The criminal justice system exists to prevent crime and to provide justice and healing to crime victims. But that system – police, prosecutors, courts, jails, prisons, and services for people with criminal records in and out of incarceration – is not alone in that mission. Community groups standing apart from the system do so as well, particularly in response to the movements for racial equity in law enforcement and to end mass incarceration. These stories look at the effectiveness of both sets of players, and at responses sparked when the criminal justice system itself is the problem.
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2021/how-a-project-is-training-incarcerated-people-to-become-journalists
Julia Métraux
Poynter
26 January 2021
Text / 800-1500 Words
In its first year, the Prison Journalism Project published hundreds of articles by more than 140 incarcerated writers in 28 states. The project provides journalism-skills training and then a platform for the work of incarcerated journalists. This delivers news and viewpoints that otherwise would not be heard by outsiders, spreading awareness of prison conditions and empowering often-ignored people to tell their stories.
https://mashable.com/article/how-to-start-a-business-formally-incarcerated
Chase DiBenedetto
Mashable
24 January 2021
Text / 1500-3000 Words
Inmates to Entrepreneurs has graduated 1 million people from its eight-week program that teaches incarcerated people how to start their own low-capital businesses. An extension of a free online entrepreneurship course, Starter U, the program offered in-person workshops until COVID forced it to go virtual. One study shows the unemployment rate in December 2020 for formerly incarcerated people was more than 27%, more than four times higher than the general public. Inmates to Entrepreneurs was started 28 years ago in North Carolina's prison system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/world/canada/marijuana-legalization-promises-made.html
Ian Austen
The New York Times
23 January 2021
Text / 1500-3000 Words
Since Canada legalized recreational use of marijuana two years ago, prosecutions for possession of small amounts of the drug have all but disappeared, erasing a major racial disparity in Canadian law enforcement. But other aspects of the country's plan for racial equity to flow from legalization have yet to be realized. Few of the estimated 500,000 people with possessions convictions on their record have managed the daunting process of getting their records cleared. Illegal sales still flourish, and Black and indigenous people have not found much success in the growing legal side of the business.
https://level.medium.com/the-free-hotline-thats-saving-women-s-lives-by-disarming-dangerous-men-f8da49f3b31f?gi=sd
Christina Noriega
Medium
22 January 2021
Text / 800-1500 Words
The Calm Hotline takes calls from men in Bogotá, Colombia, in an effort to address the root causes of domestic violence: a culture of machismo. Four psychologists take emergency calls – about 700 calls came in the service's first month – and works to refer the callers to an eight-week "gender transformation program" that will attempt to change men's toxic attitudes that can lead to violence. The program is patterned on a counseling hotline in the Colombian city of Barrancabermeja that was associated with a steep decline in domestic violence.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/1/21/22241444/nypd-officers-chokeholds-still-cant-breathe
Yoav Gonen
Topher Sanders
The City
21 January 2021
Text / Over 3000 Words
New York Police Department banned chokeholds in 1993, to prevent unnecessary injury and death. The practice has been scrutinized especially closely since the 2014 death of Eric Garner. But despite hundreds of complaints alleging the forbidden use of chokeholds, no NYPD officer has been fired for using a chokehold since 2014, nor have any complaints yielded more than some lost vacation time as a penalty. The failure of the policy stems from many causes, including ambiguity in the policy and its enforcement and lack of respect for investigative findings of the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/crime/they-probably-saved-my-life-ex-con-talks-about-how-nonprofit-is-preventing-him-and-others-from-reoffending-in-exceptional-numbers/63-cb36b1f3-f59f-429f-8a02-9c81685b9955
Christine Byers
KSDK-TV
21 January 2021
Broadcast TV News / Under 3 Minutes
St. Louis' Concordance Academy of Leadership turns the traditional approach to prison re-entry programs on its head. Rather than pushing people just released from prison to find housing and a job, the academy pays its participants a living wage while it provides them with the counseling and other support they need not to slip back into trouble. Once their lives are stable, they focus in the 18-month program on employment. The 6-year-old program improves the chances of staying out of prison by more than 40%, according to one study. Concordance is raising the money it needs to expand to other cities.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/durham-county/article248629260.html
Charlie Innis
The News & Observer
20 January 2021
Text / 800-1500 Words
Because two Durham neighborhoods using the Cure Violence method of "violence interruption" bucked the citywide trend toward higher gun violence, the city will expand its Bull City United violence-prevention program to four more neighborhoods. The additional $935,488 cost will pay for 16 employees, many of them formerly incarcerated, who will mediate disputes after a shooting, to prevent retaliation, and who will conduct outreach to people at risk of gun violence.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/01/19/zoom-funerals-outdoor-classes-jails-and-prisons-innovate-amid-the-pandemic
Keri Blakinger
The Marshall Project
19 January 2021
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When the pandemic forced jails and prisons to ban educational classes and cut off visits between outsiders and their loved ones behind bars, some jailers opened their facilities to remote-learning and -visiting tools. The result is a boom in the use of video conferencing for literacy classes, vocational training, family visits, and even to enable incarcerated people to attend family funerals. Some advocates for the incarcerated worry that in-person interactions could permanently be replaced by video, even after the risk of viral infection has eased.
https://restofworld.org/2021/mexico-city-security-theater
Madeleine Wattenbarger
Rest of World
19 January 2021
Text / Over 3000 Words
Mexico City's 11-year-old video surveillance system, one of the most advanced in the world, was a massive investment in public safety: about $660 million to date to cover the city with more than 30,000 cameras and other devices. Like so much else in Mexico's law enforcement apparatus, it has done little to control crime but instead has become a tool of corruption and official impunity. While the cameras have helped keep tourists and elites safer, the vast majority of crimes go unreported and only a tiny number of police investigations benefit from the surveillance system.
https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/more-dayton-residents-have-conflict-during-covid-19-mediation-comes-to-the-rescue/KGQQBGLZAJGPDKMFJSJ6ZY4QPU
Cornelius Frolik
Dayton Daily News
18 January 2021
Text / 800-1500 Words
In Dayton, neighbor disputes and other conflicts ended up in mediation far more often in 2020, thanks to the Dayton Mediation Center's online services at a time when local court operations were limited by the pandemic. A 23% increase in cases can be seen as both bad news and good: more conflicts among people frustrated by social distancing, but more willingness to address conflicts constructively through dialogue mediated by trained volunteers. Dayton police, who are often called to intervene in neighborhood and domestic spats, will be trained to refer cases to the free mediation center in 2021.
http://nmindepth.com/2021/01/17/albuquerques-vision-for-non-police-first-responders-comes-down-to-earth
Ted Alcorn
New Mexico In Depth
17 January 2021
Text / Over 3000 Words
In response to the 2020 policing protests, Albuquerque was among the first cities to embrace a major change in handling mental-health-crisis calls to 911. But its new Community Safety Department has foundered in its first year, a victim of inadequate planning and resources. The plan to send unarmed first responders on such calls, to reduce the risk of a violent over-reaction by the police, depended on reassigning city workers from other agencies, none of whom were mental health professionals. City councilors have sent the planners back to rethink the latest in a history of failed responses.
https://gijn.org/2021/01/15/how-open-source-experts-identified-the-us-capitol-rioters
Rowan Philp
Global Investigative Journalism Network
15 January 2021
Text / 1500-3000 Words
Digital sleuths preserved a trove of evidence from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by acting quickly to "scrape" and archive videos, images, and other data from social media. Investigative journalists from Bellingcat, the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, and Czech data archive Intelligence X were among those who responded before rioters, worried about criminal charges, began deleting posts. Crowdsourcing calls for assistance also produced a robust response from people anxious to aid law enforcement or debunk post-riot disinformation.
https://flintbeat.com/how-genesee-county-is-changing-criminal-justice-a-new-juvenile-justice-center
Amy Diaz
Flint Beat
10 January 2021
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A new Juvenile Justice Center that will focus on trauma-informed treatment of children rather than simply jailing them is still more than one year from completion. But, in the years leading to its opening, the county's family courts have cut in half the numbers of children held in detention by emphasizing rehabilitation programs over jail. Many of the services are based on the "Missouri Model" of juvenile justice, which has been shown to reduce incarceration and prevent crime through evidence-based approaches that are more therapeutic than punitive.
https://www.nj.com/news/2021/01/newark-cops-with-reform-didnt-fire-a-single-shot-in-2020-moran.html
Tom Moran
NJ Advance Media
10 January 2021
Text / 800-1500 Words
In 2020, six years after the Justice Department imposed a series of reforms on the Newark Police Department, Newark police officers have reduced their use of force so much that they didn't fire their guns at all in 2020, nor did the city pay any brutality-lawsuit settlements. Reforms in training, including de-escalation tactics, all backed by supportive leadership and extensive community outreach, turned a "rogue department" of brutality and racism into a more trusted, effective force.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/943938352/outside-in-everybody-knows-somebody
Laine Kaplan-Levenson
NPR
7 January 2021
Podcast / Over 15 Minutes
The story of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act starts with a young legal aide to Sen. Joe Biden who did not identify as a feminist and knew little about the issues, but whose methodical building of a coalition and a set of arguments led to the historic passage of the law in 1994. VAWA was the first U.S. federal law to address comprehensively the ancient problem of gender-based violence. A key provision, authorizing federal civil lawsuits by victims, helped many women for six years until the Supreme Court struck it down. The law's other effects, still ongoing, include funding victim-aid groups.
https://en.reset.org/blog/ghana-new-app-striving-save-fishermen%E2%80%99s-livelihoods
Ciannait Khan
Reset
7 January 2021
Text / Under 800 Words
With more than 200 communities along the Ghana coast relying on small-scale fishing, a new app called DASE seeks to hold industrial trawlers accountable for illegally fishing in their seas. The app allows people to take a picture or video of the activity and upload it to a database where it can be used by law enforcement to act. The app is already being adapted for use in other African coastal countries.
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/how-oregons-radical-decriminalization-of-drugs-was-inspired-by-portugal
Roshan Abraham
Next City
5 January 2021
Text / 1500-3000 Words
After Portugal decriminalized hard drugs in 2001 to treat drug use as a health problem and not a crime, the country expanded treatment services that produced sharp drops in drug-overdose deaths and HIV infections. Its numbers of people incarcerated on drug charges also dropped by nearly half. The Drug Policy Alliance studied Portugal's approach and made a modified version of it the model for Oregon, where courts and prisons have been the gateway to the state's limited treatment services. Oregon voters approved decriminalization and a vast increase in treatment programs that will roll out in 2021.
https://www.knoxpages.com/solutions/casa-program-uses-volunteers-to-advocate-for-kids/article_005f9fd8-4e38-11eb-af23-ab5c593816c3.html
Cheryl Splain
Knox Pages
4 January 2021
Text / 1500-3000 Words
In 55 Ohio counties, judges can appoint volunteers from Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) programs to represent the interests of children when their families' struggles end up in court. CASA volunteers act as a judge's eyes and ears in the lives of children who are suspected of being victims of abuse or neglect, or who at least need a more stable home. They recommend placement options and treatment services. Such programs can save counties money, by replacing paid lawyers serving as guardians, and volunteers can be more attentive to children's needs.
https://www.global-geneva.com/the-ex-monk-and-the-thai-sex-mafia-helping-victims-find-another-way
Edward Girardet
Global Geneva Magazine
4 January 2021
Text / 1500-3000 Words
Wat Arun Rajvaram Community Learning Centre, founded on Buddhist precepts by a former monk, has trained more than 250 Thai young women for work as nurse assistants, jobs aimed at keeping them out of the illicit sex trade, forced labor, and arranged marriages. High school graduates, ages 16 to 19, are selected in groups of 15-20 per year, mostly on scholarships paid by donors. They typically come from rural towns where poor families often sell their daughters to traffickers. Nearly all graduate and are guaranteed jobs at hospitals and health centers in Bangkok or elsewhere in Thailand.
https://helenair.com/news/state-and-regional/revolving-door-in-montana-corrections-still-turning-despite-reforms/article_ee9d0223-4a31-5c91-986b-3d45e8e823a3.html
Phoebe Tollefson
Helena Independent Record
4 January 2021
Text / 800-1500 Words
A set of criminal justice reforms enacted in Montana in 2017 that were meant to reduce incarceration and reinvest some of the savings in crime prevention programs has had little effect on the prison population. The state's "justice reinvestment" program, using a model adopted in 30 other states, has failed to put plans into action, partly for a lack of public spending on programs for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. As a result, the prison population is tracking where it would have been had nothing been done, and recidivism remains high.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/new-laws-lead-some-washington-prosecutors-to-rethink-three-strike-life-sentences
Manuel Villa
Nina Shapiro
The Seattle Times
3 January 2021
Text / 1500-3000 Words
Nearly three decades after Washington voters made their state the first to enact a three-strikes law, imposing life imprisonment for repeated, serious offenses, some prosecutors have found ways to avoid the law's effects that are seen as unduly harsh or racially biased. Some have interpreted a law authorizing resentencing to apply to three-strikes cases. Others have pushed the governor to grant clemency more often. This new willingness to question the law's effects is not universal among prosecutors, and the state Supreme Court soon will weigh in on the issue.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/1/3/22211709/nypd-cops-brooklyn-brownsville-experiment-defund-police
Yoav Gonen
Eileen Grench
The City
3 January 2021
Text / 800-1500 Words
For 50 hours over five days, police and community members collaborated on the Brownsville Safety Alliance pilot project, which kept police officers away from a longtime crime hotspot so that community members could provide for police-free public safety. During the experiment, no one in the neighborhood called 911 to report a serious crime. Criminologists caution that the test does not prove that police can step away permanently. But residents say that after longstanding friction over policing, they and the police struck a new tone of cooperation in community-led crime prevention that they hope can continue.
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/lawless/2020/12/30/after-3-years-and-15-million-devoted-to-testing-rape-kits-alaska-made-one-new-arrest
Kyle Hopkins
Anchorage Daily News
30 December 2020
Text / 1500-3000 Words
Despite hopes that testing a backlog of rape kits would reveal many new serial-rape suspects, Alaska's three-year push to test 568 kits under the federally funded Sexual Assault Kit Initiative led to only one new prosecution. The reasons the program fell short of expectations include a lack of usable DNA samples, errors by investigators, cases in which victims and suspects had died or victims no longer wished to proceed, or the kits revealed no evidence that wasn't previously known. Alaska is now footing the bill to test more kits, which contain physical evidence collected after a rape.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-plans-police-reform/2020/12/22/d4812c9c-3bcc-11eb-98c4-25dc9f4987e8_story.html
Robert Klemko
The Washington Post
29 December 2020
Text / 1500-3000 Words
After East Haven, Connecticut, police officers were caught harassing residents based on race, the Obama Justice Department took the police department to court and won a consent decree requiring a long list of reforms, in hiring, training, discipline, and use of force. The oversight, rare for a small city, changed the department's culture and won praise from many residents, who now trust the police more. Such federal action waned in the Trump years, but is expected to revive in the Biden administration, though perhaps under a more collaborative, less coercive model.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/cahoots-program-may-reduce-likelihood-of-police-violence/617477
Rowan Moore Gerety
The Atlantic
28 December 2020
Text / Over 3000 Words
A street-level view of White Bird Clinic's CAHOOTS program in Eugene explains its appeal as a cost-saving, humane alternative to sending the police to 911 calls concerning mostly minor problems involving homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse. From the decades-old program's countercultural beginnings to today's 24/7 presence, the private agency's publicly funded teams of a medic and crisis worker have helped keep problems from escalating into violence and jail time. But a number of factors call into question how scalable this approach would be in larger, more diverse cities.
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