Federal prison Archives - Bolts https://boltsmag.org/category/federal-prison/ Bolts is a digital publication that covers the nuts and bolts of power and political change, from the local up. We report on the places, people, and politics that shape public policy but are dangerously overlooked. We tell stories that highlight the real world stakes of local elections, obscure institutions, and the grassroots movements that are targeting them. Wed, 31 Jul 2024 19:12:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://boltsmag.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/cropped-New-color-B@3000x-32x32.png Federal prison Archives - Bolts https://boltsmag.org/category/federal-prison/ 32 32 203587192 “What’s More Extraordinary and Compelling?” https://boltsmag.org/federal-prison-sexual-abuse-survivors-pursue-compassionate-release/ Thu, 27 Jun 2024 17:26:05 +0000 https://boltsmag.org/?p=6371 Women who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of guards at a notorious federal prison in California are now seeking compassionate release.

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When Kendra Drysdale was groped by a prison guard during a pat-down, she knew that reporting it internally within her facility, the federal prison FCI Dublin, would only make things worse. So she emailed a report to what she thought was a direct line to the Department of Justice. But Dublin leadership caught wind of the email, accused her of lying in order to file a false report, and ordered her into a disciplinary hearing. 

“What do you want to keep?” Drysdale remembers an officer asking her during the disciplinary hearing. She thought immediately of her 22-year-old daughter, who’d lost her dad and had only her to rely on, and asked through tears to keep access to phone calls so they could still communicate. “And she said, ‘Okay, I’m taking your phone. I’m taking your email. I’m taking your video visits, I’m taking your in person visits,’” Drysdale recalled. The prison also took away her job, her access to commissary, and, most crushingly, her early release credits, leaving her in prison for several months past the date she was supposed to go home.

Drysdale’s story is just the tip of the iceberg at FCI Dublin, the now-notorious federal prison in Northern California whose employees preyed on the prisoners in their custody for years in a culture so pervasive that prison staff nicknamed it “the rape club.” The chaplain was abusing women. Medical staff were abusing women. The warden, who had trained staff on the Prison Rape Elimination Act, was abusing women. 

At FCI Dublin, “Everybody knew something, everybody had observed something,” said Tess Korth, who worked as a correctional officer at the prison for 25 years until she says she was forced out for calling out the abuse. “In my opinion, they enabled all this stuff to continue going on.” Internal attempts to address the situation went nowhere: 

Korth told Bolts that she made reports of the abuse within the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for six years, starting in 2016, with no results.

These violations finally came to light in 2021 after an investigation by the Department of Justice, which oversees the BOP, led to the indictment of a guard. Eventually, seven FCI Dublin employees, including the warden, were convicted of sexual abuse (an eighth will stand trial next year). In February, the California Coalition of Women Prisoners (CCWP), a member of the Dublin Prisoner Solidarity Coalition, filed a class-action lawsuit against the BOP. This past March, a federal judge appointed a special master to look into the allegations, which advocates hoped would bring some measure of oversight. Then, in April, the BOP announced it was closing the facility entirely. 

Drysdale and a few others whose sentences were ending were released, but nearly everyone else was transferred, sent to over a dozen different federal prisons throughout the country, some thousands of miles from their family and children. Women were retaliated against further on the drive there, as Lisa Fernandez, who has covered sexual abuse at FCI Dublin since early 2022, reported recently for Rolling Stone; many face ongoing retaliation at their new facilities.

Kendra Drysdale (right) and her daughter. (Photo courtesy of Kendra Drysdale)

It’s difficult to imagine a more serious abuse of power than a prison guard who preys on a person whose every action he already controls—her communication with the outside world, her visits with her family; her access to food, supplies, showers, medical care. Federal prison officials allowed this type of abuse to go on unchecked for years. Now that the story has broken open, the litigation, prosecutions, and efforts to establish broader federal oversight are really attempts to answer one central question: What does an appropriate remedy look like? 

Lately, lawyers representing the survivors are trying a novel strategy: compassionate release. The mechanism, generally conceived of as a last-resort option for dying or medically incapacitated prisoners, is for the first time being considered as a reparative measure for women who were sexually abused while in federal custody. 

“We thought, what’s more extraordinary and compelling, which is the standard for compassionate release, than being sexually abused by prison guards after your sentence has been imposed?” said Shanna Rifkin, deputy general counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), who is spearheading the effort. “No federal judge sentences people to be sexually abused in prison.” 

FAMM and the pro bono lawyers working with them have helped secure compassionate release for 17 former inhabitants of FCI Dublin thus far, and they’re evaluating 95 additional requests for legal aid from women formerly held at the facility. But seeking this remedy has come with its own challenges—ones that underscore precisely why it’s so difficult to eradicate sexual violence in prison. 

The Department of Justice has stressed that it is seeking long sentences for prison employees charged with these crimes. In response to a request for comment, a DOJ spokesperson emphasized the 20 BOP employee prosecutions the Department has brought since January 2021, and wrote in a statement that “The Department of Justice has and will continue to prioritize seeking justice for victims of sexual assault by FBOP employees.” But survivors and advocates say that prosecution alone, fails to help victims of sexual abuse heal—nor does it stop the harm at its root, given how far the cover-up and retaliation at FCI Dublin extended beyond the officers charged with criminal offenses. 

“The issues at Dublin really had a spotlight on them for good reason, but the issues run all the way up the ladder to the highest points of BOP,” said Courtney Hanson, the development and communications coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Given that sexual assault in federal prison is widespread, FAMM estimates many more people could be eligible for compassionate release around the country. 

Bolts reviewed data compiled by CCWP on the current whereabouts of more than 100 women who were being held at Dublin when it closed, and found that the vast majority were transferred to other federal facilities with a documented history of sexual abuse by guards. “It’s prevalent through the whole BOP,” Drysdale said. “They’re not safe anywhere.”


Since Congress established federal compassionate release via the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the process has been open to anyone who can prove an “extraordinary and compelling” reason that they should be freed before the end of their sentence—at least in theory. In practice, compassionate releases are rare, though a 2018 reform that allowed prisoners to petition the courts themselves led to a sharp increase in the number of applications, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

FAMM has long pushed for reforms to the compassionate release process at both the federal and state level, where access can be even more patchwork and dysfunctional. After the revelations of widespread abuse at FCI Dublin, Rifkin helped convene a group of pro bono lawyers to bring compassionate release cases before federal judges. They argued that sexual abuse in custody should qualify as a reason for release—both as a concrete reparative measure the government can offer, and as a necessary precondition to healing—and many of the judges agreed. 

Seventeen former FCI Dublin prisoners have now won their freedom after arguing that the sexual abuse they experienced in prison constituted an extraordinary and compelling change of circumstances. The road ahead is by no means easy, but Rifkin noted that release has allowed women to reconnect with their children and access resources like peer support and therapy. “Just being able to be outside, just being with your family—there’s a lot that that offers,” she told Bolts.

To Kelly Savage-Rodriguez, who worked to reform state-level compassionate release in California in 2022 and now works with CCWP, the reasoning behind release is simple. “You can’t get healed and deal with the trauma of that sitting in a cell,” Savage-Rodriguez told Bolts. “You need to be able to get counseling… not be told to shut up and sit down and this is why we’re gonna punish you more.”

Members of the Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition give a press conference after filing their class-action lawsuit against the BOP in August 2023. (Photo courtesy of Courtney Hanson, Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition)

In order to facilitate these individual compassionate release applications, FAMM sought to enshrine the principle that sexual abuse in custody qualifies as a reason for release within federal sentencing policy. To do so, they had to go through the people who decide what “extraordinary and compelling” means: the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent federal agency made up of seven presidential appointees. (Its most famous recent alumna is Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson).

Douglas Berman, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and the author of the Sentencing Law and Policy blog, told Bolts that the commission has an enormous amount of influence over sentencing policy, even as it has historically chosen to take a modest and conservative view of its own power. “I think it could do an awful lot and dramatically shape many aspects of our nation’s criminal justice systems,” Berman said. “But even in its more sort of focused role that it’s adopted, the federal sentencing guidelines are still central to literally every single federal sentencing that takes place—and that’s upwards of 60–70,000 persons every year.”

Starting in early 2019, the Sentencing Commission lacked a quorum after two rounds of Trump nominees proved too controversial for Senate confirmation (one, a federal judge known as “Hang ‘Em High Henry,” once said “I live to put people in jail”). For several years, nothing got done. But all seven of Biden’s nominees eventually proved more successful, and by mid-2022, the commission was back in action with four Democrats and three Republicans, in keeping with requirements to seat no more than four members of the same party. 

In April 2023, after FAMM’s request, the commission significantly expanded eligibility for compassionate release, including adding sexual abuse in custody as a criteria. It seemed like a victory—but it was actually about to make winning compassionate release even more challenging for survivors.


At the DOJ’s behest, the sentencing commission added two hurdles that people sexually assaulted by prison employees have to clear in order to be considered eligible for compassionate release: The sexual contact must be penetrative, and proof that the abuse occurred must come in the form of a criminal conviction, a civil admission or finding of liability, or an internal administrative finding. These changes took effect on Nov. 1, 2023. Berman said this sort of deference to the DOJ is not uncommon, even though this commission is notably more progressive than past incarnations. “Under any leadership, under any structure, we’ve long seen the Department of Justice and its voice find significant attention in the work of the Commission,” he told Bolts. 

But Rifkin says these hurdles ignore the reality of what sexual violence in prison looks like and how it’s adjudicated. “Many of the people at Dublin were sexually abused in a way that was intense stalking and harassment and abuses of power, but not penetrative genital contact,” she told Bolts. “We have a lot of people for whom a guard would stand outside their cell and say, ‘I’ll only let you use the shower if you take off your shirt and flash me’ or, ‘I’ll only let you leave and go to the lunch line if you touch yourself in front of me.’” 

The admission of liability requirement also runs counter to the way that sexual assault claims are often handled by the BOP. A 2023 investigation by The Appeal, for instance, found that many civil cases alleging abuse at another federal prison, FCI Tallahassee, were settled out of court. 

Ironically, after the new sexual assault criteria became effective, Rifkin said, these compassionate release applications faced a steeper uphill battle than when there were no criteria in place at all. “After November 1 and this new policy statement, we’ve seen many federal prosecutors who are really kind of digging their feet in the sand and saying, ‘If you don’t meet these exact standards, we’re not going to agree to the case. And we will oppose it,’” she told Bolts. 

Rifkin said that FAMM will be petitioning the Sentencing Commission to reconsider the evidentiary hurdles, highlighting their “unintended consequences.” But she stressed that it’s well within the DOJ’s power to “make clear to U.S. Attorneys Offices across the country that they should be cooperating with survivors of abuse and their attorneys to help move these cases forward.”

Bolts asked the Department of Justice whether the agency has given U.S. attorneys’ offices explicit guidance on how to approach compassionate release cases that involve sexual abuse in custody, and for a response to FAMM’s pushback on the evidentiary hurdles. A DOJ spokesperson responded, “While only a federal court can grant a petition for compassionate release, the Department fully supports the FBOP Director [Colette S. Peters] as she continues to move for compassionate release for victims in appropriate cases.” Sentencing Commission data for Fiscal Year 2023 shows that Peters used her authority to bring just 7 of the 431 compassionate release petitions that a federal judge ultimately granted (There is no indication of whether any of those 7 were victims of sexual abuse by prison staff). 

In a statement to Bolts, a BOP spokesperson said, “The FBOP is prioritizing compassionate release for victims of sexual abuse by FBOP employees. While the FBOP can’t directly reduce sentences, we recommend eligible individuals to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The FBOP is also revising the Compassionate Release policy to broaden eligibility.”

If the Sentencing Commission reconsiders the evidentiary hurdles, it could pave the way for a slew of new compassionate release cases; Rifkin says there’s no telling just how many federal prisoners might be victims of sexual abuse by BOP employees. Besides the 95 cases it’s evaluating from FCI Dublin, FAMM and its network of lawyers have accepted five compassionate release cases on behalf of women incarcerated at FCI Tallahassee, where sexual abuse has been reported for decades. (At least three guards have been indicted in the past two years; and the prison was the site of a shocking shoot-out in 2006, when a guard indicted in a sexual bribery scheme opened fire on federal agents who had come to arrest him and five of his colleagues).

Linda De La Rosa, who was formerly incarcerated at FMC Lexington, testifies before Congress in December 2022 about the abuse she endured. (CSPAN)

In December 2022, a congressional probe led by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff found that sexual violence is rampant in federal custody. The BOP is failing systemically to prevent, detect, and address sexual abuse of prisoners by its own employees,” Ossoff said during the hearing, calling the culture of abuse “cruel and unusual punishment.” A bill resulting from this research, the Federal Prison Oversight Act, passed the U.S. House in May.

Before she was transferred to FCI Dublin, Kendra Drysdale spent 11 months at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Texas, where she says sexual abuse by guards, and retaliation for reporting it, was also rampant. Scores of women at Dublin have since been transferred to other federal facilities with documented histories of guard sexual abuse, including Carswell. And women have reported retributive solitary confinement, strip searches, medical neglect, denial of food, and verbal abuse at their new prisons. “There’s sexual assault victims all over the country right now being severely retaliated against—ongoing, ongoing, ongoing—because they spoke out,” Drysdale said. 


Since her release in April, Drysdale has thrown herself into the process of recovery. “I went in diagnosed with compound trauma disorder, and I came out of it feeling like I just got more and more trauma than I ever had,” she told Bolts. She said she is lucky to be able to stay with family on a farm in the Santa Cruz mountains, where she tries to push herself to explore nature, despite naturally gravitating toward the studio apartment she sleeps in after spending years in a cell. She has found a therapist and other peer support. She finds herself crying a lot these days, which she takes as a sign that she finally has a safe place to begin to process everything she went through. 

Kendra Drysdale at home in Santa Cruz. (Photo courtesy of Kendra Drysdale)

And Drysdale has begun working with the Dublin Prisoner Solidarity Coalition to advocate for women’s rights in federal custody, which she sees as a crucial component of her recovery. “Doing this helps me get better because I know I am doing what I can to help others still suffering,” she told Bolts

The FCI Dublin developments come as state and local prison and jail systems also fail to prevent sexual abuse by employees within their walls. The Texas Office of the Inspector General has received more than 600 complaints of sexual abuse by prison guards over the past five years, Texas Public Radio reports. In New York, the Adult Survivors Act has paved the way for more than 700 lawsuits over alleged sexual abuse at Rikers Island. 

And the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is currently facing its own scandal over sexual abuse in custody. This January, attorneys filed a lawsuit on behalf of over 130 women who say they were abused in custody at California’s two women’s prisons; one guard allegedly assaulted more than 22 women over a decade-long span and now faces 96 abuse charges. As with the federal Bureau of Prisons, CDCR has been reluctant to consider releases as a remedy for survivors of sexual abuse, CCWP’s Savage-Rodriguez said. 

Meanwhile, organizers with the Dublin Prisoner Solidarity Coalition say they will keep fighting for releases, along with a host of other protective measures, for everyone transferred out of FCI Dublin this spring. Hanson said that CCWP’s work has shown that the problem of sexual abuse within prison is fundamental to the institution of prison itself. “In every single carceral institution where we’ve ever worked with people, we hear stories of gender violence and assault,” she told Bolts. “While Dublin has been a particularly egregious example, we think ultimately, we need other systems of care and accountability altogether.”

Updated (July 8) with comment from the Bureau of Prisons.

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Waiting for a Second Look https://boltsmag.org/waiting-for-a-second-look/ Thu, 17 Mar 2022 17:19:40 +0000 https://boltsmag.org/?p=2736 Colie Long has lived behind bars longer than he did on the outside. Long, 44, was sentenced to life in prison for murder when he was just 18 years old.... Read More

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Colie Long has lived behind bars longer than he did on the outside. Long, 44, was sentenced to life in prison for murder when he was just 18 years old. He used to think he’d die in lockup until last year, when the District of Columbia passed a law that could provide him with a pathway out. “I didn’t really have no realistic chances of looking to go home,” Long told Bolts from prison. “But then, lo and behold, they pass this bill.”

Long and hundreds of others are now eligible for resentencing under Washington, D.C.’s Second Look Amendment Act (SLAA), which D.C. adopted in April 2021. One of the more sweeping sentencing reforms in the country, the law allows people who have served at least 15 years of their sentence and were younger than 25 at the time of their offense to apply for resentencing and potential release. 

Now a year removed, advocates for the law say it has led to the release of at least half a dozen people who would have otherwise remained in prison. But obstacles and applications are also piling up, raising questions of how much the SLAA will deliver on its unique promise. The law made D.C. into the first jurisdiction to effectively end sentences of life without the possibility of parole for youth up to age 25—the culmination of a wave of reforms that have transformed approaches to youth sentencing over the past decade. 

A series of U.S. Supreme court decisions starting in 2005 compelled many states to revisit harsh sentencing laws and give people who have been incarcerated since they were children a shot at release. Those reforms typically only applied to people who were under the age of 18 at the time of their offense, but that cutoff point has blurred in recent years due to advances in neuroscience. 

Research showing that the brain is still developing into early adulthood has brought new momentum to the push for second chances. So have the human and fiscal realities of a bloated and aging prison system; the number of people serving life sentences in American prisons has more than quadrupled since the 1980s, with the cost of keeping them behind bars growing as they continue to age. 

A growing list of states are now clawing back life sentences imposed on young adults. The Washington State Supreme Court barred mandatory life without parole sentences for anyone under the age of 21 last year. Connecticut’s parole board recently reduced the sentences of 11 men who committed crimes when they were 25 or under to acknowledge “increased understanding in the science of brain development.” South Dakota’s GOP-run Senate passed a bill last year that would have barred life without parole for anyone under 25, though it eventually died. D.C.’s law is also part of a larger “second look” movement that is driving reforms beyond youth sentences and generating hope behind bars for others sentenced to extreme terms.

Advocates in D.C. have now turned their attention to putting the new second look reform into practice. While hundreds of incarcerated people have begun the process of applying for resentencing since last year, release isn’t guaranteed. They face major hurdles, including prosecutors who have opposed most petitions and COVID-19, which has exacerbated crisis conditions inside the notoriously dysfunctional and violent federal prison system.

People convicted of serious crimes in D.C. are typically incarcerated inside federal prisons because the district has no prison of its own. Those applying for sentencing review were usually sent to a local jail run by the D.C. Department of Corrections, but transfers to the D.C. lockup effectively stopped during the pandemic, according to lawyers who assist with resentencing petitions. Destiny Fullwood, a lawyer and deputy director of the Second Look Project, says resentencing applications are difficult to complete with clients in far-flung federal prisons for reasons that go beyond just struggling to arrange calls. 

“It’s really difficult to talk to people about trauma and abuse and neglect over the phone,” Fullwood told Bolts. “It’s especially difficult if maybe your client isn’t as high functioning as other clients are.”

Michael Boone, 50, who recently became eligible to apply for resentencing under D.C.’s new law, is currently incarcerated at USP Coleman I, a high security federal prison in Florida, while he completes the process for review. He told Bolts that the lockdowns are frequent and without warning, which sometimes complicates the application process. Still Boone, who was sentenced to 55 years in prison for murder at age 20, considers the mere chance for release to be a blessing, which he says balances out the harshness of his current surroundings. 

“I look at the Second Look Act as one of my greatest blessings,” Boone said. “So all the hardship that’s coming with it, the COVID, the lockdowns… We’re basically in limbo.”


D.C.’s initial big jump into sentencing reform came in the form of the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act (IRAA), which allowed people convicted of serious crimes committed before their 18th birthday to apply for resentencing. The original IRAA, passed in 2016, required that applicants serve at least 20 years of their sentence before applying, but a later amendment cut that down to 15 years served and allowed even those who had been denied parole to apply for resentencing. The new law D.C. council members passed last year, SLAA, was another amendment that further extended eligibility to people who were up to age 25 when their crimes were committed. 

Prosecutors testified against the SLAA, and the Washington Post editorialized against it when it was being considered by the council last year. But lawyers, academics and the friends and families of incarcerated people wrote to the council supporting the reforms, including Latoya Briggs, who told council members about Edward Williams, a loved one who she hoped might be resentenced under SLAA. Briggs insisted Williams had changed since his conviction. She described Williams as being “sucked into the cowboy phase of life” when he committed the crime he was incarcerated for.  

James Zeigler, a D.C. lawyer and the director of the Second Look Project, said that while only about 100 people were made eligible for resentencing through the original IRAA, last year’s amendment expanded that to at least 600 people. Zeigler estimated that, between the public defender’s service, lawyers appointed by the court and pro-bono counsel, between 200 and 300 people now have attorneys working on resentencing petitions. 

“Many who did not believe they would ever have a kind of viable opportunity for release all of a sudden did,” Zeigler told Bolts. “It became clear pretty quickly that this actually was pretty consequential.” 

People petitioning for resentencing under SLAA have their entire life put under a microscope during the application process. A court reviews the petitioner’s disciplinary records from the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Petitioners also have to be reviewed by a forensic psychologist, and their family members are interviewed.

Anthony Petty, who was released from prison in December 2020 under IRAA, said he learned things about himself and his family that he had never realized until putting his application together. Petty, who went to prison for killing a man during a fight that got out of hand when he was just 16 years old, said the process helped him better understand the trauma that paved his path to prison. 

“You’re going over your neighborhood you lived in, your household you come from, your schooling, you’re going over everything—your early incarceration as a youth, your incarceration as an adult,” Petty said. “It gives the courts a better understanding of who we are as individuals. … the violence we grew up in, the households we grew up in.” 

Petty said that transferring from federal prison in Kentucky to the D.C. jail during his resentencing process greatly helped his eventual transition back into society. People who transfer to the local jail can be there for more than a year during their application for resentencing. He described federal penitentiaries as being violent, abusive and “focused solely on warehousing individuals,” which can make it more difficult for petitioners to keep a clean BOP record. “If a person goes to stab you and you’re fighting back, fighting for your life, they’re going to put a disciplinary report saying you were in an altercation,” he said. “In the court’s eye, you haven’t changed.” 

Transferring to the D.C. jail, Petty said, “was one of the best things that happened for me.” According to Petty, the jail offered more support services for incarcerated people and also tended to house people with resentencing petitions together. Petty recalled how people with strong incentives to keep their records clean helped set a more positive tone and culture inside the jail. “It’s a respectful place,” Petty said. “You’re not inmate 7 now. You’re a resident.” 

For Long, transferring to the D.C. jail has helped him transition and prepare for life after prison. He said the prospect of being turned back to federal prison now is nightmarish and spoke of an incarcerated friend who had his petition denied after spending two years inside the D.C. jail. The friend was devastated upon learning that he was going back to federal prison.

“Just imagine,” Long said. “You’re looking forward to having a job, you’re looking forward to being able to pay rent, to having meaningful relationships with people outside, and then they take you back to an environment where you’re around guys who don’t have nothing to live for.” 


Boone, who remains in federal prison while his application for resentencing is pending with the court in D.C., says the Second Look reforms have generated excitement, even among people who won’t directly be helped by the new law. He says people incarcerated with him sometimes ask him about the reforms that have made him eligible for resentencing. 

“If you go to the federal system in other states, they be asking questions about it… ‘How did D.C. become the leader of it? How did D.C. become the groundbreaking people?’” Boone said. “There’s more positivity in the institutions, even with guys it doesn’t apply to right now, because they feel like even within a year or two or somewhere down the line, it could be part of the federal system.”

People released under D.C.’s sentencing reforms have self-published books, earned college degrees and have become violence interrupters after returning to their communities. Since being released in 2020, Petty has worked as a “Credible Messenger” for the D.C. government, helping reduce violence among local youth. Petty is also active in Neighbors For Justice, a community organization that connects the D.C. Jail to the neighboring community. 

But Zeigler says the frequent resistance from local prosecutors has limited the reach of D.C.’s landmark sentencing reforms.

“Their treatment of these cases since day one has been aggressive and rigid and oppositional in a way that is not contemplated by or justifiable under the statute,” Zeigler said of D.C. prosecutors, who work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. 

According to the office, 95 resentencing motions filed under SLAA and its predecessors have been decided so far, 84 of which were granted. The office told Bolts that it had opposed or objected to the timing of release in all but 12 of those motions. 

The office, now headed by U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, declined a request for an interview on their approach to the law. Prosecutors have said 15-year sentences are too short, and that the people applying for release may re-offend. A man who was freed in 2020 through the original “Second Look” reform, after being originally incarcerated over a crime he committed when he was 16, was arrested last year for murder. At the time, federal prosecutors said he was the fourth person released under resentencing reforms arrested for a new crime, such as unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, but the first to be accused of a new violent offense.

Zeigler cautions that the arrest has not yet resulted in a conviction, and that the broader recidivism rate for all people released from prison is often higher. “No system is going to be able to offer a 100 percent guarantee that no one will commit crimes, and the fact a very small number of people have recidivated seems to be a poor justification for incarcerating people into old age with no opportunity to demonstrate rehabilitation and be released,” he said.

Advocates for Second Look petitioners say that the way cases are distributed across D.C.’s Superior Court judges also presents a challenge. While in the past resentencing petitions were assigned primarily to judges with criminal calendars, according to Zeigler, they are spread across the bench to judges with less experience in relevant criminal matters. 

Zeigler also says he worries about compassion fatigue among judges, telling Bolts, “The excitement and momentum that kind of benefited a lot of earlier IRAA cases has kind of dissipated.” 

Long, who’s now midway through the process of petitioning for resentencing under SLAA, says he wants a chance to show that he’s changed since entering prison as a teenager. “It should be acknowledged the steps that we’ve taken to correct the behaviors that we did,” he told Bolts. “Give us a second chance.”

“The bad things we did to get things in prison were acknowledged and we ultimately suffered the consequences,” he told Bolts. “I think equally important, (are) the steps that we’ve taken to correct the behaviors…  There’s so much untapped potential in here.”

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