As national imprisonment rates continue to fall, so too does crime, according to data collected by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Between 2010 and 2015, the national imprisonment rate declined 8.4 percent while property and violent crime rates fell a combined 14.6 percent. During this time period, 31 states saw reductions in both crime and imprisonment. This includes California, which experienced a sharp 25.2 percent reduction in imprisonment rates along with a 1.1 percent reduction in property...

From her home in Helsinki, Maria Jain began a correspondence with a death row inmate in the US. Now, they've co-created an art exhibit that explores the need for justice reform, the potential for personal transformation, and the intricacies of healing. We talk about our lives growing up. The era was the same, the 80’s and the 90’s; the places were very different. I grew up in Finland; he grew up in Texas. I share about my difficult teenage years when I turned to self-harming. I talk about my...

Gun violence is often described as an epidemic or a public health concern, due to its alarmingly high levels in certain populations in the United States. It most often occurs within socially and economically disadvantaged minority urban communities, where rates of gun violence far exceed the national average. A new Yale study has established a model to predict how “contagious” the epidemic really is. In a study published online on Jan. 3 in the Journal of the American Medical Association,...

The private prison industry may end up being one of the winners under the incoming Trump administration, though it’s not clear how or when the new administration will act. Stocks of for-profit prison operators tumbled after the U.S. Department of Justice announced in August that it would no longer house federal inmates in private lockups. But they rebounded after the Electoral College upset in November by Donald Trump, who campaigned on pledges to crack down on crime and step up deportations...

Opened in October, the center, managed by grant sub-recipient Second Chance, started enrolling participants, with the goal of offering trauma-informed reentry services to 400 women pre-release and to 100 of those 400 post-release. Enrollment of voluntary participants is based on three criteria. The individual must: be a resident of the facility be within 180 days of release have not been convicted of a sexual offense other than prostitution Though the goals are similar for both men and women...

In their laudable effort to reverse mass incarceration, California policymakers have been too slow to provide felons with necessary care and treatment upon their release. That’s among the conclusions to be gleaned from an important reporting project by newspapers in Palm Springs, Ventura, Salinas and Redding analyzing Proposition 47, the 2014 initiative that cut penalties for drug possession and property theft, and reduced many crimes to misdemeanors. “Thousands of addicts and mentally ill...

The Chadwick Center for Children & Families at Rady Children's Hospital San Diego has just released a set of trauma-informed guidelines with concrete strategies for approaching secondary traumatic stress (STS). While these guidelines were created for intended use within child welfare systems, they may be easily adapted into other child-and family-serving organizations. These guidelines were created as part of the Chadwick Trauma-Informed Systems Dissemination and Implementation Project...

It's been years in the making, but finally, a plan to help scores of nonviolent, mentally ill people avoid jail and get treatment will take shape in the coming year, Dallas County leaders said Monday. The changes, to be primarily funded with a $7 million private grant, aims to bring fewer mentally ill people to the jail, release more of them while they await trial and connect them with services once they're freed so they don't return. The goal: to facilitate treatment for mentally ill people...

Despite the dramatic impact of erasing felonies, some former felons whose cases were retroactively resentenced will be slow to seize their newfound opportunities because they don’t know their conviction has changed. In at least a few California counties, felonies were downgraded in bulk without any involvement from the defendants. In these counties, public defenders rushed to file as much Prop 47 paperwork as possible, deciding there was no time to track down former clients before...

It’s no wonder criminal-justice reformers woke up from Election Day 2016 with a sense of existential gloom. Given candidate Donald J. Trump’s law-and-order bluster, his dystopian portrayal of rising crime and an ostensible war on the police, and a posse of advisers who think the main problem with incarceration is that we don’t do enough of it, the idea that justice reformers have anything to look forward to is at best counterintuitive. It is reasonable to expect that President Trump and his...

As it stands today, criminal justice in the U.S. exists inside an architecture of isolation: those within the system are shuffled between courthouses and prisons, which are separated from society by thick walls and high fences. “Our dominant justice system is framed around three questions: What law was broken, who did it, and what do they deserve—with the deserving part being about punishment,” says Barbara Toews, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington...

Nationwide, a movement is growing to address what civil rights advocates have called a “wealth-based detention scheme”—the traditional bail system, which often holds arrestees who can’t scrape together the funds to post bail, even for minor offenses. About 450,000 Americans are held in jails each day because of inability to pay, according to the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and Equal Justice Under Law, a Washington-based civil rights group. Eric Holder, the former attorney...