Police departments in the U.S. are under scrutiny like never before. Calls for change are the only constant. So how does a police chief lead a department in this climate? And what’s most important as we look forward, two years after Ferguson?
Read MoreWhat would innovation in probation look like? For years, it’s meant reporting to your agent, obeying conditions set by the court, drug testing – and eventually, you screw up and go back to jail. The only constants were huge caseloads and high failure rates.
Wayne McKenzie, General Counsel to the New York City Department of Probation, says change is here in the form of Neighborhood Opportunity Networks and their growing cohort of city partnerships.
New thinking, borrowed from progressive policing and social justice programs, has made probation a genuine launching pad for a second chance and public safety.
Read MoreDNA exonerations have proven that some people confess to serious crimes they didn’t commit, even without physical abuse or mental illness. Why would anyone do this? Do police cause this, intentionally or not, because of the questioning techniques they use? And what can we do to make sure this doesn’t occur?
Read MoreSince the mid 1980s, mandatory minimum drug sentences have served as the driving force behind the explosion in the federal prison population, and also the vast racial disproportionality in that population.
Read MoreThe Serial podcast, and its host Sarah Koenig, pulled off two amazing feats. Serial broke podcasting open: it was the first podcast to see 5 million downloads and now has well over 80 million. But it also pointed the lens of a full, in-depth journalistic examination on just one murder case.
Read MorePolice departments in the U.S. are under scrutiny like never before. Calls for change are the only constant. So how does a police chief lead a department in this climate? And what’s most important as we look forward, two years after Ferguson?
Read MoreWe see it over and over: police officers confront a person in the throes of mental illness. Some of these people may be dangerous; most are not violent, but they are confused, disturbed, and not acting rationally. Police officers are trained for a different job: detecting and preventing crime and disorder, and too often, things go terribly wrong, resulting in violence and even the death of a person with a mental illness.
Read MoreThe prosecutor sits in a powerful position in the American criminal justice system, deciding who to charge and with what, and wielding significant discretion. Some prosecutors use this power to focus narrowly on crime but George Gascon, District Attorney in San Francisco, CA, uses his office to attempt to better the system, to increase public safety, and to make his city a stronger community.
Read MoreThe U.S. is the land of due process and constitutional rights. So how do police get the right to seize the property of citizens without criminal convictions, often without even criminal charges? The answer is civil asset forfeiture: an old tool designed to take away the ill-gotten gains of big-time criminals, but it’s morphed into a way for police departments to seize money and property from regular people and keep it to fund their own operations.
Read MoreIn our state legal systems, elected county prosecutors decide who gets tried and on what charges. With this great power, are there any limits? With controversy surrounding the investigation of police misconduct in so many cities, should local prosecutors be the ones deciding whether to charge police officers?
Read MoreTo get released before trial, most American courts require defendants to post bail money. For people too poor to raise even the lowest amounts, this means staying in jail while waiting for trial to begin. Regardless of guilt, those with means can walk free to prepare from afar. Staying in jail awaiting trial damages both lives and legal cases: people in custody lose jobs, housing, and property, and statistics show that they end up with longer sentences if they’re found guilty. And all of this costs taxpayers billions. But there's a better way.
Read MorePimps and sex traffickers have long been part of the dark side of the economy, but they now use the internet for their ugly business. And some of this involves trafficking underage girls for sex. Our guest has pioneered an approach to meeting this challenge with a distinctively 21st-century solution: using algorithmic analysis on big data to identify and catch sex traffickers who operate online.
Read MoreThe tattered system for supplying criminal defense services to the poor is a shambles. More than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that persons charged with crimes must be provided with a defense lawyer if they are too poor to afford one, that promise has been broken. In countless places around the U.S., governments simply do not provide the resources for poor people charged with crimes to have a real defense. The result: defense lawyers with impossible caseloads struggling to meet the constitutional minimum standards for defense. It’s a national scandal, and yet year after year, state and local governments do too little – or nothing – to fix it.
Read MoreIn the second part of our look at what things might look at after the War on Drugs, we turn to Portugal. This country, a member of the European Union, decriminalized the possession of all drugs in amounts sufficient for personal use. You read that right: Portugal decriminalized all drugs – heroin, cocaine, you name it – and turned completely toward a public health outlook, and away from a law enforcement model.
Read MoreMore than four decades after President Richard Nixon first declared the War on Drugs, the U.S. is at a crossroads. We can’t arrest and jail our way out of the problem, and a small but growing number of jurisdictions are decriminalizing cannabis. So what is the next step?
Read MoreWith every shooting incident, study, and official statement, one demand always appears: better training for police. It’s easy to say and a no brainer to support, but what does that actually mean?
Read MoreBig Data has come to policing. Departments nationwide with lots of data and robust analysis capability say they can predict where crime may occur, and maybe even who will be involved as perpetrator or victim. Does this help police fight crime? And if it does, what are the downsides for citizens and civil liberties?
Read MoreWalt Pavlo had a good job, a family, a nice home. He never planned on going to prison. Now that he's out, he has a new job: counseling others who are about to enter the system.
Read MoreIn each of 93 federal districts in America, the United States Attorney is the chief federal prosecutor and law enforcement officer. The U.S. Attorney has immense responsibilities and great power, deciding what cases to pursue, who to charge, and what priorities to set. At least as important, the U.S. Attorney decides who not to charge and when to drop cases for lack of evidence. The job isn’t just to get convictions; it’s to do justice.
David Hickton is the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Read MoreWith hundreds of exonerations of the wrongfully convicted, it’s easy to think that the law and lawyers making use of DNA have made all the difference. But investigative journalists have made huge contributions: exposing shoddy forensics, showing the public how eyewitness testimony goes wrong and how false confessions get made, and confronting police wrongdoing and lack of accountability. Without the untiring efforts of reporters, much of the injustice in the criminal system would stay hidden.
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