On the surface, there are many explanations for why it’s politically or practically difficult to completely reverse course on this, but this is due to decades of infrastructure (such as the entire bail industry) built up around this nefarious policy, not any underlying need to hold people pretrial. We see similar patterns when it comes to when people get released from prison. If a state wants to keep the prison population high, it’s fairly easy to do so by cutting grants of parole. It’s unfortunately much easier to increase the number of people incarcerated than to decrease it, because once that number of people are in prison, there are a ton of factors keeping them there, from risk-aversion to corrections unions and the ease with which crime fear mongering can score political points.

It’s also a reminder that crime and arrests may go up or down, but it’s policies like pretrial detention that have the biggest influence on the number of people held inside jails and prisons. We could cut crime in half in a city or state and see no change in incarceration due to policy and political choices. That’s why I think the long term solution to America’s mass incarceration crisis lies in destroying the political and financial incentives that cause counties and states to overbuild and overuse the incarceration system. Happily, this is something we know how to get traction on through work across the ecosystem including advocacy, elections, organizing, storytelling and leadership development.

Top reads: Learn about the prisoner hunger strike at Delaney Hall detention center; ICE is spending millions on electric shock gloves, which are also already in use in Omaha public schools; a new resource, We Are Safety, dissects the administration’s false “safety” rationale for occupying cities, massively cutting public budgets, and power grabs. If you’ve been thinking about this but weren’t sure how to talk about it, We Are Safety may be helpful!

Media

• Here’s a great photo essay and article about watching the Knicks games on Rikers Island.

• The American criminal legal system is riddled with wrongful convictions. In her powerful documentary When A Witness Recants, director Dawn Porter (with executive producer Ta-Nehisi Coates) explores the case of the “Harlem Park 3,” and explains how this kind of catastrophic miscarriage of justice happens, and what’s the aftermath.

• Vidal Guzman describes his campaign to get exploitative reality TV programs like Love After Lockup and 60 days In off the air. Learn more in his interview.

• Listen to the incomparable Michelle Alexander in conversation about how we must forge spiritual communities right now in order to forge the courage for the fights ahead.

• Check out this 16-min documentary about the Participatory Defense Network, whose hubs have documented saving over 40,000 years of prison.

• I somehow missed the 2024 podcast Empire City, which tells the story of the New York Police Department. The New York Times profiled it in 2024.

• The San Quentin film festival is coming up this October 22-23.

• The Marshall Project has a series featuring musicians in prison.

• Eating Behind Bars is a new book that delves into low quality food in prison as punishment. The book won a James Beard media award.

• John Oliver did a recent episode on police surveillance tech. Here’s a clip about Flock cameras, which have an “astonishingly high error rate,” leading to terrifying and dangerous police stops.

• The Marshall Project asked filmmaker Lynn Novack to comment on 10 photographs showing the history of incarceration in the U.S. The photos are really striking. So many of them feature children.

Solutions and Wins

• Decarcerate KC (a mostly volunteer, scrappy local org) reported on its hard-fought campaign to stop the opening of a $25million ‘world cup jail’ in the city. While the city did manage to build the jail, it never opened, missing its world cup purpose, which garnered international press.

• With beautiful photographs and quotes, the New York Times profiled leaders and participants in community violence interruption programs in cities across the U.S.

• After a long, drawn out fight, the infamous Alligator Alcatraz detention camp is finally closed. Here is a wonderful in-depth essay detailing the successful environmental litigation strategy by the Miccosukee tribe that caused a judge to order its closure. The essay includes gorgeous photographs of the wetlands around the camp that the tribe fought so hard to protect.

• A unit in London’s Wandsworth prison has been transformed using methods from Sweden and Norway that emphasize the dignity and humanity of prisoners. Violence dropped by 45% and disorderly events dropped by 62% in a trial of these reforms.

• Jeff Asher calculates that in 2026, the United States will have the fewest murders since the mid-1960s despite having about 150 million more people. Moreover, lethality (aka whether an assault is fatal), has dropped over 20%. Why is crime falling so much? John Roman points to the $300 billion in pandemic relief money.

• A study found that Baltimore’s “Safe Streets” community violence intervention program was associated with a 42% reduction in homicides involving youth aged 15 to 24. In one of the Safe Streets areas, there were zero homicides this past year.

• Community Violence Intervention has seen so much success where applied, but there is so much more ground to cover to ensure that communities can benefit from it. To that end, the Gifford’s Center created a new guide with practical steps to creating a community violence intervention program. One of the leading CVI practitioners in the country told me it’s excellent.

• Minneapolis is piloting a program to send civilian responders instead of police to document crash sites. This is a much bigger deal than it seems - police spend an extraordinary amount of their time doing traffic and crash work. I’m told roughly 25-40% of police time is spent on traffic and crash incidents, maybe more; it’s a difficult topic to research, and this number is a summation of a number of studies.

Reports, tools, and research

• The Fines and Fees Justice Center released a report on the impact of their work to cut fines and fees. They find that by far the most impactful work in this area was the Free to Drive coalition’s past work to restore drivers licenses to people with overdue fines and fees payment plus preventing licenses from being taken in the first place (estimated $34.3 billion in earnings retained plus $465 million in reinstatement fees waived or prevented).

• MAPS released Relocating the Root, a scoping literature review that documents the psychological effects of the War on Drugs and explores how these effects may complicate psychedelic treatment for people who’ve been through the system. Impacted people need to co-design treatments rather than validating approaches that may have worked for other groups.

• Alabama Appleseed produced an extensive report on people serving life sentences in Alabama, of which there are 6,250 total. The report is fascinating and maddening, as you learn the various ways people end up buried in prison for decades.

• Radley Balko put together an enormous compilation of studies on racism in the criminal legal system.

• The Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center launched Constitutional Workloads, a tool to help public defender offices determine how many attorneys they need to provide constitutionally effective representation for their caseload. The Center’s policy director previously co-authored the 2023 National Public Defense Workload Study. This new tool translates that research in a way that lets defenders make the policy and professional case to increase staffing.

• The Center for Just Journalism, CCR, and Public Justice released For the Record, a guide to help journalists find the data they need to report on the criminal legal system. CJ data is notoriously difficult to deal with, as it’s decentralized and often out of date, so this will be really helpful.

• The number of ‘registries’ in the U.S. (making information about people convicted of certain crimes publicly available) is growing at an alarming rate. The Prison Policy Initiative explains why this is super counterproductive.

• The DC Justice Lab put together this report with a lot of statistics on the impacts of the National Guard “surge” on DC. Spoiler: it was a very bad deal for the city, especially economically.

Commentary and Analysis

• Alec Karakatsanis is doing a series debunking several wrong assumptions made about the criminal justice system in the current political discourse. In the first, he shows that reducing the size of police and prisons systems is very popular, counter to what we’re told by pundits.

• Dissent Magazine offers some reflections on the history of the “worst of the worst” language used to justify mass immigrant detention and targeting of dissidents, among other things.

• Professor Anna Teriel, political theorist and author of Prison Abolition for Realists, discussed her thoughts on abolition in a recent interview.

• Kwaneta Harris writes about what it’s like to find sisterhood inside a prison cell, and how that has sustained her during her years of incarceration.

• Beyond the Bars published a very interesting essay on how the construction industry shifted away from being a labor union stronghold. In short, unions refused to let marginalized workers (aka Black workers and immigrants) join unions, so companies pitted those excluded workers against them. The same thing is happening today with temp work, where many formerly incarcerated people seek employment. The whole essay is illuminating and I recommend it!

Policy, Litigation, Campaigns

• Bolts has a fascinating article on the implication of the Readmission Acts, which allowed states back into the union after the Civil War. These acts put strict limitations on the crimes subject to felony disenfranchisement, but states totally ignored these rules. A Virginia court now says the state has to get in compliance and restore voting rights.

• In an 8-1 decision, SCOTUS ruled that a defendant could appeal his case even though he had signed an “appeal waiver” as part of his plea deal. Slate has a great rundown that nicely explains the technicalities here. This is a hugely consequential area of law, as 97% of criminal cases end in a plea deal, not a jury trial. Prosecutors have overwhelming bargaining power in these cases, which is why it matters so much who the elected prosecutors are.

• Trump’s DOJ is suing Evanston, IL, to stop its reparations program that gives Black families $25,000 for housing costs to compensate for decades of redlining.

• Organizers and advocates in Atlanta have worked for years to hold off construction on a massive new jail facility. In These Times has a really interesting account of what’s happened so far.

• The 9th and 5th circuits both issued rulings requiring the government to give immigration detainees hearings that could lead to their release.

Wall of Shame

• Oklahoma City prosecutors very often reject the use of a pretrial diversion program, instead insisting that people who can’t pay bail stay locked up while awaiting trial. This cruel and destructive policy, which breaks up families and causes people to lose their jobs over misdemeanors and worthless cases that never get prosecuted, should be a scandal.

• The Supreme Court recently held that certain categories of people who have been released under the First Step Act must be sent back to prison, no matter if they have been living and working productively on the outside. It’s a nightmare scenario.

• Bolts Magazine reports that immigrants caught in Trump’s mass-deportation dragnet are being detained for increasingly long periods. Where do they find the beds? Often in horrible local jails trying to make a buck.

• NPR listened to earnings calls with private prison companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group and found that they have made simply enormous profits this year through their contracts to build detention camps for ICE. CEO Patrick Swindle (yes, that’s his real name) reported that they are charging the government $307,000 per bed.

• Trump has said he will deny federal funding to any jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate on immigration enforcement. Recently, DOJ doubled down with a statement that cities refusing to cooperate will lose money for essential services like rape kit processing. What’s at stake in this pressure to ‘cooperate’? Ultimately, the administration appears to seek the fusion of ICE and the police. Why? Because without that local cooperation, the administration doesn’t have manpower to implement their mass deportation agenda, among other things. Mechanisms of this policy include: COPS, Byrne JAG, the Office of Justice Programs, Office on Violence Against Women, the new Model Cities initiative (which will steer $300 million in DOJ grant funding toward cities that “align” with “DOJ priorities”) and at least another billion dollars in DOJ grants. In the cooperative cities, expect militarized policing to reach new heights: grant money will be funneled to a lot of new surveillance and things like electric shock gloves.

For example, as a partner in the Building Community Not Prisons coalition that’s fighting a $500 million federal prison project in Central Appalachia, IEMI researched all the angles and trained coalition members on the nitty-gritty of legal tactics they could use to beat Goliath. Drawing on these trainings and represented by IEMI, the Appalachian Rekindling Project bought 63 acres of land at the center of the intended prison site, where it is now working to reintroduce bison to the area. IEMI has supported the coalition to craft environmental demands as well, which can buy organizers time to continue building momentum against the prison.

This level of collaboration is made possible by the very sophisticated organizing led by groups on the ground, including Fight Toxic Prisons.

Commentary and Analysis

• Kwaneta Harris wrote a trenchant piece about how dangerous it is for the Democratic Party to abandon prisoners. She describes how Turning Point USA is busy recruiting in Texas prisons.

• The Work Release is Beyond the Bars’ monthly substack about how the economy locks people with criminal records out of good jobs, and how they are organizing to change the rules. Check out their 3-part series on race, work, and power in America’s construction industry.

• Mariame Kaba reflects on the 10th year anniversary of Survived and Punished, an organization built to decriminalize actions taken to survive domestic and sexual abuse. She closes with these words by Rebecca Farr that bear repeating:

“I am not proposing that sexual violence and domestic violence will no longer exist. I am proposing that we create a world where so many people are walking around with the skills and knowledge to support someone that there is no longer a need for anonymous hotlines. I am proposing that we break through the shame of survivors (a result of rape culture) and the victim-blaming ideology of all of us (also a result of rape culture) so that survivors can gain support from the people already in their lives. I am proposing that we create a society where community members care enough to hold an abuser accountable so that a survivor does not have to flee their home. I am proposing that all of the folks that have been disappointed by systems work together to create alternative systems. I am proposing that we organize.”

• The Urban Institute published a compelling letter to D.C. policymakers with ideas to reduce shootings. Very lucid and worth reading!

• Republicans have been in favor of criminal justice reform for years, including in the reddest of states (as I saw first hand when doing policy at the ACLU). They backed away during the post-COVID crime spike, but now that things have cooled down, they’re coming back to the table. This rhetoric embracing reform isn’t new, but it’s welcome. Though of course their arguments are still framed in ideological terms.

• Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson meditated on belonging and the future of America against the backdrop of a New York City united during the Knicks championship run.

Media

• I finally started reading The Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, by Orisanmi Burton. I’m not far in yet, but it’s a gripping read!

• Must watch briefing: current trends in safety and justice with criminologist John Roman. Whether you already know a little or a lot, I guarantee you’ll learn something.

• The Alabama Solution film’s website now has a curriculum page featuring a resource guide of over 30 books, films, essays, and podcasts for viewers who want to understand where mass incarceration came from, what it does, and who benefits from it.

• Here’s a short film about a historian who teaches a college course on the history of crime and punishment to a class of both incarcerated and non-incarcerated students.

• Boots Riley cited work by Alec Karakatsanis on how police departments spend vast sums to shape the news (the LA Sheriff and police have 67 employees on their PR teams) as informing his new film I love Boosters.

• The Judith Center has this new exhibit with works by people traumatized in prison.

• The Poynter Institute is offering $10,000 grants to journalists writing about the impact of incarceration on families.

• Justin van der Leun’s great new book Unreasonable Women tells the stories of women in prison who survived abuse but were criminalized. Here’s a podcast about it and a review.

  

Solutions and Wins

• San Francisco is seeing a massive drop in youth crime after committing to providing a case manager for every young person released from detention.

• Violent crime rates are “plunging” across the U.S. The Trace interviewed Jeff Asher about it. See also this coverage in Popular Information contracting Trump’s false claims about blue cities.

• Ohio’s Republican Governor Dewine is calling for abolition of the death penalty.

• Hard-fought campaigns to slow down and stop efforts by ICE to open new detention warehouses are working. The NYTimes reports that ICE will now try to sell 7 buildings worth $700million.

• The awful Alabama AG Steve Marshall was building momentum for his US Senate run in Alabama but then lost badly in the recent primary. We think it’s because the film The Alabama Solution revealed him to be a cruel and dishonest man and garnered him a lot of bad press.

• The Maryland Public Defender office championed five bills that passed this session.

• A number of meaningful reforms passed in Oklahoma this session, including automatic expungement, making ‘good time’ credits available earlier, and improvements to medical parole.

• The CA Supreme Court recently handed down a momentous decision on bail in the Kowalczyk case. This will affect tens of thousands of cases per month. Here’s a rundown on the arguments.

Policy and Campaigns

• CORCA, the very bad federal bill now in Senate Judiciary that will give even more money and surveillance power to DHS under the guise of fighting shoplifting, is becoming a political liability. Here are Democratic primary candidates attacking their opponents on it: Abdul El-Sayed, Brad Lander, Donavan McKinney, Jason Poulos, Austin Dyches, and Ethan Wechtaluk. (h/t Vera Action)

• There’s a fierce battle in SF over how pre-trial cases are handled. For years, the probation department has been trying to seize control of this arena, currently served by the nonprofit SF Pretrial. A proposed plan to dissolve that contract and send $12million to probation to do the same work is meeting fierce resistance. See coverage here and here and the website here.

• Hawaii is currently considering spending $1billion on a new jail. The state spends $112,000 a year per person in prison and a third of their incarcerated population is Native Hawaiian. Thankfully, I hear that there’s a solid coalition in place to fight the jail construction.

• The Colorado Governor just signed a bill that slightly increases earned time credits (which speed up the clock towards the release date if the prisoner completes certain programs, has no writeups, etc) and establishes a working group to think about how to deal with overcrowding. Apparently, there are 5,000 people inside who are already eligible for parole but haven’t been released due to lack of parole officers and required transition programs.

Reports, tools, and research

• Sophie Cull, along with Bisish Sarma, document the trends around the country in what they call the ‘second look movement,’ which seeks to revisit extremely long sentences handed out many years ago. Two other reports in this vein include one on challenges faced by women serving extreme sentences in Michigan prisons, and another calling for ‘second look’ legislation to combat unjust and extreme sentences in NY.

• The Prison Policy Initiative reports on changes in parole and probation trends over the decades. The number of people on supervision has fallen 30% from the peak.

• James Dold writes about the childhood ‘trauma to prison pipeline,’ outlined in this report, which produces startling statistics. He writes that 98% of children in the criminal justice system have: (1) suffered chronic abuse or neglect; (2) are victims of trafficking who were coerced into criminal acts; and/or (3) committed crimes against people who abused them. Relatedly, Hawaii is considering a bill to consider trauma before prosecuting kids in adult court.

• The MacArthur Justice Center’s recent report details the abandonment of federal oversight of police misconduct under the Trump administration.

• A study finds that, after controlling for many factors, a history of incarceration is associated with dying 6 years sooner than a person with no incarceration history.

• Jeff Asher built a crime data assistant that will let you compare different places and aspects of historical crime trends. See also his Crime Index.

Wall of Shame

• It’s a feel good story, but I can’t help feeling repulsed by this program in Indiana to allow imprisoned mothers to be with their babies. If they are safe enough to handle babies, why are they inside? The story opens with a mom in prison for violating probation on a years-old drug charge. That is grotesquely inhumane and will perpetuate a lot of harm.

• The DA of Minneapolis has charged an ICE officer who shot blindly into a house. The officer fled the state and is now hiding in Texas and it’s unclear if they will agree to extradite him.

• Thousands of people in Oregon are stuck in horrific limbo with cases that can’t be resolved (even in cases of innocence!) because the state has a shortage of defense attorneys.

• Louisiana is using AI to decide who’s eligible for a parole hearing, with dire results.

• Louisiana’s 5th Circuit Court of Appeal allowed staff to secretly dismiss over 5,000 petitions to review sentences without reading them. Most were authored by Black prisoners.

• Cook County (Chicago) prosecutors under DA Burke (who will next face election in 2028) have been refusing to issue certificates of innocence to exonerated prisoners and are insisting on seeking warrants against people who missed traffic court because they were in ICE detention.

• Tech leaders have cheerfully suggested putting microchips in prisoners in the UK to track them.

• Senitoba, MS police officer Hunter Foster shot 1-year-old Kohen Wiley to death in a Walmart parking lot. His mother had frantically signaled that there was a baby in the car. Police turned up over a false claim that the mother’s friend stole diapers. I’ve seen allegations that Foster has had many complaints of excessive force and has moved departments multiple times. This story is still being investigated, while community members are protesting and demanding justice.

Announcements

• Congratulations to Dana Kaplan, who was appointed to be New York City’s “Rikers Czar.”

• Several prison education projects are co-hosting an upcoming webinar showcasing long-form civic essays written by incarcerated youth at the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center.

• The Whirlwind Institute has officially launched its website! This team has done extraordinary work for decades to develop the intellectual foundation for modern movement strategies, and now it’s all compiled and organized for accessibility on the site.

Media

• The Inside Literary Prize, a literary award judged by incarcerated people, announced its 2026 shortlist. Freedom Reads is currently doing a 6-state prison tour in connection with the prize. Check out this post from the Carnegie foundation about why they are honoring their great library legacy by supporting prison libraries.

• Beauty Behind Bars curates exhibits by current and formerly incarcerated artists in D.C. Here you can read a conversation between the project’s founders about the power of art in advocacy.

• Here’s a podcast worth your time: a conversation with Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie about how we should understand the spectacular violence of Trump’s ICE surges as an extension of the violence of everyday policing, plus lessons in resisting proposed “reforms” that would actually give more power to ICE.

• True crime podcasts are doing crucial work to educate listeners about the extreme problems in how the criminal legal system functions and who it targets, according to Frank Racioppi for Forbes. Would you agree?

Solutions and Wins

• The combined pressure of excellent litigation and the exquisitely devastating Alabama Solution film have succeeded in pressuring the Alabama legislature to pass three key parole reform bills.

• The PA Supreme Court banned life without parole for felony murder (which is when the defendant wasn’t the person to kill the victim). This could lead to the largest resentencing effort in state history, with ~1000 people at stake. Congratulations to the Abolitionist Law Center!

• Wisconsin Governor Evers issued an execute order to appoint a commutations board to advise him on commutations he can make before he leaves office in December of this year. That’s a very very brisk timeline to get something going, but he could potentially make a sizable dent in the state’s 23,000 prison population if he focuses on this.

• The Center for American Progress identified 17 cities that have seen a 50%+ reduction in gun violence victimization since 2021. Crucially, they found that every one of these cities has prioritized launching or scaling up local community violence prevention programs.

• Congratulations to this Colorado alliance on their work to pass a new law regarding positive roadside drug tests (on a ‘suspicious’ baggie in a car, for example), which are notoriously unreliable! The new law says they cannot be arrested on the spot, but may only receive a summons. Every year, 750,000 people in the U.S. are arrested based on results of these field tests. The Quattrone Center found in 2023 that these tests are the “largest known contributing factor to wrongful arrests and convictions in the U.S.”‍

• San Francisco is expanding a street ambassador program credited with cutting the number of 911 calls in half.

• California’s prison population has dropped by 48% in the last 20 years.

• Keeping in line with her promise to hold federal agents accountable through the Fight Against Federal Overreach network, DA Mary Moriarty charged an ICE agent with assault.

Reports, tools, and research

• A fascinating study done by researchers at UVA and Harvard found that the introduction of body worn cameras in NC had major positive effects on reducing prosecution disparities. Prosecutors who previously treated police reports as the ground truth came to understand that police accounts are often biased and unreliable. The researchers found that, as a result, the racial disparities in incarceration was cut by 14% and Black incarceration cut by 10%.

• The Prison Policy Initiative compiled all the data on incarceration, probation, and parole to get a full picture of mass punishment across the country. Even though probation may be less devastating than prison, it’s still an extreme disruption that can lead to job loss, financial ruin, and even return to prison if very specific requirements aren’t met.

• Vera has compiled a ton of data to give us the “Incarceration and Inequality Data Explorer.” Here is the overview, and you can click over to the map to start seeing the patterns in the data.

• The California Coalition for Women Prisoners released “No Time to Wait,” a case for releasing elders from California’s two women’s prisons.

• A new report, Safe Roads for All, highlights the costs and dangers of addressing road safety via policing of individual drivers. Instead, they lift up structural reforms like traffic calming.

• The libertarian litigation group Institute for Justice has updated their giant report on asset forfeiture, where the government seizes money upon the mere assertion that it was used in a crime, without having to prove that crime. It’s an outrageous practice!

• The Sentencing Project did an in-depth study of reentry to society after long-time incarceration, conducting deep interviews with 33 formerly incarcerated people.

• Just Safe (f/k/a the Alliance for Safety and Justice) published a survey of police officers to test assumptions about policy preferences and perspectives about crime. They found that police strongly agree their jobs would be made safer and easier by neighborhood programs like violence interruption that help “prevent crises from becoming crime.”

Shame

• Louisiana has done two extremely shameful things of late:

  • After New Orleans voters selected Calvin Duncan, who was exonerated after 30 years in prison, to be the next clerk of criminal court, Gov. Landry signed a law to eliminate that office entirely.

  • They’re close to passing a law to criminalize public camping, aka criminalize homelessness. Convictions could be overturned later if the person completes treatment, but they must pay for it, or else be put to forced labor.

• Taxpayers in Chicago, New Jersey, and Boston will be digging deep to pay settlements of $9.5million, $12million, and $12million (in that order) for wrongful convictions after police misconduct. This is a tiny sampling of cases like this. Does everyone know that police departments aren’t required to pay out their own settlements, so they basically operate without any accountability when they cause immense and costly harm? My father Andrew Cockburn’s piece Blood Money is a great article in Harpers about this in the context of police brutality, but it pertains to wrongful convictions too!

• Galaxy Gives announced their new fellowship class. I am a huge fan of this fellowship, which provides a space for skills and community building across the field.

• If you are in New York, check out the Bedford Library exhibit called The Warehouse, exploring incarceration and its effects. The show opens April 4 and runs through June 27.

Media

• On March 18, the Wren Collective launched WeAreSafety.info. The website chronicles the administration’s attacks on public safety and its extreme use of crime fearmongering to justify invading cities, terrorizing immigrant families, and seizing power from local citizens.

• The Prison Policy Initiative hosted a webinar on the danger of ‘compassionate’ reforms that are supposed to increase dignity actually being superficial or even harmful. Here’s their explainer.

• Here’s the science behind why storytelling is such an effective tool for persuasion.

• Dispatch is a new outlet that does in-depth reporting around the world on a range of issues. Their cover story on the website when I stopped by was about Glasgow’s domestic abuse court.

• Olayemi Olurin produced an intriguing in-depth video on “Why Serial Killers Aren’t Monsters.” The successful effort to portray serial killers as evil and very different from the rest of us makes it much easier to dehumanize every person in jail and prison, while skipping systemic reforms.

Solutions and Wins

• Mayor Mamdani signed the order creating the Office of Community Safety.

• Essie Justice Group led an impressive coalition in Altadena, CA, which recently won an unprecedented civil rights investigation into the Sheriff Department’s outrageous negligence in the 2025 fires. The Sheriff’s dept failed to evacuate people, leading to catastrophic property loss and loss of

• life. The campaign has built a new kind of coalition in L.A. that connects criminal, racial, and environmental justice issues and has inspired a lot of residents to engage.

• A major ICE mega-detention facility plan has fallen through, with billionaire owner Ed Roski (of Majestic Realty) refusing to sell a Texas warehouse to detain 9000 people.

• The Arkansas governor suffered a string of defeats in Tuesday’s state primaries, when two Republican state senators who blocked her plan to build the state’s biggest prison handily defeated her handpicked challengers and the State Senate majority leader lost to another prison skeptic. Bolts covered this story in February.

• One of Alabama’s most conservative legislators is leading on a prison reform bill after seeing The Alabama Solution. “You cannot unsee what you’ve seen,” he said.

• Alabama Governor Ivey commuted the sentence of 75-year-old Sonny Burton, who had been scheduled to be executed despite the fact that he wasn’t present where a murder occurred. Word on the street is that she was influenced by the heat around The Alabama Solution.

• Anna Stein, the First Lady of North Carolina, is tackling reentry and encouraging Governor Josh Stein to step up.

• The L.A. City Council agreed to make permanent its unarmed crisis-response pilot program, diverting emergency calls related to mental health away from the LAPD to specialized clinicians.

• A judge ordered Colorado prisons to stop throwing people in solitary for refusing to work. Could the state finally begin to enforce the ‘no slavery in prison’ amendment that voters passed all the way back in 2018?

State policy

• Support is growing for New York’s Reentry Assistance Bill, which would give a $425 monthly stipend for six months ($2,550 total) to people recently released from prison, up from a one-time allotment of $40. The will give people a chance to stabilize, rather than going straight from prison into a homeless shelter.

• Alabama and Kentucky passed bills in their state senates (which are now being heard in the house) to streamline and restore voting rights after completion of sentence.

• Maryland advanced the Youth Charging Reform Act to limit charging of youth as adults.

• A measure to expand compassionate release for elderly and sick people in Pennsylvania prisons passed the PA house, and could enable 700 people to be released if it becomes law. It’s a tough year to move anything through the Senate though, as election years lower risk tolerance.

• The Illinois Home for Good Coalition of 62 community and reentry orgs is pushing a bill to expand housing and supportive services for people released from prison. Advocates note that each recidivism event costs the state an average of $199,010, and every $1 spent on the program should generate $5 in return for the state.

• Detroit launched a violence-prevention office to include violence intervention, survivor services, reentry to support, restorative justice, and more.

Reports, tools, and research

• A report on the impacts of California’s Prop 36 found that the law, which was sold to voters as a great solution for providing treatment, is instead ramping up incarceration (and costs) while failing to get people connected to treatment and enabling arbitrary, biased enforcement.

• The Center for Just Journalism compiled a guide for journalists on covering police technology and another on how to cover the child welfare system (aka the family policing system).

• A rigorous two-year evaluation of the Newark Community Street Team’s violence intervention work found that NCST’s interventions are directly associated with reductions in violent crime while deepening community trust. Meanwhile, a new study has found that a violence intervention in Chicago has driven down shootings and homicides.

• Vera Action published the results of 40+ rounds of polling, finding that 60% of Americans prefer getting “serious about safety” (improving schools, jobs, housing, and services) over being “tough on crime” (more money for prisons and harsher bail laws).

• Reason has a 50-state report on gaps in ID and reentry document assistance for people leaving prison. Without a photo ID, birth certificate, or Social Security card, formerly incarcerated people can’t access jobs, housing, or financial services.

• In a new report published by Vera, researchers analyze publicly available New York City 911 call data from January through December 2025. Researchers found that 58% of the calls did not involve a crime.

• A new The Sentencing Project report finds that old convictions have been massively driving up sentence lengths without any evidence that this improves safety. For example, for long-serving prisoners, the share of the sentence attributable to past convictions is major: Maryland (63%), Minnesota (30%), Pennsylvania (45%), and Washington (41%).

• Kilometro Cero, an outstanding police and prison accountability organization in Puerto Rico, has a new report documenting the ongoing crisis of police violence in Puerto Rico, belying claims by the police department that they no longer need to be monitored by the court.

First, Remmick (the Irish vampire) is a confusing character to some. Is he a victim of colonization or a villain? The short answer to this is that he is both. Most people have no idea what the Irish suffered. The English slaughtered their way through huge sections of the country (look up Cromwell’s massacres in Wexford and Drogheda, for example). Once they’d subjugated the island, they starved them over and over again (the Great Famine being the most severe instance). The first plantations were in Ireland. Under the Penal Laws of the 17th and 18th century, the Irish were stripped of rights - they couldn’t buy land, couldn’t marry, couldn’t vote, couldn’t worship, couldn’t learn to read, and lost rights to their children and language, while also being pushed off of their ancient lands. But the Irish who came to America were able to blend and change. While they were discriminated against, they had a personhood in America that was never granted in Ireland. Some formed allegiances with white supremacy, now in a position to dominate and subjugate (here’s a great book with more insight). Remmick perfectly represents this arc, from the pain of Ireland and transformation into a monstrous form in America.

Second, there’s a scene where Delta Slim is driving in the car through the fields with Stack and Sammie and passes the chain gang (here). Sammie asks, do you know those guys. And Delta Slim replies, yes, every one of them. They used to play music together, and were successful. So successful they attracted the fury of the Klan, who lynched one of them and sent the rest to the chain gang. If you want to know what the criminal justice system was built to do, watch this scene. It’s very apt to me that Sinners and the Alabama Solution are both nominated this year – there is a powerful conversation to be had between those two films.

“Criminalization… operates to neutralize resistance—whether used by the regime to paint targets as deserving of violence, or by “our side” when we make distinctions between “regular arrests” and ICE enforcement actions.

When we decry detention and deportation of migrants “with no criminal convictions,” leaving unchallenged incarceration, torture, and extraordinary rendition of “criminals” who are presumed to be deserving of their fate, or when we or insist that resistance be “nonviolent” and non-disruptive, even as federal officials declare that any monitoring or opposition to ICE activity (or their political agenda for that matter) constitutes “violence,” we are playing the other side’s game.

In order to fight our way out, we are going to have to fight for everybody, which requires us to divest ourselves from the notion that some people are not worth fighting for.”

Photo credit: Michael Skolnik (Minneapolis, January 2026)

Not everyone is confused about humanity right now. Indeed, the good people of Minnesota are showing through their actions that they are passionately committed to humanity, and are thereby fashioning the blueprint for not only defeating the siege on their city, but for defeating the politics of death and dehumanization that have infected our society and rhetoric. They are also seeing federal Bureau of Prisons officers enforcing ICE actions (see photo above), so the through lines are perhaps more clear.

Adam Serwer has captured the Minnesota way in his brilliant and moving account in the Atlantic:

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors.

A recent report from a donor colleague on the ground shows that the situation remains as it was when Serwer reported his article, both the danger and the commitment to protect others:

Nothing has changed here despite the PR about a “drawdown” that the national media has fallen for. Over 2,300 agents are still here. Immigrants are being picked off in the suburbs. Here in the city abductions of legal observers have picked up. Usually ICE traps their cars, breaks the car windows and then drags them out to detention at Whipple -- this is happening multiple times a day. Despite all of this, new people are joining ICE watch and mutual aid networks every day.

Media

• Emily Galvin-Almanza’s debut book The Price of Mercy is out!

• Radley Balko lays down the facts on how ICE became so violent in this 25 min podcast.

• The Alabama Solution was nominated for an Oscar, which is absolutely momentous. If you still haven’t seen this documentary, please check it out on HBO. This is not some talking heads learning opportunity. It’s a thriller filled with contraband footage. Don’t miss it!

• Rashad Robinson has a new media discussion project called Freedom Table. Here’s an episode talking about how media narratives shape our perceptions of justice and power.

• Rana Abdelhamid has a fantastic book out called Get Home Safe: A Guide to Self-Defense and Building Our Collective Power, drawing on her years of work training and organizing women. Here is her recent oped in the New York Times and here she is on Gayle King.

• The 10th Anniversary edition of This is an Uprising is out, with a new preface and afterward that reflects on key developments in the field of civil resistance.

• I’ve been recommended a podcast called Running from COPS about the impact of the show COPS on American policing. I haven’t listened yet but apparently it’s illuminating.

• Marbré Stahly-Butts and Ameca Reali teamed up to compile and edit the new book Lawyering for Liberation: a Toolbox for Movement Lawyers.

• Dr. Kenneth Glasgow, who has spent years in prison and years fighting to help people in prison in Alabama and beyond, has a new book out called Freedom Fighters.

• Dwayne Betts, creator of Freedom Reads, joined the Dog Talk podcast to talk about books in prison (plus some discussion of his pandemic puppy).

Solutions and Wins

• Outgoing New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced one of his final executive actions: restoring the eligibility to serve on juries for some 350,000 people who’d been blocked due to prior criminal convictions.

• The Massachusetts Survivors Act would allow for reduced sentences for people with convictions related to their abuse.

• A Canadian company declined to sell a 550,000 square ft warehouse in Virginia to DHS after protests and advocacy apprised them that it would be used to detain immigrants.

• Governor Hochul has backed off of efforts to roll back NY’s “raise the age law” (which returned 16 and 17 year olds to youth court instead of adult prison), after 200 groups warned they would fight to the mat to keep it. In an election year, that’s not a fight she wants to pick.

• Between 2021 and 2025, when supposedly criminal justice reform was tanking, 652 bipartisan CJ reform laws passed in the states, including 114 laws in 36 states last year (more than in 2024). This data comes from bill tracking research done by students at Princeton under Udi Ofer.

ICE Notes

• ICE is now the largest law enforcement agency in the country and ICE detention is slated to triple in size, matching the scale of Japanese internment. I highly recommend reading Silky Shah’s overview of these developments, which emphasizes the many years of bipartisan collaboration that has made this horrific apparatus possible. With this type of history, increasing professionalization will not make ICE policing less violent. So why are democratic leaders in the Senate pushing these reforms as consequential?

• How does this relate to criminal justice? Remember that “Militarized borders and heavily gated pathways to citizenship ensure a permanently exploitable class, much like felony convictions.” Moreover, there’s a strong continuum between the murder of Renee Good within the long US history of police murders. The NYTimes calls ICE a “violent and unaccountable domestic police force.” (Balko said it first). And most importantly, the massive expansion of ‘detention’ beds, which a federal court of appeals just said can hold people indefinitely, should absolutely concern anyone who’s been fighting to close prisons and jails. On the bright side, this field has considerable experience campaigning to close prisons and jails. One of the most important things to do right now is to ramp up those campaign strategies for this new terrain.

• Massachusetts, bastion of liberty and democratic resistance, is collaborating with ICE. Bolts Magazine has an excellent exposé of the state’s disgraceful contract.

• Out of Minneapolis: A bounty of stories and commentary from Minnesotans living through and protect each other from a violent federal siege; Margaret Killjoy visited Minneapolis and reports back; Jonathan Stegall and Anne Kosseff-Jones reflect on how abolition shows up in the current moment of anti-ICE mobilization there; Erin West gives a personal account of what it feels like to confront federal agents in the streets alongside an entire city: “Ice vs. Everyone.”

• The number of children in ICE detention has jumped by 6x. Pro Publica published heartbreaking letters from children in detention.

• Conditions are horrendous inside these detention centers, with rampant medical neglect.

Commentary and Analysis

• I highly recommend reading this beautiful essay, One Minute Remaining, by Shebri Dillon, who writes about her experience as an incarcerated mother.

• Niskanen, a centrist policy think tank, argues compellingly that incarcerating people for longer based on prior convictions makes no sense. This digs into the differences between age cohorts and arrest levels. Long story short, Gen Xers were much more likely to be arrested when they were young than following generations, and policy has not updated to account for this change.

• Baz Dreisinger and Alexus McNally describe the prison building boom in the Global South, heavily influenced and funded (!) by the U.S. and Europe, which is wildly detrimental.

• The Marshall Project recounts bad trends at the DOJ, including: changing priorities away from addressing police misconduct and community violence (cutting billions of dollars from effective programs) to expanding gun rights; completely corrupting the pardons process (donors get out of jail); and pressing for increased use of the death penalty. PPI is also collecting receipts.

• Bolts reports on what’s at stake in sheriff and prosecution elections this year.

Reports, tools, and research

• FWD.us has released a very readable and useful report on parole, with stories, data, and recommendations. Denying parole is bad for public safety.

• Jeff Asher does a thorough debunking of the claim that the recent dramatic decline in murder rates was caused by improved hospital care keeping more people alive. It’s not true!

• The Bail Project did a wonky report on bail policy reforms, with guidance for advocates.

• The Prison Policy Initiative found that over half a million jail bookings a year are for ‘failure to appear’, which is nuts. That’s 1 in 8 bookings!

• Former police officers and DAs turned judges are more likely to detain people and set higher bail. Researchers estimate that replacing one of these judges with an average judge would result in: 65 fewer detentions, $6 million less in imposed cash bail, 17 years less jail time, and would save about $8.7 million in detention costs over 10 years.

• PPI did a roundup of police misconduct data projects, of which there are many.

• Specialty courts don’t work very well at all.

Media

• I’m reading The Radical Fund, by John Fabian Witt, and you should too! It tells the story of how a young man’s rejection of a $1million inheritance in 1922 enabled the creation of a fund that paid for some of the most iconic and foundational campaigns, organizations, and leaders in the pre civil rights era. The book looks like a doorstop but I promise it’s a page turner; every chapter uncovers the origins of the most consequential shifts in early modern America. Witt wrote an oped on America’s future that gives a taste of his style.

• John Oliver covered the topic of felony murder, where a person can get a 1st degree murder sentence even if they didn’t kill or intend to kill anyone. It’s absolutely nuts and needs to end!

• The Alabama Solution has been added to the short list for the Oscar best documentary category. As we come closer to the announcement of who the actual nominees are, it’s heartening to see the film get top billing on Variety’s list of notable 2025 documentaries. The film has drawn attention to extreme misconduct in the Alabama prison system, including by Officer Gadson, who’s been sued 26 times for brutal use of force.

• Criminologist Jeff Asher interviewed Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, who just won reelection for another term. They discussed Krasner’s commitment to data transparency, political narratives around crime, and the challenge of communicating a progressive message.

• Aftershock: The Nicole Bell Story is a film about the police murder of Sean Bell, who they shot to death in his car the night before his wedding. The film describes the police coverup and the devastating impact on Sean’s fiancee and mother of his children, Nicole.

• I was lucky enough to see the play Punch in London at the end of the year before it closed. The play follows the true story of a young man growing up rough and getting into a lot of trouble who throws a punch one night that kills a man. After serving prison time, he agrees to meet with the parents, and they end up working together to prevent others from dying this way. It’s definitely on the nose for my work, but it was also very well acted. The best thing for me was seeing the double standing ovation in the 100% packed Apollo theater at the end. Could England be ready for a serious push to prioritize prison reform and build alternative solutions?

• If you’re interested to learn more about restorative justice from a participant perspective, the New Press has a book coming out for you: Restorative Justice Up Close.

• Stuart Hall’s classic study on moral panics and the political uses of crime, Policing the Crisis, is about to be reissued. A timely moment! You can see a PDF here if you can’t wait till February.

Solutions and Wins

• Governor Murphy of New Jersey reached a milestone of granting over 300 clemency requests before he leaves office, more than double the total of all NJ governors since 1994. One beneficiary was LaShawn Fitch.

• A study in Nature finds that the presence of mental health ‘co-responders’, meaning people with mental health training who accompany police to mental health calls and use their expertise to stabilize the situation, results in substantially fewer people being put into involuntary mental health detention. This saves money, saves beds for people who really need them, and avoids the trauma of unnecessary mental health detentions.

• John Roman has a roundup on 2025 crime stats, documenting that the decline is enormous and persistent. The one downside here is that if any crime ticks up even a small amount, which has to happen at some point unless we are on track to total crime eradication, it will likely be picked up as much more of a story than the current decline.

• Trump signed an order to expedite the process for marijuana rescheduling. President Biden pushed the issue as far as he could, but the wheels within agencies like the DEA were turning too slowly for it to get finalized in his term.

• Philadelphia has achieved an unprecedented reduction in gun violence.

Commentary and Analysis

• Check out Jonathan Ben-Menachem’s illuminating piece in The Nation laying out the context for Mamdani’s choice to retain Jessica Tisch as the police commissioner, notwithstanding serious misgivings on the left. All else aside, the left had not organized for any alternative, so that didn’t leave much of a choice. In a fascinating turn though, Klippenstein writes that Mamdani has ordered that Tisch now will report to his deputy rather than directly to him, breaking with past practice. A New York mayor starting the day some other way than meeting with the police commissioner? This could be a significant shift; we’ll have to see how it plays out.

• Paul Engler writes about what social movements and social change strategists can learn from the “innovator’s dilemma,” described as follows: “what makes dominant [organizations] strong within the current market also makes them structurally resistant to what comes next.” Scrappy outsiders are the ones positioned to bring in new ideas, but there isn’t a consistent movement infrastructure to support them. Engler advocates that this be built.

• Meanwhile, Mark Engler has done an engrossing and fascinating article about Myles Horton, one of the founders of the Highlander Center, a crucial meeting, training, and education hub for the labor movement and later the civil rights movement. Horton’s thinking about mobilization, polarisation, education, personal transformation, and bureaucracy are really relevant now.

• Matthew Cavedon at the Cato Institute reminds us that we have to take into account the “unseen” success of people allowed to move on with their lives instead of being maximally punished for a crime. He cites a study from New York finding that eliminating cash requirements for bail actually cut the chances the person would be arrested for another crime by 12%. In other words, using the system less can reduce crime.

• In his latest substack, Alec Karakatsanis tackles the false claim that criminal justice reform is ‘unpopular’ and therefore the sensible political line is to oppose or weaken it. On the contrary, data from Gallup and other major surveys show that large majorities favor spending less on police and more on social services including housing and health care. Crime survivors agree.

Reports, tools, and research

• The Free Her Institute has a major new update on women’s incarceration.

• The Marshall Project has been doing great work covering deaths in prisons and jails.

• Scrutinize has drafted a plan for New York City to change how it picks judges.

• Human Rights for Kids has a new report on the Trauma to Prison Pipeline.

• More than 70% of people coming home from prison in south Florida get jobs through a temp agency within three years, where they get stuck with low wages and no benefits. Read more in the new Beyond the Bars report, The Temp Trap (discussed in article here).

• Vera pulled together a bunch of explainer articles on various aspects of the criminal justice system into a single reference page.

• A recent study finds that subjecting prospective hires to drug testing may cancel out the benefits of second-chance hiring reforms for people with records.

• The National Association of Counties published a report highlighting services and programs across the country that “support community members living with a behavioral health condition or experiencing a behavioral health crisis.”

• Prison Policy Initiative published its list of winnable reforms in 2026.

Politics and policy

• Trump’s team is reportedly working on a big national crime bill with reform rollbacks. My sources in DC say that this is very inchoate and it’s too soon to tell if this really has momentum or not, and what it might actually contain.

• The grinning founder of the surveillance firm Palantir wants to bring back public hangings.

A new Gallup poll finds that for the first time since 2000, strengthening law enforcement as a solution to crime is losing support, while another one finds that the percentage of Americans who think crime is going up (which it is not!) is dropping substantially. Meanwhile, addressing social and economic problems is gaining popularity as the way to address crime (only 8% of Dems prefer adding law enforcement to addressing to social problems). This shift in attitudes is no doubt helped by historically low crime rates (currently the lowest since the 1960s - check the charts!).

Moreover, while Gallup surveys like the one above tend to show republicans answering in hardline fashion, I’m told by a colleague who does regular polling that “independents and republicans are overwhelmingly pro-reform on drugs, homelessness, and mental health related granular solutions when you explain it to them in terms of policy solutions like mobile crisis response, sobering centers, trauma centers, etc. When it comes to support for these programs, republicans are above water with us and sometimes 60-70+ percent, even when you ask them to make a forced choice between increasing support for law enforcement or these programs.”

This trend is born out in San Francisco, where Heather Knight (who was a leader of the anti-Chesa Boudin brigade) just wrote a glowing piece in the NYTimes about a new crisis stabilization center. When we get into the details around what non-police-non-jail responses look like, they turn out to be very popular across the board. Why? Because it turns out that prisons and jails are the most expensive, least effective solutions to problems. They are propped up by cynical political interests and crumble in the face of pretty much any other approach.

Election Day Lessons

This moment offers a strange duality. On the one hand, crime is markedly down, and support for prison reform continues to grow. On the other hand, rising authoritarianism in the U.S. is going to bleed over into this space. Not only does it have a rapidly expanding carceral apparatus, along with secret ‘domestic terrorist’ lists, but indirectly it can make democrats feel like they don’t have political capital to spend.

Indeed, some democrats are claiming that the way to fight Trump is to advocate for punitive policies and increased police power (in some cases because that’s what they really want anyways), positions which directly feed right back into Trump’s authoritarian politics. This 90s playbook is getting tired, but 90s leaders like Rahm Emmanuel (the former Chicago mayor who disgraced himself by covering up the murder of teenager Laquon McDonald) are clinging to this strategy, even though the Dem base overwhelmingly does not support that: “just 8% of Democrats prefer emphasizing increased law enforcement rather than addressing socioeconomic problems as the better general solution to crime.”

But something interesting happened on election day last month. Not only did democrats have a blowout night, winning contests around the country and massively improving their margins, but they won despite the fact that voters continue to say they trust Republicans more to handle crime.

Why? Because the economy is far more salient right now than crime. In Virginia, 49% of voters said the economy was the most important issue, whereas 5% said that crime was most important. Jeff Asher noted that perceptions of crime are coming closer to reality.

Voters may have opinions on crime control when asked, but they aren’t going into the voting both with crime top of mind. That’s what happens when crime rates fall this fast and when high-profile candidates like Zohran Mamdani lead with affordability rather than crime and safety.

Election Day Results

Below is the rundown on the top criminal justice results. While I don’t think we are going to elect our way out of authoritarianism, I do think that we must have momentum in order to get out of this pit. So these wins feel excellent, and send a great signal!

Prosecutors:

• Larry Krasner won a third term for Philadelphia, PA by more than 50 percentage points.

• Alvin Bragg won a second term for Manhattan DA by 53 points.

• Stephanie Morales won a third term in Portsmouth, VA by more than 30 points.

• Jay Jones won a first term as VA Attorney General, beating Trump darling and anti-reform champion Jason Miyares by 6 points and nearly 200,000 votes.

• Ramin Fatehi won a second term in Norfolk, VA after beating a Republican-backed primary opponent who outspent him 4:1.

• Shannon Jones won a first term in Newport News, VA after beating a 30 year incumbent.

• Erika Evans won a first term as City Attorney in Seattle, WA against tough on crime Republican incumbent, Ann Davidson. Evans won 63% of the vote.

• And for the first time in 50 years, a democrat won the DA race in Bucks County, PA. While Joe Khan didn’t run as a progressive reformer, we expect him to be good on youth justice.

Others:

• Zohran Mamdani, you won’t need reminding, won the New York City mayor’s race in spectacular fashion. Here are his positions on closing the Rikers Island jail complex.

• Exonerated former prisoner Calvin Duncan, author of “The Jailhouse Lawyer”, won a very hard-fought race to be clerk of court in New Orleans, where he will do court and election oversight. His words: “Tonight is a dream that’s been forty years in the making… I hope that all those people who died in prison because we couldn’t get their records are looking down now. I hope they’re proud of me. We never stopped fighting for each other’s rights, and I will never stop fighting for yours. Thank you for this privilege.”

• Danny Ceisler won the sheriff’s race in Bucks County, PA, pledging to halt cooperation with ICE.

• A public defender won a judicial race in upstate NY. The campaign relied on Scrutinize’s data on the incumbent’s record of excessive sentences.

• In Seattle, Erika Evans won the City Attorney race. She pledged to partner with LEAD and “prioritize housing, services and addiction treatment to those who end up perennially caught up in Seattle’s criminal legal system.” Bolts has the rundown.

Politics and policy

• Governor Newsom signed several bills benefitting incarcerated firefighters in California, including a pay increase to federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour) while on active fire duty.

• A huge win here for family members of people killed by police in California: previously police were trained to rush to family members and get dirt on victims before even informing them that their loved one had died. A new California law prohibits the practice. Mother Jones has a great story featuring the excellent Silicon Valley De-Bug, whose members spearheaded this reform.

• A proposed law in New York would require judges to visit a prison and do a full tour, including meeting with prisoners, to make sure they know what’s at stake at sentencing.

• Almost half of incarcerated people in the U.S. live in rural counties served by hospitals that may be forced to close or scale down services after medicaid cuts.

• New Orleans voters passed an anti-discrimination amendment to New Orleans Home Rule Charter preventing discrimination based on conviction history.

Notes from the field

• In one of the most exciting developments of the past few years, incarcerated women from around the world have been building a global network to fight imprisonment. James Kilgore did a deep dive on the International Network of Formerly Incarcerated Women for Truthout.

• Freedom Reads has now opened 500 freedom libraries in more than 50 prisons in 17 states.

• Young people are organizing and speaking out in New York City, calling for continued reforms to the youth justice system which continues to allow police to question children without lawyers and is keeping children in poor conditions.

• California-based Starting Over Inc. is establishing the Ruchell “Cinqué” Magee Community Land Trust, in honor of the country’s longest serving political prisoner who was released in 2023 after 67 years in prison.

• Under Biden, the FCC made unprecedented progress toward ending price gouging for prison phone calls. Now, Trump’s FCC has undone a lot (but not all!) of it, though the states can still make their own rules. Bianca Tylek has been on the front lines of this fight for years and has a comprehensive breakdown.

• As the U.S. snubbed the UN’s human rights periodic review process, American advocates and electeds traveled to Geneva to speak out forcefully against the current administration and human rights abuses. Among them were Saleem Holbrook, a major criminal justice leader out of Philadelphia, and District Attorney Larry Krasner, also from Philly. Here’s a recording.

Media: watch/listen

• The Alabama Solution, the brilliant newdocumentary about Alabama prisons, has now been out for two weeks. It has a new website and has gotten a lot of press attention. See here, here, and here for a few examples. The Marshall Project published key takeaways. Family members of those who have died in Alabama prisons have launched a campaign in connection with the film to demand action.

• Congratulations to Rahsaan Thomas and other leaders behind the visionary San Quentin Film Festival, which just had its second year! Dwayne Betts (founder of Freedom Reads) offered a vivid account of his experience there.

• Radley Balko’s podcast Collateral Damage has a new episode out that is shockingly relevant today. It looks back at the U.S. It examines the deaths of Veronica and Charity Bowers, a Christian missionary and her toddler daughter whose plane was shot down over Peru in 2001 as part of a CIA drug interdiction program, though there were no drugs.

• CYCLE is a new investigative documentary that tells the story of a police killing no one ever heard about because it wasn’t caught on video. Here’s a segment covering the film and its making.

• Amy Goodman interviewed advocates Alec Karakatsanis and Krish Gundu about the short (20 min) musical documentary Criminal. If you haven’t seen the film yet, I highly recommend it!

• Founder of Partners for Justice Emily Galvin Almanza appeared on the Weekend Show.

Media: read

• Journalist Nell Bernstein has a new book: In Our Future, We Are Free, telling the story of the advocates and organizers behind America’s stunning 75% drop in youth incarceration. Books like this make great holiday gifts!

• Read an excerpt from Joshua Clark Davis’s new book, Police Against the Movement, about police surveillance and repression in the civil rights movement. When activists fought back, the police tried to destroy the evidence, but they didn’t get it all.

• Captive State, which was a months-long exhibition telling the story from slavery to mass incarceration in Louisiana through stories, photographs, and other documents, has now been turned into a book. It’s endorsed by John Legend and Calvin Duncan.

• Galaxy Leader Fellow John J. Lennon recently published The Tragedy of True Crime, a critique of the true crime industry and its insatiable appetite for gory stories. He argues that this obsession fuels public demand for harsher punishments and perpetuates mass incarceration. The book was profiled in The New York Times. John is serving a life sentence in New York State.

• Chris Blackwell was interviewed in The Nation about his new book, Ending Isolation: the Case Against Solitary Confinement.

• Visionary media campaigner Rashad Robinson has started writing a newsletter. Check out his recent inspiring post, “We’re at the Beginning, Not the End.”

Solutions and Wins

• A Vermont county has denied the permit to build a new $90million women’s prison.

• The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition won their Get Real Denver campaign, securing $6.1 million in the Denver budget to provide grants for youth violence prevention/interruption. The website is great - check it out.

• The disgusting prison ship that operated as an overflow jail center for Rikers is finally being scrapped. For people who had to live on that ship and their families, this is an incredibly important moment.

• Gun violence in cities has plummeted to record lows. Yet the funding from the Biden administration that sent hundreds of millions of dollars to communities around the country for violence interruption programs, which police say have helped drive down violence, isn’t being renewed. Hopefully we aren’t about to see a rebound.

• San Francisco has turned an old Goodwill into a ‘crisis stabilization center,’ where people can go (or be brought) any time day or night for relief if they are in a mental health crisis.

Reports, tools, and research

• The Free Her Institute put out a major new report on the state of incarceration for women. There are alarmingly few resources on this topic, so the report is very welcome!

• After all that fuss and fear about bail reform in NYC, it’s interesting to see that recidivism went down when people were released with no bail requirements. In other words, holding people in jail unnecessarily causes more crimes to happen. To learn more, here’s an explainer.

• A recent evaluation of Durham, NC’s HEART program, which diverts nonviolent 911 calls from police, finds that it effectively reduces arrests, quickens police response times, and fosters trust.

• Researchers at Columbia University have found that the use of prison labor in Hyundai’s supply chain drives down the wages of non-incarcerated workers by as much as 14%, based on data from 600 auto workers in Alabama. That’s because they don’t quit over wages.

• A recent study finds that less than 1% of deaths in the U.S. are from homicide, yet over 40% of the news coverage on causes of death (52% on Fox News) focuses on homicide. Meanwhile, cancer and heart disease cause 56% of deaths and get less than 8% of the coverage.

Wall of shame

• In this Georgia prison run by notorious private prison company Core Civic, whether or not you get to eat depends on how fast you can run, unless you’re in a gang. Prison guards don’t intervene. In an interview, a prisoner describes how prisoners are chronically underfed, and this starvation leads to violence.

• California prosecutors have been using AI to write case filings, resulting in fake cases being cited. Civil Rights Corps is petitioning the CA supreme court to intervene.

• According to a lawsuit, Maryland prison guards left a man in his cell to die of thirst (an extremely brutal way to die), and the prison is refusing to release records.

• Covid is still running rampant in prison, but prisoners are being denied vaccines.

• The Trump administration is taking a wrecking ball to the violence interruption and gun violence prevention programs that have coincided with the most dramatic drops in violence this country has seen in decades.

Before getting to the details, my bottom line takeaway is that Norway (specifically Norway, not all of Scandinavia) is as impressive as everyone says. I was prepared for it to be humane and well run, but I was really struck by the intense commitment to human dignity on the part of every staff person I encountered, and in the overall design of the facilities. Most importantly, guards are trained and selected for maximum commitment to social work and care, rather than brutalizing punishment. I believe that changing prison officer culture would be the most consequential change we could make, before even improving the buildings and programming.

How it works

There are ~3000 people in prison in all of Norway, including people in pre-trial. These people are housed in 33 prison units containing 58 distinct facilities. (Compare the U.S., where there are many prisons that could hold all of Norway’s prison population in one). At one prison we went to, ⅔ were sentenced and ⅓ were pretrial. A third of the prisoners were non-citizens. 45% of the guards were women. Not all prisons are as well equipped as the ones we saw. Halden prison in particular was especially expensive to build – here is a photo gallery of their facilities, from which I’ve drawn all the photos in this post – and we were told there isn’t appetite to do that again. They proudly told us that Norway has some of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, around 20%.

School, health, library, and dental services aren’t funded by the department of corrections. Instead, those services are funded and controlled from the outside. This creates accountability for the prison and ensures that there are always outside eyes looking in.

Prisoners are paid 85 Kroner a day ($8.43) if working or attending school. Work is five days a week, and prisoners are assigned based on their existing skills. For example, a person with experience in mechanics might work in the auto body shop, or someone with IT experience works in the prison library. There’s a Norwegian Labor and Welfare agency representative in the prison to make sure that work rules are respected. If they refuse to do either, they receive half pay. The men use this pay to buy their daily food for breakfast and lunch, which they prepare themselves in dorm kitchens. Food is sold in the prison commissary, a store that resembles a well-stocked bodega. I met a janitor in the prison library who said his specialty is baking cakes. Men on a dorm floor will pool resources to buy the necessary ingredients for the cakes.

Officers are required to do a free, two-year course at the university level before becoming a guard. After that, they have to commit to at least one year working in the prisons. The training is considered so excellent that other social services often poach guards. This is creating a problem for the prison system as they are losing staff faster than they can replace them. A solution here might be for those other services to compensate the prison system for at least one year of pay, or for the system to require guards to work at least two years before leaving. Either way, it’s striking that prison guards are considered so exceptionally well trained that they are in high demand for poaching.

Principles that guide the guards include: thinking of this as social work, seeking dialogue, offering guidance and respect, taking a humane perspective, and fostering leadership and cohesion. Officers “have the shoes on,” and are expected to take responsibility and accountability for what’s happening with prisoners. Any restraints must be applied in a bespoke way that fits the specific security concerns regarding the person. We were told there are no routines like strip searches, shackles, etc. Assaults on staff at the prisons we visited are rare, perhaps one every 1-2 months according to guards at one prison. Guards carry no weapons. They have pepper spray, but it’s locked up. They reported having to use it roughly once every four months. I didn’t get information on how much violence takes place between people incarcerated in the prisons, but I would be surprised if it happens often given the environment I saw.

Several staff mentioned that there are serious and increasing mental health challenges in the prisons. To respond to the complex needs of prisoners, they created two special teams within the prison guards, which require extra training. The “resource team” is charged with “breaking the cycle” of negative behavior on the part of prisoners. A contact officer on the resource team is both a social worker and a guard. The “activity team” staffs individual prisoners to ensure that men who are unable or unwilling to participate in work duty (due to fear of other prisoners or mental health issues) still make it out of their cells on a daily basis, as isolation is seen as the cause of enduring mental health problems. These guards may take daily walks with the men in their care, or do other activities together.

There is a strong emphasis on not only respecting dignity in the design of rooms, work assignment, guard interactions and so forth, but also in ensuring that prisoners maintain human contact. For example, prisoners in solitary must still have time out of their cells every day that involves interaction with others. Prisoners eat at a normal table with guards in their housing units. Even the ‘worst of the worst’ have this level of contact.

One of my most memorable conversations during this tour was with a Norwegian man in the prison who had been convicted in Sweden (for assaulting a man who was robbing him) and was allowed to transfer to a Norwegian prison after 6 months in the Swedish prison. He showed us his room, including photos of his children and an enormous and very regal cat. He emphatically attested to the better conditions, food, and treatment in Norway, saying Swedish prisons are terrible. The pay in Norway is 10x higher, prisoners get single rooms instead of being double bunked, and the food is better. I asked one of the guards what they thought of this, and they said that guards in Sweden receive much less training than in Norway, so that’s not surprising. Sweden also has a right wing government right now, which doesn’t support anything like Norwegian practices. Indeed, the Guardian reports that: “Sweden is moving away from criminal rehabilitation in favour of US-style mass incarceration… as the country prepares to rent places in Estonian jails to help house its rapidly expanding prison population.”

Regarding government support, we learned that budgets have been going down over the last several years for the prisons we visited, and as a result their staffing has been cut by 25%. This has resulted in less leeway in doing programming for prisoners, as everything requires a certain amount of staffing. So, the gleaming experience we saw was apparently the pared down version. They are still looking pretty good from what I could tell. My trip to Oslo coincided with the country’s high-stakes national elections, where there was the potential for a right wing take over in the government. The Labour government pulled through in the end, which is the best result for preserving the budgets and values commitment to keeping the Norway model going. Several guards I spoke to said they were hoping for Labour to win to ensure they could keep doing their work.

Further anecdotes

• On our first prison visit, the main courtyard between the dorms was spacious and green, with trees, bushes, some small hills, and a small bell tower. A warden from Washington state prison on our trip was excited about this, as he’s been trying to convince his security team to put some greenery in their yard. Normal prison procedures stipulate that there should be nothing at all, to ensure there aren’t any places to hide and that men can’t fashion weapons out of everything. He said he thought he could bring this design back home and implement it.

• The prison hallways were very quiet and we were reminded not to speak too loudly, as the guards want to respect the prisoners’ need for calm.

• The common refrain when looking into a prison cell is that it’s “like a dorm.” There’s a bed, a desk, a bathroom with a shower and a door that closes in the room. The furniture is made of wood. The windows are large, with views out to trees.

• We spoke to a man in charge of cutting firewood. He was doing his shift with no supervision. We asked permission before asking questions; no one was required to speak with us.

• We went to several large workshops over the course of two days: a vast metal working shop, two enormous wood shops, and a car mechanic shop. Each was fully equipped with all the necessary tools and heavy machinery for producing real products, such as furniture. There was no strict system for counting tools and men were moving freely throughout the space. The American prison staff on the tour were quite struck by this.

• I asked a guard if I could shake a man’s hand after I spoke to him about his work detail, and the guard didn’t understand my question. He said, “of course! Why not?” I was used to the idea of no contact rules that I’ve experienced in U.S. prisons.

• We visited the prison grocery store. A prisoner working in the store is getting a business degree in running a store. Everyone there was unpacking goods from a recent shipment. A female prison guard was also working hard right alongside the prisoners. She was putting her back into unpacking cans from their plastic wrap.

• We spent a while chatting to men in a beautiful and well equipped art and design studio.

• In the second prison we visited, the dorms are in a separate building from the work spaces. Men walk down the hill from their dorms each day to go to work. The prison director shared that this is part of their commitment to normalcy. People in the world leave home to go to work, so the men in their prison do that as well.

• We visited the ‘supermax’ unit, which was specially built for two prisoners who trade off the space when they come from their dorm upstairs. The two men are never in the space at the same time, and they don’t mix in the general population or go to work detail. They just move between their sleeping rooms and the general living area. Even this ultra high security zone contains a kitchen with knives, a waffle iron, kettle, and other implements, a living room, dining room where the guards eat with prisoners, and a small garden.

• Even though the facilities looked amazing to us, it’s still a prison. We spoke to men through a fence in a yard who said that it’s a “shithole.” We said we’re Americans, and he said oh yeah well you guys are worse. Regardless, the place certainly was not a “resort” in his eyes.

• Halden prison has a forest in the middle, with hundreds of slender short trees. It’s dense and thick and there’s a frisbee golf set up in the middle. Men are allowed in only for specific activities, or when taken by an activity officer on a walk.

• Both prisons I saw had quite well equipped overnight visiting houses, with a bedroom for adults, one for kids, a living room, kitchen, and a yard. Men have to take a parenting class before they can invite their families there, and the visiting houses are only for visits for men with children (others may visit in the regular visiting rooms).

• There were prison staff from Connecticut and Washington on our visit. Their eyes went wide seeing how well provisioned the kitchens are with things that would be totally banned in their facilities, like knives and heavy objects.

Reflection

The most notorious prisoner in Norway may be Anders Breivik, who gunned down 69 young people attending a summer youth camp in 2011. A staff member told us how this case massively tested the Norwegian system’s resolve. What should happen to this unrepentant mass murderer? Would they make a justified exception by unleashing vengeance on this especially horrible person? Or would they double down on their humanity. They chose the latter by building the specialized supermax unit described above.

In hearing this account, I was reminded of the Ursula Le Guin story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, where a society conditions its immense peace and prosperity on the horrific treatment of an innocent child. Norway, by contrast, has committed to the opposite: they treat Brevic better than many people think any prisoner deserves to be treated, let alone the most vicious. This is not a guaranteed system - it’s frail. The budgets are being cut and plenty of people in Norway disagree with this approach. Other prisons in Norway may be less well equipped than the ones I saw, and it seems clear that non-citizens don’t get as much access to programming and education as citizens (and may be more likely to get longer sentences). But the prison leaders themselves are adamant that the way to best fortify Norwegian culture and society is to treat their prisoners with full dignity and humanity, and they are living up to that claim better than any system I’ve seen in the U.S.

Media

• The Alabama Solution is now streaming on HBO! This is an absolutely brilliant film as I’ve shared before, and I encourage you to ask three friends or family to watch it and talk to you about what impression it left with them. If you have any anecdotes to share, I’d love to hear them!

• Watch/listen to Andrea James (National Council) and Nick Salazar (Fund for Guaranteed Income) discuss the impact of AI and surveillance on justice work.

• Radley Balko launched a new podcast series, Collateral Damage, with the Intercept. It will cover what he knows best: the last half-century of scandal and failures in the war on drugs.

• Incarcerated writers answer questions from Bolts Magazine readers about their experiences in solitary confinement.

• Truthout announced this year’s winners of the Keeley Schenwar memorial essay prize, awarded to two incarcerated or formerly incarcerated writers discussing prison or policing.

• Freedom Reads released its annual report, with updates on its work to place libraries in hundreds of prison facilities around the country. It’s a simple yet very powerful vision.

• The New Yorker is featuring Robe Imbriano’s animated musical documentary about the cash bail system. It’s 20 minutes long. Even if you think you aren’t interested in this genre, I encourage you to check it out. You may surprise yourself. It’s really good!

Solutions and Wins

• A Georgia judge is tossing racketeering charges that were brought against “Cop City” protestors in Atlanta, who have suffered for several years now under the threat of federal prison time.

• Check out this summary and analysis of the 2024 Federal Prison Oversight Act by the Brennan Center. It’s a decent bill that has done some good, which is encouraging!

• The All In Mile High initiative reduced large homeless encampments by 98%.

• South Miami declared “functional zero” chronic homelessness after adopting a housing first policy, providing permanent housing before addressing other needs like jobs and health care.

• Seattle’s crime rates are decreasing with less police, thanks to prioritizing care and community.

• North Carolina’s mobile reentry center helps people get back on their feet after incarceration.

• The trend we’ve seen across the country of decreasing murders is not just confined to the U.S. London just recorded its lowest number of murders on record, even as the population has grown. Their knife crime (measured by hospital admissions) is also down by ~35% from 2019.

Politics

• When building his wildly successful campaign, Zohran Mamdani refused to lead with crime, even though polling claimed it was a top concern, and instead centered affordability. Let’s learn from this!

• Worth Rises described how Trump’s BBB bill has further emboldened the prison industry.

• Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago signed an executive order prohibiting ICE from operating in various parts of the city. The order was drafted in part by criminal justice reformers who are extremely adept with tactics for limiting police overreach. This is one of many reasons why I wish democracy funders would pay more attention to criminal justice work. This field has been fighting authoritarians for decades.

• Meanwhile, Chicago police have had minor clashes with ICE officers in Illinois. The situation is desperate on the ground - ICE has shot people dead and shot a priest multiple times in the head with pepper bullets, rammed cars, violently arrested a journalist, and executed a large-scale military raid of an apartment building in the dead of night. It would help a lot if Chicago police decided to hold the line against this takeover. Meanwhile, Governor Abbott of Texas sent national guard troops into Illinois, against Governor Pritzker’s will, which a federal judge had to step in to pause.

• Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner has been hosting town halls and encouraged Philly residents to record the national guard if they are violating peoples’ rights. Meanwhile, Andrew Yang’s ‘Forward Party’ has endorsed Krasner challenger Pat Dugan in the impending DA race.

• The Justice Department is directing U.S. Attorney offices to begin investigating the Open Society Foundation.

Research and reports

• The Prison Policy Initiative published its latest report with data on women’s incarceration, as well as a thorough deep dive on parole.

• Shaping Reality: Building Informational Power to Resist Authoritarianism is a new paper from Interrupting Criminalization. The paper gives a useful framework for building “community-controlled informational infrastructure.”

• Reducing access to abortion increases crime; Arrests decrease lifetime earnings; Probation causes much more recidivism than dismissal (echoing Cato’s 2024 report).

• A new brief from the Sentencing Project examines serious problems with “over-federalization”, where the federal government prosecutes crimes that are also pursued by local police and prosecutors. Harms include severe race disparities in sentencing, attacks on local democracy by a hostile federal government, and disrupting the balance of power between states and the federal government. The brief offers several recommendations.

• The ACLU and the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at UT Austin published a new in-depth report on the “Silent Crisis of Elderly Incarceration,” documenting the enormous growth in this population and laying out detailed policy recommendations.

Wall of shame

• The DOJ cuts are starting to hit and it’s a massive setback for violence interruption work.

• Being trans behind bars in Florida is getting even harder under Trump.

• At least 36 people have died in the Los Angeles jail this year, a shockingly high rate. Citing this and other data, the California DOJ filed a lawsuit against the L.A. Sheriff to address terrible conditions in the jail.

• The Marshall Project investigated filthy and inhumane jail conditions in St. Louis, Cleveland, and Jackson, where people are going without showers for weeks, denied sanitary products, and crammed into small cells. “Despite the mandate, detainees consistently complain of filthy conditions, including scratches and dirt on surfaces, disgusting sinks, and toilets caked in body fluids and grime. Staying clean is hard, they said, because the water pressure is so weak you can’t wash your hands. One detainee said he had to use the same spoon for every meal, cleaning it in the sink attached to his toilet.”

• Sexual and physical abuse by guards is rampant in Texas prisons; here’s a first hand account.

Media

• Don’t forget to pick up your copy of The Jailhouse Lawyer by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull!

• Jamelle Bouie did a great tiktok on what people mean when they talk about ‘crime.’ If you don’t have tiktok, you can view it in your browser.

• UC Irvine neuroscience professor Aaron Bornstein talked about recent findings on the damage caused by psychiatric holds and how the outcomes are so similar to mass incarceration.

• On the “Conversations from the Front Lines” podcast, Paul and Mark Engler discuss today’s movement moment and how we can use movement ecology to best navigate and thrive in it.

• One of the most interesting and timely writers today for thinking about the direction of human society is Kojin Karatani. I read his book “The Structure of World History” earlier this year and I’m still digesting it. Here is Guillermo Bervejillo discussing the book and its implications today.

• In a recent podcast, Jessica Pishko explains how sheriffs have quietly become key enforcers of the right-wing populist agenda, using their unchecked local authority to distort the constitution.

• Dan Grote reflects on the necessary joy of libraries in prison.

• Alec Karakatsanis’s recent substack features a 10-minute TED style talk directed at a regular audience (who were there to see Obama, not learn about criminal justice work) about the scourge of jail and pretrial detention.

• Breaking Chains, Building Futures is a new collection of first-hand accounts from people impacted by incarceration.

• Longtime advocate Jorge Antonio Renaud lyricizes the grit of prison life in his first published collection of poems, The Restlessness of Bound Wrists

• Fined Out is a short film (<9 mins) about the devastating impacts of New Mexico’s policy of suspending drivers licenses for failure to pay fines. In 2023, they ended this practice.

• Emily Galvin did a fun video on how effective non-police interventions are for creating safety.

Politics/prosecutors

• In November, Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner faces republican challenger Patrick Dugan, who switched his party after losing in the democratic primary to Krasner. The powerful buildings and trade union recently announced they are backing Krasner, after being Dugan’s biggest financial backer in the primary.

• Mary Moriarty isn’t running for reelection in Minneapolis after one term, due to personal reasons. She’s faced a lot of backlash, but has ultimately kept her promises to do system reform. State Rep. Cedrick Frazier has stepped up to run, and I hear that groups on the ground are thrilled, as he has been a champion for criminal justice reform in the legislature. He is also a former public defender.

• Bolts Magazine has a super helpful article on prosecutor elections to watch this fall.

Solutions and Wins

• Zohran Mamdani wants to invest $1 billion in establishing a Department of Community Safety in New York City. This will be a huge task but could be absolutely transformative for the city.

• Thanks to the tireless work of Worth Rises and various players behind the scenes, phone calls from prison are now free to prisoners in New York state (with costs paid by the dept of corrections), which will save 30,000 families an estimated $13million a year.

  • For a broader look at prison phone call advocacy and the effects on people inside, read this excellent coverage by Bolts.

• New Jersey has committed $3million in state funding to scale the successful Newark anti-gun-violence model to other cities around the state. Similar strategies have been very successful in Baltimore.

• Deanna Van Buren, founder and lead architect at Designing Justice, Designing Spaces, writes about how we can and should repurpose closed prisons into entirely new and useful spaces. Meanwhile, California and Wisconsin are both closing prisons.

• A study found that the opening of a plasma center in a city leads to substantial crime reductions, as people are able to meet some of their basic needs by selling plasma. The good news here is that crime numbers can be very sensitive to cash infusions. How about direct cash payments instead of extracting plasma?

• Worth Rises is doing some of the most innovative and creative advocacy in the field today. Two recent efforts include: (1) complaining to European regulators to stop the partnership between European banks and U.S. private prison/detention operators like GEO Group and CoreCivic, accusing them of supporting human rights abuses. That complaint has now been accepted; (2) intervening in the bankruptcy action for a major prison health care company.

• John Roman cites research showing that crime spiked during the pandemic due to a severe dropoff in local government employment and interaction with the public (teachers, counselors, mentors, etc). When the local government presence returned, crime fell.

Wall of shame

• Prosecutors working in conviction integrity units - which go back through old cases to reassess evidence and see if there was a wrongful conviction - are loath to ever find fault with fellow prosecutors.

• The British tabloid press is kicking up an anti-immigrant panic that’s leaning on false and misleading claims about crime. For example, one headline screams that 1 in 8 prisoners (aka 12.5%) were born overseas. However, since 16% of the population were born overseas, that means foreign born residents are underrepresented in prisons.

• Here’s a very uncomfortable and necessary piece about the criminalization of parenting.

• The massive cuts to Medicaid are likely to significantly increase crime, according to research on the relationship between lack of health coverage and crime.

• The Guardian reports that: “Sweden is moving away from criminal rehabilitation in favour of US-style mass incarceration… as the country prepares to rent places in Estonian jails to help house its rapidly expanding prison population,” as the center-Right government rejects evidence in favor of ineffective punishment.

Media

• On July 8, Penguin Press will publish The Jailhouse Lawyer, a memoir by Calvin Duncan, who spent 30 years advocating for other prisoners at Angola while fighting for his own release from wrongful conviction, written with Sophie Cull.

• Watch Over Us is a short film at Tribeca documenting a mother whose 7-year sentence for selling drugs was delayed a year so she could raise her newborn twins before being forced to leave.

• Alec Karakatsanis did a Q+A with the Columbia Journalism Review about his new book, Copaganda, which critiques the liberal media’s reinforcement of prison and jail systems. And here’s Alec interviewed on NPR about his book.

• Fwd.us produced a short video on the heavy cost of supporting incarcerated loved ones.

• I was pretty shocked to learn recently about two extremely exploitative reality TV shows focused on incarceration: 60 Days In, and Love After Lockup. It’s hard to believe these even exist. The #AIRS campaign is fighting this - here’s a short video about their campaign.

• Malcolm Gladwell reviews Unforgiving Places by Jens Ludwig, which explores the circumstantial nature of violence, which makes reduction easier than you’d think. “Why does crime seem more related to places than to people? Because some places are simply better at de-escalation than others. . . And why did Philadelphia’s vacant-lot program work so well? Because, when an empty lot becomes a well-kept lawn, people come outside. They have barbecues and picnics. Kids play. And suddenly, as Jane Jacobs famously put it, the block has ‘eyes on the street.’”

Solutions and Wins

• Ramin Fatehi, the progressive prosecutor of Norfolk, Virginia, was reelected by 5 points. He campaigned on a platform of criminal justice reform. Bolts has a wonderful in-depth story here.

• “The US is on track to record the lowest violent crime rate since 1968 and lowest property crime rate ever,” according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher.

• The NYTimes covered some of the positive impacts of California’s resentencing law, which allows prosecutors to review sentences and ask for reconsideration after a conviction.

• Partners for Justice, led by Emily Galvin-Almanza, has a national program to place client advocates in public defender offices, addressing clients needs and allowing defense attorneys to focus on legal strategy. Stateline covered the positive effects of the program.

• U.S. overdose deaths decreased 27% in 2024, according to the CDC.

• Police are responding to 911 calls much quicker than in the past in New Orleans. Jeff Asher attributes this to efforts to increase the number of civilian public safety staff, who are unarmed and aren’t police officers, who can respond to non-injury traffic incidents. Safer Cities has many more examples of the positive impacts of increasing the number of non-police responders.

• Mark Fairhurst, the head of the police officers’ union in the UK, opposes a government proposal to spend £4.7 billion on new prisons, and advocates for cutting the number of people in prison by half, focusing on supportive services.

Commentary and Analysis

• In the Atlantic, Keith Humphreys projected that the prison population is going to continue dropping precipitously to around 600,000 people, half the current level (this doesn’t count jails). He argues that prison populations reflect crime rates and crime policies from 10-20 years ago, and since we are moving long past the 90s now, we are getting into the era where the fruits of changes that have been going on for the past 15 years are really going to be felt. In 2007, 18 and 19 year olds were 5x as likely to be incarcerated as men over 64; now they are one half as likely. I think there’s a lot right with this article, but I caution that it assumes too strong a nexus between crime and incarceration. Governments have shown that they are very capable of increasing incarceration while crime is falling, as America’s overall incarceration policy attests (source for chart here).

• Two theologians urge Christians to fight to end mass incarceration.

• The editor of the Davis Vanguard asks why only ‘progressive’ prosecutors catch heat when status quo prosecutors regularly engage in unethical and destructive behavior.

• Vincent Schiraldi, a devoted and exceptionally capable justice reform leader, is stepping down as the head of the Maryland department of juvenile services. He explained his reasons in the Baltimore Sun, saying that the Maryland legislature was perpetuating massive harm by refusing to pass reforms to prevent children from languishing in jail and prison.

• There was a lot of commentary on Zohran Mamdani’s win in the NYC mayoral primary. Two comments that stuck out to me were (1) this tweet showing how Zohran changed the priority of issues in the race from immigration to affordability; and (2) this post offering analysis on what it took to win. Here’s the last paragraph, reminding us how the electorate is made:

The problem with the polling and all the emphasis on data in contemporary politics is that it does not take into account that the electorate doesn’t really exist until election day, and the politician and his or her campaign are actively creating that electorate. All political errors, from the level of action to analysis, are based on reifying the situation, believing in a static, factual reality that cannot be changed. And all great political successes are based on the opposite: the art of the impossible; believing in a chance for something new.

Reports

• FWD.us has worked with leading researchers at Duke University and NORC at the University of Chicago to document that incarceration is costing families with incarcerated loved ones almost $350 billion every year. Moreover, they find that: “The estimates on the price tag of incarceration for families presented in this report are conservative at best since we have not included the costs of legal and attorney fees, criminal justice debt, direct taxpayer spending on jail and prison facilities, family separation, reduced life expectancies, and numerous other costs of the criminal justice system that were either impossible to put a dollar figure on or not as directly related to incarceration.”

• The Justice Innovation Lab did a study finding that early screening of cases in Charleston County– meaning a careful review to make sure the case has merit and throwing out bad cases ASAP– was extremely beneficial in avoiding unnecessary jail stays and litigation. Two part-time attorneys cleared 224 cases, saving the county $400,000 over 18 months.

• The Prison Policy Initiative did a major new jails study to break down data on what charges are landing people in jail right now.

• The National Police Accountability Project has a new white paper on options for non-compliance with ICE and how to disrupt the arrest to deportation pipeline.

• The Fund for Guaranteed Income and the ACLU of Louisiana teamed up to run a pilot reparations program for 12 people who were victimized by police violence in Louisiana. Here’s their report.

Media

• Raj Jayadev is one of the most brilliant and creative organizers in America today, and the model that he and his colleagues have developed of “participatory Justice” is extremely timely. Listen to his recent conversation on the Everyday Injustice podcast.

• I recommend reading The War Before the War about the politics of slavery from the Revolutionary war to the Civil war, which drove over 80 years of viciously churning tensions between North and South. It’s a fast read and an important and timely refresher.

• I finally had the opportunity to watch The Alabama Solution, the documentary that takes us inside Alabama prisons on covert cellphones, and it blew my mind. I don’t usually watch media about how terrible prisons are as I’m pretty up to speed on that point. This film was different. There are no talking heads, no charts and diagrams. Just a ton of footage capturing the struggle of men inside trying to avoid being murdered by guards. Please see this film when it comes out in theaters in the fall. If you want to learn about or contribute to distribution or partnerships with groups on the ground, please email me and I will connect you.

• The Laura Flanders Show covered the spike in aggressive deportations by the Trump administration, which has used criminalizing language to justify its behavior.

• I’ve heard good things about The Quilters, a short documentary on Netflix about men in a Missouri prison who make beautiful, personalized quilts for foster children.

• Audible has a new series called "The Parole Room", about a man’s decades-long quest to win parole. See also the Case of Henry Dee.

Politics

• Larry Krasner won a resounding victory in his bid for a third term as Philadelphia’s District Attorney. Krasner positioned himself as a democracy defender against Trump. Mother Jones has a good piece with background on his consequential leadership. This is a huge deal - Krasner has been a number one target for enemies of this work, and they failed miserably.

• New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, now surging in the polls, has split from the pack of candidates on the question of policing. While the others have said they want to hire more officers (which will be difficult or impossible, given that the department is already having a hard time hiring officers), Mamdani is proposing that the city institute a Department of Community Safety. This department would expand programs that handle cases that aren't a great fit for police, such as mental health calls. This would relieve pressure on the NYPD while also getting more effective responses into the field, and is based on effective models like the one in Albuquerque. It’s very exciting to see this model on the major city stage in NYC!

• In New York, a terrible and out-of-line upstate judge just chose retirement rather than seeking reappointment to the bench, after a successful advocacy campaign by the Center for Community Alternatives, which relied on data compiled by Scrutinize, an organization focused on judicial transparency.

Solutions and Wins

• Governor Newsom is moving to close another CA prison, the fifth since he took office.

• Maryland’s Governor recently signed the Second Look Act, a compassionate release bill making it moderately easier for elderly and sick prisoners to get paroled.

• The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that parole reforms passed in 2023 are constitutional. This means that nearly 1800 people in Nebraska prisons will receive earlier parole eligibility dates or become parole eligible for the first time.

• 2025 is on track to produce the lowest murder rate ever recorded in the United States. This is fantastic, though I wonder if this amazing trend will reverse when the impact of Trump’s federal cuts are felt. Violence intervention programs and other crime reductions efforts around the country have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. If the rate spikes up again next year, we may know why.

• The Policing Project at NYU Law is launching the 12 Million Calls Initiative in partnership with municipalities around the country to divert 20% of police calls to non-police responses.

• Convergence magazine did a four-part series on cancel culture and how we can find other ways to work through tensions in our movements.

• Congratulations to Katherine Passley, co-ED of Beyond the Bars, a member-led worker center for people with criminal records, who just won a prestigious ‘organizer of the year’ cash award!

Reports

• Essie Justice group released a new report, The Hidden Heart of Reentry, with learnings from efforts to bail Black mothers out of jail, and the subsequent effects on their lives.

• Cornell’s Center on the Death Penalty put out a report on women and the death penalty.

• Equity and Transformation collaborated with Fathers, Families, & Healthy Communities to publish a groundbreaking report called Breaking the Chains: Reclaiming Wealth, Power, and Dignity for Black Men, focused on the experiences of formerly incarcerated Black men in Chicago.

• FWD.us released a new report called We Can’t Afford It: Mass Incarceration and the Family Tax. One striking finding from the report: Mass incarceration is costing families with incarcerated loved ones nearly $350 billion every year. This includes both out-of-pocket costs that family members pay and depressed wages over a lifetime for both the person who was incarcerated and their children.

• Jeff Asher finds that cities that implemented large recruitment bonuses for new police officers didn’t succeed in achieving more officers on the force. Whatever the politics of policing, the fact remains that many fewer people actually want to be police now, and money isn't making a difference. Cities would do well to find as many ways as possible to solve problems without police (see many examples here), and save their dwindling force for the essentials.

• The Prison Policy Initiative is maintaining a fantastic tracker of the many specific ways in which the Trump administration is producing worse outcomes for safety and for people in the criminal legal system. Given that Trump is trying to tout a few pardons as signs of his efficacy in this area, this data is really important to follow.

• Saul Kassin has produced a major study (updating his 2010 study) that lays out the risk factors for false confession and how to lessen those risks. The Innocence Project says that 29% of its exonerations involved false confessions. Hard to believe at first, but 16-hour hostile interrogations will have that effect on people.

• A very detailed new study, co-authored by several criminologists, has found that most Americans have an unfavorable opinion of mass incarceration. The news article doesn’t do it justice; I recommend reading the underlying paper.

Media

• What’s next after a prison closure in rural Virginia? Correspondents for the Laura Flanders and Friends show interviewed locals to talk about how the economy should rebuild.

• The Just Trust now has 6 episodes out in its When it Clicked series, featuring “business leaders, advocates, actors, artists, and unexpected changemakers” talking about their evolution on work to cut incarceration and increase safety.

• Visualizing Abolition is a public scholarship initiative at UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences designed to foster creative research and to shift the social attachment to prisons through art and education.

• Watch peacekeepers in Chicago tell stories about their experiences here.

• The Community Justice Exchange hosted an in-depth discussion on the need to build international solidarity in prison work. While proponents of mass incarceration have a global vision, U.S. work is extremely domestically focused.

• Veterans are demanding justice for a deported veteran, Marlon Parris, who served three tours in Iraq and has been living in the U.S. as a permanent resident for 20 years. In 2011, Parris pleaded guilty to a nonviolent drug offense. This year, ICE agents seized him outside his home and have held him since January 22nd.

• Saleem Holbrook reflected on his efforts to reclaim his life and freedom through education.

• In March, PPI hosted a webinar about pushing back against unproductive and inaccurate uses of recidivism stories and statistics. You can watch the recording of this conversation and access PPI’s recidivism training in their Toolkit.

• Amidst the increasing talk about revenue generation and independence from philanthropy, I was interested to revisit this 2014 Jessica Gordon Nembhard interview from the Laura Flanders show about cooperative economics playing a crucial economic role in sustaining the civil rights movement.

Solutions and Wins

• A bond measure that would have sent more kids to adult prisons in Louisiana failed badly.

• The Michigan Supreme Court held, in a 5-2 ruling, that mandatory life without parole sentences for people convicted of murder at the age of 19 or 20 are unconstitutional, given that the brain is still in heavy development at that age (one justice said he’d extend the ruling to age 25). This opens up hundreds of cases for resentencing.

• A multi-billion dollar case against the insurers that back the bail bonds industry is moving ahead. The case, brought by the creative impact law firm Justice Catalyst, alleges that insurers and bail bondsmen colluded to keep bail amounts artificially high. Bail bond buyers in CA alone have likely overpaid by $2 billion in the last 20 years. Once this case starts settling with the major players, it’s going to send tidal waves around the country.

• A Connecticut prison with a prevalence of mentally ill prisoners is working with the organization Amend to implement Norwegian-inspired practices to treat prisoners more humanely and to improve mental health for guards as well.

• Philadelphia saw a “remarkable” decrease in violent crime in 2024, and the largest homicide drop in city history. DA Larry Krasner was proud of the progress. This follows the national trend.

• The Oklahoma House passed a bill eliminating several fees (for electronic monitoring, indigent defense application, fees for mental health education, and more). Without knowing the full list of fees assessed, it’s hard to know how much progress this is, but it seems promising.

• Maryland’s Attorney General and the state Public Defender have formed an unusual partnership to recommend practical justice reforms. Lawmakers aren’t buying it yet.

• Journalist Radley Balko interviewed five ‘peer advocates’ at the New Orleans public defender’s office, all formerly incarcerated, who work with clients facing serious charges to help guide them.

• A Pennsylvania prison, inspired by the Norway model, has between testing an approach that gives incarcerated people more autonomy and encourages guards to actually speak with prisoners. The goals are to make prison conditions safer and to treat people in a way that makes a healthy return to society after prison more possible. Things have gone well enough that the program is expanding to three prisons. Arnold Ventures is supporting this work.

Commentary and Analysis

• Two members of the teachers union call for an anti-prison labor movement. Their commentary lays out some useful history and shows how guards’ unions have worked aggressively against the common interest by thwarting prison reform.

• Greisa Martínez Rosas wrote for the NYTimes telling Democrats how they should think about and message on immigration. Drop the language of racial oppression (which is easily countered with fear mongering about crime), and talk about lifting wages, countering corporate exploitation and creating economic prosperity for all.

• The Wren Collective identified multiple ways in which the Trump administration is fostering the conditions for an increase in violent crime, which may then justify ramping up a cycle of punitive incarceration, which will in turn make crime worse. Their analysis is succinct and worth reading.

• DA Mary Moriarty of Minneapolis made the case for her solutions-oriented approach to justice that does not prioritize incarceration.

• Emma Tai, a veteran Chicago organizer, urged readers to reject the politics of “anti politics.”

• Cristine Soto DeBerry wrote about the DOJ attacking prosecutors who charged Trump.

• The conservative Pelican Institute did an oped in favor of reform in Louisiana. The language here is very dated – this could have been written 10 years ago – but it’s still useful as a check on Governor Landry, who is also very retro in his obsession with imprisoning people.

• Did you know that after the Civil War, a large number of plantation owners decamped to Brazil, to try to resume slavery operations there? I’ve always been interested in Brazil’s prison system and I’d be curious how its development relates to this time period.

• Baz Dreisinger, who has written extensively about prisons around the world, gave a recent interview where she reflected on international trends and whence the urge for punishment.

• Mission Local has some interesting data and charts showing the relationship between police department staffing and the crime rate. The bottom line is that crime is dropping significantly even as police staffing remains at historic lows. But the overtime fees are enormous.

Wall of Shame

• Eric Adams has invited ICE to have an office on Rikers Island (for the first time in 10 years), ostensibly to help with international drug crime prosecutions. NY’s sanctuary law would prevent ICE from seizing undocumented immigrants from the jail for deportation. But will they follow it?

• The new DA of Chicago, who won her primary by a meager 2500 votes last year, has instituted a new policy allowing police in Chicago’s South Side to charge various gun crimes without a prosecutor’s approval. The point of felony review is to avoid people rotting in jail for weeks before a prosecutor can determine that charges won’t hold up. The police assigned to this ‘pilot’ program have a ton of misconduct violations on their record. This will cause a lot of harm.

• The newly elected DA of Los Angeles is relaunching death penalty prosecutions, after George Gascón had stopped them. In addition to being arbitrarily applied and often faulty (with hundreds of exonerations from death row over the past several years), the death penalty is extraordinarily expensive and sends the message that killing is acceptable.

Media

• The Guardian wrote movingly about the experience of a man waiting for the execution of his father’s killer, as portrayed in the Oscar-nominated film, I am Ready, Warden (now streaming).

• A CBS documentary about a Florida prisoner’s tragic and preventable suicide has provoked a republican legislator to introduce a bill giving diversion options to people with mental illness.

• Former South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy and Trump’s “pardon czar” Alice Johnson together critiqued mandatory minimums on a recent episode of his show. Gowdy, a former prosecutor, said “we have incarcerated a generation of young Black men with mandatory minimum drug cases and it doesn’t make any sense to me.” Note: Ms. Johnson incorrectly states that President Biden’s commutations didn’t release people from prison.

• Dwayne Betts published his new poem “Jethro’s Corner” in The Atlantic.

• Legendary Professor Steve Bright’s book The Fear of Too Much Justice comes out in paperback this spring. I have it pre-ordered. Bright founded the Southern Center for Human Rights. I met him when I took his course on how criminal procedure actually works for poor people. Spoiler - it’s deeply, profoundly unfair.

• Democracy Now covered the release of Leonard Peltier from federal prison.

Misc news

• Six senior members of the Bureau of Prisons leadership, including the Acting Director, abruptly announced their retirement. It’s not clear what’s going on in there.

• Wellpath, a major prison healthcare provider that is backed by private equity, is meandering its way through bankruptcy proceedings. They are the second such firm to file for bankruptcy in the past two years. Prisoners suing them for substandard care are trying to stay positioned. For an in-depth look at prison healthcare, see PPI’s report here.

• Larry Krasner filed for reelection as DA of Philadelphia.

Solutions and Wins

• Kentucky has introduced a ‘primary caregivers’ bill, which will provide diversion options for parents of young children. The goal is to avoid families being separated over low level crimes.

• Ann Arbor, Michigan has a new sheriff who is committed to solutions that lead people away from jail rather than into it. She will team up with DA Eli Savit to implement that vision.

• Between 2000 and 2020, the number of young people incarcerated in the United States declined by an astonishing 77%. James Forman writes for the NYTimes to explain how it happened, and you can listen to Forman and others discussing it on KQED here.

• A new study finds that the state of Indiana is saving more than $45 million a year thanks to increased mental health crisis services that are keeping more people out of jail. These savings are in addition to the more than $80 million saved in treatment costs thanks to effective early interventions that keep people out of hospitals.

• The “Community Over Cages” coalition in Atlanta is putting on pressure to reduce jailing in Atlanta and to improve the bad conditions there. Here’s a recent oped.

• Several reform bills are gaining momentum in New York, including: second look (allowing the court to consider claims by prisoners that their sentences are excessive or that they have transformed); earned time expansion (allowing prisoners to get time off for good behavior and participating in rehabilitation) and an act eliminating mandatory minimums entirely, plus elder parole (which now has a majority of the state senate in support).

• Governor Evers in Wisconsin has laid out a reform plan to upgrade certain prison facilities and close others, expand drug treatment programs, and shorten certain sentences for low level offenses. Local voices say that this is inadequate, and say that if he wants to reduce the state’s overcrowded prison population, here are some good ways to do it.

• Indigenous rights activist Leonard Peltier arrived home after nearly 50 years in prison, after President Biden commuted his sentence.

Wall of Shame

• Protesters, advocates, and lawmakers gathered in Albany, NY to demand prison reform in response to the killing of Robert Brooks, beaten to death by guards at Marcy Correctional Facility nearly two months ago. At the same time, New York prison guards went on a wildcat strike for three weeks. It ended when the commissioner fired 2,000 guards. The Center for Community Alternatives says that officers used the strike as a strategy to resist accountability for violence and human rights abuses within New York’s prisons and undermine criminal justice reforms. On point: NY Focus did an in-depth investigation into NY state prison commissioner Daniel Martuscello, detailing how his family has come to ruthlessly dominate NY prison politics over decades.

• The Lever did a remarkable deep dive into the squabbles between very wealthy owners of the prison telcom company ‘Smart Communications.’ The world would be much better without it. Follow Worth Rises for more information like this.

• The CEO of private prison giant Core Civic gleefully told investors how excited he is for the growth of their company this year. The company stands to benefit handsomely from mass detention of immigrants.

• Various states that haven’t executed a prisoner in years are scheduling executions this year.

• Thirty corrections officers in Los Angeles have been charged with various crimes for running ‘gladiator fights’ at a youth detention facility that’s run by the probation department.

• Many of the immigrants transported to Guantanamo, who Trump claimed were extremely dangerous, have in fact been designated low risk.

The pressure is only going to intensify, as Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s new film The Alabama Solution, which premiered at Sundance to glowing reviews, is expected to release this year. The film contains footage shot by incarcerated men on unauthorized cellphones who documented the astonishingly cruel and brutal conditions inside, while also asserting their own humanity and dignity. This film is likely to shock the conscience of even those who favor strong punishment; what’s happening in this movie is not punishment or accountability, but torture. Read an interview with the directors here.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed in December 2023 challenging the compulsory work policies in Alabama DOC, which the complaint alleges is “a form of slavery”, is awaiting a court ruling on the defendants’ motion to dismiss the complaint. If the judge rules against dismissing the complaint, the plaintiffs will be able to move on to discovery, where they can take depositions and subpoena other evidence. Given the very high caliber of the lawyers on this case, the state should be pretty worried about what they will uncover.

The suit claims that the state parole board intentionally denies parole so that it can make money sending prisoners to work at local businesses, profiting both the state agencies (who get paid) and the businesses (who can get away with paying less). They used to call this ‘convict leasing,’ the post-Civil-War practice that was supposed to have ended many decades ago. [See Slavery By Another Name]. If a person is safe enough to work a normal job at the McDonalds, as revealed in this brilliant and scathing report from the AP in December, they should be safe enough to be released.