NEWSBYMATT KELLEY

A bill pending before the Minnesota legislature would allow judges in the state to try 10-year-olds as adults for offenses involving murder, manslaughter, assault, aggravated robbery or sexual conduct. This is a mistake for so many reasons, and we need to tell Minnesota lawmakers why.

Strong evidence shows that people below 16 or 17 years of age have not developed the adult brain functions needed to fully analyze consequences of their actions. Programs around the country (like this one) have shown incredible results in recent years in diverting young people from a life of crime through treatment, education and community connections. Sending young people to adult court -- and adult prison -- is not the answer to juvenile crime.

This is an issue of national importance. We may be experiencing an awakening of bipartisan enlightenment on the failure of legacy prison-focused justice, but that doesn't mean we don't need to be vigilant against tough-on-crime policies and the politicians who promote them when they rear their fear-mongering head. Minnesota has traditionally been a fairly rational state on criminal justice issues, and a law like this would send the wrong message: that some people don't deserve a second chance. If passed, this law -- called "Emily's Law" -- would join Minnesota with just a few other states that allow 10-year-olds to be tried as adults.

Join me in calling on members of the Minnesota House Committee on Public Safety, Crime Prevention Policy and Finance to reject this law, and to direct critical state resources to rehabilitation, not incarceration.

In the tough-on-crime days of the 1990s, Virginia took a pretty drastic step. Through a series of rule changes and quiet policy shifts, the state essentially eliminated parole. Now a coalition of grassroots activists is working to bring back a path to freedom for prisoners who have shown improvement and potential.

In 1989, The Washington Post reports, 42 percent of prisoners reviewed for parole in Virginia received it. After the reforms in the mid-1990s, that number dropped to just 2 percent. There is now very little incentive for an individual to work hard while in prison to improve him or herself -- there's simply no way to hasten one's return back to the free world. A bill before the state legislature aims to change that.

SB796 would provide avenues for Virginia prisoners to earn sentence credits ("good time") for participating in education and treatment programs. Prisoners could earn up to 4.5 days off their sentence for each month they serve -- so a prisoner could shave a year and a half off their sentence over 10 years. It's not exactly swinging the prison doors open or embracing alternatives to incarceration, but it's a huge step in the right direction, especially in a state without parole.

A coalition of activists organized by the group Thousand Kites has been working hard to raise awareness and support for the bill across the state -- join them by signing their petition urging Virginia lawmakers to enact this important reform. And watch video from a recent rally after the jump.

A report from Hawai'i's state auditor recently turned up some disturbing news: prisoners in the state are regularly held past the end of their sentences.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new in Hawai'i; the state paid more than half a million dollars in 2002 to 180 prisoners who had been held too long. But it's disappointing to see the practice continuing. A new lawsuit alleges that nine more prisoners were held past their sentence completions and -- even more troubling -- the state auditor's report examined 985 prisoner records at Hawai'i's Halawa prison and found 280 prisoners whose release date had passed. Even one day over a sentence is too long.

Hawai'i has had a prison overcrowding problem for years, perhaps in part because the state's facilities are full of non-violent offenders who shouldn't be there. Because the state doesn't have enough cells to house all of its prisoners, it has been sending thousands of them to private facilities on the mainland. About 35 percent of the state's prisoners are housed on the mainland -- most at an Arizona facility run by our old friend, the Corrections Corporation of America.

Former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in federal prison on Friday, nearly two decades after he was fired from the department for his role in torturing more than a hundred suspects, almost all of them black and many of them completely innocent.

Burge’s four-year sentence drew understandable anger from many, especially among those directly affected by his actions, who are tired of seeing racial injustice punished with a slap on the wrist. Although I can never know what it felt like to fall victim to Burge’s torture, and although I’m a white boy from the suburbs who has no idea what living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1970s felt like, I want to make a challenge those angry with Burge’s sentence.

First, four years is not a slap on the wrist. It’s not an acquittal, and it’s twice as long as sentencing guidelines recommended. Too often, serious misconduct like Burge’s doesn’t even draw an investigation, let along charges and convictions. This measure of justice took too long to come, but it should mean something that it came at all.

The painful budget cuts on the horizon in California could have an upside for criminal justice reformers.

When new California Governor Jerry Brown announced $12.5 billion in proposed state funding cuts last week, he included a call to close the state's juvenile prison system by 2014. Community based alternatives to incarceration have been shown to reduce crime and long-term recidivism (in Missouri, for example), and Brown's proposal would move California in that direction. This is progressive leadership, and Brown deserves congratulations for raising the dialogue on juvenile justice alternatives.

But the deal is far from done. The state legislature holds the keys to the budget, and the Ella Baker Center launched a petition on Change.org calling on state lawmakers to keep this critical cut in the final budget. The Baker Center has advocated for this reform for seven years, and wisely points out in this blog post that Brown's announcement "is not merely a victory of activists and politicians. The real champions are the mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles that would not give up on their children or our state."

Brown's proposed budget, however, does not mess with another costly, wasteful pillar of the state's justice system: the death penalty. The ACLU of Northern California is calling on Brown to raise the abolition of the death penalty to his budget plans, potentially saving taxpayers more than $125 million per year (plus $400 million on a ridiculous proposed new death row). Sign the ACLU's petition here.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has two options on the death penalty -- one of them will make history and the other will perpetuate the status quo of a broken, unequal, racist, classist, brutal system. Can you tell which one I'm pulling for?

As you've heard, the Illinois legislature this month passed a bill abolishing the state's death penalty. Gov. Pat Quinn can end capital punishment in the state with a stroke of his pen -- he says he's pondering the decision and wants to hear from us. Let's oblige. Join Equal Justice USA in calling for an end to the death penalty in Illinois by signing their petition, or call Quinn directly at 217-782-0244.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the death penalty in Illinois. My first exposure to the issue of wrongful convictions, the issue I focus on in most of my work, was as an undergraduate at Northwestern University. In Professor David Protess’ class more than a decade ago, I heard Dennis Williams speak about his years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. I worked on possible wrongful conviction cases, and celebrated with classmates when former Gov. George Ryan cited exonerations from death row in his decision to impose a moratorium on executions.

Cell phones and prisoners keep popping up in the news these days. Corrections officials paint cell phones as a crisis, saying prisoners are using them to orchestrate crimes, to smuggle drugs and weapons into prison and -- gasp! -- to update Facebook profiles.

The real reason prisoners want cell phones, however, is to talk to their families. A former Florida prisoner recently told the Broward New Times that phones are being used far more often to keep in touch with loved ones than to commit crimes. "The vast majority were used by inmates desperate to stay in touch with, and hold on to, their wives and children," the long-serving prisoner, who didn't give his name, told a reporter.

What's driving prisoners to use cell phones rather than prison phones? The cost. As you may know, states and phone companies conspire to pull hefty profits from poor families and prisoners who just want to stay in touch. At last count, only six states pass up commissions from phone companies. As the ACLU pointed out in a blog post this summer, the phone companies and corrections departments win in these deals, while everyone else loses. "Prisoners and their families suffer financial hardship or fall out of touch, and when sentences expire, prisons release a more alienated and less rehabilitated group of prisoners into society."

Scott Henson recently suggested at Grits for Breakfast that prisons allow restricted, monitored access to smartphones, rather than trying -- and failing -- to restrict them. "One of the key indicators regarding successful reentry is whether the offender retained ties with friends and family while on the inside who can help them succeed
when they get out," Henson said an in intereview. "Facilitating communication with those people while inside reduces recidivism and therefore future crime."

(Update: New Orleans has long been the incarceration capital of the U.S., imprisoning more people per capita than anywhere else in the country. But in a vote on February 3, the city council approved a new 1,400 bed jail that is less than half the size of the decaying facility it will be replacing, rejecting a proposal from the sheriff to build an even bigger jail after dozens of Change.org members and other activists urged them to consider alternatives to incarceration.)

New Orleans continues to make great strides toward a more focused -- and more efficient -- criminal justice system.

Last month, the city council voted to allow police officers to issue tickets -- rather than make arrests -- for low-level, non-violent crimes. This is a major shift for a city that has long lived a sort of double-life between the anything-goes vibe of the French Quarter to the quick arrests and tough sentences for crimes both minor and major.

As a report from the city's Metropolitan Crime Commission found in December, New Orleans police in recent years have arrested thousands of people over things like traffic tickets, minor warrants from other jurisdictions and other offenses not likely to ever make it to court. And while law enforcement and court resources are expended on the paperwork of these minor offenses, attention is distracted from major crime investigations. Although violent crime dropped in New Orleans in 2010, it could fall much further -- and these reforms will help make that happen.

Elizabeth and I have both written about these reforms, and more than 140 Change.org members have sent New Orleans' leaders a petition urging them to reconsider plans to expand the parish prison. Avoiding one-day jail stays for minor offenses could free up money from the jail expansion and from the red tape that follows every arrest. Those funds could instead be spent on crime prevention, alternatives to incarceration and law enforcement work on the cases that really matter. Add your name to the petition here.

Here’s some good news: it appears that 2010 saw violence drop sharply across the United States. Meanwhile, executions and death sentences continued to plummet. Is the death-penalty-as-deterrent argument losing more ground?

Last year saw the second-fewest death sentences in 25 years (with just two more sentences than the 2009 low), and some would argue this would spark a wave of murders among those discerning, thoughtful criminals who aren’t worried at all about life without parole but are scared shitless of the lethal injection. Instead, murders -- along with all violent crime -- continue to drop. The FBI's numbers for the first half of 2010 show a 7 percent drop in killings against the same period in 2009, and all signs suggest that 2010 will be the fourth year in a row to see murders drop.

The state of Maryland is planning to spend nearly $300 million to build two new jails in Baltimore: one for kids being tried as adults and one for women. The new jails are based on outdated stats that incorrectly projected growing populations. Crime is now dropping in Baltimore -- violent offenses are down 40 percent since 2000 -- and officials need to put a hold on their costly new cages before they end up with mammoth jails they don't need.

A new report from the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) correctly argues that building  a new women's jail would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. When budget dollars go to building, staffing and maintaining a sprawling jail, the chance to spend those dollars on community correction -- or drug treatment, or family support or job training -- are lost. The problems run even deeper at the proposed youth facility. Not only would dollars committed to the new jail be diverted from badly needed education and rehabilitation programs, but the jail would be only for young people charged as adults. When we're charging so many kids in adult court that we need a separate facility for them, we're doing something wrong.

More than 500 people have already joined the Campaign for Youth Justice in urging Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley to scale back plans for the proposed youth jail in the city. Let's add the women's prison to that argument. Email O'Malley and other Maryland lawmakers here.