BOP Scrutiny, MN Ruling on Marijuana Odor & More

"Senators really take it personally when you don’t answer their questions." -Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on prison oversight this week where they questioned Bureau of Prisons Director Collette Peters on whether she's adequately delivering on promises to turn the BOP around and expressed discontent with the timeliness of responses to requests for information. The hearing came amid widespread scrutiny over prison conditions covered in previous Five Things emails, including sexual misconduct by corrections officers at numerous federal facilities, and a desire for change represents an area of strong bipartisan agreement. Previous JAN polling, for instance, showed 96% of Louisiana Republicans in support of third party oversight of jails and prisons. 

"Despite so much talk about the footprint of the nation’s criminal justice system, it hasn’t been easy to determine the size of that footprint and figure out how it has changed over time."

The overall size, or “footprint,” of the American criminal justice system remains well above historical levels, but it has shrunk substantially in recent years, according to a new dashboard of criminal justice statistics published by the Council on Criminal Justice this week. The new data resource, "The Footprint: Tracking the Size of America's Criminal Justice System," aims to quantify the true footprint of America's criminal justice system and the full compilation is worth several reads. 
 
"On average, six months after their interaction with Tucson police, people who accepted diversion to a substance abuse treatment program used illegal drugs less frequently than people who had been arrested." 
 
As the nation continues to struggle with the opioid epidemic and its collateral consequences, researchers are finding more evidence that pre-arrest diversion is more effective at reducing drug use and recidivism than an arrest, and even more effective at addressing secondary issues related to addiction, such as homelessness. Most recently, research in Tucson has shown that training officers to divert people to substance abuse treatment has led to more than 2,100 people receiving substance abuse treatment in lieu of an arrest over a three year period. 
 
"Fines and fees associated with the criminal justice system are often the least efficient in that they are the hardest to collect."

Legislators in Alabama are increasingly looking to ways to fund certain core government functions using fines and fees in the criminal justice system. An article in the Alabama Reflector this week highlights the more than 60 pieces of legislation passed this year that increase or create new fines and fees. The author argues that funding government through fines and fees can wreak havoc on the budgets of local governments who are forced to come up with creative ways to generate money in a piecemeal fashion. “In some cases, the money can be difficult to collect, and doesn’t cover the full cost of services governments need to provide. And the fees fall heaviest on those least able to pay,” writes Ralph Chapoco.
 
"Because we conclude that the odor of marijuana emanating from a vehicle, alone, is insufficient to create the requisite probable cause to search a vehicle under the automobile exception to the warrant requirement, we affirm."

The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed a lower court's ruling that the smell of marijuana alone does not provide sufficient probable cause for a law enforcement search of a vehicle this week. The decision was related to an appeal made by the state in a 2021 case involving a man whose vehicle was searched after an officer thought he smelled marijuana. The man was charged with possession of methamphetamine paraphernalia. The man's charges were later dismissed after the district court determined the odor of marijuana alone was insufficient probable cause to search the vehicle.
 
Bonus Long Read: Criminologist Colleen Eren's book, Reform Nation, dropped this week, just in time for the second presidential debate and likely renewed conversation on the federal First Step Act signed into law by President Trump. The book looks at the history, impact and momentum that made the bipartisan effort behind the groundbreaking 2018 law a success.