Wisconsin and Minnesota are very similar states with very different approaches to marijuana possession. The two states have roughly the same number of people and similar demographics, but Wisconsin arrests twice as many people for marijuana possession. Which makes for an interesting question: what might happen if Wisconsin cut its marijuana possession arrests in half?
By Amy Fettig, ACLU National Prison Project at 4:30pm
Why are the Feds spending $250 million in taxpayer dollars to build an unnecessary and counter-productive prison for women in rural Aliceville, Alabama?
As the New York Times pointed out recently, most women in federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) custody are incarcerated for non-violent offenses; over half of them have minor children. Many of these women do not need to be incarcerated in order to protect public safety. Locking them up hundreds of miles away from their families, children and communities is exactly the wrong step to take if we want them to re-enter society successfully. Decades of research demonstrates the success of policies that keep prisoners near their homes – and for women especially, concern for their children is most often cited as a prime motivator for successful rehabilitation.
By Alex Berger, Legislative Assistant, ACLU at 4:59pm
Earlier this month, a high school honors student named Kiera Wilmot was charged with felony discharge of a weapon on school property. Her crime? Creating her own science experiment.
When Kiera mixed several household chemicals together in a plastic bottle, she caused a small explosion in her school's parking lot, hurting no one and causing minimal damage. But now she faces up to ten years in prison and a felony criminal record for a crime she had no intention or desire to commit.
By Ian Kysel, Aryeh Neier Fellow, ACLU Human Rights Program at 5:07pm
There are more than 80,000 people in solitary confinement in the United States. Last week, the widespread misuse and abuse of solitary confinement in jails and prisons across the country drew international condemnation when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights criticized the United States following weeks of hearings on human rights practices across the Americas region.
By Jesselyn McCurdy, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:18pm
Talk about worrying about the symptom instead of the cause: Attorney General Eric Holder recently sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, warning of the devastating effect budget cuts will have on the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) if sequestration moves forward. If no deal is reached by March 1, the BOP will face a 5% reduction in staffing levels. His letter paints a scary picture:
By Amy Fettig, ACLU National Prison Project at 11:00am
Here’s to starting the New Year right. The notorious Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois, with its practice of housing human beings alone in cells for 22-24 hours per day with little or no human interaction or outside stimulus, officially shut its doors today.
By Brandon Buskey, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 10:16am
Prominent conservative leaders Newt Gingrich and Pat Nolan penned a forceful editorial last week in the San Diego Union-Tribune advocating that states such as California abandon the draconian practice of sentencing children to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. While professing their continued commitment to conservative values, Gingrich and Nolan assail criminal laws that fail to recognize the inherent differences between children and adults and thus destroy all hope for youth who may one day deserve the opportunity to rejoin society. Sentencing children to spend the rest of their lives in prison, they assert, represents “an overuse of incarceration.”
By Kara Dansky, Senior Counsel, ACLU Center for Justice at 12:02pm
According to a recent New York Times article, prosecutors and debt collectors are working together to threaten bad check writers with jail, even when no crime has been committed.
Here’s how it works. Someone writes a check to a merchant such as Wal-Mart (whether the person intends to defraud the merchant is irrelevant). The check bounces. The person then receives a letter signed by the local district attorney, on official letterhead, stating that the person can be sent to jail unless he or she agrees to pay the amount of the check, plus fees, plus the cost of a “financial accountability” class. The person is not informed that the letter is actually sent by a debt collection company or that no one at the district attorney’s office has reviewed the case. If the person agrees to take the class, the class participation fee is split between the debt collection company and the district attorney’s office.
