The Trump administration’s war on science continues, and its latest move will cause more wrongful convictions. Attorney General Jeff Sessions just announced that he will dissolve the National Commission on Forensic Science, the non-partisan organization tasked improving the reliability and accuracy of scientific evidence used in criminal cases. Sessions seeks to keep forensic testing under… Read More
At the end of the Obama administration, the Department of Justice rushed to release several reports about criminal justice in America, before the reports could be buried by the incoming Trump administration. One of those we recently discussed – the DOJ’s eleventh hour report about the Chicago Police Department’s institutional racism and use of excessive… Read More
Given the South’s problematic history with equal justice issues, this may be surprising: a Mississippi county may be on its way to becoming a national leader in local prison reform. In May 2015, the Justice Department found that Hinds County, Mississippi’s jails were “in crisis” (which says a lot, considering the very low bar of our poor… Read More
There’s been a lot of talk in the news about an opioid/heroin epidemic in our country. And with this epidemic, many have begun rethinking long-term incarceration for drug addicts. It is certainly time for this reform. Make no mistake: locking people up for years, decades, or a lifetime for an illness – an addiction –… Read More
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. On Martin Luther King Day this year, let’s think about how we can contribute to fighting injustice. All year, we blog about how broken our criminal justice system is, but we rarely talk about what can be done about it on a… Read More
