Sentencing Law and Policy

"From Warfare to Welfare: Reconceptualizing Drug Sentencing During the Opioid Crisis"

The title of this post is the title of this new article authored by Jelani Jefferson Exum now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

The War on Drugs officially began in 1971 when President Nixon decried drug abuse as “public enemy number one.”  The goal of the war rhetoric was clear — to cast drug abuse and the drug offender as dangerous adversaries of the law-abiding public, requiring military-like tactics to defeat.  Criminal sentencing would come to be the main weapon used in this pressing combat.  In continuation of the war efforts, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was passed under President Reagan, establishing a weight-based, and highly punitive, mandatory minimum sentencing approach to drug offenses that has persisted in some form for the last thirty years.  When the Act passed, crack cocaine was touted as the greatest drug threat, and crack cocaine offenders — the vast majority of whom were Black — were subjected to the harshest mandatory minimum penalties.  Like any war, the consequences of the War on Drugs has had widespread casualties, including (but not limited to) the devastation of many communities, families, and individuals; the increase in racial disparities in punishment; and fiscal catastrophe in penal systems across the country.  What the War on Drugs has not done is eradicate drug abuse in the United States.  And now, nearly fifty years after drugs became our national enemy, we have a new face of drug crime — the opioid addict.

The current Administration has recognized that “[d]rug addiction and opioid abuse are ravaging America.”  However, rather than ramping up punishment for opioid offenders through lengthier drug sentencing, in October 2017 the opioid crisis officially became a Public Health Emergency under federal law.  And while it is largely understood that this was mostly a symbolic statement with little practical effect, the rhetoric is markedly different than it was during the purported crack epidemic of the 1980s. Rather than drug offenders being the enemy, the opioid addict has been cast as the American Everyman, and the opioid addiction problem has become known as the “crisis next door” that “can affect any American, from all-state football captains to stay-at-home mothers.”

Now that the drug emergency is portrayed as destroying wholesome American communities — as opposed to poor, crime-ridden communities of color — the tone has changed from punishment toward treatment and rehabilitation.  The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has described opioid misuse and addiction as “a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social and economic welfare.”  While we are in the midst of this shift in messaging about drug addiction, it is an ideal time for drug sentencing as a whole to be reconceptualized from use as a weapon — designed to destroy — to having a public welfare agenda.  To do this it requires recasting potential drug offenders as community members, rather than enemies.  This change in perspective and approach also necessitates understanding drug crime as undeterred by incarceration.  The tasks must be to decide on a goal of drug sentencing, and to develop multifaceted approaches to address and eradicate the underlying sources of the drug problem.  When this is done, we may find that more appropriate purposes of punishment — rehabilitation and retribution — compel us to think beyond incarceration, and certainly mandatory minimum sentencing laws, as the appropriate punishment type at all.

Terrific new Intercept series on capital punishment titled "The Condemned"

I received an email yesterday alerting me to exciting news that "The Intercept has published "The Condemned,” an investigative series by award-winning reporters Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith focused on the modern application and history of the death penalty in the United States. Here is more from the email:

The death penalty entered its “modern era” in 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new set of statutes in the landmark decision Gregg v. Georgia. This new Intercept series examines the use of capital punishment since 1976 and is partially based on an analysis of an unprecedented dataset that The Intercept began compiling in the summer of 2016, on all individuals sentenced to die in active death penalty jurisdictions during the past 43 years.

Amazingly, this data did not exist. Previously available information was often flawed, and many states either do not track this data or do so in a haphazard way. The Bureau of Justice Statistics collects demographic and other data about states’ death row populations, but Congress has blocked the public disclosure of this information.

With this new dataset, now available on GitHub, The Intercept is offering journalists, activists, lawyers, and anyone interested in the topic, a single and comprehensive resource covering the state of the death penalty as it exists in the U.S. today. .

“We limited our inquiry to active death penalty states, to focus on capital punishment as it exists today,” write Segura and Smith. “We were curious not only about who had been executed, but how many people had been removed from death row — a sizeable but largely invisible population. We wanted to see how many people had been re-sentenced, commuted, or released; how many had died awaiting execution; and how long people spent on death row. And we wanted to see who is on death row today.”

Their findings show that capital punishment remains as “arbitrary and capricious” as ever –– and “that the ‘modern” death penalty era remains animated by the same racial dynamics that have always defined capital punishment,” writes Segura.

The series’s four initial stories have been written by reporters Jordan Smith and Liliana Segura: in “Counting the Condemned,” Segura and Smith outline the many ways in which capital punishment has failed as a policy, particularly in its racism, arbitrary application and failure to deliver on claims of public safety.

“The Abolitionists,” also bylined by Segura and Smith, show how the abolition of the death penalty has become a bipartisan issue — and a national movement;

“The Power to Kill,” by Jordan Smith, looks at the pushback against Florida State Attorney Aramis Ayala after she determined that capital punishment is an unjust practice;

and “Death and Texas,” by Liliana Segura, shows that racial disparities on the Texas death row have increased even as death sentences decline.

"Race and Class: A Randomized Experiment with Prosecutors"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new research just published in the December 2019 issue of the Journal of Empirical Studies and authored by Christopher Robertson, Shima Baradaran Baughman and Megan Wright.  Here is its abstract:

Disparities in criminal justice outcomes are well known, and prior observational research has shown correlations between the race of defendants and prosecutors’ decisions about how to charge and resolve cases.  Yet causation is questionable: other factors, including unobserved variation in case facts, may account for some of the disparity.  Disparities may also be driven by socioeconomic class differences, which are highly correlated with race.  This article presents the first blinded, randomized controlled experiment that tests for race and class effects in prosecutors’ charging decisions.

Case vignettes are manipulated between subjects in five conditions to test effcts of defendants’ race and class status.  In the control condition, race and class are omitted, which allows baseline measures for bias and pilot testing of a blinding reform.  Primary outcome variables included whether the prosecutor charged a felony, whether the prosecutor would pursue a fine or imprisonment, and the amounts thereof.  With 467 actual prosecutors participating nationwide, we found that race and class did not have detectable prejudicial effects on prosecutorial decisions.  This finding, contrary to the majority of observational studies, suggests that other causes drive known disparities in criminal justice outcomes.

Council on Criminal Justice releases new report on "Trends in Correctional Control by Race and Sex"

This morning the Council on Criminal Justice released this interesting new report detailing notable modern changes in the modern demographics of prison, jail, probaton, and parole populatons.  Like all good data-driven reports, this one defies easy summary, and so I will just here reprint the report's page of "Key Findings":

• From 2000 to 2016, racial and ethnic disparites declined across prison, jail, probaton, and parole populatons in the U.S. For example, the black-white state imprisonment disparity fell from 8.3-to-1 to 5.1-to-1, and the Hispanic-white parole disparity fell from 3.6-to-1 to 1.4-to-1.i

• Black-white disparites in state imprisonment rates fell across all major crime categories. The largest drop was for drug ofenses.  In 2000, black people were imprisoned for drug crimes at 15 tmes the rate of whites; by 2016, that rato was just under 5-to-1.

• Among women, the black-white disparity in imprisonment fell from 6-to-1 to 2-to-1, a sharper decrease than the decline among men. The disparity among women fell because of an increase in the imprisonment rate for whites for violent, property, and drug crimes, and a decrease in the imprisonment of black women for drug crimes.

• The change in the black-white male imprisonment disparity occurred as the number of black men in state prisons declined by more than 48,000 (to about 504,000) and the number of white men increased by more than 59,000 (to roughly 476,000). Comparatvely, the black-white female disparity decreased as the number of black women in state prison fell by more than 12,000 (to about 24,000) and the number of white women increased by nearly 25,000 (to about 60,000).

• Reported ofending rates of blacks for rape, robbery, and aggravated assault declined by an average of 3% per year between 2000 and 2016, decreases that contributed to a drop in the black imprisonment rate for these crimes. This decrease was ofset in part by an increase in the expected tme to be served upon admission, which increased for both blacks and whites.

• Hispanic-white disparites in all four correctonal populatons have narrowed steadily since 2000. For Hispanics and whites on probaton, the data showed no disparity in rates by 2016.

For some context and perspectives on the report, the Marshall Project has this new piece headlined "The Growing Racial Disparity in Prison Time: A new study finds black people are staying longer in state prisons, even as they face fewer arrests and prison admissions overall."

"Pushed Out and Locked In: The Catch-22 for New York’s Disabled, Homeless, Sex-Offender Registrants"

The title of this post is the title of this new Yale Law Journal Forum piece authored by Allison Frankel. Here is its abstract:

Across New York, people are incarcerated for weeks, months, and even years after their prison release dates.  These individuals are not confined for violating prison disciplinary rules or committing new crimes. New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) detains them, instead, because they are homeless.  DOCCS refuses to release prisoners to community supervision without an approved address.  But for prisoners required to register as “sex offenders,” finding housing means navigating a web of restrictions that are levied exclusively on people convicted of sex crimes and that dramatically constrain housing options, particularly in densely populated New York City. These restrictions amount to effective banishment for registrants with disabilities, who face added obstacles to finding medically appropriate housing and are barred even from New York City’s homeless-shelter system.

As this Essay explores, the State of New York, and particularly New York City, pushes its poor, disabled sex-offender registrants into homelessness, and then prolongs registrants’ detention because of their homeless status.  This detention regime continues unabated, despite studies showing that sex-offender recidivism rates are actually relatively low and that residency restrictions do not demonstrably prevent sex offenses.  Rather, such laws consign registrants to homelessness, joblessness, and social isolation.  It does not have to be this way. This Essay suggests litigation strategies to challenge the prolonged detention of homeless registrants on statutory and constitutional grounds.  The Essay also offers policy solutions to improve New York City registrants’ access to housing and to untether an individual’s housing status from their access to liberty.  New York simply cannot and should not continue both to restrict registrants’ housing options and to detain individuals because they are homeless.

New Jersey commission releases big report recommending numerous big sentencing reforms

As reported in this local article from New Jersey, an "advisory panel that was reinvigorated by Gov. Phil Murphy to study racial and ethnic disparities in the state criminal justice system issued its report Thursday, calling for the elimination of mandatory sentences for those convicted of nonviolent drug and property crimes." Here is more:

The 13-member New Jersey Criminal Sentencing and Disposition Commission — chaired by retired state Supreme Court Justice Deborah Poritz — also recommended that those still incarcerated under such sentences be allowed to apply for early release. In addition, the group is urging lawmakers to adopt a new mitigating sentencing factor for young offenders, as well as a “compassionate release” program for those sentenced to terms of 30 years or more as juveniles.

The commission, which includes designees of senior lawmakers on both political parties, reached its conclusions unanimously, according to the report. “The Commission’s recommendations … reflect a consensus-driven, policy making process that incorporates a wide range of perspectives, including those of judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, community stakeholders, corrections officials, faith organizations, and victims’ rights advocates,” the report reads.

Murphy on Thursday hailed the work of the commission, and urged the Legislature to put the reforms into bills during the current lame duck session, noting that he will sign them. “This is a comprehensive set of reforms. They will ensure the criminal justice system not only works, but works better and for all communities,” he said. “They meet the call of justice but also our broader goal of fairness.”  State Senate President Steve Sweeney called the recommendations in the report “a long-time overdue.”...

The commission was initially created by Gov. Jon Corzine a decade ago, but his successor, Chris Christie, never made any appointments and the group did not meet. Murphy jump-started the effort in February of last year, a month after he took office, noting that New Jersey “has the nation’s worst disparity in the rates of incarceration between black and white offenders” and that, “We can and must do better.”

The report also recommends a loosening of sentencing restrictions for two more serious crimes, second-degree robbery and second-degree burglary, which currently fall in a classification alongside offenses like murder, carjacking and aggravated arson. According to the report, both offenses are frequently charged even though they incorporate a broad range of conduct, including that which results in no physical injury to the victim.

Under the commission’s recommendation, the period of parole ineligibility for those convicted of such crimes would be reduced to half the sentence, down from the current 85%. The commission said it hoped its recommendations would “replicate the success” of the state’s recent bail reform initiative, in which monetary bail was largely replaced by an assessment of whether someone charged with a crime was likely to show up in court or be a danger to the community if released.

This press release from the Office of Gov Murphy includes supportive quotes from all sorts of state political and criminal justice leaders. I am eager to believe that the widespread support for the work of this state commission increases greatly the likelihood that some or all of its recommendations will become law.

The NJ commission's full report is available at this link, and it is a worthwhile read in full.  Here is the report's "Summary of Recommendations":

1. Eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug crimes.

2. Eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent property crimes.

3. Reduce the mandatory minimum sentence for two crimes – second degree robbery and second degree burglary – that previously have been subject to penalties associated with far more serious offenses.

4. Apply Recommendations #1, #2 and #3 retroactively so that current inmates may seek early release.

5. Create a new mitigating sentencing factor for youth.

6. Create an opportunity for resentencing or release for offenders who were juveniles at the time of their offense and were sentenced as adults to long prison terms.

7. Create a program, called “Compassionate Release,” that replaces the existing medical parole statute for end-of-life inmates.

8. Reinvest cost-savings from reductions in the prison population arising from these reforms into recidivism reduction and, to the extent available, other crime prevention programs.

9. Provide funding to upgrade the Department of Corrections’ existing data infrastructure to better track inmate trends and to develop partnerships with academic institutions to analyze this data.

"The Effect of Scaling Back Punishment on Racial Disparities in Criminal Case Outcomes"

The title of this post is the title of this recent research paper authored by John MacDonald and Steven Raphael that I just came across.  Here is its abstract:

Research Summary

In late 2014, California voters passed Proposition 47 that redefined a set of less serious felony drug and property offenses as misdemeanors.  We examine how racial disparities in criminal court dispositions in San Francisco change in the years before (2010-2014) and after (2015-2016) the passage of Proposition 47.  We decompose racial disparities in court dispositions into components due to racial differences in offense characteristics, involvement in the criminal justice system at the time of arrest, pretrial detention, criminal history, and the residual unexplained component.  Before and after Proposition 47 case characteristics explain nearly all of the observable race disparities in court dispositions. However, after the passage of Proposition 47 there is a narrowing of racial disparities in convictions and incarceration sentences that is driven by lesser weight placed on criminal history, active criminal justice status, and pretrial detention in effecting court dispositions.

Policy Implications

The findings from this study suggest that policy reforms that scale back the severity of punishment for criminal history and active criminal justice status for less serious felony offenses may help narrow racial inequalities in criminal court dispositions.  Efforts to reduce the impact of racial inequalities in mass incarceration in other states should consider reforms that reduce the weight that criminal history, pretrial detention, and active probation status has on criminal defendants’ eligibility for prison for less serious drug and property offenses.

"Taking a second look at life imprisonment"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable new Boston Globe commentary authored by Nancy Gertner and Marc Mauer. Here are excerpts:

While there has been a great deal of attention in recent years to the impact of the drug war on growing prison populations, in fact, the main drivers of the prison system now are excessive sentences for violent offenses.

The statistics are troubling.  There are as many individuals [in Massachusetts] serving life sentences as the entire state prison population in 1970, and more than half are black or Latino. Of the 2,000 lifers in the state, about half are not eligible for parole.  Barring executive clemency, they will die in prison after spending decades behind bars.

Since 90 percent of lifers nationally have been convicted of serious violent crimes, supporters of lifelong incarceration argue that incapacitating such people is an effective crime-control mechanism.  In fact, it is the opposite: It is counterproductive for public safety.

Criminologists know that individuals “age out” of crime.  Any parent of a teenager understands that misbehavior, often serious, is all too common at this stage.  FBI arrest data show that the rate of arrest for teenage boys rises sharply from the mid-teen years through the early 20s but then declines significantly. Arrests for robbery, for example, peak at age 19 but decline by more than half by age 30 and by three-quarters by age 40. The same is true for other violent crimes.

The reason is clear.  As teenage boys enter their 20s, they lose their impulsivity, get jobs, find life partners, form families, and generally take on adult roles.  Violent behavior becomes less attractive.

For public safety purposes incarcerating people past age 40 produces diminishing returns for crime control; less and less crime is prevented by incapacitation each year.  This impact is magnified by resource tradeoffs.  National estimates for the cost of incarcerating an elderly person are at least $60,000 a year, in large part due to the need for health care.  With finite public safety resources, these costs are not available to invest in family and community support for the new cohort of teenagers, for whom proactive initiatives could lower the risk of antisocial behavior.

Legislation introduced by Representative Jay Livingstone of Boston and Senator Joe Boncore of Winthrop, along with 34 cosponsors, would help to ameliorate this problem in Massachusetts.  Under the bill’s “second look” provision, individuals serving life without parole would be eligible for a parole review after serving 25 years....

Recently, there has been a bipartisan critique of the effects of mass incarceration, particularly on low-income communities of color.  State policy makers across the country are exploring ways to reduce excessive prison populations without adverse effects on public safety.  The proposed “second look” provision offers one significant alternative.  It should be passed.

US Sentencing Commission releases updated "First Step Act of 2018 Resentencing Provisions Retroactivity Data Report"

Late week the US Sentencing Commission released this updated new version of its data report titled "First Step Act of 2018 Resentencing Provisions Retroactivity Data Report."  The introduction to the report provides this context and overview:

On December 21, 2018, the President signed into law the First Step Act of 2018.  Section 404 of that act provides that any defendant sentenced before the effective date of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (August 3, 2010) who did not receive the benefit of the statutory penalty changes made by that Act is eligible for a sentence reduction as if Sections 2 and 3 of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 were in effect at the time the offender was sentenced.  The First Step Act authorizes the defendant, the Director of the Bureau of Prisons, the attorney for the Government, or the court to make a motion to reduce an offender’s sentence.

The data in this report represents information concerning motions for a reduced sentence pursuant to Section 404 of the First Step Act which the courts have granted. The data in this report reflects all motions granted through September 30, 2019 and for which court documentation was received, coded, and edited at the Commission by October 23, 2019.

These new data from the USSC show that 1,987 prisoners have been granted sentence reductions, and that the average sentence reduction was 70 months of imprisonment among those cases in which the the resulting term of imprisonment could be determined.   Though this data is not exact and may not be complete, it still seems sound to state that this part of the FIRST STEP Act, by shortening nearly 2000 sentences by nearly 6 years, has now resulted in nearly 12,000 prison years saved.

Of course, as I have noted before, the FSA retroactivity provision of the FIRST STEP Act was only a small piece of the legislation.  But these latest data show yet again how this small piece has had big impact in lots of years of lots of lives.  And, of course, people of color have been distinctly impacted: the USSC data document that over 91% of persons receiving FSA sentence reductions were Black and more than another 4% were Latinx.

"The Case for Race-Based Sentencing"

The title of this post is the headline of this new Vice piece discussing an interesting sentencing issues being engaged by Canadian courts. The subheadline of the piece summarizes the essentials: "In a case that could change how judges punish Black people, Ontario's top court will soon decide how much systemic racism should be taken into account when sentencing." Here are excerpts (links from original):

[W]hen [Kevin] Morris was convicted of possessing a loaded gun, his first offence, Ontario Superior Court Justice Shaun Nakatsuru decided to reduce his sentence from four years to 15 months, noting the systemic disadvantages Morris faced in his life as a Black man growing up in Toronto.  Morris’s sentence was further reduced to one year because police interrogated him after he had requested a lawyer.

To help make his decision, Nakatsuru used a cultural assessment of Morris, written by a clinical social worker and consisting of interviews and data that gave insight on him.  In his judgment, Nakatsuru wrote, “You began to notice how many were dying in your neighbourhood. Dying of violence. You did not have a lot of options. You decided you would live with it. That you would survive. Yet at the same time, you felt hopelessness.”

But in the spring the Crown will challenge that decision in the Court of Appeal, arguing that the judge was too lenient in his decision. If Morris wins, it could set a precedent for the use of cultural assessments in sentencing....

Nana Yanful, a lawyer for the Black Legal Action Centre, one of the 14 interveners on Morris’s appeal case, says that Morris’s case gives courts a chance to address the circumstances of Black offenders. She says the courts should stop asking if race can be a reason for leniency, and start to ask, if the offender wasn’t Black, how likely is it that they would be involved with the criminal justice system?

Judges in Canada already consider personal circumstances such as mental health, age, and past criminal record when sentencing an offender. Since 1999 judges have been legally obliged to consider the systemic disadvantages Indigenous offenders experienced before sentencing.

This is called the Gladue principle, and came into effect after a Cree woman pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was handed a three-year prison sentence. The Crown requested a conditional sentence, due to the offender’s history of substance abuse and lack of education. The judge did not grant the request, since she was off reserve at the time of the murder.

But after the case went to the Supreme Court, and the sentencing decision was upheld, the court clarified a section of the Criminal Code that would allow judges to recommend restorative justice measures for Indigenous offenders, such as reduced sentencing.

There is no similar principle for Black offenders, who make up 9 percent of the federal prison population, even though Black people only represent 3.5 percent of the population. The Office of Correctional Investigators reported a 69 percent increase of Black inmates between 2005 and 2015. While lawyers and judges can request cultural assessments, it’s up to the presiding judge to decide if it’s appropriate based on the circumstances of the case.

In Nova Scotia there has been a growing trend of judges considering cultural assessments in sentencing Black offenders. In one notable Nova Scotia Supreme Court case, Honourable Justice Jamie Campbell reviewed the cultural assessment of an African Indigenous man convicted of second-degree murder, before sentencing him to life in prison in 2017. Although the cultural assessment did not lead to a lighter sentence, it prompted “a judge to struggle with difficult questions for which there may not really be entirely clear answers,” the decision stated.

“That is why the cultural assessment is both a fascinating and a challenging document,” Campbell wrote in his judgment. “It provides information that makes it harder, not easier, to reach a conclusion. That is a good thing. The challenge comes from acknowledging the role that race plays in the prevalence of violent crime among young African Nova Scotian men while not falling into racist traps.”

Nova Scotia has been collecting data for cultural assessments since 2016, with 20 total requests. And requests have been increasing: In 2018 there were five requests for cultural assessments, while 11 have been requested so far this year.

A defence win in Morris’s case would set the same standard in Ontario, and also affect the disproportionate rate of incarcerated Black people in Canada. “What we’ve been doing so far isn’t working. The disproportionate impact is leading to a disproportionate outcome,” Yanful said. “So let’s take a step back and see what the sentencing court, and what the criminal justice system can do to be able to address this issue meaningfully.”

"Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019"

The Prison Policy Initiative continues to do an amazing job with updated accounts of the "whole pie" of different aspects of the US criminal justice system, and today's latest report is this updated version of an accounting of women who are incarcerated in the United States.  Here is part of the report's introductory text:

With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women’s experience with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? And why are they there? How is their experience different from men’s? While these are important questions, finding those answers requires not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal justice systems, but also unearthing the frustratingly hard to find and often altogether missing data on gender.

This report provides a detailed view of the 231,000 women and girls incarcerated in the United States, and how they fit into the even broader picture of correctional control. We pull together data from a number of government agencies and calculates the breakdown of women held by each correctional system by specific offense. The report, produced in collaboration with the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, answers the questions of why and where women are locked up...

In stark contrast to the total incarcerated population, where the state prison systems hold twice as many people as are held in jails, more incarcerated women are held in jails than in state prisons. As we will explain, the outsized role of jails has serious consequences for incarcerated women and their families.

Women’s incarceration has grown at twice the pace of men’s incarceration in recent decades, and has disproportionately been located in local jails. The data needed to explain exactly what happened, when, and why does not yet exist, not least because the data on women has long been obscured by the larger scale of men’s incarceration. Frustratingly, even as this report is updated every year, it is not a direct tool for tracking changes in women’s incarceration over time because we are forced to rely on the limited sources available, which are neither updated regularly nor always compatible across years.

Particularly in light of the scarcity of gender-specific data, the disaggregated numbers presented here are an important step to ensuring that women are not left behind in the effort to end mass incarceration.

"We've Normalized Prison: The carceral state and its threat to democracy"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new Washington Post commentary authored by Piper Kerman.  I recommend the full piece (which is part of this new Prison issue in the Post's magazine), and here are excerpts:

The reach of the American criminal punishment systems stretches to clutch far more people than many imagine.  I know this not only from being incarcerated, but also from teaching nonfiction writing classes in state prisons.  My students’ stories bravely reveal difficult personal truths and bring to light much wider realities in a way that only lived experience really can.  What incarcerated writers’ voices illustrate is that the American criminal justice system does not solve the problems — violence, mental illness, addiction — that it claims to address....

Indeed, far from solving our problems, the carceral state is causing a massive one: A nation that locks up so many people and creates an expansive apparatus that relies on violence and confinement is a nation in which democracy, over the long term, cannot thrive.  For centuries, the U.S. political economy has relied on millions being sidelined from democratic participation, most notably African Americans and, before 1920, women.  Violence, in the form of lynching, was always important to limit democracy in this country (and agents of law enforcement were often complicit).  As we near 2020, civic exclusion is still a critical tool for those invested in preserving an inequitable status quo, and the policies surrounding mass incarceration are invaluable for continuing to deny participation to millions of Americans.

Last year, the citizens of Florida voted to amend the state constitution to allow people like me, with felony convictions, to regain the right to vote after returning home.  Quickly and shamelessly, the Florida legislature and governor responded by passing a poll tax to prevent those voters — disproportionately people of color and poor people — from having a voice.  Many other states also restrict voting rights of prisoners or ex-prisoners, especially states with large African American populations — not a coincidence, as they remain overly targeted and punished by the criminal justice system.  As a result, we have not only normalized prison but normalized the exclusion of large groups of people from participating in our democracy....

Freedom and safety are too often imagined as being in opposition, but nothing could be further from the truth. Americans who have the most freedom — freedom to learn, freedom from illness, freedom of movement, freedom from violence — are invariably the safest, and the whitest, and the richest.  We did this to ourselves: Mass incarceration is a result of policies that have grown out of a history of slavery, colonialism and punishment of the poor.  Until we reconcile with these hard truths, by listening to the people most affected by the loss of freedom, we will fall far short of equity. We have a choice: We can permit injustice to remain a growth industry or we can elect to have a more fair, restorative and effective system.  And this isn’t an abstract choice — it is one you will make today, and tomorrow, and next week. Ending mass incarceration is imperative for democracy, safety and freedom.  Do you see what is happening in your own community?  And are you ready to do your part?

Philadelphia Inquirer provides detailed coverage of "The Probation Trap"

The local paper in the City of Brotherly Love has this important new series highlighting that the Keystone State is not very loving when it comes to how it treats people caught up in community supervision. The series is titled "The Probation Trap" and here is the subheading for the coverage: "Pennsylvania has one of the nation's highest rates of supervision, driven by unusual laws that leave judges unchecked.  But many people fail, ending up in jail or in a cycle of ever more probation." 

Here is some of the introduction explaining "The Problem with Probation":

In Pennsylvania, as across the country, crime rates have fallen to their lowest point in decades. But over that same time, the rate of incarceration in Pennsylvania state prisons and county jails nearly quadrupled, while the number on probation or parole also grew almost four times larger, to 290,000 people.

Counting jail, prison, probation, and parole, Pennsylvania now has the nation’s second-highest rate of people under correctional control. Probation and parole account for three-quarters of that — a phenomenon critics of mass incarceration call “mass supervision.”

Nationwide, one in 55 adults is on probation or parole. In Pennsylvania, that’s one in 35 adults. In Philadelphia: one in 23 adults.

African American adults in Philadelphia are disproportionately impacted. One in 14 is under supervision. Philadelphia’s county supervision rate is the highest of any big city — and 12 times the rate of New York City. ‍

What’s driving this? To find answers, we watched hundreds of hearings, interviewed scores of people, and analyzed 700,000 case dockets from 2012 to 2018.

What we found is a system virtually ungoverned by law or policy, resulting in wildly disparate versions of justice from one courtroom to the next.

We found a system that routinely punishes poverty, mental illness, and addiction. We met a woman who was jailed two months for failing to report to probation because she wasn’t permitted to bring her newborn child and couldn’t afford a babysitter. We met a man who was locked up because he didn’t have $227 to pay for a court-ordered drug evaluation.

As a result, some people remain under court control for years after being convicted of low-level crimes, resentenced two, three, four, or five times over for infractions including missing appointments, falling behind on payments, or testing positive for marijuana. Probation and parole violations are flooding the court system, filling city jails and driving up state prison populations.

Many other states, recognizing similar problems, have reformed their systems. Can Pennsylvania?

Here are the main articles in the series:

"Living in Fear:  Probation is meant to keep people out of jail. But intense monitoring leaves tens of thousands across the state at risk of incarceration."

"Judges Rule: When it comes to probation, Pennsylvania has left judges unchecked to impose wildly different versions of justice."

"Punishing Addiction: Courts recognize substance-use disorder is a disease. Yet some judges continue punishing relapse with ever-longer probation and even prison."

"Tipping the Scales: Challengers Take On the Old Boys' Club of Elected Prosecutors"

The title of this post is the title of this interesting short report from the Reflective Democracy Campaign. Here is how it gets started:

After someone gets arrested, a prosecutor holds the power over what happens next.  Charge the defendant, or release them?  Charge them with a felony, or a misdemeanor? Since the vast majority of cases don’t go to trial, it’s mostly prosecutors — not judges — who determine whether defendants go to prison and for how long.  In the words of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, a prosecutor “has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America.”

In 2014, as a prosecutor in Ferguson failed to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown, we were conducting our historic study of the race and gender of prosecutors. What we found made headlines:  95% of prosecutors were white, and 79% were white men.  Perhaps most alarming, most prosecutors ran for office unopposed, leading to an entrenched status quo which is highly resistant to bipartisan calls for criminal justice reform.

With race and gender inequality baked into the criminal justice system, repairing the broken demographics of prosecutorial power is an urgent goal, and the data are clear:When voters have a choice, they reject the white male status quo.  Competitive elections for prosecutor can fix the demographic crisis and level the playing field for system reform.

Five years after our initial analysis of elected prosecutors, we returned to see how their demographics have — and haven’t— changed.  Here’s what we found:

White control of elected prosecutor positions has not changed: In 2015, prosecutors were 95% white. In 2019, they are still 95% white.

The gender (im)balance of elected prosecutors is changing: While nearly 75% of prosecutors are white men, women have increased at a rate of 34% since 2015, from 18% to 24% of prosecutors.

Change is possible — when there is competition: Prosecutors run unopposed 80% of the time, but in competitive races, the old boys' club starts to give away. White male over-representation is rampant, but not unsolvable.

When women of all races and men ofcolor run for prosecutor in competitive elections, they're more likely to win than white men: In competitive 2018 elections, white men were 69% of candidates, but only 59% of winners. Women and people of color were 31% of candidates and 41% of winners.

Despite overall low numbers, women of color are making notable gains: There are nearly 50% more women of color prosecutors today as in 2015.

"Equal Protection Under Algorithms: A New Statistical and Legal Framework"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper authored by Crystal Yang and Will Dobbie now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

In this paper, we provide a new statistical and legal framework to understand the legality and fairness of predictive algorithms under the Equal Protection Clause.  We begin by reviewing the main legal concerns regarding the use of protected characteristics such as race and the correlates of protected characteristics such as criminal history.  The use of race and non-race correlates in predictive algorithms generates direct and proxy effects of race, respectively, that can lead to racial disparities that many view as unwarranted and discriminatory.  These effects have led to the mainstream legal consensus that the use of race and non-race correlates in predictive algorithms is both problematic and potentially unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.  This mainstream position is also reflected in practice, with all commonly-used predictive algorithms excluding race and many excluding non-race correlates such as employment and education.

In the second part of the paper, we challenge the mainstream legal position that the use of a protected characteristic always violates the Equal Protection Clause.  We first develop a statistical framework that formalizes exactly how the direct and proxy effects of race can lead to algorithmic predictions that disadvantage minorities relative to non-minorities.  While an overly formalistic legal solution requires exclusion of race and all potential non-race correlates, we show that this type of algorithm is unlikely to work in practice because nearly all algorithmic inputs are correlated with race.  We then show that there are two simple statistical solutions that can eliminate the direct and proxy effects of race, and which are implementable even when all inputs are correlated with race.  We argue that our proposed algorithms uphold the principles of the Equal Protection doctrine because they ensure that individuals are not treated differently on the basis of membership in a protected class, in stark contrast to commonly-used algorithms that unfairly disadvantage minorities relative to non-minorities despite the exclusion of race.

We conclude by empirically testing our proposed algorithms in the context of the New York City pretrial system.  We show that nearly all commonly-used algorithms violate the spirit of the Equal Protection Clause by including variables that are correlated with race, generating substantial proxy effects that unfairly disadvantage blacks relative to whites. Both of our proposed algorithms substantially reduce the number of black defendants detained compared to these commonly-used algorithms by eliminating these proxy effects. These findings suggest a fundamental rethinking of the Equal Protection doctrine as it applies to predictive algorithms and the folly of relying on commonly-used algorithms.

Another update on Chicago "stash-house sting" litigation showcasing feds ugly drug war tactics

Via a series of posts last year, I was able to report updates from Alison Siegler, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the University of Chicago Law School's Federal Criminal Justice Clinic, concerning the extraordinary litigation her clinic has done in response to so-called "stash house stings" in which federal agents lure defendants into seeking to rob a (non-existent) drug stash-house.  In this 2017 post, I highlighted this lengthy Chicago Tribune article, headlined "ATF sting operation accused of using racial bias in finding targets, with majority being minorities," on this topic. 

I now see that the Chicago Tribune has this new lengthy article, headlined "Convicted in a controversial stash house sting operation, Leslie Mayfield is struggling to rebuild his life after prison." which focuses on one stash-house defendant while also telling the broader stories of these cases.  I recommend the new Tribune article in full, and here are excerpts:

Leslie Mayfield wasn’t used to entering a courtroom except in shackles.  Over the years, through his trial for conspiring to rob a drug stash house, his sentencing to a decades-long prison term and his long-shot fight to overturn his conviction on entrapment grounds, Mayfield had always been escorted into court by deputy U.S. marshals from a lockup in back....

But recently, he took a seat in U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang’s courtroom gallery, whispering to his attorney that it all felt strange as he waited for his name to be called....  Reviewing reports on Mayfield’s progress, Chang noted that since his release from prison, he’d found a job, reconnected with his family and maintained a strong motive to stay straight.  Then the judge made the transformation official, agreeing that Mayfield, 51, no longer needed court supervision.

The ruling marked a quiet milestone in the widely criticized sting operations in which the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives used informants to lure unsuspecting targets into a scheme to rob drug stash houses — an undercover ruse concocted by the government.

For years, the stings were considered a smashing success, touted as a law enforcement tool to remove dangerous criminals from the streets.  But the practice came under fire in 2014 when attorneys for the University of Chicago Law School mounted a legal challenge on behalf of nearly four dozen Chicago-area defendants alleging the stings disproportionately targeted African Americans and Hispanics.

Both the ATF and the U.S. attorney’s office staunchly defended the operations in court, saying they followed rigorous guidelines to ensure the stings were lawful.  While the legal effort to prove racial discrimination fell short, the tactics drew sharp rebukes from many judges.  Prosecutors began quietly dismissing the more serious charges, and over the next year or so, most of the defendants — including Mayfield — were sentenced to time served.

As the first to be cleared of all court supervision, Mayfield could be viewed as a success story, but he’s struggled in many ways.  Like so many ex-cons, Mayfield is learning how hard it can be to rebuild his life after prison. He also continues to fight guilt over the plight of his brother and cousin — both of whom he recruited into the scheme and are still serving decadeslong prison sentences....

The outlines of each stash house sting followed the same basic pattern: ATF informants identified people they believed would commit a drug-related robbery.  If the target met certain criteria — including a violent criminal background — agents approved the sting.

The elaborate operations included a fake stash house location, fictitious amounts of money and drugs, and other made-up details of a robbery plot.  An undercover agent posing as a disgruntled drug dealer followed a script aimed at convincing the target to agree on secret recordings to take part in the robbery, pledge to bring guns — and use them if necessary.

Since agents claimed that massive quantities of drugs were involved, the prosecutions often carried eye-popping sentences, sometimes even life behind bars.  Nearly all the targets, though, turned out to be African American or Hispanic — many of whom had minimal criminal histories....

Mayfield was convicted at trial in 2010 and handed a 27-year sentence.  His brother, with only a nonviolent drug conviction in his past, and his cousin both were given 25-year prison terms.

In 2014, the University of Chicago’s Federal Criminal Justice Clinic led an effort to have charges against 43 defendants dismissed on grounds that the cases were racially biased.  In a landmark hearing in December 2017, nine federal judges overseeing the cases heard testimony from dueling experts on policing who came to dramatically different conclusions.

The U.S. attorney’s office denied that the stings disproportionately affected minorities, arguing that targets were selected by their propensity for violence, not race.  For instance, while out on bond, two men facing stash house-related indictments were charged in separate shootings, including the wounding of a Chicago police officer.

But many judges overseeing the cases had clear concerns that the ends did not justify the means.  In a decision that wasn’t binding but served as a guide for other judges, then-U.S. District Chief Judge Ruben Castillo said the stings shared an ugly racial component and should “be relegated to the dark corridors of our past.”

While Castillo stopped short of dismissing the case before him, his 2018 ruling had a ripple effect.  At the urging of Castillo and other judges, the U.S. attorney’s office began offering plea deals and dropping counts that involved stiff mandatory minimum sentences.

The results were startling. While many of the 43 defendants faced mandatory sentences of 15 to 35 years in prison if convicted, 32 instead were released with sentences of time served after pleading guilty to lesser charges.  Most of the others received prison terms that were significantly below federal sentencing guidelines.

While the cases hadn’t been thrown out of court, Alison Siegler, the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic’s founder, noted in an April report to the 7th Circuit Bar Association that "the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the ATF have entirely stopped bringing stash house cases in Chicago, even as those cases continue to be prosecuted elsewhere in the country.”

Some prior related posts:

• Deep dive into litigation over Chicago “Stash House Stings”
• Guest post series on Chicago "stash-house sting" litigation: Part 1 on "Sentencing Victories"
• Guest post series on Chicago "stash-house sting" litigation: Part 2 on "Legal Victories"
• Guest post series on Chicago "stash-house sting" litigation: Part 3 on "A Path for Future Litigation" 

"The Eighth Amendment Power to Discriminate"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Kathryn Miller now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

For the last half-century, Supreme Court doctrine has required that capital jurors consider facts and characteristics particular to individual defendants when determining their sentences.  While liberal justices have long touted this individualized sentencing requirement as a safeguard against unfair death sentences, in practice the results have been disappointing.  The expansive discretion that the requirement confers on overwhelmingly white juries has resulted in outcomes that are just as arbitrary and racially discriminatory as those that existed in the years before the temporary abolition of the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia.

While an examination of individualized sentencing is overdue, the solution is not to jettison the requirement, but instead to permit states to channel juror discretion.  This Article is the first to contend that states may achieve the goals of individualized sentencing, not by expanding juror discretion to consider mitigation evidence, but, counterintuitively, by narrowing it.  It proposes that states employ specific jury instructions that (1) require jurors to consider certain types of evidence as legally mitigating, (2) address the historically racist application of the death penalty, and (3) permit unfettered discretion solely in the direction of leniency.  Channeling and redirecting discretion will minimize racist and arbitrary outcomes and realize true individualized sentencing.

Prez candidate Beto O'Rourke proposes "Drug War Justice Grants" funding by marijuana tax revenues

As reported in this Hill piece,"President hopeful Beto O'Rourke on Thursday unveiled a plan to legalize marijuana and end the war on drugs." Here are the basics:

The former Texas congressman would grant clemency to those currently serving sentences for marijuana possession, establish a model for marijuana legalization and give grants to those affected by the war on drugs to help them benefit from the new industry.

The “Drug War Justice Grants” would be given to those formerly incarcerated for nonviolent marijuana offenses in state and federal prison. Licenses to produce, distribute, or sell marijuana would be funneled to minority-owned businesses and fees would be waived for low-income individuals who had previously been convicted of related offenses.

“We need to not only end the prohibition on marijuana, but also repair the damage done to the communities of color disproportionately locked up in our criminal justice system or locked out of opportunity because of the War on Drugs,” O'Rourke said in a statement.

This page on the O'Rourke campaign website provides some background and details, and here are excerpts focused on criminal justice matters:

In January 2009, Beto O’Rourke, one of the youngest members of the El Paso City Council, introduced a longshot resolution calling for an “honest, open national debate” on ending the prohibition of marijuana.... To Beto’s surprise, the resolution passed unanimously. But the mayor vetoed the resolution later that day....

In 2011, Beto published the book Dealing Death and Drugs: The Big Business of Dope in the U.S. and Mexico: An Argument for Ending the Prohibition of Marijuana. Long before the legalization of marijuana was overwhelmingly popular with the American public, Beto laid out his case for ending the decades-long prohibition on marijuana and repairing the damage done to the communities of color that are disproportionately impacted....

The War on Drugs has been catastrophic for communities of color, and our policy toward marijuana has been particularly egregious. Despite similar rates of use, African-Americans are almost 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people. Yet, a 2017 survey of marijuana business owners in states allowing them found that only 19% identified as non-white. These statistics tell the story of marijuana laws in our country, where certain communities have been subjected to over-policing and criminalization while others are being presented lucrative business opportunities. Beto is committed to rewriting this story and rectifying the harm caused by decades of unjust marijuana policy.

As President, Beto will:

Legalize Marijuana...

Use clemency power to release those currently serving sentences for marijuana possession and establish a review board to determine whether others currently serving sentences related to marijuana should be released;

Expunge the records of those who have been convicted for possession and prevent the conviction from precluding these individuals from accessing housing, employment, education, and federal benefits, or from having their driver’s licenses suspended;...

Remove cannabis-related charges as grounds for deportation or denial of citizenship. The Trump Administration has explicitly targeted those with marijuana possession convictions for deportation, even though marijuana has been legalized in 11 states and the District of Columbia.

Invest revenue from the marijuana industry in communities impacted by the War on Drugs through “Drug War Justice Grants” and Equitable Licensing Programs....

To guarantee that opportunities to profit from a regulated marijuana market are made available to communities disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs, Beto will:

Call for a federal tax on the marijuana industry, revenue from which will be used to:

Provide a monthly “Drug War Justice Grant” to those formerly incarcerated for nonviolent marijuana offenses in state and federal prison for a period based on time served. The grants will be funded completely by the tax on the marijuana industry.

Fund substance use treatment programs.

Support re-entry services for those who have been incarcerated for possession.

Invest in communities disproportionately impacted by marijuana arrests, including investments in housing and employment support, substance use and mental health treatment, peer and recovery support services, life skills training, victims’ services.

Support those disproportionately impacted by marijuana arrests, including those who have been convicted of marijuana possession themselves in participating in the marijuana businesses by providing technical assistance, industry-specific training, access to interest free/low-interest loans, and access to investment financing and legal services.

Ensure those most impacted by the War on Drugs are the ones benefiting from the economic activity related to marijuna.

As President, Beto will tie federal funding for criminal justice systems to requirements that states or local governments:

Waive licensing fees for producing, distributing, or selling marijuana for low-income individuals who have been convicted of marijuana offenses.

"The Democrats’ Shameful Legacy on Crime"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new New Republic piece by Marie Gottschalk.  It carries this subheadline: "Bill Clinton isn't the only one who deserves blame for turning America into a carceral state."  Here are excerpts:

For decades, a growing number of Democrats had been trying to reposition themselves as the party of law enforcement and to lure white voters away from the GOP.  With Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging Clinton to seize control of the issue by “upping the ante,” Democrats and Republicans engaged in a bidding war to see who could be the toughest and meanest sheriff in town.

The $30 billion law [known as the 1994 Crime Bill], passed 25 years ago this month, was the capstone of their efforts.  It included some modest funding for crime prevention programs, such as “midnight basketball,” but its main thrust was a vast array of punitive measures.  The crime bill funded 100,000 new police officers, established a federal three-strikes law, authorized more than $12 billion to prod states to lengthen time served and build new prisons, banned certain assault weapons, created dozens of new death penalty offenses, and ended federal educational Pell grants for inmates.  The crime bill did not significantly lower crime rates; it did, however, help transform the United States into the world’s warden, incarcerating more of its residents than any other country.

The United States has now begun a long overdue national reckoning about the bill — four years ago, Hillary Clinton faced questions about her and Bill Clinton’s complicity in mass incarceration, and Biden has also had to answer for his leading role in engineering the punitive turn taken by the Democratic Party.  But this reckoning still falls far short, partly because deep misunderstandings persist about the wider impact of the bill and other get-tough measures that built the carceral state over the last five decades.

While the Clintons and Biden are guilty as charged, they had many accomplices, some of whom were not the usual suspects.  For years, House and Senate Democrats had been pushing new legislation to curb domestic violence, but it did not come up for a floor vote until the Senate incorporated the measure into the crime bill in fall 1993.  To its credit, the Violence Against Women Act heightened public awareness of sexual assault and domestic violence and provided states and communities with important new resources for crisis centers, shelters, hotlines, and prevention programs.  But VAWA also emphasized law enforcement remedies and included measures that raised serious civil rights concerns — all with the help of many national and local organizations working against rape and domestic violence.  Many of these groups have since had second thoughts about “carceral feminism.”

During her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton claimed that the crime bill was passed with strong support from African Americans who were clamoring for tough measures to halt rising crime rates.  In reality, African Americans were deeply divided over the legislation and other criminal justice issues.  These divisions have only widened in the 25 years since then, as a new generation of “post-racial” black politicians sought to appeal to white and African American voters by castigating young black men and women as addicts, drug dealers, and common street criminals.  (In one notable example from 2011, then-Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia chastised black fathers as “sperm donors” and “doggone hoodie-wearing teens.”)  With the rise of Black Lives Matter, however, these and other activists are at last calling attention to the ways in which mass incarceration constitutes a new system of social control, one with disturbing parallels to the old Jim Crow era.

This stark reality is now a leading public issue, as it should be.  But it overshadows the deepening impact of the carceral state on other demographic groups.  The incarceration rate for white Americans — about 633 per 100,000 residents — appears relatively low compared to the rates for African Americans (3,044 per 100,000) and Hispanics (1,305 per 100,000), but it is more than ten times the national incarceration rates of certain Western European countries.  All told, half of all adults in the United States — or about 113 million people — have seen an immediate family member go to jail or prison for at least one night.

Jailed for unpaid fines almost a decade after being imprisoned for years for $31 pot sale

This new Washington Post article reminded me of a name and an ugly case from nearly a decade ago.  As the article explains, the matter has not gotten any less depressing.  The headline provides the essentials: "She got 12 years for $31 of pot. Years after her parole, she was jailed for the unpaid court fees."  Here are the dispiriting details:

Sitting in her jail cell this week, Patricia Spottedcrow couldn’t imagine where she was going to get the money she needed for her release.  In 2010, the young Oklahoma mother, who had been caught selling $31 worth of marijuana to a police informant after financial troubles caused her to lose her home, was sentenced to 12 years in prison.  It was her first-ever offense, and the lengthy sentence drew national attention, sparking a movement that led to her early release.

But once she was home free, Spottedcrow still owed thousands in court fees that she struggled to pay, since her felony conviction made it difficult to find a job.  Notices about overdue payments piled up, with late fees accumulating on top of the original fines.  On Monday, the 34-year-old was arrested on a bench warrant that required her to stay in jail until she could come up with $1,139.90 in overdue fees, which she didn’t have. Nearly a decade after her initial arrest, she was still ensnarled in the criminal justice system, and had no idea when she would see her kids again....

Back in 2011, Spottedcrow became an unwitting poster child for criminal justice reform when the Tulsa World featured her in a series about women incarcerated in Oklahoma. Then 25, she had just entered prison for the first time, and didn’t expect to be reunited with her young children until they were teenagers.

At the time of her arrest, Spottedcrow was unemployed and without a permanent home, the paper reported. She was staying at her mother’s house in the small town of Kingfisher, Okla., when a police informant showed up and bought an $11 bag of marijuana.  Two weeks later, he returned to buy another $20 worth of the drug from Spottedcrow.  Both mother and daughter were charged with distribution of a controlled substance, and, because Spottedcrow’s children were at home when the transaction took place, possession of a dangerous substance in the presence of a minor....

The two women both were offered plea deals that would have netted them only two years in prison, the World reported, but Spottedcrow didn’t want her 50-year-old mother, who has health issues, incarcerated.  Because neither had a prior criminal record and they had sold only a small amount of pot, they took their chances and pleaded guilty without negotiating a sentencing agreement, assuming they would be granted probation.

Instead, the judge sentenced Spottedcrow to 10 years in prison for the distribution charge, plus another two years for possession. Her mother received a 30-year suspended sentence so that she could take care of the children.  Kingfisher County Associate District Judge Susie Pritchett, who retired not long afterward, told the World she thought the sentence was lenient.  The mother-daughter pair had been behind “an extensive operation,” she claimed, adding, “It was a way of life for them.”

Spottedcrow said that wasn’t true.  “I’ve never been in trouble, and this is a real eye-opener,” she told the paper at the start of her prison stint.  “My lifestyle is not like this. I’m not coming back. I’m going to get out of here, be with my kids and live my life.”

After the World’s story published in 2011, supporters rallied around Spottedcrow’s cause, urging officials to reconsider her punishment.  At the time, Oklahoma had the highest per capita rate of female incarceration in the country, a title it continues to hold today.  Advocates contended that lengthy sentences like hers were part of the problem, and questioned whether racial bias could have played a role — Spottedcrow is part Native American and part African American.

That same year, a different judge reviewed Spottedcrow’s sentence and agreed to shave off four years.  Then, in 2012, then-Gov. Mary Fallin (R) approved her parole.  Spottedcrow got home in time to surprise her kids when they stepped off the school bus.  The American Civil Liberties Union described her release as a “bittersweet victory,” noting that serving only two years of a 12-year sentence was highly unusual, but the penalty that she received for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense wasn’t out of the ordinary for Oklahoma.

It also wasn’t the end of her troubles.  In 2017, five years after Spottedcrow was released from prison, Ginnie Graham, a columnist for the World, checked into see how she was doing.  The picture that she painted was dispiriting: Spottedcrow’s growing family was living in a motel off the interstate because having a felony drug conviction on her record made it virtually impossible for her to find housing, and she hadn’t been able to find work, either. “I’ve never had Section 8 or HUD, but I need it now,” she said. “I even called my (Cheyenne and Arapahoe) tribe to help, and they didn’t. I called the shelters, and they don’t take large families.”

That same year, at a forum on criminal justice reform, Spottedcrow explained that she couldn’t go back to working in nursing homes like she had done before her arrest because of her felony conviction.  And in a small town like Kingfisher, every other potential employer already knew about her legal woes....

While Spottedcrow struggled to care for her six children, the Kingfisher County Court Clerk’s Office mailed out more than a dozen notices saying she had fallen behind on her payments.  Each letter meant that the court had tacked on another $10 fine, and that another $80 would be added on top of that if the office didn’t get the money within 10 days.  When Spottedcrow first reported to prison, she owed $2,740 in fines.  After her release, she made payments at least every other month according to the World.  But it barely made an impact on her ballooning debt: When she was arrested this week, she owed $3,569.76....

Spottedcrow’s new arrest on Monday brought renewed attention to her nearly decade-old court case. KFOR morning news anchor Ali Meyer, who detailed the saga in a widely shared Twitter thread, noted that cannabis has been a booming industry in Oklahoma ever since the state legalized medical marijuana in 2018, and left it up to doctors to determine who qualified.

On Tuesday afternoon, Meyer posted the number for the Kingfisher County Court Clerk’s Office, which would allow anyone to make payments on Spottedcrow’s behalf.  By Wednesday, seven anonymous supporters had covered not just the $1,139.90 that she needed to get out of jail, but her entire $3,569.76 outstanding balance, the station reported.

Somewhere, Franz Kafka is smiling.

Prior posts on Spottedcrow's case:

• "How $31 of pot gave mom a 10-year-prison sentence"
• "Mom who sold $31 in pot seeks reduction to 12-year sentence"
• "Mom of 4 reflects on first year in prison for $31 pot sale"
• Early parole after two years' imprisonment for Oklahoma woman initially given 12 years for small pot sales 

"The Gendered Burdens of Conviction and Collateral Consequences on Employment"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper recently posted to SSRN and authored by Joni Hersch and Erin Meyers.  Here is its abstract:

Ex-offenders are subject to a wide range of employment restrictions that limit the ability of individuals with a criminal background to earn a living.  This Article argues that women involved in the criminal justice system likely suffer a greater income-related burden from criminal conviction than do men.  This disproportionate burden arises in occupations that women typically pursue, both through formal pathways, such as restrictions on occupational licensing, and through informal pathways, such as employers’ unwillingness to hire those with a criminal record.  In addition, women have access to far fewer vocational programs while incarcerated.

Further exacerbating this burden is that women involved in the criminal justice system tend to be a more vulnerable population and are more likely to be responsible for children than their male counterparts, making legal restrictions on access to public assistance that would support employment more burdensome for women.  We propose programs and policies that may ameliorate these gendered income burdens of criminal conviction, including reforms to occupational licensing, improved access to public assistance, reforms to prison labor opportunities, improvements in labor market information sharing, and expanded employer liability protection.

"Arrest, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new report from the Prison Policy Initiative authored by By Alexi Jones and Wendy Sawyer.  Here is how the report gets started:

Police and jails are supposed to promote public safety. Increasingly, however, law enforcement is called upon to respond punitively to medical and economic problems unrelated to public safety issues.  As a result, local jails are filled with people who need medical care and social services, many of whom cycle in and out of jail without ever receiving the help they need.  Conversations about this problem are becoming more frequent, but until now, these conversations have been missing three fundamental data points: how many people go to jail each year, how many return, and which underlying problems fuel this cycle.

In this report, we fill this troubling data gap with a new analysis of a federal survey, finding that at least 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed each year, and at least one in 4 of those individuals are booked into jail more than once during the same year. Our analysis shows that repeated arrests are related to race and poverty, as well as high rates of mental illness and substance use disorders.  Ultimately, we find that people who are jailed have much higher rates of social, economic, and health problems that cannot and should not be addressed through incarceration.

Terrific review of localities that are "Addicted to Fines"

The latest (and sadly the last) issue of Governing magazine has this terrific lengthy cover story fully titled "Addicted to Fines: Small towns in much of the country are dangerously dependent on punitive fines and fees." I recommend the full extended article, and here is how it gets started:

Flashing police lights are a common sight all along Interstate 75 in rural south Georgia.  On one recent afternoon in Turner County, sheriff’s deputies pulled over a vehicle heading northbound and another just a few miles up on the opposite side of the interstate.  In the small community of Norman Park, an officer was clocking cars near the edge of town. In Warwick to the north, a police cruiser waited in the middle of a five-lane throughway.

These places have one thing in common: They issue a lot of tickets, and they finance their governments by doing it.  Like many other rural jurisdictions, towns in south Georgia have suffered decades of a slow economic decline that’s left them without much of a tax base.  But they see a large amount of through-traffic from semi-trucks and Florida-bound tourists.  And they’ve grown reliant on ticketing them to meet their expenses.  “Georgia is a classic example of a place where you have these inextricable ties between the police, the town and the court,” says Lisa Foster, co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center.  “Any city that’s short on revenue is going to be tempted to use the judicial system.”

This is by no means just a Georgia phenomenon. Throughout the country, smaller cities and towns generate major dollars from different types of fines, sometimes accounting for more than half of their revenues. Some places are known for being speed traps. Others prop up their budgets using traffic cameras, parking citations or code enforcement violations.

To get a picture of just how much cities, towns and counties rely on fines and fees, Governing conducted the largest national analysis to date of fine revenues and the extent to which they fund budgets, compiling data from thousands of annual financial audits and reports filed to state agencies. 

What we found is that in hundreds of jurisdictions throughout the country, fines are used to fund a significant portion of the budget.  They account for more than 10 percent of general fund revenues in nearly 600 U.S. jurisdictions.  In at least 284 of those governments, it’s more than 20 percent.  Some other governments allocate the revenues outside the general fund.  When fine and forfeiture revenues in all funds are considered, more than 720 localities reported annual revenues exceeding $100 for every adult resident. And those numbers would be even higher if they included communities reporting less than $100,000 in fines; those jurisdictions were excluded from our analysis.  In some places, traffic fine revenue actually exceeds limits outlined in state laws.

High fine communities can be found in just about every state, but they tend to be concentrated in certain parts of the country.  Rural areas with high poverty have especially high rates.  So do places with very limited tax bases or those with independent local municipal courts.  And these jurisdictions are far more common in the South than elsewhere.  The states that stood out in our analysis were Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, plus New York.  Fines and forfeitures accounted for more than one-fifth of general revenues in the most recent financial audits for 52 localities in Georgia, and 49 in Louisiana.  By contrast, several Northeastern states with high property taxes had no localities exceeding the 10 percent threshold.

Notably, the big criminal justice reform plans released by major candidates for the Democratic Prez nomination all make brief mention of excessive fines of fees. But this Governing report provides an interesting insight into just how significant these matters can be for rural areas and their citizenry, and candidates eager to speak to the experiences of rural voters might want to give particular attention to this particular arena for needed criminal justice reforms.

"The Thirteenth Amendment: Modern Slavery, Capitalism, and Mass Incarceration"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper now available via SSRN authored by Michele Goodwin. Here is its abstract:

The Article makes two conceptual contributions.  First, it tells a story about the Thirteenth Amendment forbidding one form of slavery while legitimating and preserving others. Of course, the text does not operate absent important actors: legislatures and courts.  Yet, as explained by Reva Siegel, despite “repeated condemnation of slavery,” such united opposition to the practice "may instead function to exonerate practices contested in the present, none of which looks so unremittingly 'evil' by contrast."  In this case, uncompensated prison labor inures economic benefits to the state and the companies capable of extracting it.

The Article argues that this preservation of the practice of slavery through its transformation into prison labor means only that socially, legislatively, and judicially, we have come to reject one form of discrimination: antebellum slavery, while distinguishing it from marginally remunerated and totally unremunerated prison labor, which courts legitimate.  The Article tells the story of post-slavery convict leasing; fraud and debt peonage; as well as the heinous practices imposed on children through coercive apprenticeship laws throughout the American south.  The Article then addresses modern slavery's transformations, including federal and state prison labor and the rise of private prisons.  It concludes by offering pathways forward.

Billionaire behind victims' rights reforms now prompting another kind of criminal justice change in Nevada after cutting sweet plea deal for his drug offenses

Last year I noted in this post the remarkable criminal justice story of Henry Nicholas, the tech billionaire who has pushed Marsy's Law reforms around the nation, upon his arrest at a Las Vegas Strip casino-resort on suspicion of trafficking heroin, cocaine, meth and ecstasy.  A helpful former student made sure I saw this new press article, headlined "Public defenders to use generous plea deal offered to billionaire Henry Nicholas as model for future plea deal requests," which details how the Nichols case is now having a remarkable ripple though the local criminal justice system.  Here is the latest chapter in this fascinating story:

Starting next week, public defenders in Clark County plan to directly invoke and ask prosecutors to grant terms similar to the generous plea deal offered to tech billionaire Henry Nicholas for criminal cases with indigent defendants.  According to documents shared with The Nevada Independent, attorneys in the Clark County public defender’s office have drafted a plan to begin filing motions in criminal cases seeking similar treatment offered to Nicholas by Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson’s office.

Civil justice advocates and some Democratic lawmakers cried foul after Wolfson’s office announced a plea deal with Nicholas, after he and a woman (Ashley Fargo) were arrested in Las Vegas last year and charged with several counts of felony drug trafficking.  The deal will see the two avoid prison time, go on informal probation, perform 250 hours of community service, attend regular drug counseling sessions and each make a $500,000 contribution to drug counseling programs in Clark County.

Public defenders in Clark County plan to begin filing motions in District and Justice courts that draw a direct comparison to the plea deal reached with Nicholas and the treatment of indigent defendants, including asking for a reduction in sentence, own recognizance release and a contribution of 0.0128 percent of their net worth — the same percentage of Nicholas’s net worth that he agreed to pay as part of his plea deal.  “Billionaire Defendant Nicholas and Defendant XXX are similarly situated and should be similarly treated by the prosecution and the courts,” the draft motion states. “The primary difference between the two men is that Billionaire Defendant Nicholas is wealthy, while Defendant XXX is not.”

The office has also drafted a form motion asking a District Court judge to recuse the district attorney’s office, for use in potential future criminal cases where prosecutors offer a less-generous plea deal than the one offered to Nicholas and that states the “appearance of impropriety and unfairness” so erodes the public trust that appointment of a special prosecutor is warranted.  “The appearance of impropriety and the bias is most obviously seen in the overly harsh plea bargain the State has offered the indigent defendant versus the sweetheart deal afforded the Billionaire Defendant Nicholas,” the draft motion states. “In this case, it seems clear that the criminal justice system, wealth rather than culpability shaped the outcome.”

The district attorney’s office declined to comment on the planned filings.

Nicholas is the co-founder and former CEO of Broadcom Corporation, with an estimated net worth of $3.8 billion. After leaving Broadcom in 2003, he has poured millions of dollars into passing ballot measures in multiple states (including Nevada) to add a “victim’s bill of rights” called Marsy’s Law to individual state constitutions.  Wolfson appeared in television ads supporting the ballot question in the run-up to the 2018 election.

Nicholas and Fargo — the ex-wife of Brian Fargo, an heir to the Wells Fargo bank fortune — were arrested in Las Vegas in August of 2018 on suspicion of drug trafficking after police found multiple drugs including heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and ecstasy in their hotel room.  According to a police report, Nichols alerted hotel security at the Encore after he had difficulty opening the door to his hotel room and became concerned about the welfare of Fargo.  Police entered the room and found Fargo unresponsive with a semi-deflated balloon in her mouth, used to recreationally ingest nitrous-oxide (commonly known as whippets or poppers).  Police also reported finding 96 grams of methamphetamine, 4.24 grams of heroin, 15.13 grams of cocaine, and 17.1 grams of psilocin in the hotel room....

Nicholas was previously indicted on federal drug charges in 2008, but the charges were dropped in 2010.  He is scheduled to enter the plea deal, which must be accepted by a judge, on August 28.

I have long said in a variety of settings that advocates of criminal justice reforms out to utilize strategically, rather than complain loudly about, the lenient treatment often afforded more privileged criminal defendants.  Thus, I am quite pleased to see this clever effort by the Clark County public defender's office to try to get all of their less privileged defendants the Nichols treatment.

Prior related post:

• High-profile drug arrest of billionaire addict spotlights issues of what is "trafficking" and who is a "victim" and "recidivist"

"Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our criminal-justice system."

The title of this post is the title of this new piece authored by Bryan Stevenson from the New York Times magazine. Based on the title and author, regular readers should know this is a must-read in full.  Here is an excerpt:

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth: We represent 4 percent of the planet’s population but 22 percent of its imprisoned.  In the early 1970s, our prisons held fewer than 300,000 people; since then, that number has grown to more than 2.2 million, with 4.5 million more on probation or parole.  Because of mandatory sentencing and “three strikes” laws, I’ve found myself representing clients sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana.  And central to understanding this practice of mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of slavery....

The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes.  After emancipation, black people, once seen as less than fully human “slaves,” were seen as less than fully human “criminals.”  The provisional governor of South Carolina declared in 1865 that they had to be “restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime.”  Laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people — making the criminal-justice system central to new strategies of racial control....

Anything that challenged the racial hierarchy could be seen as a crime, punished either by the law or by the lynchings that stretched from Mississippi to Minnesota.  In 1916, Anthony Crawford was lynched in South Carolina for being successful enough to refuse a low price for his cotton.  In 1933, Elizabeth Lawrence was lynched near Birmingham for daring to chastise white children who were throwing rocks at her.

It’s not just that this history fostered a view of black people as presumptively criminal.  It also cultivated a tolerance for employing any level of brutality in response.  In 1904, in Mississippi, a black man was accused of shooting a white landowner who had attacked him.  A white mob captured him and the woman with him, cut off their ears and fingers, drilled corkscrews into their flesh and then burned them alive — while hundreds of white spectators enjoyed deviled eggs and lemonade.  The landowner’s brother, Woods Eastland, presided over the violence; he was later elected district attorney of Scott County, Miss., a position that allowed his son James Eastland, an avowed white supremacist, to serve six terms as a United States senator, becoming president pro tempore from 1972 to 1978.

This appetite for harsh punishment has echoed across the decades. Late in the 20th century, amid protests over civil rights and inequality, a new politics of fear and anger would emerge.  Nixon’s war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults, “broken windows” policing — these policies were not as expressly racialized as the Black Codes, but their implementation has been essentially the same.  It is black and brown people who are disproportionately targeted, stopped, suspected, incarcerated and shot by the police.

Hundreds of years after the arrival of enslaved Africans, a presumption of danger and criminality still follows black people everywhere.  New language has emerged for the noncrimes that have replaced the Black Codes: driving while black, sleeping while black, sitting in a coffee shop while black.  All reflect incidents in which African-Americans were mistreated, assaulted or arrested for conduct that would be ignored if they were white.  In schools, black kids are suspended and expelled at rates that vastly exceed the punishment of white children for the same behavior.

Inside courtrooms, the problem gets worse.  Racial disparities in sentencing are found in almost every crime category.  Children as young as 13, almost all black, are sentenced to life imprisonment for nonhomicide offenses.  Black defendants are 22 times more likely to receive the death penalty for crimes whose victims are white, rather than black — a type of bias the Supreme Court has declared “inevitable.”

The smog created by our history of racial injustice is suffocating and toxic.  We are too practiced in ignoring the victimization of any black people tagged as criminal; like Woods Eastland’s crowd, too many Americans are willing spectators to horrifying acts, as long as we’re assured they’re in the interest of maintaining order.

Previewing the (swift? endless?) litigation sure to ensue in wake of effort to restart the federal machinery of death

As noted in this prior post, AG William Barr has engineered a new federal execution protocol and the scheduling of executions for five federal death-row inmates in December 2019 and January 2020. Perhaps the only thing this moves mean for certain is litigation over whether the new protocol is sound and whether these executions will go forward. Here are links and excerpts from a couple articles previewing the litigation to come:

From BuzzFeed News, "The Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Federal Executions. It Will Immediately End Up In Court."  Excerpt:

Megan McCracken, a lawyer involved in the case and an expert on lethal injections, told BuzzFeed News that the litigation focuses on whether a particular execution protocol is constitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment” and also whether the process is otherwise lawful.  The lawsuit could examine, for instance, whether the Trump administration followed the proper procedures in adopting the new policy.  The administration did not go through the public rule-making process that agencies normally use in adopting regulations, which includes publishing details in advance and giving the public a chance to weigh in, before making its announcement Thursday.

“The devil is really in the details, and so all of the unknowns at this point are going to be the relevant issues for whether or not this protocol is constitutional, is lawful,” McCracken told BuzzFeed News.  “That is why the litigation that’s been on hold in federal court since 2011 ... will now need to proceed and give the court opportunity to review the procedure, the drugs, the execution teams, how they plan to administer it.”

A senior Justice Department official said that former attorney general Jeff Sessions directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to explore options for resuming federal executions when he took office. The bureau recently concluded its review and submitted the proposal to Barr, who approved it, the official said.  The department’s press release said the new protocol was similar to single-drug procedures used in Georgia, Missouri, and Texas....

The prisoners involved in the pending litigation already had execution dates scheduled, which were put on hold.  The five men now scheduled for lethal injections aren’t parties to the case — defendants without execution dates hadn’t sought to join the case while it was delayed — but the Justice Department’s notice to the court Thursday means it expects the judge to review the new protocol.

From The Hill, "Opponents vow to challenge Justice decision on death penalty." Excerpt:

Human rights and anti-death penalty groups are vowing to challenge the Justice Department’s decision to resume the federal death penalty after a 15-year hiatus.... The groups predicted the decision would set off new lawsuits opposing the Trump administration, particularly given a decades-long move against capital punishment that has seen a number of states suspend the practice....

A number of groups, including the ACLU, have indicated that they plan to challenge the new policy, whether in court or through other means. “Under no circumstances should the Justice Department be allowed to rush through executions. The federal death penalty is defined by the same problems of racial bias, geographic disparities, prosecutorial misconduct, and junk science that have led to the decline in support for capital punishment nationwide,” Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said in a statement....

Legal battles will likely center on how the policy is being implemented: Barr indicated in Thursday’s announcement that the protocol has already been formally adopted. But experts say that such a policy should have to go through a comment and notice period as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, and that sets it up to be challenged in court....

At least one of the planned executions is already being challenged by the death-row inmate it involves: Attorneys for Daniel Lewis Lee, whose execution is planned for Dec. 9 of this year, are speaking out against the move, saying that his conviction was secured despite the “demonstrated unreliability of the evidence.”

Lee’s attorney Morris Moon raised concerns about the DNA and other evidence used in the case, arguing that it “exemplifies many of the serious flaws in the federal death penalty system.” “Given the problems that undermine the fairness and reliability of Danny Lee’s conviction and death sentence, the Government should not move forward with his execution,” Moon said.

A lawyer for another one of the men, Purkey, also said Thursday that he shouldn’t be executed, claiming that “substandard representation permeated Mr. Purkey’s trial with errors and meant that his jury never had a full picture of his deep and sincere remorse or the personal circumstances that led to these tragic events.“

“The DOJ seeks to execute Mr. Purkey now, despite the myriad legal violations in his case and despite his advancing age and declining health,” attorney Rebecca Woodman said in a statement of her 67-year-old client. “The timing of this decision raises serious questions about the application of capital punishment under this administration."

As suggested by the title of this post, the really big question is whether this capital litigation will move swiftly or slowly. Obviously, the defendants now scheduled to be executed in less than six months would like this litigation to drag on for years. I assume the feds are eager and prepared to move this litigation along swiftly, but just how swiftly? Any ruling adverse to these defendants is sure to be appealed to a federal circuit court and to the Supreme Court. Is DOJ prepared to ask all these courts for expedited briefing schedules in order to try to preserve these scheduled execution dates?

Not mentioned in these pieces, but of great interest to me conceptually, is whether and how these defendants can constitutionally contest how AG Barr decided to put them in the front of the execution queue.  Notably, more than a dozen persons on federal death row were sentenced to death before Danny Lee was condemned in 2002, and more than a few were condemned more than half a decade before Lee.  Just why was he selected to be the first to be executed?  In addition, though less than half of federal death row is white (details here from DEPC), Danny Lee and two other of the condemned given the first execution dates are white. Did AG Barr think it might be politically useful to have more white defendants at the start of the execution queue, and if so wouldn't such thinking raise equal protection concerns?  (Because 8 of the 10 defendants sent to federal death row in the 1990s were black, including all three condemned way back in 1993, I think there is a circumstantial basis to believe that AG Barr may not have set executions dates chronologically because of concern that only black defendants would be scheduled to die first.  But is it constitutionally permissible for him to give race consideration this way?)

"Who’s helping the 1.9 million women released from prisons and jails each year?"

The question in the title of this post is the title of this new Prison Policy Initiative publication.  Here is an excerpt (with links from the original):

As in other stages of the criminal justice system, most post-release policies and programs were created with the much larger male population in mind.  But research makes clear that women returning home have “a significantly higher need for services than men,” and that reentry supports should be responsive to the particular needs of justice-involved women:

• Economic marginalization and poverty: As we’ve previously shown, formerly incarcerated women (especially women of color) have much higher rates of unemployment and homelessness, and are less likely to have a high school education, compared to formerly incarcerated men. These findings help explain why, in a 2012 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study, 79% of women interviewed 30 days pre-release cited “employment, education, and life skills services” as their greatest area of need (followed closely by transition services). An earlier study (Holtfreder et al., 2004), found that poverty is the strongest predictor of recidivism among women, and “providing state‐sponsored support to address short‐term needs (e.g., housing) reduces the odds of recidivism by 83%” for poor women on probation and parole.

• Housing: A 2017 Prisoner Reentry Institute (PRI) report identified homelessness and the lack of stable housing as the biggest problem facing women in the New York City justice system, noting that 80% of women at Rikers said they needed assistance finding housing upon discharge. A 2006 California study found that 75% of formerly incarcerated women surveyed had experienced homelessness as some point, and 41% were currently homeless. Women who can’t secure safe housing may return to abusive partners or family situations for housing and financial reasons – a point echoed in interviews with paroled women in a study by Brown and Bloom.

• Trauma and gendered pathways to incarceration: The PRI report emphasizes the importance of gender-responsive and trauma-informedinterventions for reducing recidivism among women. According to that report, such interventions should: provide a safe, respectful environment; promote healthy relationships; address substance use, trauma, and mental health issues; provide women with opportunities to improve their socioeconomic conditions; establish “comprehensive and collaborative” community services; and prioritize women’s empowerment.

• Family reunification: Most incarcerated women are mothers, and are frequently the primary caretakers of their children. The importance of family reunification – noted throughout the literature, by Carter et al.(2006), Brown and Bloom (2009), Wright, et al. (2012), the NIJ (2012), among others – cannot be overstated, especially given the trauma experienced by children when separated from a parent.

Two notable new stories of marijuana's still notable criminal justice footprint

Throughout most of the Unites States, millions of Americans are able to "legally" buy and sell marijuana for medical or recreational purposes.  (Of course, I put "legally" in quotes because all these activities are violations of federal law, but the laws and practices of states and localities define enforcement realities.)  Given all the "legal" marijuana activity, it can be dangerously easy to forget that the criminalization of marijuana is still a significant criminal justice reality for a significant number of individuals.  But these two new stories about arrests in two states provides an important reminder of this reality:

From the Washington Post, "Marijuana arrests in Va. reach highest level in at least 20 years, spurring calls for reform."  An excerpt: 

Nearly 29,000 arrests were made for marijuana offenses in Virginia last year, a number that has tripled since 1999, according to an annual crime report compiled by the Virginia State Police. Marijuana busts account for nearly 60 percent of drug arrests across Virginia and more than half of them were among people who were under 24, according to the data. The vast majority of cases involved simple possession of marijuana....

The Virginia Crime Commission found that 46 percent of those arrested for a first offense for possession of marijuana between 2007 and 2016 were African Americans, who represent about only 20 percent of Virginia’s population....

In Virginia, a first conviction for possessing marijuana is a misdemeanor that can result in up to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine. Subsequent arrests can result in up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine. A defendant’s driver’s license is also revoked for six months for a drug conviction. The Virginia Crime Commission study found that only 31 people were in jail in July 2017 solely for a conviction of possessing marijuana in the state. The libertarian Cato Institute estimated Virginia spent $81 million on marijuana enforcement in 2016.

From Wisconsin Watch, "Blacks arrested for pot possession at four times the rate of whites in Wisconsin." An excerpt:

Almost 15,000 adults in Wisconsin were arrested in 2018 for marijuana possession, a 3% increase from 2017, according to data from the state Department of Justice.  Prison admissions in Wisconsin for marijuana also were higher in 2016 for black individuals than for whites, according to the state Department of Corrections. Some experts believe this disparity can be attributed to policing practices in low-income neighborhoods that tend to have more residents of color....

Under state law, possession of marijuana of any amount for a first-time offense can lead to up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $1,000. Any offense after that is classified as a felony and can result in a sentence of three and a half years in prison with a maximum fine of $10,000. 

I want to believe that recently increases in marijuana arrests are mostly a product of increased marijuana activity and not an extra focus on marijuana enforcement. But whatever the reason, I sincerely wonder if anyone sincerely believes that all of the time, money and energy expended for all these marijuana arrests serves to enhance justice or safety in these jurisdictions.

Cross-posed at Marijuana Law, Policy and Reform.

"Measuring Algorithmic Fairness"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper now available via SSRN authored by Deborah Hellman.  With all the use of risk assessment tools throughout the criminal justice system, as with the risk-and-needs tool required by the FIRST STEP Act due out very soon, this discussion of "algorithmic fairness" cause my eye. Here is its abstract:

Algorithmic decision making is both increasingly common and increasingly controversial.  Critics worry that algorithmic tools are not transparent, accountable or fair.  Assessing the fairness of these tools has been especially fraught as it requires that we agree about what fairness is and what it entails. Unfortunately, we do not.  The technological literature is now littered with a multitude of measures, each purporting to assess fairness along some dimension.  Two types of measures stand out.  According to one, algorithmic fairness requires that the score an algorithm produces should be equally accurate for members of legally protected groups, blacks and whites for example.  According to the other, algorithmic fairness requires that the algorithm produces the same percentage of false positives or false negatives for each of the groups at issue.  Unfortunately, there is often no way to achieve parity in both these dimensions.  This fact has led to a pressing question.  Which type of measure should we prioritize and why?

This Article makes three contributions to the debate about how best to measure algorithmic fairness: one conceptual, one normative, and one legal.  Equal predictive accuracy ensures that a score means the same thing for each group at issue.  As such, it relates to what one ought to believe about a scored individual.  Because questions of fairness usually relate to action not belief, this measure is ill-suited as a measure of fairness.  This is the Article’s conceptual contribution.  Second, this Article argues that parity in the ratio of false positives to false negatives is a normatively significant measure.  While a lack of parity in this dimension is not constitutive of unfairness, this measure provides important reasons to suspect that unfairness exists.  This is the Article’s normative contribution.  Interestingly, improving the accuracy of algorithms overall will lessen this unfairness. Unfortunately, a common assumption that antidiscrimination law prohibits the use of racial and other protected classifications in all contexts is inhibiting those who design algorithms from making them as fair and accurate as possible. This Article’s third contribution is to show that the law poses less of a barrier than many assume. 

US House Subcommittee hearing spotlights "Women and Girls in the Criminal Justice System"

Last week, as noted over at my marijuana blog, the Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee of the Committee of the Judiciary of the US House of Representatives conducted a notable hearing titled "Marijuana Laws in America: Racial Justice and the Need for Reform."   This week, that subcommittee continue to spotlight the need for criminal justice reform through a hearing this morning titled "Women and Girls in the Criminal Justice System."  This ABC News piece, headlined "House Judiciary subcommittee meets on growing population of women behind bars," provides a an effective summary of parts of the hearing, and here are excerpts:

Like 80% of women incarcerated in the U.S., Cynthia Shank was a mother when she went to prison.  Shank was pregnant when she was indicted and like many incarcerated women, she served time for nonviolent offenses -- in her case, she was sentenced to 15-years for federal conspiracy charges related to crimes committed by her deceased ex-boyfriend.  Nearly 150,000 women are pregnant when they are admitted into prison.

Shank, along with other prison reform advocates, appeared in front of the House Judiciary subcommittee for a hearing on women in the criminal justice system to discuss ways to make sure women are not overlooked in the conversation on criminal justice reform.  "Prison destroyed my small young family," Shank said.  "Prison is set up to separate and destroy bonds."...

Piper Kerman, author of the novel turned Netflix series "Orange is the New Black," also shared what her experience was like while imprisoned and why there needs to be a shift in policy to directly impact the growing number of women in prison.  "Policies, not crime, drive incarceration," Kerman said.

Women are now the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population and initiatives to slow and even reverse the growth of the prison population have had disproportionately less effect on women, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.  The total number of men incarcerated in state prisons fell more than 5% between 2009 and 2015, while the number of women in state prisons fell only a fraction of a percent, 0.29% "In a number of states, women's prison populations are growing faster than men's, and in others, they are going up while men's are actually declining," said Aleks Kajstura, legal director of the Prison Policy Initiative.

The war on drugs is what many of the panelists and lawmakers pointed to as part of the reason there are such high rates of women incarcerated.  "Much of the growth of women in prisons can be attributed to the war on drugs," said Jesselyn McCurdy, deputy director of the Washington legislative office for the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Addressing this unfair issue is important because the war on drugs appears to be a large driver of the incarceration rates of women, as illustrated by the fact that the proportion of women in prison for a drug offense has increased from 12% in 1986 to 25% in more recent years." Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said.

An estimated 61% of women are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, according to The Sentencing Project.  McCurdy touched on what many women, including Shank, fall victim to in the criminal justice system -- conspiracy charges as they relate to a significant other, also known as the "Girlfriend problem."

"You don't have to necessarily have dealt drugs, you have to have some role in a conspiracy and that role is very little," McCurdy said. "You can pick up the phone in your house that you live in with your partner and that's enough to implicate you in a conspiracy."

Family trauma was also a major focal point of the hearing, as lawmakers turned to the panel to seek their insight on the best ways to address the trauma of family separation. Shank told the subcommittee members that while she was incarcerated in a federal prison in Florida, she was only able to see her children once a year and that her children would beg her not to hang up the phone when they spoke.  "I'm an adult, I accepted the consequences of my sentencing, but my children were the innocent victims of this," Shank said.

The committee also spent time discussing the relationship between male prison guards and female inmates, with both Shank and Kerman saying that there needs to be more attention on the safety of women who are behind bars with male guards. "I never felt safe changing," Shank said.  "Guards know your schedule, and if they want to single you out they will."

Panelists were also asked to speak on the need of bail reform for women behind bars, as 1 in 4 women who are incarcerated have not been convicted and over 60% of women who could not make bail are parents of minor children, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.  Kerman said that there needs to be primary care consideration in the courts that require judges to consider the impact on families in both pre-trial hearings and sentencing.

"Women will no longer be overlooked in the criminal justice conversation," Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., said. "We must have an overall approach to criminal justice reform that specifically considers women.

The full two-hour+ hearing, along with the written testimony submitted by the official witnesses, can all be found at this official webpage.  And Piper Kerman's written testimony has a first footnote that provides this statistical basis for heightened concerns about the modern treatment of women and girls in the criminal justice system: "Since 1978, women’s state prison populations have grown 834%, while men’s state prison populations have grown 367%."

Philly DA argues, based on study of local capital cases, that "death penalty, as it has been applied, violates the Pennsylvania Constitution"

As reported in this local article, headlined "DA Krasner wants Pa. Supreme Court to strike down state’s death penalty and declare it unconstitutional," a notable local prosecutor has filed a notable state court brief that surely could have national consequences.  Here are the basics:

In a response to a death penalty case that could have far-reaching ramifications, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is asking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to strike down the state’s death penalty and declare it unconstitutional.  “Because of the arbitrary manner in which it has been applied, the death penalty violates our state Constitution’s prohibition against cruel punishments,” District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office wrote in a motion filed with the court Monday night....

The DA’s Office was responding to a petition filed by federal public defenders representing Philadelphia death-row inmate Jermont Cox, convicted of three separate drug-related murders in 1992 and ordered to die for one of them.  The defense attorneys, who also represent a Northumberland County inmate, Kevin Marinelli, sentenced to death for a 1994 killing, have asked the high court to end capital punishment, arguing that the death penalty violates the state Constitution’s ban on cruel punishment.

Krasner’s office agrees with that assessment.  The office’s position does not come as a surprise — Krasner had campaigned against the death penalty while running for district attorney in 2017, saying he would “never seek the death penalty” — but Monday night’s motion in the Cox case is the first time Krasner has articulated it to the state’s highest court....

The justices’ eventual decision on Cox and Marinelli could affect not just future death-penalty cases, but also the approximately 130 other inmates awaiting execution, potentially forcing the courts to resentence them.  After a June 2018 bipartisan legislative Joint State Government Commission report found troubling deficiencies in the state’s death-penalty system, Philadelphia-based federal defenders in August filed separate petitions for Cox and Marinelli, asking the state high court to find the death penalty unconstitutional.

The defense attorneys asked the high court to invoke its King’s Bench authority, which gives the court the power to consider any case without waiting for lower courts’ rulings when it sees the need to address an issue of immediate public importance.  The court consolidated the two cases in December.  In its February joint petition for Cox and Marinelli, the federal defenders asked the high court to “strike down the Commonwealth’s capital punishment system as a prohibited cruel punishment” and heavily relied on the joint commission’s report in finding problems with the death penalty....

The DA’s Office response to the defense petition was initially expected in March.  City prosecutors three times requested a deadline extension.  The high court then set a July 15 deadline. The court has set a Sept. 11 hearing date for oral arguments on the petition from Cox and Marinelli....  

Pennsylvania’s death penalty has been used three times since it was reinstated by the state in 1978.  The last person executed was Gary Heidnik of Philadelphia in 1999.

The full brief from DA Larry Krasner's office is available at this link, and it is a must-read in part because it makes much of the office's own study of Philadelphia capital cases. Here are a few paragraphs from the the brief's introduction:

To assess whether Pennsylvania’s capital sentencing regime ensures the heightened reliability in capital cases required by our Constitution, there is no better place to start than Philadelphia — the jurisdiction that has sought and secured more death sentences than any other county in the state.  In order to formulate its position in this case, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office (DAO) studied the 155 cases where a Philadelphia defendant received a death sentence between 1978 and December 31, 2017.

As will be detailed below, the DAO study revealed troubling information regarding the validity of the trials and the quality of representation received by capitally charged Philadelphia defendants — particularly those indigent defendants who were represented by under-compensated, inadequately-supported court-appointed trial counsel (as distinguished from attorneys with the Defender Association of Philadelphia).  Our study also revealed equally troubling data regarding the race of the Philadelphia defendants currently on death row; nearly all of them are black.  Most of these individuals were also represented by court-appointed counsel, often by one of the very attorneys whom a reviewing court has deemed ineffective in at least one other capital case....

Where nearly three out of every four death sentences have been overturned— after years of litigation at significant taxpayer expense—there can be no confidence that capital punishment has been carefully reserved for the most culpable defendants, as our Constitution requires. Where a majority of death sentenced defendants have been represented by poorly compensated, poorly supported court-appointed attorneys, there is a significant likelihood that capital punishment has not been reserved for the “worst of the worst.” Rather, what our study shows is that, as applied, Pennsylvania’s capital punishment regime may very well reserve death sentences for those who receive the “worst” (i.e., the most poorly funded and inadequately supported) representation....

As this Court observed in Zettlemoyer, our 1978 statute attempted to establish a reliable, non-arbitrary system of capital punishment. Decades of data from Philadelphia demonstrates that, in its application, the system has operated in such a way that it cannot survive our Constitution’s ban on cruel punishment. Accordingly, the DAO respectfully requests this Court to exercise its King’s Bench or extraordinary jurisdiction and hold that the death penalty, as it has been applied, violates the Pennsylvania Constitution.

Some additional good discussion of this brief and its context can be found in discussions at The Appeal and Reason.

More coverage prisoner reentry issues as FIRST STEP Act's "good time" fix approaches

Prior FIRST STEP Act implementation posts (linked below) noted the delayed application of the Act's "good time" fix, which provides that well-behaved prisoners now get a full 15% credit for good behavior amounting to up to 54 days (not just 47 days) per year in "good time."   And in this post last month, I noted press coverage and efforts surrounding this "good time" fix as it gets closer to kicking in this month (assuming the Attorney General complies with a key deadline in the Act).  This press coverage continues with this Fox News piece headlined "Thousands of ex-prisoners to reunite with their families this month as part of First Step Act," and here are excerpts therefrom:

More than 2,200 federal inmates are returning to their families this month from behind bars under the bipartisan prison reform bill President Trump signed into law last year, according to policy experts and prisoner advocates involved in the effort.

This month will see the largest group to be freed so far under a clause in the First Step Act that reduces sentences due to "earned good time."  In addition to family reunification, the formerly incarcerated citizens, 90 percent of whom have been African-American, hope to get employment opportunities touted by Trump last month at the White House as part of the "Second Chance" hiring program.

"We’re a nation that believes in redemption," the president said, noting Americans with criminal backgrounds are unemployed at rates up to five times the national average, which was around 3.8 percent earlier this year. "You're gonna have an incredible future."

The Trump Administration has asked the private sector to help the ex-prisoners reacclimate to their newfound freedom with jobs and housing in one of the largest criminal justice public-private-partnerships ever assembled.

Kim Kardashian West, who successfully lobbied President Trump to free Alice Johnson, a great-grandmother who was serving a life sentence convicted of drug trafficking for a first-time, non-violent drug offense, announced a partnership with rideshare organization Lyft to hand out gift cards for reformed criminals to get to and from job interviews as transportation can be a barrier. "I just want to thank the president for really standing behind this issue and seeing the compassion that he's had for criminal justice has been really remarkable," the "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" star said during a Second Chance Hiring and Re-entry event at the White House in June....

Matthew Charles, the first inmate released from the program and recognized by Trump for being a “model citizen,” told “America’s Newsroom” barriers to employment and housing need to be “eliminated” so former inmates don’t find themselves back in prison.  The Trump Administration has a broad amount of support across governmental departments from labor to DOJ to DOE, as well as governors across the country streamlining state services in order to reduce the barriers Charles mentioned.

This article seems to imply that ninety percent of those who will be released from prison soon thanks to the "good time" fix are African-American, but that racial statistic actually relates to the distinct group of prisoners who have received reductions in their crack sentences due to a different provision in the FIRST STEP Act.  The group getting relief thanks to the operation of the "good time" fix later this month is likely to be more closely representative of the entire federal prison population (which is, very roughly speaking, about 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Latino).  And, as noted in another recent press article, a good number of non-citizen offenders will be deported upon their release from prison.

Prior related posts:

• Spotlighting how FIRST STEP Act implementation challenges and uncertainty has already begun
• Spotlighting problems with immediate application of expanded good time credit in the FIRST STEP Act 
• Another review of the bad mess surrounding the "good time" fix in the FIRST STEP Act
• Curious (but still encouraging) discussion of expected release of prisoners after FIRST STEP Act "good time" fix becomes operational
• Noticing that early federal prisoner release often means earlier deportation for non-citizen offenders

Summer reading (with a Fall cover date) from the American Journal of Criminal Law

Over the holiday week, I noticed that American Criminal Law Review already has published its Fall 2019 issue, and that this issue includes a number of articles that sentencing fans may want to add to their summer reading list: 

The Biased Algorithm: Evidence of Disparate Impact on Hispanics by Melissa Hamilton

Is Mass-Incarceration Inevitable? by Andrew Leipold

Defining the Proper Role of “Offender Characteristics in Sentencing Decisions: A Critical Race Theory Perspective by Lisa Saccomano

Cruel, Unusual, and Unconstitutional: An Originalist Argument for Ending Long-Term Solitary Confinement by Merin Cherian

Pandora’s Algorithmic Black Box: The Challenges of Using Algorithmic Risk Assessment in Sentencing by Leah Wisser

"Language matters for justice reform"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable recent Hill commentary authored by Deanna Hoskins. I recommend the whole piece, and here is an excerpt:

Words such as offenders, convicts, prisoners and felons have existed in our lexicon for decades if not centuries.  But in recent years people have begun speaking out against the use of these dehumanizing terms.  Eddy Ellis, the late justice reform leader, penned a letter more than 15 years ago that ignited a movement demanding an end to dehumanizing language. He wrote, “The worst part of repeatedly hearing your negative definition of me is that I begin to believe it myself ‘for, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.’ It follows, then, that calling me inmate, convict, prisoner, felon, or offender indicates a lack of understanding of who I am, but more importantly what I can be.”

Movement leaders have long-recognized Mr. Ellis’s call to use humanizing language — but journalists, elected officials, and people new to the field must recognize this and make the shift as well.  In some state corrections systems, offensive terms such as “inmate” and “offender” have been banned from prisons.  A few years ago, the Department of Justice Office of Justice program that oversees criminal justice efforts announced that it would no longer use the word felon or convict in any of its communications and grant solicitations, instead using “a person who committed a crime.”  Resources including Mr. Ellis’ letter, the Social Justice Phrase Guide and The Opportunity Agenda’s toolkit are readily available to help people understand humanizing “people-first” language and why it’s important.

When we no longer define someone in the media or other arenas as “other,” we shift culture and policies toward human rights and dignity.  By making a conscious effort to change, we can use language that addresses injustice without dehumanizing people — especially black and brown people facing disproportionate discrimination after a record. Several years ago racial justice advocates, successfully stopped media outlets such as the Associated Press from using the phrase “illegal immigrant” which implied that a person’s existence violated the law.  Doing so brought attention to the mistreatment and human rights violations experienced by immigrants seeking refuge in this country.

We can achieve the same in the justice space. We must all commit to using terms such as “formerly incarcerated or incarcerated person” or “person with a felony conviction” instead of “ex-con,” “felon,” or “inmate.”  By doing so we make a conscious effort to recognize and respect people’s humanity.  To do otherwise only reinforces the second-class status we relegate upon many people in this country and therefore stalls our efforts toward equal justice for all.

I am quite sympathetic to the spirit and substance of this commentary, but I fear I will continue to struggle to move away from short-hand terminology like offender and prisoner (rather than person who committed an offense or person in prison).  

"The Gendered Burdens of Conviction and Collateral Consequences on Employment"

The title of this post is the title of this notable paper recently posted to SSRN and authored by Joni Hersch and Erin Meyers.  Here is its abstract:

Ex-offenders are subject to a wide range of employment restrictions that limit the ability of individuals with a criminal background to earn a living.  This Article argues that women involved in the criminal justice system likely suffer a greater income-related burden from criminal conviction than do men.  This disproportionate burden arises in occupations that women typically pursue, both through formal pathways, such as restrictions on occupational licensing, and through informal pathways, such as employers’ unwillingness to hire those with a criminal record.

In addition, women have access to far fewer vocational programs while incarcerated.  Further exacerbating this burden is that women involved in the criminal justice system tend to be a more vulnerable population and are more likely to be responsible for children than their male counterparts, making legal restrictions on access to public assistance that would support employment more burdensome for women.  We propose programs and policies that may ameliorate these gendered income burdens of criminal conviction, including reforms to occupational licensing, improved access to public assistance, reforms to prison labor opportunities, improvements in labor market information sharing, and expanded employer liability protection.

"Beyond the Algorithm Pretrial Reform, Risk Assessment, and Racial Fairness"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new report released by the Center for Court Innovation and authored by by Sarah Picard, Matt Watkins, Michael Rempel and Ashmini Kerodal. Here is its introduction: 

Pretrial detention, often resulting from a defendant’s inability to afford bail, is one of the primary drivers of incarceration nationwide. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that two out of three people in local jails in 2016 were held while awaiting trial, having not yet been convicted of a crime.  Jurisdictions looking to safely reduce their use of bail and pretrial detention have increasingly turned to automated or actuarial risk assessments.  These tools employ a mathematical formula, or algorithm, to estimate the probability of a defendant incurring a new arrest or failing to appear in court.  Typically, in a risk assessment, defendants’ criminal history, criminogenic needs, and/or basic demographic information, such as age and gender, are weighted and combined, generating a score which can be used to group defendants into risk categories ranging from low to high.

With the aid of better information about the defendants who appear before them, judges, in theory, can make more consistent decisions regarding pretrial release and bail.  For example, jurisdictions that use risk assessments may be more likely to consider pretrial release for defendants in lower-risk categories, or pretrial supervision in the community for higher-risk defendants.  In cases where victim or community safety is a concern, risk assessment may provide guidance regarding the need for bail or detention hearings.

The appeal of pretrial risk assessment — especially in large, overburdened court systems — is of a fast and objective evaluation, harnessing the power of data to aid decision-making.  Research suggests that actuarial risk assessments are more accurate than decisions made by criminal justice officials relying on professional judgment alone.  By intervening in a process historically driven by subjective decisionmaking, risk assessments arguably act as a corrective to a system plagued by bias, as witnessed in the racial disparities long seen in incarceration rates across the country.

That said, important objections have been raised that, far from disrupting racial biases in the criminal justice system, risk assessments unintentionally amplify them, only this time under the guise of science.  The debate is still unresolved, but from a justice system practitioner’s perspective — let alone that of a defendant — the stakes are urgent.

What follows are the results of an empirical test of racial bias in risk assessment and, based on an original analysis, a consideration of whether there are policy-level solutions that could conserve the benefits of risk assessment, while also addressing valid concerns over racial fairness.

The Sentencing Project reports one of every 15 women in prison (nearly 7,000) serving life or virtual life sentence

Via email I received this morning this fact sheet from The Sentencing Project titled "Women and Girls Serving Life Sentences" (which lead me to see that, a few weeks ago, it also release this related fact sheet titled "Incarcerated Women and Girls"). Here is the start of this latest publication:

Nationwide one of every 15 women in prison — nearly 7,000 women — is serving a life or virtual life sentence.  One-third of them have no chance for parole, so their prospects for release are highly improbable.  The number of women serving life sentences has grown dramatically despite declining rates of violent crime among women.

As is the case with imprisonment generally, men comprise the overwhelming proportion of people in prison for life; 97% of lifers are men.  At the same time, the number of women serving life sentences is rising more quickly than it is for men.  The Sentencing Project collected life-imprisonment figures by gender in 2008 and 2016. W e find that during this nine-year period the number of women serving life sentences increased by 20%, compared to a 15% increase for men.

The rise in life imprisonment among women has also been far more rapid than the overall prison population increase among women for violent offenses.  Between 2008 and 2016 there was a 2% increase in the number of imprisoned women for a violent crime, but a 20% increase in the number of women serving a life sentence.  When analysis is limited to life-without-parole sentences, we see that the number of women serving these sentences increased by 41% compared to 29% for men.

SCOTUS finds Batson violation based on "extraordinary facts" in Flowers

The Supreme Court ruled for a criminal defendant today in a Batson challenge in Mississippi v. Flowers, No. 17-9572 (S. Ct. June 21, 2019) (available here). As with all criminal cases, I find the line up of the Justices notable:

KAVANAUGH, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and GINSBURG, BREYER, ALITO, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined. ALITO, J., filed a concurring opinion. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GORSUCH, J., joined as to Parts I, II, and III.

Here is part of the start of the lengthy opening of the opinion of the Court:

In Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), this Court ruled that a State may not discriminate on the basis of race when exercising peremptory challenges against prospective jurors in a criminal trial.

In 1996, Curtis Flowers allegedly murdered four people in Winona, Mississippi. Flowers is black. He has been tried six separate times before a jury for murder. The same lead prosecutor represented the State in all six trials.

In the initial three trials, Flowers was convicted, but the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed each conviction. In the first trial, Flowers was convicted, but the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the conviction due to “numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct.”  Flowers v. State, 773 So. 2d 309, 327 (2000)....

In his sixth trial, which is the one at issue here, Flowers was convicted. The State struck five of the six black prospective jurors.  On appeal, Flowers argued that the State again violated Batson in exercising peremptory strikes against black prospective jurors. In a divided 5-to-4 decision, the Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the conviction.  We granted certiorari on the Batson question and now reverse....

Four critical facts, taken together, require reversal....

We need not and do not decide that any one of those four facts alone would require reversal. All that we need to decide, and all that we do decide, is that all of the relevant facts and circumstances taken together establish that the trial court committed clear error in concluding that the State’s peremptory strike of black prospective juror Carolyn Wright was not “motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent.” Foster v. Chatman, 578 U.S. ___, ___ (2016) (slip op., at 23) (internal quotation marks omitted). In reaching that conclusion, we break no new legal ground.  We simply enforce and reinforce Batson by applying it to the extraordinary facts of this case. 

"Most US drug arrests involve a gram or less"

The title of this post is the title of this new short piece by Joseph Kennedy (which condenses some of his really important work set forth in this recent full article, "Sharks and Minnows in the War on Drugs: A Study of Quantity, Race and Drug Type in Drug Arrests"). Here are excerpts:

U.S. drug laws are designed as if every offender was a dedicated criminal like Walter White, treating the possession or sale of even small quantities of illegal drugs as a serious crime requiring serious punishment.

I have studied the war on drugs for a number of years.  Last December, my colleagues and I published a study on U.S. drug arrests, showing that roughly two out of every three arrests by state and local law enforcement target small-time offenders who are carrying less than a gram of illegal drugs.

Virtually all states treat as felonies the sale of any amount of illegal drugs.  The thinking behind these laws is that you cannot catch the big fish without catching some minnows as well.  Many states also treat the mere possession of any amount of a hard drugs, such as cocaine, heroin or meth/amphetamine, as a felony....

We wanted to find out how often the police made arrests involving large quantities of drugs.  To make things manageable, we narrowed our study to three evenly spaced years, 2004, 2008 and 2012.  The resulting data set contained over a million cases, with usable data found in over 700,000 cases.  We believe our study is the most comprehensive study of drug arrest quantity undertaken to date....

Our study found that, by and large, state and local police agencies are arresting small fish, not big ones.  Two out of three drug offenders arrested by state and local law enforcement possess or sell a gram or less at the time of arrest. Furthermore, about 40% of arrests for hard drug are for trace amounts — a quarter of a gram or less.

Because possessing any amount of a hard drug and selling any illegal drug is a felony in virtually every state, the small size of these quantities matter.  They suggest that very minor offenders face felony liability.  Felony convictions make it difficult for ex-offenders to secure good jobs.  They carry many other harmful collateral consequences.

There are few truly big, or even medium-sized, offenders in the remaining arrests.  Arrests for quantities of hard drugs above five grams range between 15 and 20 percent of all arrests, and arrests for a kilogram or more are less than 1%.

What’s more, the racial distribution of these small quantity arrests reveal importance differences between arrests for different types of drugs.

Our study confirms that blacks are disproportionately arrested for crack cocaine offenses, as are whites for meth/amphetamine and heroin offenses.  When it comes to possession of a quarter gram or less, police arrest almost twice as many blacks as whites for crack cocaine.  However, they arrest almost four times as many whites as blacks for heroin and eight times as many whites as blacks for meth/amphetamine.

Offenders of color are, by and large, not significantly more serious offenders in terms of quantity of drugs.  They just possess and sell drugs that are the most frequent target of arrest.  Our study showed about twice as many arrests for crack cocaine as for meth/amphetamine and almost four times as many arrests for crack cocaine as for heroin.

Finally, this study shows that 71% of drug arrests are not for hard drugs, but for marijuana.  The majority of those arrests are also for tiny quantities: 28% for trace amounts and almost 50% for a gram or less.  Once again, blacks are disproportionately arrested for marijuana offenses, making up about a quarter of all marijuana arrests despite being about 13% of the population.

Illegal drugs are ultimately sold in small quantities to users, so it’s not surprising that there are more small quantity offenders in the pool of drug arrestees.  But this study suggests that the majority of state and local drug enforcement resources are spent catching these small fish.  The drug war is not being waged primarily against the Walter Whites, but against much less serious offenders.

Prior related post:

• "Sharks and Minnows in the War on Drugs: A Study of Quantity, Race and Drug Type in Drug Arrests" 

"Science and Ethics of Algorithms in the Courtroom"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Kia Rahnama now available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

This Article analyzes the societal and cultural impacts of greater reliance on the use of algorithms in the courtroom.  Big-data analytics and algorithms are beginning to play a large role in influencing judges’ sentencing and criminal enforcement decisions.  This Article addresses this shift toward greater acceptance of algorithms as models for risk-assessment and criminal forecasting within the context of moral and social movements that have shaped the American justice system’s current approach to punishment and rehabilitation.

By reviewing salient problems of scientific uncertainty that accompany the use of these models and algorithms, the Article calls into question the proposition that greater reliance on algorithms in the courtroom can lead to a more objective and fair criminal sentencing regime. Far from liberating the society from the biases and prejudices that might pollute judges’ decision-making process, these tools can intensify, while simultaneously concealing, entrenched cultural biases that preexist in the society.

Using common themes from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), including boundary-work analysis and Public Understanding of Science (PUS), this Article highlights unique technical characteristics of big-data analytics and algorithms that feed into undesirable and deeply-held values and beliefs.  This Article draws attention to specific gaps in technical understanding of algorithmic thinking, such as the black box of algorithms, that can have discordant impact on communicating uncertainty to the populace and reduce accountability and transparency in regulating the use of algorithms.  This Article also provides specific policy proposals that can ameliorate the adverse social and cultural effects of incorporating algorithms into the courtroom.  The discussion of policy proposals borrows from the STS literature on public participation in science and encourages adoption of a policy that incorporates diverse voices from political actors, most affected communities, and the offenders themselves.

Spotlighting racial divides in perceptions of crime and punishment

Just about every serious study of US criminal justice systems shows a different form of justice applies to black and white Americans.  And John Gramlich at Pew Research Center has this interesting new piece spotlighting many of the different perceptions of justice among black and white Americans.  I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts with a sentencing emphasis  (and with links from the original):

Black Americans are far more likely than whites to say the nation’s criminal justice system is racially biased and that its treatment of minorities is a serious national problem.  In a recent Pew Research Center survey, around nine-in-ten black adults (87%) said blacks are generally treated less fairly by the criminal justice system than whites, a view shared by a much smaller majority of white adults (61%).  And in a survey shortly before last year’s midterm elections, 79% of blacks — compared with 32% of whites — said the way racial and ethnic minorities are treated by the criminal justice system is a very big problem in the United States today.

Racial differences in views of the criminal justice system are not limited to the perceived fairness of the system as a whole.  Black and white adults also differ across a range of other criminal justice-related questions asked by the Center in recent years, on subjects ranging from crime and policing to the use of computer algorithms in parole decisions....

A narrow majority of Americans (54%) support the death penalty for people convicted of murder, according to a spring 2018 survey.  But only around a third of blacks (36%) support capital punishment for this crime, compared with nearly six-in-ten whites (59%).  Racial divisions extend to other questions related to the use of capital punishment.  In a 2015 survey, 77% of blacks said minorities are more likely than whites to be sentenced to death for committing similar crimes.  Whites were divided on this question: 46% said minorities are disproportionately sentenced to death, while the same percentage saw no racial disparities.

Blacks were also more likely than whites to say capital punishment is not a crime deterrent (75% vs. 60%) and were less likely to say the death penalty is morally justified (46% vs. 69%).  However, about seven-in-ten in both groups said they saw some risk in putting an innocent person to death (74% of blacks vs. 70% of whites)....

Some states now use criminal risk assessments to assist with parole decisions. These assessments involve collecting data about people who are up for parole, comparing that data with data about other people who have been convicted of crimes, and then assigning inmates a score to help decide whether they should be released from prison or not.  A 2018 survey asked Americans whether they felt the use of criminal risk assessments in parole decisions was an acceptable use of algorithmic decision-making. A 61% majority of black adults said using these assessments is unfair to people in parole hearings, compared with 49% of white adults.

Two notable new publications on how criminal justice contacts impact schooling and employment realities

I just recent came across two new interesting publications from the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment concerning the intersection of criminal justice realities and labor, schooling and employment realities.  Here are titles, links and overview/abstracts from the papers:

"Finding Employment After Contact with the Carceral System" by Lisa McCorkell and Sara Hinkley

High rates of unemployment among the formerly incarcerated serve to extend punishment long after time has been served.  Much of the difficulty in finding a job comes from institutional exclusion, but the search methods jobseekers employ also pose obstacles to their success.  UC Berkeley sociologist Sandra Susan Smith has found that the system-involved are less likely to search for jobs, and those who do use less effective search methods.  Policies that might improve these outcomes include creating resource guides on best practices for employment as well as expanding post-release employment programs.  Expanding expungement, Ban the Box/Fair Chance legislation, and employer hiring incentives can also help overcome institutional barriers to employment for those exiting the carceral system.

"Does Locked Up Mean Locked Out? The Effects of the Anti-Drug Act of 1986 on Black Male Students’ College Enrollment" by Tolani Britton

This paper explores one reason for the educational gaps experienced by Black men.  Using variation in state marijuana possession and distribution laws, this paper examines whether the Anti-Drug Act of 1986, which increased the disproportionate incarceration of Black males, also led to differences in college enrollment rates.  The results suggest that Black males had a 2.2% point decrease in the relative probability of college enrollment after the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.  There is some evidence that laws around crack cocaine, and not marijuana, led to this decrease in the probability of enrollment.

A Mother's Day round up of stories in incarceration nation

Last year in this post I did a review of mom-related incarceration articles in honor of Mother's Day. And another year brings another set of these articles worth posting:

From the Boston Globe, "Criminal justice reform must focus on women who are incarcerated"

From the Idaho State Journal, "Mother's Day Behind Bars: Card contest helps Pocatello women's prison inmates cope"

From the Marshall Project, "Why Mothers Are the Unsung Heroes of Prison"

From NBCNews, "#FreeBlackMamas works to bail black mothers out of jail in time for Mother's Day"

From WNYT, "Schenectady man offers shuttle so adult kids can visit mom in prison"

"Law, Prison, and Double-Double Consciousness: A Phenomenological View of the Black Prisoner’s Experience"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new Yale Law Review Forum piece authored by James Davis III. Here is its abstract:

This Essay introduces double-double consciousness as a new way of conceptualizing the psychological ramifications of being a black prisoner.  It begins by revisiting W.E.B. DuBois’s theory of double consciousness.  It then offers a phenomenological exposition of double-double consciousness — the double consciousness that the black prisoner came to prison with, coupled with the double consciousness that the black prisoner develops in prison.  Thought and feeling, time and space are all different in the prison.  This world relentlessly imposes the prisoner identity on all those who inhabit it, requiring them to reconcile their new status with their conceptions of self.  Based on my own experience as a black prisoner, I conclude that double-double consciousness is a mechanism through which the prisoner can maintain dignity despite living in captivity.

Noting the encouraging story of reduced rates of incarceration for African Americans

Charles Lane and Keith Humphreys have this nice new Washington Post commentary spotlighting one notable part of the last BJS numbers on prison populations (discussed here).  The piece is headlined "Black imprisonment rates are down.  It’s important to know why."  Here are excerpts:

The imprisonment rate for African Americans is falling, has been falling since 2001 and now stands at its lowest level in more than a quarter-century.  These remarkable data are hidden in plain sight, in the latest annual statistical survey of prisoners issued last week by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Comparing 2017 survey results with prior years shows that the African American male imprisonment rate has dropped by a third since its peak and is now at a level not seen since 1991.  African American women’s rate of imprisonment has dropped 57 percent from its peak and is now at a 30-year low.

How big a change does this represent? Had African American imprisonment held steady at its highest point (2001 for men, 1999 for women) instead of declining, about 300,000 more African Americans would be in prison right now.  Instead they are free to live in the community, to raise families, to hold jobs, to be healthy and happy.

Dramatic failures command attention and therefore often drive efforts at policy reform and innovation. Yet success can be just as informative. It’s just as vital to understand why black imprisonment rates have fallen as it was to understand why they rose.  Yet, so far, there is still more discussion about the latter than the former.

It’s time for the debate to catch up with the data.  Collapsing crime rates in black neighborhoods surely reduced imprisonment rates, but how did that increase in public safety come about?  Did programs to make policing and sentencing more equitable also contribute?  Do prisoner reentry programs deserve any credit for reducing incarceration, and if so, which ones?  What is being done right that should be expanded to accelerate the positive trends?

Obviously, there is a risk of feeding complacency in taking note of — and celebrating — the decrease in black imprisonment. Yet to do otherwise risks feeding defeatism in the face of clear evidence that progress is possible. It also would miss an opportunity to break down racist myths: The declining imprisonment rate for African Americans definitively rebuts any notion of intractable black criminality....

Undeniably, today’s still-high and still-disproportionate rate of black imprisonment represents the appalling legacy of institutional racism.  Equally undeniably, the continuing presence of about 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons poses a challenge to public policy and the nation’s conscience.  But in important respects, the situation is getting better.  We need to say so: The nation’s reformers could use the recognition and the inspiration.

BJS releases "Prisoners in 2016" and "Jail Inmates in 2017" reporting notable declines in incarcerated persons

As reported in this press release, "from 2007 to 2017, incarceration rates in both prisons and jails decreased by more than 10%, according to reports released today by the Bureau of Justice Statistics." Here is more from the release:

Over a decade, the incarceration rate among state and federal prisoners sentenced to more than a year dropped by 13%, from 506 prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents in 2007 to 440 prisoners per 100,000 in 2017. The prison incarceration rate also dropped 2.1% from 2016 to 2017, bringing it to the lowest level since 1997. The jail incarceration rate decreased by 12% from 2007 to 2017, from 259 to 229 jail inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents, but did not decline from 2016 to 2017.

The U.S. prison population was 1.5 million prisoners at year-end 2017, and the population of jail inmates in the U.S. was 745,000 at midyear 2017. There were 1.3 million prisoners under state jurisdiction and 183,000 under federal jurisdiction. From the end of 2016 to the end of 2017, the number of prisoners under federal jurisdiction declined by 6,100 (down 3%), while the number of prisoners under state jurisdiction fell by 12,600 (down 1%).

By citizenship status, non-citizens made up roughly the same portion of the U.S. prison population (7.6%) as of the total U.S. population (7.0%, per the U.S. Census Bureau). This is based on prisoners held in the custody of publicly or privately operated state or federal prisons. Among racial groups, the imprisonment rate for sentenced black adults declined by 31% from 2007 to 2017 and by 4% from 2016 to 2017, the largest declines of any racial group.

However, the imprisonment rate for sentenced black males was more than twice the rate for sentenced Hispanic males and almost six times that for sentenced white males (2,336 per 100,000 black males compared to 1,054 per 100,000 Hispanic males and 397 per 100,000 white males). The rate for sentenced black females was almost double that for sentenced white females (92 per 100,000 black females compared to 49 per 100,000 white females).

Among state prisoners sentenced to more than one year, more than half (55%) were serving a sentence for a violent offense at year-end 2016, the most recent year for which state data are available. An estimated 60% of blacks and Hispanics in state prisons were serving a sentence for a violent offense, compared to 48% of whites. At the end of fiscal year 2017, nearly half of all federal prisoners were serving a sentence for drug trafficking.

Privately operated prison facilities held 121,400 prisoners, or 8% of all state and federal prisoners, at year-end 2017. Inmates in these facilities were under the jurisdiction of 27 states and the Bureau of Prisons. The number of federal prisoners held in private facilities decreased by 6,600 from 2016 to 2017 (down 19%).

In 2017, almost two-thirds (482,000) of jail inmates were unconvicted, awaiting court action on a charge, while the rest (263,200) were convicted and either serving a sentence or awaiting sentencing.

The demographic characteristics of persons incarcerated in jails shifted from 2005 to 2017. During this period, the percentage of the jail population that was white increased from 44% to 50%, while the percentage that was black decreased from 39% to 34%. Hispanics accounted for 15% of all jail inmates in 2017, the same as in 2005. Asians accounted for less than 1% of jail inmates in both years. In 2017, the jail incarceration rate for blacks was more than 3 times the rate for whites and Hispanics, and more than 20 times the rate for Asians.

Jails reported 10.6 million admissions in 2017, which represented no change from 2016 but a 19% decline from 13.1 million in 2007. The overall weekly inmate turnover rate was 54% in 2017, while the estimated average time spent in jail before release was 26 days.

The full BJS reports are chock full of additional important data points, and are excitingly titled "Prisoners in 2017" (running 44 pages) and "Jail Inmates in 2017" (running 18 pages).  Especially because I am busy with end-of-semester tasks, I would be grateful to hear from others about any particular data points within these documents that seem especially notable and important.  Helpfully, the Sentencing Project has this release about the data with these interesting observations:

Analysis of the new data by The Sentencing Project reveals that:

• The United States remains as the world leader in its rate of incarceration, locking up its citizens at 5-10 times the rate of other industrialized nations. At the current rate of decline it will take 75 years to cut the prison population by 50%.
• The population serving life sentences is now at a record high. One of every seven individuals in prison — 206,000 — is serving life. 
• Six states have reduced their prison populations by at least 30% over the past two decades — Alaska, Connecticut, California, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont. 
• The rate of women’s incarceration has been rising at a faster rate than men’s since the 1980s, and declines in recent years have been slower than among men. 
• Racial disparities in women’s incarceration have changed dramatically since the start of the century.  Black women were incarcerated at 6 times the rate of white women in 2000, while the 2017 figure is now 1.8 times that rate. These changes have been a function of both a declining number of black women in prison and a rising number of white women. For Hispanic women, the ratio has changed from 1.6 times that of white women in 2000 to 1.4 times in 2017.

Texas completes another execution of another killer involved in notorious hate crime

As reported in this local article, headlined "Texas executes John William King in racist dragging death of James Byrd Jr.," the Lone Star State has completed another notable execution.  Here are the basics:

It’s been more than two decades since an infamous hate crime in East Texas, where three white men were convicted of chaining a black man to the back of a pickup truck, dragging him for miles and then dumping the remains of his body in front of a church.

On Wednesday evening, John William King, 44, became the second and final man to be executed in the 1998 murder case of James Byrd Jr. Lawrence Brewer was put to death in 2011 for the crime, and Shawn Berry is serving a life sentence.

King had previously been involved in a white supremacist prison gang, and he was notoriously covered in racist tattoos, including Ku Klux Klan symbols, a swastika and a visual depiction of a lynching, according to court documents. But King maintained that he was innocent in Byrd’s murder — claiming that Berry dropped him and Brewer off at their shared apartment before Byrd was beaten and dragged to death.

In a last-minute appeal, King’s attorney argued that a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling entitled his client to a new trial because his original lawyers didn’t assert his claim of innocence to the jury despite King’s insistence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals narrowly rejected this appeal in a 5-4 ruling Monday, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against stopping the execution about 30 minutes after it was scheduled to begin Wednesday.

After the ruling, King was taken from a holding cell and placed on a gurney in the death chamber and hooked up to an IV. He had no personal witnesses at his execution and spoke no final words, but he did provide a written statement beforehand, stating "Capital Punishment: Them without the capital get the punishment."  He was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital at 6:56 p.m., and pronounced dead 12 minutes later, according to the prison department.

Two of Byrd’s sisters and his niece planned to watch King's death. One of the sisters, who also watched Brewer's execution in 2011, told The Texas Tribune Tuesday that she didn’t understand why King’s case was tied up for so long with numerous appeals. He was sentenced to death in February 1999. “He wants to find a way not to die, but he didn’t give James that chance,” said Louvon Harris. “He’s still getting off easy because your body’s not going to be flying behind a pickup truck being pulled apart.”...

Before the execution, Harris said King's death would bring her some closure, but she will still have to be involved in Berry’s case as he becomes eligible for parole in 2038.

Notably, this was only the fourth execution in all of the US so far in 2019.  For telling contrast, consider that 10 years ago, there were 24 executions in 2009 before the end of April; and 20 years ago, there were 40 executions in 1999 before the end of April.  Were the pace of just one execution per month to continue, we would see in 2019 the fewest total number of executions in the United States in more than 30 years.

However, as this upcoming executions page reveals, there are already five executions in five different states scheduled for May 2019.  If all those executions are carried out, the pace for nationwide executions in 2019 would be comparable to the pace in 2017 and 2018.

"Misdemeanors by the Numbers"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new article now available via SSRN authored by Sandra Mayson and Megan Stevenson.  Here is its abstract:

Recent scholarship has underlined the importance of criminal misdemeanor law enforcement, including the impact of public-order policing on communities of color, the collateral consequences of misdemeanor arrest or conviction, and the use of misdemeanor prosecution to raise municipal revenue.  But despite the fact that misdemeanors represent more than three-quarters of all criminal cases filed annually in the United States, our knowledge of misdemeanor case processing is based mostly on anecdote and extremely localized research.  This Article represents the most substantial empirical analysis of misdemeanor case processing to date.  Using multiple court-record datasets, covering several million cases across eight diverse jurisdictions, we present a detailed documentation of misdemeanor case processing from the date of filing through adjudication and sentencing.

The resulting portrait reveals a system that disproportionately impacts poor people and people of color.  Between 2011 and 2016, each jurisdiction studied relied on monetary bail, which resulted in high rates of pretrial detention even at relatively low amounts, and imposed court costs upon conviction.  There were substantial racial disparities in case-filing rates across locales and offense categories.  The data also, however, highlight profound jurisdictional heterogeneity in how misdemeanors are defined and prosecuted.  The variation suggests that misdemeanor adjudication systems may have fundamentally different characters, and serve different functions, from place to place. It thus presents a major challenge to efforts to describe and theorize the contemporary landscape of misdemeanor justice.  At the most fundamental level, the variation calls into question the coherence of the very concept of a misdemeanor, or of misdemeanor criminal justice.  As appreciation for the significance of low-level law enforcement builds, we urge scholars and policymakers to attend carefully to the complexity of this sub-felony world.

"Death by Stereotype: Race, Ethnicity, and California’s Failure to Implement Furman’s Narrowing Requirement"

The title of this post is the title of this new empirical article now available via SSRN and co-authored by an especially impressive list of folks: Catherine M. Grosso, Jeffrey Fagan, Michael Laurence, David C. Baldus, George G. Woodworth and Richard Newell.  Here is its abstract:

The influence of race on the administration of capital punishment in the United States had a major role in the United States Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia to invalidate death penalty statutes across the United States.  To avoid discriminatory and capricious application of capital punishment, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment requires legislatures to narrow the scope of capital offenses and ensure that only the most severe crimes are subjected to the ultimate punishment.  This Article demonstrates the racial and ethnic dimension of California’s failure to implement this narrowing requirement.

Our analysis uses a sample of 1,900 cases drawn from 27,453 California convictions for first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and voluntary manslaughter with offense dates between January 1978 and June 2002.  Contrary to the teachings of Furman, we found that several of California’s “special circumstances” target capital eligibility disparately based on the race or ethnicity of the defendant.  In so doing, the statute appears to codify rather than ameliorate the harmful racial stereotypes that are endemic to our criminal justice system.  The instantiation of racial and ethnic stereotypes into death-eligibility raises the specter of discriminatory intent in the design of California’s statute, with implications for constitutional regulation of capital punishment.