Pressure from advocates for incarcerated people and investigative reporting pushed California officials to take action in recent years. In 2021 state lawmakers passed a reparations program to provide $35,000 to each person who was involuntarily sterilized while in state custody. 

But that program has compensated only a fraction of the around 800 women identified by a state audit who underwent procedures that could have resulted in sterilization while imprisoned between 2005 and 2013; that state audit also found that prison doctors regularly violated the consent process for such procedures during that time. As of June, the California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB), the body tasked with determining who gets reparations under the program, has approved compensation for roughly 120 of those survivors, according to documents from the board.

The board has denied more than 430 of the 549 applications it reviewed, rejecting about 4 in 5 people who sought compensation, according to documents from the board. The board told Bolts in a statement that more than 200 of the applications it denied came from “currently incarcerated male inmates.”

Advocates helping people seek redress for being involuntarily sterilized in state custody say the high denial rate is a result of the board’s narrow definition of sterilization. For instance, until recently, the board rejected cases of women subjected without consent to endometrial ablations—a procedure that, while not clinically defined as sterilization, greatly reduces the chances of pregnancy and leads to much more dangerous pregnancies for people who can still become pregnant.

This summer, the state compensation board was forced to reconsider an application from Geynna Buffington, who underwent an ablation procedure in prison without her consent that made her unable to get pregnant. The board had denied Buffington’s application four times before she sued and an Alameda County Superior Court judge ordered the board to reconsider, ruling that she was wrongfully denied compensation. The board approved her application about two months later.

After the June court ruling, California lawmakers passed a law that gave people who had previously been denied up until Jan. 1, 2025 to appeal their rejections and ordered the board to reconsider those cases. A board spokesperson told Bolts in a statement that it sent letters to applicants who had previously been denied telling them they could still appeal. 

John Moore, an Oakland attorney who represented Buffington, says her case should force the board to approve other people who sought compensation for ablations. But he’s also worried that, with just weeks to go until the January deadline, many victims still don’t understand that the board will now reconsider a previous rejection. 

Moore also says the extended deadline to appeal rejections won’t help women who experienced forced or involuntary sterilizations in prison who never applied in the first place because of the compensation board’s narrow approach. The board stopped receiving new applications at the end of 2023. And while the board conducted outreach to victims when it was receiving applications, Moore says those efforts overlooked people who didn’t fit their limited standards for sterilization procedures.   

“I think there’s a whole population of hundreds of other women who didn’t even know about the benefit program because they never got the notice that the state was required to send, because the state determined that if you had an ablation you didn’t qualify for benefits,” Moore told Bolts.

Advocates say the state’s compensation program created another burden that retraumatized those who already experienced an injustice by the state. Jennifer James, associate professor at the Institute for Health & Aging at the University of California, San Francisco, had been working with incarcerated women who were sterilized with an ablation procedure and said it seemed like many have given up on seeking restitution.

“For some people who were denied, they just feel like once again, no one cares, and that’s incredibly heartbreaking,” James said. “I think that it felt to some people like it was more of a fight than it should have.”

California’s shameful history of involuntarily sterilizing people goes back to the early 1900s, when about 20,000 Californians were forcibly sterilized in state-run facilities, mostly mental institutions, from 1909 to 1963 to rid society of people labeled “feeble-minded” or “defectives.” California was such a leader in eugenics that historians say the Nazis sought the state’s advice for their own sterilization program in the 1930s.

News about the forced sterilizations in California’s state-run prisons came to light in 2013 with an exposé by the Center for Investigative Reporting, which uncovered that doctors under contract with the state prison system sterilized nearly 150 women without the required approvals between 2006 and 2010. 

The news outlet also interviewed an OB-GYN at Valley State Prison, James Heinrich, who claimed he was providing an important service to poor women. “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for those unwanted children—as they procreated more,” he said in 2013.  

In 2014, the California State Auditor found many violations of the consent process leading up to the sterilization procedures, including physicians failing to sign documents certifying that the women “appeared mentally competent and understood the lasting effects of the procedure.” They also found that the sterilizations were not always reported if they were conducted alongside another procedure, such as a woman giving birth.

The audit also found that the majority of women who were sterilized were between the ages of 26 and 35, and most had a high school reading level. Of the women who received a tubal ligation procedure, which blocks or removes fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy (one of the only procedures the compensation board previously deemed eligible for reparations), between 2005 and 2013, 50 were white, 47 were Hispanic, and 35 were Black. For most, it was their first time being incarcerated.

The report led California to enact a law in 2014 that explicitly prohibits prisons and jails from performing sterilization procedures for the purpose of birth control. Through organized workshops, letters, emails, and social media posts, advocates had raised awareness about the forced sterilizations and fought for more protections.

“Pressuring a vulnerable population into making permanent reproductive choices without informed consent is unacceptable, and violates our most basic human rights,” said the bill’s author, state Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, in a statement following its passing.

James said that there may be even more women who experienced involuntary sterilizations in prisons who might not have realized it happened to them. Some were told they were having minor procedures like a biopsy only to end up undergoing a full hysterectomy. James says women often underwent sterilization procedures for non-legitimate reasons. 

“They were told they had cancer but they didn’t have cancer, and they were told the only option was a hysterectomy and not offered anything else,” James said. “We will never know how many of those 800 people just from 2005 to 2012, their sterilization happened with proper informed consent and with medical necessity and without any infringements upon people’s autonomy, any coercion.”

Following the law banning sterilization as birth control in prisons, advocates began rallying for reparations for those who already experienced forced and involuntary sterilizations. The California Coalition for Women Prisoners and Justice Now were among some of the advocacy groups that pushed for a compensation program during multiple legislative sessions before it finally passed in 2021. The California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB) began hearing applications in 2022. 

The board is a three-member body currently comprised of Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton, who was selected for the board by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021, State Controller Malia Cohen, who was first elected to her office in November 2022, and Secretary of Government Operations Amy Tong, a Newsom appointee who has led the state agency that oversees the board since early 2022. 

Advocates say they quickly found that the board’s process excluded many women based on the type of sterilization procedure they experienced. 

“They didn’t believe that ablation was part of sterilization,” said Chyrl Lamar, an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners who has been helping some of these women appeal their denials. “This is not fair. Some people had gotten out and were trying to have kids with zero results. They can’t have kids.”

Moore, who represented Buffington in her appeals, said the board’s narrow approach made it difficult for many victims to make claims because prison doctors had used several different procedures to sterilize women besides the ones approved by the board as eligible for compensation. Moore said that advocates and lawmakers explicitly left the definition of a “sterilization procedure” open because of this history. He said they “didn’t want women who were entitled to benefits to be frustrated by the state doing exactly what the state did, which is to say, ‘Well, you had an ablation procedure, but that’s not sterilization.’”

According to CVCB documents, 104 of the 431 people who were denied compensation for their sterilization tried to appeal their denial before the court overturned Buffington’s rejection this summer. Of those appeals, only one was found eligible and the rest of the denials were upheld. 

Since this summer’s court decision, advocates like James and Lamar have been trying to reach currently and formerly incarcerated people to let them know that they have until Jan. 1 to file a letter with the compensation board asking them to consider their case.

Lamar says she regularly receives letters from incarcerated women asking questions about sterilization procedures that they didn’t realize they underwent or confused by the procedure they were coerced into that stripped them of their reproductive freedom. She uses a Global Tel-Link account to message women who have reached out about their sterilizations, and helps them work on their appeals. She said that outside of the women who reach out, it can be difficult to identify others who could benefit from the compensation program and help them.

“The problem is a lot of people have parole, go home, change prisons, so I can only really reach the people that are inside,” Lamar said. “Some of the people have given up.”

James said that she has heard women who experienced sterilizations in prison talk about how traumatizing it is, and the process of having to apply and appeal can add to that pain. She said that many have become discouraged or given up.

“There’s no amount of money that’s enough to compensate for having your organs taken away,” James said, “But I think that for folks who have been able to be compensated, there’s a feeling of legitimation, like this did happen, like this was a harm, and that is really meaningful, in addition to the money being a huge help to folks.”

(This story was updated Dec. 20, 2024 after further comment from California’s victim compensation board.)

The post For Survivors of Forced Sterilization in California Prisons, a Rushed Shot at Justice appeared first on Bolts.

The passage of Prop 36 will also lengthen the sentences of some existing felonies up to three years if the crime, like felony theft causing property damage, was committed together by three or more people. It will also require that felony convictions for selling drugs be served in state prisons, whereas currently some of those sentences are served in county jails. The measure will also create a new category of offense, a “treatment-mandated felony,” which carries a prison sentence of up to three years for people with previous drug convictions who fail to complete court-ordered treatment.

Prop 36 reverses some of the changes California voters made a decade ago when they passed Prop 47, which made some felonies misdemeanors in order to reduce severe overcrowding in the state’s prisons. The state estimates that the reduced incarceration from Prop 47 helped save $800 million over the past decade, the majority of which was reallocated to mental health and drug treatment services.

Advocates who supported those reforms a decade ago are now bracing for a reversal of those trends, as the state’s own analysis predicts that costs associated with increased punishment and prison will soar as state funds allocated to treatment services fall with the passage of Prop 36. While this year’s ballot measure was put forth as a way to make communities safer, opponents worry it will bring a drop in services that erodes community safety. 

“Rather than strip money away from resources, we should have doubled down and really fund these things that actually worked,” said Jose Bernal, Political Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “The safest communities are the ones that are the most resourced, and so that’s the alternative. That’s what we’ve been fighting for.”

Advocates for incarcerated people fear that Prop 36 will also exacerbate the overcrowding and dangerous conditions that still exist inside many local jails and state prisons. Sam Lewis, executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, one of the groups that opposed Prop 36, said jails are already severely overcrowded and understaffed, and sending more people to jail will prevent them from getting treatment and prevention.

“We’re going to fill them up with more people, that means people are going to die in there, it means people are going to take a longer time to be able to go to trial, that means more people in the county jail will be suffering instead of actually receiving the treatment that they need.” 

Prison overcrowding, and the dangerous and squalid conditions that it created behind bars, helped motivate California to take a step away from mass incarceration with the 2014 passage of Prop 47. 

At the time, California prisons held about 156,000 men and women in custody, almost twice their holding capacity. The prison system averaged around one death each week as overcrowding created dangerous conditions inside. Civil rights lawsuits over inadequate medical and mental health care eventually led to a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had violated people’s Eighth Amendment rights. The 5-4 ruling, which found that overcrowding was the primary cause for lapses in treatment, upheld a lower court’s order for the prison system to decrease its population by 46,000. 

“Prop 47 was passed because we decided that we want to change felony [charges] so people would not be incarcerated, cost us millions of dollars and human lives,” Lewis said.

From the time the measure passed in 2014 to now, the incarcerated population has fallen from about 131,200 to over 91,800. But after a decade of falling prison populations, Prop 36 is now set to rapidly grow the number of people behind bars in the state. According to an analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative, elevating penalties for theft and drug crimes could increase California’s prison population by 35 percent over the next five years, which would fully undo the reductions the state has seen over the past decade.

A state legislative analysis estimated that implementing Prop 36 would increase state spending on criminal punishment “ranging from several tens of millions of dollars to the low hundreds of millions of dollars annually.” The analysis also estimated that local criminal justice authorities like jails and police departments could see costs increase “by tens of millions of dollars annually.”

The Prop 47 reforms a decade ago funneled savings from decarceration toward community-based support services like mental health and addiction treatment, school truancy and dropout prevention, and job training and housing assistance. Since 2014, the state has allocated around half a billion dollars in savings from Prop 47 to local programs that have helped reduce recidivism for low-level offenses across California. 

As those savings dry up thanks to the passage of Prop 36, so will state funding for those local programs, according to the legislative analysis, which estimated a reduction of state spending “in the low tens of millions of dollars annually.”

Bernal with the Ella Baker Center said he would often hear people who supported Prop 36 say that they thought the measure supported programs for people who needed treatment or housing. He said that grassroots organizers who opposed the measure struggled to convince voters concerned about public safety that it could actually threaten community programs that help prevent crime. “I think the people who voted in favor of Prop 36 really want to live in safe communities and don’t want everyone locked up, particularly Black and brown folks,” Bernal added. “But I think folks were misguided.”

Prop 36 was introduced as an effort to assuage voters’ fears about surging rates of shoplifting and commercial theft, which did increase during the pandemic. This time also saw dramatic videos of so-called smash-and-grab burglaries that spread widely across social media and national news. 

But a longer-term view reveals an opposite trend: Property crime rates are at some of the lowest levels they’ve been in 40 years. More recent analysis by the California Budget and Policy Center shows that rates of shoplifting remain below pre-pandemic levels. 

At the same time, a study of the Prop 47 reforms published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy found that its passage had no impact on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery and burgalary; while motor theft and larceny rates went up, California’s rates still remained below the national average. Bradley Bartos, a professor of government and public policy at the University of Arizona who co-authored the study, said he doesn’t think that “the nitty gritty technical details of the proposition are going to address the change to the landscape of property crime.”

The authors of Prop 36 have also stated that it is aimed to reduce homelessness, but studies show that formerly incarcerated people are ten times more likely to become homeless than the general population. Accordingly, California’s leading homeless policy organizations have come out against the measure. 

Already, observers are characterizing the passage of Prop 36 as part of a larger “pendulum swing” towards harsher punishment in California politics. At the same time voters approved Prop 36, they rejected another measure—Prop 6, which would have prohibited slavery and banned forced labor in California. Los Angeles also ousted progressive District Attorney George Gascon in favor of his more conservative opponent, and in Oakland, voters recalled progressive prosecutor Pamela Price after just two years. More California counties voted red than in 2020. Bartos said “it certainly is movement in the opposite direction California had been moving” over the last decade.

But advocates point out that this swing has much more to do with public perceptions of crime than facts on the ground. Lewis attributes the measure’s success to scare tactics pushed by politicians and harmful narratives from news media that led people to believe that crime was going up, despite FBI data showing otherwise.

“The narrative has been one to scare people, to believe that if we lock people up for addiction, that’s going to help us,” Lewis said. “We did that before, and we found that it didn’t work.” 

Bartos at the University of Arizona concurs: “People’s perception of how at risk they are has changed over the last four years,” he said, in large part due to shoplifting videos that have gone viral on social media.

The Prop 36 “yes” campaign was backed by large retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, which collectively gave more than $4 million to the campaign, as well as statewide prosecutor and prison guard organizations. Bartos fears Prop 36 will give law enforcement officials the discretion to arrest and prosecute low level offenders.

“If police and prosecutors interpret this as a broad countering crime mandate, you may start to see them act as such and be more willing to arrest, pursue,” Bartos said. “It’s going to be a question, how people view it more so than how it changes the calculus of crime.”

Ricardo Garcia, the Los Angeles County Public Defender who opposed Prop 36, said California has “gone back in time 10 years” and predicted a decline in services that will likely lead to worsening drug addiction, substance abuse and trauma.

“After this election, we may find ourselves in the most challenging landscape for the criminal legal system and reform that we’ve seen in decades,” Garcia said. “But it doesn’t mean that we stop the struggle or that the struggle is over. Elected officials need to own the solutions that bring us real safety, accountability and justice, and they need to be proud of them.” 

Lewis points out that poverty is a main driver of criminal behavior, and that addressing people’s material needs is a more lasting solution, rather than mass incarceration. He points to instances he has heard of people being arrested for selling baby formula, for example.

“When we think about people that are committing these petty crimes, do you think they’re trying to take over the world and make a million dollars from that? No, they’re trying to feed their children, but those are also the type of people that will be locking up,” Lewis said.

Numerous advocates have said that they will continue to push local and state elected officials to find ways to fund resources that are going to lose money following the passage of Prop 36. The goal, they said, is to redirect resources into proactive measures like substance treatment, schools, creating jobs, and affordable housing for individuals and families. 

“We’re not going to stop, we’re going to keep fighting,” Lewis said. We’re going to do the things that the government that’s supposed to represent us, that’s supposed to really fight for us. If they won’t do it, we’ll do it.”

The post How California’s Embrace of a Tough-on-Crime Measure May Undo a Decade of Reform appeared first on Bolts.

Cynthia Mendoza’s first pregnancy, in the free world, was a time of enveloping love and anticipation. But in 2006, six months into her second pregnancy, Mendoza was arrested and jailed pre-trial in a Lynwood facility overseen by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Once there, she was sent to solitary confinement, where every good thing she remembered about pregnancy became a horror. “I had nobody to talk to, I had nobody to comfort me,” she told me. Cut off from human contact and the warmth of the sun, Mendoza’s mental health quickly deteriorated. Her access to proper nutrition was so poor that her hair started falling out.

Mendoza gave birth shackled to a hospital bed, and she only got to spend three days with her newborn son. On the third day, jail officials handed him off to her father. Then, already suffering from postpartum depression, she was sent back to solitary confinement. “It felt like I was just stuck in this black cloud, and I could not see a foot in front of me,” she said. She would remain there for nearly three more years—all while she was still innocent in the eyes of the law. 

Some 16 years later, in 2022, a broad coalition of organizers in California introduced an ambitious bill to limit the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons, jails, and detention centers—and outlaw it entirely for pregnant people, as well as a few other categories of vulnerable individuals. They called it the Mandela Act after the South African leader, who was held in solitary confinement for at least six of the 27 years he spent jailed. “Solitary confinement, if done a certain way, drift[s] into the area of torture—and these are correctional facilities, not torture camps,” California Assembly Member Chris Holden, the bill’s sponsor, told me. 

Mendoza watched the bill’s progress with excitement. If it passed, she thought, no one else would have to go through what she did. No other children would have to grow up, like her son had, grappling with the realization that the time they spent in their mother’s womb had been, for her, a time of total deprivation and isolation. 

In 2022, the Mandela Act was passed by the state legislature, but California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it. In 2023, organizers negotiated with the governor’s office to try to come up with a compromise of the Mandela Act that he would consider signing into law. Then, this year, a different organization picked up the Mandela Act’s provision banning solitary for pregnant people and included it in a separate bill focused on improving nutritional standards for pregnant and postpartum women in custody.  

While the Mandela Act stayed stuck this year, this new, narrower bill was adopted by lawmakers in August and signed into law by Newsom in September. But by then, it had grown so unrecognizable to its original community sponsor that they withdrew their endorsement.

The initial bill would have banned solitary confinement for anyone who is pregnant in a California jail, detention facility, or state prison. The version that became law no longer applies to local jails and detention centers, meaning that someone like Mendoza wouldn’t be covered. 

And instead of outright banning solitary confinement, it capped the number of days it can be used. But the result is that the new law expressly allows prison officials to put pregnant women in isolation for up to five days at a time in certain cases. Advocates are alarmed that, for the first time, the legislation has codified in California law that it is permissible to use solitary confinement against pregnant women.

The divergent fate of the two bills is a tidy illustration of what can happen to grassroots efforts to change criminal legal policy in the face of two powerful forces: the California prison system, which enjoys great influence over the state’s elected leaders and tends to resist efforts to impose limits on its authority; and Newsom, whose efforts to style himself as a national leader on prison reform have often involved letting that system guide how and when it wants to change. 

Keramet Reiter, a law professor at UC Irvine who wrote a book on the rise of solitary confinement in California, was frank in her assessment of the new law. “This is an abomination,” she told me. “There are categories of people who unequivocally never, ever should be in solitary confinement, and one of them is pregnant women.”

The debate over solitary confinement in California has been a multi-decade battle between the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) on one side, and the prisoners it puts in solitary confinement on the other, alongside survivors of the practice and their family members and supporters. In 2013, a historic prisoner hunger strike organized by four men in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay led to a lawsuit and eventual settlement, Ashker v. Governor of California, that was meant to lead to significant changes, including an end to the practice of indefinite isolation, which left people languishing in solitary for years on end with little recourse.

But in 2022, when Holden introduced the Mandela Act, he told me that the bill was partially a response to CDCR’s failure to abide by the reforms laid out in Ashker. “CDCR, you have been told by the courts to change how this solitary confinement process works and how it’s being utilized—and to no avail. So we write a bill to say, ‘Okay, we’re just asking you to do what the courts ask you to do,’” he said.

In California, 10 percent of all state employees work in corrections, and their union, CCPOA, has a great deal of lobbying power in Sacramento. The association regularly flexes its muscle via political donations, but its spending on Newsom has been especially notable: the union sunk $1 million into TV ads promoting his gubernatorial run in 2018, and they have more recently spent $1.75 million opposing the recall effort and $1 million on Proposition 1, Newsom’s marquee mental health treatment plan. The latter two expenditures alone represent nearly a third of all CCPOA’s political donations since 2001, according to a recent Cal Matters analysis. 

Newsom has championed some aspects of prison reform during his nearly six years as governor, moving to shut down some facilities and placing a moratorium on the state’s use of the death penalty. But he has also overseen raises and perks for prison guards that even California’s office of legislative analysis found unwarranted. And after the same office determined that five more prisons could be shut down, Newsom declined to implement further closures. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story).

Solitary confinement has remained a cornerstone of prison officials’ strategy for managing incarcerated populations, as they insist that they need to be able to continue to separate people from the general population for safety reasons. And Newsom has repeatedly erred on the side of trusting CDCR’s discretion and allowing the agency leeway to shape its own policy on this issue. (The CCPOA officially opposes the Mandela Act.)

Reiter, however, contends that it’s not an all-or-nothing decision. “Certainly people get in situations in prison where they need to be removed from the rest of the population, but there are ways to do that without restricting their access to natural light, to human contact, to time out of their cell,” she told me. To Reiter, Newsom’s willingness to let CDCR guide its reforms casts doubt on his stated commitment to changing the state’s carceral system. “It raises real questions to me when a governor who claims to be so invested in reform defers again and again in these ways,” she said.

In 2022, after the Mandela Act made it to the governor’s desk, Newsom returned it unsigned. In his veto message, the governor called the bill “overly broad.” He granted that solitary confinement in California was “ripe for reform,” but chose to put the prison system in charge of overseeing that reform, directing CDCR to implement changes to its solitary confinement policies. 
The department waited nearly a full year to do so, until the Mandela Act was once again being debated and nearing the final deadline for Newsom to sign or veto bills. Then, it proposed its own policy changes that would reduce the number of offenses that land someone in solitary and raise the number of hours of mandatory out-of-cell time to 20 per week, meaning that someone in solitary confinement could still be held in their cell for more than 21 hours per day.

At the same time, Newsom’s office was seeking to winnow the Mandela Act into a data collection bill that outlawed solitary only for pregnant women. The Mandela coalition refused these changes, considering them an unacceptable compromise that would allow Newsom to tout a seemingly progressive reform while failing to address the structural problems with prison isolation. Instead, they opted to pause on the legislation in order to keep negotiating with the governor the following year. They already had all the votes they needed in the state Assembly to get it back on Newsom’s desk: “We were simply parked right outside the governor’s door,” coalition member Hamid Yazdan Panah, co-executive director at Immigrant Defense Advocates, told me. 

But come 2024, Newsom wouldn’t engage. The coalition tried to negotiate, but they didn’t get far. In late July, a staffer from the governor’s office emailed the coalition to let them know the door was closed, referencing the recent CDCR changes as justification. “Given CDCR’s relatively recent update to their regulations on the use of [solitary] the [Governor’s office] isn’t comfortable making further changes to [solitary] policy this year,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, organizers with the gender justice organization Essie Justice Center, based in LA and Oakland, were trying to advance separate legislation that would improve the treatment of pregnant people in custody. As initially conceived, Assembly Bill 2527 included a blanket ban on solitary confinement for pregnant women in jails, detention facilities, and prisons across the state. 

Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the bill’s legislative sponsor, had also supported the Mandela Act, but she told Politico that she wanted to ensure these sorts of protections regardless of whether Mandela made it through. But the bill’s focus on pregnant people happened to resemble the narrowed version of the Mandela Act that Newsom’s office pushed in 2023. “Internally within Sacramento or in the capital, I think this bill was pitted against the California Mandela Act,” Essie policy associate Ellie Virrueta Ortiz told me. Virrueta Ortiz believes that legislators and the governor’s office “wanted this to be the smaller, narrower, much more palatable version.”

This summer, as they worked on drafting the bill, Bauer-Kahan’s office called together policy representatives from Essie as well as CDCR. The prison officials were pushing for an exception to the blanket ban: If the move was for their own protection, pregnant women could still be housed in solitary confinement for up to 10 days at a time. 

When I reached out to CDCR asking why they would advocate for this sort of exception, the department’s press secretary responded: “By moving the person from their housing (often a dormitory environment) to a more protective area, CDCR is allowed a window to determine a safe housing alternative. The bill also includes provisions for CDCR works to ensure the pregnant person is allowed to remain enrolled in their programs.”

Essie’s representatives pushed back. The group’s executive director, Gina Clayton-Johnson, told me that their group wasn’t opposed to amending the legislation, but the exception that CDCR was asking for was a bridge too far. 

“No amount of solitary confinement of a person while they’re pregnant is ever fine,” she said.

Soon after, Bauer-Kahan’s staff informed Essie that they had accepted a version of CDCR’s request: The bill was being amended to allow up to two days of restrictive housing at a time for pregnant people. A subsequent draft of the bill raised the time limit from two to five days. Bauer-Kahan’s office didn’t respond to my request for comment.

When Essie’s members saw the new draft that had been submitted to the Senate Appropriations Committee, they learned that it no longer applied to pregnant women held in jail or immigration detention facilities. 

For Essie, this news was a gut punch. “It was something that really, truly was last minute and was unexpected,” Virrueta Ortiz told me. “We know that the real problem is in the jails.” 

Vanessa Ramos, a community organizer with Disability Rights California and a survivor of solitary herself, didn’t mince her words: “The California legislature is viciously and violently co-opting bills from the community, encouraging folks to take obnoxious amendments that not only water down the bill, they create a false narrative that the California legislature is working with CDCR and county jails, to improve conditions—and they’re not,” she told me. 

When organizers with Essie reached out to the coalition supporting the Mandela Act to ask their advice, a member offered language that would enshrine the sort of provisions Reiter outlined: safe isolation that still allowed out of cell time and proper medical care. Bauer-Kahan’s office didn’t accept these amendments.

Finally, Essie made the difficult decision to withdraw their support for the bill. “So many human rights groups had really called us and said, ‘This is not something that we want to see in the state,’ and we really had to listen to that,” Clayton-Johnson said. Over 80 organizations sent a letter to Bauer-Kahan and Newsom expressing their opposition. They urged the governor to veto the bill. A day of action that was originally intended to galvanize supporters of the Mandela Act but became a protest against AB 2527 instead, where Mendoza spoke about her experience in solitary. “It was the most degrading, inhumane thing that I’ve ever gone through,” she told the crowd, her voice shaking. 

But it was too late. The bill breezed through both chambers. “No one paid attention to it, because everyone thought it was the same bill as before,” Yazdan Panah said. On Sept. 27, Newsom signed it into law, leaving the coalition outraged that California had explicitly enshrined into its statutes the use of solitary confinement for pregnant women.

This development “follows a decades-long pattern of nominal reform in this state where the prison system in particular gets just one millimeter ahead of the bare minimum with their policies,” Reiter said. “It feels like reforms that are calculated to avoid actual reforms.”

For now, the fate of the Mandela Act is uncertain, but organizers vow to continue the fight. Ramos credited the veterans of the fight to end solitary confinement in California for refusing to give in to efforts to water down the bill. “The Mandela Act could have very easily been passed, but the receiving end would have been some fucked up bill,” she said. “The Mandela Act has not passed because of the integrity of the people that are leading these efforts.”

“I don’t see the movement slowing down,” Reiter said. She outlined a number of positive changes that have occurred since the days of the 2013 hunger strike: vastly more public attention on the harms of solitary, policy changes that have ended indeterminate confinement. “But are we still overusing solitary confinement? Is the ultimate winner still the Department of Corrections, who’s shown again and again that they’ll set the policies and the terms and that they control the elected politicians?” she said. “So we have a long way to go.”

Holden, the Mandela Act’s sponsor, is termed out of the state legislature this year. I asked him for his reflections on the bill’s future after three unsuccessful legislative sessions and whether he believes that CDCR can reform solitary confinement by itself. 

“If there’s a system that’s working for some, they don’t think that it really needs to be modified to any great extent, then they’re not going to necessarily have the motivation to see that extended change happen,” Holden said. He also noted that CDCR still has never fully complied with the Ashker settlement requiring extensive changes to the state’s use of solitary confinement—and, as of this January, the settlement is now closed. “I think that CDCR is now able to operate in a lane of making the changes that they see appropriate to make, unless directed by the legislature to do something different,” he said. “And that time has not yet come.”

Cynthia Mendoza’s son is 18 now, but the conditions of his birth linger. “It definitely has affected him,” she told me. He has a hard time talking about it, she said, but lately, “we have been working on his feelings and what he went through, having to be born in jail, and then having to visit his mom in prison.”
It remains a tough subject for Mendoza as well, but she told me that she will continue to speak out about her experience despite the difficulty of revisiting the worst moments of her life. “I will never lose hope that my story can help change the narrative for other women,” she said.

The post On Solitary Confinement, California Officials Side With the Prison System—Again appeared first on Bolts.

Gascón and Price’s backgrounds are starkly different—he’s a former beat cop who left his job as San Francisco DA to run in LA; she’s a longtime civil rights attorney—but both came into office vowing to use the power of the DA to redress the harms, abuses, and disparities of mass incarceration. Both issued ambitious policy proclamations that involved keeping young people out of the adult criminal system, ending the use of the death penalty, holding police accountable for wrongdoing, and tamping down on harsh sentencing. And both became the target of intense and sustained opposition campaigns from virtually the day they stepped into office. Reform DAs “are being watched so closely, not only by their constituents, but by people all around the country with big pulpits,” Mona Sahaf, the director of the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, told me back in January. 

In 2020 and 2022, Gascón and Price represented a new chapter in counties where decades of top prosecutors embracing harsh sentencing had led to extensive racial disparities without making residents feel particularly safe. Gascón’s election was fueled by the George Floyd uprising that summer; Black Lives Matter’s LA chapter had protested every week outside his predecessor Jackie Lacey’s office. Describing the sentiment that led to Price’s win two years later, Ella Baker Center political director Jose Bernal said, “We want community members to thrive. We want to feel safe walking on the street. And in order to do that, we need to address the root causes of these social problems.” 

Voters embraced the vision that both candidates laid out—a vision of racial justice, restorative justice, second chances, and accountability for police who abuse their power. But this time around, many of those same residents have rejected the two prosecutors.

“We all have a lot to learn here around how to get past the policy-politics divide,” Sahaf told me when we spoke again on Wednesday. “There’s no evidence that the reforms that Gascón and Pam Price and other reform candidates promote don’t work,” she said, but “what’s very real is people feeling that they are not safe, people feeling that they’re not being heard, people not understanding how these solutions are going to actually make their lives better. That’s where we have a lot of work to do.”

The election results have left reformers asking where the progressive prosecutor movement goes from here. Sahaf cautioned against interpreting the losses as a referendum on the movement’s viability. “I do see wins outside of California for the same exact policies that Gascón and Price put forth,” she said. In Orlando, for instance, Democratic prosecutor Monique Worrell won her job back after Governor Ron DeSantis removed her and installed a Federalist Society member instead. In Austin, reform DA José Garza beat back tough-on-crime challengers in the March primaries and again on Tuesday to hold onto his seat. 

“I think this is about a much larger bucket of frustration that people have with government that they feel is not providing for them,” Sahaf said. But, she added, “it is also that larger frustration that opens up this environment where justice reform is an easy target.” 

The repudiation of Price and Gascón was part of a broader shift in California politics. This week, residents also voted down a ballot measure that would have outlawed forced work in prisons and passed another to increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes, functionally repealing a landmark 2014 sentencing reform that helped reduce severe prison overcrowding. 

This didn’t happen in a vacuum: Since 2020, right-wing politicians, corporations, and police associations have waged a coordinated backlash campaign that has successfully capitalized on people’s fear and anguish during a devastating pandemic. And Democratic leaders in the state and across the nation have responded by shrugging off the mantle of prison and police reform, ramping up the criminalization of homelessness, endorsing tougher penalties for retail theft, and even in some cases directly undermining local Democratic officials elected on a reform platform. In 2020, reform DAs were held up as a solution—perhaps an unrealistically quick fix for decades of mass incarceration. In 2024, they were left holding the bag.

“It was really left on the backs of the people, of grassroots organizers, to push for Gascón,” Black Lives Matter LA co-founder Melina Abdullah told me. “The Democratic Party should have been pushing for Gascón.” 

In the intervening years, the fountain of money that fueled progressive wins back in 2020 has slowed to a trickle: Democratic megadonor George Soros spent nearly $2.5 million on Gascón’s initial election, only to avoid the race entirely this time around. Meanwhile, both candidates’ campaign promises to prosecute abusive and violent cops spurred police groups into action: All 14 law enforcement associations in Alameda County endorsed the Price recall, and at least eight donated to support it. In LA, local and statewide sheriff, police, and prison guard associations gave over $2 million to support Hochman, Gascón’s challenger. Both DAs were opposed by the deputy prosecutors in their office, sparking embarrassing lawsuits and bolstering a narrative of internal turmoil. 

And with the successful ouster of reform DA Chesa Boudin in San Francisco in 2022, recalls were ratified as a viable playbook for monied interests seeking to unseat democratically elected candidates whose policies they opposed as quickly as possible. Gascón, for his part, survived two recall attempts before his defeat at the polls. In Price’s case, a petition urging her recall circulated as soon as a month after she took office, and an official recall committee was organized within seven months. The campaign ultimately raised more than $3 million, receiving hefty donations and loans from the same donor who spent big to recall Boudin. 

“When you’re doing recalls, you gotta have some money somewhere,” Brenda Grisham, the public face of the Price recall movement, told me. “Somebody’s got to pay for those signatures.” 

Price and Gascón were widely seen as flawed leaders who made strategic missteps while in office. They both struggled to rise to the challenge of transforming calcified bureaucracies staffed with people who broadly opposed the sort of change they heralded. Gascón disappointed many by backing away from nearly all of his blanket policies to varying degrees, and by failing to more vigorously prosecute police officers responsible for a number of high-profile shootings that outraged Angelenos. Alex Trantham, secretary for the LA public defenders’ union that endorsed Gascón in 2020 but withheld its endorsement this year, told me that the DA was “definitely an improvement from under Jackie Lacey, but he still, as many elected officials can, changed his policies based on public perception of what was going on with certain cases.” 

Price didn’t have much time to disillusion her supporters. “She had it tough going in…I don’t think she got a lot of support,” Bernal said. From the start, the DA contended with community anger over youth crime and demands for harsher punishment, which clashed with her platform for juvenile justice, which prioritized rehabilitation and keeping young people in the youth system rather than transferring them to adult criminal court. 

But Bernal also noted that the high staff turnover that characterized the office under Price gave the appearance of dysfunction: “It’s not a good look, that many transitions while in office.” He added that Price would have benefited from doing more and better community outreach. Both DAs failed to effectively communicate their accomplishments to the broader public, were prickly and at times hostile to media, and could come off as tone-deaf when dealing with crime victims’ families. 

“You gotta have allies—and she doesn’t feel she needs to,” Grisham said of Price when we spoke in May.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors is now responsible for selecting an interim DA, a task with high stakes considering the appointee will be in office for at least two more years, as much time as Price has spent in office; voters won’t select a DA to serve out the remainder of her six-year term until 2026. (Meanwhile, the president of the Oakland City Council will serve as interim mayor until a special election is held to replace Thao.) Bernal noted that the passage of Proposition 36, which will reduce funding for mental health services in Alameda County, only raises the stakes for the DA appointment. He urged that the board “really look at someone who’s going to continue to really prioritize mental health for our community members, expand mental health courts and pretrial diversion.” 

Grisham, who pushed for the recall, said she hopes the next DA will eschew blanket policies for young people who commit crimes and be more open to working with victims’ families.

In LA, Hochman has vowed to overturn all of Gascón’s blanket policies, including what has been the least controversial and only blanket policy Gascón has stuck to during his first term: his prohibition on seeking the death penalty. Trantham with the public defenders’ union also worries that a return to widespread use of sentencing enhancements and prior “strikes,” both of which Hochman has vowed to revive, will strain the public defender’s office and coerce defendants into unfair plea deals. “You’re forcing people to plead because they’re so afraid of the total maximum time they could be facing,” she said. 

While Gascón walked back his blanket prohibition on charging young people as adults, the office currently only seeks transfers to the adult system in cases of murder. The public defenders’ union believes that Hochman may begin seeking adult prosecutions of young people for a wider variety of crimes. The DA-elect has pledged to seek a “hard middle” that doubles down on long punishments for repeat offenders but preserves second chances for first-timers, but both Abdullah and Trantham say they’re skeptical. 

“No such thing as a hard middle,” Abdullah told me. “What Hochman threatens for Los Angeles County is a new era of lock ‘em up—and devastating and decimating Black communities especially.” 

After we spoke, Tranthem sent me a follow-up message: “We hope that we are wrong about Hochman and that he proves to us that he sees our clients as human beings who deserve a chance at rehabilitation.” 

“The loss of Gascón and that seat is devastating,” Abdullah said. She still thinks it’s worth focusing on DA offices as an important lever of power, but noted that Gascón’s election, and the policy vision he outlined, was always a response to community demands. “An electoral strategy is an important strategy, but it’s also only one strategy,” she said. “November 5th was for voting…I think the answer for November 6th is to organize. To keep the movement going, to redouble our efforts.”

The post Voters Dismiss Two of California’s Leading Progressive Prosecutors appeared first on Bolts.

While there are roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the ballot this year, there’s not much at stake in this election for most of these offices because they drew just one single candidate. But Bolts has kept track of other important races for sheriff and DA all year to identify and cover the elections that are poised to make the biggest difference for local policy. During the primaries, we covered critical DA races from Ohio to Texas and sheriff races from Florida to Michigan.

And now the general elections are upon us. Below is Bolts’ guide to 33 prosecutor and sheriff elections next month—and some honorary mentions, too.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

This used to be the office of Joe Arpaio, the far-right strongman who housed detainees at an outdoor camp called Tent City and was convicted of contempt of court for refusing a court order to stop detaining people suspected of being undocumented, only to be pardoned by Donald Trump. Paul Penzone, the Democrat who defeated Arpaio in 2016, resigned from the office earlier this year, and Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy, is now trying to win back the office for the GOP.

Sheridan is on the Brady List, a database of law enforcement officers with a history of lying, because a judge found that he lied under oath during a civil rights lawsuit. Sheridan has said he’d bring back some of the most controversial practices from his former boss, Arpaio, including building a new facility like Tent City, which the county tore down in 2017. Tyler Kamp, a former Phoenix police officer who switched parties late last year to run for sheriff as a Democrat, is connecting Sheridan to Arpaio’s record of racial discrimination. 

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor 

Just two years ago, Republican County Attorney Rachel Mitchell narrowly defeated a progressive challenger who ran on curbing the punitive legacy of this office. That was a special election, so Mitchell is already back on the ballot, and this time her challenger has a different message. Tamika Wooten, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, has accused Mitchell of “leniency” toward defendants and faulted her use of diversion programs, The Arizona Republic reports. Wooten’s criticism echoes the attacks made by Mitchell’s primary opponent, who lost by a large margin in August.

On abortion, though, the fault lines in this race align more closely with partisan expectations. When the state supreme court revived an 19 century ban on nearly all abortions this spring, Wooten told Bolts that she would not bring charges under the law, saying, “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider.” While lawmakers later overturned the 1864 law outlawing virtually all abortion, a ban after 15 weeks remains in place, and Mitchell has refused to rule out prosecuting doctors. She has also fought an effort by the Democratic governor to prevent local prosecutors from charging abortions. 

Arizona | Pima County (Tucson) sheriff

This race erupted in controversy this week after Democratic Sheriff Chris Nanos put challenger Heather Lappin, a Republican who works in the local jail, on forced leave. Nanos alleged that Lappin helped the newsroom Arizona Luminaria, which has long reported on excessive force and inhumane conditions in the Tucson jail, connect with an incarcerated source for pay. Arizona Luminaria has denied that it pays sources, saying it only reimbursed an incarcerated source for costly phone calls from the jail.

Nanos’ leadership over the jail, which has seen a string of deaths during his tenure, has been subject to scrutiny. Moreover, the county board, which is run by Democrats, has for months pressed Nanos for information about sexual assault allegations against a sheriff’s deputy. Nanos and Lappin have largely blamed problems at the office on understaffing, Arizona Luminaria reports. 

The race is unfolding against the backdrop of a GOP ballot measure, on the ballot this fall, that would ramp up the role of sheriffs in patrolling the border. Nanos has steadfastly opposed the measure, and he has said he would not enforce it. He defeated a challenger in the July Democratic primary who argued for tighter relationships with federal immigration authorities. Lappin said during the GOP primary that she supported the measure but has since backtracked.

California | Alameda County (Oakland), and Los Angeles County

Two first-term DAs in California faced near immediate efforts to remove them from office, plus mutinies by staff within their office angered by their reforms. Now each faces a political threat. In Oakland, former civil rights attorney Pam Price won the DA’s office in 2022 on a decarceral platform, and rolled out policies meant to focus on rehabilitation over punishment. But local forces who opposed her election, many of which had just succeeded in ousting San Francisco’s DA next door, quickly organized a recall campaign against her, Bolts reported in August. 

Further south, in Los Angeles, George Gascón made a splash within a day of entering office four years ago, as he rolled out a suite of policies to reduce cash bail and sentencing enhancements. Much like Price, Gascón faced a deluge of controversy and negative press over specific cases that critics said he did not prosecute aggressively enough, and he backtracked on some of his measures, Bolts reported earlier this year. 

Now Gascón faces Nathan Hochman, who is running on bringing back more punitive policies to the office and accuses the incumbent of having “extreme pro-criminal policies,” even as violent crime in Los Angeles is decreasing. Hochman was the GOP nominee for attorney general two years ago, though he is helped in this blue county by the fact that this race is nonpartisan.

California | San Francisco prosecutor

Brooke Jenkins replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin as prosecutor in 2022, after Boudin was recalled by voters. As Bolts reported at the time, Jenkins quickly disbanded one of Boudin’s major initiatives, a police accountability unit that had prosecuted killer cops. Jenkins won when she faced voters for the first time two years ago, and is now running for a full term. 

She faces Ryan Khojasteh, a former prosecutor in the office who was hired by Boudin and then promptly fired by Jenkins when she took office. Khojasteh is making the case that Jenkins has gone too far in ramping up punishment for teenagers accused of crimes, proposing a return to more rehabilitative policies. He has criticized her for rolling back diversion programs But he has also tried to distance himself from Boudin and eschew some of his policies. This election is overshadowed by the higher-profile races for mayor and city council, which feature similar debates, and even candidates who are proposing to ramp up policing and arrests on matters like homelessness.

Colorado | Arapahoe County prosecutor, and Douglas County prosecutor

Arapahoe and Douglas, two populous counties south of Denver, have long shared a DA. But as Alex Burness writes in Bolts, come 2025, “similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different responses—depending on which side of [a] new administrative boundary they occur.”

That’s because Colorado recently split its 18th Judicial District in two, separating the liberal Arapahoe County (home to Aurora) from its more conservative neighbor. 

As a result, a reform-minded prosecutor may be coming to suburban Colorado. Democrat Amy Padden is favored over former Republican DA Carol Chambers in Arapahoe County. Padden lost her first DA bid in 2020, when she said she’d work to curb jail terms for low-level offenses and reduce the prosecution of minors as adults. She has kept up these themes this year. “We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” she told Bolts in July. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.”

Douglas County is likely to head in the opposite direction. The GOP tends to do very well here, so Republican George Brauchler, a former DA with a punitive record, is favored over Democrat Karen Breslin. Brauchler is running on the unusually harsh promise of seeking jail time for anyone who commits any theft, Bolts reported in July. 

Florida | Hillsborough County prosecutor, and prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties 

Twice since 2022, GOP Governor Ron DeSantis has removed a reform-minded prosecutor from office. The legal battles over whether he had the authority to do this are still ongoing. But the two suspended prosecutors are not waiting for the courts: They’re running to get their jobs back, challenging the people DeSantis appointed to replace them.

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren faces Republican Suzy Lopez, the DeSantis appointee. Lopez quickly rolled back Warren’s policies, Boltshas reported, canceling a reform he had put in place to curb aggressive policing of Black cyclists in Tampa. In the Orlando metro region, in a circuit that combines Orange and Osceola counties, Democrat Monique Worrell faces DeSantis appointee Andrew Bain, who is running as an independent. This race is marred by a legal complaint that the GOP fielded a sham candidate to help Bain.

Complicating both elections, DeSantis may choose to overturn the elections again if Warren and Worrell win, maintaining Lopez and Bain in office no matter the results. He kept that door open in remarks in September, and some Republicans have said they expect it should voters reject his appointees. 

Georgia | Chatham County sheriff

The Savannah jail, long plagued by allegations of neglect and abuse, has become a flashpoint in the race between Republican Sheriff John Wilcher and Democrat Richard Coleman, a local police chief. 

Wilcher’s campaign has received thousands of dollars from jail contractors, including people associated with CorrectHealth, the jail medical provider targeted by a scathing 2019 investigation into treatment at the jail and at the center of a wrongful death lawsuit alleging poor treatment. Wilcher has also stopped in-person visitations, which Coleman says he will restart if elected; such visits can be an important lifeline for people who are detained.

Many other Georgia sheriffs oversee jails with abusive conditions, though they may not be holding competitive races this fall. Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen, a Democrat who oversees a jail where deaths keep mounting, is unopposed, for instance. 

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff, and Gwinnett County sheriff

When Democrats in 2020 flipped the sheriff’s offices in Cobb and Gwinnett, two large counties in the Atlanta suburbs, it prompted rapid change in immigration policy: The new sheriffs immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to cancel their counties’ participation in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local sheriff’s officers to act as federal immigration agents. 

But Georgia Republicans this year retaliated with a new law that requires sheriffs to apply to join 287(g), and hold people suspected of being undocumented when ICE requests it.

The law shrinks sheriffs’ discretion. But Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, an organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights in Georgia, says sheriffs still have room to minimize ICE’s footprint, if they so choose. Even if a sheriff’s office is forced to enter into a 287(g) contract, she told Bolts, it can still refrain from proactively interrogating or arresting immigrants. “The way in which the sheriffs implement 287(g) is under their control,” she said.

The first-term Democratic sheriffs are now running for re-election. Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens, who has spoken out against the new law and said he wouldn’t devote resources to 287(g), faces Republican David Cavender, who says he’d partner with ICE more closely and has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the “open southern border.” Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor faces Republican Mike Baker, who has made fewer public statements and who did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment on his views on immigration. 

Georgia | Chatham County prosecutor, and Clarke and Oconee counties prosecutor

The Georgia GOP adopted a law last year that threatens to remove DAs from office if they adopt a policy to not charge certain types of cases, such as abortion or marijuana. Critics denounced the law as an effort to target a swath of new Democratic officials, mainly women of color. To sign the law, Governor Brian Kemp traveled to Savannah, home of DA Shalena Cook Jones, who ran on expanding diversion programs locally and has defended reforms from Kemp’s attacks.

Republicans also signaled that they hoped to use the law to target Deborah Gonzalez, the DA of Clarke County (Athens) and Oconee County, who’d quickly rolled out some reforms such as ending marijuana prosecutions after winning office. 

The new law hasn’t yet been used to remove a DA. But Cook Jones and Gonzalez are now running for second terms, fighting off complaints that they’ve neglected the duties of their office, and saying they would continue their approach. Cook Jones faces Republican Andre Pretorius, with whom she is trading accusations of misconduct. And Gonzalez is facing Kalki Yalamanchili, a former prosecutor who is running as an independent.

Illinois | DeKalb County prosecutor, and Lake County prosecutor

In eliminating the use of cash bail last year, the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act also made prosecutors the gatekeepers of bail reform, Bolts explained this spring. Proponents say they now hope that prosecutors will implement the law in good faith, though some prosecutors have been clear that they’ll do what they can to maximize pretrial detention. 

The debate is playing out in two prosecutor races this fall. In Lake County, a populous suburb just north of Chicago, State’s Attorney Eric Rineheart was one of very few prosecutors who backed ending cash bail. Four years after ousting a GOP incumbent, he faces Republican Mary Cole, who has centered her campaign around her opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, saying it endangers public safety. (Data shows that crime has not increased since its implementation.)

West of Chicago, in DeKalb County, GOP State’s Attorney Rick Amato is retiring this year after spending the last few years fighting bail reform. Republican Riley Oncken is continuing Amato’s strategy of blaming Democrats for crime, while Democrat Chuck Rose says the law is working. 

Kansas | Johnson County prosecutor, and Johnson County sheriff

Kansas’ most populous county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 for the first time since 1916. Sheriff Calvin Hayden, a Republican, did not take it well, and spent the following years amplifying lies about the 2020 results and investigating unfounded allegations of fraud. GOP voters responded by kicking him out in their August primary, which he lost to Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff. 

Bedford is now running against Democrat Byron Roberson, the Prairie Village police chief. In 2010, Roberson shot and killed a woman with a history of mental illness, Susan Stuckey, in her apartment. The local DA’s office declined to prosecute, but the family demanded answers and had to sue to obtain records that raised questions about the police response. As he runs for sheriff, Roberson has said the events made him more aware of a need for mental health professionals to respond to 911 calls. 

The DA who decided to not prosecute Roberson at the time, Republican Steve Howe, is still in office and he has faced more recent accusations of glossing over police shootings; one investigation showed that he provided a false account of a 2018 shooting. This fall, Howe is seeking a new term against Democrat Vanessa Riebli, a former prosecutor in his office.

Riebli narrowly won the Democratic primary over a defense attorney who campaigned on a more progressive platform, while she focused on administrative restructuring like changing how cases are assigned in the office. She is also running on a promise to guard reproductive rights. One question is whether Hayden’s actions stain Howe: The DA has faced criticism within his own party for not speaking up against the sheriff’s endless and baseless investigation into local elections.

Michigan | Macomb County prosecutor

Peter Lucido faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment while he served in the Michigan legislature. After he became Macomb County’s prosecuting attorney in 2021, an investigation found that he had behaved inappropriately toward women working in his new office. 

Lucido, a Republican, now faces Democrat Christina Hines, who has worked as a prosecutor in neighboring counties. In 2021, shortly after Eli Savit became the reform-minded prosecutor of Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Hines joined Savit’s office and helped develop a restorative justice program. Last year, she published an article that defended restorative justice as a rehabilitative tool that also brings more closure for victims. But as she runs in Macomb County, which Trump narrowly carried twice, Hines has distanced herself from some of Savit’s major policies, such as his decision to stop seeking cash bail, Michigan Advance reports.

Even so, CPAC, a prominent conservative conference that Lucido has attended, attacked Hines this summer with a social media ad associating Hines with George Soros, the billionaire whose super PAC has helped liberal prosecutors win office, calling her part of a “radical plan to fundamentally change Michigan, and ultimately our country.” Hines has denied any direct association with Soros, focusing her campaign on Lucido’s ethical issues, from the many allegations against him to his decision to celebrate Confederate General Robert E. Lee. 

Michigan | Oakland County prosecutor, and Ingham County prosecutor

Two counties east of Detroit feature Democratic prosecutors running for second terms. 

The race in Oakland County will be this year’s clearest test for criminal justice reform in Michigan. Karen McDonald, a self-described “progressive prosecutor,” has expanded diversion programs, and she has helped some people who were sentenced to life without parole as children apply for resentencing. Her Republican challenger, Scott Farida, is a former prosecutor who says the office should be harsher toward defendants.

In Ingham County (Lansing), Democrat John Dewane was appointed prosecutor in late 2022 after his predecessor Carol Siemon resigned. Siemon had implemented reforms to reduce incarceration, including limiting firearm possession charges and refusing to seek life without parole for people accused of murder. Dewane rolled back her reforms when he took office.

The county is blue enough that Dewane is the clear favorite to win a full term next month. But the race is still worth watching because of who the GOP nominee is: Norm Shinkle played a starring role in one of the moments where Trump came closest to overturning the 2020 election results. As one of the four members of the State Board of Canvassers that fall, Shinkle refused to certify the results, amplifying Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. Michigan is intimately familiar with what a law enforcement official willing to entertain election conspiracies can bring: Just an hour west of Lansing, a sheriff has kept investigating the 2020 election. 

New York | Albany County prosecutor

David Soares, a vocal foe of criminal justice reform and the DA of New York’s capital county for two decades, lost in the June Democratic primary to local attorney Lee Kindlon. But he did not concede and he is now mounting a write-in campaign to secure a sixth term.

Bolts reported this summer that Soares has used his bully pulpit to attack a suite of reforms passed by Democrats, most notably the landmark changes to New York’s bail system and a law that raised the age for charging people as adults from 16 to 18. Kindlon is more supportive of the reforms, and he has accused Soares of fearmongering. Albany progressives who back Kindlon say they hope that the election fosters more attention to rehabilitation and diversion efforts, especially for young people. 

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) prosecutor 

Four years ago, Republican Joe Deters held on to this prosecutor’s office after beating Fanon Rucker, a Black Democrat who told Bolts this year that racist messaging against him contributed to his loss. But Deters joined the state supreme court last year, and was replaced as prosecutor by Republican Melissa Powers, who has emulated his rhetoric. She has said that, if she loses, Cincinnati will transform into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” she has called for maximizing prison terms, and she has joined the police union in attacking local judges as “woke”, particularly juvenile court judges that she claims are too lenient. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that a decrease in youth crime belies the fearmongering against judges.

Powers faces Democratic challenger Connie Pillich, a former lawmaker and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. Pillich’s campaign has not focused on proposing criminal justice reforms; as a lawmaker last decade, she sponsored legislation to roll back a reform meant to rule out prison for some nonviolent charges. She has also blamed Powers and prior GOP prosecutors for crime in the county; Democrats have not held this office since the 1930s even as they have taken firm control of the rest of the county government.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

Voters in Cincinnati are also choosing their sheriff. Democrat Charmaine McGuffey is running for re-election in a rematch against her predecessor, Jim Neil. McGuffey ousted Neil in the 2020 Democratic primary in a tense race. McGuffey, who had worked under Neil, alleged that Neil fired her because she’s gay and because she warned about abuse in the jail. She also faulted Neil’s cooperation with ICE and said she’d reduce the overcrowded jail. While the jail population decreased slightly during the pandemic, it still remains well above capacity.

This year, Neil is running as a Republican. He says he wants to resist the “agenda of the Democratic Party” to “not support law enforcement,” and has complained that the county is flying the Pride flag on public buildings. He also says the office could detain still more people, and that it has room to hold immigrants, including by shipping detainees out of the county.

Ohio | Portage County sheriff

Some conservative sheriffs have involved themselves in elections, engaging in yearslong investigations of the 2020 results and setting up task forces to police voting. Enter Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, who in September drew widespread condemnation when he called on county residents to “write down all the addresses” of people with yard signs for Kamala Harris. 

He made those remarks in a xenophobic social media post that used the term “locust” to describe undocumented immigrants. 

Jon Barber, Zuchowski’s Democratic opponent this fall, denounced the sheriff’s remarks, telling Bolts, “I don’t know how it could be interpreted as anything else but voter intimidation.” Barber also took issue with Zuchowski’s “derogatory” attitude toward immigrants, saying, “I don’t know anyone who’s in the United States who does not have some immigration lineage.” Zuchowski is also facing allegations that he forced people held at his jail to work for his reelection campaign. 

South Carolina | Charleston County prosecutor and sheriff

During her 17-year tenure as Charleston’s prosecutor, Solicitor Scarlett Wilson has faced complaints of widespread racial inequalities. Four years ago, she narrowly beat a Democrat who promised to conduct a “racial audit” of the office to address disparities. But the dynamic in this year’s campaign is very different.

Wilson’s Democratic challenger, David Osborne, is a former prosecutor Wilson demoted in 2021 because he sent an email to a defense attorney mocking the office’s mandatory training on racial equity and unconscious bias, The Post and Courier reports. The defense attorney was representing someone charged during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020; Osborne has since accused Wilson of letting down police and not prosecuting protesters aggressively enough. Still, Thomas Dixon, a pastor and prominent local Black activist who has long denounced Wilson for not holding law enforcement accountable for shootings or in-custody deaths of Black people who die in custody, has said he’d welcome change in the office.

Charleston voters did force some turnover in 2020—just not in the prosecutor’s race. Sheriff Al Cannon, a Republican who’d held the office since 1988, lost to Kristin Graziano, a Democrat. Upon taking office, Graziano immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to reduce collaboration with ICE, terminating the county’s participation in the agency’s 287(g) program and refusing to hold people for ICE without a judicial warrant. Prominent Republicans have since attacked her for not detaining immigrants, using the Trumpian strategy of equating immigration and crime. 

Graziano in November faces Republican Carl Ritchie, who has indicated he’d toughen office policies toward people suspected of being undocumented.

Texas | Harris County (Houston) prosecutor and sheriff

A Democratic primary in March already shook up Houston’s DA office: Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in the office, defeated eight-year incumbent Kim Ogg. When a 2017 court ruling held that local bail policies were unconstitutional because defendants were routinely jailed simply for being poor, local officials reformed how the county handles pretrial detention for misdemeanors, but Ogg strongly opposed those changes. Teare defended bail reform while challenging Ogg, and he told Bolts that Ogg had created a “culture of fear” in her office that made her staff overcharge some cases and remain too reliant on pretrial detention.

Now Teare faces Republican Dan Simons, another former prosecutor in the DA’s office who, like Ogg, is accusing misdemeanor bail reform of endangering public safety and misrepresenting the changes in bail policy that followed the court ruling. During his time at the office, some coworkers questioned Simons’ ethics, Houston Landing reported, with one junior prosecutor claiming he told her to lie to a defense attorney to force a plea deal. Democrats have grown stronger in Harris County in recent years, and are now generally favored to win, but some countywide races have remained tight.

If he wins the DA’s office, Teare could have an ally in Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat who embraced the bail changes and some other reforms, but who is also overseeing jails that are rife with abuse and deaths. Gonzalez is also up for reelection this year, facing Mike Knox, a former Houston police officer who wants to ramp up policing and join ICE’s 287(g) program, which Gonzalez left in 2017. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) prosecutor

Another reform-minded prosecutor won in Texas’ March primaries. Travis County DA José Garza beat an expensive challenge funded by tech interests and Elon Musk backing attorney Jeremy Sylestine, who made the case that Garza’s policies were endangering Austin. “We scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform,” Garza said on election night. Garza now faces Republican Daniel Betts, who is campaigning on a similar message as Sylvestine. Travis County is a lot bluer than Harris County, making any race there an uphill climb for the GOP. 

Garza, who has been a foil of Texas GOP officials, also faced a separate effort to toss him from office this year when a county resident filed a legal complaint against him, taking advantage of a new state law providing for the removal of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute certain charges. A GOP prosecutor assigned to investigate the complaint recommended that it not move forward this summer, though a local judge has still kept the case alive.  

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

Fort Worth’s local jail has seen a surge of deaths during the tenure of Sheriff Bill Waybourn. Local organizers have long been demanding an investigation into Waybourn’s practices and accountability over the deaths, and Bolts reported this week that he appears to be flouting a state law dictating oversight, sparking the attention of the state agency that regulates jails.

Waybourn has also ramped up immigration enforcement and helped set up a county task force to police elections.  

Waybourn, who is a Republican, is facing Democratic challenger Patrick Moses, who accused the sheriff during a public forum earlier this year of “neglecting the people that are dying in the jail,” Bolts reported. Tarrant County, one of the nation’s largest jurisdictions, has historically voted Republican but grown more competitive in recent years—a political shift that itself has fueled far-right conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Washington | Pierce County (Tacoma) sheriff 

The 2021 death of Matthew Ellis, a Black man who was hog-tied by the Tacoma police and a Pierce county sheriff’s deputy, sparked a state investigation into local law enforcement and led to the passage of a ban on hog-tying this year. Even as he faced scrutiny, Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer stood by the practice and was the only sheriff to defend it to the attorney general. Troyer also faced a scandal within months of taking office in 2020 for calling the police on a Black newspaper carrier, sparking reform calls from state Democrats. 

Troyer is retiring this year, and two candidates hope to replace him. Keith Swank, a former Seattle police officer, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022 on a platform of cracking down on immigration and blaming crime on “anti-police activists.” Patti Jackson, who currently works in the sheriff’s office, is endorsed by local Democrats and says she’d pursue “progressive initiatives” to address the “root causes” of crime. She’s also touting Troyer’s endorsement.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that helped champion the ban on police hog-tying, told Bolts she’ll demand reforms from whoever wins, including pushing for deescalation policies, changing how mental health calls are handled, and barring police traffic stops for minor infractions—a reform other jurisdictions are considering this election.

And the list goes on | Some honorary mentions

Chicago is poised to elect Eileen O’Neill Burke as its new prosecutor after she squeaked out a close Democratic primary win and is now heavily favored in the overwhelmingly blue Cook County. It’s the same dynamic in Ohio’s blue Franklin County, home to Columbus, where Democrat Shayla Favor, who won a tight Democratic primary for prosecutor campaigning on what she called a “progressive vision for public safety,” now faces Republican John Rutan, who shares conspiracy theories about elections and 9/11 and has been disowned by the local GOP. 

In another blue county, Atlanta DA Fani Willis is poised to win re-election; she’s still prosecuting Trump while running against one of his former lawyers, Courtney Kramer. 

Savit, the prosecutor in Ann Arbor, is running for re-election unopposed and he is bound to gain a new ally: Alyshia Dyer, a social worker, who won a tight primary to become the next sheriff of Washtenaw County. Bolts reported that Dyer has put forth a progressive platform, including ending low-level traffic stops, and she is now unopposed in the general election. Other unopposed candidates include Dar Leaf, a far-right Michigan sheriff in Barry County, Michigan, who has kept investigating the 2020 election, and Greg Tony, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, who rolled back a reform shortly after being appointed to the office by DeSantis.

Elsewhere still, Miami is electing a sheriff for the first time in decades. In Clay County, Florida, a sheriff who was ousted in 2020 after allegations that he wrongfully detained a mistress—he was later acquitted— is attempting a comeback. In Wisconsin’s swing Kenosha County, the site of the Black Lives Matter protests during which Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in 2020, the deputy DA (Democrat Carli McNeill) who authored the criminal complaint against Rittenhouse faces Republican Xavier Solis, an attorney who represented a foundation that raised money for his legal defense. 

Bolts is also watching prosecutor races that could be competitive in Florida’s Palm Beach County, New York’s Westchester County, New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, and Texas’ El Paso County, as well as sheriffs races in Genesee County (Flint), Michigan and San Francisco.

The post The 33 Prosecutor and Sheriff Elections that Matter to Criminal Justice in November appeared first on Bolts.

The last job that Jared Villery had before his 21-year prison sentence ended was working “quick chill” in the main kitchen at Valley State Prison in California, where he would help flash freeze meals to be dispersed for the entire population. The job required Villery to lift trays that he said could weigh up to 60 pounds. But Villery had cartilage damage to his right knee, for which he had metal plates, and he also had pins in his ankle. He said it hurt to do any heavy lifting.

On several occasions, Villery told officers about his knee and that he could be injured on the job. He asked them to put him in a different position, but they refused and threatened to give him a write up if he didn’t work, which would have impacted his impending parole board hearing. Villery was worried that speaking up might cost him his release date. He had no choice but to work the job. 

“I couldn’t refuse or else I’m guaranteed denial of parole, you know, I’m not going to go home,” Villery said. “So I worked, and I kept doing the job.”

Just as he’d warned, Villery’s knee buckled one day when he was lifting a tray out of the freezer, which caused him to fall and hit his head. He had to walk with a cane for two years after that.

“All of it could have been avoided if I had any say whatsoever in how job assignments are made,” Villery said. “But they don’t care. All that mattered was filling the positions.”

Like Villery, many people incarcerated in California don’t have a say in the job they work, and can be met with retaliation if they refuse. They can be forced into prison labor because the state never fully abolished slavery.

California’s state constitution contains the same loophole that’s in the 13th Amendment to the federal constitution, which formally abolished chattel slavery but allowed it to continue as punishment for crime. This allows prisons to force incarcerated people to work jobs they have little to no say in for as little as pennies an hour. Even if someone wants to attend rehabilitative programs or college classes to prepare them for reentry, they can be forced to miss out on those opportunities to work jobs like yard crew, kitchen staff or janitor, which advocates say is counterproductive to the supposed goals of rehabilitation.

In November, Californians will vote on whether to end forced labor in the state’s prisons and jails. Proposition 6, which will appear on the statewide ballot, would amend the state’s constitution to ban involuntary servitude behind bars and prohibit punishment for refusing work assignments.

If passed, the amendment would make California the latest state to close the prison-labor loophole by adding anti-slavery language to state constitutions. In 2022, voters passed anti-slavery amendments in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont. 

Nevada is the only other state this year to be voting on a similar measure. California and Nevada are currently among 16 states that haven’t closed the loophole.

In California, a coalition of advocates, many of whom are formerly incarcerated, have pushed for years to amend the state constitution. They say banning involuntary servitude will give more agency and dignity to people in prison. 

“Forced labor does no good for anyone,” Villery said. “If you are stealing someone’s decency, the innate human dignity that they have by telling them ‘We’re going to force you to do whatever we want’, I don’t see how anybody can ever truly rehabilitate in that situation.”

J Vasquez never minded his work as a porter in a California prison—the job got him out of his cell. But as he started turning his life around, he wanted to seek out programming to focus on healing and accountability. Vasquez had heard about a victim impact class that he wanted to attend, which would help him learn more about the harm he caused. He wasn’t allowed, though, because it interfered with his responsibilities of sweeping and mopping the prison floors.

“Had I put down that broom and went to that victim impact class to take accountability, to learn about the ripple effect and victimization and to work on my own healing journey, I would have gotten a write up,” Vasquez said. “I would have been punished.” 

Like Vasquez, many people in prison may be forced to miss out on healing and rehabilitative programs if they conflict with a job. Vasquez said that having people work meager prison jobs does not get to the core issue of whatever trauma or underlying problems people faced when they entered the system. Work assignments can sometimes make it impossible to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, substance abuse treatment, anger management classes, trauma awareness sessions and college courses with opportunities to earn a degree, said Vasquez. 

“People should not be punished for simply trying to better, heal and rehabilitate themselves,” Vasquez said. “That’s what Prop 6 would do, give incarcerated people the autonomy, the agency to choose what rehabilitative path works best for them at the moment where they’re at in their life.”

A representative for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told Bolts that it has already made some changes since April in alignment with Governor Gavin Newsom’s “California Model”, including raising the minimum wage from eight cents an hour to $0.16 an hour, and transitioning up to 75 percent of full-time jobs to part-time.

“CDCR’s goal is for every incarcerated person to take advantage of positive programming and rehabilitative opportunities such as education, self-help, vocational and other programs,” said the spokesperson. “These career pathways are intended to ease the transition back into their communities and reduce recidivism.”

Advocates for the amendment say prison jobs don’t prepare people for reentry, and that the low pay can make it harder to reintegrate into society and be successful once released. 

“We’re contracted as laborers inside the prison, and the system reaps the benefits as well because we do not have any funding that goes to our social security or retirement,” said Ivan Serrano, peer support specialist at Starting Over, an organization that offers transitional housing and reentry services to formerly incarcerated people.

When Serrano was serving a 25 year sentence at Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, his job assembling eyeglasses was considered one of the better jobs because he made 87 cents an hour. 

Even though he was able to learn skills from the job, Serrano says it did little to help him find work after release from prison, which was already an uphill battle because of his felony. 

He said giving incarcerated people more say over their work would help them better prepare for life outside.

“Forced labor inside doesn’t provide the options to educate yourself or anyone that is serving time in our prison system, because you do not have an option,” Serrano said. “They just tell you that this is the line of work you’re going to do, and you have to do it. You have no choice.”

Villery says his experience with his “quick chill” job wasn’t the first time he had problems with supervising officers. While working a job as a porter in 2015, he faced retaliation from officers who antagonized him for his history of filing complaints. He said that at one point, they even turned away his family after they had driven two hours to see him, using his job assignment to justify canceling the visit. 

Even when Villery did get a doctor to issue a medical restriction saying he couldn’t go up stairs, he said officers would tell him to clean the top floor of the prison despite knowing about his bad knees. He says that one time when he refused to climb the stairs to the top tier, officers took away his property, restricted his access to showers and put him in solitary conditions where he was only allowed to leave his cell an hour a day up to three times a week.

“They held it over my head for months, that if I did anything they didn’t like, they would write me up in connection with that job assignment, because they were my supervisors,” Villery said.

If someone refuses to work, they can also face issues with the parole board when determining their release, Villery said. Sometimes getting a write up can result in loss of good time credits, which usually take time off a person’s sentence, making the time they stay in prison even longer.

Villery, a fellow with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition who has been active in the campaign to pass Prop 6, says he hopes it will take away some of that discretion away from correctional officers and give people inside more control over their lives.

“It’s something that’s so long overdue, having spent so long inside and seeing just the core coercive nature that officers have and the way in which job assignments are used as more punishment than like character development,” Villery said.

A large network of grassroots organizations, as well as other nonprofits across the state, have been advocating for years to stop forced prison labor, since the End Slavery in California Act was first introduced in 2020. That measure passed the state Assembly with bipartisan support but died in the Senate in 2022 after opposition from Newsom’s administration, which raised concerns about how much it might cost. Newsom’s finance department opposed the measure, warning it could cost around $1.5 million to pay people in prison a minimum wage—a policy that was nowhere in the amendment. 

Activists continued to rally around the amendment and proposed it again last year, with added language allowing the state to set up volunteer work assignments for people to earn credits to take time off sentences. Lawmakers passed it this summer, putting the issue on the ballot for voters this fall. 

Most of the advocates who have been pushing for the change are formerly incarcerated themselves or have loved ones in prison. Ahead of the November vote, they have been holding rallies, promoting the ballot measure on social media and educating the public about the dynamics of forced prison labor inside California prisons. Advocates say they often find that the public is not aware that a form of slavery still exists in California. A poll of likely voters conducted in September by the Public Policy Institute of California showed 50 percent opposed to the measure and 46 percent in support.

“One of the most important things that we’re fighting for is for people just to have the autonomy to be able to choose how they want to spend their time when they’re incarcerated and not be penalized when they choose not to work,” said Stephanie Jeffcoat, founder of Families Inspiring Reentry and Reunification for Everyone. 

“This would mean a lot to the people inside, because they don’t have to no longer live in fear of being punished for not going to work,” she added.

Opponents of Prop 6 say that incarcerated people should be required to perform work that helps offset the costs of their incarceration. The editorial board for the San Diego Union Tribune recently urged voters to reject the amendment, arguing it could undermine victims’ rights “by allowing prisoners to refuse to make court-ordered restitution payments.” 

If the amendment passes, advocates say that many incarcerated people will still seek out work to get outside of their cell. Someone might do yard crew just to spend extra time outside, or work in the kitchen to have more access to food. They say Prop 6 would just give consent to the work arrangement and give the people inside more autonomy. 

Even if voters pass it, the amendment alone might not immediately end forced labor in the state’s prisons. 

As Bolts reported last year, incarcerated people in Colorado, the first state to pass an anti-slavery amendment in 2018, are still punished for refusing work assignments long after the vote.

Vasquez says that advocates for Prop 6 hope that it will allow people in prison to have more say in their job decisions and rehabilitative path. He says that if the measure passes, advocates are prepared to ensure CDCR implements it. 

“We want to actually change the conditions for the people on the inside to go to choose what jobs they want to work at, whether they want to work in rehabilitation or education or drug treatment instead of a job,” Vasquez said. “We want to make sure that that is going to happen in practice.”

The post The California Ballot Measure That Could End Forced Prison Labor appeared first on Bolts.

Last July, in the hillside neighborhood of Montclair, California, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price faced a church overflowing with people, many of whom blamed her for the crime in their neighborhoods, and said: “I am the person who is not supposed to be here.”

Price was talking about her childhood. She described how she was arrested as a teenager, how she spent time in foster care, and how the criminal legal system might have been her future if things had gone slightly different. 

Price—battling a recall attempt that kicked off just months after she took office as Oakland’s first Black female DA—had shown up to the town hall that night to defend her vision for the office, which included an unwavering refusal to over-criminalize young people. She ran on a 10-point plan to reform criminal justice. And since taking office, she has instituted policies to keep 16- and 17-year olds in the youth justice system instead of transferring them to adult prisons, and reevaluated how the county treats young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. These issues, Price said, were what had inspired her to run for DA in the first place. She told the crowd, “When I looked at our racial disparities for our young people in Alameda County, I could not look away.” 

Price was making this appeal in enemy territory. Montclair, whose location abutting a freeway may have made it a target for theft, had not voted for her. Neither had the rest of the Oakland Hills, where handsome Craftsman homes and tree-lined streets perch high above the much poorer city with which they share a chief prosecutor. And so after the DA spoke about racial disparities in youth justice—87 percent of children in the county’s juvenile system are Black or Latino—and emphasized her belief in redemption for young people, a member of the neighborhood association that hosted the event took the mic and asked about “one of the elephants in the room”: a series of recent robberies allegedly committed by teenagers. Rumors had been going around that Price’s office had let the young people go without so much as a charge. 

The issue of youth crime has become a flashpoint in Oakland politics. Local news stories of retail theft, robberies, and a small number of serious crimes have captured public attention. People grimace over the news that more than half of Oakland’s students are chronically absent from school, double the national average. This spring, The Berkeley Scanner, a local paper that has been relentlessly critical of Price, broke the news that the DA had decided to keep in the juvenile system a young man who was 17 when he opened fire at a birthday party, killing teenage brothers Angel and Jazy Soleto. This outraged members of the Soleto family, who later held a press conference supporting the recall.

Citizens at the town hall—and especially those backing the recall effort—are looking to the DA to use her prosecutorial powers to halt what they see as a crime wave. “It has gotten out of hand,” one attendee told local news outside the event. Violent crime was up in Oakland in 2023, sparking talks of a “crime surge,” though homicide numbers were lower than in 2022; overall crime is now down 33 percent this year, with reduced rates of homicide, assault, and burglary. Only robbery numbers are up. Still, residents are frustrated at the feeling that nothing is being done to stop young people who commit crimes from developing into violent and unaccountable older people.

Price, meanwhile, wants people to see how the system’s traditional response often forges broken adults as well. With her invocation of her younger self, the DA was asking the town hall attendees to consider an alternative path for young people who have committed crimes. Given the right guidance and resources, she argues, someone they see as a threat now could grow up to become someone like her. In these differing visions lie the fundamental problem: How should the state meaningfully intervene in a young person’s life? What is the line between doing nothing and sending a kid to prison? 

At one point, Price made a request to the audience in Montclair. She asked people to volunteer with the organizations and advocates who work with young people—plenty of whom went through the criminal legal system as teenagers themselves. 

These youth justice workers are Price’s partners in trying to enact a system that prioritizes care over criminalization. For the most part, they argue that the inflamed rhetoric around youth violence bears little resemblance to the teenagers and young adults they see in their daily work. “It feels like young people are being scapegoated,” Dieudonné Brou, the youth advocacy and program coordinator for the nonprofit Urban Peace Movement, told me. 

“We’re hearing things like this is as bad as we’ve ever seen it—without any mention of the pandemic,” and how it affected young people’s mental health and development, said Vamsey Palagummi, the managing director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ). Palagummi spent time in juvenile hall and on probation as a teen and now works on a number of county initiatives that focus on juvenile justice. The recall, he said, “has absolutely consumed our work daily, whether we’re in the commission spaces, whether we’re on the streets talking to folks.”

As recall proponents argue that the county’s approach toward youth crime has become too lenient, people who work on juvenile justice point to a complex mix of issues—legislative changes, resource allocation, trauma and mental health needs—that shape the system long before the district attorney comes into play. Ultimately, Price’s position, influential as it is, represents just one point in this matrix of courts and probation and youth services and school. 

“We also have to work in collaboration with many other actors who are able to intervene in many other points in this complex arena,” Cynthia Chandler, the Alameda County DA’s senior assistant policy chief, told me. “The DA can only intervene in a very small subset of harm.” And by definition, by the time the office is poised to intervene, that harm is almost always already done. 

Palagummi said he appreciates that the DA’s office seems to be considering how to “provide the support that this young person needs, thinking outside of the box, working more with community members,” but he added, “quite frankly, it’s not too different and drastic from the previous administration.” The problem, advocates argue, is not that the system has changed too much or too swiftly—it’s that it hasn’t changed enough.

In theory at least, the juvenile justice system is predicated on the notion, backed by extensive scientific evidence, that young people are both less culpable for their actions and more capable of change than older adults. In this sense, it’s arguably the most compelling place to make the case for criminal legal reform, because it’s where the connections between societal and personal adversity—poverty, discrimination, disinvestment, abuse—and crime are the most obvious. 

“I don’t think that punishment is often, if ever, the answer for young folks,” said Celsa Snead, the executive director of Oakland’s The Mentoring Center, whose work on violence prevention puts the organization into contact with adolescents caught up in the criminal legal system. “Rehabilitation, support, recognition, accountability—all those things are important.” 

With youth crime rates broadly declining since the mid-’90s, many states have tried to overhaul their youth justice systems, with varying degrees of success. Hawaii has touted its investments in community-based alternatives to youth incarceration; in 2022, the state announced that it had reached zero girls in juvenile detention. Maine, meanwhile, has attempted to transform its own approach to juvenile justice, but failed to provide and fund the services necessary to do so, leaving the state a “cautionary tale about the path to reform,” as a joint investigation by the Bangor Daily News and The New York Times put it.

In recent years, California has sought to reshape its youth justice system, but its efforts at improvement have had mixed results. For a long time, young people convicted of serious offenses and kept in the juvenile system—in Alameda, about five people a year—would be sent to youth prisons run by the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice, which were rife with abuse, violence, and neglect. But a “realignment” law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020 closed down the remaining facilities and put youth custody in the hands of counties—specifically, their probation departments. Now, teenagers from Oakland who would have once been sent to state facilities that could be hundreds of miles from the Bay Area are housed in juvenile detention centers much closer to their communities. 

“While that’s a great thing, because DJJ [facilities] were essentially gladiator schools and really horrible places, and young people now have an opportunity to be closer to home, from my perspective, we’re replicating a lot of the harms that we worked really hard to rally against,” said Palagummi.

Since the realignment law, Palagummi and Brou have both remarked that judges are sending more kids to juvenile hall’s “secure track”—essentially, long-term confinement. They worry that judges are expanding their criteria to determine which young people deserve this comparatively punitive outcome (their observations are borne out by Probation Department data).

At the same time, Palagummi said, not enough investments are being made in the sort of care and support-oriented services that kids need. The problem is not in overall criminal legal funding levels, he said, but in how the money gets allocated: “We firmly believe that there are enough resources as it exists right now to provide robust therapeutic services.” On the realignment commission, he tries to advocate for using state juvenile funding “to focus more on diversion and community based solutions” rather than things like overtime for probation staff, a significant chunk of the current budget. Palagummi also cited a therapist shortage combined with a higher level of need after the pandemic’s total disruption to kids’ school routines and mental health. “We do not have 24/7 clinicians—we don’t even have clinicians that can work regularly on the weekends,” he said.

Groups like Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) now have contracts to send “credible messengers,” formerly incarcerated adults who can act as mentors, into the juvenile detention facilities to work with young people. But these types of offerings are still a small part of the overall system, and they’re up against a daunting level of need. Teiahsha Bankhead, RJOY’s executive director, told me that the org also ends up providing critical post-release services for kids—holding welcome-home circles within 24 hours of release, helping them out with groceries, or calling them a rideshare so they can make it to a new job—without a formal contract. (RJOY is currently in the process of applying for one.) “I get kids who are from juvenile hall calling me, my staff, telling us that they’re hungry,” she said. “I don’t care who’s funding us. We’re going to respond to that.” 

Today, Brou is in his mid-30s, a UCLA graduate who runs a footwear company in addition to his work with Urban Peace Movement. The organization is a member of the Alameda County DA Accountability table, a coalition of local organizations who have pushed Price to, among other things, end the practice of transferring youth to the prison adult system in her first 100 days in office. 

Brou knows intimately the harms that can befall a young person in an adult prison. After first coming into contact with the criminal legal system in middle school, he was arrested again at 18 and entered a California prison about a year later. In total, he was incarcerated for seven years—an eternity for an 18 year old, but far shorter than the average young person transferred into the adult system, who, depending on the severity of their crime, might receive a sentence of multiple decades.

Soon after his arrival at High Desert State Prison, about 250 miles away from home, Brou was stabbed in his sleep during a riot. He remains traumatized by the experience. “When I’m sleeping, my family has to be cautious about the way they wake me up,” he said. 

Brou said that any personal growth that he underwent in prison happened in spite of the environment. “There’s no real rehabilitation taking place in the adult system,” he told me. He also stressed that he had other advantages, like a family that cared for him and supported his efforts to enroll in school upon returning home, that many young people lack. “There’s plenty of other young men, I remember they would go home, and they would be back [in prison] within a week,” he said. “I know I can easily be in those other guys’ situation where they’re going back to a traumatic environment where there’s no real support there for them, and then they’re going to be faced with those same decisions.” 

Price has little sway over many aspects of the youth system, but one power the DA does enjoy is the ability to set charging priorities. In May 2023, Price released juvenile sentencing guidelines prohibiting transfers into the adult system absent “extraordinary circumstances” or a highly vulnerable victim. Chandler says that while the office is reviewing a small number of transfer requests made under Price’s predecessor, no new transfer processes have been initiated during her administration. 

Price’s commitment to this directive has drawn fire from critics, including Brenda Grisham, one of the organizers of the recall effort. “I don’t care if they’re 16, 17—when they use an adult gun to kill somebody, they need to be held accountable more than the juvenile system gives them,” she told me. Grisham’s son was murdered in front of her in 2010, but his killer was never caught. She feels as though Price has not done enough to listen to victims’ families or establish transparency about her office’s charging and conviction rates.

Snead of The Mentoring Center told me she suspects that people tend to conflate keeping a young person in the juvenile system with a lack of consequences for their actions. “The philosophy that says if you’re not charging 16 and 17 year olds with crimes as adults [you’re letting them off easy]… what they’re really saying is that you’re not punishing them,” she said. But she stressed that the youth system has always, at least theoretically, centered rehabilitation over punishment—Price didn’t come up with that paradigm. 

Of course, part of the issue is that some parents who’ve lost children to gun violence may want punishment—faith in personal growth and transformation can be difficult to extend to someone who has taken any possibility of a future away from your own children. Relatives of the Soleto brothers, who were killed at the birthday party, have said they thought the case should qualify as one of the exceptions that Price leaves room for in her youth sentencing policy. Grisham agrees. “Nobody said anything about locking people up and throwing away the key,” she said. “Over the course of 25 years, they could become a better person.” (Twenty-five years is the minimum sentence for first-degree murder within the adult system.)

Still, California law leaves the window for a transfer to adult court quite narrow. Owing to recent reforms passed both by the legislature and directly by voters, only minors who are at least 16 years old are eligible to be tried as adults, and then only if the court finds that the teenager in question is “not amenable to rehabilitation” within the juvenile system. According to data from the Alameda County Probation Department, only five teenagers in the county were recommended for transfer to the adult system between 2016 and 2022, when Price’s predecessor was in office. 

In March 2023, when Price’s office announced that the young man who allegedly killed the Soleto brothers would be kept in the juvenile system, CURYJ defended the decision, noting that the probation department also recommended that he be kept in juvenile court. The group has worked with the defendant since he’s been in custody. “While we’ve seen some young people who may not be tried as adults… it’s not like we’re letting kids free,” Palagummi said. He noted that the juvenile detention population has stayed essentially the same since Price took office. 

Another of Price’s campaign promises centered around establishing “age-appropriate programs” for transitional-age youth accused of a crime—essentially, an attempt to extend the rehabilitative principles of the juvenile system to young adults under 25. “When a child reaches the age of 18, that is not some magical line that they cross where they’re ready for the world,” Price told The Imprint after her campaign. 

These efforts are still preliminary. At various town halls, press conferences, and rallies, Price has touted a pilot program that pairs young men between 18 and 25 charged with firearms possession with a mentor, hoping to intervene in their lives, avoid the life-changing consequences that can attend a criminal record, and stop harm before it happens—a rare case where the DA may have some power. 

The DA’s office told me this program currently has three participants, who are being mentored by the Alameda County Probation Department. Participants who are selected have to choose to go through the program rather than follow the traditional path through the criminal legal system. It’s too soon to draw any real conclusions, according to Chandler. Still, she said, “our team has viewed it as successful in that no one who has been involved in this pilot project has engaged in any kind of recidivist behavior.” She said the office is in talks with the court to expand the program, and is also planning to establish other early-intervention models for young people under 18, though they’re far from being ready to implement anything. 

In the future, participants will be working with Youth Alive, an independent public health organization, through their Pathways program, a 12-month-long intensive case management and life-coaching process. “We’re helping them get those supports they need to live a healthy life, whether that be support in getting back in school, in finding a job so they have income security, making sure they have housing security,” Youth Alive’s executive director, Joseph Griffin, told me. “For many of them, what got them to this point was just a mere matter of survival.”

Youth Alive’s intensive mentoring has proved transformative for some of its past participants. “Today, we have many of them who are in college, who are gainfully employed, who have families, who got back in school and back on track,” Griffin told me. But the pilot program through the DA’s office only has the resources to work with six individuals for now, meaning that the vast majority of 18-to-25 year old Alameda County residents will still be routed through the traditional criminal system. Griffin said he hopes the DA’s office will partner with other organizations and county departments to expand the services available for that age group, including people who might not jibe with the Youth Alive model. “It’s important [for the DA] to really keep eyes open and recognize that addressing violence and addressing the type of healing and support that’s needed isn’t one size fits all,” he said.

During her campaign for DA, Price talked often about restorative justice. “Our goal is to keep people out of the system and to create a pathway that does not involve punitive prosecution,” she told me about a month before her election. But fully integrating restorative justice into the criminal legal system would require a level of transformative change that still feels a long way off, the youth justice advocates I interviewed said—even for young people, who already benefit from a more restorative approach than their adult counterparts. 

Grisham, the recall proponent, said that she hasn’t seen restorative justice as she understands it being employed in the Alameda County criminal legal system. “Restorative justice is the person that committed the crime is supposed to go to the person that they harmed and make amends,” she said. “None of that’s being done… none of the victims I know have talked to the people that killed their kids.” 

Palagummi argues that restorative justice can be practiced even without this type of formalized sit-down, though he said that CURYJ tries to engage with families of victims whenever they can. He praised organizations like RJOY’s work with young people in custody, but noted that “we have yet to see anything formalized as part of the court process” with regards to restorative justice. “We would love to see just more intentionality around that, but it would really take a paradigm shift from all parties, not just the DA’s office,” he added.

The idea of some greater paradigm shift toward restorative justice for youth offenders may have seemed possible, if optimistic, when Price swept into office in November 2022. Now, though, as her November 5 recall election date draws nearer, and voters bay for more punishment, including for young people, it seems positively fanciful. 

One issue may be how the office is explaining its distinct approach to the public. Price’s first goal in the 10-point plan she campaigned on was to “restore public trust in our criminal justice system,” but her administration’s relationship to the press ranges from bewilderingly disorganized to outright antagonistic. As I reported this piece, Price’s office stalled on my requests for an interview with the DA for months, while declining my entreaties to speak with any other member of the office who worked on youth justice until the last possible second.

Price’s sense that she has been subjected to unfair scrutiny and criticism because of her identity and goals for the office is doubtless legitimate. “Reform prosecutors are under a serious microscope,” Mona Sahaf, who runs the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, told me. “There’s very little grace or forgiveness given even though prosecutors all over the country are making mistakes and errors all the time.” And a special level of vitriol has been reserved for Black female DAs who advance a reform agenda. 

The recall against Price, which is majorly funded by one of the biggest donors to the successful effort to oust DA Chesa Boudin just across the bay, was launched before she’d had a chance to prove herself in the job, and Price has received little support from Governor Gavin Newsom, who recently announced he’d be sending National Guard prosecutors to take over narcotics cases from the Alameda DA’s office—an act of preemption that feels more in line with recent moves by hard-right Southern governors like Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and Florida’s Ron DeSantis than the act of a fellow Bay Area Democrat. But Price and her deputies’ unwillingness to communicate clearly about their policies and practices may have left the office more vulnerable to criticism, good and bad faith alike. 

There is no public polling available to give a hint of how Price may fare in November, but the recall committee has raised well over $3 million in their efforts to oust her, including large donations from real estate interests and hedge fund managers. A committee defending the DA has raised less than 10 percent of that. And even if Price holds on to her seat, she will still be attempting to realize her agenda in more or less the same climate as now: up against the disorganization of her own office, a generalized backlash to criminal justice reform, and a voter base with little patience for the time it would take to bring about the change in people’s lives that might reduce crime in the first place. 

“It took us 30 years, with those old policies, to put us in this predicament that we are now,” Brou reflected when we spoke. “It’ll take just as much time for us to get out of those practices of punishment, and really focusing and really investing in rehabilitation, alternatives to incarceration, and healing.” That’s the sort of work that can’t be measured on the same timeline as district attorney elections—or recalls, which happen even quicker.

The post In Oakland, a DA’s Vision for Youth Justice Collides with a Recall Movement Leery of Second Chances appeared first on Bolts.

After giving birth in 2011, Eboney Ellis says she didn’t get any time to bond with her new son. Ellis, who was incarcerated and in the custody of the California prison system, says her baby was taken away so fast that she could barely even lay eyes on him and didn’t learn the baby’s gender. 

Ellis says she was given prenatal vitamins from the time she first got to prison during her pregnancy but never got access to a personal social worker she could consult if she had a question. For incarcerated women who are pregnant, social workers can be the middle person between them and an intentional start for a newborn, as they often help facilitate things like family finding, information sharing, lactation, and more. She still considered herself lucky because her family was there to pick up her baby, unlike some women whose children are quickly taken by child protective services.

“I was never able to see this child,” Ellis said. “From the moment the child was taken out, it was taken away from me.”

Ellis is now part of a coalition of advocates pushing for more humane treatment of pregnant people in California prisons. This year, they have been rallying behind proposed legislation that would mandate that people get to spend at least three days with newborns after giving birth in state prison custody—an increase from the current one to three days before removing the child and returning them to prison. Advocates say that currently, many women get little to no time with newborns after giving birth, and there is no current standard to protect and expand that time.

The proposed legislation, Assembly Bill 2740, would also codify that prison officials connect pregnant people with social workers within a week of entering prison custody or being identified as pregnant. Additionally, the bill requires prison staff to expedite the visitation process so that incarcerated mothers can have overnight visits with their newborns as soon as possible. It would also require an incarcerated mother to be permitted to breastfeed their newborn and pump breast milk to be stored and provided to the child once they’re separated.

Ellis says she is advocating for AB 2740 because it is her personal story. “It was such a horrific thing,” Ellis said. “It meant everything for me to reach back and do whatever I can to make that situation a little bit more softer, a little bit more personal.”

During a legislative hearing in late May, State Assemblymember Marie Waldron, who introduced AB 2740, said that it “recognizes the fundamental rights and health needs of women and their babies in state custody.” 

“It is undeniable that prenatal and postpartum care are very important,” Waldron said during the hearing. “Reimagining outcomes of infants born in California state prisons will strengthen family bonds and reduce recidivism.”

The bill passed with unanimous approval during a May 22 floor vote in the state Assembly but has yet to clear the state Senate, which is in its final stretch of hearings before this year’s legislative session ends on Aug. 31.

As it stands, care provided to pregnant women in California prisons amounts to little more than prenatal vitamins and OB-GYN appointments, as described by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Operations Manual. De Anna Pittman, a program manager with the Young Women’s Freedom Center, which is part of the coalition pushing the reform bill, says the state needs to bolster care for people who give birth in CDCR custody. She points to research showing that a lack of bonding time and breastfeeding puts newborns at increased risk of poor health and worse developmental outcomes. 

“The state of care for incarcerated pregnant people in California is not what it should be. There’s no dignity in giving birth in prison,” Pittman said. “There’s just a lot of confusion and honestly a lot of heartbreak. The process of giving birth is already a traumatic process, and to have your baby ripped away from you instantly is terrible.” 

Pittman also emphasized the importance of access to social workers and expedited visitation because she says that many women could still get released while their children are young. Research shows that when incarcerated people have strong family ties, recidivism decreases.

“We want to give parents the tools that they need, so when they get out, they’re not coming back in,” Pittman said.

Just two days after Jonala Vann found out she was pregnant in 2011, she was sent to jail for a nonviolent probation violation. She said the care she was able to obtain while incarcerated at a Riverside County Jail in Southern California paled in comparison to the time she was pregnant with her daughter outside of prison two years prior; Vann said she was not given prenatal vitamins and was only given an ultrasound a handful of times.

Right before she went into labor, Vann had gone to a court hearing to see whether her case would go to trial or be dropped. She hoped a judge would let her go home to have her baby, but instead she was sent back to jail.

“I was really hoping just to have my daughter, even if I had to serve out my time, I just wanted to have her free,” Vann said.

After she gave birth, Vann was only given 16 hours with her baby. She said she did not sleep after childbirth because she didn’t want to miss any moments with the baby and knew they would soon be separated. She stayed up singing “You’ll Be in My Heart” from the Disney movie “Tarzan”, a song she sang to her baby all the time when pregnant, hoping her daughter could recognize her voice.

“[Those 16 hours] were really hard because I knew that I was going to have to give her up,” Vann said. “I was trying to enjoy them but at the same time I couldn’t help but feel really sad and upset that I put myself in the situation.”

It would be about seven months before Vann got to see her daughter again. She remembers the first visit as “the best and the hardest at the same time. It was nice holding my daughter and getting time to bond, but it was difficult when it came down to leaving.”

Research on pregnancy and incarceration estimates that some 55,000 pregnant people are admitted to U.S. jails every year and about 1,400 to U.S. prisons. Carolyn Sufrin, an OB-GYN who started the Pregnancy in Prison Statistics Project to advocate for reproductive justice for incarcerated people, says that treatment of pregnant people typically varies from facility to facility and that there are often barriers to the kind of care pregnant people might expect to get on the outside. 

“You can’t control your own access to health care, you’re completely reliant on the facility for that. Sometimes that works out, but many times it doesn’t,” Sufrin said. 

Being incarcerated while pregnant can also pose health risks. When Martha Torres was pregnant in a Los Angeles County jail, the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the country. She said the virus was making its way through the facility, and eventually she contracted it and was worried because she didn’t know how it would affect her pregnancy.

Torres went into jail a month and a half into her pregnancy for a probation violation. She said there were times she was not listened to when she voiced her concerns about the virus and was sometimes not allowed to take walks around the yard. 

Torres was eventually able to enter an alternative incarceration during her pregnancy that allowed her to live with her newborn daughter after she gave birth so that she could bond with and breastfeed her. Torres also had another son at home who was less than a year old when she went to jail, and said it was traumatic to be separated from him and difficult to repair their bond when she got home.

“There’s a huge difference, you miss out on all your milestones, and it’s actually very traumatic for the parent and for the child,” Torres said.

This year, California lawmakers filed a series of bills aimed at improving treatment for pregnant people who are incarcerated and protecting the bonds between newborns and incarcerated mothers. One would prohibit state prisons and county jails from putting people in solitary confinement during pregnancy or for 12 weeks postpartum. Another would encourage judges to consider alternatives to incarceration for pregnant and postpartum women so they could bond with their newborns during their first year. None of the bills have yet to pass as the legislature enters its final days of this year’s session, which ends on Aug. 31.

The effort to pass new protections for pregnant people in jails and prisons follows other policy reforms at the intersection of incarceration and pregnancy in recent years. In 2020, California passed AB 732 mandating new treatment guidelines for people incarcerated in any state or county correctional facility, including transport to a hospital during childbirth and prohibitions on tasing or pepper spraying pregnant people in custody. Before that, in 2012, California passed a bill outlawing the shackling of pregnant incarcerated people, including the use of leg irons and waist chains. 

Other reforms to accommodate pregnant women and new mothers in jails and prisons have hit a wall. In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the California Healthy Start Act, which would have expanded a program where women in prison could live with their children to include incarcerated women regardless of the conviction type or length of their sentence. The same year, the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act died in the state Assembly’s Appropriations Committee.

“We want to keep that mother and that baby bonded together for life so they actually get to be raised by their mothers, instead of having to believe in the system or by a grandparent,” said Tyrique Shipp, a policy fellow with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition.

Shipp pointed out the lack of oversight standards to ensure consistent physical and emotional care for the complexities of incarcerated pregnant women. Even if legislation passes that sets better baseline standards for treatment of incarcerated people during pregnancy, Shipp says more oversight is needed to ensure consistent physical and emotional care for incarcerated pregnant women, mothers and infants. 

“A prison cell is no place for somebody who is pregnant or somebody after pregnancy — it’s not safe, it’s not clean — and so the focus is just trying to make sure that we can create a safe environment for these women,” Shipp said.

The post “There’s No Dignity in Giving Birth in Prison”: New Bills Would Improve Care Behind Bars appeared first on Bolts.

Now, these experiences have led Cofer, currently a senior policy director at the organization Public Health Advocates, to seek the top job of California’s capital city. Cofer came in first in the nonpartisan mayoral primary in March, an upset victory for a young, Black, female first-time candidate running against several established politicians. In the general election in November, she is facing off against Kevin McCarty, a former Sacramento city council member who more recently served several terms in the state legislature. 

If she wins, Cofer has vowed to take a public health approach to setting policy in Sacramento. “Public health is about maximizing the two things that matter most to humans: the number of years in your life, and the quality of life in your years,” she told Bolts. “And I see that as the major charge of every public-facing institution.” 

For Cofer, this means seeing the city as an ecosystem, understanding homelessness, gun violence and other social problems as akin to infectious disease, and zeroing in on preventing their spread rather than simply treating its effects. “It’s one thing to fight a symptom, it’s another thing to eradicate a disease,” said Asantewaa Boykin, a nurse and activist against police violence who has worked with Cofer on community issues. 

While McCarty has espoused a fairly standard Democratic vision for homeless policy, speaking of the importance of services while also working on laws to restrict where unhoused people can camp, Cofer has called for stopping sweeps of homeless encampments and expanding and improving “safe ground” camping sites. She has also advocated for more funding for violence intervention networks, overhauling the city’s well-meaning but flawed alternative crisis response system, and using the budget to advance a set of clearly articulated values around health and welfare. 

As the primary results showed, hers is an enticing pitch to many in the city who are frustrated that the conventional solutions—a jumbled mixture of services, imperfect temporary shelter options, and homeless sweeps—aren’t working. But Cofer faces various barriers to realizing her vision: a $60-odd-million budget deficit, a district attorney and a state government bent on enforcing the criminalization of homelessness, and housed and homeless residents alike who are deeply mistrustful that anything will meaningfully change. 

In response to an affordable housing shortage and a growing number of people sleeping outdoors, Sacramento has, like many of its counterparts, tried everything from services and temporary housing to criminalization. In 2021, now-outgoing mayor Darrell Steinberg unveiled a costly plan to increase shelter options, but the following year, the city and county each passed ordinances restricting camping on sidewalks or near businesses, infrastructure, and the city’s American River Parkway. 

Then, in the fall of 2022, voters approved Measure O, which outlawed camping on public property. Cofer opposed Measure O, while Cofer’s mayoral opponent McCarty worked on a bill to outlaw camping on the parkway that he suggested could work in tandem with these other restrictive measures. McCarty did not respond to a request for comment for this piece.

Homeless advocates like Anthony Prince, a lawyer for the Sacramento Homeless Union, whose 2,800 members represent nearly half of the city’s unhoused population, argue that the city has wasted much of the money it has spent under Steinberg’s plan. “It was about pop up tents, mass congregant shelters, a few tiny homes scattered here and there, some so-called safe parking sites and safe camping sites,” he said. “This is not housing.”

Charley Willison, an assistant professor at Cornell’s Department of Public & Ecosystem Health, called shelter “a really important first step—if it is used as a transitional housing mechanism. We can’t have shelter being used as the final step.” But she also noted that too many cities create behavioral requirements, like curfews or complete abstention from substances, for shelters that disqualify whole swaths of people. 

Niki Jones, the Executive Director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, believes that the city’s vast expenditures have accomplished little and left housed residents pessimistic, inclined to blame their unhoused neighbors, and thus more likely to support punitive measures against them. “There’s this idea that all this money has gone into homelessness—why isn’t it solved?” she said. “There’s a woman who lives outside who says it really well—she says, ‘They treat us like we blew $80 million.’” 

Meanwhile, homeless advocates in Sacramento say that the municipal government’s repeated  sweeps of unhoused people continue to be destabilizing and traumatizing. It’s a practice that Willison says has been proven ineffective over the long term. “The evidence base shows us that these punitive policies, whether that’s arrests, encampment closures, without links to housing, all make homelessness worse,” she told Bolts. 

Part of the underlying issue, Cofer argues, is that the city has never set explicit priorities for what it wants to accomplish each year, instead opting to create a “status quo budget” based on the previous year’s expenditures. “Unfortunately, when you do that, you keep getting what you’ve always got,” she said. 

To address the root issue of affordable housing and stop people from falling into homelessness in the first place, Cofer supports Sacramento Forward, a policy package put forth by several current city council members that aims to enact “Just Cause” renter protections, mandate a certain percentage of new housing be reserved for low- and very-low-income residents, and prevent corporate purchases of existing housing by giving priority to tenant buyers. If elected, Cofer says she’ll use her power as mayor to expand support for the package and place individual policy items on the agenda for direct approval or an eventual ballot initiative. 

But then, of course, there is the issue of the nearly 9,300 people currently homeless in Sacramento County. Prince has recently served as the lawyer for Camp Resolution, a “safe ground” site that allows people to camp without police interference at minimal expense to the city. Prince stresses that this is not a permanent solution for his clients—“they don’t want to stay there forever,” he told Bolts—but it is safer and more stable than sleeping alone on the street. 

The city initially signed and then renegotiated a lease with the organization Safe Ground Sacramento that promises it will not clear the camp until all of its residents get into permanent housing, but Prince says that officials have also intensified sweeps around the camp and sought various ways to compel residents to leave. Last week, Safe Ground announced that it cannot fulfill the terms of its lease, including providing water and electricity, which Prince worries will give the city another reason to void the agreement.

Cofer has praised the “safe ground” concept as a low-cost interim solution and said she’d extend Camp Resolution’s lease, open more sites around the city, and ensure that any sites have running water, electricity, shower services, and other amenities that allow the people there to live with dignity. She sees the sites as a form of stabilization that might allow people a moment to breathe and get connected to resources that can pave the way for more long-term stability. “60 percent of our unhoused folks have disabilities,” she said. “Are they all receiving disability? Are they all receiving food stamps? Are they all receiving the services that they’re eligible for?”

Cofer also criticizes the city government’s reluctance to robustly fund a suite of programs that could prevent violence, homelessness, and unnecessary police encounters. In 2018, Cofer and others advocated for the passage of Measure U, which would have doubled an existing half-cent sales tax. The revenue from the first half-cent, around $50 million per year at that time, went largely to the police department, but the city said the additional half-cent would go toward things like inclusive economic development targeted at historically redlined neighborhoods, and an affordable housing fund. “That was the campaign promise and that was the way that this measure was marketed to voters,” Cofer said. 

But after the measure passed, most of the revenue from the tax ended up going back to the police department—not illegal, Cofer stressed, but “a breach of trust.” She advocated for the creation of a committee that would advise the council on how to better invest the funds from Measure U, and ended up chairing it from 2019 until the end of 2022. During her time there, the committee piloted a participatory budgeting process that invested money in community-led projects in two Sacramento neighborhoods, which Cofer hopes to continue and focus on youth-related projects if she’s elected. 

Cofer is clear-eyed about the way that Sacramento’s policing budget strains the city’s coffers and takes resources away from other departments. She notes that it’s gone up around $100 million in just four years to reach over $250 million today, and proposes a realignment of the Measure U dollars towards their intended purpose and a return to the 2018-2019 police budget of around $150 million. McCarty is clear that he will not cut police funding if elected. 

But Cofer is also leery about being portrayed as anti-police. She stresses that she empathizes with law enforcement officers and compares their plight to that of teachers: public sector employees burdened with the effects of social issues far outside their remit. 

One attempt to disrupt this paradigm came in the form of the Department of Community Response (DCR), which Mayor Steinberg debuted during the 2020 protests. The idea was to form a team of social workers and mental health specialists to respond to 911 calls related to mental health and homelessness instead of police. But Boykin, whose organization Mental Health First was already doing similar work, told Bolts the department engaged with her only superficially, and conversations soon ended. Jones, who has volunteered with Mental Health First, said that DCR has since betrayed its initial mandate as a police alternative and become imbricated in the broader apparatus of sweeps, displacement, and criminalization. 

“What really came into being was actually just a team that responded to unhoused folks, usually sent there before police,” she said. “They don’t respond instead of police. They respond as a precursor.” 

Cofer wants CDR properly staffed and resourced—she said it needs at least $7 million in additional yearly funds—so that it can fulfill its initial mission of taking over various 911 call types from the police department. This would, in turn, free officers up to respond to calls that involve violent crime, and leave the department less reliant on overtime. “If we’re talking about baking this into 911 response, that means that we have to have staff available 24 hours a day,” she said. “You kind of have to commit.” She also says she’d more closely collaborate with community partners like Boykin’s Mental Health First that have experience doing this work already.

In interviews, both Prince and Willison emphasized that any lasting solutions to the city’s homelessness crisis must come from listening to the people most impacted by it, rather than simply following housed residents’ complaints. 

Generally, Willison said, “the needs, rights and preferences, including the health and well being of people experiencing homelessness, get completely circumvented” in policy discussions around homelessness. A public health approach must prioritize “being responsive to the needs of people experiencing homelessness themselves.” 

Of course, Cofer would also have to contend with the many constituents who want some measure of criminalization, if only because they’re exasperated by the city’s lack of progress on reducing homelessness. Cofer says that it’s understandable that Sacramentans have looked to fixes like the 2022 ballot measure that ramped up enforcement, which she framed as well-meaning but misguided. But convincing residents to be patient as the city attempts to implement longer-term solutions will be a challenge. And it could be a lonely fight, too. 

Sacramento’s District Attorney, Thien Ho, has sued the city twice for failing to enforce its anti-homeless ordinances, and has also threatened a lawsuit over Camp Resolution. And the recent Grants Pass decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has made it harder for officials to argue that their hands are tied when it comes to criminalization. Shortly after Grants Pass, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies to begin clearing encampments on state-owned land, and strongly suggested that local leaders follow suit. This could further alarm individual council members reluctant to assert the political will to oppose sweeps or build new safe ground sites in their district, leaving it harder for Cofer or any future mayor to get the votes they need to make significant changes on this front. 

Cofer said that she’ll try to work around these challenges by encouraging collaboration and setting an ambitious affirmative vision for Sacramento. “I want us to set the benchmarks. How many people are we going to house this year?” she told Bolts. “And I want the media and advocates and everyone to be able to call in, or go to the city’s website and see how are we doing towards that goal, and I want us to be unafraid of setting an ambitious goal and potentially failing.” 

The post The Epidemiologist Running for Mayor to Bring Public Health to Sacramento Politics appeared first on Bolts.

Last fall, Los Angeles started using new bail guidelines that required judges to set bail at affordable rates, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from sitting in court all day. In conjunction with her pretrial justice clinic, UCLA law professor Alicia Virani spent part of October 2023, the first month LA’s new bail schedule was in effect, observing court proceedings that seemed as quick and rote as an assembly line at LA’s largest courthouse. “They’re churning out pretrial decisions like a factory,” she told Bolts. 

Alongside volunteers from Courtwatch LA, Virani and her students witnessed higher bail amounts, and lower rates of release without having to pay bail, for Latinx defendants compared with Black or white defendants. “Various court watchers observed at [the main courthouse] what they felt was like a notably hostile environment towards Latinx folks who were in custody,” Virani said. The clinic and Courtwatch LA went on to publish their observations in a joint report, finding that cash bail was set in 68 percent of the over 200 cases they observed, and the median amount set was $100,000, double the statewide average and far more than the average Californian can afford. Judges are “just blatantly ignoring the law that they’re supposed to follow,” Virani told Bolts.

Choosing to set bail so high that there’s no hope of paying can mean the loss of a job, or a defendant’s ability to care for their children. These decisions can also carry life-altering consequences in a jail system where someone dies nearly once a week. But judges ultimately have the final word, and there are few mechanisms to challenge their decisions. “When a judge denies bail in a situation where it should not be denied, or sets bail in a situation where it shouldn’t have been set, we’re sort of stuck with that decision,” Ericka Wiley, a public defender in Los Angeles County, told Bolts.

For some organizers, bringing change to Los Angeles’ court system demands more than just updating its rules. They think that the county needs judges with a different approach, one more attentive to the pitfalls of incarceration—and in Los Angeles, that takes winning judicial elections. In 2022, a slate of four attorneys with a background in public defense or civil rights ran for judge with mixed results: One of them, Holly Hancock, won her election, while the others lost to opponents who followed the more conventional prosecutor-to-judge pipeline. 

A new set of public defenders is trying again this year. One, Kimberly Repecka, already won her seat in the March primary and will join Hancock on the Los Angeles Superior Court. Three others still face tests this fall: Wiley, as well as George Turner, Jr. and La Shae Henderson, are bidding to replace three retiring judges. In the March primaries, each grabbed one of the top two spots and advanced to the November runoffs. 

These candidates are running in separate countywide elections. But they’ve delivered similar messages. Last summer, they all participated in a judicial election bootcamp run by La Defensa, a community group that recently took over Courtwatch LA, and by the organization LA Forward. Now on the campaign trail, they insist that the job of a judge should be more about finding creative solutions to foster rehabilitation than doling out punishment. 

“We have over a half a century of experience in this apparatus, and we know that it doesn’t work,” Turner told Bolts. “It didn’t make sense 20 years ago and it doesn’t make sense now that you would have thousands of people in Los Angeles County in custody [who] haven’t been convicted of anything. It didn’t make sense then and it doesn’t make sense now that we would put someone in a cage without figuring out what led to the conduct.”

In the runup to the primary, Henderson, Turner, and Wiley joined forces, appearing at events together and forming an informal slate with a joint website and branded social media. Like their predecessors on the 2022 slate, they called themselves “The Defenders of Justice.” Prominent local progressives, like Los Angeles Controller Kenneth Mejia, endorsed all three candidates. 

Repecka, who won her seat in March after challenging an incumbent judge who had received a rare public rebuke from the state judicial oversight agency, did not join this “Defenders of Justice” grouping; she did, however, make campaign statements signaling that she broadly shares their beliefs on how the judiciary might work to reduce mass incarceration. Turner and Wiley are still campaigning as a team for the general election. But Henderson has since chosen to run her campaign separately and no longer appears on “Defenders for Justice”-branded material, though she told Bolts she still supports their mission. 

In November, Henderson and Wiley will face current prosecutors Sharon Ransom and Renee Rose, respectively. Turner is running against Steve Napolitano, a parole board attorney and Manhattan Beach city council member. 

In separate interviews, Henderson, Turner, and Wiley all said that they chose to run in part because they found themselves frustrated by judges’ reluctance to consider pre-trial release or implement alternatives to incarceration for their clients. “We’re finally starting to get to a place where the laws are starting to get more and more in tune with common sense and what is morally right,” Turner told Bolts. But, he said, “when you walk through the average courtroom, it hasn’t changed.” They argue that their experiences position them to implement reforms that California has adopted over the last decade—laws that allow the sealing of criminal records, expand access to mental health diversion, and permit judges to reduce incarcerated people’s sentences.

“As a public defender, when you go to that court every day, you see whether it’s being implemented,” Henderson said of the state’s new reforms. “That’s where the fight is, is taking it from off of the page of a book and getting people to really start to put it to action.” 

Win or lose, these public defenders are only running to take over just a few of the over 400 superior courts seats that adjudicate Los Angeles County criminal cases. While any change to how judges approach defendants will be incremental, Holly Hancock’s new daily routine illustrates what that sort of piecemeal scale change looks like in one courtroom. 

These days, Hancock, the lone winner from the original “Defenders of Justice” slate, presides over a misdemeanor court in Inglewood, where she most commonly sees DUI and domestic violence cases. She says her background as a public defender has shaped her use of judicial discretion and equipped her to take a more holistic approach to the defendants—one that incorporates an awareness of mental health and addiction issues, as well as an appreciation for how the collateral consequences of a criminal legal interaction can derail someone’s life. “It’s really in every area, at every step,” Hancock told Bolts. “I’ve always said it gives me an opportunity to be actually more even handed.”

At arraignments, Hancock said she makes sure to review what leeway she has on bail. When considering a defendant’s ability to pay, she’ll sometimes let them post the cash they’re able to raise directly to the court, in order to avoid the exorbitant interest rates that bondsmen charge. ”A lot of times it’s the family members or the girlfriends [who pay], it’s not even the person who’s in jail,” she said. “Grandma is now on the hook, or her house is on the hook. So I’d rather, if they can get the cash together, just post the cash.” 

Whenever possible, Hancock said, she diverts people toward programs that help them avoid a criminal conviction if they complete certain steps, like community service. She also refers people who need support with housing and other services to the county’s new Justice, Care, and Opportunities department, an agency created as part of a county-level effort to implement a “care first, jails last” approach toward crime. 

“You can work so many different things to assist people that don’t have anything to do with incarceration,” Hancock told Bolts about the misdemeanor cases she handles. 

The three public defenders currently in contention for a judicial seat told Bolts they would take a similar approach, prioritizing alternatives to incarceration and viewing jail or prison time as a final course of action rather than a default. “I’ve never seen someone come out of prison and be better overall… It’s a devastating experience and should be a last option when all others have failed,” Wiley said. 

Henderson said she’d like to see the principles of the youth justice system—rehabilitation and redemption over punishment—applied to adults well. “We kind of have this mindset that once you’re 18, you’re on your own and you messed up. But if we could bring more of that restorative style, even for the adults, I think it would prevent more recidivism,” she told Bolts. 

Henderson and Wiley’s opponents, Ransom and Rose, are both line prosecutors with the LA District Attorney’s office. Neither responded directly to a request for an interview, and a campaign consultant representing both candidates did not provide responses to a request for comment. On her website, Ransom touts her work in the DA’s mental health unit, writing that her “focus on community empowerment diverges from traditional prosecution.” Rose currently works as the supervisor of the DA’s elder abuse unit. Her website stresses that she has worked in many units of the DA’s office, “dedicating her entire legal career to the protection of crime victims.”

Napolitano, who faces Turner, told Bolts via email that he too supports alternatives to incarceration when appropriate. If elected, he said he’d “take advantage of work programs, community service programs, and educational programs for youth offenders as alternatives to juvenile hall which too often hardens kids against the system instead of them benefiting from it.”

Napolitano, who has worked as a parole hearing representative, administrative hearing officer, and local politician, added that he thinks Los Angeles would benefit from judges who have done multiple things in their careers, rather than career public defenders.

“We need more judges with diverse backgrounds who know our communities, who have worked with both victims and criminals, and who have the experience to know what works and what doesn’t,” Napolitano said.

The public defender candidates, though, believe that what sets them apart is the depth of their experiences representing indigent defendants.

Early in his career, Turner worked in the Los Angeles County public defender’s juvenile division in Inglewood, the predominantly Black and Latinx city where he grew up. “I would see kids who are going through the same sort of issues that I went through as a public school kid growing up in the city,” he recalled. “And I also saw the system not address their needs and kind of put them on a pathway to destruction in some cases.” Given these experiences, Turner said he feels that putting young people in an adult prison makes no sense from a developmental perspective. 

“I’ve been a victim myself of multiple crimes,” he told Bolts. “I have friends and family who have been killed. What happens in the courtroom doesn’t make you feel any better.” 

Like Turner, Henderson, who recently left the public defender’s office to set up her own criminal defense practice, worked in the juvenile division earlier in her career. She says she frequently watched judges treat Black and Latinx youth harshly, with little regard for their age. 

“That’s an opportunity to mentor, that’s an opportunity to speak into that kid’s life,” she told Bolts. “What would it look like if our courts facilitated that?”

Despite the recalcitrance of some judges and line prosecutors, a lot has changed in Los Angeles courts in the last decade. A broad effort to correct for some of the injustices of the tough-on-crime era has brought reforms at various levels, from a state supreme court decision that held that it is unconstitutional to imprison someone because they cannot afford bail, to ballot measures like Proposition 47, which downgraded some felonies to misdemeanors, to Los Angeles’ new bail schedule and the election of reform-minded politicians like DA George Gascón. 

These changes have already refashioned the role of judges in LA. Hancock noted that in her court, prosecutors are “by and large, far and away, not asking for incarceration on the misdemeanors,” meaning that judges who preside over misdemeanor court largely aren’t even in a position to approve jail time—nor do they have to go out on a limb to reject it. 

In theory, judges are also responsible for evaluating whether to transfer 16- and 17-year-olds to adult criminal court. But this only comes into play if prosecutors propose that move, and Gascón initially pledged that his office never would. Though he has walked back that blanket ban on prosecuting juveniles as adults, there have nonetheless been few opportunities for LA judges to make these determinations: Only 10 cases were recommended for transfer between when the DA took office in December 2020 and the end of January 2024. 

But this landscape may shift again this year. Repecka and any of the public defender candidates who wins their election this fall could take their seat in a different Los Angeles, one where prosecutors are pursuing notably harsher outcomes and where judges have more authority to crack down on low-level offenses.

Gascón faces a difficult reelection bid against Nathan Hochman, a former Republican candidate for state attorney general who has said he’d undo many of Gascón’s reforms. Hochman has vowed to seek harsher charges and sentences, criticized Gascón for being too lenient toward minors, and indicated he may seek the death penalty again, a practice that Gascón forbade.

A win by Hochman in the DA race may lead to a growth in the number of transfers to adult court or in the sorts of penalties sought for misdemeanor cases. Whether judges think it’s appropriate to treat a minor as an adult or order jail time for a misdemeanor could matter more under a different DA. And if line prosecutors are given more freedom to seek lengthy sentencing enhancements than under Gascón, judges would also have more occasion to impose significantly longer sentences.

Voters across California will also be deciding this fall whether to walk back Prop 47, the 2014 measure that helped the state lower its prison population from historic heights, but which has been much maligned lately by conservatives and business organizations who hold it to blame for retail theft. Under the terms of the ballot measure, judges would have significantly more discretion to punish defendants more harshly, though they’d retain the ability to send someone through the diversion process instead.

Turner noted the strangeness of running at a time when the ferocity of the backlash can feel at odds with the day-to-day work. 

“We’re almost in bizarro world, because if you look at the statistics, crime is down,” he said, a reference to police data that show robberies, homicide and violent crime rates in LA are lower than several years ago. “But part of the reason why I’m running and part of the reason why I am so vocal and active about these sorts of reforms, is because I don’t believe that [they’re] just a fad.” 

Turner ultimately takes the long view, stressing that calls for reform have come out of the decades-long failure of punitive solutions. “We can actually change these institutions,” he said. “And we should.”

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