What does a drug abuse epidemic have to do with angry political attacks against immigrants and minorities? Everything, concludes a new CJCJ study detailing key facts so far missing from debate over Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law. The study analyzes recent figures documenting that drug abuse has become a deadlier crisis in Arizona than almost anywhere else – worse, even, than California’s formidable drug woes. After a tripling in drug death rates over the last two decades, overdose of…
Blog Aug 2, 2010
Ventura: Overcrowded and Understaffed
Current information available on the DJF creates concern in regard to the level of rehabilitative care provided in Ventura Youth Correctional Facility. In the Fifteenth Special Master Report, filed July 13, 2010, experts identified that DJF is experiencing several obstacles to reform resulting from the State’s fiscal crisis, including a hiring freeze, lay-off plans, and travel bans. Moreover, the closure of the Heman G. Stark facility in February of this year required DJF to swiftly transfer…
Blog Jul 30, 2010
A New Responsible CCPOA
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) has long been seen as the primary villain responsible for the disastrous state of the California prison system. During the late 1980s and 1990s while under the leadership of Don Novey, the CCPOA argued, advocated, and spent enormous amount of its resources to intimidate lawmakers to support harsher sentencing laws and prison expansion. The calculation, of course, was that an ever expanding prison system would translate into an…
Two provocative papers issued by CJCJ this month find that despite racial progress in other areas, American authorities’ historical campaign to associate taboo drugs, particularly marijuana, with “Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos,” and other minorities (U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics Harry Anslinger, 1936) remains powerful in 2010. CJCJ’s first paper analyzes new criminal justice, health, and drug monitoring agency statistics to document that California operates a separate, harshly unequal…
Blog Jul 21, 2010
Building a new consensus on California prison policy
The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association are co-hosting an unprecedented series of policy discussions in Sacramento with some of the state’s leading correctional experts to help forge a consensus on future corrections policy. With the continued deterioration of conditions in the state’s prisons, a new urgency has emerged that is bringing together a new coalition of groups and individuals to work with state leaders to address…