26k Falsified Traffic Tickets, Bail Reform Success & More

"The candidates that ignore beltway consultants and instead show voters they are capable of this endeavor are the ones that will stand out on the debate stage — and at the ballot box."

In the late 80's and early 90's, beltway politicians undertook a radical crackdown on crime that shifted American's perception of the role of prisons and incarceration. The result: exploding prison populations, ever expanding corrections budgets, and voters who lost faith in the system. This week, JAN’s own Jenna Bottler asserts that following our nation’s peak incarceration rates in 2009, many conservative leaders realized they didn’t have to play into fear-mongering rhetoric about crime to score political points, and instead could shape safer communities relying on research, evidence, and facts. Their actions, she argues, offer a roadmap for 2024 GOP presidential candidates. 

"New Jersey’s bail reform leadership has steered the justice system toward first looking to see if someone charged with a crime could and would be helped to return to a law-abiding life."

Nearly a decade after New Jersey led the nation in reforming its pretrial detention framework, communities are finding full-system coordination successful. In Atlantic County, the latest in the state to release numbers, a balance of compassion and enforcement from police to corrections is resulting in three-quarters of defendants—the highest rate in the state—being released on a summons and connected with community treatment options, and only a quarter held on warrants for possible detention. The Press of Atlantic City’s Editorial Board writes this week that the “promise of bail reform has been fulfilled.”

"The analysis suggests that people released under the FSA have lower recidivism rates than rates estimated for similarly situated people."

A new analysis from the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) published this week found that those released from federal prisons as a result of the federal First Step Act legislation passed in 2018 had a 37% lower recidivism rate than the general population released the same year. Those released under the First Step Act were found to have a 12.4% recidivism rate, which is considerably lower than the 46.2% recidivism rate for all people released from BOP facilities in 2018.

"It really taints everything they did. Because if they’re willing to lie about the little things, it really means they’re willing to lie about anything."

An audit released in late June in Connecticut found that as many as 311 state troopers may have collectively entered at least 25,966 tickets into a State Police database for traffic stops that never took place. Now state officials are bracing for the possibility that this scandal could jeopardize efforts to prosecute large numbers of people arrested by troopers caught up in the controversy.

"Because felony murder laws impose identical sentences on individuals regardless of their role in the crime, they can produce especially unjust punishments for women who are coerced by intimate partners." 

The United States is an outlier when it comes to allowing a person to be convicted of murder even if they weren’t the person who caused the death. These laws, called ‘felony murder’ laws, allow an individual considered an accomplice to a crime – such as being present during a robbery gone wrong, or being in the getaway car—to be charged and convicted of murder as if they pulled the trigger themselves. An op-ed published in MarketWatch this week argues that these laws result in sentences that neither fit the crime nor make us safer.