/2018

How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever | The Marshall Project
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/12/03/how-incarcerated-parents-are-losing-their-children-forever?ref=h

Hurricane Floyd struck eastern North Carolina in 1999, flooding her trailer home and destroying her children’s pageant trophies and baby pictures. No stranger to money-making scams, Adams was convicted of filing a fraudulent disaster-relief claim with FEMA for a property she did not own. She also passed dozens of worthless checks to get by.

Adams served two year-long prison stints for these “blue-collar white-collar crimes,” as she calls them. Halfway through her second sentence, with her children — three toddlers and a 14-year-old — temporarily under county supervision, Adams said she got a phone call from a family court attorney. Her parental rights, he informed her, were being irrevocably terminated.

Before going to prison, Adams had sometimes drifted from one boyfriend to another, leaving her kids with a babysitter, and she didn’t always have enough food in the house. But she was not charged with any kind of child abuse, neglect or endangerment. Still, at a hearing that took place 300 miles from the prison, which she couldn’t attend because officials wouldn’t transport her there, she lost her children. Adams’s oldest daughter went to live with her father, and her other three kids were put up for adoption. She was banned from seeing them again.

#USA #prison #enfants #droits_de_l_homme

Subway Policing in New York City Still Has A Race Problem.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/09/12/subway-policing-in-new-york-city-still-has-a-race-problem
▻https://external.fham1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQDwYIwTyBduVL7Q&w=540&h=282&url=https%

or New York City police, turnstile jumping has long been much more than a class A misdemeanor. The strict policing of people evading the fare on public transit was justified as an all-purpose solution to the rampant crime that plagued the city’s subways in the 1980s. It became one of the first examples for the New York Police Department that cracking down on minor offenses—the controversial “broken windows” theory of policing—might restore order to the city.

This story was produced in partnership with Gothamist.
But New York might be changing its mind about turnstile jumping. With broken windows strategies increasingly discredited by many criminologists, a more lenient approach to this minor offense has taken root in New York’s courts, and perhaps from there found its way onto subway platforms across the city. Last year, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced that his office would stop prosecuting most cases of fare evasion, which includes riding public transit without paying the fare through any number of means: jumping over or under a subway turnstile, boarding a bus through the back door or failing to pay for a cab. Public defenders across the city observe that the vast majority of fare evasion cases come from the subways. Since Vance’s announcement, such arrests dropped from a high of 25,000 in 2016 and are now on track to be fewer than 10,000 this year. The NYPD has said that the majority of turnstile jumpers are issued civil summonses, not arrested. Some city leaders wonder though—should turnstile jumping be a crime at all?

Medium-Security Monastery: McCarrick House Arrest Skirts
Civil Justice System.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/08/14/medium-security-monastery-mccarrick-house-arrest-skirts-civil-ju

https://www.americamagazine.org/sites/default/files/main_image/AP18206006022231.jpg

The pope accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals, barred him from public ministry, and ordered him “to remain in a house yet to be indicated to him, for a life of prayer and penance,” pending a canonical trial.

VIDEO.

Inside Family Detention, Trump’s Big Solution.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/06/22/inside-family-detention-trump-s-big-solution

▻https://d63kb4t2ifcex.cloudfront.net/famdetentionhed20180621/assets/icevideo.e7472e56.mp4

At first glance, it resembles a doctor’s office, or perhaps a rec center. Security footage depicts sterile gray hallways leading to common areas with office couches and rainbow-colored, child-sized chairs. At the door to an outdoor field, there are tricycles and assorted balls, and in a small chapel with wooden benches, a detainee sweeps the floor. Correctional officers, referred to as “residential counselors,” sport khakis and blue polo shirts. But the Berks Family Residential Center, located about 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia, is also a place where immigrant parents and children are held for indefinite periods of time without adequate healthcare, according to multiple complaints and lawsuits. In one 2016 case, a guard there was convicted of “institutional” sexual assault; his victim was a 19-year-old asylum seeker from Honduras who had been detained with her three-year-old son for 7 months. It is facilities like Berks — operating in a gray area between federal prison and childcare provider — that may begin to sprout up across the country following President Trump’s announcement on Wednesday that he will end his administration’s practice of forcibly separating migrant parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border.“We are going to keep the families together,” Trump said, at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office for his executive order.

Rewriting the Story of Civil Rights.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/04/30/rewriting-the-story-of-civil-rights

What does it mean to “change a narrative?” Bryan Stevenson has been insisting on the importance of changing the narrative on criminal justice since he published his best-selling book, “Just Mercy”, in 2014. He’s a death penalty lawyer who likes to say, “We have a system of justice that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.” The notion that locking up more bad guys makes us safer is hard to shake. Law-and-order rhetoric has a new friend in the White House, with an attorney general who wants to double down on harsh sentences. And Stevenson, with the opening of a new museum and lynching memorial that I attended in Montgomery, Alabama, last week, has chosen a more revolutionary approach to fixing criminal justice than the skilful lawyering for which he’s well known. He is rewriting the history of the civil rights movement.To those who follow criminal justice, Stevenson’s new narrative may not sound so new. Lawyer Michelle Alexander argued in her influential 2010 book, “The New Jim Crow”, that white supremacy was never fully vanquished, as slavery gave rise to the horrors of the Jim Crow south. Virulent racism survived the civil rights movement, too, as Jim Crow morphed into a criminal justice system that continues to lock up African-Americans disproportionately. Millions have read Alexander’s book, or seen the video version of it in Ava Duvernay’s 2016 documentary, “13th”.Stevenson is also trying to spread this narrative beyond the criminal justice cognoscenti. His TED talk has been viewed nearly 5 million times, and he has indefatigably toured college campuses and corporate headquarters in recent years, making the case for mercy. Stevenson, who sits on the advisory board of The Marshall Project, once told me that he turns down the majority of the media requests that come his way. Instead, delivering a stump speech that verges on sermon, he seems to be trying to change America one auditorium at a time.

Framed for Murder By His Own DNA
We leave traces of our genetic material everywhere, even on things we’ve never touched. That got Lukis Anderson charged with a brutal crime he didn’t commit.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/04/19/framed-for-murder-by-his-own-dna

▻https://d1n0c1ufntxbvh.cloudfront.net/photo/08e9c6e6/31752/1140x

Back in the 1980s, when DNA forensic analysis was still in its infancy, crime labs needed a speck of bodily fluid—usually blood, semen, or spit—to generate a genetic profile.That changed in 1997, when Australian forensic scientist Roland van Oorschot stunned the criminal justice world with a nine-paragraph paper titled “DNA Fingerprints from Fingerprints.” It revealed that DNA could be detected not just from bodily fluids but from traces left by a touch. Investigators across the globe began scouring crime scenes for anything—a doorknob, a countertop, a knife handle—that a perpetrator may have tainted with incriminating “touch” DNA.But van Oorschot’s paper also contained a vital observation: Some people’s DNA appeared on things that they had never touched.In the years since, van Oorschot’s lab has been one of the few to investigate this phenomenon, dubbed “secondary transfer.” What they have learned is that, once it’s out in the world, DNA doesn’t always stay put.
Objects bearing DNA of a participant who never touched them
Objects bearing foreign DNA that didn’t match any participants

THE MYTH OF THE CRIMINAL IMMIGRANT.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/03/30/the-myth-of-the-criminal-immigrant
▻https://external-frx5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQDa5UYUCuoFEXYN&w=476&h=249&url=https%3A

According to data from the study, a large majority of the areas have many more immigrants today than they did in 1980 and fewer violent crimes. The Marshall Project extended the study’s data up to 2016, showing that crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board.

In 136 metro areas, almost 70 percent of those studied, the immigrant population increased between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed stable or fell. The number of areas where crime and immigration both increased was much lower — 54 areas, slightly more than a quarter of the total. The 10 places with the largest increases in immigrants all had lower levels of crime in 2016 than in 1980.

And yet the argument that immigrants bring crime into America has driven many of the policies enacted or proposed by the administration so far: restrictions to entry, travel and visas; heightened border enforcement; plans for a wall along the border with Mexico. This month, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against California in response to the state’s refusal to allow local police to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants charged with crimes. On Tuesday, California’s Orange County signed on in support of that suit. But while the immigrant population in the county has more than doubled since 1980, overall violent crime has decreased by more than 50 percent.

Policing a City in Crisis.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/03/05/policing-a-city-in-crisis
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYGyUsmmDbg

How does a police department respond to a city in crisis? In 2014, Flint, Michigan switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River in a bid to save money, but toxic levels of lead leached into the city’s tap water. A year later, the city elected a new mayor who in turn hired a new police chief. Tim Johnson arrived at the job facing a funding and personnel shortage in a city that is the ninth most violent in America. Under these conditions, Jessica Dimmock, Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper began filming the city’s police department for “Flint Town,” a new eight-episode series on Netflix. The show provides a rare insight into a how lack of resources puts a further strain on the already tense relationship between the police department and the community it serves.Over 20 months, Canepari, Cooper and Dimmock documented the struggles of the department and its officers against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election and a series of police-involved shootings that rocked the country.

Guantánamo, Forever.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/02/28/guantanamo-forever
▻https://d1n0c1ufntxbvh.cloudfront.net/photo/72e4d60b/30802/1200x

After nearly a decade in detention, Haroon Gul believed he had a chance at freedom. Then came President Trump.

Nouveau projet multimedia The Marshall project.
A fascinating dive into the history of “Cops” and how it shapes/reflects perspectives on policing.
Bad Boys- How “Cops” became the most polarizing reality TV show in America.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/01/22/bad-boys

https://longreadsblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/cops-still-2.jpg?w=1200

To Stephen Chao, the former Fox executive who helped launch the show, its unvarnished simplicity remains one of the most radical things he’s ever seen on television. To Steve Dye, the police chief of the Grand Prairie Police Department in Texas, where the show was recently filmed, “Cops” is a powerful marketing and recruitment tool amid historically challenging times for law enforcement.

“Cops,” of course, is no longer the Fox behemoth it was in the ’90s, when it topped more than 8 million viewers an episode and was often the most watched reality show. Robinson proudly attributes this to Color of Change: In May 2013, a few months after the group launched a campaign to oust “Cops" from Fox, the show moved to Spike. There, it flourished, becoming one of the channel’s most watched shows with an average of 1.1 million viewers per episode last year. This season featured its 1,000th episode, while a Hollywood adaptation, possibly directed by Ruben Fleischer, of “Zombieland” and “Gangster Squad,” is expected to be released this year.

And yet, “Cops” almost never happened. This is the story of how it did—and the polarizing, influential thing it became.

Trump Justice, Year One: The Demolition Derby.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/01/17/trump-justice-year-one-the-demolition-derby
▻https://d1n0c1ufntxbvh.cloudfront.net/photo/975e6b71/29325/2000x

On criminal justice, Donald J. Trump’s predecessor was a late-blooming activist. By the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, his administration had exhorted prosecutors to stop measuring success by the number of defendants sent away for the maximum, taken a hands-off approach to states legalizing marijuana and urged local courts not to punish the poor with confiscatory fines and fees. His Justice Department intervened in cities where communities had lost trust in their police. After a few years when he had earned the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief,” Obama pivoted to refocus immigration authorities — in effect, a parallel criminal justice system — on migrants considered dangerous, and created safeguards for those brought here as children. He visited a prison, endorsed congressional reform of mandatory minimum sentences and spoke empathetically of the Black Lives Matter movement. He nominated judges regarded as progressives.In less than a year, President Trump demolished Obama’s legacy.