Press Contact: For all media inquiries, please contact Madison Kaigh, Communications Manager, at mkaigh@TexasCJE.orgor (512) 441-8123, ext. 108.
An [incarcerated individual] is suing the Texas prison system after officials allegedly failed to adequately treat his flesh-eating bacteria infection for a week, letting the wound fester as they refused to take him to the hospital because the unit was too understaffed.
While the criminal justice reform movement gains momentum across the country, Arizona remains on the outside looking in. Even as more conservative states with a tradition of harsh justice reduce prison populations through smart reforms that target the root causes of crime, Arizona persists in the failed policies of mass incarceration, wasting resources to imprison low-level offenders.
Read the rest of this article from the Arizona Capitol Times.
Doug Smith, a senior policy analyst with the nonprofit Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, says lawmakers never delivered on the rehabilitation-focused approach they had promised. Without re-entry planning, ongoing mental health care and other rehabilitative programs, many formerly incarcerated Texans have little chance of reintegrating into society.
“Any criminal justice researcher will tell you that the people who are least likely to [commit the same crime over again] are people who have committed violent crimes,” said Doug Smith, a senior policy analyst at the non-partisan Texas Criminal Justice Coalition who has studied Texas’ reforms.
Read the rest of this article at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
A bill aiming to detach the ombudsman from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice died in 2017. But news from the past year makes advocates hopeful that 2019 will be different.
A lawsuit challenging the cash bail system in Harris County, Texas, is at an unusual crossroads after 14 Republican municipal court judges named as defendants in the suit — all of whom opposed reforms — were voted out of office this month, a move that likely spells big changes for alleged offenders stuck behind bars because they can't pay their way out.
The liberal Texas Criminal Justice Coalition was a major player in the fight, but it was the support of the conservative TPPF that helped make passage possible in a Republican-dominated Legislature.
Last year, the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition reviewed the citizen panel’s recommendations in other cases, including other mental health calls that resulted in cops killing people, and found that police officials mostly ignored them.
"For 19 black women and a socialist to be elected judge in Houston, which is the epicenter of mass incarceration, is not a small deal," said Jay Jenkins, an attorney with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. "The possibility that we could fix some of the issues that the sitting judges have just proved unwilling or unable to fix is on the horizon."
Read the rest of this article - and watch an interview with TCJC's Jay Jenkins - on Vice News.
In Harris County, which is home to Houston and the third-largest county in the United States, Democrats unseated 59 Republican judges—including all 23 district judges, all 13 family court judges, all eight county civil judges and probate judges, and all 15 misdemeanor judges. Of the newly appointed Democrats, an unprecedented 19 are black women, significantly changing the face of a judiciary that had been primarily white.
