By Michael Friedrich, CityLab, October 27, 2019 Standing before the congregation of the Progressive Community Church of Stockton, California, Eric Jones, the city’s police chief, apologized. It was July 2016, in the furious days after the police shootings of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Those were followed closely by the deadly ambush of police officers in Dallas, Texas, and in Baton Rouge after protests over the Sterling...

By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, California Health Care Foundation, April 24, 2020 Many county correctional facilities throughout California are reducing their teeming populations to prevent large-scale COVID-19 outbreaks. The dorm rooms, dining halls, and recreation areas in many of these institutions are breeding grounds for spreading the virus, experts say. People have been complaining for weeks that inmates don’t have hand sanitizer or equipment like masks to protect themselves and that cramped...

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)...

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...

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...

By Jason Fagone and Megan Cassidy, San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2019 The suicide rate inside California prisons, long one of the highest among the nation’s largest prison systems, jumped to a new peak in 2018 and remains elevated in 2019, despite decades of effort by federal courts and psychiatric experts to fix a system they say is broken and putting lives at risk, a Chronicle investigation has found. Last year, an average of three California inmates killed themselves each month...

From Public Policy Institute of California, June 16, 2020 About the Program While the COVID-19 pandemic has required changes to law enforcement and correctional policies, widespread protests over the police-involved deaths of African Americans have intensified concern about racial and ethnic disparities in our criminal justice system. In recent years, California has implemented significant reforms that, while not motivated by racial disparities, are narrowing them. PPIC researcher Brandon...

By Jason Pohl, The Sacramento Bee, May 27, 2020 California’s long history of altering its criminal justice system — from requiring life in prison for third-strike offenders to reducing the punishment for hundreds of crimes — is having another moment that could dramatically alter how the state locks people up. In a seismic, almost overnight shift, California has jailed 21,700 fewer people — nearly one-third of its daily population — in county lockups since the new coronavirus hit the state.

By Jason Fagone, Megan Cassidy, and Alexei Koseff, San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 2020 Gov. Gavin Newsom will release approximately 8,000 people incarcerated inside California’s prison system by August, in a move that comes amid devastating coronavirus outbreaks at several facilities and pressure from lawmakers and advocates. The releases, which were announced just before noon Friday, will come on a rolling basis, and they’ll include both people who were scheduled to be freed soon as well...

Spectrum News joins CPP's Fritzi Horstman and California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris at Valley State Prison in California.

Cal State LA BA Prison Program Graduate Fights to End Involuntary Servitude On October 5, 2021, Samual Nathaniel Brown, co-founder of the Anti-Violence Safety and Accountability Project (ASAP), creator of the 10P program, and author of the constitutional amendment proposal, The California Abolition Act (ACA 3), recently became one of the first along with 24 other men to graduate with a bachelors in communication from Cal State LA’s Prison B.A. Graduation Initiative on the yard at California...