Here’s the good news: the Texas Legislature put hundreds of millions of additional dollars into mental health for Texas in the new biennial budget. The state now allocates $8 billion for services ranging from community mental health services to substance abuse treatment, and more. The bad news is it isn’t always about the money. Texas still faces...
The safety of our prison staff should be one of our paramount concerns — alongside the safety of inmates and the communities into which they eventually will be released. Some states are enacting reforms that enhance all of the above, through putting appropriate limits on solitary confinement. Why should we care about those in solitary?...
$8.7 billion. That’s the staggering amount of criminal justice fees and fines Texas’ criminal courts have imposed on defendants between 2012 and 2018. That may look like a windfall to the state, but imposing a fee or a fine shouldn’t be confused with actually collecting them. A recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice...
Last month, in a move that captured national attention, Oklahoma released 462 people early from prison after Gov. Kevin Stitt commuted their sentences. Each of these individuals was imprisoned for low-level, nonviolent offenses that, due to recent reforms, would not result in prison were they arrested today. Stitt’s order was the largest single-day commutation in...
Every election year, politicians in Wisconsin take to the campaign trail and promise to spend taxpayer dollars wisely and to keep our streets safe. But in our state, we have a criminal justice system that often betrays those promises and undermines our shared values. Since 1980, Wisconsin’s prison population has grown more than fivefold. Today,...
When Americans who are on welfare get a job and no longer need public assistance, we rightly celebrate that. Similarly, are we also willing to acknowledge when Americans on community supervision have proven to be exemplary and no longer need the long arm of government around their neck? The issue of when the system’s mission...
There’s an order to these things: Defendants in the U.S. must be found guilty before they’re punished. But a celebrity’s case overseas demonstrates the order is often reversed, elsewhere, and even here. American rapper A$AP Rocky is now free, after previously being indefinitely detained before trial in Sweden. Unlike A$AP Rocky, thousands of Americans are in...
America’s criminal justice system at its breaking point. For decades, we’ve been addicted to more: more people convicted of drug offenses in prison; more prosecutors putting people in prison; and more money spent on prosecutors putting people in prison. These policies have not made us safer, haven’t addressed the root causes of crime and haven’t...
Across the nation, nearly thirty percent of jobs require an occupational license or certification; that percentage has more than quintupled since the 1950s. These licensing restrictions often create a lifelong barrier to gainful careers for the large number of qualified workers in Rhode Island with an arrest or conviction record. Now is the time for...
Michigan produces more cars and cherries than any other state, but it can do better with the state’s most important product: its children. Michigan is now just one of four states that automatically treats 17-year-olds as adults in the justice system, even for the lowest-level misdemeanors. Fortunately, legislation that was re-filed earlier this month with bipartisan support...
Imagine if your whole life was defined by a mistake. A lapse in judgment at 19 or 20 meant you couldn’t get a job, find a place to live or provide for your children at 40 or 50. This is the unfortunate reality for many of the one in three Americans with a criminal record,...
A new infection may be spreading through Texas like a brushfire — the Washington Monument Syndrome. No, a virus has not been transmitted from our national mall to the San Jacinto Monument. The syndrome is a moniker coined back in 1969 when George Hertzog, then head of the National Park Service, was so unhappy with...