criminal justice

Analysis: The Case for Defunding the Police

Local governments invest a huge percentage of their budgets in policing, often to the detriment of other community services. Yet the results of this enormous taxpayer outlay are mediocre at best.

That’s why advocates across the country are calling on governments to reduce police budgets and reallocate those funds to services that tackle the underlying social and economic factors generating crime and perpetuating structural racism. These include programs such as job training, mental health services, homelessness prevention and basic income supports.

California Needs More Funding for Alternatives to Juvenile Detention, Legislator Says

By Claudia Boyd-Barrett

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.

Funds From Ballot Initiative Help Newly Released Prisoners Find a Home in Los Angeles

By Ron Shinkman

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.

Facing Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric and ICE Raids, Fewer Undocumented Victims Willing to Report Domestic Violence

By Claudia Boyd-Barrett

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.

Instead of prison, felons get jail and rehab

By Lynn Graebner

After serving time in jail, a three-step program helps men in Santa Cruz county make a new life after a felony conviction.

Poor health care moving from prison to jails

By Mary Flynn

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.

Ballot-mandated drug treatment cut, despite success

By Heather Gilligan

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.

San Mateo County courts strained by state prison reforms

By Callie Shanafelt

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.

Tribal courts aim to heal

By Callie Shanafelt

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.

Therapy to help close revolving door on prisons and jails

By Heather Gilligan

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.

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