Commentary

In a rare case of local media nuance, a Boston TV news station provided a humane and health-focused segment on safe drug use.

A Pittsburgh public radio piece lacked critical reporting about the many problems with jailing children in adult facilities.

Even in states where use is decriminalized, child welfare systems continue to treat it as a sign of neglectful parenting, particularly among families of color.

Kansas City news outlets called scores of people ‘violent criminals’ based solely on the word of police and the federal government.

Our response to crime should focus on healing and accountability, not punishment and retribution.

How high or low bond is isn’t a measure of how severe the state considers a crime.

Murder rates are at an all-time low in Brooklyn, but one would hardly know it reading the New York Times.

Most coverage of police raids targeting homeless people and substance users parroted official—and fraught—talking points.

The New York Times’s coverage of the one-off case of a 77-year-old man omits key facts about how older adults are treated by our punitive legal system.

The American Correctional Association has granted accreditation to includes detention centers, prisons, and jails where people are held in horrific conditions.

Police unions resist accountability and exert influence over criminal justice reform.

Dozens of reports about an indigent man in Bradenton, Florida, showed the cruel excesses of local news’s homelessness coverage.

The death penalty in the U.S. is dying, and yet Attorney General William Barr announced that the federal government would begin executing people for the first time since 2003.

This month, two research scientists and an attorney published an op-ed about risk assessment tools, which are presented as ways to reduce personal bias in the criminal legal system.

For far too long, the press has leaned on wrong-headed tough-on-crime officials like the former NYPD commissioner when reporting on the criminal legal system.

The backlash is underway against a recent wave of prosecutors who champion criminal justice reform. Here are some methods of attack.

As public servants, prosecutors should be willing to put their cases before anyone in the communities they serve.

Sensational and false news reports about the drug are pushing lawmakers to enact harmful policies.

Since the state’s public safety realignment in 2011, sheriffs have used criminal legal reform as a scapegoat for their failure to maintain safe jails—and recent reporting has given county officials a free pass to make that excuse.