Biden Won’t Say If He Still Stands By His Crime Bill’s Ban on Pell Grants for Prisoners
Michael Dwyer/AP Growing up in South Philadelphia, Carl Upchurch dropped out of elementary school and was first locked up for stealing a bike when he was nine. By 13, he was involved with gangs; in his twenties, he was sent to prison for armed robbery. During his 10-year sentence, Upchurch returned to his education, earning…
Should Rape Victims Have to Spend Time in Jail for Not Testifying?
xijian/Getty Images In 2015, Renata Singleton, an accountant in New Orleans, arrived at court in an orange jumpsuit, shackled at her hands and feet. But unlike the other inmates she was chained to, Singleton, a mother of three, hadn’t been accused of any crime. She was still jailed five days earlier on a $100,000 bond…
Can a Prosecutor Ever Truly Be Progressive? Ferguson May Be the Ultimate Test Case.
Credit: Mother Jones; Jeff Roberson/AP On the night Wesley Bell unseated longtime St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch, Kayla Reed celebrated a progressive electoral victory and a personal promise fulfilled. Reed has been protesting and organizing in the St. Louis area ever since Darren Wilson, a white cop, shot Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, in…
The Supreme Court Made a Death Penalty Decision in the Dead of the Night and Justice Breyer Is Pissed
Associate Justice Stephen BreyerJ. Scott Applewhite/AP At approximately 3:00 a.m. Friday morning, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that allows the execution of an Alabama death row inmate to move forward, after a lower court had issued a stay of execution. The order itself was only a paragraph, but Justice Stephen Breyer responded with…
A 72-Year-Old Juvenile Lifer Won a Landmark Supreme Court Ruling, But Louisiana Won’t Let Him Out of Prison
Henry Montgomery at the time of his arrest in 1963 /Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, courtesy of the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange In 2016, Henry Montgomery won a landmark Supreme Court case that gave him and thousands of other inmates hope for a second chance. The 72-year-old was locked up in Louisiana at the age of…
Texas Asked Judges to Stop Throwing People in Jail for Unpaid Parking Tickets. They Didn’t Listen.
Hiob/Getty After Emily Gerrick became a lawyer in 2014 in Austin, Texas, one of her first clients was a mother who was jailed for 21 days because she couldn’t afford to pay her traffic tickets. “She was just beside herself because she didn’t know where her kids were,” she recalled. Gerrick, now a senior attorney…