One year after securing $37 million in state funding for programs that keep young people out of the criminal justice system, an assemblyman from Los Angeles is seeking to more than double support for the initiative in next year’s budget.
criminal justice
As Latanja Madison’s release date from prison inched closer, she felt more terrified than elated. During a decade behind bars at the California Institution for Women in Corona, her immediate family members passed away. She feared leaving prison may lead to a worse fate – habitual homelessness.
Spooked by ICE raids in their communities, news of family separations at the border, and anti-immigrant policies from the federal government, undocumented domestic violence survivors are staying with abusers longer and shunning help, often at risk of their lives. Survivors who do come forward also face greater challenges to pursuing safety and stability than in the past.
After serving time in jail, a three-step program helps men in Santa Cruz county make a new life after a felony conviction.
California’s sweeping criminal justice reform plan, in place since October 2011, was meant to sharply reduce the state’s prison population. But the changes may have also had the unintended consequence of passing along the biggest problem associated with overcrowding – poor health care – to county jails.
In 2000, California voters overwhelmingly approved Prop 36, a ballot measure that offers non-violent drug offenders treatment instead of jail. But now the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act is on life support, if not altogether dead, despite data that shows it has saved taxpayers money and tamped down recidivism among its participants.
State prison reforms are supposed to reduce dangerously overcrowded prison populations and help to alleviate the state’s fiscal crisis. But trial courts in San Mateo are feeling the squeeze of the fiscal crisis and the reforms on the county.
Advocates for Native American survivors of intimate violence cheered when they won the right to prosecute non-Indian assailants in tribal court. That change came with a provision in the Violence Against Women Act earlier this year. On at least one slice of California sovereign tribal land, the change also means defendants will have to engage with a very different criminal justice system – one that is based on restorative justice.
When California legislators decided that certain felons no longer would be held in the state’s overflowing prisons, they were under pressure from a court order to relieve the system’s dangerously overcrowded conditions. But part of their goal also was to keep lower-level convicts near rehabilitative programs in their own communities. Some counties are embracing the goal of rehabilitation, too, and are turning to local non-profits to help people convicted of non-violent, non-serious and non-sexual crimes start a new life.
What happens at Veteran’s Treatment Court is anything but typical. Modeled on drug treatment courts, they provide extra support and treatment opportunities for vets.