California has been using a universal and inevitable fact of life as a form of punishment – death. The penalty may be seeing its final days, however, as the state explores other forms of justice. On January 31st, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he plans to dismantle California’s death row by relocating inmates of San […]
Tag: #Criminal Justice
Voting Behind Bars: Why Incarceration Should Not Limit the Right to Vote
On March 2, as congressmembers considered the For the People Act, a bill that would enact the most comprehensive expansion of voting sights in the United States since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Democratic representatives Cori Bush of Missouri and Mondaire Jones of New York introduced an unprecedented and groundbreaking amendment to the bill […]
Death to the Death Penalty: Capital Punishment as a Tool of White Supremacy
White America is slowly but surely coming to the realization that when government-created and funded systems fail minorities, the intended systems have not broken; rather, those systems are working exactly as intended. They directly reflect their creation on the backs of slaves as our nation was born. One of the most vile and haunting reminders […]
The Real Winner of the 2020 Election: Local Criminal Justice Reform
As our nation was fixated on the results of the Nov. 2020 presidential election, many Americans may not have paid much attention to local down-ballot elections concerning criminal justice and mass incarceration. Yet, voters delivered resounding and consequential verdicts on the criminal justice system, from electing progressive prosecutors and decriminalizing drugs, to addressing felony […]
On California’s Law and Order Initiative: Proposition 20, Featuring Eric A. Stanley
“This bill is being pushed through at the same time that the people across the United States are demanding the abolition of the prison industrial complex. It’s indicative of a culture war, which is to say a class war, around prisons and policing.” – Eric A. Stanley Walking on the streets of California after consuming […]
On the Ballot: Prop 25
Is SB10 worth the cost? This November, California voters will have the opportunity to vote on criminal justice reform and make a serious decision: should the state end the former cash bail system for a new risk assessment system? Proposition 25 is a referendum on Senate Bill 10 (SB10), which was signed by Gov. Jerry […]
A Place Run by Criminals: An Insight into The American Prison
Over the course of three years, prisoners from across the United States sent letters to Human Rights Watch detailing cases of sexual assault in prisons, most of them first-hand experiences. An inmate labeled A.H. wrote, “I have been raped by up to 5 black men and two white men at a time. I’ve had knifes […]
Is Justice Bought?
CRIMINAL You’re a drug dealer who’s just been busted for possession with intent to distribute. You started dealing in college to help pay for tuition and promised you would stop after graduation. Beads of sweat shoot down your face as you realize the evidence is stacked against you and could do up to ten years. […]
To Fund or Not to Fund
How should society determine its priorities? Should government invest only in services that yield a quantifiable, measurable benefit? Or, should government also recognize the importance of things that, while gratifying to the soul, are not as clearly utilitarian? For decades, the arts have been lumped in with the second category. Museums, theaters, galleries, and other […]
România: Fixing a Broken Record
On January 18th 2017, thousands of Romanians swarmed the streets in anger to oppose their government’s reported plans to adopt an emergency law, which would decriminalize forms of corruption if the damages caused amounted to less than $48,000. Though the government withdrew its plans to approve the bill, these protests have now become a nightly […]