Cheh, who was a Washington D.C. City Council member at the time, says a tour she took of the D.C. Jail that summer that led her to introduce the Inmate Segregation Reduction Act of 2015, which attempted to limit solitary confinement throughout the District’s correctional facilities. 

In December of that year, advocates with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture erected a full-size replica of a solitary confinement cell in the Foundry United Methodist Church in Northwest D.C. to raise awareness for Cheh’s bill ahead of a council vote. Cheh, who visited the church one Sunday that month to speak about the proposed reforms, says the image of the cell’s cramped confines has stuck with her ever since.

“It really took the activism of groups to point out to me the ills—the absolute horror, even—of solitary confinement,” she told Bolts. 

But Cheh’s bill never made it to a vote. In fact it never made it out of the judiciary committee where it was first referred. Cheh tried twice more to pass laws reducing solitary confinement before leaving the council in 2022, but those proposals died as well. 

Then in September 2023, D.C. Council member Brianne Nadeau took up the baton by introducing the ERASE (Eliminating Restrictive and Segregated Enclosure) Solitary Confinement Act. Nadeau’s office worked with the local chapter of Unlock the Box, a coalitional advocacy campaign seeking to end solitary confinement nationwide, in drafting the language of the bill. It aims to comprehensively ban solitary practices in the D.C. Department of Corrections’ facilities, but it remains to be seen whether Nadeau and her co-sponsors on the Council will be able to generate the political will to get it passed this time. 

Despite calls to end it over the intervening years, solitary confinement has remained a regular practice in the D.C. Jail, which holds between 900 and 1,300 residents at any given time. Most are pretrial defendants or people serving short sentences for misdemeanor convictions. 

In fact, D.C.’s Department of Corrections has been shown to use solitary confinement more than many other correctional systems around the country. An agency memo reported that eight percent of its population were held in solitary confinement in 2018, and nine percent in 2017—three times the national average, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released in 2015. And at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the agency reportedly held 1,500 people in prolonged isolation for nearly 400 days.

Solitary confinement—defined as prolonged isolation with little to no human contact—has been decried by governments and activists the world over for exacerbating the harmful behaviors that often land people in solitary in the first place. In 2015, the United Nations classified solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days as torture for the damage it does to inmates’ physical and mental health. Studies have shown that some residents held in solitary confinement become “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.”

“It creates a situation where if somebody is already suffering from a mental illness, it exacerbates those conditions,” Jessica Sandoval, national director of the Unlock the Box, told Bolts. 

“All of the research out there and all of the personal experience we hear people share shows that putting someone in solitary is likely to make them more violent, not less,” said Emily Cassometus, former director of government and external affairs at DC Justice Lab, part of the Unlock the Box D.C. coalition. “Towards themselves, towards other people in the facility, staff and residents included, and more likely to be victims of violence, to be victims of self-harm, and to commit violence once they’re released.”

The D.C. Jail has leaned on isolation as a strategy to deal with inmates experiencing mental health crises in particular, yet publicly contends that it doesn’t put people in “solitary confinement.” In 2022, then-DOC spokesperson Keena Blackmon told a local outlet that the D.C. Jail “does not operate solitary confinement within its facilities,” and only uses “restrictive housing” for suicide prevention. 

These are known as “safe cells,” designed to keep suicidal inmates from environments that could endanger their safety. But advocates have argued that these restrictive housing units are just isolation by another name, and say these units more closely resemble punishment than medical care. 

“Jail authorities are very clever and they give different names to solitary confinement, but it’s still solitary confinement,” Cheh told Bolts. “They could call it whatever they want.”

A lawyer representing people formerly incarcerated in the D.C. Jail told Bolts of numerous complaints emanating from the restrictive housing cells over the past decade. People incarcerated in these units have complained of being held for 23 hours of each day isolated inside their cell; that they had no access to showers or running water; that they slept on plastic blocks due to a lack of mattresses; that bright fluorescent lighting blazing all day inside their cell made them lose track of time; that they were stripped of all their clothes and personal belongings, including religious material, and even thrown in cells with feces on the walls—likely from past residents who’d covered themselves in it trying to force officers to let them shower. 

Between November 2012 and August 2013, four residents of the facility committed suicide, which jail officials at the time said was three times the national average. So the department commissioned suicide prevention expert Lindsay Hayes to survey the area in order to prevent further self-inflicted harm.

In his report published September 2013, Hayes found the conditions “overly restrictive” and “seemingly punitive,” and suggested that the agency avoid isolating at-risk residents to prevent further self-harm.

“Confining a suicidal inmate to their cell for 24 hours a day only enhances isolation and is anti-therapeutic,” he wrote.

While the jail has updated their practices based on Hayes’ suggestions, residents are still reportedly held for up to 22 hours a day in severe conditions. And the suicides haven’t stopped.

Nadeau’s bill makes note of the “deplorable conditions at the District’s jails and restrictive housing units—including flooding, lack of grievance procedures, lack of mattresses, and more.”

The bill seeks to prohibit “segregated confinement” outright within the D.C. Jail. But it still makes an exception for safe cells; it would “strictly limit” their use for suicide prevention, allowing for people on suicide watch to be put in “safe cells” only if “immediately necessary”, and sets a 48-hour maximum limit for holding a person there continuously. It also puts in place other guardrails, such as frequent checks by a medical professional. 

This stripped back version, which didn’t include juvenile detention facilities the way Cheh’s bill did, was introduced in an attempt to ease its way to passage.

But even if the bill is passed, the reforms would need to be regularly enforced by an independent oversight body or risk becoming toothless. The D.C. Corrections Information Council was created for such oversight, but in recent years it has received sharp criticism for its inattention to conditions in the D.C. Jail.

“Sixteen years on the Council taught me a few things,” Cheh told Bolts, “and one of them is that you can pass all the laws you want, but if people aren’t enforcing them, then they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.”

The legislation hasn’t progressed much in the new year. In fact, the city council seems to have moved in the opposite direction on criminal justice, passing an omnibus anti-crime bill in early February that would among other things create harsher penalties for gun crimes and theft, with a focus on retail theft in particular. The ERASE Solitary Confinement Act was referred to the judiciary and public safety committee back in November, but there hasn’t been any movement on the legislation since.

Cassometus says she fears that to many D.C. leaders, the invisible nature of solitary confinement is a feature, not a bug. “It’s really hard to draw attention to an issue that no one can see, hear or smell,” she told Bolts. “Solitary confinement has been talked about as a solution to problems but it’s not. It’s locking our problems in a smaller box inside the jail and wishing that they would go away without actually proposing any solutions.”

The post “An Issue No One Can See”: Watchdogs Fault D.C. for Ongoing Solitary Confinement appeared first on Bolts.

When the Massachusetts supreme court banned sentences of life without the possibility of parole against children in late 2013, the state was ahead of the curve—just five states had taken that step as of the start of that year. 

Today there are 28. In an unusually rapid sea change over the last decade, red and blue states alike have rushed to bar that punishment, which denies someone any possibility of ever leaving prison, for anyone under age 18. That includes GOP-run Ohio in 2021, and Democratic-run Minnesota and New Mexico last year. 

Will a similar surge now shield even more youths from being incarcerated for life with no hope of release?

Once again, Massachusetts is ahead of the curve: The state supreme court issued landmark rulings on Jan. 11 that expanded its earlier holding, and raised the minimum age for a life without parole sentence from 18 to 21. 

In a 4-3 vote, the majority ruled that youth aged 18 to 20 are never beyond redemption, and that they should receive the same consideration as minors due to their continuing mental development. “A sentence of life in prison without parole eligibility review for those up to age twenty-one—individuals with diminished culpability and a heightened capacity for change—is no less cruel or unusual than it is for those up to age eighteen,” Justice Scott Kafker wrote in a concurrence that drew a direct line between the court’s decision in 2013 and its new ruling. 

The decision doesn’t guarantee actual release to anyone. Rather, it grants people opportunities to appear in front of a parole board to showcase their growth—and only once they’ve spent 15 to 30 years in prison, depending on the case. State officials estimate that the ruling made roughly 200 people newly eligible for a parole hearing.

“Emerging adults… must be granted a ‘meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation,’” Chief Justice Kimberly Budd wrote for the majority, quoting from a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that applied to children. The court was considering the cases of two people, Sheldon Mattis and Jason Robinson, who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole as 18- and 19-year olds. (All seven justices who took part in the decision were nominated to the court by Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican.)

Massachusetts is just the second jurisdiction to ensure that everyone incarcerated over a crime committed before age 21 has some opportunity for release. 

In 2021, Washington, D.C., adopted a “second look” reform that’s functionally equivalent: People convicted as young adults can ask for a review after serving 15 years in prison. (D.C. does not call this review “parole,” so people in this group can technically still be sentenced to life without parole, but they have a mechanism to petition for release.) 

In fact, D.C. applies that reform all the way to age 25, rather than 21, a narrower definition of who is a full adult in the eyes of the law.

The Massachusetts ruling also builds on other very recent gains for reformers pushing for a higher cutoff age than 18. 

Just over the last twelve months, Connecticut and Illinois both adopted laws to restrict LWOP up to age 21. In Michigan and Washington state, judges banned sentencing rules that mandate life without parole for people under 19 and 21, respectively. Each has important carve-outs: Illinois’ law does not apply to people convicted of predatory sexual offenses, nor does it apply retroactively; Connecticut’s law applies only to people convicted before 2005; in Michigan and Washington, judges still have discretion to impose the sentence as long as it’s not automatic. But each concretizes the same principle as Massachusetts’ ruling: that 18 is not the proper place to set a limit for who gets to be considered a young person deserving of special protections. 

“People who committed crimes at a very young age have the capacity to turn their lives around and become productive citizens,” said Alex Taubes, a Connecticut lawyer who represents people on parole and supports his state’s 2023 reform. 

Preston Shipp, who advocates for such reforms nationwide as policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, says his advocacy work gets easier when he can tell lawmakers that more and more states have acted against juvenile life without parole. “When one domino falls, it causes the next domino to fall,” Shipp said. “These are very important steps that we’re continuing to take on our journey to make sure that people who don’t have fully formed brains are not thrown away and told there’s no hope.”

Reform proponents in other states are already lining up to be next. California’s supreme court heard a similar case in early December; it could prohibit life without parole up to age 26. 

In Washington state, legislation that would end life without parole up to age 25 received its first hearing on Jan. 15, just days after the Massachusetts ruling. Chelsea Moore, an advocate with the ACLU of Washington, and co-founder of Look2Justice, an organization centered on the rights of incarcerated Washingtonians, is championing that bill. “It’s wonderful that we see this acknowledgement spreading across the U.S.,” she said. “It’s very helpful for us to be able to interact with folks in those states, and to point to those states.”

This momentum reflects the extraordinary changes since the “superpredators” panic of the 1990s, which fueled more life sentences for children. The notion that a young person who commits a crime is particularly dangerous and unredeemable has been debunked, replaced with a consensus that youth is redeeming, a sign that one really could change. But to translate that idea into law would seem to demand drawing a bright line—a legal age that separates youth and adulthood, at least for the purpose of deciding what counts as too young to be sentenced to die in prison. And with different visions of change competing, that task itself is making reformers confront the nuances of age and development, and ponder how to best restrict a sentence that many refer to as “death by incarceration” without leaving too many people behind. 

This sense of an emerging momentum is not just a political boost for reformers like Moore. In the Massachusetts ruling, it actually served as legal evidence.

To justify raising the age from 18 to 21, the state supreme court appealed to the “evolving standards of decency,” an approach to constitutional law that connects people’s rights to contemporary norms, and that’s long been used to expand protections on juvenile defendants. The majority talked about recent laws and rulings in other states—as well as reforms in other nations—to conclude that these standards are shifting. 

Among the reforms the court cites: D.C.’s 2021 law, and Illinois’ 2023 law. 

Bolts asked Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Illinois-based organization Restore Justice, for her reaction about the Massachusetts court drawing on a law she championed hundreds of miles away. “I think it’s incredible to see this momentum continue to build,” she said. In turn, she hopes that this out-of-state ruling can help her persuade Illinois lawmakers to revisit last year’s law and make it retroactive. 

“It is so encouraging for legislators to know that other states are reaching that same decision that young people are different,” she explained.

Besides these “evolving standards,” the Massachusetts court grounded its ruling on research in neuroscience and psychology that shows that people’s brains continue to develop into their mid-20s. “Advancements in scientific research have confirmed what many know well through experience: the brains of emerging adults are not fully mature,” the majority wrote.

Stephanie Tabashneck, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Harvard Medical School, offers an example: Young adults “can’t regulate their emotions” as well as older adults because their frontal lobes are not fully developed. Tabashneck is not surprised that such findings resonated with the court. She often gives presentations to judges and attorneys, showing them brain scans highlighting the marked differences between younger and older adults; just seeing those images has a powerful effect on her interlocutors, she said. 

Some public officials echoed the science in praising the Massachusetts ruling. “The practice of putting a person behind bars forever, without paying attention to decision-making ability based on age and the science of brain development, should end,” Kevin Hayden, the district attorney of Suffolk County (Boston), said in a statement. Hayden succeeded Rachael Rollins, a reform-minded DA who’d also backed the litigation against life without parole, as well as efforts to raise the age of youth justice from 18 to 21 in other contexts.

But here’s a rub: Much of this research has found that people’s brains continue developing for years beyond age 21, leaving a gap with where the Massachusetts justices landed. The majority recognizes this, writing that “we acknowledge that the scientific record in this case suggests that the unique attributes of youth may persist in young adults older than twenty-one.” 

And here, too, the majority invoked examples from other states to explain how it reached its decision—except this time, it did that to justify not going up higher, say to 25, rather than to support going beyond 18: “The contemporary standards of decency that govern our decision today do not suggest a societal consensus that those aged twenty-one and above should be treated differently from older adults.”

On this point, the dissenting justices harshly criticized the majority for having it both ways. “[E]ven if it could, science does not definitively place the line of brain maturation at twenty-one, but rather suggests that it extends into the mid-twenties,” wrote Justice David Lowy. He accused his colleagues of “manufactur[ing] a new category of individuals entitled to distinct constitutional treatment,” and usurping the prerogative of lawmakers by deciding what he argues ought to be a political question—what is youth for the purposes of punishment. 

“Perhaps nothing speaks louder to the flaws in the court’s holding,” Lowy wrote, “than the court having crafted a line that ends at age twenty-one, thereby engaging in legislative line-drawing inconsistent with the science upon which it relies.” 

If there’s no switch that flips in a person’s brain the day they turn 18, neither is there one the day they turn 21. For Lowy, the seeming arbitrariness of setting a line at one’s 21st birthday was a reason to not raise the age at all. But for some reformers, it’s a reason to think even bigger.

Moore, the Washington advocate, feels a twinge of concern that if politicians and judges settle on 21 as the new age for juvenile justice, it may make it trickier to push bills with a higher age cutoff—like her state’s proposed legislation, which goes to 25, closer to what scientific studies envisage. “Just like the age of 18 was socially constructed, I think the age of 21 is also socially constructed,” she said. “We’re hopeful that we will continue to move past these social constructions of what we see as mature, into what we really know in science.”

Still, Moore is confident that, no matter how a particular reform defines who counts as young enough, it’ll pave the way for still more change down the line. Since Washington state abolished life without parole for teenagers under 18 in 2018, “We have people running nonprofits, we have people doing anti-violence work,” she said. “It’s so impressive what folks have done.” She points to a study conducted last year by two University of Washington scholars that showed low recidivism among the incarcerated people whose petitions were granted. 

“We just know that that model can be replicated if we bump the age up to 25 for those folks serving life and long sentences,” she added. “Those folks can come home safely and our parole board can determine when it is safe to return to their homes: They’re already doing it, and so they would be able to do it for this other group of folks.”

James Zeigler, who leads the Second Look Project, a D.C.-based group that championed D.C.’s reform and has helped implement them, questions if an age cutoff is needed at all. “If you have to draw a line somewhere, identify when someone becomes a full blown adult for culpability purposes, [25] probably makes the most sense, and it makes more sense than 18 or 21, which are both ages after which people continue to grow and develop quite a bit,” Zeigler said.

But “developmental maturation process doesn’t end at 25 for anybody,” he pointed out. “While it may slow down as a kind of general rule, everybody continues to kind of grow, change, and mature… I have seen it in my work that plenty of people who commit crimes and make serious mistakes well into adulthood, past the age of 25, past the age of 30, can still grow and change in the way that we are talking about, that you hope for in people.”

Katy Naples-Mitchell, a special litigation advisor at Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute, also wonders how to draw a rigid line as to when one enters adulthood, when the characteristics that make humans capable of change don’t just disappear as one ages.

As the Massachusetts supreme court considered the Mattis and Robinson cases, Naples-Mitchell co-authored an amicus brief in support of ending life without parole for young adults in Massachusetts. The brief focused on the huge racial disparities in who’s serving life without parole in Massachusetts, finding that Black youth between ages 18 and 20 are sixteen times more likely to have received that sentence than white youth.

“People of color are facing more extreme charges for less serious conduct,” Naples-Mitchell told Bolts, explaining that Black people in particular are more likely to face a charge that triggers life without parole. Research by the American Psychological Association has found that people perceive Black youth as older than they are, making judges more prone to treating Black defendants as full adults than they are with white defendants.

Those disparities also apply across age groups, though. According to research conducted by the Sentencing Project, an organization that researches criminal justice, the majority of people serving life without parole in Massachusetts as of 2020 were Black and Latinx; those groups make up less than one-fourth of the state’s overall population. Studies nationwide show prosecutors and judges use harsher charges and sentences for people of color.

For Naples-Mitchell, the debate over young adults should be a gateway for a broader reckoning with how we dole out punishments. “This is an opportunity to reshape norms about life sentences more broadly, beyond the categorical approach in the brain science,” she said. She described the neuroscientific research as critically important to understanding the need for reform but also says “the brain science is a window for the public to access new empathy.”

“There are lots of ways to build on that,” she added, “whether it’s to build to another later-in-life bright line, or to think more holistically about sentences of life without parole, and whether that is something that public policy should promote.”

D.C. underwent just the trajectory that Naples-Mitchell envisions. It first provided an opportunity for release to anyone convicted as a minor. Then, in 2021, it extended that approach to offenses committed up to age 25. And then, the local government chose to expand its reform yet again by guaranteeing any incarcerated person a judicial review after a lengthy term in prison—no matter their age at the time of the offense. That ordinance was part of the omnibus package that was blocked by Congress and President Biden last year. 

State Senator Liz Miranda, a progressive politician from Boston, wants Massachusetts to take the same route. She is sponsoring legislation that would repeal life without parole sentences regardless of the age at which someone commits a crime. Under the bill, anyone incarcerated in Massachusetts would receive a parole hearing after 25 years of incarceration.  

At a hearing for her bill, Miranda talked about her brother, who was murdered in Boston, explaining why she opposes life without parole as a punishment for his alleged killer. “I believe life without parole is death by another name, and I do not believe in death sentences,” Miranda said.

The post A Wave of States Reduce “Death by Incarceration” for Young Adults  appeared first on Bolts.

One reform, which drew the ire of congressional Republicans, will enable noncitizen residents to vote in local elections. The second largely flew under the radar of national politicians, and will overhaul the city’s approach to voter registration. 

Underlying the Automatic Voter Registration Expansion Amendment Act, that seemingly technical bill, is a challenge to a core aspect of U.S. elections. Why put a burden of registration on prospective voters when public authorities can determine who is eligible on their own? 

Going forward, D.C. will use the information it collects when residents interact with public agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles to create a running list of people who are “preapproved” to vote. For people on this list, there will be no need to register in advance of an election; all they will have to do is vote.

This new law would pair with a reform that the council has adopted but is not yet law, which would set up universal mail-in voting: That bill would apply to people on the “preapproved” list. As a result, D.C. would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible to vote—even if they have not registered. 

“Unlike other parts of the country where we’re seeing people try to restrict the ability of people to get to the polls and to vote, in D.C., we want everyone to be able to vote,” Councilmember Charles Allen told Bolts last year when he filed the bill. This act, he said, will “make sure we are really reaching every single person we possibly can to make sure they can participate and have their voice heard.”

The bill was approved unanimously by the D.C. council in December and signed by the mayor. It became law after the customary congressional review that all D.C. bills undergo expired this week. Republicans in Congress did not target this legislation, though they sought to block other recent city reforms, including a bill that enables noncitizens to vote in local elections. 

That noncitizen voting bill, known as the Local Residents Voting Rights Act, also became law this week. The U.S. House voted to block it in January in a resolution proposed by the GOP and supported by some Democrats, but the Senate did not follow up by the March 14 deadline that was set by the chamber’s parliamentarian. 

As a result, noncitizens who have been residents of D.C. for 30 days will be able to vote in local elections—including for mayor, city council, education board, and ballot initiatives. The law would not apply to federal elections.

“While we’re expanding voting rights here within our boundaries, Congress is attacking our autonomy altogether,” Brianne Nadeau, a D.C. councilmember who sponsored this bill, told Bolts this week. “It’s kind of a wild moment in history.” 

D.C. follows at least 15 other municipalities, including Maryland suburbs of D.C. such as Takoma Park, that already allow non-citizen voting. Most recently, voters in Oakland, California, approved a ballot measure in November to enable noncitizens to vote in school board races; in January, Vermont’s supreme court upheld several towns’ decision to enfranchise noncitizen residents. 

Similar proposals are on the table in other cities such as Boston. But the GOP is working in several states to preempt such local reforms.

A conservative group filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against D.C.’s new noncitizen voting law, claiming that it “dilutes the vote of every U.S. citizen voter in the District.” Nadeau says she also worries that Congress may still move to block the the funding needed to implement the measure; Congress has budgetary tools available to thwart D.C. measures beyond the congressional review period.

Proponents of the change say that restricting the franchise from noncitizens excludes a large swath of the population from decision-making. The Legal Aid Society of The District of Columbia testified before the council that more than 40,000 D.C. residents are not U.S. citizens, but many of them work, pay taxes in the District, or send children to public schools. They should have a say in their elected government, Nadeau said. 

“We have a special opportunity to show that getting involved locally can make a difference,” she said. By getting involved in municipal government, she added, “you can make change in a very short amount of time.”

The Automatic Voter Registration Expansion Amendment Act, D.C.’s other new law, only applies to U.S. citizens. It aims to draw into the process people who are already eligible to vote by building on D.C.’s prior reforms to voter registration.

The city already follows a model known as automatic voter registration, or AVR, along with more than 20 states. The idea is to use the fact that people from all walks of life are already interacting regularly with a DMV and other public agencies for reasons that have nothing to do with voting, like getting a driver’s license. While they’re there, the thinking goes, the government should take the opportunity to register them to vote. Studies have found that this approach boosts registration and turnout rates.

Some automatic registration programs, including the one D.C. currently uses, give residents the chance to opt out of registering while they’re still conducting the transaction with an agency. Many people take the chance to opt out up-front, often because they’re in a hurry and believe that declining will get them out the door faster, or because they may have questions about their eligibility. 

The new law switches D.C. into another model, known as “back-end.” Residents who are automatically registered are offered the chance to opt out later on: They will receive a mailer at home, and they can return it if they wish to opt out. If they do nothing at all, they will remain registered to vote. 

Colorado made this switch in 2019 and saw its registration rates soar as a result. Testifying last fall in support of D.C.’s change, Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold said that under the state’s prior “front-end” system, roughly 60 percent of eligible residents were opting out. After the switch, Colorado found that more than 99 percent remained registered after receiving the post-transaction mailer.

Allen, the sponsor of the D.C. law, told Bolts he drew inspiration from Colorado. 

But his proposal also goes beyond this “back-end” approach. It charts a new path that no longer treats registration as a step that residents must take before voting. 

Requiring voter registration, says Alex Keysarr, a Harvard historian who studies the development of voting laws in the U.S., “creates a barrier between the voter and the act of voting.” Historically, he told Bolts, this barrier has suppressed the electoral influence of poor people, immigrants, and people of color. 

Under the new law, the city will identify people who, based on information they’ve already provided the government, are eligible to vote. They will then receive a ballot in the mail. For those individuals, the only decision would be to vote, or not. 

Still, people added to the “preapproved” list in D.C. would be sent a mailer that gives them an opportunity to remove their name.

The new law also does not get rid of voter registration. The city would inform people that returning the mail-in ballot or heading to the polls would activate their registration. In effect, voting itself would be the act of registration.

But D.C.’s reform may still leave some residents behind since it hinges on them heading into specific public agencies. People who do not interact with the DMV or a Medicaid office would not be added to this “preapproved” list. 

“I would caution that there are still people who will not be offered registration opportunities, particularly people who do not interact regularly with government agencies like the driver’s license offices,” said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida who studies turnout.

D.C. has for years offered same-day voter registration, so those people would have the opportunity to head to a polling location during the early voting period or on Election Day. They would not receive a mail-in ballot, though. 

McDonald does not expect the new law to make a major change to turnout in D.C. given the city’s unique circumstances. “The fact that the city is highly uncompetitive and the District has limited self-rule probably matter more,” he said.

D.C. is already facing new attacks on its self-rule. Last week, some House Republicans launched a new push to overturn a set of policing reforms, known as the city’s Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act, adopted by the D.C. government to expand citizen oversight of police and limit police use of dangerous weapons against protesters, among other provisions. 

Nadeau said, “Recent congressional action makes it clear that any of the work we do in the District of Columbia is very precarious as long as we don’t have statehood.” 

The post Pair of Reforms to Expand the Electorate Become Law in D.C. appeared first on Bolts.

Washington, D.C., may soon do away with voter registration as most Americans know it. Under a new bill, set to have its first council hearing on Friday, D.C. would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible, even if they are not registered.

Drawing inspiration from Colorado, which many voting-rights experts characterize as the national standard for accessibility, the city would take information it collects when residents interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles and other agencies to maintain a constantly-updating list of people who are “preapproved” to vote. For people on that list, all there would be left to do is to vote come election time. 

“Traditionally, registration has been used as a way to keep people from voting,” Charles Allen, the D.C. councilmember who is sponsoring the legislation, told Bolts. “It’s a way to be a gatekeeper as to who you think should be able to vote.” 

Under Allen’s bill, voting itself would be the act of registration—at least for those the city identifies as prequalified. This would “make sure we are really reaching every single person we possibly can to make sure they can participate and have their voice heard,” Allen said.

D.C. already enacts a policy known as automatic voter registration. First adopted in Oregon in 2015, it has since spread to more than twenty states, plus D.C., as a tool to expand voter rolls. (It largely exists in Democratic-run states, with some exceptions.) The idea is that instead of the traditional approach of waiting for people to opt in being registered, agencies like the DMV make it the default to register them to vote and then give them the opportunity to opt out of the rolls. Studies have found that this policy has boosted registration and turnout rates.

But in most places with automatic voter registration, the policy is falling short of its promise. Many people who enter the DMV unregistered are still not registered when they leave. Neal Ubriani, policy and research director at the Institute for Responsive Government, an organization that promotes efficiency in government, and an advisor to Allen on the D.C. bill, says this boils down to how these systems are designed.

When they go to to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license or get an ID card, D.C. residents are currently told that their information will be used to register them to vote, they are shown a list of criteria they must meet, and they are given the option to refuse registration by checking a box: “I decline/opt out. Do not register me to vote or update my voter registration.”

Ubriani said systems like D.C.’s on average have about a 50 percent opt-out rate. Some just want to leave the DMV and think that by opting out they’ll avoid more time and questions; some may not be sure whether they are eligible; others might trust themselves to update their voter registration on their own; or they may believe (falsely, in many cases) that their registration is up-to-date and not tied to a previous address.

D.C.’s design is known as “front-end” since people are asked whether they want to opt-out while still at the DMV. Most states with automatic voter registration do the same. 

“I’ve seen states that call themselves AVR systems that have an 80 percent declination rate at the DMV,” Ubriani said.

Allen wants his bill to fix that problem. “We already have a version of automatic voter registration, and this really takes it further,” he told Bolts.

Allen says he looked toward the handful of states like Oregon, Alaska and Colorado that have gone a different route, implementing a design known as “back-end” automatic voter registration. There, people who provide documents that indicate that they are U.S. citizens are automatically registered to vote and they are not asked any further questions while at the public agency; they later receive a mailer at home, and they can return it if they wish to opt-out. If they do nothing at all, they will remain registered to vote. 

Colorado switched from a “front-end” system to a “back-end” one in 2019, and a recent study conducted by two political science professors at Stanford University found that the switch successfully activated voters. It drastically cut down the rate of people who opted out: Less than one percent of the people who were sent a mailer returned it indicating they declined registration. This sent registration in Colorado soaring, roughly doubling the registration rate for DMV customers who were previously unregistered. About 250,000 Coloradoans were automatically registered to vote during the first year of implementation, and about half voted.

Amanda Gonzalez was a voting rights advocate as then-executive director of Common Cause Colorado in 2019 when she helped draft and lobby for these changes. “I think the question we probably should be asking ourselves is, what is the system that is going to best facilitate the most participation?” she told Bolts.

Allen has an answer, telling Bolts, “We want to make it as automatic as possible.”

His bill would not exactly move D.C. to a “back-end” system like Colorado’s because it wouldn’t outright register people. But it’s guided by a similar principle that it’s really up to public authorities to review someone’s eligibility based on the information they’ve already shared. Under his proposal, as long as someone has provided certain documents, the city would verify and record them as eligible: This would pre-qualify them as voters, even when they’re not formally on voter rolls. 

D.C. would then send people on this preapproved list a mail-in ballot for every election during the following two years. They would never need to proactively register, though they would be given an opportunity to remove their name from this list through a mailer. D.C. would also inform them that they can return a ballot or head to the polls to activate their registration. All they would need to do at that point is choose whether or not to vote.

Ubriani thinks that this would break the mold of how we usually approach elections. “It’s not mythologizing this first antecedent step (registering to vote) as some important, necessary civic duty,” he said.

Alex Keysarr, a Harvard historian who studies the development of voting laws in the U.S., has documented that the emergence of registration laws made voting a two-step process that had exclusionary effects.

Voter registration requirements gained widespread popularity in the U.S. starting in the 1870s. The result was to deny some people the ability to vote, or at least to make exercising their right more difficult. “We know historically that those people have tended to be poor people and people of color and immigrants—people who haven’t had the resources,” he told Bolts.

He added, “It creates a barrier between the voter and the act of voting.” 

The bill pending in D.C. would chip away at that barrier. Still, the policy would only cover people who interact with select agencies, mainly at the DMV and when filling a Medicaid application. What of people who don’t go to those agencies? There are efforts nationwide to include automatic voter registration with a broad array of public services—–some of which would need approval from the Biden administration—and some want to eliminate voter registration altogether.

Allen says he’s open to expanding his D.C. proposal to use data collected in other settings— perhaps at libraries or public recreation centers—to build a more comprehensive “preapproved” list of voters. 

That can get tricky, though. The DMV is an ideal setting not only because it’s a place visited by people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, ages and races. It’s also a place where citizenship questions are already being asked, and all sorts of information relevant to voting, such as age and home address, are already collected. With relatively low effort, a government interested in boosting participation can simply use information the DMV was going to gather anyway.

Expanding this program to, say, libraries or recreation centers would mean asking people about their immigration status in more settings, citizenship being an obvious prerequisite to voting, and that’s a step many balk at.

“I love the idea of libraries, but those aren’t places that currently do citizenship checks, nor should they be,” said Gonzalez, the Colorado advocate who is now the Democratic nominee running for county clerk in Jefferson County, outside of Denver. “We don’t want to create new places where people are being asked to verify their citizenship.”

Some voting right organizations like the Brennan Center worry about these immigration issues even at the DMV, which has led them to criticize “back-end” systems; they say that registering people without asking them immediately if they want to opt out could mistakenly add noncitizens to the polls.

Ubriani says that these risks are already present in D.C.’s current “front-end” system, which is designed to pose registration-related questions to DMV clients even when they are not U.S. citizens. That means people who affirmatively show a document making clear their lack of citizenship still get asked about voter registration. “That’s sort of like a trap for the unwary,” Ubriani said. “If I miss that question, if I’m less English-proficient or confused, even slightly inattentive during the transaction, suddenly I’ve incorrectly indicated citizenship.”

For Ubriani and Allen, this hazard adds to the flaws that they want D.C. to urgently fix.

Allen chairs the committee that his bill will start in, which makes for strong odds that the bill will advance past its first hearing on Friday. The bill would then have to be approved by the full city council and the mayor, and Congress would need to not intervene to repeal it.

The councilmember is simultaneously sponsoring a bill to enact universal mail voting; in 2022, all registered voters in D.C. are already set to receive a mail-in ballot due to pandemic-era rules, but this bill would make that permanent. Allen has also backed other measures to expand participation, including the landmark law that enabled people to vote from prison starting in 2020. 

“Unlike other parts of the country where we’re seeing people try to restrict the ability of people to get to the polls and to vote,” Allen said, “in D.C., we want everyone to be able to vote.”

—

Editor’s note: Neal Ubriani was a member of the board of directors of the nonprofit organization that runs Bolts from July 2021 to January 2022.

The post New Washington D.C. Bill Would End Voter Registration As You Know It appeared first on Bolts.

Earlier this month, about ten men detained in the Young Men Emerging unit in the Washington, D.C., jail sat around a TV to watch the Democratic candidates for mayor debate issues including affordable housing and gun violence. 

“It was on a communal TV, and it was loud,” said Gregory Barnhart, 25, who is incarcerated in the unit. Barnhart said the men were split in their support for the two Black men challenging current Mayor Muriel Bowser, but all agreed that it was time for a fresh face in the mayor’s office. “Everybody who was there was super interested.” 

For Kortez Trasvant, who is 24 and has been detained in the jail since August, it was the first political debate he’d ever watched. Barnhart, who has been in the jail for more than three years, said he also watched a presidential debate in 2020.

Trasvant, Barnhart, and the other men in their unit were particularly interested in the mayoral debate because all of them can vote, even though they are serving time for felonies. 

In July 2020, the District became the third place in the nation to grant the right to vote to people who are incarcerated. Just Maine, Vermont, and the District allow anyone to vote while in prison for a felony. 

Neither Trasvant nor Barnhart had ever been registered to vote before their time in the District jail, but both say they now understand the importance of having their voices heard. 

“People who are incarcerated, we make up a big part of the population and a lot of people who have a lot of strong views that are happening in our society are incarcerated,” Trasvant said. “So if we want to change what’s going on and change the narrative, it’s important for us to take the initiative to vote.” 

The Tuesday primary is just the second election in which incarcerated people in D.C. can cast ballots. 

It is the first in which the D.C. Board of Elections is legally obligated to provide every D.C. resident in the custody of the D.C. Department of Corrections (DOC) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) a voter registration application and educational information about their right to vote. Anyone who has registered to vote will receive an absentee ballot.

In November 2020, out of about 4,000 incarcerated D.C. residents, only 562 registered to vote and 264 of them cast ballots. 

But voting advocates in the District and at the Board of Elections say they’re hopeful that number will increase this year. Currently, 650 incarcerated D.C. residents are registered to vote. 355 of them in BOP custody and 295 in DOC custody, according to the Board of Elections. 

“There’s just a simplicity here,” said D.C. Council member Charles Allen, who was an early supporter of the Restore the Vote Amendment Act of 2020 and who chairs the council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety.

“You’re not going to lose your right to vote. You may have made a really bad decision, and you may have created harm, and so you’re going to lose your freedom, you’re going to be incarcerated, but you haven’t lost that right to vote.”

Still, the District’s fragmented correctional bureaucracy is a challenge. As of May, 1,390 D.C. residents are held in the D.C. jail, under DOC custody, and 2,615 are in federal prisons all over the country. The voter registration rate is higher among people detained in the jail, where outreach has been more frequent and consistent.

Outreach to federal prisons

Trasvant and Barnhart explained in a joint Zoom interview that they’re confident that all the detainees in the D.C. jail know they’re eligible to vote. The hallways are lined with posters informing them of their eligibility and the Board of Elections has worked with jail staff, giving them pamphlets and information and registration applications to hand out in the jail.

Jail staff has also been trained on how to help people register to vote, something they’ve been doing for a long time given that people serving time for misdemeanors have always been eligible, said Nick Jacobs, a public information officer with the Board of Elections. 

But informing D.C.’s federal prisoners, who serve their time in roughly 100 different federal prisons outside the District because D.C. has no federal prison of its own, has proven to be more difficult. 

Federal detainees from the District are often housed far from home and the District has to rely on the staff at each facility to help get the word out to D.C. residents about their eligibility. 

“We’re talking about the entire federal prison system,” Jacobs said. 

To reach everyone, the Board of Elections was allocated a larger budget this year, which allowed it to hire two staff members dedicated to the effort. 

One of the new hires, Scott Sussman, joined in February from the Bureau of Prisons, where he worked for 26 years. It was important to bring on someone who knows the agency and the best way to work with it, Jacobs said. 

According to Sussman, the Board of Elections has mailed BOP facilities registration applications, ballot instructions, and postage paid envelopes and has asked staff at each facility to distribute them to those who are eligible.

“There were some packages that got returned as undeliverable, and we had to send them to a different address, but nobody outright said they wouldn’t do this for us,” he said.  

The Board of Elections has also worked with the federal prisons agency to post voter registration applications electronically on an internal prison messaging system to all incarcerated people from the District.

“They allow us to post material specifically targeted to D.C. residents,” Sussman said. “We also supplied them with an electronic version, a PDF, of the voter registration form and some helpful hints on how to fill out that registration form, which they can print and send back.”

The Board of Elections is also trying to work with BOP staff members who help with new prison admissions and orientation, as well as staff members who assist people preparing for release, so everyone is informed of their right to vote.

Sussman said that he feels confident the Board of Elections has been able to make contact with every D.C. resident in federal prison custody, whether it’s through electronic or physical mail.  

But “part of the challenge,” Jacobs said, is that prison officials often transfer D.C. residents from one prison to another, and it’s hard to track where people may be at any given point. 

When a D.C. resident is moved, the burden is on them to update their voter registration so they can receive a ballot at their new prison address, as the BOP does not share transfer information with the Board of Elections to update the rolls. 

It’s also difficult to know who in BOP custody is a D.C. resident because BOP “is unable to provide a comprehensive list due to privacy laws,” Sussman said. “However, they have provided us the number of D.C. residents that are out there. We just have to depend on their staff to distribute material to them.”

Despite some hurdles, Sussman said he believes that “the Bureau of Prisons is going to great lengths to help us, within their rules and regulations.”

In addition to outreach by the D.C. government, the Restore the Vote Coalition—which formed to push towards voting rights restoration in D.C.—has pivoted to voter outreach since the effort succeeded in 2020. 

The non-profit organizations involved in the coalition, including the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and the D.C. chapter of the League of Women Voters, have also helped to distribute voter guides and registration forms. 

Voting in other states

Allen said he’s proud that restoration of voting rights in D.C. passed the council unanimously and was never controversial. 

“There weren’t any games being played,” he said. “Everyone just realized it was the right thing to do.”

A few other states have also tried in recent years to restore voting rights to people in prison, but the efforts have all failed. 

A legislative attempt in Oregon stalled earlier this year despite strong support among Democratic lawmakers. And legislation was proposed in Illinois but hasn’t made it out of a House committee. Similar unsuccessful bills have also been introduced in Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Virginia.

In some cities, including Houston, Los Angeles, and Chicago, people detained in jail for misdemeanors can vote at a polling place inside the jail, but Texas, California, and Illinois all prohibit people convicted of felonies from casting ballots while incarcerated. 

Across the country, roughly 5.2 million people were disenfranchised as of 2020 because of a felony conviction, according to the Sentencing Project. The population shut out from elections is disproportionately Black, with 1 in 16 Black adults disenfranchised nationally. 

Rights restoration laws vary from state to state, with 20 states allowing people to vote as soon as they leave prison and 16 others requiring people to complete periods of probation to get their rights back. In 11 states, certain people with felony convictions lose their right to vote for life.  

A stronger connection

Despite being incarcerated and not knowing when they will be released, Trasvant and Barnhart both said being able to vote makes them feel more connected to their D.C. community. They said they see no reason why other states shouldn’t follow the District’s lead. 

“I feel like it’s something everybody should do across the whole United States because it’s imperative that our voices get heard too,” Trasvant said. 

“It should spread across the nation because over 2 million people are incarcerated at the moment and those are a lot of voices that need to be heard,” Barnhart added. “I do believe that Washington, D.C., taking the initiative with Vermont and Maine to allow those incarcerated to vote, they’re taking a big step to lay the groundwork for the rest of the nation to follow.”

The post D.C. Residents Are Voting from Prison This Week appeared first on Bolts.

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.”

The post Waiting for a Second Look appeared first on Bolts.

Update (July 23): Mayor Muriel Bowser has signed the emergency bill.

The burgeoning national movement to abolish criminal disenfranchisement reached a major milestone on Tuesday, when the D.C. Council approved an emergency bill that would end the practice of stripping people convicted of a felony of their voting rights.

If the mayor signs the bill, Washington, D.C., will join Maine and Vermont as the only jurisdictions to allow all incarcerated citizens to vote.

“Expanding voting rights to persons in prison is a historic step for American democracy,” Nicole Porter, director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, said in a statement Wednesday. 

The emergency bill would immediately restore voting rights to more than 4,000 people. But it would only remain in effect for 90 days without an extension from the council. Councilmember Charles Allen, who wrote the emergency bill, told The Appeal the council will vote later in July on whether to adopt a measure making the change permanent as part of its budgetary process.

The legislation also contains police reforms, including a ban on the use of chokeholds, tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets. But many of the provisions are weaker than those included in an earlier version of the bill that the City Council adopted in June, and which Mayor Muriel Bowser resisted. 

The provision ending felony disenfranchisement, the Restore the Vote Amendment Act of 2019, originated as a standalone bill introduced by Councilmember Robert C. White in June 2019. 

Under the terms of the new bill, the D.C. government will also be required to provide voter registration materials and absentee ballots to D.C. residents who are in Department of Corrections or Bureau of Prisons custody beginning in January, although prisoners can request and cast ballots for the November election.

D.C. disenfranchises an outsize number of people because it has a higher incarceration rate than any state in the country. As of the end of 2019, 4,049 D.C. residents were incarcerated in BOP prisons, according to the District’s Corrections Information Council, and over 90 percent of them were Black.

Maine and Vermont are the nation’s two whitest states. Washington D.C., by contrast, is the jurisdiction with the highest share of Black residents. White told The Appeal last year that “it’s no coincidence” that states with large African American populations often have strict disenfranchisement policies.

“The majority of states and most Southern states,” he said, prohibited incarcerated residents from voting “right around the time that African Americans were getting the right to vote.” 

In 1955, before D.C. had home rule and the ability to pass its own laws, the federal government enacted a law to disenfranchise incarcerated residents. White called that bill “an active effort to disenfranchise African Americans.”

Efforts against felony disenfranchisement have gained tremendous steam in recent years, with six states expanding their electorates since the 2018 midterm election. Among them are three Democratic-controlled states that restored the right to vote to anyone who is not presently incarcerated, enfranchising tens of thousands of voters and bringing the total number of states that allow all people on probation and parole to vote to 18. 

But up until now, proposals to altogether abolish felony disenfranchisement have not succeeded, despite some preliminary legislative movement last year in Hawaii and New Mexico and unprecedented debate of the idea in the Democratic primary.

If Washington, D.C., takes the extra step and abolishes felony disenfranchisement altogether, advocates are hopeful it could inspire the pursuit of bolder change around the country. 

White emphasized that D.C. politicians would be forced to consider policies that are important to incarcerated people—like prison conditions and the use of solitary confinement—if the right to vote is universal.  

“People who don’t have the right to vote generally have their needs ignored, and that’s something we see in our prison systems,” he said.

Many public officials in Maine and Vermont, where incarcerated people already are able to vote, have told the Appeal they share that perspective. “They’re still people, they’re still human beings, they’re still American citizens, and I think this is a process that should belong to every American citizen,” Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said last year. “And in no small way it helps keep them connected to the real world.”

The post D.C. Is Poised To Abolish Felony Disenfranchisement appeared first on Bolts.