The passage of California’s Proposition 47 in November 2014 – which reduced many felony drug possession and property crimes to misdemeanors – might be a harbinger of criminal justice reform nationwide. But for now, reform advocates have gladly accepted the release of as many as 10,000 California state prisoners and ...
A new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) argues that U.S. lawmakers and "tough-on-crime" advocates have relied on incarceration as a default approach to criminal justice for far too long, not only costing billions of taxpayer dollars and endless human potential but also strangling the most fundamental of human rights. ...
Exponential increases in the U.S. jail population over the past 20 years appear to have leveled off and even reversed slightly, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
The DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported in May 2014 that the jail population in midyear 2013—731,208 nationwide—was "significantly lower" ...
After being sentenced to life in prison by a Union County, South Carolina judge for killing a registered sex offender and his wife, a pair of white supremacists lashed out at the victims' family with a vitriolic rant.
"See you perverts later," Jeremy Moody shouted at Charles and Gretchen Parker's ...
Despite recommendations from the United Nations, the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) and from within its own federal corrections system, Ontario, Canada's Millhaven Institution continues to lock up prisoners with acute mental illnesses inside cells that are part of a former segregation unit and have been called "grossly inadequate."
Canada's ...
Late-night releases from prisons and jails place former prisoners across the country at not only an immediate disadvantage—possibly unable to access transportation and shelter or a support system of friends and family— but also in the dangerous position of potentially committing new crimes that could land them back behind bars. ...
It took a prison guard’s compulsive sexual behavior to draw the critical eye of Delaware corrections officials to a boot camp program intended for troubled youth, and subsequently shut it down.
The Sussex Boot Camp, which opened in 1997 at the Sussex Correctional Institution (SCI) in Georgetown, Delaware, “does not ...
The American Bar Association (ABA), based in Washington, D.C., passed a resolution in February 2014 urging state governments to require public comment before corrections departments institute rules and regulations affecting prisoners and their families.
Such "notice-and-comment" requirements, the ABA argues, "will increase government transparency and accountability and provide an important ...
In violation of international law, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has executed a Mexican national with an IQ of 67, placing Americans in danger of being denied fair legal treatment abroad.
The January 22, 2014, execution of convicted murderer Edgar Arias Tamayo, 46, was the third of a Mexican ...
Virginia should decriminalize drug-related behavior and treat drug abuse as a public health issue, while increasing educational resources and opportunities in low-income communities of color in order to improve public safety and lower the state's prison population, according to a recent report from the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute (JPI). ...
