The bad news about the criminal justice system can seem overwhelming: vast racial disparities; an incarceration rate unprecedented in world history and more than quadrupling over the past four decades; a school-to-prison pipeline that short-circuits our children’s futures.
If law enforcement agencies in Alabama want to seize and keep someone’s property — cash, cars, real estate, guns, TVs or other assets — they don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was used in drug trafficking or obtained through criminal activity.
Today, families around Louisiana are being reunited as some people incarcerated for nonviolent, non-sex-related offenses are released due to bipartisan criminal justice reforms that state lawmakers adopted earlier this year.
Florida Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, and Rep. Ben Diamond, D-St. Petersburg, filed legislation — SB 694 and HB 481 — today that would create a safety valve, allowing judges to depart from mandatory minimum sentencing for low-level drug crimes.
Alabama is grappling with how to reform an overcrowded, understaffed prison system that perpetuates violence and fails to rehabilitate prisoners. It’s a problem that has confronted many other states as their prison populations mushroomed during the era of “tough-on- crime” policies that made America the incarceration capital of the world.
The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) must conduct a meaningful analysis of the staffing it needs to address an unconstitutionally inadequate level of care for prisoners who have mental illnesses, according to a brief filed in federal court yesterday by the SPLC.
Healthy people who are forced into solitary confinement in prison may develop mental illnesses due to their isolation, but the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) deliberately ignores the problem, according to a brief filed in federal court last week by the SPLC.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a package of 10 criminal justice reform and reinvestment bills earlier this year that will reduce the state’s prison population by 10 percent and scale down the parole/probation population by 12 percent over the next decade.
A solution to fix the “horrendously inadequate” mental health care provided to people in Alabama prisons may require a series of evidentiary hearings, a federal judge indicated this week at a status hearing.
The policies and procedures at a private, for-profit immigrant detention center in Georgia are violating the due process rights of detainees by forcing them to wait hours to see their attorneys in one of only three meeting rooms at the facility that can house 1,900 detainees, the Southern Poverty Law Center told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the facility’s operator CoreCivic in a letter sent today.
