"How States Transformed Criminal Justice in 2020, and How They Fell Short"

The title of this post is the title of this big retrospective put together masterfully by Daniel Nichanian at The Appeal: Political Report.  I highly recommend review of the whole piece, so that you can fully understand its subhealine: "This year of crises, revisited. Nearly 90 state-level bills and initiatives. 17 themes. 7 maps." And here is the lengthy piece's preamble to the issue-by-issue review of reforms:

Throughout 2020’s unprecedented challenges, criminal justice reform advocates called for sweeping changes.  But state officials and legislatures largely ducked the COVID-19 pandemic that is raging inside prisons and jails, and the protests against police brutality and racial justice that followed Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s murders.  With some exceptions, they forgoed the sort of reforms that would have significantly emptied prisons amid the public health crisis or confronted police brutality and racial injustice in law enforcement.

Still, on other issues there was headway, and states — whose laws and policies control a lot about incarceration and criminal legal systems—set new milestones: They decriminalized drug possession, expanded and automated expungement availability, repealed life without parole for minors and the death penalty, and ended prison gerrymandering, among other measures.

Throughout the year, The Appeal: Political Report tracked bills, initiatives, and reforms relevant to mass incarceration.  Just as in 2019, here’s a review of major changes states adopted in 2020.

Jump to the sections on: the death penalty, drug policy, early release and parole, youth justice, policing, fines and fees, pretrial detention, trials and sentencing, voting rights, expungement and re-entry, prison gerrymandering — and then there’s more.