"My husband told me this morning he's going to have to go see a therapist because of the things that happened..."
An analysis by The Appeal this week found that as many as 28,000 people were incarcerated in jails in mandatory flood zones leading up to Hurricane Milton's landfall, with many of those facilities refusing to evacuate. Just last week, 2,190 people were evacuated from five North Carolina prisons following Hurricane Helene. The evacuations came amid reports that people incarcerated at the facilities were locked in their cells with standing water and feces for days as a result of electrical and water service disruptions following the storm.
"If you’re not getting the results that you expect from receiving $1.3 billion, then there needs to be somebody saying, ‘wait a minute, this needs to be done.' The only way that’s going to be done is independent prison oversight."
The Tennessee Senate Corrections Subcommittee held a meeting this week during which Tennessee Department of Corrections Commissioner Frank Strada insisted external oversight of the state's prison facilities is unnecessary despite years of scathing audits. The meeting came amid a US Department of Justice audit at one of the state's scandal-plagued prisons, Trousdale Turner Correctional Facility. Trousdale is a privately run facility, and the operator has been fined nearly $30 million dollars in the past two years for failure to meet state standards. While Strada insists the fines are enough to bring the facility, and others like it, in line, advocates point out that the fines have not prevented drug deliveries by drone, gang assaults, and even deaths within the prisons thus far.
"[Collaborative defense] could help bring the US criminal-justice system closer to what the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black called the 'noble ideal … of fair trials before impartial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law.'"
As states continue to grapple with crisis-level understaffing in public defender offices across the nation, a team of researchers from Stanford and Partners for Justice are finding promising initial results with what they call "collaborative defense." The model introduces the concept of “client advocates” who act as both quasi-translators – helping clients understand legal processes and requirements – and navigators, connecting defendants to services that address the root causes of their legal issues. After initial testing in the Bronx, this model has reduced custodial sentences by 16% and shortened expected sentence lengths by nearly 25% without compromising public safety.
"These people are looking for information and our organization tries to provide information they can use. Now, I’m unsure how I can continue to do this manually for thousands of people..."
For people in federal prisons, email newsletters have become a critical connection to the outside world. The Bureau of Prisons, however, announced that soon they won't be able to receive them. The announcement comes on the heels of an Office of Inspector General audit that recommended the Bureau find ways to mitigate the risk of certain individuals communicating with unvetted parties. However, advocates fear the measure will mostly prevent incarcerated people from obtaining information about bills, regulations, and advocacy efforts that directly impact their experience behind bars.
"It’s not unusual that people who are in the system are also victims themselves. A lot of us are in the same family, we’re in the same community."
When Reverend Christobal Kimmenez came face to face with the boy who, at just 12-years-old, killed his son, his first instinct was to retaliate. Instead, as a visiting speaker at the facility where the boy was completing his sentence of incarceration for the crime, Kimmenez forgave him. A formerly incarcerated person himself, Kimmenez now runs a non-profit in Pennsylvania focused on restorative justice for both victims and perpetrators. Forgiveness, he says, is critical to rehabilitation for all.