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"I don't even want more school resource officers. Do you know the racial discrepancies they have against African-American and Latino students? We're going to create a system where we widen the school-to-prison pipeline."
— David Hogg via
@outline
On
#420day
, take a moment to reflect on Bernard Noble, a man who was sentenced to 13 years of hard labor for carrying two joints worth of weed.
After serving 7 years in prison, he was released last week.
On Tuesday, the same day Florida marked a new daily high for deaths from COVID-19, Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods banned his deputies from wearing masks on the job. More at
@washingtonpost
.
We asked incarcerated people what might have prevented them from committing the crimes that landed them behind bars. Respondents said that affordable housing, a living wage, and mental health care would have made the most impact.
NEW: Prosecutors around the country are asking potential jurors if they support
#BlackLivesMatter
—and having them removed if they do.
A California appeals court will soon determine whether that's legal.
A 9-year-old pepper sprayed in handcuffs, crying for her dad. A teenager wrestled to the ground, and another pepper sprayed while waiting for the bus.
All were Black girls hurt by police.
President Biden quietly extended a policy that critics call a betrayal of his campaign promise to end mandatory minimum sentences. The measure could land more low-level drug dealers in prison for longer and with less proof than is usually required.
Our hearts go out to Erica Garner's family. Her voice has been one among many that have shined a personal light on the injustices of the criminal justice system.
Watch Erica's full We Are Witnesses story here:
In 2016, Tony Timpa called 911 and asked for help. Afraid, he ran out of a store and was handcuffed by security guards. Dallas police arrived, and within an hour he was dead.
Now,
@DallasNews
has obtained the body cam footage from that day.
Roughly one of every three people bitten by Baton Rouge police dogs were teenagers 17 or younger — some as young as 13. That’s one teen bitten every three weeks, on average.
President Biden quietly extended a policy that critics call a betrayal of his campaign promise to end mandatory minimum sentences. The measure could land more low-level drug dealers in prison for longer and with less proof than is usually required.
Books allowed in Louisiana prisons:
❌ George Jackson's "Blood in My Eye"
❌
@prisonculture
's "We Do This 'Til We Free Us"
✅ Hitler's "Mein Kampf"
✅ every book on
@splcenter
's racist lit. round-up
Read about what prisons nationwide do & don't ban:
"I was scared and I was crying and that's when they told me I had escaped from juvenile and I had a gun. I said I didn't escape from juvenile and I don't have a gun."
More at
@newsweek
:
NEW: Police in rural areas shoot and kill about 200 people every year, yet there’s little public attention paid to these deaths, and no national call to action. We spent a year examining police shootings in rural America.
Here's what we found:
A story has been circulating recently: Police are quitting in droves, demoralized by the Defund the Police movement.
But that’s not true. Labor data shows that police lost < 1% of workers last year. Almost every other industry has lost more workers.
"The way police treat black people in America is symptomatic of how America feels about black people, which is this state of conditional citizenship steeped in mistrust and in fear."
Listen to
@Jamiles
on
@nprfreshair
.
An analysis by
@ajc
finds Georgia police department that took more than $1,000 in surplus military gear from the federal government fatally shot about four times as many people as those that didn’t.
In New Orleans, every girl who was involved in police use of force incidents from 2015-2020 was Black; two-thirds of the girls who live in the city are Black. The story is similar in Chicago, Minneapolis, Indianapolis Columbus, Ohio and Portland, Oregon.
In 2015, we published 'An Unbelievable Story of Rape.' In 2016, the story won a Pulitzer Prize.
Now, it's a critically acclaimed
@Netflix
series. Read the original, real-life story here.
NEW: Cops and union officials have been predicting a crime wave as cities reduce low-level arrests and release the jailed to slow the spread of
#COVID19
.
But in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and San Francisco, data show big drops in crime reports.
Two separate lawsuits allege law enforcement officers targeted journalists and used unnecessary force against protesters during demonstrations in Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd in police custody.
More at
@PioneerPress
.
NEW from
@MarshallProj
and
@Guardian
: Today, more than 52,000 immigrants are currently confined in detention centers across America.
Forty years ago, this system did not exist. 1/
“Men—mostly Black and brown—are still forced to work in the fields. They still harvest cotton. They still don’t get paid ... They are prisoners at the Darrington Unit, one of Texas’s 104 prisons. And not the only one in the South named after slaveholders.”
The "Reunification Ride" buses more than 100 children and family members through frigid temperatures and icy roads to see their mothers in prison for a holiday celebration.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died,
@NPR
reports. "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed," she told her granddaughter earlier this week.
An appeals court ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records was unlawful, seven years after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the program. via
@guardiannews
Documents obtained by
@TheAtlantic
reveal that ICE has put immigrant detainees into solitary confinement for such reasons as having contraband sugar packets or menstruating on a prison uniform.
One study showed that 35 of 37 death row prisoners said they had been physically abused as children, leading to post-traumatic stress, which is a common precursor for violent behavior. More than half said they were sexually abused.
A 2007 law made it illegal for people to wear pants below the waist in Shreveport, Louisiana.
In February of this year, a man was killed during a confrontation with police over his pants. Now the city is considering changing the law.
via
@VICE
Why does Rodney Reed need celebrities—like
@SusanSarandon
and
@Alyssa_Milano
—to help stop his execution?
TMP's
@MauriceChammah
explains why Congress, the Supreme Court, and others have made it harder for people on death row to make their case in court.
Teachers were in a meeting when calls and texts streamed in informing them that ICE was arresting workers in their rural Nebraska town. The teachers then opened the town's public elementary school for kids who needed support.
More at
@buzzfeednews
:
Salt Lake City police released body camera footage Monday of an officer shooting a 13-year-old boy with autism on September 4. “I don’t feel good,” he can be heard saying. “Tell my mom I love her.”
Black Americans die at higher rates than White Americans at nearly every age, our investigation found.
Infants are most affected by the inequality. Black babies were more than twice as likely as White babies to die before their first birthday.
White kids were being released from juvenile detention centers at a far higher rate than their Black peers during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Young people of color have since been detained for longer than they were before the crisis.
Dozens of members of Congress signed a letter released by Reps.
@AyannaPressley
and
@CoriBush
calling President Biden to commute the sentences of all federal death row prisoners. From
@theappeal
:
Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison for the murder of George Floyd.
Before his conviction, he was was the subject of at least 22 complaints or internal investigations during his more than 19 years at the department.
Before Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd, he was the subject of at least 22 complaints or internal investigations during his more than 19 years at the department, only one of which resulted in discipline.
Since White hospitals frequently refused to send ambulances for Black patients, Black medical workers repurposed hearses for medical transport. Patients sometimes died in the hearse as the driver searched for a hospital willing to accept a Black person.
Baton Rouge police dogs bite people at extremely high rates, higher than those at any of the departments in the country’s 20 largest cities. In a three-year period, almost every person bitten was Black, and more than one-third were children.
In Olympia, Washington, unarmed "crisis responders," wearing no uniforms, are being dispatched by 911 to de-escalate some conflicts and connect people with services.
Research found police in schools, known as school resource officers, don't reduce school shootings, but do increase suspensions, expulsions, and arrests of students, reported
@reason
:
The so-called Groveland Four were falsely accused of rape in 1949. Years later, their accuser recanted.
In 2017, their families received apologies.
Today, a Florida clemency board and Gov. Ron DeSantis have granted them a long-sought posthumous pardon.
"We appreciate you guys, we really do," police in Kenosha, Wisconsin are on video saying to a self-styled militia group that included Kyle Rittenhouse, not long before Rittenhouse allegedly shot three people, killing two, at protests Tuesday night.
Amer Adi: "The American dream started 40 years ago for me... I built this whole thing scratch from nothing. Even if anybody wants to stop that American dream, I won't let them. I'm going to keep the fight going." via
@cnn
We asked incarcerated people what might have prevented them from committing the crimes that landed them behind bars. Respondents said that affordable housing, a living wage, and mental health care would have made the most impact.
Some judges punish women who appear angry or aggressive; fail to understand how trauma can warp emotions and personal demeanor; and rely on forensic assessments that some experts consider misinformed at best and unethical at worst.
The Marshall Project has made the decision to stop using terms like “convict,” “inmate,” and “felon” in our journalism. Journalism is a discipline of clarity. That’s why we’ve solidified our policy for how we talk about people behind bars:
An incarcerated writer describes how living through the constant chaos and culture of violence in prison can make it difficult for people to reenter society after completing their sentences.
A judge sentenced a Texas woman to five years in prison yesterday for voting illegally while she was on supervised release from a prior conviction. Sacrificing her freedom to vote was not something she would knowingly do, she told the judge.
NEW: Before Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he died last May, he used strikingly similar techniques on others.
Three people who Chauvin arrested before and one witness described him as quick to use violence and callous about their pain.
A year ago,
@RollingStone
began documenting six families whose lives have been disrupted by the Trump administration’s punitive and unpredictable immigration policies. Here are their stories.
The NYPD is feuding now with local prosecutors over the refusal to prosecute some protesters,
@nytimes
reports. In response, police officials have withdrawn cops from their assignments in district attorneys offices.
Decarceration comes to New Jersey. State corrections officials released more than 2,500 prisoners Wednesday—those whose sentences were going to end anyway within a year—to stem the tide of the coronavirus behind bars.
“Men—mostly Black and brown—are still forced to work in the fields. They still harvest cotton. They still don’t get paid ... They are prisoners at the Darrington Unit, one of Texas’s 104 prisons. And not the only one in the South named after slaveholders.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill eliminating bail for suspects awaiting trial. Starting in October 2019, people arrested for nonviolent misdemeanors will be released within 12 hours of being booked.
More at
@ap
:
"Jail is hell to be in. I'm going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts." — Aretha Franklin on her offer to post bail for Angela Davis
More at
@QZY
:
Today would have been Tamir Rice's 17th birthday.
In honor of his memory, his mother Samaria penned an open letter at
@essence
: "This is what I've learned since you've been physically gone: We all have to keep fighting against injustice."
Hundreds of sheriffs across the country now subscribe to the “Constitutional Sheriff” ideology, believing their own authority “supersedes” governors and presidents.
They’re rejecting gun laws, COVID-19 mandates and, now, election results. 🧵
Ex-police sergeant Wayne Earl Jenkins admitted taking part in at least 10 robberies of Baltimore citizens, planting drugs on innocent people and re-selling drugs he stole from suspects on an almost daily basis.
More at
@BBCWorld
:
A police union spokesman called Kimberly Gardner a “menace" who must be removed “by force or by choice.” Kim Foxx has been targeted by white nationalists. Aramis Ayala received a noose in the mail.
Now black female prosecutors are fighting back.
Tomorrow, voters in and around Ferguson, Missouri, will head to the polls to decide who will be their next top prosecutor.
Here,
@thenation
talked to Wesley Bell, who is challenging incumbent Robert McCulloch.
Witnesses said Adam Purinton, yelled, "Get out of my country" before firing shots that killed Srinivas Kuchibhotla and wounded two others last year. Federal authorities have called the attack a hate crime. via
@nytimes
A formerly incarcerated woman spoke out about the morale-lifting power of accessible hygiene products: "Something crazy happens when you start treating people like people: They start acting like it." via
@kjzzphoenix
In 2018, Everett Palmer Jr. went to resolve a warrant for a DUI charge. His family was later told he'd been arrested and died in jail. When they received his body, his brain, heart, and throat were missing.
They're still looking for answers.
via
@NY1
"I cried a lot of times in prison silently because you can't do it out loud in a treacherous place like that. But I always said, 'one day it's gonna get better.' "
In the national conversation about policing, public attention has focused on those who have died at the hands of officers. Few know that tens of thousands of people end up in the ER after run-ins with police.
NEW: Police dogs bite thousands of Americans each year, inflicting serious injuries. Occasionally, they kill people.
The dogs are bred and trained to capture people. And there is little oversight of how police depts. use them.