"Hearing each others' stories, we have a chance to understand the causes and conditions that gave rise to even the worst things we do to one another. Stories don't offer excuses, but they offer a window -- however cloudy -- into how and why someone did a terrible thing to us or the people we love."
New Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is making good on his promise to revolutionize the job of district attorney and, in the process, offering an extraordinary experiment in criminal justice reform at the municipal level that could serve as a national model.
From raising the minimum wage to enacting police reforms, here are ballot initiatives progressives should watch in 2018.
Trump has often said he would govern for the benefit of the middle class. But he blurted out the truth about which interests he actually represents when he told friends at his $200,00-a-year Mar-a-Lago club, “You all just got a lot richer.”
“Many people don’t even have $100 in the bank, so paying 10 percent to a bond agent means that money won’t be going toward rent or food.”
Almost two years ago, Kalief Browder died after suffering abuse and torture at Rikers Island for three years - all while he was waiting for a court date. This gross injustice happened because many of our towns still rely on money bail, a broken system that keeps Black people in jail even before they are ever convicted of anything.
Analyzing offender data on roughly 1.5 million US prisoners, researchers from the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that for one in four, drug treatment, community service, probation or a fine would have been a more effective sentence than incarceration. The study also concluded that another 14% of incarcerated individuals had already served an appropriate sentence. These people could be released within the next year “with little risk to public safety”.
The tide is beginning to turn on criminal justice. California is again setting the national tone, first by rolling back juvenile incarceration at unprecedented rates and now, through the same ballot initiative system that ushered in those extreme sentences, by passing voter-driven laws to roll back those laws and clean up the damage they created.
While there has recently been a push from advocates and policy -- makers alike to reexamine sentencing policy and practice, the negative impacts on former prisoners and people with felony convictions themselves and the economy as a whole will grow in scale unless the burgeoning reform trend continues and accelerates.
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