This is good news.
Yesterday "the Supreme Court declined to reinstate three key voting restrictions that had been appealed by North Carolina—the state’s voter-ID law, cutbacks to early voting and elimination of preregistration for 16- and-17-year-olds."
"Nearly two centuries after Georgetown University profited from the sale of 272 slaves, it will embark on a series of steps to atone for the past, including awarding preferential status in the admissions process to descendants of the enslaved, officials said on Wednesday...
"In addition, two campus buildings will be renamed — one for an enslaved African-American man and the other for an African-American educator who belonged to a Catholic religious order."
"What we’ve done is just so far beyond the number of people we’ve stuffed into prisons. We actually took generations of people, mostly low-income communities of color, and completely stripped hope and opportunities for basic economic stability and dignity. And we called it public safety."
"Federal investigators found that many students enrolled in the program were confined to classrooms in basements or separate wings of the same school buildings as students without disabilities but had little opportunity to interact with them. One student reported feeling 'like an outcast' in the program to Justice Department investigators. A parent called the GNETS program 'a warehouse for kids the school system doesn't want or know how to deal with.'"
Good news!
"If they cannot pay fees, impoverished offenders may, like Dequan, spend extra months and years on probation. In some cases, they may even be incarcerated longer because they cannot pay the daily fee for a GPS ankle bracelet. One 13-year-old in Arkansas who could not pay several hundred dollars in fines for truancy, the report found, spent three months in detention instead.
"In another practice that deepens inequities, about 20 states charge fees to have juvenile records expunged or sealed; in South Carolina, for example, juvenile offenders must pay more than $300."
We just filed a complaint in Florida for subjecting black students and students with disabilities to disproportionate arrests and restraints such as pepper spray for common misbehavior.
“Pinellas County Schools delegates student discipline to law enforcement when it comes to marginalized students,” said Amir Whitaker, SPLC attorney. “The police practices endanger the lives and futures of students by subjecting them to excessive force and saddling them with criminal records for adolescent misbehavior. We’re urging the federal government to take action to protect students.”
This is an incredible story that's ongoing. Must read.
Led by the anti-Muslim ACT! For America, a small town in Idaho has been turned upside down by hateful lies and virulently anti-immigrant activism that has shocked the local community.
"The problem is growing as the American prison population gets grayer. By 2012, there were almost 125,000 inmates age 55 and older out of a total population of 2.3 million. Even as the overall prison population continues to decrease, it is estimated that by 2030, there will be more than 400,000 over 55s — a staggering increase from 1981, when there were only 8,853.
"The numbers are rising despite recognition that continuing to lock up older prisoners not only does nothing to reduce crime, but is also expensive and inhumane. More and more aging people are becoming seriously ill and dying in prison. Prisons are not equipped to be nursing homes."
This is good news. We need more commutations, more policy changes, less incarceration. Too many in prison for far too long.
"In Missouri, [the gutting of the Voting Rights Act] resulted in renewed efforts to pass a voter ID law so restrictive that in 2006 the state’s supreme court found it violated the state constitution — which, unlike the U.S. Constitution, includes an affirmative right to vote. But instead of shelving the bill as unconstitutional, legislators moved to change the constitution itself, making Missouri the only state in the country that’s attempting to rewrite its supreme law in order to restrict access to the polls.
"On November 8, Missourians will head to the polls to elect the president and a host of statewide officials in a deeply divided state. But this time, they will also be asked — in language that some have described as confusing — whether they want to amend their constitution to open the door to stricter voting laws."
This must be emphasized in police reform efforts.
"Though past federal investigations have addressed the problem, the Baltimore report went a step further: It was the first time the Justice Department has explicitly found that a police department's policies violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. The finding is intended to chart a path to what federal officials hope will be far-reaching improvements, including better training for dispatchers and officers, diversion of more people to treatment rather than jail and stronger relationships with mental health specialists."
More great news from the federal government announced today. Immigrant detention centers are among the most overlooked in our system of mass incarceration.
Removing private prisons from the picture is welcome news.
"That the money bail system can potentially transform a 'low-risk' American arrested for a misdemeanor into a repeat offender simply because they can’t pay bail runs counterintuitive to every impulse designed to abate the flood of taxpayers into the prison-industrial complex. While the recidivism rate for local jails is nowhere near as high as state and federal prisons (67.8 percent, according to the National Institute of Justice), it still creates a carceral system where offenses perpetuate offenses, leading to a permanent underclass of people forever bound to the criminal justice system simply because of their inability to pay."
The guest worker program is flawed.
"If a US business uses a recruiter abroad to hire guest workers, it can skirt anti-discrimination laws with impunity." —SPLC Senior Supervising Attorney Dan Werner
Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of Emmett Till's death. His murder inspired many to move to action. Next month, his casket will be on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and that''s important.
"What this museum is going to do is make sure that America remembers that, at one point — and unfortunately some of that still goes on — we killed our children." —Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Deputy Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Prison gerrymandering means prisoners in the US census where they are imprisoned rather than where they lived before incarceration.
"This practice transfers the voting power of millions of mostly urban black and brown people to overwhelmingly white and rural districts, an all-out plunder of the political power of black and brown communities. They are counted in the population in the districts where their prisons are even though convicted felons are banned from voting."
