JPI Daily News Digest 3/21/12
Published: March 21, 2012
CA: New ACLU report on costly prison realignment - counties ignoring cheaper, better alternatives (San Jose Mercury News)
California may be dismantling its prison-industrial complex, but it's quickly replacing it with a jail-industrial complex, a new report released late Tuesday warns. The state's prison population has plummeted -- by 22,440 inmates, or about 15 percent -- since October, according to the report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. That's when the state responded to a court order to reduce overcrowding by adopting realignment, which shifts responsibility to counties for imprisoning and rehabilitating nonviolent felons...
DC: High Court Debates Life Without Parole For Juveniles (NPR)
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in two murder cases testing whether it is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a 14-year-old to life in prison without the possibility of parole. There are currently 79 people serving such life terms for crimes committed when they were 14 or younger...
DC: End the Drug War (Foreign Policy Magazine)
What more evidence does the U.S. government need to understand that the current approach to fighting the Mexican drug cartels is failing? The U.S. general who commands military forces in North America testified before a Senate committee last week that, while the "decapitation strategy" has succeeded in killing some of Mexico's major drug figures, it "has not had an appreciable effect" in thwarting the drug trade. Regional leaders see it even more dimly, as evidenced by their frustrated reactions to Vice President Joseph Biden's visit to Mexico and Central America this month. That trip suggested the White House just doesn't grasp that the approach launched by George W. Bush's administration in 2007, and continued essentially unchanged by President Barack Obama, has been irrelevant at best and disastrous at worst.
NY: Supreme Court Revisits Issue of Harsh Sentences for Juveniles (New York Times)
At a pair of Supreme Court arguments on Tuesday, the justices returned to the question of what the Constitution has to say about harsh sentences imposed on juvenile offenders. A majority of them appeared prepared to take an additional step in limiting such punishments, but it was not clear whether it would be modest or large. The court’s precedents have created so many overlapping categories — based on age, the nature of the offense and whether judges and juries have discretion to show leniency — that much of the argument was devoted to identifying the possible lines the court could draw...
NY: Cruel and Unusual Punishment for 14-Year-Olds (New York Times)
The Supreme Court in 2005 justly banned the death penalty for minors convicted of murder. In 2010, it banned life without parole for youths convicted of crimes other than murder. In two cases argued before the court on Tuesday, the justices should take the next step and ban life without parole for youths convicted of murder...
Posted in Criminal Justice News