After the Supreme Court removed federal protections for abortion in its Dobbs decision last June, the state’s attorney general immediately petitioned a federal judge to enforce a 2019 law that banned abortion after six weeks. It included an exception for when the mother’s life is at stake but not for instances of rape or incest. The six-week ban remained in effect for nearly three months, until a lawsuit brought by abortion providers led to an indefinite stay of the law. During that 82-day window, the costs associated with abortion care skyrocketed, and people were forced to cross state lines to seek the procedure—including, notoriously, a ten-year-old whose heartbreaking story became embroiled in a national controversy. 

The Abortion Fund of Ohio jumped into action, helping hundreds of Ohioans seek care elsewhere, in states where they could access abortion. The fund helped reroute them “out of state to be able to get the care that they were entitled to,” recalls Maggie Scotece, a doula and attorney who is currently serving as the organization’s interim executive director. (The organization is part of the coalition supporting Issue 1.)

But the organization, which helps people fund and access abortions, also received confused calls from, or on behalf of, people who could not travel: minors in group homes or juvenile justice centers, and people on probation and parole. 

Hundreds of thousands of Ohioans have their freedom of movement greatly restricted because they’re under some form of state supervision, and the stakes of Issue 1 may be highest for them. 

 According to data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative, Ohio ranks fourth nationally in the share of its population under any form of carceral control (this includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole), behind Idaho, Arkansas, and Georgia—“and that’s largely due to the massive number of people who are on probation,” said Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at PPI.

A 2023 PPI report found that, at any time, some 191,000 state residents are on probation, which is an alternative to incarceration that comes with heavy restrictions and surveillance, while around 22,000 more are on parole, a form of post-release supervision that in Ohio is baked into prison sentences. “Probation is handed out like candy here in Hamilton County,” said Sean Vicente, a Hamilton County (Cincinnati) public defender. 

Abortion is currently legal up to 21 weeks and 6 days in Ohio because of the legal dispute over the 2019 law. Meanwhile the campaign to pass Issue 1 and permanently codify abortion rights has raised millions of dollars and gained traction; recent polls have found that between 52 percent and 58 percent of prospective voters supported the measure. 

But Issue 1 has also garnered many opponents, especially among the state’s Republican leadership. If it fails, Scotece predicted that the state supreme court, which has a GOP majority, will “almost certainly” reinstate the six-week ban. 

If that happens, people on probation or parole would face an impossible choice, Vicente said: “Do I travel out of state to take care of that health care issue and possibly get locked up? Or do I have an unplanned pregnancy? Do I have an ectopic pregnancy? Do I have a child via rape?” 

“It’s going to put poor people in a really tough spot where they have to truly decide between health care and liberty,” he told Bolts. 

Parole and probation are often conceived of as alternatives to incarceration that can keep more people in their communities. But both systems are so full of delays, requirements, and catch-22s that Vicente says he and his fellow public defenders often fear they are “setting up our clients to fail.” 

“The restrictions that are placed on people—and the ban on traveling out of state, which is common, is one of these—are often so onerous that people say that they would just rather be in prison,” Bertram said. 

At any given time, 39 percent of the people in Ohio’s jails are being detained because they violated the terms of their probation or parole, according to the PPI report. That’s double the national average of 20 percent. 

“I can understand it being that high, because anything can get you [violated],” said Malika Kidd, who helps women navigate reentry as the Program Director for the Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry in Akron and Cleveland. “You can be around another person that was in prison and you can get violated, just in the same area with them. Somebody in your family can have a gun with them and you’re around it, you could be violated. If you get a traffic ticket and don’t let them know, you can be violated.”

Though women are generally proportionally underrepresented within the criminal legal system, they are far more likely to be on probation than under other forms of correctional control, and both parole and probation compliance present special challenges for women. “Women are more likely to be the primary caregivers of children—all of the requirements that supervision imposes that get in the way of childcare are going to fall harder on women,” Bertram said. “That takes a huge amount of time out of your day.” There are fewer reentry programs serving women, who are more likely to be homeless upon their release—another factor that would make it difficult to comply with the often onerous requirements that accompany supervision. “It’s a combination of a lot of stuff that can overwhelm anybody,” said Kidd. 

Kidd is, in many ways, the face of women’s reentry in Ohio, but her experience with parole there illustrates how arbitrary and burdensome the system can be—and how it restricts people’s freedom of movement. In 2001, after police found cocaine in her car on a trip from Chicago to Cleveland, she was sent to prison for drug trafficking. Her son was just three years old; by the time she got out, he was 17. 

As part of her mandatory minimum sentence, Kidd was given a 5-year “post-control release” term. From the beginning, she says, her parole officer seemed biased against her and determined to make her life harder. The woman upped her risk level, calling her a flight risk because she is originally from Illinois, and forced her to wear an ankle bracelet, which tracked her movements and prohibited her from leaving Ohio. Some people on probation cannot even leave their county of residence without permission. 

Moreover, Kidd says her parole officer exacerbated the already toilsome process with delays in processing her requests for permission to travel outside the state. Ironically, some of Kidd’s requests were in order to speak at conferences about the myriad barriers associated with reentry. Her work was understanding about her spending hours at the parole office waiting for approval, she said, but “I’m sure there were plenty of other employers that weren’t as flexible as mine,” which could leave people to choose between potentially losing their job—a violation of parole conditions in itself—or giving up on the travel request. 

If abortion were once again banned in Ohio, people on parole or probation might be forced to choose between lying to the officer or judge assigned to their case about their reasons for travel, going out of state without permission, or being honest. The former two options both carry the risk of violating your supervision terms and being reincarcerated. 

Vicente said he couldn’t fathom any judges signing off on a travel request that involved going out of state to do something that would violate the law if done within state borders. 

He said, “You’re petitioning the court to say, ‘Hey, I know this is against the law here in Ohio, but I need my client to travel up to Michigan to get the care she needs. Judge, are you willing to allow her to travel out of state to break the law that’s currently in effect in Ohio?’ That I doubt any judges would sign off on.” 

“I think there’s gonna be a lot of frenzied and panicked calls, and it’s gonna put us in a tight spot as well,” Vicente added, wondering how his fellow public defenders would begin to advise their clients under such circumstances. 

An unexpected and unwanted pregnancy—and the stress, exhaustion, physical and hormonal changes, and increased number of health check-ups that tend to follow in its wake—could also make it harder to comply with the terms of supervision. “The medical needs are going to take priority over visiting the probation officer, which puts you in further jeopardy,” Vicente said. More people being forced to carry to term a pregnancy that they don’t want and can’t handle could ultimately contribute to the already high percentage of Ohioans jailed for violating the terms of their supervision.

With polling showing public support for abortion and other reproductive health rights, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine recently proposed to soften Ohio’s six-week ban if it were to come back into effect and to allow some exceptions, for example in the case of rape. But other Republican lawmakers have already resisted such changes. 

Republicans also tried to change the rules of the initiative process in Ohio to undermine this abortion rights measure, which was petitioned onto the ballot by organizers who collected hundreds of thousands of signatures. GOP lawmakers called a special election in August asking voters to raise the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent. That proposal failed by a wide margin in August.

The GOP’s proposal to change the rules in August was also called Issue 1, which has led to concerns of voter confusion as abortion rights proponents who fought the summer’s Issue 1 are now campaigning for people to approve the new Issue 1. 

If Issue 1 fails, it would add to the existing barriers that preventOhioans from accessing reproductive care. 

Even though abortion is currently legal up to nearly 22 weeks on paper, access is extremely limited in practice, Scotece of the Abortion Fund of Ohio said. While Ohio had more than 40 clinics in the ‘90s, anti-abortion groups have been “incredibly successful” in seeking to close them down, she told Bolts. The state now has just nine clinics concentrated in Ohio’s big cities, only three of which perform abortions up until the legal limit. 

Meanwhile, Scotece stressed that Ohio is already one of the leading states for the criminalization of pregnancy, whether it be arrests and prosecutions for self-managed abortions or the use of narcotics while pregnant. A 2021 study done by researchers at the University of California San Francisco that surveyed people who searched for abortion care via Google showed that intensifying abortion restrictions in the U.S. have led to an increase in self-managed abortions, including by attempting to hurt oneself or ingest drugs and alcohol—which would likely further expose people to criminalization. 

“We already know that folks who are low income, folks that are already under state scrutiny, whether it’s for parole or the family policing system, are more likely to be criminalized for pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes regardless of whether or not that is related to abortion,” Scotece said. 

Codifying the right to abortion and other reproductive care, and creating legal protections for people and organizations that assist others in accessing abortions, won’t solve all of these problems, Scotece added. But it will create a new test that Ohio courts must use when considering the constitutionality of a law that restricts or criminalizes abortion in the state. 

Kidd is not actively campaigning for Issue 1, but told Bolts she supports it. “It’s a woman’s right and I think these good old boys should not decide what a woman should do with her body.”

Correction (Nov. 1): An earlier version of this article misstated a quote from the Abortion Fund of Ohio, and inaccurately stated the number of Ohioans who sought out-of-state care when the six-week ban was enacted.

The post If Abortion Measure Fails, Ohioans on Parole And Probation Could Face Graver Restrictions appeared first on Bolts.

But Shelton knew this was wrong. While she has a felony in her past, Virginia’s then-Democratic governor restored her voting rights in 2021 and she has had no new convictions since.

“I was like, ‘This isn’t right. I had my rights restored and I’ve already been voting. I shouldn’t be getting this letter,’” she recalls. 

Still, she dared not participate when this summer’s primary elections rolled around in June. “I knew that it was illegal if I voted, that I could be criminally charged,” she told Bolts. “I was worried they would try to come after me.” 

She was finally vindicated in early October, when Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration acknowledged a major error: It had incorrectly marked some Virginians as receiving a new felony conviction that they’d never actually received, instructing local election officials to remove them from their voter rolls. (Virginia disenfranchises people when they are convicted of a new felony, and Youngkin this year made it much harder to regain those rights.)

The state’s admission, first reported by Virginia Public Media, has triggered an outcry among voting rights groups and state Democrats. Virginia’s two U.S. Senators have called for a federal investigation into the erroneous removals, whose visibility bubbled up throughout the summer as some Virginians removed from the rolls went to court in protest. 

Even after Virginia’s delayed acknowledgment, it took the state two additional weeks to reinstate Shelton onto voter rolls. She found out Monday when she checked her registration status on the state’s site.

Shelton says neither state officials nor her county registrar have reached out to tell her that she has been reinstated. “I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I just happened to be checking online,” she said. “If I wasn’t checking, I would not have known, and I would keep on assuming I was denied.”

There is little time before Virginia’s Nov. 7 elections, which will decide control of the legislature and other local offices; half of the early voting period is over, and the deadline to ask to vote by mail looms next week.

Voting rights advocates warn that Virginia is doing too little, too late to stave off confusion and correct its costly mistake in the lead-up to Election Day.

They say they don’t even know how many people the state has reinstated so far and how many remain improperly purged, since the state is sharing little information. “They’re very tight-lipped about what they’re doing now, how this happened, and how they’re going to rectify it,” says Sheba Williams, who helps formerly incarcerated people regain their rights as the founder of the Richmond-based nonprofit Nolef Turns. “I don’t think they care.”

Even if Virginia restores everyone on the rolls, the confusion sparked by the error would be hard to walk back in such a short amount of time if officials are not proactively reaching out to voters, and Williams explains that it’s difficult for outside groups to step in. “It’s really hard to pinpoint who’s been removed and how to do outreach for people who have been removed,” she says.

The Virginia Department of Elections told Bolts that it was working with the Virginia State Police to identify the people incorrectly booted from voter rolls, and that once it had those names it would notify local election officials to reinstate them, with no action needed on the part of those whose rights were wrongly denied. But Andrea Gaines, a spokesperson for the Department of Elections, specified no timeline for this correction. Macaulay Porter, a Youngkin spokesperson, similarly told Bolts that the governor “ordered a review,” but provided no sense of timing.

Neither responded to follow-up questions about the timeline and how the state intends to reach out to wrongly purged voters.

The state’s explanation, relayed by Gaines, is that the mistake is due to a data classification error in a database maintained by the Virginia State Police. 

The police share this database with election officials, who then consult it to determine who to remove from voter rolls. Gaines said the police wrongly recorded people who violated the conditions of their probation as having a new felony conviction. This would be a problem because voters are supposed to lose their voting rights over a new conviction, but not over a probation violation, which can occur over events like a failed urine test or a missed appointment.

Youngkin’s administration has minimized the issue’s scope. Elections Commissioner Susan Beals told The Washington Post this month that the state wrongly purged at least 270 people, and that the number was not expected to grow much higher upon further review. 

But voting rights advocates worry that the problem is much larger. They point to a Department of Elections report released last month, in which the agency touted that it removed more than 10,000 people from voter rolls between September 2022 and August 2023. “These were individuals who had their rights restored following a felony conviction, and then were convicted of a new felony and were not subsequently removed from the voter list,” the report said. Released weeks before officials admitted an error, the report immediately raised alarm bells among voting rights groups worried that this purge was too aggressive, Virginia Public Media reported in September.

The same groups are now skeptical that only 270 people were affected, given the revelation that state police were classifying probation violations as new felonies. 

Galen Baughman, a Virginian who was wrongly disenfranchised in the same way as Shelton and who advocates for criminal justice reforms, said he suspects the state’s estimate is but “the tip of the iceberg,” an analysis echoed by politicians and attorneys who spoke with Bolts.

Thousands of Virginians violate their probation each year, according to state data. Virginia State Police spokesperson Corinne Geller told Bolts that the police database that records probation violations—the database that the state says is responsible for the wrongful disenfranchisement—does not pick and choose which violations it records and refers to elections officials. Youngkin’s spokesperson did not answer Bolts’ question about how they reached the estimate of 270. 

Questions also remain about why the state coded probation violations as new felonies in the first place. Bolts talked to Geller, the police spokesperson, in mid-September, before the Youngkin administration admitted the error and attributed it to her agency. Geller said her office hadn’t recently changed anything about how its databases record information. “Our portion of this picture is just that we maintain the database,” she said. “As far as who’s determining rights lost, rights gained, rights restored—that is all under the Department of Elections.”

The suspicions of voting rights advocates are deepened by other policies that the Youngkin administration has pursued this year to drastically tighten the rights of Virginians with felony convictions.

He announced in March that he was rescinding his predecessor’s executive policy of automatically restoring people’s voting rights when they leave prison. This made Virginia the only state to enforce a lifetime of disenfranchisement on anyone with a felony conviction, absent a discretionary decision by the governor. (Tennessee has since joined Virginia.)

Youngkin’s decision barred voting for thousands of Virginians who have been released from prison during his governorship and would have had their rights restored under the policy he ended, Bolts reported before the June primaries. It also led to widespread confusion for many Virginians whose rights had already been restored by Youngkin’s predecessors. Still, his announcement only applied going forward, as he could not strip voting rights already restored by past governors.

In June, Baughman walked confidently into Swanson Middle School, in the northern Virginia city of Arlington, to cast his vote. His voting rights were restored in 2021 by Northam, and he had made a point to vote in every election since; he follows local politics closely and, on that day at Swanson, was excited to weigh in on the local sheriff and prosecutor contests, among others.

Baughman was shocked when poll workers could not locate his name on the voter rolls, and even more so when the precinct chief informed him he’d been removed from those rolls. He cast a provisional ballot, which he later learned was never counted, left the school, and started to investigate why this had happened.

Baughman got a judge to issue an order in July saying that he should be reinstated on voter rolls. Still, it took months longer for the Youngkin administration to acknowledge that his and other residents’ exclusion was the result of a systematic error. 

“The fact that it took somebody in my position to figure this out—it suggests to me that this problem is way bigger than we realize,” Baughman told Bolts. He is a white man with professional ties to criminal justice organizations that work on court and legal issues. “Too often, the people that are impacted by these problems are too marginalized to be able to do anything about them.”

Shelton suspects that the erroneous exclusions that were exposed this fall go hand-in-hand with Youngkin’s policy announcement this spring. After all, the report in which the state congratulated itself for purging over 10,000 people with felony convictions comes from the same agency that has implemented the governor’s decision to tighten voter eligibility. 

“I think that Governor Youngkin has cultivated a culture of marginalizing people and really putting a negative face on reformed criminals,” Shelton said. “I just think, personally, that this is malicious and it is with every intent to keep away voices that are not aligned with Governor Youngkin.“

Baughman has little confidence as he watches the officials who ignored his cries over the summer now helming the crisis response. 

“There are a lot of people who could’ve stepped up and chose not to, who chose the easy, bureaucratic thing,” Baughman said. “I’m very leery of having those same people now fix the problem.”

Local elections officials don’t seem to have a clear plan, either. When Bolts talked last week to Kathy Davenport, Northumberland County’s registrar, who heads the office in charge of voter registration where Elizabeth Shelton lives, she said she was only vaguely aware of the scandal. The state had not notified her of any county resident wrongly stripped of voting rights, she said. In a follow-up call on Monday, after Shelton learned her voting rights were reinstated, Davenport declined to detail how her office is addressing this and how it would reach out to wronged voters, telling Bolts to call the state instead. 

Thalia Simpson, a spokesperson for the Prince William County Office of Elections, initially told Bolts that it may cause “unnecessary panic” for her office to reach out to people to inform them that they were affected by an erroneous purge. Simpson called back shortly after to say her office would actually mail letters to any county residents affected by the illegal purge. “The burden of correction has fallen completely on our office,” she said.

Voting rights advocates in Virginia want the state to reach out to voters as promptly as possible. “People may not be checking their status,” said Williams, the head of Nolef Turns. “A lot of people won’t check their status until it’s time to go vote, if they check at all.”

Even if state and local officials correctly identify everyone wronged by the purge and send them all letters, it may not be enough to mitigate the harm.

At least some of those affected by this purge received letters from their county registrars informing them they had lost their voting rights, and advocates are concerned that this did lasting damage even if they were to now receive a notice correcting the matter. 

“At a bare minimum, somebody should go knock on their doors and say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and make sure they got the message,” Baughman says. “A lot of people don’t check their mail and, a lot of times, mail doesn’t get to people.” 

Jon Sherman, litigation director of Fair Elections Center, a group that promotes rights restoration, worries that the error will undermine people’s trust in government. “Many people, if they have a conversation with their local registrar or the Virginia State Police or the secretary of the commonwealth, will accept their authority, not contest it, and be intimidated. Most people aren’t lawyers,” he said.

And some harm cannot be undone. Baughman, like Shelton, already lost the opportunity to cast a ballot in the primary. “Even though I did everything right and made every effort at every opportunity to try to correct this problem, the other side still won by default. My ballot wasn’t counted,” he said. “It was legally cast, and I should have properly been registered, and yet they won.”

Now he fears others will experience the same frustration next month. “Voting is already going on,” he said, “so the time is now.”

The post “I Don’t Think They Care”: Virginia Is Slow-Walking the Fix to a Wrongful Voter Purge appeared first on Bolts.

The near-total ban will severely constrict the reproductive choices of Georgians on probation and parole. Residents in this category who need an abortion will be faced with an impossible choice: giving birth and caring for a baby they do not want and likely cannot afford to raise, or traveling out of state for an abortion and risking a violation of their parole or probation conditions, which could land them back in prison.

Amy Ard, the executive director of the Atlanta-based Motherhood Beyond Bars, works with expectant mothers in prison, on probation, and on parole. The organization also supports their former clients in transitioning out of prison. “I’ve talked to a few of them about the restriction on travel,” Ard said, “and how frustrating it is for them to hear you just have to go to another state, like that’s no big deal, like you get in a car and you drive to another state and stay with friends. That’s not the way it works for them. And you know, no one seems to understand that.” 

Around 666,400 women are on parole or probation at any given day in the U.S., according to a recent Prison Policy Initiative report. In Georgia, the rate of people under probation is the hightest in the nation, affecting hundreds of thousands. Around one in 25 adults are under “community supervision.”  

This stems from a law that forced judges to give the maximum sentence to people convicted of a second felony, Andrew Fleischman, an appellate lawyer at the Atlanta firm Ross & Pines, told Bolts. “What this ends up meaning is that people who have relatively minor second offenses end up getting 20 years probation,” he said. And though Georgia enacted a 2021 reform that allows people to request early termination of their probation after three years, it’s too early to tell whether that will substantially reduce these numbers. Fleischman noted that many people simply don’t have the means to challenge their probation. “If you fix the rules but don’t give people automatic counsel or an automatic hearing, it’s not always going to get fixed,” he said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Georgians are living with this sword of Damocles hanging over them. Probation’s intended status as a community alternative to incarceration is “definitely complicated by the number of people who go back to prison for violating probation,” said Page Dukes, the communications associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights. “There’s so many restrictive conditions.” And being on probation often costs more than people can afford. 

In 2015, probation revocations accounted for an astonishing 55 percent of all prison admissions in Georgia. Over 1,100 people in the state were sent back to prison for technical parole violations in 2019—just over three people a day. A 2017 Harvard Kennedy School report on probation concluded that “the largest alternative to incarceration in the United States is simultaneously one of the most significant drivers of mass incarceration.” 

Dukes spent three years on probation after serving a mandatory minimum ten-year sentence. In 2020, she filed for early release, in part so she could register to vote in time for the presidential election (people who have received a felony conviction and are on parole or probation in Georgia cannot vote). Dukes said her experience on probation was remarkably smooth, owing to her strong support system and the fact that she could afford to attend college after getting out. Still, she said, “I lived with the implicit threat of their control over my life and my movements.” Other people she knows had much worse experiences: Dukes mentioned a friend who’d been forbidden from having social media accounts as a condition of his probation. After he filed a motion under the recent reform to terminate his supervision early, probation officials searched his laptop, in what Dukes assumed was a retaliatory move, and discovered he’d watched a TikTok video. He went back to prison.

“It’s very arbitrary,” Dukes said. “Just as most other things in the criminal legal system, it very much depends on what office you’re at, what probation officer you have, what kind of caseload they have, and what kind of biases they have.”

This close monitoring and surveillance could pose specific challenges for people seeking abortions or other criminalized forms of reproductive healthcare. Some people on community supervision are forced to wear ankle bracelets that track their movement. “You are constantly drug tested,” noted Dominique Grant, the digital organizer at Women on the Rise, an organization by and for women of color who are targeted by the criminal legal system. “They have the authority and the right to show up (at your home) whenever they want to.”

“On top of everything else,” Fleischman said, people on parole and probation “typically sign Fourth Amendment waivers now,” meaning that they waive their right against being searched without a warrant. The state, he said, could conceivably wiretap your house, record you talking about a future abortion, and use it against you at a probation revocation hearing. 

People on community supervision must ask their parole or probation officer for permission to travel out of state, leaving POs with a troubling amount of discretion over the reproductive choices of their clients under the state’s newly enacted abortion ban. “You have to explain to them what you’re traveling for, how long you’re gone for, and then they now have a record of where you were,” Grant said. “If they don’t like you or if they’re the type of person that believes everyone is a criminal—it can really ruin people’s lives. I’ve seen it happen.”

“I don’t see why a PO would give you permission to go break the law,” Fleischman told Bolts. And the alternative—misrepresenting why you need to leave the state—could constitute a violation in its own right if discovered. Georgia’s Department of Community Supervision didn’t respond to queries about how its officers would handle pregnant people under supervision who want to leave the state to access abortion. 

All of this leaves Georgia’s many residents on parole and probation in an exceptionally tough position if they become pregnant. “This is a group of people who we already know are at risk for poor outcomes in general, and we don’t give them the support they need to have safe pregnancies or stable experiences of motherhood or parenthood,” said Ard with Motherhood Beyond Bars, noting that there are vanishingly few organizations in Georgia that support women on parole or probation during pregnancy. “And now we’re telling them they’ll also have no access to an abortion if pregnancy is not something that they can sustain financially, emotionally, or for any other reason.”

Right now, the women who take maternal health classes at Motherhood Beyond Bars want to be pregnant, despite the additional barriers to accessing maternal healthcare. Soon, though, Ard fears that could change. “The day that I end up with someone in my program who is (in prison) and pregnant because they tried to access a safe abortion and then were prosecuted and criminalized—that will be a very difficult day,” she told Bolts.

“We’re working with a population of people who’ve seen the worst of what society has to offer—they’ve been locked in cages and denied basic civil rights,” said Grant. “No one really feels a thousand percent surprised.” She noted that the ban is not yet in place, and that the state may enshrine protections for abortion if Stacey Abrams wins the gubernatorial election in November. “But if Brian Kemp stays, we already know the direction,” she said.

The post For Thousands of Georgians, Freely Traveling Across State Lines for an Abortion Is Not an Option appeared first on Bolts.

When rapper Meek Mill was reincarcerated for a minor probation violation in 2017—after spending more than a third of his life under court supervision—no one familiar with the Philadelphia probation system was surprised. To the lawyers, advocates, and people under supervision who wrestle with this system, this case was an outlier only because it made national headlines. Mass supervision is a seldom discussed product of the tough-on-crime era in the United States, but today it is a leading driver of incarceration.

Philadelphia is at the center of this machine. This city’s rate of people under court supervision (including probation and parole) is by far the largest of any large city in the United States, according to a 2019 analysis by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The paper’s yearlong investigation concluded that this dubious standing was due to a confluence of regressive laws, judicial culture, and lack of oversight.

That dynamic has begun to change, though. Reining in the size of the probation and parole population was among the goals of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner when he came into office in 2017, and during his first term the population has decreased by more than a third.

“Supervision for probation and parole, in general, is not just ineffective, it causes failure,” Krasner told The Appeal: Political Report. “It causes crime, it causes people to lose their jobs and not be able to support their families and not rehabilitate, and go back to jail.”

An upcoming election could roll back the gains he has made. In a May 18 Democratic primary, largely seen as a referendum on criminal justice reform, Krasner will face off against Carlos Vega, a career prosecutor who was one of the 31 attorneys that Krasner fired early in his tenure in an effort to change the office’s culture. A Republican candidate, defense attorney Charles “Chuck” Peruto Jr., is aiming to challenge Krasner in the November general election if Vega loses the primary.

Vega, who is backed by police unions and running with tough-on-crime rhetoric, is opposed to one of Krasner’s key reforms: capping probation lengths.

Even with probation caps and other changes in place, the number of people in Philadelphia on probation is still significant: Based on BJS figures, Philadelphia’s rate of community supervision is nearly one third higher than the national average.

Krasner came into a situation where probation reform was already underway—the public defender had been working on it for years, and was beginning to make some traction thanks to a multimillion-dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation. But Krasner’s approach to probation represented an about face from his predecessor’s.

“Philadelphia might be ground zero for mass supervision in America,” said Vincent Schiraldi co-director of the Columbia Justice Lab and the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation. But, he added, “Larry is helping it dig out from under that.”

—

Meek Mill’s story has almost become a folk legend for criminal justice reformers. The rapper, whose real name is Robert Rihmeek Williams, initially served five months in jail for gun and drug charges when he was 19. He was incarcerated over a decade later for violations of the probation conditions that were added to the sentence. The violations that kept him churning through a Philadelphia courtroom included not asking for permission to leave the state to go on tour and failing a drug test. 

The national uproar that followed Meek Mill’s 2017 incarceration paved the way for his release and his charges being dropped—and it shifted focus toward millions of people, disproportionately Black, who are in his shoes as probationers. At the end of 2018, the most recent year that data is available, 3.5 million people in the United States were on probation, or one in 72 adults, representing more people than in jail and prison combined. 

Technical probation violations are common because supervision typically comes with monthly fees, mandatory meetings, drug tests, and other requirements like completing certain programs. These conditions can make compliance difficult, particularly for low-income people, and lead to mistakes that land people in jail or prison.

Probation began as a humane alternative to incarceration. “It took a sharp turn to the more control, surveillance, punitive model in the ’70s,” said Schiraldi. “They started to borrow some of the more punitive elements” of the legal system. 

Studies have shown that short periods of supervision can have benefits. However, if someone is going to reoffend, they are most likely to do so early on, and the positive effects for lower-risk supervisees diminish in the second and third year—the requirements of probation hinder a person’s ability to lead a productive life, and they become more likely to be reincarcerated for minor violations. More than one in 10 state prison admissions are the result of a technical violation of probation such as missing appointments with their probation officer or testing positive for marijuana.

A recent analysis of data from Oregon and South Carolina by Pew Charitable Trusts found that 90 percent of people who make it through the first year of probation supervision without rearrest could have had their sentences shortened without diminishing a community’s safety, as measured by rearrests. 

As legal scholar Cecelia M. Klingele has written, “community supervision is not an alternative to imprisonment, but only a delayed form of it.”

This type of research informed Krasner’s mindset regarding probation when he came into office. His approach to decreasing the load involves first working with the public defender’s office and the courts to streamline early termination of supervision for people who they determine no longer need it. 

Byron Cotter, director of alternative sentencing at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, says this is not a new concept. 

“For years we’ve been filing termination petitions, termination of probation early when a client is doing well,” he said. But, he added, Krasner has been a much better partner than past administrations. Cotter said that this year his office filed over 800 petitions, as of Feb. 9 when he talked with the Political Report. Of those, 95 percent have been granted early termination. 

“He has assigned a specific DA to respond to those petitions, so the responses are quicker,” he says. Previously the petitions would ping-pong between the court and the DA’s office making for a slow and unproductive system. 

Cotter believes the new system has enough support that it could be a permanent feature of the office, even if Krasner doesn’t win a second term. 

“I’m hopeful that even if there is a change, that the person that comes into that new position will understand this now,” he said. 

Vega agrees with Krasner that if a person is doing well under supervision, that person should be rewarded with a shorter sentence. “I’ll start from the beginning. You get clean and sober, I’m reducing your probation. When you get your GED or associate’s, I’m reducing your probation,” he told the Political Report. “And finally when you get that paycheck job where you say, ‘Look, I’m paying taxes to pave our roads and put into our schools,’ I terminate that probation.”

He advocates for a more individualized program for each supervisee, tailoring their requirements to what they need to get back on their feet—an approach that New York City has largely been able to implement because the caseload is so much smaller, so there are more resources for each person. 

Where the two candidates differ is on the front end. “A short probation isn’t helping you,” said Vega. “You need a roadmap to success.” This stance is in line with the policies of Krasner’s predecessors and counters Krasner’s guidelines that call for shorter supervision sentences. 

Krasner directed his line attorneys to stop adding probation after incarceration, referred to as a probation “tail.” The attorneys have discretion to make decisions outside his guidelines with the approval of a supervisor if an individual case merits it. 

When it comes to probation as an alternative to incarceration, the guidelines put a cap at three years of supervision for felony charges. And for misdemeanor cases the ceiling is one year of supervision unless state law requires more. For a technical violation of supervision conditions, Krasner’s prosecutors are directed to not ask for more than 60 days of incarceration. Also, his office has simply charged fewer low-level nonviolent crimes than the prior administration. Between 2018 and the present, the average number of drug convictions decreased by more than 50 percent compared to the 2015 to 2017 average, while the average number of dismissals increased by more than half.

Krasner’s office has tracked future years of court supervision—that is, years imposed assuming a person does not get a violation. The drop in the number of years of supervision sentenced from 2015 to 2017 compared to 2018 to date dropped by more than half. The effect of shorter sentences will most likely be more significant  in coming years, as shorter terms of supervision are completed. 

“I’ve seen this pattern over and over again in criminal justice reform,” Krasner said, “it’s much easier to change things and do them well in the future than it is to go back in time and fix things.”

The post Philadelphia D.A. Race Tests Larry Krasner’s Sweeping Probation Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

Among other measures, her office will stop prosecuting people for simple possession of marijuana, decline to prosecute or divert other low-level drug possession cases, and limit charges that carry mandatory minimum sentences. Gonzalez also rules out ever seeking the death penalty. 

Some of the most important transformations, though, concern probation, an issue that is particularly significant in Georgia: The state has the highest population of people on probation in the country, with more than 400,000 individuals under community supervision in 2018.

Gonzalez’s memo aims to significantly reduce probation; it lays out plans to avoid charging people for technical violations of probation, and to shorten probation terms. 

“Probation is this back door into incarceration,” Gonzalez told The Appeal: Political Report. “We [prosecutors] have the power and authority to make many of those fixes that are part of the problem and the causes of mass incarceration … we want to hold people accountable, but we want to do it in a humane way.”

Gonzalez joins a growing wave of progressives who are taking over DA offices. Last year, reform-minded prosecutor candidates won elections in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, among other places. Now, some are quickly enacting the policies they championed on the campaign trail. This week, Eli Savit, the newly elected prosecutor of Washtenaw County, Michigan (Ann Arbor) announced his office would not seek cash bail. In December, George Gascón, the new DA of Los Angeles County, set forth a wide-ranging slate of reforms.

In Athens, Gonzalez’s victory is the latest in a string of progressive wins for local offices. A groundswell of grassroots organizing has helped elect progressive candidates to local office and made criminal justice reform a focal point.

Gonzalez says she was inspired to address probation after meeting with members of the Athens Reentry Collaborative, a community of individuals affected by incarceration and the criminal legal system. She learned that though probation was an alternative to incarceration, it still burdens people with surveillance, bills, and stigma. 

“They’re not incarcerated, but [probation] can affect their ability to get a job, it can affect their ability to get a school loan, or even be accepted into certain schools,” Gonzalez said. “Probation affects whether they can get their kids back, if they lost custody, because they’re still technically serving [a sentence], even though they’re free.”

In its original conception, probation “was meant to be rehabilitative in the sense that folks on probation were to be given the opportunity to change their behavior and reform their lives without having their liberty deprived of them,” said Sarah Shannon, a University of Georgia sociology professor and one of the coordinators of the collaborative.

But that’s not the reality, Shannon said. People on probation talk about its “many hoops” as “almost being double or triple punishment,” she added. 

The rules of probation can be onerous, requiring weekly meetings with officers, drug testing, and other forms of surveillance and monitoring. Many of these requirements come with costs, on top of a standard, monthly probation fee. Probation officers can choose to waive the monthly fees, but other costs brought on by the terms of probation—like ankle monitoring services and drug tests—can add up.

“If you are sentenced to an anger management or family violence class, those fees are up to you,” said Shannon. “So your inability to pay for those things may mean that you can’t successfully complete your probation.” 

Simple violations of such probation terms, like missing a bill or an appointment, could result in jail time––what probation sentences arguably seek to avoid. 

“So when you think about the number of conditions that you have to meet, then that’s the number of opportunities that you have to fail, and therefore end up for a long period of time being vulnerable to being incarcerated anyway,” Shannon said.

Many counties handle misdemeanor probation through private companies like Sentinel Offender Services. This was part of a larger push within Georgia, starting in the 1990s, to trim local budgets by outsourcing misdemeanor probation management. But it created a profit motive that can lead to probation companies neglecting the rights of indigent defendants. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that probation generally cannot be revoked, resulting in incarceration, if an individual is unable to pay their fines and fees despite attempting to do so. However, there is no statewide standard for poverty in these cases and many courts delegate that determination to probation companies. Recent lawsuits in Georgia found that Sentinel threatened to jail indigent probationers for their inability to pay, and it unlawfully collected fees.

Though private companies don’t handle misdemeanor probation in Athens-Clarke or Oconee counties, there’s still a problem of technical probation violations landing people in jail. Gonzalez has purview over misdemeanor probation in Oconee (in Athens-Clarke it’s the responsibility of a Solicitor General), and she wants to avoid revoking probation for technical violations—like failed drug tests or failure to pay fees. She also wants to build on existing efforts to bring down the cost of probation; for example, judges have set up a fund to offset the financial burden for people on probation.

Gonzalez also will cap probation at two or three years, depending on the circumstances. 

Georgia not only has the largest number of people on probation, it also has the longest probation sentences, with an average of more than six years in 2016. More than one-third of people on probation serve sentences longer than 10 years. 

“What we see with these extremely long probation sentences is that it is more punitive than anything,” Gonzalez said. She said it’s possible for someone sentenced to 10 years on probation to complete nine years without incident, commit a technical violation in the last year, and go to prison for a decade. 

Gonzalez’s new policies of not prosecuting marijuana possession and some low-level drug possession cases would also reduce the number of people who receive probation terms in the first place. Marijuana arrests have disproportionately targeted Black residents in Athens.

Gonzalez’s path to the prosecutor’s office was a rocky one. She was elected despite Governor Brian Kemp’s attempts to cancel last year’s DA election for Athens-Clarke and Oconee counties, which would have effectively ensured that the interim DA, Democrat Brian Patterson, could stay in office for another two years. Gonzalez sued Kemp, resulting in a unanimous decision from the Georgia Supreme Court upholding the need for an election.

Gonzalez’s success is emblematic of local politics in Athens, which has seen a rising tide of progressivism. In 2014, Tim Denson, an activist in the Occupy Movement, ran for mayor on promises to cut the city’s poverty rate in half and provide free bus service and affordable child care. Though he didn’t win, Denson went on to form a political group called Athens For Everyone, which, along with other groups like the Athens Anti-Discrimination Movement, has become a force shaping local government.

In 2018, Athens for Everyone helped get six progressive candidates, including Denson, elected to seats on the Athens-Clarke County Commission, and also endorsed Kelly Girtz, who won the mayoral race. These candidates have largely championed policies to address racial inequity, climate change, living wages, affordable housing, and criminal justice reform. 

Commissioner Mariah Parker, who made national news when she was sworn in on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” was instrumental in passing a measure last year that ended cash bail for violations of local ordinances. She and Denson have also pushed to decriminalize marijuana and end the use of unpaid jail labor. These measures have the support of the new Athens sheriff, John Williams, who was also elected in 2020 after ousting an incumbent in the Democratic primary on promises of not accepting donations from the bail bonds industry and ending cooperation with ICE. 

Erin Stacer, president of Athens for Everyone, says these progressive wins were the product of years of work by local activists. “It was really the organizers around town who engaged people in a way that got them … to start realizing that there is a local government and that they have a say,” she said.

“This is about human lives,” she added. “This is about changing people and changing our systems, so that we do not destroy people, but rather look at them as part of our society.”

The post New D.A. Commits to Fixing Georgia’s ‘Backdoor to Incarceration’ appeared first on Bolts.