Philly Uses High-Tech Solution to Keep Kids in Touch With Incarcerated Moms

Job training is an invaluable resource to prisoners who may not have any other resources for such a thing. A new job center, established with a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, aims to assist 1,000 Milwaukee County offenders over two years.

Juveniles who were placed on sex offender registries, some for crimes they committed before they were even teens, face a slew of life changing consequences that follows them for the rest of their life: “depression, addiction, suicidal thoughts, and other signs of post-traumatic stress.” Many will struggle to find a job, others will get targeted and harassed, some, overwhelmed by the pressure, have ended their life. Parents, legal scholars, and activists are pushing back against the notion that children, under the law, should be tried as mini adults.

For many low-income people who are arrested, coming up with even a small amount of bail money is nearly impossible, leaving them to languish for months before their cases are ever adjudicated. That means lost jobs and housing and sometimes custody of their kids. In Philadelphia, a number of groups have banded together and raised funds to bail out inmates, following examples in other cities, as a temporary measure until policymakers can enact long-term bail reform.

Participatory defense, is a model that integrates the family into the legal defense of someone being prosecuted for a crime. Loved ones can bring in evidence like photos and records that speak to the character of the accused person. In Philadelphia, the model is being implemented and already helped reduce someone’s bail from $500,000 to $0. Nationally, the method has been proven to be highly effective. “Over 10 years, participatory defense hubs have popped up in 20 other cities and reduced people’s sentences by 4,218 years.”

In Texas, legislators and advocates are working to address mental health concerns for individuals entering or in the criminal justice system. For those already in jail, telepsychiatry is being offered to help rehabilitate inmates. For those just entering the system, a mental health court in Travis County has been developed to connect people with needed mental health services so that they can stand trial and even have their cases dismissed.

New Jersey’s responses to police misconduct offer stark lessons in how certain failures can allow troubled officers to hop from job to job undetected. The state lacks a central database of police misconduct and remains one of only five states that cannot revoke an officer’s credentials because of performance. In one case, an officer with serial failures at nine departments, involving 16 incidents in which people he arrested got injured, the red flags that should have been raised never were, allowing him to mistreat residents of majority-Black neighborhoods despite a record indicating racism and brutality.

San Quentin Prison's media created by the men incarcerated there have gone beyond rehabilitation of individuals to a broader mission of promoting criminal justice policy reform by reframing the narrative about those who have committed crimes and the system's inequities. Through San Quentin News, the podcast Ear Hustle, and a series of dialogues between incarcerated men and criminal justice officials, their stories have shed new light on prison life and those held in prison, and formed a cadre of journalists who gained experience behind bars and have become prominent advocates on the outside.

Comparing Norway's and the United States' approaches to prisons and policing puts the lie to the American notion that being tough and unrelentingly punitive effectively addresses crime. In Norway, even people imprisoned for violent crimes, in maximum-security prisons, are treated with respect and kindness, with privileges that would be unthinkable in most American prisons. The results are telling: Norway's recidivism rate, the lowest in the world, is less than one-third of the U.S. rate. While prison costs are far higher per capita, the ultimate costs in lower crime make the Norwegian approach affordable.

When the pandemic forced jails and prisons to ban educational classes and cut off visits between outsiders and their loved ones behind bars, some jailers opened their facilities to remote-learning and -visiting tools. The result is a boom in the use of video conferencing for literacy classes, vocational training, family visits, and even to enable incarcerated people to attend family funerals. Some advocates for the incarcerated worry that in-person interactions could permanently be replaced by video, even after the risk of viral infection has eased.

To improve voter access for people in jail, the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office hired an election worker to comb through county records and identify incarcerated people who are registered to vote. The staffer then went from pod to pod in the jail to deliver absentee ballot request forms and give others an opportunity to register. In all, 70 people were able to request their absentee ballots.