Portside

Despite decades of attention, the proportion of girls in the juvenile justice system has increased and their challenges have remained remarkably consistent, resulting in deeply rooted systemic gender injustice. The literature is clear that girls in the justice system have experienced abuse, violence, adversity, and deprivation across many of the domains of their lives—family, peers, intimate partners, and community.

No one knows how many innocent people have been convicted based on junk forensic science, but the National Research Council report recommends substantial funding increases to enable labs to conduct experiments to improve the validity and reliability of the many forensic subfields.

As the movement for racial justice spurred by the seemingly endless series of police killings of African Americans grows we are reminded that the issues are not new, they are endemic in U.S. history. What happens after the headlines subside? The truth has been buried too often, and for too long and there can be no justice until these stories are resurrected, scrubbed of their racist falsehoods. U.S. history needs to be put right.

In Chicago, over a 5 year period from 2005-2009, there were: 851 blocks with over $1 million committed to prison sentences; 121 blocks with over $1 million committed to prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses. This is wasteful spending at its worst, especially given that research has shown that incarceration does not necessarily reduce crime in neighborhoods. The good news is that there are many innovative, common-sense, and creative alternative approaches.

An abundance of data has fueled the reform movement, but from prisons to prosecutors, crucial questions remain unquantified.

The bail system affects the poor disproportionately, and the legal outcomes for those who await trial behind bars are much worse than the outcomes for those who don't. The work of Pretrial Services Agency shows that alternatives to bail exist.

Beginning in the 1930s, the LAPD pioneered the use of stop-and-search policing whereby officers flooded an area after a reported crime to question persons found on the street. This was the anti-Friday dragnet — indiscriminate, racist, and the reality for urban, black communities after World War II.

This is a national problem. Across the United States, most of the people incarcerated in local jails have not been convicted of a crime but are awaiting trial. And most of those are waiting in jail not because of any specific risk they have been deemed to pose, but because they can’t pay their bail. In other words, we are locking people up for being poor. This is unjust. We should abolish monetary bail outright.

Attorney "Marty" Stroud was the prosecutor in the 1984 murder trial of Glenn Ford, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Isadore Rozeman. Ford was released from prison in 2014, after the state admitted new evidence proving Ford was not the killer. Stroud denounces the state’s attempt to deny compensation for Ford’s wrongful conviction, speaks of his role in creating the “horrors” Ford suffered, and denounces the death penalty as an "abomination."

Jails admit nearly 12 million people every year. Yet they are largely off the radar of critics of mass incarceration. However, as a new report by Vera Institute and actions by activists around the country demonstrate, jails matter.