/2017

A Mass Incarceration Mystery
Why are black imprisonment rates going down? Four theories.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/12/15/a-mass-incarceration-mystery

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One of the most damning features of the U.S. criminal justice system is its vast racial inequity. Black people in this country are imprisoned at more than 5 times the rate of whites; one in 10 black children has a parent behind bars, compared with about one in 60 white kids, according to the Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality. The crisis has persisted for so long that it has nearly become an accepted norm.So it may come as a surprise to learn that for the last 15 years, racial disparities in the American prison system have actually been on the decline, according to a Marshall Project analysis of yearly reports by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system. . At the same time, the white male rate increased slightly, the BJS numbers indicate.Among women, the trend is even more dramatic. From 2000 to 2015, the black female imprisonment rate dropped by nearly 50 percent; during the same period, the white female rate shot upward by 53 percent. As the nonprofit Sentencing Project has pointed out, the racial disparity between black and white women’s incarceration was once 6 to 1. Now it’s 2 to 1

‘Black Identity Extremists’ and the Dark Side of the FBI | The Marshall Project
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/10/17/black-identity-extremists-and-the-dark-side-of-the-fbi
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Recent political developments have helped put the FBI in a favorable light. The agency and its leadership have been praised for its performance throughout the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Former director James Comey affirmed the agency’s fundamental goodness in a letter to his colleagues after he was relieved of his post President Trump.

“I have said to you before that, in times of turbulence, the American people should see the FBI as a rock of competence, honesty, and independence,” wrote Comey. “It is very hard to leave a group of people who are committed only to doing the right thing.”

While Comey might only have good things to say about the FBI, newly leaked documents suggest he shouldn’t. Despite the agency’s new, upstanding image, it might be back to its Hoover-era dirty tricks—if it ever really departed from them.

Foreign Policy reported recently on the existence of a document that circulated within the FBI’s counterterrorism division. Just nine days before the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, it named a major threat to public safety: not organized white nationalists, but “black identity extremists.”

Puerto Rico Puts Its Prisons in Flood Zones | The Marshall Project
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/09/21/puerto-rico-puts-its-prisons-in-flood-zones

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Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico early Wednesday morning as a category 4 storm. With winds measuring 155 miles per hour, by mid-day local media were reporting that all of Puerto Rico had lost power. The whole island, home to 3.4 million people, is currently under a flash flood warning, and the National Weather Service in San Juan is advising people to move to higher ground.

While it will be difficult for most people to move to safety, it will be harder still for people who are incarcerated in Puerto Rico’s 29 territorial and federal prisons. As you can see from our map, the prisons are clustered around eight complexes across the island, most along the coast and near high-risk flood areas.

During last month’s flooding in Houston following Hurricane Harvey, nearly 6,000 inmates in five Texas prisons were evacuated. The same happened in south and central Florida, where over 7,000 prisoners were moved across the state in anticipation of Hurricane Irma.

Puerto Rico was still recovering from Hurricane Irma, less than two weeks ago, which spared the island the brunt of the fierce weather but did leave mounds of debris and about 63 percent of the island, about 1.5 million power clients, without electricity. Now Hurricane Maria has cut off communication with most government officials and the re

Project Life Inside
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/tag/life-inside

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First-person essays from those who work or live in the criminal justice system. Please send pitches for Life Inside to ehager@themarshallproject.org. We’re looking for 1,000 to 1,400-word nonfiction stories about a vivid, surprising, personal experience you had with the system — whether you’re a lawyer, prisoner, judge, victim, police officer, or otherwise work or live inside the system. Poetry, fiction, essays about experiences that are not directly related to criminal justice, and op-eds will not be accepted. Our honor roll recognizing Kickstarter donors who generously supported

“Prison is a Real-Life Example of the World White Supremacists Want”
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/24/prison-is-a-real-life-example-of-the-world-white-supremacists-wa

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The Marshall Project invited some of its incarcerated contributors to reflect on the fallout from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. These essays were gathered and edited by Eli Hager for this special edition of Life Inside.

In prison, I’m surrounded by racists all day long, and I don’t wish to see that kind of thing happening out in the world I long to return to. Everything in here is about race — and I mean everything. Whites have their side of the chow hall, blacks have their side of the chow hall. Whites use the white barber, blacks use the black barber. It’s the 1950s in here — I mean, we share drinking fountains, but not much else. In other words, prison is a real-life example of the world that white supremacists want to return to. The only difference between prison in 2017 and a segregated 1950s is the fact that whites are often the minorities behind bars.

Nevada Plans to Use Fentanyl in Upcoming Execution
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/30/nevada-plans-to-use-fentanyl-in-upcoming-execution
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Keeping with a recent trend of pharmaceutical industry opposition to the use of their products in executions, the drug manufacturer Pfizer ordered its distributors not to sell midazolam and hydromorphone to prisons. Nevada solicited bids for those drugs from suppliers and received zero offers. Earlier this month, Nevada officials announced a solution in the form of a new drug combination, which numerous experts say has never been used in a U.S. execution. At Dozier’s execution on November 14 — the state’s first in more than a decade — he will be injected with fentanyl (the well-known opioid), diazepam (the sedative better known as Valium), and cisatracurium (a muscle relaxant that causes paralysis).Though the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that some pain during an execution does not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the new combination is sure to revive debates over how executions are carried out.

Killings of Black Men by Whites are Far More Likely to be Ruled “Justifiable”
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/14/killings-of-black-men-by-whites-are-far-more-likely-to-be-ruled-

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When a white person kills a black man in America, the killer often faces no legal consequences. In one in six of these killings, there is no criminal sanction, according to a new Marshall Project examination of 400,000 homicides committed by civilians between 1980 and 2014. That rate is far higher than the one for homicides involving other combinations of races.

How The Marshall Project revealed racial disparities in “justifiable” homicides
▻http://www.storybench.org/marshall-project-revealed-racial-disparities-justifiable-homicides

From 1980 to 2014, roughly three percent of all homicides in America were ruled justified. But a striking disparity persists in killings involving a white person and a black male victim. In these instances, write Anna Flagg and Daniel Lathrop in a recent analysis published by The Marshall Project and The New York Times’s Upshot, killings were ruled justifiable more than eight times as often as others.

We caught up with Flagg, an interactive reporter at The Marshall Project, to talk about the methodology behind the analysis and explore its possible impact on the criminal justice system in America.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. It has been crossposted on Northeastern School of Journalism’s site The Docket, too.

You have degrees in math and human/computer interaction. Have you always intended on working in journalism?

Guess Who’s Tracking Your Prescription Drugs? | The Marshall Project
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/02/guess-whos-tracking-your-prescription-drugs
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As drug overdose deaths continue their record climb, Missouri last month became the 50th state to launch a prescription drug monitoring program, or PDMP. These state-run databases, which track prescriptions of certain potentially addictive or dangerous medications, are widely regarded as an essential tool to stem the opioid epidemic. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens last month announced he was creating one in what had been the lone holdout state; legislative efforts to establish a program there had repeatedly failed because of lawmakers’ concerns about privacy.

Their concerns were not unfounded.

Federal courts in Utah and Oregon recently ruled that the Drug Enforcement Administration, in its effort to investigate suspected drug abusers or pill mills, can access information in those states’ PDMPs without a warrant, even over the states’ objections. And last month in California, the state supreme court ruled that the state medical board could view hundreds of patients’ prescription drug records in the course of its investigation of a physician accused of misconduct. “Physicians and patients have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the highly regulated prescription drug industry,” District Judge David Nuffer wrote in the Utah case.

The New Tool That Could Revolutionize How We Measure Justice
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/05/23/the-new-tool-that-could-revolutionize-how-we-measure-justice

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“The enormity of the country’s criminal justice system — 15,000 state and local courts, 18,000 local law enforcement agencies, more than two million prisoners — looks even more daunting when you consider how little we know about what is actually going on in there. Want to know who we prosecute and why? Good luck. Curious about how many people are charged with misdemeanors each year? Can’t tell you. How about how many people reoffend after prison? We don’t really know that, either. In an age when everything is measured — when data determines the television we watch, the clothes we buy and the posts we see on Facebook — the justice system is a disturbing exception. Agencies exist in silos, and their data stays with them. Instead, we make policy based on anecdote, heavily filtered through a political lens. This week the nonprofit Measures for Justice is launching an online tool meant to shine a high beam into these dark corners.It is gathering numbers from key criminal justice players — prosecutors offices, public defenders, courts, probation departments — in each of America’s more than 3,000 counties. Staffers clean the data, assemble it in an apples-to-apples format, use it to answer a standard set of basic questions, and make the results free and easy to access and understand.”