criminal justice

The American Civil Liberties Union is planning a major political advocacy program, including pursuing ballot intiatives to try to enact criminal justice reform and protections for gays, lesbians and transgendered people, the Washington Post's James Hohmann reports. The ACLU will pick three states with high incarceration rates and then sponsor ballot initiatives with the goal of driving sentencing reform. The ACLU also has raised $5 million to try to enact protections for nondiscrimination protections for LGBT individuals.

The number of Americans in state prison or on parole or probation has fallen to the lowest level in a decade, while the number of people in federal prison has fallen for the first time in more than 30 years, the Washington Post's Reid Wilson reports. "The total incarceration rate has fallen ... from about one in every 100 adults to one in every 110 adults," Wilson further reports. However, the number of people incarcerated in the United States remains close to historic levels: "more than 1.5 million inmates are housed in state or federal prisons, and another 731,000 reside in local jails."

Charles Koch, one of the wealthiest Americans and a prodigious supporter of conservative causes, told his hometown newspaper, the Wichita Eagle, that he thinks the American justice system has "been over-criminalized with too many laws and too many prosecutions of nonviolent offenders, not only for him but for everybody." Koch said his family and he are going to expand on the money they give to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to work on other efforts to reverse the trends in criminal justice that have led to 2.2 million people being incarcerated in the United States. Koch also has concerns that "the Sixth Amendment right to an attorney has been impaired by allowing public defender offices to be underfunded and overwhelmed, including by government prosecutors with more far more resources at their disposal," the Wichita Eagle's Roy Wenzl reports.
 

Judicial elections often involve campaign ads attacking candidates for being too soft on crime, even though there is a "growing bipartisan consensus that America locks up too many people for too long," The Marshall Project's Christie Thompson reports.

In 2014, there has been at least $13.8 million spent on TV advertising for state supreme court races, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. And the liberal American Constitution Society found that "as more TV campaign advertising aired in judicial election campaigns, elected state supreme court justices became less likely to rule in favor of defendants," Thompson further reports.

The irony is that many spenders on judicial campaign ads like the Koch brothers actually support policies in favor of decriminalization, but the "tough on crime" ads are used because they play on people's fears, Thompson also notes.

The Washington Post investigated 400 seizures from when police stopped drivers under a practice called "highway interdiction" and seized cash, having "their departments share in the proceeds through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Police can also make seizures under their state laws." Many drivers "had to engage in long legal struggles to get their money back after officers made roadside judgments about one of the most fundamental of American rights — the right to own property," the Post further reports. Advocates say that the practice has resulted in abuses of power in which the innocent suffer because their cash is seized even though they were not arrested.

This week, Law and Order Commission issued its findings on the lack of public safety on American Indian reservations, according to the Associated Press. Governmental statistics show the violent crime rates can be 20 times the national average, the AP also reported. The commission set the goal of improving those crime rates within a decade, including giving tribes more control over policing crime on reservations.