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. 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.
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.
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 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 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.
Imagine that you are a lawful resident married to a U.S. citizen serviceman who is deployed overseas, and you are looking for a job to help support your family. You find one, but unbeknownst to you, your employer, aiming to expedite the hiring process, checks the "citizen" box on the application, a box that you correctly left blank. After audit, you are accused of making a false statement of citizenship status, which could provide grounds for mandatory deportation. Imagine that the allegation is never substantiated and you are never given the opportunity to explain the circumstances, but you are banished from the U.S. and from your family. Well – you don't have to imagine all this since it's a true account shared by Margaret D. Stock, Lt. Col. (Ret.) and counsel at Lane Powell, at a congressional briefing organized last month by the ACLU. Her client was forced to return to her country of origin and separated from her husband while he put his life on the line for the freedoms we enjoy.
By Meghan Groob, Media Relations Associate, ACLU at 3:11pm
It's a rare day in Washington when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) agree on anything. So when I heard earlier this week that Paul and Leahy introduced a bill together that gives judges more discretion on mandatory minimum sentences, I had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1.
Even in today's hyper-partisan era, it seems there's at least one thing people on both sides of the aisle can agree on: our country's one-size-fits-all sentencing practices just don't make sense.
By Chloe Cockburn, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU & Alex Stamm, ACLU Center for Justice at 4:51pm
Good news for criminal justice reform: the 2013 state legislatures have already introduced a number of impressive bills that build on the growing momentum of the last few years. If 2012 was notable for the number of major reforms that passed (see summaries here and here), then an early look at the crop of 2013 bills shows even more promise. While we may not see victories across the board on the bills currently moving though statehouses across the country, the clear message is that legislators are turning away from decades of cripplingly expensive and unjustly punitive incarceration policies and looking for alternatives.
