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.
Children are still being held in isolation in detention and correctional facilities across the United States. Children can be found curled up on cement floors in bare cells for 22 hours a day, and for days at a time. In order to use bathroom facilities in Los Angeles County Jail, young people must bang on their cell door and hope that someone comes to escort them to a bathroom.
A movement has emerged to take up the mantle on one of the most pressing civil and human rights issues of our time: criminal justice reform. Many of these movement leaders are mothers with a child in prison, rendering this cause just as political as it is personal.
GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson and Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders came to Allen University Saturday with very different views of the criminal justice system and what should be done to address its failings.
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