Our expert panelists on this webinar spoke about the power of prosecutors to make decisions that affect people’s lives — thousands of times a day. Despite the enormous power prosecutors wield and the fact that a vast majority are elected officials, many of us don’t know their names, when they’re up for election, or…

How did a Mississippi man end up getting sentenced to serve 60 years in prison for purchasing cold medicine and batteries? Blame the state’s ineffective and unjust habitual offender laws — Mississippi’s version of a “three-strikes” law — which continue to ruin lives with extreme prison sentences for relatively minor crimes. Our panel discusses the…

Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis joins The Justice Collaborative to discuss his recently published book, “Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System.” Karakatsanis, executive director of Civil Rights Corp, explores nagging questions of who we choose to punish, how we punish them, and for what crimes, while concluding that the alignment…

Since its formalization, the death penalty has been marked by racial bias, wrongful convictions, soaring costs, and disproportionate impacts on the most vulnerable people. From innocence to redemption, the reasons for ending the use of the death penalty are many, and the longer the practice persists, the more injustice flourishes. Eliminating the death penalty ensures…

How many people are really booked into local jails each year? And for what crimes? Our panel digs into a recent Prison Policy Initiative report that examines the data to help explain the problem of jail churn in cities and jurisdictions across the U.S. Panelists include: Ethan Corey, Senior Fact Checker & Researcher, The Appeal…

Kids should not be in the adult criminal legal system. But every year in the United States, close to 100,000 youth are put into the adult system, most of them for non-violent offenses. The school environment created by constant policing through the use of school resource officers has significant social, psychological, and even physical impact…

During the webinar, panelists discussed how the cash bail system criminalizes poverty, as well as pretrial incarceration’s impact on a person’s later sentencing (especially for people of color and low-income communities) and the myths behind bail as a legitimate form of accountability.  Our panelists explored the social and legal contexts of the country’s bail system…

As of 2016, there were 206,268 people in the United States serving a life-sentence or a de-facto life sentence of over 50 years. It would take an 80% reduction in incarceration to get us to the level of other Western democracies. There is no way to make a significant reduction in incarceration without addressing these…