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https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-web-report/examining-prisons-today#:~:text=More%20than%20half%20of%20incarcerated,that%20of%20the%20general%20population.

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"'I'm beginning to believe that 'U.S.A.' stands for the Underprivileged Slaves of America,' wrote a 20th-century prisoner from Mississippi in a letter detailing the daily violence he witnessed behind prison walls. His statement resounds with a long tradition of prisoners, particularly African-American prisoners, who have used the language and narrative of slavery to describe the conditions of their imprisonment."

~ Kim Gilmore, "Slavery and Prison: Understanding the Connections," Social Justice, 2000

"Daily degradations grind away at men's souls. As one prisoner explained, the [South Carolina] Corrections Department has reduced visits from family members, limited their ability to send food and there are now only 'two meals a day on weekends' . . . One man . . . sent pictures of the metal plates that prison officials put over the windows, meaning too little light and fresh air gets into this sweltering and filthy prison. Others have sent photos of the food they are served, which in contrast to the menu that the Department of Corrections posts publicly, looks barely nutritional. The men say it is sometimes moldy, and for those on lockdown, it is served erratically and cold."

~Heather Anne Thompson, "How a South Carolina Prison Riot Really Went Down," New York Times, 2018.

Life in America's prisons is dismal, and the brunt of these dismal conditions falls overwhelmingly on people of color and those who are socially and economically disadvantaged, the result of their systematic and historic economic and social exclusion from mainstream-predominantly white-American society. Once in prison, their ties to that mainstream society are severed-often irreversibly-through prolonged separation from family and community. While behind bars, incarcerated people are subjected to degrading treatment, inhumane conditions, and abusive interactions-all of which result in substantial social, behavioral, and cognitive trauma that handicap them in their efforts to reintegrate into society upon release. In short, prison thwarts their chances for a successful and fulfilling life.

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"'I'm beginning to believe that 'U.S.A.' stands for the Underprivileged Slaves of America,' wrote a 20th-century prisoner from Mississippi in a letter detailing the daily violence he witnessed behind prison walls. His statement resounds with a long tradition of prisoners, particularly...

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https://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/overviewdeathpenalty.html

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Death Penalty

The number of executions and the size of the death row population (those awaiting execution) has ballooned since the restoration of the death penalty in 1976. But the situation is subtle; more so than the graph (following) illustrating the size of death row suggests.

The graph's mid-1970s depression represents the period between the 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision that declared existing death penalty laws to be unconstitutionally "arbitrary and capricious" and the 1976 Supreme Court's upholding of the new death penalty laws in Gregg v. Georgia.

Encouragingly, the number of new arrivals on death row in 2001 was the smallest number since 1973: 155.11 The number of executions in 2001 was down from the 1999 peak of 98, to 66. As of mid-December, 68 executions had been carried out in 2002.

A graph of the number of executions, while smaller than the number of people on death row, tells a different story. Implementation of the death penalty had become quite rare (at least compared to the size of the death row population) prior to the 1972 Supreme Court decision. There were 5 executions in 1965, 1 in 1966 and 2 in 1967, and no more than 2 per year until 1983.

Making future predictions based on these graphs is complicated not only by the evolving moral and legal views on the death penalty, but by the long delay between changes in the law and a resulting change in the number of death sentences and executions.

Factors suggesting the death penalty will be carried out more frequently in the next 5 years:

The 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act limited the number and type of appeals a death row prisoner can make. Not all of these changes apply retroactively, but all are expected to decrease the amount of time an execution may be postponed while the sentence is appealed.

The 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act made more crimes eligible for the death penalty, countering a trend started in the 1950s to make the death penalty apply to a narrower and narrower list of crimes.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th may have created a more punitive mood in government and the population.

President Bush's November 13, 2001 executive order authorized secret military tribunals to try suspected terrorists and impose the death penalty without the usual due process protections of U.S. courts.

Factors suggesting the death penalty will be carried out less frequently in the next 5 years:

The DNA exoneration scandals, where DNA evidence has conclusively shown that the innocent were wrongly convicted, has cast public doubt on the finality and infallibility of the death penalty. A number of states have declared or are considering a moratorium on the death penalty until the DNA issues can be resolved.

Increasing attention to the racial disparities in death sentencing has caused a number of states to enact or propose moratoriums on executions.

In June 2002, the Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty laws of several states that allowed a judge and not a jury to impose a death sentence. An estimated 180 to 800 current death sentences will be converted to life sentences, reducing the current death row population.

In June 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that executions of the mentally retarded violate the 8th Amendment. This decision is expected to remove a number of prisoners from death row and prevent defendants with mental retardation from being sentenced to death in the future.

There is a growing movement to abolish the death penalty for juvenile offenders. Five states and two countries have recently abolished the death penalty for juveniles. The United States and Iran are the only two remaining countries to execute juveniles. 12

"Despite the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the recent sniper shootings in the Washington D.C. area" ... public "support for the death penalty is lower than the support registered in the early 1990s." 13

The number of countries without the death penalty is growing and many countries refuse to extradite suspects to the United States without a promise that the death penalty will not be applied.

This page is an excerpt from The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (April 2003) by Peter Wagner, published by the Western Prison Project and the Prison Policy Initiative.

Footnotes

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The number of executions and the size of the death row population (those awaiting execution) has ballooned since the restoration of the death penalty in 1976. But the situation is subtle; more so than the graph (following) illustrating the size of death row suggests. The graph's mid-1970s depression represents the period between the 1972 Furman v.

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https://www.sentencingproject.org/news/death-penalty-part-larger-system-punishment/

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As the number of people on death row decreases, the number of people serving life sentences has risen. Abolishing the death penalty should not serve as a way to replace one extreme sentence with another-but as a first step to reform extreme sentences altogether, says The Sentencing Project's Ashley Nellis.

This pairing of opposition to capital punishment with an embrace of life without parole sentences bears some responsibility for where we are today, with over 53,000 people sentenced to die in prison. In 2015, Ashley Nellis of the Sentencing Project and an author of the " The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences," explored the tensions between death penalty abolition work and efforts to end extreme sentencing in a law review article. The "rapid rise in LWOP [life without parole] sentences" she wrote, "can partly be attributed to a desire for a reliable, terminal punishment to replace the death penalty after it was declared unconstitutional in 1972." But, Nellis said, it does not have to be this way: "Strategies to abolish the death penalty can be improved upon by viewing the successful elimination of the death penalty as just the first step on the road to the reformation of extreme sentences altogether. In this view, the efforts to eliminate the death penalty are not in conflict with efforts to eliminate LWOP."

What is important, she wrote, was not just whether the death penalty is abolished but why. "The reasons why American society will eventually decide to eliminate the death penalty as a punishment are as important as the outcome-maybe more so."

Read the full article from The Appeal's Vaidya Gullapalli here.

Related Posts

Honoring April as Second Chance Month gives us an opportunity to check in on developments in voting rights and expanding the franchise to incarcerated voters. The Sentencing Project is working regularly with state and local campaigns to expand voting rights to justice impacted voters.

The PROTECT Act of 2022 would have far-reaching implications for eroding fairness and justice, including the potential to usher in a new era of mandatory minimums.

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The Appeal: The Death Penalty Is Part Of A Larger System of Punishment | The Sentencing Project

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As the number of people on death row decreases, the number of people serving life sentences has risen. Abolishing the death penalty should not serve as a way to replace one extreme sentence with another-but as a first step to reform extreme sentences altogether, says The Sentencing Project's Ashley Nellis.

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https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/02/27/youth/

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The number of youth locked up in adult facilities remains on the decline, but new jails data shows how much further we still need to go.

by Maddy Troilo, February 27, 2018

One of the overlooked findings of last week's Jail Inmates in 2016 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics was that the number of youth locked up in adult jails grew over the year prior. The number of youth locked up with adults overall remains on the decline, but the new data shows how much further we still need to go:

As our new report Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie discusses, most detained youth are held in various youth-specific facilities, but one in ten are held in adult facilities. To support the new report, I've been collecting the data and exploring why youth end up in adult facilities and what happens to them once they do.

In some states, seventeen-year-old youths are automatically prosecuted as adults. In other states, certain offenses automatically require adult prosecution, and some states give prosecutors and the courts discretion to try youths as adults. Thirty-one states have " once an adult, always an adult " policies, which mandate that if someone under eighteen has ever been charged as an adult, all of their future cases must also be handled in the adult system.

Thirty years ago, there were 2,300 kids held in adult jails. From 1990 to 1999, youth jail populations increased by 311%, peaking at 9,458. That number then began to decline, culminating in a 2016 population of 3,700, still far more than the already-high 1990 number.

The data for prisons, available from 2000 forward, follows a pattern of consistent decrease. 3,892 kids were confined in adult prisons in 2000; by 2016 this number had fallen to 956 - still far too high.

The decline in number of youths in adult facilities represents a more general decline in the number of youths coming into contact with the criminal justice system. Between 2005 and 2014, the number of youths arrested dropped by 51.2%; similarly, between 1997 and 2013, the number confined in correctional facilities dropped by 48%. Some of the decline in youth incarceration, however, is the result of youths aging out of the statistics but remaining behind bars for crimes committed before they were eighteen.

Much of the general decline in youth confinement in adult facilities is the result of legal and legislative changes brought about by youth-focused criminal justice advocacy. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that imposing the death penalty for a crime committed while the offender was under eighteen violates the Constitution. In doing so, the court established the principle that children cannot be held to the same standards of responsibility as adults, nor can their actions be considered evidence of an "irretrievably depraved character." This decision established the legal precedent for rollbacks of mandatory life sentences for juveniles and other policies that kept youth imprisoned.

States have also been taking independent legislative action, including raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction. Since juvenile courts are more likely to hand down sentences other than confinement, these laws reduce the number of people under eighteen who end up in jail or prison. State legislatures have also focused on delinquency prevention efforts, creating intervention programs for at risk-youth and diversion programs for nonviolent offenders.

While these legislative decisions are steps in the right direction, they still leave thousands of children in adult facilities, condemning them to countless long-term harms. The 2006 Justice Policy Institute report The Dangers of Detention summarizes the academic research on the harms of incarcerating youth in juvenile facilities, and shows that putting kids in cages:

slows the natural process of aging out of delinquency,

exacerbates any existing mental illnesses,

increases the odds of recidivism,

reduces the chances of returning to school, and

diminishes success in the labor market.

Incarcerating youth in adult facilities is even more harmful than incarcerating them with people their own age. Of all incarcerated people, youth held with adults are at the highest risk of sexual abuse; they are also 36 times more likely to commit suicide than youth in juvenile facilities, and are at a greater risk of being held in solitary confinement than they would be in juvenile facilities.

These devastating and life-long effects come as the result of decisions made before age eighteen - an age when, according to research, youths' brains are still years away from full development. This research further legitimizes the Supreme Court's argument that children shouldn't be held to the same standards of responsibility as adults. With that in mind, there's absolutely no reason to punish them as adults.

Black and brown youth face a significantly higher chance of being held as adults than do white youth, an unjust disparity reflective of the racism that permeates the entire criminal justice system. According to the Campaign for Youth Justice, Black youth are 8.6 times more likely than their white peers to receive an adult prison sentence, while Latino youth are 40% more likely than white youth to be admitted to adult prison. These disparities reinforce those in the rest of the system by disproportionately subjecting youth of color to the harms of being incarcerated with adults.

Groups like the Campaign for Youth Justice and the Children's Defense Fund are fighting against youth confinement in adult facilities by spearheading campaigns to raise the age of juvenile jurisdiction, advocating humane alternatives to confinement, and opposing policies that automatically place youths in the adult system. These are common sense reforms that should already be the law.

Data sources:

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by Maddy Troilo, February 27, 2018 One of the overlooked findings of last week's Jail Inmates in 2016 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics was that the number of youth locked up in adult jails grew over the year prior.

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https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-once-sent-thousands-of-juveniles-to-14480958.php

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Some were as young as 14 or 15 when they were arrested. Society saw them as hardened criminals, prosecutors charged them as adults and judges sent them to jails and prisons, sometimes for decades, in a sweeping crackdown on "superpredator" teenagers who supposedly robbed, raped and killed without conscience.

Now, California's mass transfer of children to adult courts - where they faced the prospect of longer sentences and less rehabilitation - has been all but abandoned by voters and lawmakers. Yet the fallout remains.

From 2003 to 2018, more than 11,500 youths ages 14 to 17 were moved into adult courts across California, according to a Chronicle review undertaken as part of "Vanishing Violence," a yearlong investigation into falling youth crime.

The get-tough movement, driven by fear of rising crime, peaked well after youth violence began a historic decline. The punishments juveniles received while it lasted varied widely depending on their race and the political climate where they lived.

As a result, an untold number of people arrested as children and tried as adults remain imprisoned, because many of the laws reforming the crackdown weren't retroactively applied.

Today, the state's approach to juvenile justice is vastly different. The stark decrease in youth crime, a growing body of research on adolescent development, and a progressive push to treat young people who commit violence as malleable and redeemable have prompted lawmakers to reverse many of the policies that shifted power from judges to prosecutors and opened up adult courts to children.

In just one decade, The Chronicle found, the number of juveniles charged in adult court fell by 94% statewide, from 1,201 cases in 2008 to a mere 77 last year.

Some counties that previously prosecuted dozens of youths in adult courts each year, including Sacramento and San Joaquin, transferred none from juvenile courts in 2018, according to an analysis of state Department of Justice data by the W. Haywood Burns Institute. Teenagers who once faced stiff sentences are now benefiting from a more lenient system geared toward reform and rehabilitation.

But California is still reckoning mightily with how it previously treated young offenders - some of whom remain behind bars serving sentences that the state now views as too severe. No one is tracking that number, but in 2013 state officials estimated that 6,500 people who committed their crimes as juveniles were serving adult sentences in California prisons. Scores more who have been released are marked by their time in adult lockups.

The changes in the juvenile justice system have ignited an intense debate - not only over whether the crackdown of two decades ago was effective, but whether the recent backlash and wave of reforms have gone too far, making the public less safe. In some cases now, district attorneys argue, the worst offenders will be released at age 25 from the juvenile system with virtually no supervision.

Elizabeth Calvin, an attorney at Human Rights Watch who advocates for juveniles in the criminal justice system, said that allowing prosecutors to put thousands of teens into adult court "meant that in a real sense we had children who were being disappeared."

But Jeff Rosen, Santa Clara County district attorney, called the latest reform efforts in California "an overreach." He opposes a law that barred the prosecution of 14- and 15-year-olds as adults, even with a judge's consent. Some crimes in his county, he said, are "so awful I just wonder if the advocates realize not everyone thinks the way they do."

At the center of the debate are people like Michael Mendoza.

At age 13, a turbulent home life in San Juan Capistrano (Orange County) sent him searching for acceptance, and he chose to join a gang. Many of his family members had drifted toward crime, he said in a recent interview, and the gang lifestyle and violence that came with it "seemed natural."

In 1996, when he was 15, Mendoza and three members of his crew ventured from their turf to seek out a rival. As Mendoza rode in the backseat, the front passenger opened fire and killed a young man.

He and his accomplices were soon arrested and charged with murder under a new law that allowed 14- and 15-year-olds to be tried as adults. A judge sent Mendoza to adult court after weighing his crime and his character and deeming him unfit for the juvenile system.

On his 17th birthday, in 1998, he was brought through the reception center at Wasco State Prison in Kern County.

"It was the scariest thing ever," he recalled. "Walking through a prison yard feels like you're walking through a battlefield. Survival becomes the main priority. The last thing I was thinking about was, 'How do I rehabilitate myself.' It was, 'How do I get through this day?'"

Had he been prosecuted in juvenile court, Mendoza likely would have been released, at the latest, on his 25th birthday. Instead, Mendoza, now 38, spent nearly two decades behind bars before being granted parole in 2014.

"To me, a life sentence was a message from the world that they no longer wanted me, that they had given up on me," he said. "It was the most hopeless thing anyone could ever face - let alone a kid."

Mendoza was at the front end of a swell of juvenile offenders treated as adults by California's court and prison systems.

He was arrested and charged just a year after the implementation of AB560, the 1994 law that, for the first time in state history, allowed children ages 14 and 15 to be tried and sentenced as adults.

The law came during a fear-stirring era in California when youth crime climbed for reasons that remain in dispute. Between 1986 and 1994, homicides committed by juveniles quadrupled. By 1995, 382 people ages 10 through 17 were killed in California, nearly two-thirds of them in reported gang feuds, according to state data.

Youth arrests for violent felonies such as murder, kidnapping and rape crested at 21,900 that year, or an average of 60 per day. The public was captivated by descriptions of teen "superpredators" - remorseless criminals who supposedly had no value for life - that prompted action from prosecutors and lawmakers.

The responding crackdown peaked in 2000 when voters passed Proposition 21, sweeping legislation pushed by the California District Attorneys Association. It ratcheted up sentences for many youth offenders and gave prosecutors broad discretion to send many defendants as young as 14 to adult court, even as serious youth crime had begun to drop.

Previously, prosecutors seeking to put juveniles in adult court had to hold a fitness hearing, with a judge making the decision.

Fearing a disproportionate impact on young people of color, then-San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan opposed Prop. 21, and Kamala Harris, then one of his office's prosecutors, was a vocal leader in the fight against it. But, while most Bay Area voters rejected the measure, it passed statewide with 62% support.

The law survived an aggressive challenge in the courts and, between 2003 and 2016, roughly 11,300 youths were prosecuted as adults, data show. More than 70% of those cases were directly filed by prosecutors, a practice that became increasingly common even though advocates say it originally was intended to occur only in exceptional cases.

District attorneys in rural and conservative parts of the state were especially prolific in directly filing cases to adult court.

In San Joaquin County, all 459 youths prosecuted as adults from 2003 to 2016 were the result of direct filing, according to state records provided by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group in San Francisco. Of the 663 cases in which young people were prosecuted as adults in Sacramento County, all but five were directly filed.

At the same time, district attorneys in more liberal counties were far less likely to charge youths as adults.

In San Francisco, which transferred juveniles to adult court at a lower rate than any county in California, just 18 youths were prosecuted as adults over the same period. In Alameda County, 182 cases were directly filed, less than places that had far fewer violent felony arrests, including Kings, Ventura and Kern counties.

"The transfer rates were very disparate around the state," said Sue Burrell, policy and training director at the nonprofit Pacific Juvenile Defender Center in San Francisco. "It really is justice by geography."

As the rate of juveniles being sent to adult prison increased, racial disparities were particularly stark.

While black and Latino people represent 70% of inmates in prison, they made up 86% of all juveniles charged as adults in California over the past decade, The Chronicle's review found. In Los Angeles County, 96% of the 1,551 juveniles prosecuted as adults from 2007 to 2016 were black or Latino. In Kern County, the figure was 92%.

Black and Latino youths made up 70% of the juvenile population of Los Angeles County in 2010 and 65% of the juvenile population of Kern County that year, according to figures from the state finance department.

A 2016 study by several juvenile justice organizations, including the W. Haywood Burns Institute in Oakland, found that black youths charged with crimes were 11 times more likely than white youths to have their cases directly filed to adult court.

But, even as juveniles were increasingly being sent into adult courts and prisons, serious youth crime in California was already plummeting. From 2003 to 2016, juvenile arrests for violent felonies declined 55%. Prosecution rates also fell, with adult court cases dropping by 50% during that period, according to state Department of Justice data.

The toughening of laws meant longer and harsher sentences for scores of people accused of the most serious crimes. Philippe Kelly, who is black, at age 15 was sent to prison in 2001 on a 40-years-to-life sentence after he was found guilty of second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of Joseph Cox in Los Angeles.

Kelly was a gifted child, skipping a grade in elementary school, but life at home was rough, he said in a recent interview with The Chronicle inside San Quentin State Prison. He joined a gang, started getting in fights and graduated to robbing people. He turned "callous and cold" on his path to becoming a killer, he said.

At San Quentin, he said he started on a path to redemption, and has come to see his situation as "a blessing." He works with the Squires Program, which brings juvenile delinquents into the prison and exposes them to the reality of life inside. "So they don't end up in our situation," he said.

"I'm very appreciative," he said, speaking between prison classes one day. "The way I was going, prison has given me a second chance. If I wasn't here, I would probably be dead."

Kelly's circumstances changed in 2013, when the fight against sending more children to adult courts won a victory with SB260.

Under the law, the state Board of Parole Hearings must consider releasing offenders who were convicted while under 18 after 15, 20 or at most 25 years behind bars. In these youth offender hearings, the board gives "great weight to the diminished culpability of juveniles as compared to adults, the hallmark features of youth, and any subsequent growth and increased maturity."

Last year, the governor commuted Kelly's sentence to 20 years to life and he got his first youth offender hearing on Aug. 7. He was denied release, but can try again in three years.

SB260 was followed by other reforms. In 2016, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 57, limiting who could be transferred to adult court and shifting the decision making back from prosecutors to judges.

Last year, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB1391, barring anyone under age 16 from being tried in adult court and undoing one of the last vestiges of the state's tough-on-juvenile-crime era.

"There is a fundamental principle at stake here," Brown said when signing the bill. "Whether we want a society which at least attempts to reform the youngest offenders before consigning them to adult prisons, where their likelihood of becoming a lifelong criminal is so much higher."

But, as advocates have celebrated the policy rollbacks, people like Cathy Russell, whose son was slain by two teenagers, say their voices are being suppressed and their trauma minimized.

On Nov. 10, 2009, Jae Williams, then 15, and Randy Thompson, then 16, went to 15-year-old Michael Russell's home in San Jose after his family left to go shopping. Michael, a Santa Teresa High School sophomore described by his family as "quiet and caring," had been studying when the two classmates showed up.

The pair lured Russell into his backyard, where Williams tackled him and pinned him down and Thompson stabbed him with a chef's knife. The victim fought for his life, suffering defensive wounds to his hands and arms, before Williams slit his throat.

Williams, who had a history of torturing rabbits and cats, had told some classmates he wanted to lose his "killing virginity," authorities said. He was tried and convicted as an adult in May 2014 by the Santa Clara County district attorney's office, which called the attack a "thrill kill." A judge sentenced him to 26 years to life.

However, because Williams' appeals process was not completed before the onset of SB1391 - the law that barred children under 16 from being tried as adults - he may have a chance at winning his release.

"It's a huge smack in the face to everyone who's had faith in the justice system," Cathy Russell said in an interview. "It makes you lose faith in the system. It's not fair."

Williams' attorney did not return phone calls and messages seeking comment.

Rosen, the Santa Clara County district attorney, has cited Williams' case in challenging the constitutionality of SB1391. Juvenile court is appropriate in most cases for children 14 and 15, he argues, but taking away the ability to charge some as adults means people like Williams could go free with no court-mandated supervision.

"Here's a 15-year-old who committed a heinous murder, as well as other things before that, and it seems unlikely he is going to be rehabilitated by age 25," Rosen said. "That's not justice. It's not fair to the victim. It's not fair to the community. It's wrong."

Rosen's office has aggressively prosecuted juveniles as adults compared with his Bay Area counterparts, directly filing 208 cases between 2010 and 2016. San Francisco directly filed 11 cases in that period, records show, and Los Angeles County - with double the population of Santa Clara County - directly filed 152 cases.

Other district attorneys around California have sought to overturn the removal of all 14- and 15-year-olds from adult court. The law has survived thus far, though the issue appears headed to the California Supreme Court.

The back-and-forth has troubled advocates for juveniles in the criminal justice system. An exception in state law allows people convicted in juvenile court to be detained indefinitely if they're deemed too dangerous to be released, the advocates noted, pushing back on the argument that even the worst criminals would automatically be set free at age 25. And they say prosecutors unfairly trot out the most heinous cases when arguing against reforms to the criminal justice system.

While brutal killings committed by teenagers have often been the focus of media reports and policy debates, they don't account for most cases. Between 2007 and 2016, records show, more than half of all youths prosecuted as adults - 4,492 people - were charged with robbery or assault. About a quarter were accused of homicide.

"Yes, there's a handful of horrible cases, but most of them really aren't like that," said Burrell of the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center. "There's not an innate character flaw in most of these youth. They were doing what was happening in their neighborhood, and they got caught up in it."

Even as California rolls back prior laws, those who were tried as adults in recent decades face challenges that differ from offenders who remained in juvenile court.

Their criminal records are public, not private, which can make it more difficult to find jobs and housing. And people who served time in jails and state prisons, which are less geared toward rehabilitation than juvenile detention centers, are more likely to reoffend when released.

A 2010 Department of Justice analysis found recidivism rates were higher for young people tried in adult court than for youths kept in the juvenile system, particularly in the case of those convicted of violent crimes. One 1996 study found that youths locked up in juvenile detention centers were 29% less likely to be rearrested than those sent to adult jails or prisons.

"I think that there are many thousands of people who will never be able to reach their full potential because of the way we treated them," said Burrell. "My sense is that a lot of them get out and are trying to survive."

Some, like Michael Mendoza, say that despite their harsh punishments, they found a way forward.

Mendoza, who spent almost two decades behind bars for the 1996 killing in which he took part, said he matured in prison and began to educate himself. He took college courses. He started changing his attitude, he said, and thinking about his responsibilities.

Upon release in 2014, after his second parole hearing, he earned a bachelor's degree in political science from San Francisco State University and became a policy director with the nonprofit Anti-Recidivism Coalition, which has offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

In August, he started a job as national director for #cut50, which was co-founded by San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney, Van Jones, the activist and commentator, and Jessica Jackson, a human rights attorney and Mill Valley city councilwoman. He lives in the Sacramento area, where he advocates for laws favoring rehabilitation over incarceration.

"I think our generation of young people who fell into the model of punishment as adults is a black mark in our history in California that we're always going to have to heal from," Mendoza said. "There are a lot of people that were very young who are still suffering, and many who will never recover."
Chronicle staff writer Jill Tucker contributed

Evan Sernoffsky and Joaquin Palomino are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com, jpalomino@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky @JoaquinPalomino

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California sent thousands of juveniles to prison. Laws have softened, but fallout remains

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Some were as young as 14 or 15 when they were arrested. Society saw them as hardened criminals, prosecutors charged them as adults and judges sent them to jails and prisons , sometimes for decades, in a sweeping crackdown on "superpredator" teenagers who supposedly robbed, raped and killed without conscience.

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https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/justice-system-reform/wrongful-convictions

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The strength of our criminal justice system depends on its accuracy - its ability to convict the guilty and to clear the innocent. But we know that wrongful convictions happen. Identifying and understanding the causes of wrongful convictions is critical to maintaining the integrity of our justice system.

A conviction may be classified as wrongful for two reasons:

1. The person convicted is factually innocent of the charges.

2. There were procedural errors that violated the convicted person's rights.

A wrongful conviction based on possible factual innocence can sometimes be detected using postconviction DNA testing.

Postconviction DNA testing is a major factor contributing to the increased discovery of wrongful convictions. With the advent of DNA testing over the last two decades, biological evidence retained in cases from the "pre-DNA" era could be tested. In addition, advancements in DNA technology have broadened opportunities for DNA testing. For example, as DNA analysis of aged, degraded, limited or otherwise compromised biological evidence has improved, samples that previously generated inconclusive results might be amenable to reanalysis with newer methods.

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The strength of our criminal justice system depends on its accuracy - its ability to convict the guilty and to clear the innocent. But we know that wrongful convictions happen. Identifying and understanding the causes of wrongful convictions is critical to maintaining the integrity of our justice system.

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https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/extreme-sentencing

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Snatching a purse off the arm of an elderly woman is one of the nastier offenses I can think of - the kind of thing that might make you shake your head and say to yourself "I hope whoever did that gets what's coming to him." And then you think for a second about just what he ought to have coming to him: community service, maybe - or even a night in jail. Stealing from an old lady is pretty mean, after all, and you'd want whoever did it to learn a lesson.

I guess that's what the state of Texas was thinking when it sentenced Willie James Sauls last week for that very crime. Except in this case, apparently the lesson Texas wants us all to learn is "we don't believe in rehabilitation" - for the crime of stealing a purse, Sauls was sentenced to 45 years in prison. The prosecutors in the case justified the long sentence by pointing out that Sauls has prior convictions and that he "already had chances to address the issues with his behavior." And with that, they decided this purse snatcher should be locked in prison until he's 82.

Also in Texas, in 2010, Larry Dayries stole a tuna sandwich from Whole Foods while wielding a knife. He had prior convictions for burglary and theft, so the sandwich incident landed him a 70-year sentence. Larry will be 111 at the end of his sentence.

Down the road in Mississippi, Anthony Crutcher is serving a 60-year sentence for selling $40 worth of cocaine. Anthony was sentenced under Mississippi's habitual offender laws; his two prior convictions were also nonviolent, minor drug crimes. Anthony is due out of prison a month after his 101st birthday.

Sauls, Dayries and Crutcher are not anomalies - in fact, they are more like the rule. Since 1990, the average length of prison sentences in the U.S. has increased by 36 percent. Long sentences for non-violent first offenses, coupled with laws mandating increased penalties for repeat offenders, mean our prisons are more crowded than ever - even as crime rates have fallen.

Some might argue that these extreme sentencing policies would be justified by their effectiveness at dissuading would-be criminals. But that's not the case. A 2003 review of the research on sentence severity and crime rates concluded that "sentencing severity has no effect on the level of crime in society." And in 2005, researchers at California's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office concluded that the state's notoriously punitive three strikes law, which will send a third-time felony offender to prison for 25 years to life even for a nonviolent offense, has no clear effect on crime rates in the state.

As the U.S. has doubled down on tough sentencing, we've diverged sharply from much of the developed world. In Canada, the Supreme Court declared a mandatory minimum sentence of seven years for importing narcotics to be cruel and unusual punishment; in the U.S., selling a couple ounces of methamphetamine carries at least a ten-year sentence. In France, Italy and Germany, all prisoners serving life sentences have a right to be reviewed for potential release; in the U.S., there are 41,000 people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. And the U.S. is one of only 33 countries with mandatory increased penalties for offenders with prior convictions - alone with Japan in representing the developed world.

The U.S. incarcerates more people - in absolute numbers and per capita - than any other nation in the world, including the far more populous China and Russia. And, it seems, we incarcerate them for far longer. The dramatic, unprecedented rise in incarceration rates and lengths should be a source of great concern to all Americans: this lock-down mentality costs us dearly in freedom and tax dollars, but it doesn't make us safer.

While bipartisan lawmakers have been willing to reform some parole and probation laws recently, there has been less political will to engage in meaningful sentencing reform. And yet we know that sentencing reform is essential to bringing down the number of people in our prisons and the associated costs. States like New York that have passed real sentencing reform have seen prison populations and crime rates go down significantly and stay down.

It is time for the U.S. to commit to real sentencing reform. We should stop jailing people for low-level offenses and reduce the number of people who needlessly enter prison in the first place; shrink the existing prison population by offering opportunities for ready prisoners to re-enter society; and in the meantime seek out more effective alternatives to incarceration like drug courts and work programs that are more effective at rehabilitation and reducing recidivism than lengthy sentences.
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Snatching a purse off the arm of an elderly woman is one of the nastier offenses I can think of - the kind of thing that might make you shake your head and say to yourself "I hope whoever did that gets what's coming to him."

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https://www.georgiainnocenceproject.org/2022/02/01/beneath-the-statistics-the-structural-and-systemic-causes-of-our-wrongful-conviction-problem/

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Beneath the Statistics: The Structural and Systemic Causes of Our Wrongful Conviction Problem

The statistics related to wrongful convictions, and to race and wrongful convictions, are profoundly disturbing and illustrative of a deeply rooted problem.  Studies estimate that between 4-6% of people incarcerated in US prisons are actually innocent.

If 5% of individuals are actually innocent, that means 1/20 criminal cases result in a wrongful conviction.

To fully understand why wrongful convictions are so prevalent in our society, and to find solutions to our wrongful conviction problem, we must dig deeper into these race and wrongful conviction statistics.

The presumption of innocence is a foundational rule in our criminal legal system. When paired with the requirement that the prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, it is supposed to help ensure that someone charged with a crime is not wrongfully convicted. But what happens if, despite that instruction, unchecked biases cause jurors, judges, lawyers and others to presume some people are less innocent than others? Is it then easier to convict?

Black Americans make up only 13% of the US population, but make up 40% of the prison population and almost 60% of all DNA exonerations in the country (Sources: US Census Bureau, Prison Policy Initiative National Registry of Exonerations)

As so well explained by Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, the legacy of racial injustice in America –involving centuries of white supremacy, racial violence, and the marginalization of people of color – has evolved “into the widespread presumption that people of color are suspicious, dangerous, and criminal—that young Black men are to be feared, monitored, and even hunted.”

These insidious, implicit racial biases create perceptions and presumptions that play out continuously in societal interactions with the criminal enforcement system and can manifest as the following actions directed toward Black and Brown people in America:.

Formation of unwarranted suspicions in everyday situations

Inaccurate assumptions of criminal activity when there is none

Routine arrests based on weaker evidence than someone implicitly presumed innocent, harmless, or with access to power and influence

Rampant criminalization (with excessive sentences) of actions that disproportionately impact Black and Brown people

Erroneously, unfairly, unjustly, and/or inequitably prosecuting, convicting, imprisoning, keeping imprisoned, and controlling upon re-entry.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet. If each state were a country, Georgia would rank fourth in incarceration. These rates are not explained by higher levels of violent crime. (Source: Prison Policy Initiative)

Sweeping so many people – disproportionately Black and Brown people – into these systems of overcriminalization and mass incarceration, often caging them in horrid conditions and branding them as “criminals” or “felons” upon release, has a number of consequences:

(1) It dramatically increases the number of people in prison and thus, statistically, the number of wrongfully convicted people in prison.

(2) It creates insufficient resources and time to slow down and ensure accuracy and reliability in investigations, charging, convictions and to ensure an adequate defense.

(3) The sheer number of Black and Brown people trapped in the system can reinforce society’s implicit racial biases involving the presumption of dangerousness and criminality.

(4) It dehumanizes large segments of the population while desensitizing others to the plight of human suffering and injustice, creating official indifference.

At a certain point, it becomes more about simply securing a conviction than ensuring conviction of the correct person or ensuring justice and community safety. Additionally, when the State routinely subjects Black and Brown people to differential treatment and inequities, it normalizes that very behavior, which can lead to official misconduct, corruption, favoritism, and / or  selective or malicious prosecution.

Indeed, not all innocent incarcerated Americans are Black people. Wrongful convictions can and do happen to almost any person, of any race. But the system that allows wrongful convictions to be so disconcertingly common–and so frustratingly difficult to correct–is a system infected to its core by racism and racial bias. The problems traceable to that racism and racial bias are pervasive enough to affect everyone.

Prosecutors’ jury notes from Johnny Gates’s 1977 capital murder trial in Columbus, Georgia. Prosecutors struck all the qualified prospective Black jurors after denoting race with the letter “N,” using dots next to their names, and ranking Black jurors as “1”s on a 1-5 scale (with “1” being least desirable). The prosecutors, who repeated this practice in every capital case involving Black defendants in the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit from 1975-1979 to secure verdicts from all-White juries, also wrote derogatory descriptions next to the Black prospective jurors’ names.

We at Georgia Innocence Project envision and work toward a criminal legal system where the very few wrongful convictions that do occur are quickly and easily corrected. Where the common factors that enable wrongful convictions are remedied. And where the structural systems that promote and perpetuate wrongful convictions are reconfigured into something more just, equitable, accurate, reliable, and accountable.

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Beneath the Statistics: The Structural and Systemic Causes of Our Wrongful Conviction Problem

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The statistics related to wrongful convictions, and to race and wrongful convictions, are profoundly disturbing and illustrative of a deeply rooted problem. Studies estimate that between 4-6% of people incarcerated in US prisons are actually innocent.