Commentary

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

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. “After 147 years, California residents are now free to turn down law enforcement officials who ask for help with an arrest,” reported Jacey Fortin for the New York Times […]

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.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. “Even before Boston Municipal Court Judge Richard Sinnott had defense attorney Susan Church handcuffed on Wednesday morning, proceedings in his courtroom had gotten bizarre—and worrying,” wrote Yvonne Abraham, […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Anyone who has ever done work combating mass incarceration has most likely been approached by family members and friends asking what they can do to join the […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. While progressives and reformers wax poetic about reducing low-level arrests, one group is making it happen: the NYPD. Not out of some newfound understanding about the moral […]

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.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. This month, billionaire Henry T. Nicholas III, who made his fortune as a co-founder of the semiconductor firm Broadcom, was arrested in Las Vegas for narcotics trafficking […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. The ironies of the Trump administration can seem to pile up, beginning with his campaign against elitism and corruption, and including the first lady’s pet project combating online […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. This week, the two most progressive frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, added their criminal justice proposals to the pile. They […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. At 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, while attempting to serve a warrant, Philadelphia police found themselves under fire. Six of them were shot, and although none were seriously […]

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

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. When Jeffrey Epstein died in a federal jail, the attorney general was, as he tells it, “appalled” and “frankly angry to learn of the MCC’s failure to adequately […]

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

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. No aspect of the Trump presidency has prompted the level of outrage, ire, frustration, devastation, and desperation as his treatment of people who did not happen to […]

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.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. In 2011, Anders Breivik killed 77 people, many of them teenagers attending a Labor Party meeting. He said the murders were justified because his victims embraced multiculturalism, […]

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

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. In 2017, the coalition Freedom to Thrive looked at the enormous outlay on policing and incarceration across the U.S.—over $180 billion annually—contrasting it with the systemic underinvestment […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Americans might be forgiven for overlooking immigration news of late. Some have been busy trying to ease their disappointment over the Mueller hearings, and many, apparently, have […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Nearly 20 million people in the United States are estimated to have felony convictions. This makes up approximately 8 percent of all adults and a full third […]

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

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. For years, civil rights organizations have litigated cases on prison systems’ failures to respect the rights of Muslim plaintiffs to practice their faith. In a report published […]

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.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. This week, The Advocate reported on the case of Gloria Williams, also known as Mama Glo, and her win before the pardon board. Williams has been in […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Last week, court watchers from the Philadelphia Bail Fund and a journalist filed a federal lawsuit to challenge a ban on audio recording during bail hearings, arguing that […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Over the weekend, much of the United States experienced a heat wave. In The Atlantic last week, Robinson Meyer described what was coming as “a vast blanket of […]

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.

Editor’s Note: The Daily Appeal is occasionally examining the 2020 presidential contenders’ records, platforms, and rhetoric on issues relating to criminal justice. You can find past installments here. An article by Campbell Robertson in the New York Times today looks at the case of Angelo Robinson, in prison in Ohio since 1997 for the murder of […]

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

Just about every year while they were on the bench, the Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia would take each other on. “These contests reflect the temperaments of the two men—Stevens’s cautious balancings against Scalia’s caustic certainties,” wrote Jeffrey Toobin for the New Yorker in 2010. Two years prior, in Baze v. Rees, the justices […]

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

“Five years ago, my son said ‘I can’t breathe’ 11 times as officers placed him in a banned chokehold and killed him. After patiently waiting, following the rules, hoping for accountability and closure, we now learn that the Department of Justice has decided not to bring federal charges against Officer Daniel Pantaleo. “The DOJ has […]

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.

Last week, FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums) launched a campaign, calling on state and federal lawmakers to visit a prison, jail, or juvenile detention facility in the next 12 months. The challenge highlights the fact that although legislators make the laws governing when people can be sent to jail or prison, and for how long; […]