Listen to Daniel Macallair, Executive Director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, speak on the Juvenile Mental Health Outlook on KCBS View Full Clip
Federal Courts to the Rescue: Fixing California’s Broken Prison System BeyondChron, August 20, 2009
Blog Aug 15, 2009
Treating kids under 12 as adults
A new study released by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin illustrates once again the punitiveness that remains an essential feature of American society. The title of the study is “From Time Out to Hard Time: Young Children in the Adult Criminal Justice System.” To see the complete study go to the following web site: http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/news/images/file/From%20Time%20Out%20to%20Hard%20Time-revised%20final.pdf . The study began when the…
Blog Aug 10, 2009
Juvenile Mental Health Outlook
Listen to Daniel Macallair, Executive Director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, speak on the Juvenile Mental Health Outlook on KCBS View Full Clip
Blog Aug 6, 2009
San Francisco: The “Selma” of Drug Policing
In any given year over the last two decades, San Francisco Police Department arrests for simple possession of marijuana have varied by up to 300% over other years. After a 1999 peak (946 arrests), numbers plunged to 357 in 2007, then nearly doubled to 609 in 2008. Why? Who knows? Nobody seriously contends pot smoking varies that radically over time, if the streets’ sweet haze densities are any indicator. What has changed, and radically, is who’s getting arrested. In the peak year of 1999,…
Blog Jul 14, 2009
New California Crime Stats: The Good-Bad News
Just released Criminal Justice Statistics Center 2008 crime numbers and Center for Health Statistics 2007 death figures deal a double whammy to three decades of California’s criminal justice failure. But first, the ironies. The 2008 figures show California’s crime index (key offenses reported to police) stands at its lowest level since 1963, including the lowest rates of homicide in 40 years. Among youth, 2008 arrest rates continue the trend of the last seven years, with felony rates at their…
Blog Jun 23, 2009
Now the hard part of prison reform…
Last month, CJCJ released a detailed study documenting the feasibility, benefits, and cost savings of closing California’s juvenile prison system and transferring its dwindling roster of inmates to county detention facilities. The main obstacle now is to convince counties and traditionalists that the state will provide sufficient funding, which would be a fraction of the annual $250,000 per ward, $400 million total cost of state lockup. Juveniles are the easy part of deincarceration reform,…
Jun 22, 2009
School safety programs that work
School safety programs that work Examiner.com, June 15, 2009
Jun 22, 2009
Save the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office
Save the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office BeyondChron, June 22, 2009
Blog Jun 22, 2009
Save the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office
Few events better reflect the priorities of elected officials more vividly than a budget crisis. It is during a budget crisis that policy-makers are forced to choose between the interests of powerful or popular constituencies and the needs of the less powerful and most vulnerable citizens. Presently, this drama is being played out in San Francisco where social and legal services to the poor are being slashed while Police and Fire Department budgets are being protected. This Faustian bargain…
Jun 22, 2009
Daniel Macallair writes on the question of budget cuts for the SF Public Defender’s office
Though many wish to see the public defender’s budget cut due to the current economic conditions, Daniel Macallair explains how this would be detrimental to the city in an article published on BeyondChron .
Blog Jun 11, 2009
Prison Industry
I’m sure not too many people noticed but a brief news report from a newspaper in Chattanooga, Tennessee called attention once again to the perils of the privatization of prisons. This story involves the settling of a lawsuit filed against Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the leading private prison company in the world. (Here’s the story , which has a link to the actual lawsuit that you can download). Although the case centered around one prison in Hamilton County, it was a national…