Might getting more technology and more lawyers (as well as more masks) to prisoners help create a turning point for criminal justice change?

The question in the title of this post is my reaction to this notable news from Politico, headlined "Twitter CEO gives $10M to help prisons battle coronavirus: The donation will buy 10 million face masks and other equipment for people who are incarcerated and corrections employees." Here are excerpts:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged $10 million Monday to help U.S. prisons battle the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as inmates living in confined quarters remain particularly vulnerable to the disease.  The donation to REFORM Alliance, a criminal justice advocacy group led by CNN analyst Van Jones, will buy 10 million face masks and other personal protective equipment for people who are incarcerated, as well as correctional officers, health care workers and other prison employees.

The money comes from Dorsey's #startsmall initiative, which he flooded with $1 billion in April using equity from his mobile payment company, Square.  Since then, funds have been distributed to organizations setting up testing sites and assisting health care workers, as well as battling hunger and domestic violence, among other causes.

“The criminal justice system needs to change," Dorsey said in a statement. "Covid-19 adds to the injustices and REFORM is best suited to help." REFORM Alliance, which counts hip-hop artists Meek Mill and Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter and internet billionaire Michael Rubin as founding partners, was created last year to reduce the nation's incarceration rate through changes to probation and parole policies.

The group has since launched a campaign to provide much-needed safety equipment to prisons.... REFORM Alliance also has called for elderly and at-risk inmates to be released to home confinement, for jail terms for technical violations and parole office visits to be suspended, and for inmates to receive free access to medical care, hand sanitizer and protective gear, among other measures.  The group will release a video today called #AnswerTheirCall and circulate a petition that demands public officials take action, both of which Dorsey and others are expected to promote on social media.

“Not only will this gift help us protect millions from the threat of Covid-19, but this level of support from a tech titan marks a turning point for the criminal justice reform movement," Jones said in a statement.

I am very pleased to see an eight-figure pledge to the criminal justice reform cause, and the REFORM Alliance has been doing great work in this space both before and during our COVID pandemic.  The group's new public service announcement, which concludes with an emphasis on how the coronavirus has impacted prison populations, is quite effective, and I am confident REFORM will put its new resources to good use.

That said, when I think about what brings about real dramatic changes in society, I think about disruptive technologies and disruptive people.  Twitter and other social media certainly counts as disruptive technologies, and yet prisoners have precious little access to these critical modern communication platforms.  Because we do not see regular posts and tweets coming from the mass number of humans that are caged in our prisons, we too readily forget about the mass number of humans that are caged in our prisons.  I do not know if this Twitter CEO could somehow pledge 10 million tweets to incarcerated persons, but I do want to believe that a lot more people would care a lot more about prisoners if the extraordinary humanity of all those incarcerated were all that was filling up our feeds in the weeks and months ahead.

As for disruptive people, my job as a law professor has me always thinking about lawyers and the dramatic changes they can bring.  Coming off my last posting, which notes that more prisoners have dies from COVID in weeks than have be executed in the last decade, I am still reflecting on the dramatic impact that lawyers have had on the administration of the death penalty in the last two decades.  The 75%+ decline in death sentences and executions during this period has been largely the result of the extraordinary work of an extraordinary number of lawyers litigating (and lobbying) aggressively and effectively against capital punishment.  

Of course, many lawyers have been litigating (and lobbying) aggressively and effectively against mass incarceration, but the problems and challenges are so huge and complex, more lawyers are always needed.  Notably, a $10 million pledge would be enough to provide a grant of $100,000 to one hundred lawyers to spend the next year representing prisoners.  With plenty of prisoners needing legal help, and plenty of law students graduating into an uncertain legal market, I would love to see funding that might allow creating a small prison litigation army to help take on the now extra deadly excesses of incarceration nation. 

(I especially love imaging other tech titans funding this project, starting with this article's list of five persons whose personal wealth has each already reportedly grown over $2 BILLION in 2020:  "Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon has seen his wealth rise by $25 billion as of April 15, 2020; Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and founder of SpaceX: up $5 billion; MacKenzie Bezos, philanthropist, and the ex-wife of Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos: up $8.6 billion; Eric Yuan, chief executive and founder of Zoom: up $2.58 billion; Steve Ballmer, owner of Los Angeles Clippers: up $2.2 billion."  If the select members of this group were just to give just 1% of their added wealth from 2020 to the cause, we could fund a large army of many thousands of lawyers that surely could help produce a "turning point for the criminal justice reform movement.")