Reports and Links
Reports
August 2008: Unequal under the law report (ACLU of LA)
The ACLU of Louisiana releases its report entitled Unequal Under the Law, the culmination of a year-long study on racial profiling in Louisiana. The ACLU¹s Racial Justice Fellow spent a year gathering and analyzing data from local law enforcement agencies and speaking with victims of racial profiling across the state. The report tells victims¹ stories, and analyzes three months of arrest and population data from law enforcement agencies in Avoyelles Parish, DeSoto Parish, and St. Tammany Parish. In each of these parishes, the data show that people of color are arrested at a higher rate than their representation in the population. The report also lays out specific steps law enforcement and community members may take to move aggressively towards ending racial profiling in Louisiana.
February 2008: One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (Pew Center on the States)
Three decades of growth in America’s prison population has quietly nudged the nation across a sobering threshold: for the first time, more than one in every 100 adults is now confined in an American jail or prison. According to figures gathered and analyzed by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project, the number of people behind bars in the United States continued to climb in 2007, saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime.
February 2008: Behind the Cycle: Moving Toward an Integrative Approach to Justice Reform (Open Society Institute)
At this moment in time, there is a unique opportunity to address issues that fuel America’s cycle of incarceration – issues such as poverty, racial disparities, lack of economic opportunity, inadequate education, health disparities, family and child welfare, and inadequate housing. This is a moment of significant challenge, and the stakes have never been higher. Implementation of the recommendations proposed in this report provides a means of seeding and energizing a new movement to promote more effective approaches to criminal justice issues, to address significant budgetary challenges, and to respond to the significant social policy and human service needs that exist in communities across America. Ultimately, implementation of these recommendations provides a means of abating the disproportionate numbers of the poor and people of color cycling through the criminal justice system.
What practical steps can New Orleans take to make its criminal justice system more reliable, effective, and just? To answer this question, the Vera Institute of Justice interviewed key stakeholders—including justice system leaders, representatives of nonprofit research and advocacy groups, and several members of the city council—and reviewed data on how the system has been operating after flooding devastated the city.
Since that tragedy, government officials and other leaders have demonstrated a clear commitment to restoring the city’s justice system and investing in the implementation of fair and efficient practices. This dedication provides a window of opportunity in which New Orleans can begin rebuilding a justice system that is indeed both effective and just.
February 2007: Public Safety, Public Spending: Forecasting America’s Prison Population 2007-2011 (Public Safety Performance, Pew Charitable Trusts)
This report is the first known attempt to determine the future growth of the nation's state and federal prison systems as a whole, along with the projected cost of that growth. Its findings show that America's prison population will continue its extraordinary growth in the coming years, with more than 192,000 prisoners added by 2011. This growth will carry a heavy fiscal burden, estimated at up to $12.5 billion in new prison construction and $15 billion in operations costs.
In a comprehensive report from our National Prison Project, the ACLU documents the terrible conditions and dangerous lack of planning at the Orleans Parish Prison during and after Hurricane Katrina. This report focuses on the experience of thousands of individuals trapped in the prison during and after the storm, and recounts the nightmare many of them later faced at various receiving facilities around Louisiana. The approaching anniversary of the storm creates an opportunity to reevaluate the systems that were in place leading up to Katrina and to assess whether those systems have since improved.
This report follows the journey taken by these trapped children – from Orleans Parish Prison to Office of Youth Development. In their own words, a harrowing tale of escape, mismanagement and neglect unfolds, illustrating deep problems in New Orleans’ system of juvenile justice and how we treat children in New Orleans. Experts note that detention is the cornerstone of a local juvenile justice system. Problems with Orleans Parish’s detention centers and our juvenile justice system – made more pronounced by Katrina’s damage – were neither created nor washed away by Katrina’s impact.
This study measures the impact of race, gender and representation on economic loss for indigents prior to sentencing. To clearly identify the impact of these characteristics on the economic loss of indigents, the following characteristics are controlled for in the empirical analysis: personal characteristics, crime categories and county differences. Economic loss is a complicated outcome to identify because it consists of three separate measures: (1) the length of time a person spends in county jail from the arrest date until the sentence date; (2) the direct cost per day of time spent in jail; and (3) the opportunity cost per day of time spent in jail from missed work days. Although this research points to a number of findings concerning Mississippi's system of indigent defense, the most important finding to note is the following: The implementation of a state wide full-time public defender system could increase personal income in Mississippi by over $90 million annually, with resulting increases of $5.3 million in state general fund revenue and $546 thousand in local government revenue. In addition, county jail costs could decrease by $16.5 million per year.
Links:
American Bar Association: http://www.abanet.org
Innocence Project New Orleans: http://www.ip-no.org
Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana: http://www.jjpl.org
Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers: http://www.lacdl.org
Louisiana Public Defenders Association: http://www.lapda.org
Louisiana Public Defender Board: http://www.lapdb.org
Louisiana State Bar Association: http://www.lsba.org
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers: http://www.nacdl.org
National Legal Aid and Defender Association: http://www.nlada.org
National Juvenile Defender Center: http://www.njdc.info