Criminal Justice and Public Safety

Last week the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of disenfranchised felons in Washington, holding in a summary judgment order that the state's practice of denying the vote to felons violates the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA).  Notably, instead of basing their argument on the nature of the felon disenfranchisement law at issue, the case centered on the interaction between felon disenfranchisement and the discrimination in the criminal justice system itself.

When Denver voters rejected a proposal last week by 70% to force police to automatically impound cars of unlicensed drivers -- an anti-immigrant measure designed to punish undocumented immigrants who can't get drivers licenses -- they followed the trend of communities across the nation, often led by public safety officials themselves, who are refusing to divert scarce public resources for anti-immigrant purposes.

The lure is the supposed promise that privatization will deliver a short-term budget fix.  Yet many privatization efforts, as this Dispatch will highlight, have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and botched services for the public.  That privatization continues to move forward despite such a poor track record reflects pure ideology that the private market delivers the most efficient outcomes, even without demonstrable results.  Some states may also be making the more cynical decision to pursue immediate short-term infusions of capital at the expense of long-term financial cost in pursuit of short-term electoral gains.  In any case, privatization comes at the expense of long-term investments in the community, sustainable budget policy and public accountability.

Local communities are increasingly rejecting punitive anti-immigrant law enforcement policies such as 287g from the previous administration. They are walking away from agreements to have local police serve as federal immigration authorities, rejecting both their budgetary costs and the way they damage relationships and trust between police and the communities they serve.

With deficits mounting and a court order requiring the end of prison over-crowding, the California Assembly has passed a scaled-back version of a Senate prison reform plan that would reduce the state's bloated prison population by 27,000 and save $1 billion. However, the plan falls short of the needed $1.2 billion in cuts mandated by lawmakers' state budget agreement and fails to fully comply with a court order that California reduce its prison population by 43,000 inmates because of overcrowding and unconstitutionally-low levels of prisoner services.  

Whether out of circumstance or an emerging trend, where state authority was at issue, this term the U.S. Supreme Court overwhelmingly deferred to state decision makers-- a significant reveral from last year. 

Minnesota legislators passed a landmark voter registration modernization bill recently that would, absent a veto, have registered or updated the registration of voters automatically when they applied for a driver's license, learner's permit or ID card.  It would also use information in motor vehicle and corrections databases to verify and maintain voter rolls.  This legislation, sponsored by Rep. Steve Simon and Sen. John Marty, would have made Minnesota the first state in the nation to proactively register voters, and made it among the most advanced in maintaining clean, accurate voter rolls.  The bill was designed to build on the state's already first-in-the-nation portability bill, which requires automatic updates to voter registrations based on changes of address.

However, Governor Pawlenty vetoed this historic legislation last week...

A report byThe Sentencing Project released this week shows that the number of African-Americans in state prisons for drug crimes dropped 21.6% from 1999-2005, a reduction of more than 31,000 individuals.

Given the central role of private contractors in delivering public services, this Dispatch continues our series of Privatization Updates (see November's edition). Today we focus on current privatization debates in the education, prison and mental health sectors -- and what states are doing to increase accountability for contractors.

As with our health care system, a generation of conservative control has left a broken and bloated criminal justice system for progressives to mend. Current systems are both ineffective and wildly expensive. The US now incarcerates one out of every one hundred adults.  And newly released numbers from the Pew Center on the States shows that an even greater number - 1 in 45 adults - is on probation or parole.  Adding the two together, 1 in 31 adults in the US is under some form of correctional supervision.  When men (1 in 18) and blacks (1 in 11) are even more stupefying.  Many states have rates significantly higher than the national average. Georgia ranks first in the nation with 1 in 13 adults under correctional supervision, and high ranking states include liberal bastions like Massachusetts (1 in 24).