DeSantis' FSA Flip-Flop; New Reports on LWOP, Home Confinement & More

"Ron DeSantis voted for the First Step Act and hailed its ‘successes.’ He now calls it ‘the jailbreak bill.’"
 
As election season continues to gain momentum, reporters are increasingly turning their attention to fact checking claims made by candidates in the earliest stages of their campaigns, including Ron DeSantis' attack on former President Trump’s signature criminal justice reform bill, the First Step Act. CNN's KFile recently took a deep dive into DeSantis' history with First Step, noting the Governor voted for an even stronger version of the bill during his time in Congress and has praised similar reintegration efforts in public forums prior to announcing his bid for the White House.
 
"In just over three years, BOP placed 13,204 individuals in home confinement under the CARES Act. Of these, 96 percent committed no violations or new criminal offenses."
 
More than 13,000 people have been released from federal prisons and placed in home confinement to serve out the remainder of their sentences since former President Trump signed the CARES Act in March 2020. In a report published by the Niskanen Center this week, authors cite data that shows the program has been enormously successful—only 22 people have been returned to prison for committing a new crime, or less than 1% of those released —and urge Congress to codify the home confinement framework put in place by the CARES Act, extending the success indefinitely. 
 
"[T]he incarceration is their punishment, not cooking them to death."
 
This week, the Marshall Project published an article detailing how ill-equipped our nation is at keeping those who are employed at or incarcerated in prison facilities safe from the dangerously high temperatures. In states across the country, people incarcerated in many state prisons often live without air-conditioning in areas where temperatures exceed 100 degrees for days at a time. The extreme heat can cause irreparable physical damage or death. Calls for access to air conditioning in prison facilities this year take on greater urgency as the prison population is increasingly older, sicker, and struggling with mental health conditions that can make their bodies less capable of dealing with extreme heat.
 
"He remembers the judge looking down at him from the bench. Although tall for his age, he felt himself shrinking as the judge spoke, telling him that he was irredeemable, that he would never walk freely in society, and that he would die in prison." 
 
Jarrett Harper is one of over 55,000 people who have been sentenced to life without parole in the United States as of 2021. However, after receiving a rare gubernatorial commutation, he is also one of a much smaller number of those people who have been granted a second chance at life. Since his release, he has maintained steady employment, become a father, been an active member of his church, and a mentor to youth in the community. His story and the stories of others like him are featured in a new report that looks at the growing number of people behind bars on a life sentence without the possibility of parole, how difficult it is to find redemption, and more. 
 
"[Associate Justice] Corrigan noted one lack of clarity in the law herself, writing that legislators had failed to indicate whether they intended the law to apply retroactively — leaving the ‘difficult, divisive and time-consuming’ process of deciding that to the courts."
 
The California Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a newly enacted probation reform law, which capped most probation terms to two years for many nonviolent offenses, applies retroactively to plea agreements that hadn’t been finalized when the law took effect in 2021. The number of defendants who might qualify for a reduced probation sentence is unclear, though the court noted there are many pending plea bargains in the state. Associate Justice Carol Corrigan, who authored the court’s decision, noted that legislators had failed to indicate whether they intended the law to apply retroactively, and urged them to “regularly express their intent” as to whether laws should be retroactive in the future.