Richard Rivera served more than 38 years in prison after killing an off-duty NYPD officer during a botched armed robbery. He was released in July after being denied parole five times.

A member of San Francisco’s juvenile probation commission, a citizen oversight body, talked to the Daily Appeal about her decision to spend a day and a night inside the city’s juvenile hall.

Candidates offered reforms for people accused of low-level, nonviolent offenses, but more than half of U.S. prisoners have committed a violent crime.

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

The parole board failed to comply with a new law about notifying victims, the board’s director said.

The city comptroller, state lawmakers, and advocates call on the state to end its use of fines and fees in the legal system.

People seeking commutations from life sentences encounter a steep hurdle in the state’s board of pardons. The board will convene on Sept. 13 to review more than 20 cases.

California is one of only six states that allow staff in juvenile facilities to carry pepper spray. But LA’s coming ban is still facing pushback.

In a rare move, a federal court vacated Anastazia Schmid’s murder conviction, saying she’d received ineffective assistance of counsel and had been mentally unfit to stand trial. But Schmid, who’d spent 18 years in prison, remained locked up for three months more.

Advocates warn that overuse of ankle monitors and other forms of electronic monitoring produce consequences of their own.

South Carolina’s decision not to evacuate people in prison in the evacuation zone is consistent with an indifference to the humanity of those in prison.

Barred from other shelters, registrants were left with few options as the hurricane approached.

16-year-olds won’t have to reappear in adult criminal court if they’re arrested when youth court isn’t in session.

People who have lost loved ones to violence and to life without parole sentences are calling for an end to these sentences in Pennsylvania.

Senate Bill 136 would repeal one of California’s most frequently used sentence enhancements, which gives judges the discretion to add a year to a felony sentence for every prior felony prison or jail term.

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

The intense interest in conditions at MCC after Jeffrey Epstein’s death was preceded by years when little was done to address restrictions so oppressive one observer described them as “diabolical.” Why do Americans allow brutality, even torture, to go unchecked?

The 2020 presidential candidates recently unveiled national criminal justice agendas that reimagine public safety and punishment.

A lawsuit is challenging Mohave County’s practice of charging certain people for mandatory GPS monitoring before trial.

In 1998, prosecutors failed to tell the defense that a key witness in Toforest Johnson’s capital murder trial would receive thousands of dollars in reward money for her testimony, Johnson’s attorneys say. Now a Birmingham judge must decide whether their argument has merit.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics relies in part on states to self-report prison capacity numbers, which can result in a misleading snapshot of overcrowding in the U.S.

Forty-three elected local prosecutors filed an amicus brief last week in support of the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s office’s Conviction Integrity Unit’s work in the case of Lamar Johnson.

Assemblymember Jim Cooper is pushing to roll back changes that have successfully reduced incarceration.

Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors votes to cancel contract to build Mental Health Treatment Center in place of Men’s Central Jail

In the wake of the Dayton shooting, Gov. Mike DeWine proposed creating more space in psychiatric hospitals by removing some people who are court-ordered to be there.

The same culture exists across the country, experts say—with devastating effects.

Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent death by suicide highlights the problems of adequate mental health care and monitoring in jails nationwide.

Nearly 380 people remain in custody after ICE raids in Mississippi Wednesday. They are likely to be held in immigration detention in Louisiana, far from their families and access to legal counsel.

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.

Black Lives Matter and other advocates have pushed county officials to abandon the $2.2 billion project with McCarthy Builders.

In Cook County, Illinois, 99 percent of defendants deemed ‘high risk’ for pretrial violence don’t reoffend.

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

Richard Kinder thought he would die in an Alabama prison until the Supreme Court ruled mandatory juvenile life without parole unconstitutional. But last year, despite a judge concluding there was “uncontradicted evidence” that Kinder had worked to rehabilitate himself, the state parole board refused him release.