Blog Oct 2, 2012
Romney, the 47% and juvenile justice
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney committed a major blunder that has gone viral all across the country. In a moment of candor he told a very exclusive audience (of mostly some of the infamous one percenters and perhaps a few wanabees) that “There are 47 percent of the [American] people who will vote for the president no matter what.…there are 47 percent who are with whom, who are dependent on government, who believe they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to…
The execution of justice is not always neutral. Unfortunately, racial discrimination remains deeply imbedded in the policies and practices of the justice system, and not merely a relic of the past. For example, minority youth are disproportionately affected with higher arrest and confinement rates than White youth. Experts identify this phenomenon as Disproportionate Minority Contact/Confinement (DMC). This is a widely recognized problem, one already given considerable attention by law…
Blog Sep 25, 2012
Jails, poorhouses, and debtor’s prisons
CJCJ staff writer Selena Teji recently posted a blog called “Overcrowded jails, the bail industry, and pretrial alternatives .” Among other things she notes that many are in jail “simply because they cannot afford to post bail.” In short, it’s a place for the poor. A couple of years ago I posted an article called “From Poorhouses to Jails, Same Function, Different Time ” I began by referring to a book by David Wagner called The Poorhouse: America’s Forgotten Institution . In his book one…
Blog Sep 20, 2012
Report: Senate Bill 678 delivers on its promises
In July the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) released it’s second year report on the effectiveness of Senate Bill 678 , a well-designed piece of legislation sponsored by Senator Mark Leno in 2009. Adapted from a successful model in Arizona , SB 678 created a system of performance-based funding that incentivizes county probation departments to implement and sustain data-driven model practices in adult felony probation supervision. If county probation departments demonstrated…
On Wednesday, September 12, 2012, the San Francisco Police Commission met to discuss a range of issues, including the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD)‘s faulty and problematic system of collecting arrest data. Recently highlighted by the Bay Citizen , San Francisco County is the only county of 58 in California that does not accurately report the arrests of Hispanic residents. CJCJ noted this data limitation in an April 2012 publication documenting a 40+ year pattern of racially…