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.
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As a reader, I came to Senior Reporter Iris Dimmick’s Q&A with the nine candidates who want to be mayor of San Antonio with skepticism. Readers of the interviews published Saturday will recognize only a few of the candidates’ names, at best, so there was little reason to expect coherent responses or actionable ideas.
A vote on changes to the San Antonio Independent School District’s Student Code of Conduct was tabled Monday by its board after a coalition of social justice advocacy groups said it didn’t adequately address the school-to-prison pipeline.
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Allison Franklin still thinks about the transgender women who helped her during her 10 years as a prostitute. In those years in and out of jail, Franklin — now an LGBTQ advocate — and the people she was with were just trying to survive. Along with prostitution, some sold drugs or tried to recruit others to join them. It’s a narrative all too familiar for those members of the LGBTQ community caught in a spiral after incarceration, ending up there after committing crimes just to stay alive or find a place to sleep.
A coalition of advocates and lawyers on Friday morning asked Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg to develop a list of police deemed too untrustworthy to rely on in court — and to release the names publicly to rebuild community trust on the heels of a botched narcotics raid that left a Houston couple dead earlier this year.
The Harris County District Attorney's Office is again asking county commissioners for more prosecutors, this time to handle fallout from the failed Pecan Park drug raid that left two homeowners dead and prompted an investigation into potential police misconduct.
House Bill 37, which goes into effect Sept. 1, criminalizes mail theft, with the penalty ranging from a class A misdemeanor to third-degree felony, depending on the number of addresses mail is taken from.
The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition reviewed all arrests in Harris County, which includes Houston, over the course of 16 weeks. It found that African Americans accounted for nearly half of all drivers arrested on a single, “non-jailable” motor vehicle offense.
Following the launch of a first-of-its-kind criminal justice data dashboard in Harris County late last year, the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition is proud to announce that its Dallas County dashboard is now live.
Gerald Goines, who as a Houston narcotics cop led a botched deadly drug raid in January, heavily targeted Black people for low-level drug sale charges in majority black neighborhoods, according to arrest data obtained by The Appeal.
