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beatrixlockwood · 7 years ago

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READING THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE BEAT

JAIL EXPANSION: CB1 discusses the borough jail plan. Last week, representatives from the Mayor’s Office appeared at a community board meeting for the district home to the MDC to answer questions about the proposed jail expansion plan. Anti-prison activists joined concerned neighbors in decrying the plan.

VOTING RIGHTS: Iowa's governor teases a voting rights amendment in the state constitution. In her State of the State address last week, Gov. Kim Reynolds said she would propose a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to people who have served sentences for felony convictions. “There are few things as powerful as the joy of someone who got a second chance and found their purpose,” Reynolds said.

IMMIGRATION: An immigrant activist was arrested and detained in the Bronx. Yajaira Saavedra was taken into custody last week during an NYPD raid of her mother’s Mott Haven restaurant, La Morada. Her mother, Natalia Mendez, says she believes their family was targeted for their anti-gentrification work in The Bronx. “I was under the impression that I was in a sanctuary city, but more barriers are being [placed] by the mass policing that targets unjustly the working class like my family and street vendors,” she said in a statement.

DA RACE: Queens for DA Accountability, a new progressive coalition, released a policy platform. Member organizations, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, Court Watch NYC, and JustLeadership USA, gathered Monday to unveil policy recommendations for the next Queens District Attorney. Their demands include discovery reform, keeping ICE out of courthouses, a police misconduct unit, and an end to prosecutions for marijuana possession. The coalition is not backing a single candidate.

NYC JAILS: People detained in a federal jail in Manhattan are on a hunger strike due to the shutdown. After family visits were canceled for the second straight week due to the government shutdown, inmates at the Metropolitan Correctional Center or M.C.C., a federal jail in Manhattan, have begun to refuse meals. The shutdown has also affected visits from their lawyers and has slowed down the federal court system, depriving some of the detainees of their right to a speedy trial.

WHAT I’M RESEARCHING

Do you have experience or expertise that could help me answer these questions? Please reach out at beatrixlockwood [at] gmail.com.

How many people on parole in NYC each year are violated for “associating with a known criminal?”

What are the unique pathways that land women in jail?

What is the racial and gender breakdown of who pays bail in NYC?

#blog

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beatrixlockwood · 7 years ago

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Notes from CB1 Meeting 1/14

At the Manhattan CB1 meeting on Monday, January 14th, representatives from the Mayor’s office answered questions from the community board and residents about the plan to build a new jail at 125 White Street (the site of the Manhattan Detention Complex).

Most questions mainly centered around the following topics:

Neighborhood Advisory Committees

Residents are worried about transparency and community input with regard to the Manhattan “Neighborhood Advisory Committee,” which will hold its first meeting this Wednesday (January 16.) The meeting will not be open to the public or to press, but the minutes will be posted online.

Some lamented that the members of these committees are not subject to conflict of interest training due to the fact that they are acting on a volunteer basis and have no voting power. Others worried that the make-up of the committees (the full list is in my last newsletter) does not reflect the immediate area, and called for more residents to be appointed to the committee. “It just doesn’t seem very neighborly,” one woman said.

The community board has requested that the city invite several other groups to participate, including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Walker Street and Getting Out Staying Out, a re-entry organization.

Size and Specs

Each borough-jail will hold 1,500 beds for a total of 6,000 allowing for a daily population of 5,000 and 1,000 of “swing space” for safety reasons.

There will be 20,000 square feet set aside for “community space,” the use of which will be determined during the ULURP process. Residents had heard that this space had been designated as retail, giving the impression of a sort of jail-mall hybrid, but in fact, the use of the 20,000 square feet is undecided.

“Community Jail” Logistics

Residents questioned the city’s line that the jails would allow detainees to remain closer to their families and to courts, noting that people would likely be detained in the facility in the borough they are arrested, not the borough where they live. Representatives from the Mayor’s Office pointed out that there is often significant overlap between where a person is arrested and where they live, and emphasized that moving people closer to where they will be arraigned will allow for a speedy trial.

Criminal Justice Reform

“Why are you constructing these cages when you could close Rikers right now by ending pre-trial detention and eliminating broken windows policing?” one activist asked to applause from both fellow activists and at least one community board member.

Representatives from the Mayor’s office answered by stating that they are pursuing criminal justice reform in Albany and that the jail plan is part of a larger criminal justice reform plan meant to lower the city’s overall jail population. Four new jails will be replacing 11 facilities on Rikers, they said.

They did not address what reforms, if any, they were pursuing locally, including regarding the NYPD which one activist at the meeting pointed to as “the single largest driver of mass incarceration in New York City.”

#blog #jails #nyc

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beatrixlockwood · 7 years ago

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Who’s on the neighborhood advisory councils for the borough jails?

Last week, I noted that I was looking into who is serving on the Neighborhood Advisory Councils weighing in on the jail expansion plan. A couple of days ago, I got a response from the Mayor’s Office with more info. Below is the list they provided. Each of the groups has already begun meetings, except for Manhattan which will commence later this month, per the Mayor’s Office.

Bronx

In addition to several community members, there have been representatives from:

Community Board 1

Bronx Defenders

SOS Bronx

Bronx Connect

Latino Pastoral Action Center,

Queens

In addition to community members from Kew Gardens (Kew Gardens Civic Association) there have been representatives from:

Community Board 9

LaGuardia Community College

Queensborough Community College

Life Camp

Queens House

Fortune Society

Hour Children

Brooklyn

In additions to community members from Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights Associations there have been representatives from:

Community Board 2

JustLeadership USA

Brooklyn Law School

Gangstas Makings Astronomical Community Changes (GMACC)

Lippman Commission

Atlantic Avenue BID

Manhattan

In addition to Chinatown community members (Confucius Plaza, Smith Houses, Hamilton Madison house and Chatham Towers) there have been representatives from organizations such as:

Smith Houses

Hamilton-Madison House

Chatham Towers

Community Board 1

Community Board 3

Chinatown Partnership

Chung Pak

Chinese- American Planning Council

Street Corner Resources

READING THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE BEAT

DA RACE: Queens DA Richard Brown will not seek re-election this fall. The announcement sets the stage for the first competitive primary for Queens district attorney in decades. Related: For district attorneys and sheriffs, “tough on crime” is becoming a liability. The Appeal looks back on 2018 as the year organizers put their attention on elections that typically haven’t gotten much attention, but that have huge effects on how the criminal justice system functions. The best example is, of course, Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s progressive DA, who during his first year on the job has made significant changes to how all kinds of crimes — both non-violent and violent — are prosecuted. Related: Could the borough get its own Krasner? A number of progressive candidates are already throwing their hats in the ring, including Tiffany Caban, Lorelei Salas, Jose Nieves, Rory Lancman and Gabe Munsen.

JAIL EXPANSION: Mariame Kaba went on Democracy Now! to discuss the NYC jail plan. In an interview with Amy Goodman Friday, Kaba (aka @prisonculture) advocated for the #NoNewJails approach to closing Rikers, arguing that replacing the jail complex with new facilities completely misses the point. The Mayor, she said, only came out against closing Rikers after massive pressure from organizers, “who did not say, ‘Close Rikers and open up a bunch of decentralized jails.’ That was not the demand, OK? It was ‘Close Rikers and decarcerate.”

CRIMINALIZED SURVIVORS: Cyntoia Brown will be released in August. This week, Tennessee Gov. granted full clemency to the sexual trafficking victim who killed a man who paid her for sex when she was just 16 years old. She has already served 15 years behind bars. Background: For a good backgrounder on her case, read this from The Appeal. In her own words: Here’s Brown’s full statement on her clemency. And also read this: There are thousands of Cyntoia Browns. Some of them are here in New York. Since 2011, Gov. Cuomo has granted clemency to just 12 people — zero in 2018. #FreeThemNY advocates are calling on him to do more.

DISASTER PREPAREDNESS: After Hurricane Michael, a prison town in South Carolina struggles to get back on its feet. The New York Times looks at how the town of Marianna is recovering from the 2018 storm, which forced hundreds of inmates to relocate to a facility in Yazoo City, Miss., more than 400 miles away. I’ve been following reports about disaster preparedness in jails and prisons for a few months, and have read about Marianna before, in the news and on online prison forums. When Michael hit, families were left wondering where their loved ones ended up, and were working together to crowdsource reports of evacuations and conditions in prisons. Another disaster: Two sheriff’s deputies let mentally ill patients drown in a jail van during a flood. This devastating story was missed during the hubbub about prisoners eating food during the government shutdown.

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN: Clickbait aside, the shutdown did have a real impact on both staff and inmates in federal prisons. Among them: family visits canceled during the holidays, terminally ill patients denied compassionate release, fewer mental health resources, reduced programming, and more.

ELSEWHERE: Across the country, locking people up who can’t pay fines is standard practice. These “modern-day debtors prisons,” where defendants can be imprisoned for months at a time simply for not having enough money, are especially common in declining southern towns but can be found all over the U.S. The New York Times talked to some of those who’ve experienced them. “I thought, Because we’re poor, because we’re of a lower class, we aren’t allowed real freedom,” one of them said. “And it was the worst feeling in the world.”

JAIL EXPANSION: Los Angeles County is rethinking its $3.5 billion jail plan. After months of community opposition, members of the LA County Board of Supervisors will reconsider their plan to retrofit an immigration detention center as a women's jail on toxic land in Lancaster. Justice Leadership USA celebrates the news in a press release: “We have organized as members of the Justice LA campaign, led by directly impacted communities, and we have gathered research making the case to stop the construction to avoid the deep generational harms that would come with this $3.5 billion dollar jail expansion.”

VOTING RIGHTS: Amendment 4 went into effect in Florida this week. Massive numbers of people flocked to government buildings to register to vote on Tuesday, the first day Amendment 4 expanded voting rights access to formerly incarcerated people who completed their sentences. “I just thank God for this day,” one man told the Sun Sentinel after registering. “I’m a different man now.” Related: New Yorkers who voted for the first time in 2018 had similar responses, as I reported in November. “I felt like my citizenship had been legitimized,” one man who voted for the first time after serving his sentence told me.

INSPIRATION

A resource hub on transformative justice. I am certain that Transformharm.org will become an invaluable resource to me as I continue to do solutions-based reporting on mass incarceration and its impacts. Do not miss this resource, compiled by Mariame Kaba (aka @prisonculture), which contains tons of useful information about abolition, transformative justice, community accountability, and more.

City Bureau is training and paying community members to record public meetings. The nonprofit launched Documenters.org last week, a project to creating a robust and centralized public record for Chicagoans. It will provide essential info on city and county meetings to the public daily, in part by enlisting the help of the public in collecting this information. I would love to see a journalistic project like this for the courts.

WHAT I’M RESEARCHING

Do you have experience or expertise that could help me answer these questions? Please reach out at beatrixlockwood [at] gmail.com.

How many people on parole in NYC each year are violated for “associating with a known criminal?”

What are the unique pathways that land women in jail?

What is the racial and gender breakdown of who pays bail in NYC?

#newsletter #blog #criminal justice

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beatrixlockwood · 7 years ago

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More newspapers are changing the way they cover crime. That’s a good thing.

Back in October, Cleveland.com instituted a new “right to be forgotten” policy for its crime coverage. The local news outlet announced it would begin reviewing individual requests to have names removed from old crime stories. The idea behind the change, the newsroom said, was “that people should not have to spend their lifetimes answering for mistakes they made or minor crimes they committed many years earlier.”

They also stopped publishing mugshots and, with some exceptions, names of people who committed misdemeanors or other low-level crimes.

These types of editorial choices are still rare, but several outlets across the country like the New Haven Independent have similar policies around mugshots and names of perpetrators.

Last week, the Mississippi Sun Herald became the latest newsroom to make such a change. The paper announced it would be removing its mugshot gallery and would think twice about reporting crime “clickbait” — stories about low-level thefts, drunk and disorderlies, and other types of crimes that are so easily sensationalized and so rarely in the public interest. “For years, we posted the pictures of people charged with felony crimes, and, again, it was a popular part of our website,” the Herald’s editor explained. “But the mugshot stayed a part of people’s lives forever, whether they were convicted or not.”

More media outlets should follow suit. So often, crime coverage is guilty of so many of the same issues inherent in the criminal justice system. Changing the way we report on crimes is one way to change the way we deal with crime as a whole.

Getting rid of mugshots, covering fewer low-level crimes, and removing people’s names from certain stories are all steps in the right direction. But there’s more I think news outlets can do to fundamentally change the way we write about crime. Here are a few:

1. Source outside of the criminal justice system. As others have noted, local crime reporting “skews heavily toward the narratives of police and prosecutors.” There’s a myth that law enforcement are a neutral party, but by relying on them, we are promoting a law enforcement narrative, a huge bias in and of itself. It also leaves out other important community voices, like faith leaders, academics, community residents, and of course victims.

2. Report solutions. Crime reporting, particularly reporting on group violence and other community conflicts, so often frames these types of crimes as unavoidable or motivated by individual bad actors. In fact, there are many ways we can build stronger, safer communities, such as through community-based violence intervention programs and increased social services. Imagine if every crime story included information about these types of “solutions” to community violence and educated people on how to build stronger, more resilient communities.

3. Report on everyday violence as a public health crisis. Group violence, domestic violence, and suicide are rarely covered, especially by mainstream media. As the New York Times’ Andrea Kannapell writes, “It was something about them being too common, too obvious, no deeper meaning.” Although more reputable papers are increasing coverage of these commonplace crimes (like this recent feature from The Washington Post), there’s still a collective deprioritization. In the case of domestic violence and suicide, there’s a sense that these are private matters, not public health crises. And our racial biases allow us to deprioritize group violence and other “urban” crimes, which kill so many black people every day. As German Lopez writes in Vox, “Americans more likely to perceive black people as less innocent and even as criminals, which may, in some people’s minds, make these victims more deserving of the gun violence in their communities.”

Reading the Criminal Justice Beat

BAIL REFORM: A 61-year-old grandmother died in jail. Thirty bucks could have freed her. Janice Dotson-Stephens died earlier this month in a Texas jail, where she has been held since July for a misdemeanor trespassing charge. She had been given a $500 bond from a judge, which means she could have been released for about $30. It was her first arrest.

VOTING RIGHTS: Voter restoration means next to nothing without voter education. When Floridians passed Amendment 4 this November, they restored the right to vote to 1.4 million formerly-incarcerated people. But without proactive steps from the state, that likely won’t translate into votes. In this op-ed from Alabama, where voting rights were restored in 2017, organizers warn that the state’s complete lack of voter education has left many newly-enfranchised people in the dark about their rights. Back in November, I wrote about the lack of voter education for justice-involved New Yorkers. Out of the tens of thousands of people granted voting pardons by Cuomo, only an estimated 1,000 had registered by early October. Advocates say small number points to “miseducation and misinformation” originating from the state itself.

JAIL EXPANSION: “We’ll fight again. This is our community.” A decade ago, community organizers in the Bronx successfully defeated a plan to build a new jail in Hunts Point. Many of them are bringing the same tactics to the #NoNewJails movement. But it seems the city has learned some lessons from its past defeats as well. Organizers say the city planning is much more sophisticated this time around and will likely be tougher to beat.

JAIL EXPANSION: The Lippman Commission weighs in. In its latest report, the commission pushing for the closure of Rikers Island recommends that the city reduce the capacity of the new jails from 6,040 beds to 5,500 and to build a fifth facility on Staten Island. The commission also calls on city officials to do a better job listening to community concerns. But it dismisses critiques that argue Rikers should be closed without jail expansion. “The City’s proposal for four borough facilities is a necessary step towards closing Rikers,” it reads.

ELSEWHERE: A “betterment program” in Florida prisons, brought to you by the Church of Scientology. Criminon, a new program being offered in at least one Florida correctional facility, relies on the teachings of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and is being bankrolled by the controversial church. A spokesperson for the Florida DOC says that “theories of mind control would not be approved” in a prison-based program.

Inspiration

The first nationwide eviction database. The nationwide eviction crisis is a sister to mass incarceration.“Many of our poor, young black men are being locked up, and many of our poor, black women are being locked out,” says sociologist Matthew Desmond, who contributed to the Eviction Lab, a new project from Princeton University. Researchers collected evictions data from 48 states and D.C. and published it on an interactive map, the first of its kind.

A survey of women in prison. In partnership with Chicago Books to Women in Prison, The Point magazine mailed short surveys to incarcerated women across the country. Their crowdsourced responses paint a picture of what life is like for women behind bars. This is the type of project I’d love to do locally, particularly exploring women’s pathways into the justice system.

What I’m Researching

Do you have experience or expertise that could help me answer these questions? Please reach out at beatrixlockwood [at] gmail.com.

Who is on these secretive Neighborhood Advisory Councils weighing in on the jail expansion plan?

What are the unique pathways that land women in jail?

What is the racial and gender breakdown of who pays bail in NYC?

#criminal justice #blog #link roundup

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beatrixlockwood · 7 years ago

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When Rikers closes, what will happen to people with mental health and substance abuse issues?

This post started with a question someone asked me at a community input session for the borough jail in Brooklyn: What will happen to people with mental health and substance abuse issues?

New York City’s largest jail facility is also its largest mental health facility. And it’s shutting down.

As one of the largest jail complexes in the United States, Rikers Island holds more people with mental illness than any psychiatric hospital in the nation. More than 40 percent of the city’s overall jail population is diagnosed with a mental health issue, and more than 10 percent have a serious mental illness, according to city data. Research has shown that New York City’s jail system houses more individuals with serious mental illness than all of the state hospitals in the five boroughs combined.

But the jail system is not equipped to deal with this population. “It was not designed to be a therapeutic facility,” said Dr. James Gilligan, a psychiatrist and jail expert whose 2013 report on the conditions on Rikers Island exposed a mental health crisis within the jail system.

In addition to problems with staffing and resources, Gilligan said jails like Rikers are counter-therapeutic by design. “Every facility was oriented toward control and security,” he said, “leaving virtually no opportunity to treat human beings like human beings.”

In August, the city announced a plan to replace Rikers Island with new, community-based jails in four New York City boroughs. These jails are billed as a humane alternative to the notoriously violent Queens jail complex. They will be closer to communities, which the city said will make it easier for incarcerated people to travel to court and maintain contact with their families, lawyers, and health providers. “We’re taking a big step forward in the process of closing Rikers Island and creating a modern community-based jail system that is smaller, safer and fairer,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a press release.

The closing of Rikers Island has historical parallels with the closing of large psychiatric facilities nationwide. In the 1960s, mental health proponents nationwide argued that shifting from large mental hospitals to community-based treatment would make it easier for patients to stay connected with their families. It was a more humane alternative, they said, to notoriously cruel and dehumanizing mental health asylums.

“The original theory had been that the closure of [mental health] hospitals would release money that would then be invested into the community,” said Martin Horn, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction between 2003 and 2009. But the expected money from hospital closures never materialized and neither did investments into community-based health alternatives.

Gilligan said when hospitals closed, it didn’t just move people with mental illness out of hospitals. “It was a transinstitutionalization, which removed people from mental hospitals and into prisons and jails.”

In New York state between 2010 and 2017, the number of psychiatric beds in New York state fell from 4,958 to 3,217, leaving just 16.3 beds per 100,000 residents. Over that same period, the city’s jail population went from around 13,000 to around 8,700, even as national incarceration rates rose. But the number of people with mental illness in the jails stayed more or less steady, resulting in a higher concentration of people with mental health issues. At Rikers in 2010, thirty percent of people in the jail had a mental illness. That number surpassed 40 percent by 2014.

The city’s plan for closing Rikers includes just two strategies specifically addressing the jail population with mental illness: finding non-jail alternatives for people with mental illness and adding new mental health housing units.

Rikers has already implemented some mental health services, according to New York City Department of Corrections Press Secretary Jason Kersten.

“We currently offer a number of services in this area, such as specialized housing units that offer therapeutic treatment for those with serious mental diagnoses,” he said in an email. “We have crisis intervention and mental health first aid training for staff. We have eliminated punitive segregation for people with serious mental health issues. We are proud of these measures and will continue to look for ways to improve our services as we move into new, smaller and safer facilities.”

He added that the department of corrections prioritizes mental health care and will continue to in the new borough-based jail facilities, though he did not say specifically how care would be delivered to this population and how people with mental health issues would interact with other populations in the jails.

Criminal justice advocates agree that the city has taken major steps forward for the treatment of people with mental illness in the jail system. Jennifer Parish, director of Criminal Justice Advocacy at the Urban Justice Center, said that the shift to community jails could be another positive step. “Outside providers would have better access for continuity of care in the borough-based system,” said Parish. “If a person has a community treatment team, they would be able to better access their clients there. It can be time-consuming to go all the way to Rikers Island. Having jails in the community would make that much easier.”

But some warn that even if borough-based jails are able to provide treatment to people with episodic or acute mental illness, designing jail facilities to care for the mentally ill is not a solution. “Any jail is counter-therapeutic,” said Horn. “Even for those who can’t be diverted, the jail is the wrong place for someone whose problem is mental illness.”

Horn said that by designing a therapeutic setting rather than a punitive one, the city could better serve its population with chronic mental illness and reduce the burden on the jail system. Determining that people with chronic mental illness belong in a hospital instead of a prison would change the numbers and size requirements of the jail, and would influence their overall design. “It is imperative to be having this conversation now,” he said, “because it is a basic, conceptual issue about whether the mentally ill belong in jail at all.”

#rikers #blog

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