face five times.

In 2009, Blake filed a lawsuit in federal court against the two guards, plus two supervisors and the state government, seeking damages for his injuries. The assault worsened a preëxisting head injury, his lawyers said, and left Blake suffering from migraines and permanent nerve damage in his face. Madigan, the guard who threw the punches, was found liable and was ordered to pay Blake fifty thousand dollars, but a judge eventually dismissed the case against the supervisors and the government.

The issue in Blake’s case against the second guard, Ross, now before the Supreme Court, is not the role Ross may have played in the assault (Ross has argued that he attempted to deëscalate the situation) but, rather, whether the case should be dismissed because Blake did not file the proper paperwork.

Blake’s Supreme Court case, which is set to be decided in the next few weeks, shows the P.L.R.A.’s effect: at issue is not the role Ross may have played in the assault (Ross has argued that he attempted to deëscalate the situation) but, rather, whether the case should be dismissed because Blake did not file the proper paperwork. As passed, the law requires prisoners who believe their rights have been violated to first submit a grievance form to their prison’s administration, and, if that grievance is rejected, to appeal the decision within their state’s corrections system as high as the process allows. Only after those steps have been taken can prisoners file suit in an actual court. This type of provision is known as an “exhaustion requirement.”

Functioning properly, a grievance system can provide corrections officials with early warnings of staff misconduct, deficient medical care, and unsanitary or dangerous conditions. But in practice, critics say, these systems create a tangle of administrative procedures that discourage or disqualify inmates from filing lawsuits. Before 1996, courts applied an exhaustion requirement only if a state’s grievance process met certain high standards of fairness outlined by the Justice Department. The P.L.R.A. eliminated those standards. There are currently no regulations governing prison grievance processes, and, in the two decades since the law’s passage, many prisons’ procedures have become so onerous and convoluted—“Kafkaesque,” in the words of one federal judge—that inmates whose rights have been violated are watching their cases slip through the cracks.

As the New York Times reported at length this week, Judge Block, of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, sentenced a young woman convicted of a drug felony to probation, saying that the collateral consequences of the conviction were punishment enough – no prison necessary. The Judge observed that such consequences served “no useful function other than to further punish criminal defendants after they have completed their court-imposed sentences.” He noted that there were nearly 50,000 federal and state statutes and regulations that imposed penalties on felons. Those penalties — denial of government benefits, ineligibility for public housing, suspension of student loans, revocation or suspension of driver’s licenses — can have devastating effects, he wrote, adding that they may be “particularly disruptive to an ex-convict’s efforts at rehabilitation and reintegration into society.”

As discussed in a recent story in The Crime Report:

There is “reasonable concern about the obstacles and challenges that confront people who have been incarcerated for years, isolated from a changing world, separated from families and home communities by hundreds of miles, having to overcome barriers imposed by a criminal conviction, in an environment short on needed services…”

This is not a small problem – Federal prisons alone release 50,000 people a year. In response to reentry issues the DOJ and Attorney General Loretta Lynch have announced an overhaul of federal prison practices, issuing a “Roadmap to Reentry” declaring that individualized reentry plans should be prepared for federal inmates as soon as they enter prison.

Criminal Justice reform means mental health service reform. Estimates of the number of incarcerated individuals with mental health problems vary by definition and by method, but the conservative estimate of the DOJ’s  Bureau of Justice Statistics is that more than half of all prison and jail inmates have a mental health problem, including  56% of State prisoners, 45% of Federal prisoners, and 64% of local jail inmates. In many if not most cases this represents a failure to provide adequate mental health services rather than a connection between mental health problems and criminal behavior. In part to address these issues, May is Mental Health Month.

The ABA has published a National Inventory of the Collateral Consequences of Conviction that attempts a comprehensive summary of the consequences of criminal conviction in all 50 states – and by extension, the resulting barriers to reentry and reintegration into society.