From The Sentencing Project, January 2020 The United States is a world leader in incarceration and keeps nearly 7 million persons under criminal justice supervision. More than 2.2 million are in prison or jail, while 4.6 million are monitored in the community on probation or parole. More punitive sentencing laws and policies, not increases in crime rates, have produced this high rate of incarceration. Ending mass incarceration will require changing sentencing policies and practices, scaling...

By Jordan Bailey, January 22, 2020, for Portland Phoenix ME In 2008, 21-year-old Brandon Brown shot a man in Portland’s Old Port. He was eventually convicted of attempted murder and elevated aggravated assault, and sentenced to 17 years in prison. Now Brown is poised to be the first person in Maine to earn a master’s degree while incarcerated, and may be the first inmate to conduct approved research on fellow inmates for his thesis project. Brown shot former Marine James Sanders, crippling...

By Tess de la Mare, Belfast Telegraph Digital, January 2, 2020 The traumatic histories of offenders stuck in the prison system should be treated as a public health issue to break cycles of offending, psychologists working with inmates have said. But despite the often complex histories of violent offenders, in the UK’s squeezed prison system there are limited resources available for rehabilitation. Forensic psychologist Dr Naomi Murphy runs a five-year intensive psychotherapy programme for...

Every week, Daniel Westbrooks walks through a metal detector and several locked doors to visit teens at Nashville’s Juvenile Detention Center. He weaves through the shuffle of boys in matching blue polo shirts and gray slip-on sneakers, joking and chatting. Westbrooks says he knows what it’s like to be locked up. He cycled in and out of juvenile detention, jails and prisons for nearly two decades. All the while, he was holding in painful secrets from his past. It’s easy for Westbrooks to...

By Steve Milne, Capital Public Radio, December 20, 2019 One of the last pieces of legislation from former California Gov. Jerry Brown’s final year in office would end the prosecution of pre-teens who commit crimes, other than murder and forcible sexual assault. Right now, California has no minimum age for sending children to juvenile hall. Beginning in the new year, counties will no longer be allowed to process kids under 12 years old through the juvenile justice system. Instead, they will...

There is a saying, made famous by the criminal justice reformers Glenn Martin and Piper Kerman, that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution, but are also furthest from the resources and power to address it. For Sherman Spears, his own experience of being shot and treated at a local Oakland hospital was a turning point in his life. He founded Youth Alive!’s Caught in the Crossfire , the first hospital-based violence intervention program . It has become a national model to...

For the past year, The Kansas City Star has examined what happens to kids who age out of foster care and found that, by nearly every measure, states are failing in their role as parents to America’s most vulnerable children. https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html#storylink=cpy

Dr. Melissa Merrick, president & CEO of Prevent Child Abuse America, provides four key takeaways from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest Vital Signs/ACEs report , of which she is the lead author. Merrick also identifies several practical solutions for creating the conditions for safe, stable and nurturing relationships and environments for all children, families and communities, which are fundamental to preventing ACEs. Among these solutions is strengthening economic...

Every couple of years, the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) revises California's Title 15 and 24 regulations which set standards for the hundreds of local adult detention facilities across all 58 counties. This includes adult jails, temporary holding facilities, and court holding facilities. The standards cover everything from family visits to solitary confinement to nutrition. The revision process has started up again and our coalition is working to make sure a diverse set of...

By Taylor Walker, Witness LA, November 11, 2019 Research and the national conversation around racial disparities in school discipline have largely remained focused on the outsized disparate treatment that black students receive when compared with their white peers. Yet Native American youth face much the same disciplinary treatment in schools that black students do, according to a report from San Diego State University and Sacramento Native American Higher Education Collaborative (SNAHEC)...

Educational Trauma is the inadvertent and unintentional perpetration and perpetuation of harm in schools. The use of standards and the normal distribution or the bell curve to rank students and identify those at risk of developing problems later is born in the same theories and practices as eugenics. Eugenics practices thrive in schools and feed the school-to-prison pipeline, which is the most extreme example of Educational Trauma. This book ambitiously aims to open a feld of inquiry into...

By The Times Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2019 As California continues to burn, the state’s firefighters have spent day after day in the searing heat and ferocious wind, hiking toward the flames, cutting fire lines and protecting homes. It’s grueling, heroic work that saves lives and prevents more devastation. And sometimes, it’s done by prison inmates. Among the thousands of federal, state and local firefighters on the fire lines, there are also more than 2,500 prisoners...