Portside

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 the nation is gripped by new police killings, hope quietly fades in the Eric Garner case

Do police in the US keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do history and global context explain recent police killings of young Black people in the US? What alternative ways might there be to keep communities safe? These are questions explored in Truthout's first print collection, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States.

Thousands of people have reached out over the past week to connect with SURJ and find ways to move into action against police violence and for racial justice. Below is a statement from SURJ’s leadership in light of the 136 murders of Black people by police this year and the shooting in Dallas last night.

Several of the officials charged with regulating Texas’s prison labor program, wherein thousands of workers behind bars are compelled to produce goods and provide services for free, are connected to some of the richest and most powerful institutions and people in the state.

The 1985 police attack on the MOVE house is one of the last times a police department dropped an actual bomb on its residents.

People in at least 30 states are barred from voting because they're unable to pay their court fines.

A recent UCLA Labor Center report, Get to Work or Go To Jail: Workplace Rights Under Threat, goes further by exploring the ways in which the criminal justice system can also lock workers on probation, parole, facing court-ordered debt, or child support debt into bad jobs. Because these workers face the threat of incarceration for unemployment, the report finds that they cannot afford to refuse a job, quit a job, or to challenge their employers.

In March 2016 the U.S. Department of Justice announced a powerful new effort to stop local practices that unfairly target poor people by trapping them in “cycles of poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape.” Courts across the country are requiring people arrested with minor misdemeanor charges—like driving with a suspended license—to pay fines before getting their day in court. If they can’t afford the fine, they are forced to wait behind bars until they can.

New analysis shows that the growth in the jail population is happening in unexpected places.