Men released from prison are being returned due to interpretation of Armed Career Criminal Act

About 20 men who had been sent home from federal prison have been locked up again. Not because they violated their parole, but because of a court fight over whether they should be considered “armed career criminals,” reported The Marshall Project.

One of the 20 men, Michael Lemons, bought a hunting rifle from a neighbor, despite several burglary convictions when he was a teenager. Federal law says you can’t own a gun if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony. Authorities found the rifle while searching his home on an old warrant dating back to his time on probation in his early 20s.

All of Lemons’ burglaries were committed in the course of a single year more than a decade earlier, when he was homeless. He had not been in any trouble with the law since. Still, under a 1984 federal law, he was considered an “armed career criminal.”

People convicted of being a “felon in possession of a firearm” spend about five years in prison, on average. But the 1984 law requires an automatic 15-year sentence if someone with a record of three or more violent felonies gets caught with a gun. In the years since, the Supreme Court has struggled to define violent crime in the context of the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Critics point to mandatory minimum sentences like this one as an example of the excesses of the tough-on-crime 80s and 90s, which President Joe Biden has pledged to eliminate.

Lemons was a decade into his 15-year sentence when he caught a break. A federal appeals court said that the burglaries from Lemons’ youth did not count as violent after all, because the law against breaking into a home in Tennessee didn’t meet the federal definition of a “violent felony.” He and at least 30 other Tennesseeans could each apply to a judge to be resentenced without the mandatory 15-year minimum, and, in many cases, go home.

Then, in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed course: Those burglaries counted. Though federal prosecutors could have left the new sentences as is — and did, in some cases — they began filing court papers to have about two dozen of the men resentenced and sent back.

“Based upon his significant and repetitive prior felony conviction record, Lemons has demonstrated time and time again that he cannot be trusted,” D. Michael Dunavant, the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted Lemons, told The Marshall Project. “If the rule of law is to have any meaning or legitimacy in our society, it must be enforced consistently, uniformly, and unapologetically.”

The Supreme Court’s reversal was a “profound and arbitrary legal flip flop,” wrote lawyers for Tony McClurg in one recently filed legal brief. McClurg, like Michael Lemons, committed a string of burglaries and thefts when he was young and homeless — “a 60-day splurge he went on when he was 21,” his lawyers said at his sentencing hearing. Later, when McClurg was in his 30s, police discovered guns stashed in his trailer. He was selling marijuana and he kept the guns for protection, McClurg said. 

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MCN/USA TODAY NETWORK: The plight of pregnant women in prisons and jails

Matthew T. Mangino
More Content Now /USA TODAY NETWORK
February 26, 2021

Pregnancy can be challenging to a mother and fetus under the best of circumstances.  According to Johns Hopkins University, pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to life threatening complications if not closely monitored by a physician.

Without close medical observation, conditions like hyperemesis gravidarum, a severe form of morning sickness that can cause significant weight loss; gestational diabetes, which may cause the fetus to grow larger than normal causing problems during child birth; or preeclampsia which causes dangerously high blood pressure, can cause harm or death to a mother and child.

Now, imagine pregnancy in jail or prison. Incarcerated pregnant women are a vulnerable population with special needs. For example, national guidance provides that they should receive regular prenatal care, screening, and diagnostic tests. However, the U.S. Government Office of Accountability (GOA) found that while the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) have policies on pregnancy-related care, they do not always align with the national guidance.

Outside of the prison walls the government and private businesses make a host of accommodations for pregnant and parenting women.  The Pregnancy Discrimination Act is a federal statute that protects pregnant workers and requires covered employers to make job-related modifications for pregnant employees. The Act forbids employment discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth, or medical conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth.

When a family is expecting a new child, the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides equal leave for both the mother and father. Both, or either covered parent, may take 12 weeks leave for the birth of a newborn. If both parents work in positions covered by the FMLA, they will both be entitled to leave. FMLA also provides leave for pregnancy-related health reasons. 

In prison, the government is not so generous when it comes to pregnant women or women who have recently given birth.  According to the GOA report, while the Marshals Service and BOP both have policies in place for pregnant women, not all policies fully align with national guidance recommendations on 16 pregnancy-related care topics.

Women in the custody of the Marshals Service are typically those in pretrial detention.  Those inmates may be in federal facilities, but are more likely in state or local facilities where beds are leased by the federal government.  Those in the BOP have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment.

GAO analyses of available data show that from 2017 through 2019, there were at least 1,220 pregnant women in Marshals Service custody and 524 pregnant women in BOP custody.

According to The Crime Report, national guidelines created by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists call for special nutrition for pregnant women and, if needed, mental health care, as well as other screenings and services.

According to the GOA the Marshals Service policies align with only on three of 16 care topics and BOP policies fully align with eight of 16 recommendations.

Prisons and jails are not equipped to properly care for pregnant women. For instance, pregnant women with mental health problems are advised to stop taking psychotropic drugs for bipolar, anxiety and depression. Obviously, confinement exacerbates their condition.  Intensive mental health therapy must stand in the void.

Special nutritional concerns like seafood, foods not fully cooked or fruit and vegetables not properly cleaned put women and their babies at risk. Proper intake testing and evaluation, prenatal care and postpartum care, especially mental health care after separation from a newborn child can go a long way toward protecting pregnant women and their newborn.

Pregnant women do not belong in prisons or jails, but until we get to the point where society can achieve an alternative—intensive evaluation, observation, care and treatment are essential.

(Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino)

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Mangino on Law and Crime Network

Watch my interview on Law and Crime Network about the trial on James Prokopovitz, a Wisconsin man accused of killing his wife.

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Judge finds Missouri's waiting list for public defender unconstitutional

 Though he found Missouri’s practice of putting poor criminal defendants on a waiting list to be appointed a public defender is unconstitutional, a state judge issued a stay to give legislators more time to remedy the situation, reported the Courthouse News Service.

In a ruling issued last Thursday, Phelps County Judge William Hickle cited continued reductions in the number of defendants currently on the list and the prospect of more funding being provided to the public defender’s office that would eliminate the list entirely as reasons for the stay.

The case, which Hickle heard during a two-day bench trial in November, is stayed until June 30, 2021. A review is docketed for July 1, with the state required to provide monthly updates regarding the number of defendants on the list and the status of legislative funding.

“Respondents are optimistic that there will be sufficient funding to wholly eliminate the [Missouri State Public Defender] waiting list sometime this calendar year,” Hickle wrote. “Respondents urge that separation-of-powers and comity interests are furthered by allowing the General Assembly time to provide funding to eliminate the MSPD waiting lists, which in turn will hopefully render moot Petitioners’ requests for relief.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, representing the plaintiffs, objected to the stay. Attorneys for both sides did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During the trial, Jason Williamson, deputy director of the ACLU’s criminal law reform project based in New York, told the court that five of the named petitioners spent 93, 107, 116, 1147 and 160 days, respectively, on the waiting list before being assigned representation.

He cited numbers from 2019, when there were 4,690 defendants on the list. Of those, 2,744 had been waiting for at least three months; 2,233 for at least four months; 1,916 for at least five months; 1,546 for at least six months; and 600 for one year.

When the trial occurred, there were roughly 2,000 people on the waiting list. Of those, 1,113 had been waiting for at least three months; 922 for at least four months; 734 for at least five months; 665 for at least six months; and 233 for at least one year.

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At least 23 states have proposed banning employers from requiring vaccinations

Lawmakers in at least 23 states, often encouraged by vaccine skeptics, have proposed banning employers from requiring workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or other infectious diseases. Most bills are sponsored by Republicans, who say employees shouldn’t have to choose between getting a shot and staying employed, reports Stateline.

“I just kind of like the idea of personal freedom, and that’s one of my biggest things as a legislator,” said Republican state Sen. Dennis Kruse, who sponsored one such bill in Indiana.

Although vaccines protect individuals and communities from disease outbreaks, online disinformation has turbocharged some people’s concerns about vaccine safety and potential mandates in recent years. Some anti-vaccine activists have spread false information about the science and public policy surrounding immunizations.

Yet despite lobbying from anti-vaccine groups, often known as anti-vaxxers, the employer mandate bills are unlikely to pass, experts say. That’s because the proposals threaten employers’ legal obligation to maintain a safe workplace and could put the lives of workers, customers and patients at risk.

Federal guidance issued in December allows employers to require that their workers get COVID-19 vaccines, although they must accommodate employees' religious objections and also make sure vaccine requirements don't discriminate against employees with disabilities.

Accommodating a religious objection could involve changing an unvaccinated worker's job duties to maintain a safe workplace. For instance, employers could ask workers who refuse immunization to work remotely or wear protective gear.

Kruse’s bill would have applied to all vaccines, not just COVID-19, which particularly alarmed public health experts. “The main concern is that this applies to all vaccines in all contexts,” Patrick Glew, a program manager for the Indiana Immunization Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for vaccinations, said when he testified against Kruse’s bill in January.

“If you do not have to get a vaccine for these [diseases] as a hospital worker, as a doctor, as a nurse, as somebody who works in health care, you’re not only making a decision for yourself,” Glew said. “You’re making a decision for everyone else you treat, too. You’re putting them at risk.” 

Nationwide, the bills could face opposition from both business and public health groups, said Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

That’s exactly what happened in Indiana, where the state Chamber of Commerce, health care groups and public health experts all opposed Kruse’s bill. His legislation also would have allowed workers who had been punished by their employers for refusing a vaccine to sue for damages.

Republican state Sen. Phil Boots, who co-sponsored the bill, killed it last week by declining to bring it up for a committee vote.

“There was simply not enough support for the bill to move forward in the legislative process,” he said in an email to Stateline. “Many of my colleagues felt that federal exemptions are adequate … and that the bill went too far in the potential employer penalties."

A similar bill in North Dakota has failed, and most of the other bills have yet to receive serious consideration. But vaccine skeptics say they’re not giving up. 

“We are just getting started,” said Ashley Grogg, founder of Hoosiers for Medical Liberty, a group that represents vaccine skeptics and worked with Kruse on his bill. “There’s going to be more to come next year.”

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Recreational marijuana is legal in New Jersey

 After years of false starts and failed attempts, New Jersey Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed into law three bills that effectively permit and regulate the use of recreational marijuana in New Jersey, making it the most populous state in the Northeast to fully legalize the drug, reported the New York Times.

New Jersey is now one of 14 states to legalize the recreational use of cannabis for adults 21 and older, while also easing several penalties for underage possession and allowing for the creation of a regulated market that could provide a welcomed boost to the state’s economy as it recovers from the pandemic.

Legal sales likely remain months away at the earliest, as the state takes on its next task of creating a heavily regulated industry large enough to support public demand, with licenses still to be doled out to dispensaries.

But after years of failed legislative efforts to approve the use of recreational marijuana, Monday’s move came as a long-awaited win for supporters, including Mr. Murphy, who had long pushed for the inclusion of measures to address the disproportionate number of marijuana arrests in communities of color.

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95-year-old former Nazi guard extradited from Tennessee to Germany

 A 95-year-old man who lived in Tennessee was deported to Germany on Saturday, one year after a federal judge found that he had served as an armed guard at a Nazi concentration camp where prisoners were forced to work outdoors “to the point of exhaustion and death.”

The deportation of the former guard, Friedrich Karl Berger, capped what could be the last prosecution by the U.S. government of collaborators in Nazi war crimes as most of the targets have died in the more than 75 years since the end of World War II.

The Justice Department said Mr. Berger had served as an armed guard at a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp near Meppen, Germany, where Danes, Dutch, French, Italians, Jews, Latvians, Poles and Russians as well as political opponents of the Nazis were imprisoned in “atrocious” conditions and forced to dig anti-tank fortifications in the dead of winter.

At the end of March 1945, when the Nazis abandoned Meppen to escape advancing British and Canadian forces, Mr. Berger helped to guard the prisoners during their forcible evacuation to the main camp, a nearly two-week march under inhumane conditions that claimed the lives of some 70 prisoners, the department said.

The entire Neuengamme system — which included scores of camps — imprisoned some 100,000 men and women, about 40,000 to 55,000 of whom died, the Justice Department said. Between 3,000 to 4,000 people were imprisoned at two Meppen subcamps, one of which Mr. Berger guarded.

During a two-day trial in February 2020, Mr. Berger acknowledged that he had guarded prisoners to prevent them from escaping as they worked from dawn to dusk, and as they traveled to work sites and back to the camp, the Justice Department said. Mr. Berger also acknowledged that he never requested a transfer from concentration camp guard service and that he had continued to receive a pension from Germany based in part on his “wartime service.”

In November 2020, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld an immigration judge’s decision that Mr. Berger was removable under the 1978 Holtzman Amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act because his “willing service as an armed guard of prisoners at a concentration camp where persecution took place” constituted assistance in Nazi-sponsored persecution.

“Berger’s removal demonstrates the Department of Justice’s and its law enforcement partners’ commitment to ensuring that the United States is not a safe haven for those who have participated in Nazi crimes against humanity and other human rights abuses,” Monty Wilkinson, the acting attorney general, said in a statement.

“In this year in which we mark the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg convictions, this case shows that the passage, even of many decades, will not deter the department from pursuing justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi crimes,” Mr. Wilkinson said.

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Bail bondsman fatally shoots wanted Pennsylvania man inside his home

Authorities say a bail bondsman fatally shot a wanted man inside a Nanticoke home after showing up to take him into custody on a court-ordered arrest warrant, reported The Citizen's Voice.

City police identified the man as 26-year-old Thomas Worthy Painter.

Painter had been scheduled for a bail revocation hearing Friday in Luzerne County Court following a sixth arrest since April, most involving drug charges.

Police said the preliminary investigation revealed Painter pulled a gun on the bondsman, who responded by shooting Painter in the abdomen inside 83 Fairview Drive, which is located in a cul de sac neighborhood in the city’s Hanover section.

Painter was taken to Geisinger South Wilkes-Barre for treatment, but died of his injuries, Nanticoke police said.

Investigators said the bondsman, who was not identified, is cooperating and agreed to be interviewed by police.

Three other people were inside the home at the time gunfire broke out and were also interviewed, investigators said.

“Obviously, it’s very early on. We don’t know what the subject of those statements will be. That’s part of the investigation,” Luzerne County First Assistant District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce said.

Painter’s defense attorney, Larry Kansky, said the incident was a “tragedy” that didn’t need to happen.

“It’s sad a young person’s life had to end when most likely it would have been resolved,” Kansky said. “We were all set for the hearing tomorrow.”

Kansky said his client, who had drug problems, probably feared he was heading back to jail, but he thinks he would have been able to convince the court to keep him free with home confinement or electronic ankle monitoring.

Kansky said Painter lived with his grandmother at the Fairview Drive house and she put up her house as collateral for Painter’s bail with AA Bail Bonds in Wilkes-Barre.

“If he absconded, she would lose her house,” Kansky said.

Kansky said he learned Painter had called the bail bonds company asking that his grandmother no longer be held responsible for his bail, prompting the visit by the bondsman to take Painter into custody for Friday’s hearing.

“Did that mean he was going to run? Or refuse to go to the hearing? Or did he want suicide by bail bondsman? I don’t know. That’s something the district attorney’s office is going to have to investigate,” Kansky said.

A representative who answered the phone at AA Bail Bonds said the company did bail out Painter, but she had no further information.

Records show Painter has a lengthy criminal history and was out on bail on six open criminal cases in Luzerne County since April, including one from August in which he swam across the Susquehanna River following a hit-and-run crash in Plymouth only to be arrested by awaiting police when he reached the opposite shoreline in Hanover Twp.

County prosecutors had previously moved to revoke Painter’s bail, which authorities say prompted the efforts to take him into custody to ensure his appearance at Friday’s bail revocation hearing.

Sanguedolce said it is commonplace for bail bondsmen to be tasked with taking a defendant into custody when the person is subject to their company’s bail.

Thursday’s incident occurred around 2 p.m. inside 83 Fairview Drive.

Sanguedolce said the bondsman was “invited into the residence.”

“As he entered, he tried to take the individual into custody,” Sanguedolce said. “The individual pulled a weapon on the bondsman, who responded with gunfire and struck the individual.”

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MCN/USA TODAY NETWORK: The time is right to fix punishment for felony murder

Matthew T. Mangino
MCN/USA TODAY NETWORK
February 19, 2021            

           Pennsylvania has not carried out an execution in 22 years.  More than 58 years have passed since the last prisoner in the Commonwealth was executed involuntarily.

            Although Pennsylvania might not be carrying out executions—Governor Tom Wolf has declared a moratorium on executions—Pennsylvania has thousands of de facto death sentences. There are about 5,200 state prisoners serving what has been referred to as “death-by-incarceration.”

            What is death-by-incarceration? Offenders condemned to life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

           Under Pennsylvania’s sentencing scheme, offenders—other than lifers—are sentenced to a minimum and a maximum term of sentence.  The maximum must be at least twice the minimum.    

            In Pennsylvania, once an inmate has served her minimum sentence she is eligible for parole.  Release from prison is determined by the parole board.  Once released the offender is supervised on parole until the expiration of her maximum sentence. 

            A life sentence in Pennsylvania has no minimum—there is no opportunity for parole—life means life in Pennsylvania. 

            There isn’t much sympathy for an offender who has been sentenced to life without parole for killing another human being.  However, in Pennsylvania more than 20 percent of lifers didn’t kill anyone.  Those offenders were convicted of second-degree murder—felony murder. 

             Felony murder is a statutory crime in Pennsylvania promulgated at 25 Pa.C.S.A. 2502 (b) providing “[C]riminal homicide constitutes murder of the second degree when it is committed while defendant was engaged as a principal or an accomplice in the perpetration of a felony.”      The law in Pennsylvania is clear, if a death occurs during the commission of a felony, the death is considered murder and anybody who participated in the felony is equally responsible for the murder, regardless of whether they had any criminal intent to harm or cause death.

               The concept of felony murder can produce bizarre outcomes.  For instance, two teens go into a convenience store unarmed. They pretend to have guns and ask the store owner to turn over the cash. The owner pulls a gun and kills one of the would-be robbers.  The surviving robber can be convicted of Second Degree Murder and sentenced to life in prison, even though he had no intent to kill and no means to kill.

            Pennsylvania lawmakers have tried to provide hope for those serving life sentences. A recent proposal would have allowed lifers a chance at parole after serving 35 years on a first-degree murder conviction and 25 years on second-degree murder.  The proposal never made it to the floor for a vote.

             Now a lawsuit has been filed on behalf of six people convicted in their late teens of “felony murder,” arguing that prohibiting parole consideration for felony murder is cruel and unconstitutional under Pennsylvania law. Article I, Section 13 of the Pennsylvania Constitution prohibits “cruel punishment.” Pennsylvania’s constitutional provision predates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

           According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs are three women and three men who have served between 23 and 47 years in Pennsylvania prisons. Each was sentenced to life after a felony murder conviction. None committed or intended to commit any killing in the course of the crime.

             The Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole has denied the plaintiffs parole consideration through 61 Pa.C.S.A. 6137(a) that prohibits individuals serving life sentences from parole eligibility. The plaintiffs seek to show the parole statute is “grossly disproportionate to any legitimate penological interest as applied to individuals who did not take a life or intend to take a life, and must be struck down.” 

             With essentially no death penalty in Pennsylvania—and what appears to be the slow undoing of the death penalty nationwide—it is ridiculous to impose the same sentence of life in prison without parole on an individual who commits planned premediated murder and someone who is along for the ride.  The legislature must act to provide a sense of hope for those serving a felony murder life sentence and provide the option of parole for those sentenced in the future.

(Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. in New Castle, PA. He is the author of The Executioner’s Toll, 2010. His weekly syndicated column is distributed by Gannett. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino)

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Portland police guard dumpster with supermarket's discarded food

Roughly a dozen Portland police officers faced off with a small group at a Northeast Portland Fred Meyer after people tried to take food that had been thrown away, The Oregonian.

Workers at the Hollywood West Fred Meyer threw away thousands of perishable items because the store, like many others, had lost power in an outage brought on by the region’s winter storm.

Images on social media showed mountains of packaged meat, cheese and juice, as well as whole turkeys and racks of ribs that had been tossed into two large dumpsters near the store.

A few people gathered about 2:30 p.m. at the store, 3030 N.E. Weidler St., in hopes of salvaging the food.

But within a few hours, people seeking food from the dumpsters began to report police officers showing up to guard the dumpsters and prevent people from taking the items.

Morgan Mckniff, a prominent activist and outspoken Portland police critic who lives in the neighborhood, said employees were guarding the dumpsters when they showed up to get some of the discarded food. Mckniff began to film the employees and reported staff members threatened to call the police on them for doing so.

The store manager called police shortly thereafter, Mckniff said, and Mckniff began livestreaming the interaction on Instagram.

“After that, other people started showing up and asking them, ‘Why are you guys guarding a dumpster?’” Mckniff said.

Mckniff said about 15 people eventually gathered in an attempt to collect food.

At that point, Mckniff said, a dozen officers arrived at the scene. One officer wasn’t wearing a mask and refused to put one on until a supervisor arrived and brought him one, according to Mckniff.

On Wednesday, Portland police said officers were sent to the scene after employees said “they felt the situation was escalating and feared there may be a physical confrontation,” a police spokesman said in a statement.

Also on Wednesday, a Fred Meyer spokesman responded to what had become a deluge of criticism, noting the company donates more than five million pounds of food annually.

“Unfortunately, due to loss of power at this store, some perishable food was no longer safe for donation to local hunger relief agencies,” the company wrote. “Our store team became concerned that area residents would consume the food and risk food borne illness, and they engaged local law enforcement out of an abundance of caution. We apologize for the confusion.”

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Two Ohio lawmakers look to repeal state's death penalty

Two Ohio lawmakers are looking to put an end to the state's death penalty, according to WLWT-TV.

State Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Loveland) and State Rep. Adam Miller (D-Columbus) introduced a bipartisan bill that would repeal Ohio's death penalty, which they called "out of date" and "flawed."

Schmidt said she has reevaluated the issue throughout the course of her life. Once a supporter for continuing the death penalty, Schmidt said more than a decade later, she now feels it is time to end the death penalty in Ohio.

In a release, the lawmakers stated that Ohio has had 56 executions since 1999 and there are currently 136 people on Ohio's death row. Schmidt and Miller feel Ohio could save millions of dollars if prisoners were given life without parole instead of the death penalty.

"It is 2021. It is time to end the death penalty," said Miller. "Apart from moral, ethical, and spiritual reasons to oppose capital punishment, the carrying out of executions raises significant concerns on who is sentenced to death and how that sentence is carried out. It is long past time Ohio joins the global community in ending the death penalty. "

In December, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine declared that lethal injection is no longer an option for Ohio executions, and lawmakers must choose a different method of capital punishment before any inmates can be put to death in the future.

It’s “pretty clear” there won’t be any executions next year, DeWine told The Associated Press during a year-end interview, adding he doesn’t see support in the legislature for making a switch in execution method a priority. Ohio has an “unofficial moratorium” on capital punishment, he said.

“Lethal injection appears to us to be impossible from a practical point of view today,” the governor said.

DeWine said he still supports capital punishment as Ohio law. But he has come to question its value since the days he helped write the state’s current law — enacted in 1981 — because of the long delays between crime and punishment.

DeWine called himself “much more skeptical about whether it meets the criteria that was certainly in my mind when I voted for the death penalty and that was that it in fact did deter crime, which to me is the moral justification.”

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The recipe for mass radicalization

An excerpt from a Politico interview with Michael Jensen, an expert on extremism who leads the domestic radicalization team at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism on mass radicalization:

First, you have to have a vulnerable audience receptive to the extremist narrative—individuals who are scared, angry, isolated and looking for answers that satisfy their own personal biases, looking to cast blame for their problems on someone else. They find narratives that tell them their problems are not their fault; it’s the product of a conspiracy trying to undermine your way of life and well-being. Those messages are deeply appealing, because it’s harder to look inside and question your own decision-making and behaviors. Over the past year in particular, we’ve had an unprecedented situation that has left a very large audience receptive to those narratives. The pandemic has left people scared, without jobs and looking for answers to what happens next.

The second thing you need is an influential voice pushing the extremist narrative. And over the past 4½ years, we have had a very influential political leader [President Donald Trump] pushing a narrative that is not only polarizing—not only highlighting that the right and left are far apart on policy issues and disagree on discretionary spending—it’s a narrative of “othering.” It’s a narrative that casts the other side as evil, as “enemies,” as individuals you have to fight at all costs in order to preserve your way of life. We saw this, whether [Trump’s “others”] were Democrats, the news media or the scientific community. 

The final thing you need is a mechanism to spread that narrative to the masses. Historically, mass radicalization took time. If an influential leader wanted to spread a message, they’d do it through newspapers or political speeches in towns and cities throughout their country, and it could take a while for that message to spread. But that’s not our reality anymore.

Our reality now is one in which a radicalizing message can be broadcast to hundreds of millions of people in a matter of seconds. And if it catches on, you’re virtually guaranteed that millions of people will [believe] that narrative. We’ve seen this in the more traditional forms of media, with outlets like Fox News pushing some of these conspiratorial views, but we’ve also seen it with social media companies not cracking down on this rhetoric early, and instead letting it fester.

Those three conditions [make people] ripe for mass radicalization. And once that narrative changes into a call for action—when it’s not just about changing someone’s beliefs, it’s about inspiring them to act on those beliefs—you get January 6. You get mass mobilization. That’s what we saw.

The question is moving forward is, are those conditions still present? Does the future of extremism in this country look like January 6, or does it look like something we’ve been dealing with for a couple of decades? In my estimation, we are reverting back to somewhat of a mean. The future of extremism in this country won’t look like January 6, but it will look like what we’ve been dealing with for the past couple of decades, [with a] significant threat we have to challenge in a very smart way.

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Report: Reform life without parole for second-degree murder

 Pennsylvania's Lt. Governor John Fetterman says the state's life without parole sentence for second-degree murder needs to be reformed, reported KDKA-AM.

“More than 1,000 people are sitting in jail right now on what amounts to a death sentence despite never having taken a life,” Fetterman said. “That’s not because a judge thought the sentence was deserved. It’s because a one-size-fits-all law makes it mandatory. Any reasonable person who looks at the unfairness of these sentences will acknowledge the need for change.”

Fetterman, who says the law ruins lives and costs taxpayers billions of dollars, cites a new study by Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity as confirmation that the law has to change.

The report states that "Unlike almost every other crime, second-degree murder – often called “felony murder” – does not describe an act but a situation: it applies when someone dies related to a felony. In Pennsylvania, that felony is defined as committing, attempting to commit, or fleeing from an act of robbery, burglary, kidnapping, rape, or arson."

In addition, the law is equally applied to anyone else involved in the crime, known as accomplices, no matter what role they played in the crime.

According to the report, it costs the state an average of just under $47,000 a year to house a prisoner in a state facility.

It's noted that an inmate incarcerated the longest on a second-degree murder convictions is a 73-year-old man whose sentence began in 1971. It's estimated that today date, it's cost the state $2.4 million to keep the man in prison.

The study also says age is a factor that should be taken into consideration. More than 73% of those convicted and serving a life sentence on second-degree murder were 25-years-old or younger.

The study says medical and behavioral science confirms that the brain continues developing into a person's mid-twenties and therefore younger individuals are less culpable, but serve the longest sentences than older individuals with mature brain development.

The report suggests that releasing these prisoners at age 50 could save the state near $1.4 billion.

State Attorney General Josh Shapiro also agrees that changes need to be made. In a release he said, “As a member of the Board of Pardons, I review the facts and circumstances of each case, and this report has provided valuable context for those deliberations,” Shapiro said. “The findings in this report also support the call I have made on the General Assembly to change the law so second-degree murder is not an automatic life sentence and to provide additional sentencing options, and I renew that call today."

The report concludes "While the mandatory nature of life without parole removed discretion at the time of sentencing, it is without question that the Board of Pardons, and the Governor, are vested by the Pennsylvania Constitution with the power to “override” the decision of the legislature in fixing the appropriate penalty for those who have been involved in felonies that resulted in someone’s death decades ago and are transformed people today. This report provides many instances that the Board of Pardons not only could properly exercise its discretion and recommend clemency, but should.

To read the full report CLICK HERE

New Jersey grants defendants new detention hearings due to COVID-19 delays

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Thursday that defendants who are facing prolonged incarceration due to COVID-19 trial delays have the right to a new detention hearing if certain requirements are met, reported Jurist.   

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Jersey and the Office of the Public Defender brought this case. The New Jersey Supreme Court denied the lawsuit’s broad requests that (1) defendants charged with a second-degree offense or less be released if they have been detained for over six months; and (2) defendants charged with a first-degree offense be given a new detention hearing if they have been detained for over six months.

Rather than granting the blanket requests, the court unanimously ruled that defendants have the right to apply for a new detention hearing. The justices explained that the COVID-19 related trial delays constitute a “change of circumstance” under New Jersey statute law.

To reopen a detention hearing, the defendant must have been detained for at least six months. The defendant must also “present new information that was not known that the time of the initial hearing and that ‘has a material bearing’ on the release decision.” Materiality may be dependent on the individual defendant’s length of detention, the length of detention compared to the predicted length of incarceration, the defendant’s plea offer, the defendant’s health risks, and other factors.

Defendants who have been charged with murder or who face a potential life sentence will likely be ineligible to reopen detention hearings.

Regarding the court’s ruling, the ACLU-NJ Director of Supreme Court Advocacy Alexander Shalom said “we’re gratified that the court recognized a desperate need to address the crisis in the criminal courts precipitated by the pandemic.”

To read more CLICK HERE

New hope for forensic practice with appointment at WH Office of Science and Technology Policy

Eric Lander, who co-authored a damning 2016 report on the faulty forensic practices behind hundreds of wrongful convictions, has been tapped to advise newly elected President Biden as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, reports The Intercept.  In the PCAST report, Lander and other members concluded that a host of long-used pattern-matching forensic practices lacked sufficient scientific underpinning, according to The Crime Report. After four years of the Trump administration, which saw federally driven efforts at reforming forensics grind to a halt, many hope that having Lander and other well-respected scientists in key policy positions will reinvigorate those initiatives.

Save for DNA analysis, forensic science disciplines were mainly developed according to the needs of law enforcement — bereft of scientific underpinning. That’s particularly true of so-called pattern-matching practices like fingerprint analysis, firearm analysis, bite-mark analysis, shoe tread analysis, and handwriting analysis, all of which involve an “expert” looking at a piece of evidence and visually tying it to a suspect. PCAST was not the first body to point out the lack of scientific foundation to these practices. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences released a landmark study titled “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward,” which questioned the basis of nearly every forensic discipline used to arrest, prosecute, and send people to prison. Roughly a quarter of the more than 2,700 cases in the National Registry of Exonerations involved faulty or misleading forensic evidence; forensic errors have been implicated in about half of the more than 500 exonerations based on DNA testing.

To read more CLICK HERE

MCN/USA TODAY NETWORK: Virginia begins down the road of racial reconciliation

Matthew T. Mangino
More Content Now/USA Today Network

February 12, 2021

Last week, the Virginia House of Delegates voted to abolish the death penalty. In the modern era of the death penalty Virginia is second only to Texas in the number of condemned prisoners sent to their death. Gov. Ralph Northam has promised to sign the bill, which will make Virginia the 23rd state in the country without a death penalty.

            Virginia’s use of the death penalty dates back over 400 years—to 1608, when Jamestown settlers carried out the first recorded execution in North America. According to TIME, in the centuries since, amid periods of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation, Virginia has executed hundreds of people.

Virginia has also been the setting for at least 87 documented lynchings between 1888 and 1932, including Shedrick Thompson, a black man who was lynched in Linden, Virginia in 1932. According to research by James Madison University, even though a small number of the victims of mob violence were white, lynching was essentially a form of state-sanctioned terrorism against African Americans—few of those involved in lynchings were ever indicted and even less faced trial.

Virginia is also the state that sentenced Daryl Atkins to death twice and where seeking the death penalty for a third time. The irony is that Atkins’ first death penalty was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court when the court declared that executing the intellectually disabled violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment. The landmark decision carries his name Atkins v. Virginia.

Atkins’ case was remanded to Virginia for resentencing and the trial court sentenced him a second time to death.  The case was sent back for a third sentencing when Atkins was removed from death row for an unrelated matter.

Gov. Northam was involved in a racist scandal himself. A decades-old photo of a person in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan robe surfaced from Northam’s medical school yearbook page.

Virginia is the home of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe—literally the founding fathers of the United States of America.  They were also slave owners. Virginia has a lot to reconcile.

Northam’s scandal nearly forced him from office. He resisted widespread calls to resign and pledged the remainder of his term to rebuilding trust and addressing Virginia’s long history of racism and inequity.

To that end Northam empaneled The Commission to Examine Racial Inequity in Virginia Law in 2019 with an examination of racist laws that—though long unenforced—had remained on the books.

The commission is comprised of lawyers, judges and law professors chaired by a former state chief deputy attorney general. The 100-plus page report focuses on six policy areas: housing, education, criminal justice, health, environmental justice and agricultural equity.

In the realm of criminal justice, abolition of the death penalty is a start. Blacks have been disproportionately represented in terms of executions in Virginia.  As for education, the commission proposed overhauling the school funding formula, repealing statutory language that limits the power granted to the state to draw school zone lines, and encouraging programs like choice zoning and magnet schools to improve integration, reported The Associated Press.

With regard to housing, the commission recommended increasing affordable housing and reducing evictions through changes to landlord-tenant laws.

The report also calls for collecting better data on racial disparities in the criminal justice system; loosening or repealing restrictions on voting rights for people convicted of felonies; and closing the gap in healthcare access.

The report provides recommendations, not mandates, but it is a start for a state that a little more than three years ago was maligned for a rally of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville that turned violent and deadly.

To read more CLICK HERE

Joe Ligon longest serving juvenile lifer released from prison

Joe Ligon has been released from a Pennsylvania prison after more than 68 years, as the oldest and longest-serving juvenile lifer in the country. He’s been imprisoned since 1953, when he was just 15 years old, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Leaving the State Correctional Institution Phoenix in Montgomery County, his white hair peeking out below a prison-issue hat, Ligon was accompanied by a dozen large file boxes. That’s about 10 more boxes than regulations normally permit.

“I’m a special guy,” Ligon explained.

“I guess you accumulate a lot of stuff in 68 years,” said Bradley Bridge, a lawyer with the Defender Association of Philadelphia who’s represented Ligon since 2006. Having taken on the mission of getting Ligon home — first legally, then logistically — he had to scramble to fit the materials into his car, commandeering a reporter’s trunk for the overflow.

Ligon, now 82, received his life term for taking part in a spree of robbery and assaults in which two people died. Ligon admits participating in the crime with a group of drunk teens, but denies killing anyone.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that automatic life terms for kids are cruel and unusual, he was one of more than 500 Pennsylvania prisoners all resentenced to terms contingent on lifetime parole.

But Ligon, resentenced to 35 years to life in 2017, rejected the very idea of parole after nearly seven decades in prison.

“I like to be free,” he said. “With parole, you got to see the parole people every so often. You can’t leave the city without permission from parole. That’s part of freedom for me.”

Other prisoners tried to coax him out into the free world. John Pace, a former juvenile lifer and now a re-entry coordinator for the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP), recalled a fruitless visit to the prison with a group of other ex-lifers. “If you want to fight, fight it when you get out,” he counseled Ligon at the time.

To read more CLICK HERE

 

States begin to repeal Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights

Months after George Floyd’s death sparked a national demand to overhaul policing, Maryland lawmakers are launching a historic effort to get rid of police protections such as the bill of rights, a decades-old statute that was the first in the country to codify workplace protections for officers accused of misconduct, reported the Washington Post.

The law was a blueprint for at least 15 other states, including Wisconsin, where Jacob Blake was paralyzed from the waist down after a police-involved shooting this summer; Minnesota, where Floyd was killed after an officer knelt on his neck for over eight minutes; and Kentucky, where police stormed into Breonna Taylor’s home on a no-knock warrant and fatally shot her.

Repealing the protections might seem relatively easy in Maryland, a state where both legislative chambers have supermajorities of Democrats, who have tended to be sympathetic to calls for police accountability and social justice. But prior efforts have failed, including after Black’s death and the fatal injury of Freddie Gray — another unarmed young Black man — in Baltimore police custody three years earlier.

Some blame systemic racism and the disparate treatment of Black people in the state’s justice system, noting that 70 percent of Maryland’s prison population is Black — the highest percentage in the country. Others point to the influence of the police union, which argues that police work exposes officers to special risks and, therefore, requires special protections.

“All I hear is a bunch of adults giving illegitimate reasons for why they can’t do the right thing,” said LaToya Holley, Black’s sister.

 “I am not someone who hates the police,” Jones the first Black House speaker in Maryland, said during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “But over the years, I have had my own experiences with law enforcement, as have my brothers and my sons, that have called in to question the way that we as a state and as a society have empowered law enforcement officers to execute their duties.”

Holley has traveled to Annapolis numerous times since her brother’s death to push for a reform bill that Acevero named in her brother’s honor. She was scheduled to testify before lawmakers remotely Tuesday night.

Maryland’s laws must change “to protect the Antons to come,” she said in an interview. “How many more of our brothers and fathers and sons have to die before you do something?”

Protecting the 'good officers'

Since Floyd’s death, 36 states and D.C. have introduced more than 700 police accountability bills. Nearly 100 have been enacted, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

They range from mandating use-of-force training to creating civilian review boards to requiring departments to report when their officers use their service weapons or other force.

But experts say they are not aware of any state that has repealed the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights. In addition to making disciplinary records public, Maryland lawmakers are also weighing bills that would require independent investigations of officer-involved killings; a statewide use-of-force standard that includes a ban on chokeholds; and a restriction on no-knock warrants.

“Just because it hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done,” Jones said. “This is the time and place to do it.”

Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha, described Maryland’s police bill of rights, enacted in 1974, as one of the “worst” in the country because it contains a provision that makes it impossible for civilians to investigate an officer’s conduct. It also gives an officer five days instead of the normal 48 hours to appear before internal investigators.

“It’s really disastrous,” Walker said.

To read more CLICK HERE

 

New York moves closer to decriminalizing sex workers

 Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill that repeals a decades-old statute that advocates say disproportionately targeted trans people who are simply walking or standing on the street. The legislation also automatically seals any previous arrest records under the statute, reported The Appeal. 

“It’s a beginning of a new era,” said TS Candii, executive director of Black Trans Nation and a Black trans woman who has likened the statute—often called the “walking while trans” ban—to stop and frisk, the NYPD tactic of randomly stopping pedestrians to look for guns that disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx people. 

The repeal of the 1976 law, which was ostensibly meant to target those “loitering for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense,” comes at a time when similar laws are being rolled back across the country. The Seattle City Council unanimously repealed a similar “prostitution loitering” law in June, and California lawmakers are considering pushing for a similar repeal this year. Activists have also started organizing against similar statutes in Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans.

Next, advocates in New York plan to move forward on efforts to make it the first state to decriminalize sex work. (A bill introduced in 2019 never advanced.) They’ll also advocate for a bill that would vacate sex trafficking-related convictions from people’s records, and push to defund the NYPD’s vice unit. And they’ll have to compete with a bill in the state legislature that decriminalizes sex work while still cracking down on sex workers’ clients, a model that advocates argue won’t protect them.

“We know we’re going to win because we have a majority” of the public’s support, Candii said. A 2019 national poll of registered voters shows a majority of voters support decriminalizing sex work.

The “walking while trans” statute repeal and sex work decriminalization legislation both stem from a growing movement for sex workers’ rights across the U.S. The same year the decriminalization bill was introduced in New York, another was introduced in Washington, D.C. In the recent election, a number of Democratic presidential candidates embraced the idea of decriminalizing sex work.

Although the “walking while trans” statute was intended to target sex workers, its vagueness allowed police to harass trans people of color, advocates say. A 2016 civil rights class-action lawsuit brought by the Legal Aid Society alleged that 85 percent of people arrested under the statute were Black or Latinx, and that women had been arrested for “wearing a ‘short dress,’ ‘a skirt and high heels,’ ‘tight black pants,’ or ‘a black dress.’” 

Those arrests and charges can make it more difficult to get government benefits or even employment, Candii said. “It leaves them more vulnerable.”

A surge of protests in New York after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, including a 15,000-person rally for Black trans lives last summer, helped bolster the movement to repeal the law. But reform has been a long time coming, the result of years of organizing and activism by Candii and others. 

To read more CLICK HERE

Mangino a guest on the Law and Crime Report

 

PA Governor looks to fund indigent defense

Pennsylvania is the only state in the country that doesn’t allocate general funds for indigent defense

Last November, experts at the Brennan Center, writing in USA Today, observed that “mass incarceration has been a driving force of economic inequality,” that’s only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

“Involvement in the criminal justice system — specifically time in prison or conviction of a crime — casts a shadow over someone’s life, limiting their ability to earn a living wage in the short and long term,” the Brennan Center’s Ames Grawert and Terry-Ann Craigie wrote. “The effect of prison is especially pronounced: a 52 percent reduction in annual earnings and little earnings growth for the rest of their lives, amounting to a loss of $500,000 over several decades.”

So it was encouraging to hear senior staffers for Gov. Tom Wolf, say that the administration wants to “build support for indigent defense” into the spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Pennsylvania is the only state in the country that doesn’t allocate general funds for indigent defense, according to a 2011 study by the Joint State Government Commission. Those costs are borne entirely by the state’s 67 counties, which each maintain their own public defender’s office.

The state took a token step toward redressing the balance in 2019, providing $500,000 in funding to reimburse counties for costs of indigent criminal defense in capital cases, the Capital-Star’s Elizabeth Hardison reported at the time.

The money, tucked into a piece of budget-enabling legislation known as the Fiscal Code, was distributed through a grant program administered by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. The grant program didn’t go far enough for criminal justice reformers, who called it a token amount.

“It’s a small and … an unrealistic appropriation,” Phyllis Subin, a former public defender who now heads the Pennsylvania Coalition for Justice in Philadelphia, told Hardison. “This is pretty much a drop in the bucket of what’s really needed in terms of appropriate and systemic change.”

Wolf didn’t propose a specific appropriation in his 2021 spending plan, administration spokeswoman Lyndsay Kensinger told the Capital-Star on Sunday.

“The administration is looking forward to working with the Legislature to create this program in Pennsylvania,” Kensinger said.

Whatever dollar figure Wolf and lawmakers eventually negotiate, that money can’t come soon enough, Sean Quinlan, a criminal defense lawyer in Cumberland County, said. That’s particularly true in the case of death penalty prosecutions, he added.

“The death penalty is a political tool used by district attorneys in election years to seek career advancement, not criminal deterrence,” Quinlan, also a Capital-Star opinion contributor, said. “If by ‘increased funding for indigent defense’ the governor intends to plug budget holes in counties out of pocket for defense in capital cases, he’ll essentially be subsidizing the campaigns of county district attorneys, not protecting the poor or fixing a a broken system. Enormous capital case defense expenses are just the symptom. The death penalty is the disease.”

Quinlan is right. While other states are moving toward abolition (Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, like Wolf, a Democrat, is expected to sign an abolition bill any day now.), Wolf, who imposed a moratorium on executions, was notably silent on abolition during his budget address.

Pennsylvania, which hasn’t executed anyone since 1999, effectively doesn’t have a death penalty, so one wonders why Wolf didn’t just shoot the moon and propose eliminating this racist, antiquated and immoral relic.

Wolf’s spending plan does, however, call for probation and bail reforms. As we’ve previously noted, state Rep. Summer Lee, D-Allegheny, has a bill banning cash bail. Rep. Chris Rabb, D-Philadelphia, meanwhile, is expected to soon reintroduce the death penalty abolition bill he pushed in the 2019-2020 legislative session. In a tidy circle, Prejean lent her support to that effort as well.

To read more CLICK HERE

Jail populations are on the rise, some back to pre-pandemic levels

Gordon Weekes, the chief public defender in Broward County, Florida, believed that March 2020 could have compelled the start of something different for the criminal legal system. The COVID-19 pandemic had just hit the U.S. Officials all over the nation needed to decide whether they would risk letting thousands of people contract a potentially fatal disease simply because they were incarcerated in overcrowded and unsanitary jails and prisons, reported The Appeal.

At first, he was hopeful. Local cops, prosecutors, and judges worked with defense attorneys to lower the jail population of Broward County, a region of nearly 2 million people that includes the cities of Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood. By last April, the jail population was less than 3,000 people for the first time in decades. But now, nearly one year later, COVID-19 is spreading at a higher rate, and the county jail population has instead risen once again. Weekes confirmed to The Appeal that, as of mid-January, nearly 3,500 people were being held.

“I was hoping that the pandemic would give people some real-life data to show the justice system, and the ways we’ve been doing things in the past, was inherently flawed,” Weekes told The Appeal. But, he added, “it seems like no one has learned anything from the last year when we’ve been addressing this issue. That is the great frustration you have with the system.”

That frustration is shared in cities around the nation. According to numerous news reports, as well as data obtained by The Appeal, the number of people held pretrial in many of America’s major cities rose during the latter half of 2020. In some cities, jail populations have now risen back to their pre-pandemic populations.

According to a review by The Appeal, jail populations in New York City, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Miami, Broward County, Orlando, and Tampa declined briefly in early 2020 and have since returned to pre-pandemic levels. Other major cities that released some incarcerated people in early 2020, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Columbus, Ohio, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Boston, Indianapolis, Oakland, Denver, and Austin, Texas, have seen their jail populations swell over the latter half of 2020, but they remain somewhat lower than their pre-pandemic levels.

As of Tuesday, more than 452,000 incarcerated people and prison staff nationwide have been infected by the coronavirus, and nearly 2,400 have died.

“I thought everyone would take this as a lesson learned, but it seems old habits are hard to break,” Weekes said.

To read more CLICK HERE

Mangino talks Impeachment 2.0 on Weekend Today on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview about the upcoming second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. 

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

MCN/USA TODAY: An investment in education is an investment in crime prevention

Matthew T. Mangino
More Content Now-USA TODAY NETWORK
February 5, 2021

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf recently unveiled, as part of his 2021-22 budget, a plan to invest $1.3 billion in public schools. As part of the initiative the governor has also taken on a taboo subject - increased taxes.

“My legislative plan is an investment in Pennsylvania’s students, but really it’s an investment in the future for all of us - for every Pennsylvanian,” said Wolf.

Investments are typically made with an eye toward cashing in. Can an investment in education pay dividends?

Several years ago the Alliance for Excellent Education reported that America could save billions of dollars in annual crime costs if school districts could raise the male high school graduation rate. While graduation rates have increased according to a 2019 Alliance report, males and “historically underserved students” have lagged behind.

“The nation needs to focus dollars and efforts on reforming school climates to keep students engaged in ways that will lead them toward … a career and away from crime and prison,” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. “The school-to-prison pipeline starts and ends with schools.”

There was a time when disruptive students were sent to see the principal. Today in some school districts, the disruptive student is handcuffed and ushered off to court. The school-to-prison pipeline is overflowing with students.

According to the Washington Post, more than 3 million students each year are suspended or expelled from school across the United States. Federal data, though limited, show that nearly a quarter of a million students are annually referred to law enforcement.

There is an indirect correlation between educational attainment and arrest and incarceration rates - particularly among males. According to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 56% of federal inmates, 67% of inmates in state prisons, and 69% of inmates in local jails did not complete high school.

The Alliance for Excellent Education found that increasing the male graduation rate would decrease crime nationwide. Annual incidences of assault, larceny, motor vehicle thefts and burglaries could see significant reductions.

In Pennsylvania, and across the country, the potential savings from an increase in the male high school graduation rate could save literally hundreds of millions of dollars in crime-related costs and produce millions in earnings and tax revenue from individuals who are employed rather than incarcerated.

There is more to the crime and education connection than just coursework and passing grades. The combination of largely unnoticed actions undertaken by individual schools affects education climates for millions of students in thousands of schools across the country. These school climates, in turn, often profoundly affect student performance.

The school-to-prison pipeline is fueled, in part, by “zero-tolerance” policies that accelerate the involvement of the criminal justice system in routine school disciplinary practices. The involvement of law enforcement in traditional matters of school discipline has soared as school districts across the country expanded the use of armed police officers in schools.

The nightly news is flooded with stories like the 7-year-old North Carolina boy with autism, whose mother said he was overwhelmed by the “comings and goings in his classroom,” and began spitting inside his special needs school.

The “school resource officer” arrived on the scene, put the boy in handcuffs, and pinned him to the ground, according to body-cam footage of the September 2018 incident that was recently published by WSOC-TV.

This pattern is all too familiar. Just this week, police pepper sprayed a 9-year-old New York girl during a family disturbance outside of school.

An investment in education is an investment in crime prevention. The potential to save money, generate revenue and minimize the anguish that comes with victimization is too important to ignore.

To visit the column CLICK HERE

Minnesota sex offenders involuntarily committed to treatment center go on hunger strike

A dozen men held at a sex offender treatment center in Moose Lake, Minnesota ended a 14-day hunger strike after state officials agreed to meet with the men and discuss their demand for a “clear pathway” for release from the program, which confines sex offenders indefinitely after they have completed their criminal sentences, reported The Dobb's Wire.

A dozen men who had stopped eating called off the hunger strike after Human Services Commissioner Jodi Harpstead offered to hold monthly meetings between the strikers and leaders of the state sex offender program.

The purpose of the meetings will be to discuss the strikers' primary complaint: They have no "clear pathway" for release from the program and its prison-like treatment centers in Moose Lake and St. Peter.

The strike was organized to protest Minnesota's civil commitment system, which confines hundreds of rapists and other sexual offenders long after their prison terms. Some men have been held at the Moose Lake facility for years or even decades, effectively turning civil commitment into what they describe as a life sentence.

The strikers and other detainees maintain that the state program is more focused on warehousing offenders than treating them, and they have demanded that officials increase the program's historically low rate of release.

The protest organizers had been refusing food since Jan. 21. Several of the men said in interviews that they were prepared to be hospitalized or starve to death if the state did not respond to their demands.

By early this week, the strikers reported feeling muscle pains, dizziness, nausea and rapid weight loss from lack of nourishment, according to organizers.

The men finally called off the protest and resumed eating after Harpstead offered to hold the monthly listening sessions, which are expected to begin this month and last through May.

Under the agreement, the Department of Human Services (DHS) will develop a report on the state sex offender program at the end of the discussions and produce recommendations. The agency has not made any commitments to specific changes.

"I am relieved that no one was seriously hurt or died, but this system of indefinite confinement has gone on far too long," said Merry Schoon of Appleton, Minn., whose 33-year-old son, Daniel A. Wilson, is being held at Moose Lake. "These men have families and they deserve a second chance to be productive members of society just like everyone else."

To read more CLICK HERE

MCN/USA TODAY NETWORK: An investment in education is an investment in crime prevention

Matthew T. Mangino
MCN/USA TODAY NETWORK
February 5, 2021

Gov. Tom Wolf recently unveiled, as part of his 2021-22 budget, a plan to invest $1.3 billion in public schools. 

Investments are typically made with an eye toward cashing in. Can an investment in education pay dividends?

Several years ago the Alliance for Excellent Education, which advocates for raising the high school graduation rate, reported that America could save billions of dollars in annual crime costs if school districts could raise the male high school graduation rate. While graduation rates have increased according to a 2019 Alliance report, males and "historically underserved students" have lagged behind. 

There was a time when disruptive students were sent to see the principal. Today in some school districts, the disruptive student is handcuffed and ushered off to court. The school-to-prison pipeline is overflowing with students.

According to the Washington Post, more than 3 million students each year are suspended or expelled from school across the United States. Federal data, though limited, shows that nearly a quarter of a million students are annually referred to law enforcement. 

There is an indirect correlation between educational attainment and arrest and incarceration rates — particularly among males. According to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 56% of federal inmates, 67% of inmates in state prisons, and 69% of inmates in local jails did not complete high school. 

The Alliance for Excellent Education found that increasing the male graduation rate would decrease crime nationwide.

In Pennsylvania, and across the country, the potential savings from an increase in the male high school graduation rate could be literally hundreds of millions of dollars in crime-related costs and produce millions in earnings and tax revenue from individuals who are employed rather than incarcerated. 

There is more to the crime and education connection than just coursework and passing grades. The combination of largely unnoticed actions undertaken by individual schools affects education climates for millions of students in thousands of schools across the country. These school climates, in turn, often profoundly affect student performance. 

An investment in education is an investment in crime prevention. The potential to save money, generate revenue and minimize the anguish that comes with victimization is too important to ignore.

Matthew T. Mangino is the former district attorney of Lawrence County and an adjunct professor at Thiel College in Mercer County.

To visit the column CLICK HERE