Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history. And yet, our criminal justice system has failed on every count: public safety, fairness and cost-effectiveness. Across the country, the criminal justice reform conversation is heating up. Each week, we feature our some of the most exciting and relevant news in overincarceration discourse that we’ve spotted from the previous week. Check back weekly for our top picks.
Earlier this year, the Orleans Parish Defenders Office (OPD), which represents more than 80 percent of criminal defendants in Orleans Parish and handled 30,000 cases in 2011, faced a particularly severe fiscal crisis.
Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history.
By Tiseme Zegeye, ACLU Women's Rights Project at 12:33pm
In a Louisiana public school, female students who are suspected of being pregnant are told that they must take a pregnancy test. Under school policy...
Earlier this week, the City of New Orleans and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) entered a consent decree to revamp the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). A consent decree” is essentially a contract monitored by a judge to ensure that the terms of the agreement are met. This is the broadest such agreement in the DOJ's history, covering all aspects of the NOPD from recruitment and training to officer discipline. It will, literally, remake the NOPD and, we hope, remake the city of New Orleans.
Louisiana's prison crisis has been much in the news recently. Just a few days ago I posted about the terrible conditions and what the ACLU is doing to help alleviate the overcrowding and over-sentencing.
In that post I mentioned an ACLU-sponsored bill, House Bill 543, which would grant parole eligibility for nonviolent and non-sex offenders who have been sentenced to life without parole. These prisoners wouldn’t automatically be let out of prison – rather, they would have the chance to go before a parole board and prove that they are ready to re-enter society rather than spending the rest of their lives behind bars.
The Times-Picayune recently finished an exposé of the crisis in the Louisiana prison system. Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, at enormous human and financial cost. In an eight-part series that later became the source of a column in the New York Times, the newspaper focused on both the political underpinnings and social consequences of incarcerating so many members of society.
Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it's ever been in U.S. history. And yet, our criminal justice system has failed on every count: public safety, fairness and cost-effectiveness. Across the country, the criminal justice reform conversation is heating up. Each week, we feature our some of the most exciting and relevant news in overincarceration discourse that we've spotted from the previous week. Check back weekly for our top picks.
By Carl Takei, ACLU National Prison Project at 3:12pm
New Orleans' incarceration rate is the highest in the country — the city locks up three times more people than the national average. The city jail, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), holds nearly 3,200 prisoners and remains the largest per-capita jail in the nation. But Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman wants to use hundreds of millions of dollars in post-Katrina Federal Emergency Management Adminstration (FEMA) reconstruction funds to make it even bigger.
