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.

But last month, Wu, now mayor, flipped on that key campaign issue and asked the city to increase funding for BRIC. On Oct. 4, the Boston City Council approved Wu’s funding request, electing in a series of 7-5 votes to give the surveillance center an additional $3.4 million in grant funding to hire eight new analysts—four times the amount that Wu voted against two years ago. 

The increase in BRIC funding was approved despite concerns from some city councilors that the center and the Boston Police Department (BPD), which oversees it, had not sufficiently addressed evidence of targeted surveillance, with all five of the council’s members of color voting against the funds. BPD’s gang unit and BRIC’s gang database are currently being investigated for racial bias by the Massachusetts attorney general.

“They provided no metrics, no evidence that it makes us safer,” said Councilor Ricardo Arroyo during the meeting. “The fact that they’re currently under investigation for possible civil rights abuses and racial discrimination makes it impossible for me to vote for those grants today.” 

To local organizers, Wu’s 180-degree pivot feels emblematic of a larger reluctance by her administration to enact the policing reforms that she championed during her rise in Boston politics. Wu had called for a 10 percent reduction in the city’s police budget during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The following year, she campaigned for mayor with bold rhetoric around policing as well as specific policy priorities, from ending police use of tear gas and no-knock warrants to abolishing the surveillance center. Anger over years of police abuses helped sweep her into the mayor’s office with a 28-point margin of victory. 

But since she took office, those promises largely have not materialized, and funding for law enforcement has mostly gone up. During the most recent round of budget negotiations in June, Wu even rejected the council’s attempt to cut $30 million from the police department, and instead passed a final budget with a $9 million increase for police.  

Fatema Ahmad, the executive director of Muslim Justice League, which has led the charge against BRIC funding, said that Wu’s about-face on the surveillance center is part of a broader retreat from the promises that politicians made during the height of the movement for police accountability. “As soon as she was elected, the stances started turning around,” Ahmad told Bolts. “Immediately, we were told that the gang database wasn’t a priority because of other policing issues they were tackling. You know, we saw not only a lack of commitment to decreasing the budget, but now this year an increase in the police budget.”  

Wu has gestured to policing reforms instituted since she voted against the BRIC funding in 2021 to explain her change of heart. In a recent letter to city council members urging them to support the increase in funding, Wu wrote, “Since the June 2021 council vote, several consequential policy and leadership changes have been implemented such that the BRIC and the Boston Police Department operate in a significantly different environment today.” 

In this new environment, Wu explains, the surveillance BRIC conducts—which she calls “public safety intelligence and analysis”—is crucial to achieving larger public safety goals like reducing gun violence. “From reimagining community outreach and coordination of providers, to engaging high-risk individuals with high-quality supports,” Wu wrote, “Our community safety efforts rely on detailed and accurate intelligence to guide all City agencies to close gaps through deploying coordinated resources and services.” Wu did not respond to Bolts’ request for an interview for this story. 

Boston-area activists and other politicians elected in the wake of the 2020 uprising say that little has changed about policing there and argue that Wu’s progressive credentials are now serving to provide cover for what is little more than an attempt to give even more money to a law enforcement agency that operates mostly in the shadows. 

janhavi madabushi, the executive director of the Massachusetts Bail Fund, which pays people’s bond so they can stay in their community pre-trial, told Bolts, “I don’t understand how a progressive mayor can rubber stamp and give basically a blank check to the Boston Police Department.”

The Boston Regional Intelligence Center was established in 2005 as one of a host of intelligence-sharing “fusion centers” established around the U.S. after the events of 9/11. BRIC brings together local law enforcement and first responders from nine communities across the Boston metro area, as well as liaisons from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and even the “private sector,” according to an archived description of the center on BPD’s website.

“The initial justification for the creation of these places was ‘we need local police to be involved in a nationwide fight against terrorism,’” Kade Crockford, the director of the Massachusetts ACLU’s Technology for Liberty Program and a longtime scholar and critic of the BRIC, told Bolts—despite the fact that the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 had nothing to do with local law enforcement. 

“There was almost immediately an identity crisis in these fusion centers, because local police and the democratically elected people that are in charge of the police are in pretty much every city in the country under some degree of pressure politically to deal with regular crime,” Crockford explained. “People are not going to community and neighborhood meetings where they can have coffee with a cop and asking them, ‘What are you doing about al-Qaeda?’” Moreover, actual instances of terrorism on U.S. soil are quite rare; in 2012, a report by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations concluded that fusion centers were ineffective and wasteful of taxpayer dollars. 

So fusion centers shifted course, allocating resources to ordinary street crime while continuing to maintain their image as crucial bulwarks against terrorism. But Crockford argues that BRIC and its brethren have actually been used for two very different purposes: “One, to monitor people’s noncriminal speech and associations that are protected by the First Amendment related to activism and religious expression; and two, to continue criminal intelligence operations primarily directed at Black and Latino young people under the auspices of anti-gang programs.” 

BRIC regularly shared information about Boston public school students with ICE, with life-changing consequences for at least one person: in 2018, a young Salvadoran man was deported after police wrongly labeled him as an MS-13 associate. A 2012 report by the Massachusetts ACLU and state chapter of the National Lawyers Guild  found that the center has a habit of spying on anti-war demonstrators and other activists engaged in constitutionally protected forms of protest. And in late 2017, FOIA requests by the organization revealed that BRIC had used a social media surveillance program called Geofeedia to monitor common Arabic terms like ummah, which translates to “community,” as well as phrases like #blacklivesmatter and #muslimlivesmatter. The program flagged posts that expressed solidarity between Jews and Muslims, tweets from the volunteer group Muslims Against Hunger, and a slew of sophomoric jokes about ISIS. (“My god ISIS needs some decent videographers. Any Emerson students interested? I hear they pay well in promised virgins.”) 

“We’re so used to being surveilled by every type of law enforcement,” said Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, speaking about Muslim communities in the U.S. “And so when you have something like BRIC locally, it’s just so much harder for the community here to feel like they can talk about their politics especially, or organize in the face of an institution that’s not just flagging them for using just really common Muslim words—but also clearly going after activists.”

Today, BRIC operates a fleet of cameras throughout the Boston metropolitan area—including at least 40 in the northwest suburb of Somerville, which, like all the other cities besides Boston included within its purview, has no direct say over how or where that surveillance technology gets used. Willie Burnley Jr., a city councilor in Somerville, says this presents basic democratic and transparency issues. “Without the consent of the council and an explicit pathway for us to withdraw participation in BRIC, it puts us in a particularly challenging position to adequately protect our constituents from surveillance that may not be in their best interest,” he told Bolts.

Moreover, Burnley says that BRIC’s inter-agency status allows it to effectively override the fact that Somerville, as a smaller, more progressive city than Boston, has different attitudes towards policing and greater checks already in place around the use of surveillance technology. Burnley himself was elected to his at-large city council seat in Somerville in 2021, after helping found the activist group Somerville Defund the Police, which advocated for the reallocation of money away from the Somerville Police Department and towards social services and housing.

Recently, when the department decided it wanted access to a phone hacking program, GRAYKEY, BRIC went ahead and bought it for them. “This extremely well-funded multi-jurisdictional surveillance structure is bypassing our own municipal laws and policies,” Burnley told Bolts. The department still needs to go before the council to be granted official use of the technology, Burnley said, but the center’s actions seemed to bypass some standard checks and balances on police department authority. “We’re not in the police department watching them every day,” he said. “So the fact that they have this technology, we have to essentially take them at their word that they aren’t using it.” 

BRIC has been arguably best known for the controversial gang database it maintains: a list of thousands of Boston-area residents, only about 2 percent of whom are white. As of 2021, 75 percent of names in the database belong to Black people, who make up only 7 percent of the Boston metro population. 

Wu once spoke of abolishing the gang database altogether. But earlier this month, in her letter to city council asking for increased BRIC funding, she praised new guidelines for the database that resulted in the removal of nearly 2,500 names since 2021. 

But to local activists, this purge doesn’t go far enough. They believe that the entire methodology that underpins the database is fundamentally flawed. 

“There’s this myth that they’re using some kind of science for figuring out who is a gang member in this database, but it’s based on this 10-point model,” said Ahmad. “It’s all very behavioral. And that hasn’t changed.” Residents are assigned different numbers of points for various behaviors or associations, including the clothing or tattoos they sport and the people they interact with. The young Salvadoran man who was deported had racked up 21 points, all for instances in which police observed him hanging out with people they had also labeled MS-13 associates or gang members.  

madabushi’s organization posts bond for residents in five counties, including Suffolk, where Boston is located. They said that the people they work with are more likely to be assigned a higher bail, denied bail entirely, or face harsher conditions of release, such as house arrest or GPS monitoring when their name appears in the gang database. “Young people are being surveilled over social media and if there is cash appearing in a young person’s picture, or a certain kind of hat that they are wearing, the BRIC is making assumptions about what that could mean for them being involved in organized crime,” they told Bolts. They have also seen people in this situation receive additional federal charges or have immigration enforcement looped in.

madabushi also noted that from the experience of the community members the bail fund works with, the collateral consequences of inclusion on the gang database don’t necessarily end when someone’s name is removed. “The demand is not to purge names from the database, the demand is to completely shut down the database and shut down the entity that is carrying on this kind of racist surveillance,” they said.

While Wu has pointed to changes in the gang database to justify backtracking on the BRIC grants, she has also gestured to broader police oversight and accountability reforms that have been implemented since 2020. 

In both her letter to council and a recent interview with WBUR, the mayor cited the creation of new state and local police oversight bodies—the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, as well as its local counterpart, Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency. 

The state commission, established by a 2020 police reform law, is supposed to standardize training, certification and disciplinary standards for police, as well as maintain a public database of police disciplinary records, but its work has been beset by delays and debate over how much information about officers should be posted online. Some worry the commission is essentially toothless since it can’t compel agencies to disclose records or mandate that they remain public. And since it’s only tasked with oversight of sworn law enforcement officers, it’s unclear how the new state police commission could provide more accountability for the many civilian analysts who work at BRIC and feed information to local law enforcement. 

As for Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, which was created in January 2021 to review police policy and investigate civilian complaints against officers, it has faced staff turnover and criticism that it has done very little. Of the 107 complaints submitted since its inception, only three were sustained (47 were still pending as of publication, according to the database). Of these, two involved officers posting inappropriate information or comments online—information that is more or less objectively verifiable.

Ahmad with the Muslim Justice League questioned whether the new office would have any impact on BRIC operations. How could people surveilled or targeted by BRIC even know enough about the center’s actions to submit a successful complaint?

To her, recent reforms like the state police commission and Boston’s police accountability office largely seem like window dressing to make a weary public feel better about law enforcement. “These task forces and commissions and, you know, call them whatever name you give them—it doesn’t address the root problems,” she said.

The post Boston Mayor Backtracks on Ending  Controversial Police Surveillance Center appeared first on Bolts.

Annalyse Gosselin would like a new coat. Hers is ripped, and its zipper doesn’t work anymore. 

She’d also like a new phone and to eat at a restaurant one of these days—the last time she dined out was in May, on her 20th birthday—but can’t afford those things either. Gosselin works two jobs, at a grocery store and part-time as a nursing assistant, but she says that nets her less than $20,000 a year. That isn’t nearly enough to thrive where she lives in Boston, where the median one-bedroom apartment rents for about $3,000 a month.

Fifteen months ago, she started a relationship with an imprisoned man she’d been corresponding with through a pen pal program that connects incarcerated people with concerned strangers. Now budgeting is even harder: her boyfriend, Syrelle, is held in Norfolk, 30 miles from her home, and keeping in regular touch with him is enormously expensive. It costs about $2.50 to talk with him for 20 minutes on the phone, and twice that if they do a video call. Emails cost 25 cents apiece. The private company the prison system uses to run communications takes a $3 surcharge every time she adds money to her account. 

Gosselin says she’s spent about $5,000 just to talk with Syrelle since the start of their relationship, and roughly the same amount on purchases for him at the prison commissary: an extension cord, a small television, chicken, vegetables, medicated protein shakes.

“I go broke, literally. I make my bank account negative,” Gosselin told Bolts. “I don’t do much for myself; I just do for him. My mom and everybody always tells me, ‘You can’t keep making sacrifices for your relationship.’ But who else is going to do it?”

Massachusetts is now poised to ease that financial burden for Gosselin, as well as for the thousands of people held in the state’s prisons and jails, and their loved ones. Lawmakers just approved reforms on Monday that would eliminate charges for communicating with incarcerated people. It would also limit commissary markups in all jails and prisons to 3 percent above an item’s purchase price.

Gosselin says making communications free would change her life. She’d be able to speak with her boyfriend without watching the clock or her wallet. “It will honestly be the best thing,” Gosselin said. “It just feels like a burden taken off my back once it happens.”

The reform, which is part of the state’s annual budget, now awaits the signature of Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat who has expressed support for the change and is expected to approve it. Her predecessor, Republican former Governor Charlie Baker, denied a similar proposal last year. 

If Healey does approve this change, Massachusetts would be the fifth state to make prison phone calls free. Connecticut in 2021 became the first to do so, followed by California in 2022 and Colorado and Minnesota earlier this year. Several large U.S. cities have also mandated free phone calls for people in jails, starting with New York City in 2018 and followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami, among others. Last year, Congress also passed a law granting the Federal Communications Commission new and greater authority to regulate the high cost of calls to and from incarcerated people.

The Massachusetts reform would be among the most wide-reaching: The state would join only Connecticut in making communications of all kinds free for all incarcerated people—that is, not just phone calls, but also video, email, and messaging. Massachusetts would pay for the communications out of a $20 million state trust fund meant specifically to cover those costs.

The changes were guided in large part by the advocacy of people directly harmed by the exorbitant costs of communicating with loved ones in prison. For instance, many of those people expressed worry that some facilities would respond to free communications by further restricting the amount of time people can spend on phone or video calls—indeed, Healey’s initial budget proposal called for just such a cap, and also excluded jail communications. Advocates told Bolts that incarcerated people helped add a provision to the current budget prohibiting jails and prisons from limiting communication access beyond their existing policies as those services become free.

“We’re feeling extremely happy with the language that came out of the legislature,” Jesse White, policy director at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, told Bolts. “Not only will phone calls be free, but also access should not be reduced.”

Many people now cheering the prospect of free prison phone calls once thought such reforms would never happen. Jarelis Fonseca, whose partner is incarcerated in Norfolk and who says she spends more every month on prison communications than on her car insurance, rent, and groceries combined, told Bolts she long ago accepted that extreme costs come with the territory of having a loved one in prison. 

“It’s something we feel like we just have to deal with, and deal with by ourselves,” she said. By becoming active in advocating for the Massachusetts change, she added, she’s come to understand how common her struggle is. 

“I was like many families: in the dark. I knew what I knew from what I pay and how much it cost for me. Many people are not able to talk about it,” she said. “We’re all deciding what we’re going to go without, putting things off, to add money to continue to speak to our loved one. It’s stressful.”

In recent years, a groundswell of activism has coalesced around cutting the high costs of communicating with people behind bars. Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, an abolitionist organization helping lead a nationwide movement for free prison and jail communications, says organizers wanted to help incarcerated people and their loved ones while also chipping away at the network of private companies that profit off them. 

“Our strategy, when we started this work in 2017, was that we had to start somewhere,” Tylek told Bolts. “If we’re going to dismantle an industry—one that very few people know anything about—we have to start somewhere that feels accessible.”

Worth Rises estimates that prison telecommunications companies make nearly $1.9 billion annually from contracts with jails and prisons. That money goes mostly to a small group of private equity-owned corporations, but those corporations typically send kickbacks to governments who award them exclusive contracts. For instance, before Colorado made prison phone calls free, the state received up to $800,000 per year from the company Global Tel*Link for rights to run the prison system’s phone program.

Tylek says organizers highlighted the exorbitant cost of prison phone calls because they thought it would resonate with others. “I don’t think there’s anything more accessible than a simple phone call,” she said. “A phone call to your mom, to your child, to your partner. That seemed like something we could explain to people: that children deserve to hear ‘I love you’ whether or not their parent can afford a phone call.”

Tylek says there’s legislation planned for next year in Hawaii, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, and that advocates are actively organizing for reforms in a half dozen other states. She says organizers hope to make at least prison phone calls free in every state by 2027.

Free communications may well enable even more advocacy from incarcerated people in Massachusetts, who could participate remotely in policymaking at no cost if prison calls are free. As this reform nears the finish line, organizers are already working on other legislation to loosen restrictions on in-person visitation that the prison system implemented in 2018. 

James Jeter, director of Connecticut’s Full Citizens Coalition, said he’s been able to dramatically expand his advocacy network since his state made calls free in 2021. That reform led to an immediate doubling of both total phone calls by incarcerated people in Connecticut and of average call duration, CT Insider reported. 

“We had this idea that once the phone calls went free, we could actually start in the prisons, educating guys in there on how to be advocates to their families, to run a phone-banking campaign through the incarcerated and their families,” Jeter, who is formerly incarcerated and whose organization is working toward full enfranchisement for all people in Connecticut with felony convictions, told Bolts. He added that his coalition now sends about 400 emails into the state prison system every day.

“We’re having conversations with people that we would otherwise have no access to,” Jeter said.

In this way, Tylek said, the movement to make communications free is already building on itself.

“We plan to get people from talking about prison telecom to talking about how we get into financial services or food or health care or commissary. Talking about telecom has allowed us to talk about exploitation more broadly,” she said.

For now, in Massachusetts, those most closely affected by the big business of calling home are hoping for financial relief and also closer connection to their loved ones behind bars. Research has consistently shown that maintaining close ties with family and friends is critical not only in improving outcomes for people while incarcerated, but also in giving those people a better shot at success once released.

Fonseca says she calls the prison about five times a day to talk with her partner in hopes that he feels connected to home. “For him and for anyone incarcerated, we know that when people feel incorporated still to their family and friends, they’ll do better when they’re in there and they’ll do better when they come out,” she said. “It’s about him knowing he’s supported, that sacrifices are being made for him, because he’s worth that.”

Joanna Levesque has also been stretching her budget to keep in touch with her partner, who is incarcerated in a prison in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. “It’s amazing what the consistency of having someone to talk to does for someone’s mental health,” Levesque said. “Nobody wants to be alone.” 

“It makes little sense to me that the cost of phone calls for inmates is so insanely high when the vast majority of us are indigent,” Levesque’s partner, Christopher O’Connor, told Bolts by email. “I often feel so bad for being a financial burden to my friends and family.”

Levesque says she hopes free calls allow them to remain close and also enable her to live more comfortably, including by eating breakfast and lunch more often. At the moment, she told Bolts, she works multiple jobs and prioritizes communication with her O’Connor over her own wellbeing—which, she says, means long stretches of fasting.

“I am so beyond excited,” she said.

The post Massachusetts Is Making Communications Free for Incarcerated People appeared first on Bolts.

But voters by and large rejected election denier candidates while embracing measures that expanded access to the ballot in places like Michigan and Connecticut. Outside of elections, states and municipalities saw big policy shifts around democracy and voting procedures—some of it expanding voting access, like North Carolina restoring the voting rights to tens of thousands people on probation and parole, and a lot of it threatening to curtail and criminalize voting, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s new elections police force. 

In the coming year, expect these fundamental conflicts around democracy to remain at the forefront, so we here at Bolts have identified ten key questions that will shape these issues in 2023. They range from the continued threat of election denialism in state governments to the power of state supreme courts over the gerrymandering of congressional maps—and Bolts will be watching it all for you. 

1. How will the election deniers who won secretary of state act once in office?

Election deniers largely failed in their efforts to take over election administration offices during the midterms, with the exception of four candidates in deeply red states—Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. As they now prepare to enter office as the elections chief of their respective states, these incoming officials will have the clout to push for significant changes to election procedures.

The stakes are clear in: Alabama

Wes Allen, who won the secretary of state race in Alabama, already seems to be making good on his promise to remove the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national organization that assists states in maintaining accurate voter rolls and has become a target of right-wing conspiracies. Shortly after he was elected, he released a statement saying that he informed the organization that he would end Alabama’s membership as soon as he is inaugurated in January. 

Member states—including Alabama—have relied on the ERIC program to detect voter fraud. Outgoing secretary of state John Merril defended the system, saying that the program helped Alabama detect 12 instances of voter fraud in 2020. Despite this, Allen has said that the state will be able to maintain its own voter rolls using drivers license records, death records, and change-of-address information from the US Postal Service. 

Also keep an eye on: In South Dakota, Monae Johnson has expressed her distrust of vote tabulation machines and has already said she would encourage county election officials to do a hand-count audit of election results. In Wyoming, Chuck Gray has maintained that he wants to ban ballot drop boxes. 

2. Where will conservatives ramp up policing of elections and expand criminal statutes around voting? 

Trump’s lies about fraud fueled a raft of GOP-crafted state laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing criminal penalties around voting. As Bolts has reported, those laws are part of a larger effort in red states to police elections and criminalize voting under the pretense of cracking down on fraud. That includes an entire new state agency designed to investigate elections in Florida. Heading into 2023, conservatives are already gearing up to set up new tripwires that could ensnare more people in the criminal legal system.

The stakes are clear in: Texas 

The last time the Texas legislature gaveled into session in January 2021, it was less than a week after a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that had been fanned by many top GOP officials in the state—including Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election and even rallied Trump supporters in Washington D.C. hours before they rioted on Jan. 6. Conservative leaders then used Big Lie rhetoric to make ‘election integrity’ a top priority, ultimately ushering in the passage of Senate Bill 1, a sweeping elections law that raised new threats of criminal penalties around assisting voters and election workers. 

Now Texas Republicans are once again pointing to the most recent elections to justify more policing of elections. GOP lawmakers say problems voters experienced at the polls around Houston on election day—polling places that opened late and shortages of ballot paper—inspired them to file a bill that would direct the secretary of state to appoint state police officers as “election marshals” to investigate voting. Republicans have also proposed legislation ahead of the session that would impose harsher penalties for election crimes and expand Paxton’s ability to initiate prosecutions for voter fraud. 

Also keep an eye on: The administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis this summer arrested people for allegedly voting when they were barred from doing so, despite evidence that state officials told them they were eligible. Judges have since tossed out some of those cases, but many remain to be adjudicated in 2023—and Florida’s new election police force has the authority to launch new prosecutions. Other cases involving people prosecuted for voting are ongoing elsewhere in the country, such as Crystal Mason‘s in Texas.

3. Will more states curtail felony disenfranchisement or enable voting from prison? 

In 2022, 4.6 million Americans were barred from voting due to a felony conviction—a number that’s high but also considerably down from just four years ago, before a wave of reforms ended or curtailed felony disenfranchisement in more than ten states. Will more states join the efforts to restore people’s voting rights in the coming year?

The stakes are clear in: Oregon

Since 2018, the states that have expanded the franchise have largely acted to restore the rights of citizens who are already out of prison. In states that had already done that, activists have focused on also enabling people to vote from prison, though so far those bills have mostly stalled. (After a milestone 2020 reform, D.C. joined Maine and Vermont as the only places that strip no one’s rights.) Such a push failed in Oregon earlier this year. But a new legislative effort on the issue is coming in 2023, a state advocate confirmed to Bolts. 

The stakes are also clear in: New Mexico 

New Mexico is a rare blue state that bars people on parole and probation from voting, and a bill to enfranchise anyone who is not incarcerated failed last year in chaotic circumstances and mutual recrimination among Democrats. Voting rights advocates told Bolts that they would try again; they have a short window in early 2023 given the state’s brief legislative session.

Also keep an eye on: Other states where bills to end or curtail felony disenfranchisement have been considered in recent years or may be introduced this year include Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Inversely, in Kentucky, the fate of an executive order announced by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear in 2019 that has restored the voting rights of most people who have completed their sentence may hinge on the results of the governor’s race in November.

4. Which states will further ease ballot access and voting procedures?

From automatic voter registration to universal vote-by-mail, specific policies meant to ease ballot access have snowballed in recent years, largely in Democratic-run states. In 2023, which states play catch-up and what new proposals emerge that push existing boundaries further?

The stakes are clear in: Connecticut

Connecticut is close to shaking off the distinction of being the bluest state in the nation with no in-person early voting. In November, residents approved a ballot measure that amends the state constitution to authorize in-person early voting, but the state legislature must adopt legislation to set up such a system before it can go into effect and change anything about how elections are actually run. In advance of the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers and advocates are now debating how long the early voting period should be, with disagreements already emerging between some officials and the state ACLU, which is pushing for a longer window.

The stakes are also clear in: Washington, D.C.

The city council of Washington, D.C., held a hearing in 2022 on a proposal that could, should it move forward next year, redefine common assumptions about the need for voter registration. The bill, as Bolts‘s Alex Burness reported in September, would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible, even if they are not registered. “Traditionally, registration has been used as a way to keep people from voting,” the bill’s chief sponsor told Bolts.

Also keep an eye on: Voting rights advocates in New York are pushing many reforms to ease registration and strengthen local administration. As Democrats take power in Michigan, they are eying possible legislation on election procedures and they will be in charge of implementing a voting rights package that Michiganders adopted in November. And Delaware lawmakers are back to square one after the state supreme court struck down their voting reforms this fall. 

5. Will more states pass voting laws restricting ballot access?

This year’s was Georgia’s first federal election since the passage of Senate Bill 202, a sweeping voting law passed by Republicans that introduced new restrictions to voting such as stricter ID requirements for absentee voting, restricting the availability of ballot drop boxes, and making it illegal to offer people standing in long voting lines food or water. The law, as Anoa Changa reported for Bolts, also created a critically short four-week runoff election period. But Georgia is not alone: SB 202 implemented a slew of measures that Republicans nationwide have used as a template for legislative changes, and more may come in 2023.

The stakes are clear in: Ohio

Republicans in the Ohio legislature pushed through a new bill this month tightening voter ID requirements for in-person voting, shortening the period for absentee voting, and limiting the number of ballot drop boxes per county to just one. The bill, which was originally intended to get rid of certain election days, was expanded to include these other provisions just before it was passed in both houses. The bill is now on Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s desk; Democrats have signaled they will bring a lawsuit next year if he signs it.

Also keep an eye on: Pennsylvania Republicans are eying stricter voter ID laws as a priority in the upcoming session. Since they lost control of the state House in November, they may be hard pressed to find the votes to succeed; but Republicans are looking to take advantage of multiple vacancies in the chamber to keep control until the spring, a chaotic situation that may give them a legislative window. In Texas, lawmakers have already pre-filled 66 bills having to do with election administration, some of which would shorten early voting and purge voter rolls. 

6. Will states change their rules around ballot initiatives? 

Facing popular referendums to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions or expand healthcare access, Republicans in many red states have tried to change the goalposts to make ballot measures harder to pass, including this year in South Dakota and Arkansas. Expect more states to try to raise the threshold for passing voter-initiated reforms next year. 

The stakes are clear in: Ohio 

Republicans in the Ohio legislature have been rushing to change the rules for constitutional amendments since activists began discussing a potential ballot measure to solidify legal protections for abortion in light of the state’s criminal ban. While abortion activists used the ballot initiative process to protect abortion rights in neighboring Michigan, the vote didn’t clear 60 percent, the new threshold Ohio Republicans now want to set for such changes in the future. 

The stakes are also clear in: Missouri

In Missouri, GOP lawmakers have filed nearly a dozen bills to increase requirements for ballot initiatives in the state—from raising the signature requirements to get a proposal on the ballot to increasing the threshold for approval from a majority to 60 percent. Those proposed changes come on the heels of voters legalizing recreational marijuana via the ballot initiative process in November and discussions among abortion rights advocates about pursuing a ballot measure to challenge the state’s criminal abortion ban. 

7. How will the politics of state supreme courts affect mid-decade redistricting?

While redistricting typically takes place at the start of the decade, new majorities in state courts can shift the balance of power and trigger new rounds of map drawing.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin is extremely gerrymandered, making it very unlikely that Democrats could win the legislature this decade under present maps. Could they get state courts to force fairer maps, as their peers in Pennsylvania did last decade? At the moment, conservatives enjoy a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, which ruled on those ideological lines last year to effectively preserve the skewed maps in effect during the 2010s. But a supreme court race looms in April that could transform state politics: Should a liberal candidate gain the seat, it would flip control of the court and likely change its outlook on the Republican gerrymanders.

Also keep an eye on: The GOP swept state supreme court races in North Carolina and Ohio in November, wins that are likely to deliver newly-robust conservative majorities and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering in each state. For different reasons, both states are required to redraw congressional maps by the 2024 or 2026 cycles, and now the Republicans who control the redistricting process will get to do so under friendlier judges than over the past two years. 

8. Will Harper vs. Moore throw a wrench in redistricting and other democracy debates?

If you are reading this, odds are you’ve heard of the “independent state legislature” theory, a largely obscure legal doctrine just twelve months ago that is now on the brink of receiving the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultraconservative majority. If not, Cristian Farias’s primer in Bolts has you covered: this is the “feverish idea is that state legislatures should have complete and unfettered control over how federal elections are run and regulated, shielded from the oversight of state courts,” Farias wrote in March. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court took a case, known as Moore v. Harper, that tests this doctrine, and heard it on Dec. 7.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

The Supreme Court could rule in the case anytime between January and June, falling anywhere between a repudiation of the theory to an embrace of its strongest form, which would unleash state legislatures to regulate federal elections as they please. During the Dec. 7 hearing, court watchers observed that some conservative justices did not seem to support the theory’s strongest iteration but may be willing to fashion a weaker version. 

Also keep an eye on: Depending on how the justices rule, the outcome could unleash GOP lawmakers to ramp up voter ID rules, restrict voting procedures, or draw new maps without worrying about intervention from their state courts in places like North Carolina or Ohio where state judges have been a thorn on their side has been an issue for them. The conservative justices could also make it tougher for a new majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, should liberals flip it in April (see above), to have any effect on the congressional map. But if the justices is affirm some version of the independent state legislature theory, the consequences could also be felt in blue states where judges have constrained Democratic legislatures: Just over the past year, for instance, New York’s highest court struck down Democrats’ gerrymander of the state in 2021, and Delaware’s highest court threw out new laws enabling same-day voter registration and no-excuse mail voting—all moves that may be called into question by Moore v. Harper.

9. Will other cities move on democracy vouchers?

In 2022, Oakland, California, followed in the footsteps of Seattle in offering residents a novel way to more actively participate in local elections. Voters in November approved a ballot measure for a Democracy Dollars program, giving every Oakland voter four $25 vouchers to donate to a candidate of their choice in future city and school board elections. 

As Spenser Mestel reported for Bolts in July, the idea behind the program is to engage more voters, encourage a more diverse set of candidates, make political giving more transparent, redistribute power to poorer and less white areas, and combat the power of special interests. 

The stakes are clear in: California municipalities

Advocates elsewhere in California are looking to Oakland as an example. Los Angeles and San Diego have each had their respective campaigns for democracy dollars in place for some time, and in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the editorial board offered up these vouchers as one of several tools that could be used to restore LA voters’ confidence in local government shaken by the racist comments made city council leaders on a leaked tape. 

Also keep an eye on: At a recent city council meeting in Evanston, Illinois, officials discussed democracy vouchers as one of two new proposals for using government dollars to fund campaigns. The discussion was tabled until February, when the proposals will go up for a committee vote. 

10. What is next for local initiatives to expand voter eligibility? 

Cities around the country are experimenting with ways to broaden their electorate. In recent years, some have passed reforms allowing non-citizen residents to vote in local elections, and others have tried extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds. Watch for more of those efforts next year as well as pushback from conservative groups. 

The stakes are clear in: Massachusetts 

Several Massachusetts cities have in recent years passed ordinances allowing both 16-and 17-year olds and noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections. But to implement those reforms, the cities must get approval from the governor and the Democratic-run legislature, which have so far ignored their requests. As Bolts reported this year, proponents of expanding the franchise have hoped that a breakthrough in Boston would help push state leaders to finally act. Last month, Boston’s city council overwhelmingly passed an ordinance giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in municipal elections, and GBH News reports that council members who also support noncitizen voting are pressing for the city to take up that issue next.

The stakes are also clear in: California

Conservative activists in California have sued to block expanding the franchise in the state since San Francisco voters in 2016 approved letting noncitizen residents vote in local school board elections. This past summer a judge struck down the ordinance, ruling that it violated the state constitution. While the courts allowed noncitizens to vote in the November election as the city appealed, it could be the last time depending on how the legal challenge shakes out. Meanwhile, Oakland seems willing to join the fight, with voters overwhelmingly approving a resolution last month that also seeks to allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections. 

Also keep an eye on: Other legal fights over expanding the franchise include Washington DC’s attempt to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, which the DC council passed in October but Republicans in Congress have already vowed to block. New York City is also currently appealing a trial court ruling this summer that struck down the city’s attempt to authorize close to 900,000 noncitizen residents to vote in local elections. In Vermont, two cities implemented noncitizen voting in local elections, and where the incoming secretary of state says she supports expanding voting eligibility. 

The post Ten Questions that Will Shape Democracy and Voting Rights in 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

But the tide turned on Tuesday, as Massachusetts voters approved giving people in the state driver’s licenses regardless of their immigration status. The referendum followed the adoption of a law earlier this year that expanded access to licenses; Republicans petitioned a veto referendum onto the ballot, and voters blessed the law this week.

“People are going to feel safer going on the roads, doing what Americans do—go to a doctor appointment, take children to school,” Reiter said. She works at the Brazilian Worker Center of Boston, an immigrants’ rights group that helped spearhead the Yes campaign.

The state’s immigrant advocates also cheered landmark wins this week in two counties where sheriff’s offices have long worked closely with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify and detain immigrants. Under such local arrangements, minor interactions, like traffic stops, can escalate into detainment and even deportation. 

Barnstable County, home to Cape Cod, stood out as the only county in New England to contract into ICE’s 287(g) program, which enables sheriff’s deputies to act like federal immigration agents. But voters on Tuesday elected a new sheriff who promises to “rip up” the county’s contract to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

“The sheriff’s office should not be doing ICE’s job,” Democratic nominee Donna Buckley, who will replace a retiring, 23-year Republican sheriff, told Bolts in September. Her GOP opponent favored maintaining the county’s contract with ICE.

In neighboring Bristol County, voters ousted Thomas Hodgson, a far-right sheriff with a history of draconian anti-immigrant policies. In 2017, Hodgson famously offered to send people detained in his custody to the U.S.-Mexico border to help build former President Donald Trump’s wall, and last year the federal government shut down his county’s immigrant detention facility over alleged civil rights violations.

Each of these changes was driven by on-the-ground organizing by immigrants’ rights activists in a state that tilts heavily Democratic but hasn’t always embraced immigrants in policy-making. Local groups like Bristol County for Correctional Justice and the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities mounted active campaigns to educate voters in their counties about the stakes of these local elections. 

Elsewhere in the country, two GOP candidates with a history of championing harsher immigration enforcement failed to seize sheriff’s offices.

In Doña Ana County, a border county in New Mexico that is home to Las Cruces, Democratic Sheriff Kim Stewart easily prevailed over a Republican challenger who was advocating for a tighter relationship with federal agents. 

In Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, longtime sheriff Donnie Harrison failed in his comeback effort and lost to Democrat Willie Rowe. While in office, Harrison joined the 287(g) program and frequently demonized immigrants. He was ousted from office in 2018, alongside many other Republican sheriffs known for contracting with ICE who lost their reelection bids in North Carolina that year.

During his campaign, Harrison abruptly changed his stance on collaborating with ICE. When asked by Bolts in August about his public desire for Wake to rejoin 287(g), which his Democratic successor had quickly terminated, Harrison said he no longer wanted to. Advocates took his flip as a sign that protecting immigrants remains a potent issue.

Felicia Arriaga, a sociology professor at Appalachian State University, in western North Carolina, has compiled data showing that Harrison’s policies as sheriff contributed to hundreds of deportation a year; she says Harrison’s change this year was an electoralist effort to woo the center, and that his loss was met with relief by local organizers. Other North Carolina counties like Durham and Mecklenburg reelected Democratic sheriffs who came into office in 2018 and promptly limited ties with ICE.

North Carolina Republicans also failed to win veto-proof majorities in their legislature; that is likely to keep legislation they have championed to force sheriffs to work with ICE at bay for two more years, since the Democratic governor opposes it.

But at least one of the nation’s notorious anti-immigrant sheriffs survived on Tuesday in a more rural area. In Alamance, a North Carolina county roughly one hour west of Wake County, GOP Sheriff Terry Johnson won another term. He has faced federal accusations over racial profiling and for detaining immigrants in abusive conditions, and he reportedly once directed his deputies to discriminate against people who “appeared” to be Mexican, telling staff to “go out there and get me some taco-eaters.”

In Frederick County, Maryland, another mostly rural but rapidly-diversifying county north of D.C. Republican Sheriff Chuck Jenkins has a hefty lead as of publication, though many mail-in ballots, which lean heavily Democratic, remain to be counted. Jenkins has been under national scrutiny for policies that have ramped up fear among immigrants even as the county rapidly diversified under his tenure. Besides his connections to prominent national politicians and far-right groups, Jenkins has been a longstanding member of the 287(g) program and has been successfully sued over racial profiling in traffic stops.

“As an immigrant, you never really felt safe,” local resident Jesus Santiago told Bolts in September. He was once arrested in Frederick County over driving with a suspended license and then transferred into immigration detention; he was later shielded by former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. 

Democrats on Tuesday gained full control of the state government in Maryland for the first time in eight years and may look to pass more protections for immigrant residents. In recent years, they already passed bills curtailing local cooperation with ICE with enough votes to override the vetoes of outgoing Republican Governor Larry Hogan. 

“With the way Congress is, a lot of people are very focused on what they can do in their own states right now to try to improve the situation,” Sarang Sakhavat, political director at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, told Bolts. “With Congress, we don’t really expect them to be changing much of anything.”

In Massachusetts, where Democrats also flipped the governorship and grabbed control of the government, advocates have been frustrated at the Democratic legislature’s failure to pass a bill limiting immigration enforcement; known as the Safe Communities Act, the reform was opposed by outgoing Republican Governor Charlie Baker. 

Massachusetts organizers who worked on various immigrant-rights campaigns this year also focused on making a public-safety argument.

The coalition that supported the Massachusetts driver’s license measure called itself “Yes on 4 For Safer Roads,” making the case that everyone is less safe when people are denied licenses because more driverspeople are uninsured. Similarly, opponents of county-level ICE partnerships are telling voters that communities are less safe if certain populations are disincentivized to interact with police and the legal system in general.

Working with ICE “doesn’t improve safety in any measurable way, and if anything it’s detrimental because it scares witnesses and victims away,” Sakhavat said.

Daniel Nichanian contributed to the reporting for this article.

The post Immigration Hardliners Lose Sheriff Races in Massachusetts and Beyond appeared first on Bolts.

Thomas Hodgson, the Republican sheriff in Bristol County, conceded defeat late on election night, ending a 25-year reign marked by extreme medical neglect, mounting jail suicides, and staunchly anti-immigrant policies.

“Today is a great day!” Kellie Pearson, the former partner of Michael Ray, who committed suicide in jail in Bristol County, texted Bolts on Wednesday. Bolts reported last week on Pearson’s allegations that Ray experienced extreme medical neglect. “People are becoming more educated about the state of our jails and they are ready for a change.”

Hodgson’s successor will be Democrat Paul Heroux, a former state representative and the mayor of Attleboro, Bristol County’s fourth-largest city. Heroux declared victory just after 1 a.m. local time Wednesday, after several hours of back-and-forth returns had produced no clear winner. 

“Whatever the voters decide in the end is ultimately what they want and we’ll obviously recognize that, understand it,” Hodgson told local reporters, prior to conceding the race. “There’s no other way to look at it. … This is a democracy and ultimately, in the end, the last thing we want to do—we’ve seen enough people questioning our democracy in this country.” (Hodgson has been an avid Donald Trump ally and, like Trump, has echoed baseless claims about widespread voter fraud.)

Heroux beat Hodgson in the cities of Dartmouth and New Bedford, where the county lockups are located. He performed particularly well in New Bedford, home of one of the oldest and most notorious jails in the nation. It has been the subject of lawsuits, protests and calls for a permanent shutdown by advocates. One formerly incarcerated man, Richard Saunders, told Bolts of pipes exploding with sewage in that jail, of rats and opossums that ran through it and of food so revolting that he and everyone he knew there became malnourished.

Hodgson routinely boasted about his deliberate efforts to make jail so unwelcoming that no one would want to come back. At various points over his 25 years in office, he reinstituted chain gangs and deprived people in his custody of any fresh fruits or vegetables. He also offered to send Bristol County incarcerees to help build Trump’s wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.

His jails were host to a disproportionate share of the state’s suicides in the decade between 2006 and 2016, according to a report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. Hodgson has often described these suicides as unavoidable tragedies that caught his staff off-guard—but lawsuits and Bolts interviews with people who knew the deceased in those cases suggest the sheriff’s office tends to ignore major warning signs, with fatal consequences.

The Heroux campaign was bolstered by a team of local activists that has spent years laying groundwork for this victory. One member of that team, writer David Ehrens, told Bolts Wednesday morning, “Hodgson’s defeat represents the tireless efforts of regular citizens, church groups, and community organizations across Bristol County who had simply had enough of Hodgson’s intentional and egregious cruelty.”

Perhaps no population felt Hodgson’s brutality more acutely than immigrants detained in his custody. The sheriff for years had contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deputize local officials to enforce federal immigration law and to house immigrants from the region and beyond in Bristol County. The federal government ended both of those contracts after Massachusetts Attorney General—and, as of Tuesday, Governor-Elect—Maura Healey found severe civil rights violations by the sheriff’s office, including overwhelming use of chemical agents and trained dogs on detainees.

Heroux describes a fundamentally different vision from Hodgson’s: “His attitude is to make life miserable for you,” he previously told Bolts. “My attitude is that we’re going to address your needs, your drug addiction, mental illness.” 

But Heroux took no conclusive stances on key policy areas that local activists have focused demands on. He’s said he’s open to cooperating with ICE in the future and that he isn’t sure whether he believes the jail in New Bedford should be shut down. 

He is not the only Democrat to win a critical Massachusetts sheriff election. In neighboring Barnstable County (Cape Cod), Democrat Donna Buckley won on Tuesday, replacing a Republican who held office for two decades. Barnstable County is home to the last remaining county-level ICE partnership in New England, and Buckley told Bolts she would end that arrangement on her first day in office. 

The post Massachusetts Voters Oust “The Arpaio of the East” appeared first on Bolts.

With over 2,000 elections for prosecutor and sheriff on the ballot this year, Bolts has worked throughout the year on identifying and covering the most critical races—those that feature the starkest choices for voters, or those that deserve the brightest spotlight. The primary season resolved many, from reformer wins in Tennessee and Vermont to reformer losses in San Francisco or San Jose. But a lot remains to be decided on Nov. 8. 

Below is our guide to the 30 prosecutor and sheriff elections that may upend criminal justice next week. 

1. Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor

Four years after questioning Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018, Rachel Mitchell became chief prosecutor of Maricopa County this year when the incumbent resigned. And abortion looms large over her bid for a full term, due to the decision by Kavanaugh and his peers to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Mitchell has said she would enforce a ban on abortion. whereas Democratic challenger Julie Gunnigle has ruled that out, as Bolts reported in May in partnership with The Appeal. “As Maricopa County attorney I will never prosecute a patient, a provider, or a family for choosing to have an abortion or any other reproductive decision,” Gunnigle said. “Not now, not ever.”

In this county of 4.5 million residents, the office has been notorious for decades for its punitive policies, and Gunnigle has deployed a broader reform platform, charging that incarceration is far too high in Arizona. She told Arizona Central that Maricopa prosecutors like Mitchell have “ramped-up sentences…, opting to throw people into unsafe prisons where they are farmed out to prison labor camps.” Gunnigle ran on a similar message in 2020, for instance promising not to seek certain sentencing enhancements as a means of reducing sentence length, but she lost by 1.4 percentage points to Alister Adel, Mitchell’s predecessor who resigned in March.

2. California | Alameda County (Berkeley, Oakland) prosecutor

Retiring incumbent Nancy O’Malley has been a vocal critic of many of the legislative reforms and ballot initiatives that California progressives have championed to reduce incarceration. Running to replace her in this populous county are deputy DA Terry Wiley, whom she has endorsed, and civil rights attorney Pamela Price, a critic of O’Malley’s failure to address racial disparities in the county’s justice system. In a partnership between Bolts and The Nation, Piper French reported on Tuesday on Price’s platform of focusing on gender justice through policies that don’t rely on criminal punishment to address gender-based violence.

Both candidates are running in the shadow of horrible gun violence in Oakland. Wiley casts himself as sympathetic to reform, stressing his efforts to improve the juvenile justice system and reduce racial disparities from within, but he also presents himself as a moderate alternative to Price, which has won him the support of an array of law enforcement unions. Price is more squarely in the mold of progressives who have won other DA offices: she has committed to never charging children as adults and centering restorative justice initiatives.

3. California | Los Angeles County sheriff 

Under Alex Villanueva’s leadership, the Los Angeles sheriff’s department has been marred by scandals and investigations into abuses and organized violence—enough to fill a book, as Piper French reports in Bolts. And the sheriff only drew more scrutiny since then as he ordered the search of the house of one of his chief critics in September.

In the runoff, Villanueva faces Robert Luna, who has accumulated his own controversies while heading the Long Beach Police Department. The incumbent’s critics have still rallied around Luna, including Eric Strong, a more progressive challenger who was eliminated in June after coming in third. Whoever emerges victorious, local progressives have made it clear that they are circumspect about any talk of internal change given a history of failed reform, and they are pressing for more independent oversight: Angelenos are also deciding on Measure A, which would enable the county’s board of supervisors to remove a sheriff from office.  

4. California | San Francisco prosecutor

After the prominent reform DA Chesa Boudin was recalled in June, Mayor London Breed appointed the recall surrogate Brooke Jenkins to replace him. The transition brought a sea change: the dismissal of 15 staffers, including a complete turnover at the unit that investigates police violence against civilians, as Bolts reported, and reversals of key Boudin policies, including his moratoriums on gang sentencing enhancements, on seeking cash bail, and on charging children as adults. 

In the upcoming special election, Jenkins will defend her new seat against two challengers. The first is attorney Joe Alioto Veronese, a critic of both Boudin and Jenkins who is positioning himself as tough on crime and corruption. The progressive lane is occupied by John Hamasaki, the former police commissioner and critic of the San Francisco Police Department, who has lambasted Jenkins for her close relationship with London Breed and acceptance of large sums of money from the recall campaign.

5. California | San Diego County sheriff

San Diego is plagued by deadly jail conditions, even by the standards of the state’s dangerous carceral system, and this has become an unusually prominent issue in the open race for sheriff. Bolts reported in June that candidates are bringing vastly different commitments to the table. 

The contender who went furthest in proposing changes, Dave Myers, lost in June; this paved the way for a runoff between Undersheriff Kelly Martinez, who is endorsed by the association of deputy sheriffs, and John Hemmerling, a Republican who is generally critical of criminal justice reform. 

6. Florida | Pinellas (St Petersburg) and Pasco counties prosecutor

Home to a combined 1.5 million residents, Florida’s Pasco and Pinellas counties share a state attorney but they have not had a contested race for prosecutor in 30 years. Democrat Allison Miller, a public defender, is challenging Bruce Bartlett, a Republican incumbent appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to fill a vacancy. Miller jumped into the race proposing an array of reform proposals, including curbing pretrial detention and the adult prosecution of children; she told Bolts that she was fueled to run by her frustration at a system stacked in prosecutors’ favor.

But the climate transformed in August, as Bolts’s Piper French reported, when DeSantis made the extraordinary decision of suspending Andrew Warren, the elected prosecutor of neighboring Hillsborough County based on Warren’s statements that he would not prosecute cases of abortion and gender-affirming healthcare. Miller made a similar vow to not charge people over abortions, raising the specter that DeSantis could seek to block her from office even if she wins.

7. Indiana | Marion County (Indianapolis) prosecutor

Marion County is one of many places this year where police unions have clashed with local prosecutors who pushed some amount of reform. The local Fraternal Order of Police overwhelmingly approved a vote of “no confidence” against Democratic incumbent Ryan Mears over the summer and endorsed Republican challenger Cyndi Carrasco to replace him.

Carrasco says Mears crossed the line by promising to not prosecute certain behaviors, citing his blanket policy of not charging people for marijuana possession. “I do not want Indianapolis to become a San Francisco, to become a New York City, to become a Los Angeles,” she said at a recent forum. She also disagrees with Mears’ vow to not prosecute cases that touch on abortion. Should Mears win, he may also face retaliation from GOP lawmakers who have already signaled they want to get around the discretion of local prosecutors on that issue.

8. Iowa | Polk County (Des Moines) prosecutor

Kimberly Graham, who says she was inspired to run when she listened to an interview with Boston’s former DA Rachael Rollins on progressive prosecution, won a tough Democratic primary in June in Iowa’s most populous county. Graham, who represents abused and neglected children in court and used to work as a defense attorney, told Bolts that she has never worked as a prosecutor and considers her outsider status an asset. “If you’ve been a prosecutor for 30 years, maybe everything just looks like an opportunity to charge someone with a crime and send them to jail or prison,” she said. “Public safety and being safe is not just policing and prosecution.”

If she wins, her politics would represent a stark break from the status quo in Polk County, where the retiring Democratic prosecutor drew national headlines in 2020 for aggressively charging activists and a journalist after the Black Lives Matter protests. GOP nominee Allan Richards, by contrast, is emphasizing continuity with the outgoing incumbent, and a law-and-order message, despite the party difference. The election is unfolding against the backdrop of a ruling by the state supreme court in June that struck down constitutional protections for abortion in the state; Graham says she would not prosecute cases linked to abortion if it was banned.

9. Maryland | Frederick County sheriff

The rapidly diversifying Frederick County, located one hour north of D.C., has a long legacy of anti-immigrant policies, championed in large part by Sheriff Chuck Jenkins. This fall, Jenkins is seeking a fifth-term and immigrants’ rights advocates hope their longstanding efforts to reverse those hardline policies finally pay off, Bolts reported. Democratic nominee Karl Bickel, a former sheriff’s deputy, told Bolts that he would curtail the sheriff’s department’s relationship with ICE and end the county’s membership in ICE’s 287(g) program. 

Jenkins is also deeply affiliated with national far-right networks and subscribes to the idea that sheriffs are the supreme guardians of the Constitution. “Is it going to come down to my men facing off with a federal agency at gunpoint?” he has said. “I hope not.”

10. Massachusetts | Barnstable County (Cape Cod) sheriff 

Officials in Democratic-leaning Barnstable County publicly expressed support for immigrants last month after Florida’s governor flew dozens of asylum seekers to the region for a political stunt. But as Alex Burness reported from Cape Cod in Bolts, the county also has an unusually tight relationship with ICE: It is the only county in all of New England that contracts into the agency’s 287(g) program.

The local GOP sheriff is not running for re-election this year, which opens the door for possible change to immigration policies. The race pits a Republican lawmaker and a Democratic attorney, who told Bolts she would “rip up” the 287(g) agreement on her first day in office. 

11. Massachusetts | Bristol County sheriff

Thomas Hodgson, the longest-serving Massachusetts sheriff, has overseen jails marred by mounting suicides and complaints of medical neglect, squalor, and malnutrition, Bolts‘s Alex Burness reported this week. Hodgson, a Republican who is deeply embedded in national far-right networks, now faces his first opponent in twelve years, local Democratic mayor Paul Heroux.

Bristol County’s jail system has seen a long trail of lawsuits and investigations, including allegations of violence against detainees that led the Biden administration last year to break a contract to detain immigrants in the county. Elizabeth Matos, who heads an organization that advocates for people incarcerated in this state, told Burness the regime in Bristol is “intentionally dehumanizing.” “He’s earned the nickname ‘The Arpaio of the East’,” she said, referencing Joe Arpaio, the rightwing strongman and former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County.

12. Massachusetts | Plymouth County prosecutor

Back when he worked at the ACLU of Massachusetts, civil rights attorney Rahsaan Hall helped file requests for records from the DA’s office in Plymouth County. The office charged the ACLU $1.2 million dollars, only later relenting when faced with the threat of litigation. Now, Hall is the Democratic nominee against longtime Republican incumbent Tim Cruz, a vocal reform critic.

Hall is hoping to carry the torch for reform prosecutors in Massachusetts, a state that saw two watershed victories for reform-minded DAs in 2018 but is set to lose both this year. “I see it as my responsibility and duty to be, for lack of a better phrase, the voice crying out in the wilderness saying that there is another way,” Hall told Bolts‘s Alex Burness in September. Hall says he would reduce the footprint of the office by establishing a list of low-level charges his staff would have a presumption of not prosecuting, following the example of Rachael Rollins, the former prosecutor in Boston with whom Cruz frequently clashed.

13. Minnesota | Hennepin County (Minneapolis) prosecutor

Voters in the Minneapolis region will elect a prosecutor for the first time since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. For Malaika Eban, deputy director at the Minneapolis-based Legal Rights Center, the race is “a referendum on what we want to do as a community moving forward since George Floyd was murdered.” 

As Eamon Whalen reported last month as part of joint dive into the race by Bolts and Mother Jones, Tuesday’s election features two diametrically opposed visions of the criminal legal system. On the one side is Mary Moriarty, the county’s former chief public defender who long clashed with the outgoing prosecutor over racial inequities in his office and is now carrying the mantle of progressive policies. Her opponent Martha Holton Dimick is a former judge and prosecutor, who champions a law and order message and blames the mere talk of reform for fueling crime.

Hennepin voters are also voting for a new sheriff. The incumbent is not seeking re-election after crashing his car in a drunk-driving incident; both candidates on the ballot have said they will continue the policies implemented under his watch to curtail cooperation with ICE, including directives against sharing jail detainees’ booking information with the federal agency, reports The Sahan Journal. Dawanna Witt, a deputy in the department, is favored as she already received more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round in August.

14. Nebraska | Douglas County (Omaha) prosecutor

Incumbent prosecutor Don Kleine switched to the GOP two years ago after the local Democratic Party accused him of furthering white supremacy during the Black Lives Matter protests; he had brought no charges against the man who killed James Scurlock, a Black protester.

Two years later, Kleine faces a challenge from Dave Pantos, a Democrat and former director of Legal Aid of Nebraska, who is emphasizing some reform promises such as lowering criminal charges for drug possession.

15. New Mexico | Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) sheriff

Elected as a Democrat, Sheriff Manuel Gonzales antagonized his party by associating with Trump and resisting accountability over his office—including the man who this year ended up becoming the Democratic nominee to replace him, former sheriff’s deputy John Allen. Allen says he left Gonzales’s office in 2019 over concerns about compromised investigations into police use of force, and he now wants shootings probed by independent agencies. (Allen himself was hit by a lawsuit over an illegal search during a patrol two decades ago.)

Republican Paul Pacheco, a former police officer and head of the local police union, is using the conservative rhetoric around crime that is so ubiquitous this campaign season, blaming “anti-police rhetoric” for fueling a rise in crime. Bernalillo is one of only two sheriff’s races in which Everytown for Gun Safety, the group founded by Mike Bloomberg, has gotten involved. Everytown launched an ad campaign accusing Pacheco of being beholden to the gun lobby. Also on the ballot: a 21-year Libertarian who says sheriffs are authoritarian and denounces policing as “local tyranny.” 

16. New Mexico | Doña Ana County (Las Cruces) sheriff

Four years ago, Kim Stewart pulled off an unusual feat in this border county: She ousted the incumbent sheriff in the Democratic primary, and then beat a former Republican sheriff in the general election. Both of the men she defeated had entangled their department with federal immigration enforcement, whereas Stewart warned that a sheriff’s department should not be “the immigration police.” 

Stewart’s re-election bid next week offers a similar fork in the road for immigration enforcement in the county. Republican challenger Byron Hollister is advocating for tighter collaboration with federal agents, including by participating in a CBP grant program that Stewart opposed and halted in 2019. Doña Ana County leans Democratic, giving Stewart an edge.

17. North Carolina | Alamance County sheriff

Under President Barack Obama, U.S. Department of Justice accused Terry Johnson, the county’s longtime anti-immigrant sheriff, of making racist remarks and engaging in an “egregious pattern of racial profiling.” Two presidents later, Johnson is still sheriff, still demonizes immigrants, and still draws federal attention; the Biden administration canceled an ICE contract with Alamance this year. 

Johnson ran unopposed in both 2014 or 2018, despite the DOJ’s 2012 report. But this year, he landed a challenger, Kelly White, right before the final deadline. White, a Black Democrat, took part in a Souls to the Poll event last week meant to encourage voting. Just two years ago, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Johnson’s deputies pepper-sprayed voters who were marching to the polls as part of a similar event.

18. North Carolina | Columbus County sheriff

A bizarre story, as recounted by WECT:  Jody Greene, the Republican sheriff of a county that is home to the city of Whiteville, started making phone calls to Jason Soles, a Democrat who had briefly replaced him, to unleash hateful, racist tirades. Soles recorded the conversations. When the tapes became public, and amid broader allegations of abuse of power against Greene, the sheriff resigned from his job in mid-October to avoid a judge removing him from office.

But Greene is not giving up on power: He is still running in the Nov. 8 sheriff’s election. And his opponent will be none other than Jason Soles, the man who recorded him.

19. North Carolina | Forsyth County (Winston Salem) prosecutor

As the former president of North Carolina’s association of state prosecutors, Republican DA Jim O’Neill has been a vocal proponent of a tough-on-crime approach, including pushing back on legislation to legalize recreational marijuana, The Winston-Salem Journal reported in a profile last month. He said the state should be more aggressive in pursuing death penalty cases, and proposed a curfew on young people based on incorrect crime data. And when the state’s Innocence Inquiry Commission found evidence that two people convicted in Forsyth County may be innocent, O’Neill called for its dismantling. 

O’Neill now faces Democrat Denise Hartsfield, a retired local judge. Hartsfield has sought to capitalize on the county’s blue lean and has criticized O’Neill’s style but has steered clear of a reform platform, including telling the Journal that she is not opposed to the death penalty. That has not stopped O’Neill from saying she embodies “the path of lawlessness, destruction.”

20. North Carolina | Pasquotank County sheriff

Pasquotank County sheriff’s deputies shot Andrew Brown Jr., an unarmed Black man, last year, and Brown’s death was met by protests in Elizabeth City that drew national attention. “We cannot go back to the way it was before Andrew Brown, Jr.’s murder,” the head of the local NAACP told WUNC in April, as protesters decry broader racial inequities in local policing. But local conservatives responded by rallying behind Republican Sheriff Tommy Wooten and defending the deputies. 

Wooten now faces Eddie Graham, a Black Democrat. “Let’s face it, Andrew Brown Jr. did not have to die,” Graham told The Daily Advance. “We cannot have a cowboy-style SWAT that lacks training, standards, and protocols.” Graham is proposing changes to deescalate interactions, such as banning no-knock warrants and having mental health professionals accompany sheriff’s deputies in responding to some emergency calls, though not necessarily to reduce them. 

21. North Carolina | Wake County (Raleigh) sheriff

During his tenure as Wake County sheriff, Donnie Harrison demonized immigrants, falsely blaming them for rising property and violent crime in the state, while increasing his department’s cooperation with ICE, including participating in its 287(g) program. That hardline stance became a liability at the polls when he sought re-election in 2018, as Trump’s presidency changed the way voters viewed the issue, especially in urban counties like Wake. Harrison lost that year by a whopping 10 points to a challenger who eventually made good on his promise to pull Wake out of 287(g). Other sheriffs who collaborated with ICE in North Carolina lost as well in 2018.

Harrison is now running for his old job back. He continued to defend 287(g) until flipping his position this summer when asked about it by Jeffrey Billman for Bolts; he said he would no longer rejoin the program—a sign that ICE collaboration remains a potent issue in some local races. Willie Rowe, a former deputy who ousted the incumbent sheriff in the Democratic primary, says Harrison couldn’t afford to let this year’s election become a referendum on ICE, telling Bolts, “He wants to win. That’s the motivating factor. The numbers aren’t there to support that kind of policy.”

22. Oklahoma | Oklahoma County (Oklahoma City) prosecutor

Kevin Calvey, the Republican nominee for DA in Oklahoma’s largest county, is running on a striking vow: to drop the charges filed by the outgoing DA against five Oklahoma City police officers who shot and killed 15-year Stavian Rodriguez outside a convenience store. “I would have shot him (Rodriguez) myself,” Calvey said at a forum last year.

Calvey, a conservative firebrand and state lawmaker turned county commissioner, faces Vicki Behenna, a former federal prosecutor who served on the team that convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and who later worked with The Innocence Project, Bolts and the Oklahoma-based The Frontier reported in October. Behenna has said Calvey is pandering to the police, but she too has criticized the outgoing prosecutor for having trained relationships with local law enforcement.

23. Texas | Bexar County (San Antonio) prosecutor

Joe Gonzales made jail diversion and other criminal justice reforms the focus of his winning DA campaign in 2018. But the Democrat said it was a personal threat from the county’s former DA that first inspired him to run. As a then-defense attorney, Gonzales claimed that then-DA Nico LaHood threatened to destroy his law practice after Gonzales confronted him about withholding evidence in a case. Gonzales unseated LaHood in the Democratic primary and then won the general election that year, while LaHood eventually faced probation and a fine by the state bar.  

Nico LaHood’s younger brother, Marc LaHood, is now challenging Gonzales with support from both local and state police unions, which have been predictably hostile to diversion programs Gonzales has implemented since taking office meant to prevent arrest and convictions for people accused of minor offenses, like misdemeanor marijuana possession. Marc LaHood says he will crack down on even low-level offenses, using the language of “broken windows.” He has also vowed to enforce the state’s criminal abortion ban; Gonzalez said after the Dobbs ruling he planned to not prosecute abortion cases but added he would not pledge that to avoid possible Republican preemption.  

24. Texas | Dallas County prosecutor

John Creuzot helped turn Dallas County a deeper shade of blue in 2018 when he beat a sitting Republican DA on a reform platform that promised to help “end” mass incarceration. Over the past four years, he has followed through on promises to implement policies to divert people from jail, including by simply refusing to charge people for certain low-level crimes that often stem from homelessness and drug addiction. And yet, as he runs for re-election this year touting those reforms, Dallas’ jail population is now at a six-year peak. Degrading conditions inside the local lockup have grown even worse in recent years because of overcrowding and the pandemic. 

Writing in Bolts in October, Tyler Hicks reports that the landscape in Dallas highlights the limits of Creuzot’s reforms and also the challenges facing reform-minded DAs in red states, where top officials are often actively hostile to decarceration. Creuzot faces the same opponent that he beat in 2018, former DA Faith Johnson, who has since then dialed up her tough-on-crime rhetoric.

25. Texas | Hays County prosecutor

The criminal legal system in fast-growing Hays County has long been defined by punitive, zero-tolerance policing and prosecution despite its close proximity to Austin, Texas’s liberal capital city. In large part that has been thanks to GOP officials like the current DA Wes Mau, who has taken a notably hard stance on low-level charges like marijuana possession. 

This year’s DA election to replace the retiring Mau highlights the groundswell of local activism in recent years challenging the status quo, Michael Barajas reports in a Bolts story highlighting the work of the group Mano Amiga. Democratic nominee Kelly Higgins vows a “sea change” in the county, promising to decline prosecution of cannabis possession and implement the kind of pretrial diversion that local activists have demanded for years. Higgins faces David Puryear, who is leaning into the anti-reform, tough-on-crime rhetoric of state and national Republicans. 

26. Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) prosecutor

Tarrant County is the GOP’s last urban stronghold in Texas, but it has also started to break for Democrats at the top of the ticket in recent years. This year’s DA race is one of many local elections that could test that trend. Two longtime fixtures of the local court system are running to replace outgoing Republican Sharen Wilson, who had become notorious among voting rights advocates because of her selective enforcement of election laws that led to lengthy prison sentences for Rosa Ortega and Crystal Mason—women who mistakenly thought they could vote. 

Tiffany Burks, the Democratic nominee and a longtime prosecutor in the office, told Bolts earlier this year that she disagreed with the direction of the office under Wilson, but she has steered clear of the kind of systematic reforms other Democratic prosecutors and candidates have pushed, like declination or diversion policies for low-level offenses. Still, Burks told Bolts that she “does not have any plan to prosecute women or anyone who facilitates an abortion, doctors or whomever—Tiffany Burks has no plans to do that.” Republican nominee Phil Sorrells, a longtime local judge running with endorsements from Trump and local police unions, seems determined to enforce the state’s abortion ban. And he has tried to paint Burks as a radical; an outside group tied to Virginia’s GOP attorney general also recently attacked Burks by sending mailers across Tarrant County with fake quotes in an attempt to make her look soft on crime. 

27. Washington | Clark County (Vancouver) sheriff

Just north of Portland, Oregon, Clark County is a politically divided county that may elect a sheriff who is associating with the far-right. Rey Reynolds, a Voucouver police officer, is running as a so-called constitutional sheriff, and pledging to not enforce laws he deems unconstitutional. The growing movement of constitutional sheriffs, which has a number of adherents in the Northwest, preaches that sheriffs enjoy ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.. (In a recent letter, Reynolds denied belonging to a movement even as he embraced its central tenets.)

Reynolds also faces an internal police probe over statements he made on an online show that mirrored the conservative fearmongering against trans people and suggested he would ramp up arrests over it. Reynolds, who is endorsed by the state’s Fraternal Order of Police and the local GOP, faces John Horch, who has called this constitutional sheriff rhetoric “dangerous.” But Horch, a longtime sheriff’s deputy, is himself critical of state efforts to reform policing and of county efforts to increase oversight of the local jail.

28. Washington | King County (Seattle) prosecutor

Dan Satterberg is retiring this year after fifteen years as Seattle’s chief prosecutor, and local reformers have rallied behind Leesa Manion to replace him, The Stranger reports. Manion is Satterberg’s chief of staff, and she touts the launch of reforms like a program to divert people accused of a first offense away from criminal prosecution and toward social services.

Manion has cast herself as a cautious reformer, rather than embrace progressive priorities. Still, fault lines are stark between Manion and her opponent Jim Ferrell, who is running on tough-on-crime messaging, wants prosecutors to crack down on minors, and touts the backing of local police organizations. (Manion says a prosecutor should be independent from police groups.) Ferrell was part of a group of local mayors last year who called on Satterberg to end his diversion program; the group wrote another letter this summer that assailed the state’s recent criminal justice reforms and called for ramping up prosecutions, including of drug cases.

29. Washington | Klickitat County sheriff

Klickitat is a sparsely populated county in southern Washington, 100 miles east of Portland, but Sheriff Bob Songer has earned it outsized attention, including the spotlight of a New Yorker article in 2020 after he rejected the state’s COVID-19 restrictions. To justify his stance, Songer has said he had pledged an oath to the “Supreme Judge of the Universe,” which he says ties his function as sheriff to Christianity. Songer is part of the far-right movement of “constitutional sheriffs,” which says sheriffs have supreme authority when it comes to interpreting the constitution, and he has threatened to arrest state officials who pursue laws he believes are unconstitutional.

Songer now faces a tricky re-election race against fellow Republican Garique Clifford, after finishing narrowly ahead by about one percentage point in the first round in August. Clifford says Songer is too extreme and combative, but has also taken pains to not reject some of his premises regarding a sheriff’s role.

30. Washington | Spokane County prosecutor

Prosecuting Attorney Larry Haskell, a Republican, has been under a cloud of controversy since early this year, when the Inlander exposed racist statements by his wife, who publicly describes herself as a “proud white nationalist.” First elected in 2014, Haskell has also fought against criminal justice reforms passed by state Democrats, using his discretion as local prosecutor to effectively circumvent sentencing reforms to dial back the state’s three strikes laws, as HuffPost reported this summer.

Haskell now faces Deb Conklin, a local pastor who is running as an independent and a former prosecutor who has not practiced law since 1987. Conklin has criticized Haskell’s tough on crime approach and has proposed reforms like pretrial diversion for nonviolent offenses, The Spokesman-Review reports.  Haskell and Conklin moved to this runoff after a tight first round in August, where Haskell received 28 percent and Conklin received 27 percent, with two other candidates close behind. 

And some honorable mentions

There are plenty of other elections that are worth keeping an eye on. 

Bolts is also watching sheriff races in California’s Monterey County, where the sheriff’s office is marred in scandals; Florida’s Duval County (Jacksonville), where an incumbent’s summer resignation triggered a special election; Washington’s Thurston County, where a right-leaning incumbent fell behind in the first round of his re-election race in August and now face a runoff; and Wisconsin’s Dane County (Madison), a heavily blue area where the Democratic sheriff told Bolts over the summer that he would not arrest people over abortion.

As for prosecutors, we are also keeping an eye on Delaware’s race for attorney general, the office that oversees prosecution in a rare state that has no elected DAs; Massachusetts’s Cape and Islands district, where a tough-on-crime prosecutor who sparred with reformers is retiring, Nebraska’s Lancaster County, where a Republican DA faces a challenger who founded a progressive political organization; and New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, where the former chair of the national Libertarian Party is challenging a Republican incumbent.

Prosecutors and sheriffs are just one slice of the pie when it comes to criminal justice, of course. Tuesday will also decide control of governorships and legislatures in most states, many attorneys general who often have prosecutorial power, the mayors meant to oversee the police, and judicial races that might change the outlook of the bench at the level of state supreme courts, with clear stakes for sentencing in a place like Michigan, or of local judgeships like in California. 

Piper French contributed to the reporting. This piece also draws from earlier guides Bolts has published throughout 2022, including a national introduction to the DA and sheriff races of 2022 in February by Daniel Nichanian, a guide to elections that matter to abortion in July by Daniel Nichanian, and a guide on California elections in October by Piper French and Daniel Nichanian. Our cheat sheet of elections to watch on Nov. 8 also has other elections of import to criminal justice.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the results of the August primary in Klickitat County.

The post The 30 Prosecutor and Sheriff Races that Will Shape Criminal Justice Next Week appeared first on Bolts.

The official line was that Mark Trafton’s suicide came out of nowhere.

A guard found Trafton hanging in his cell just before 5 a.m. on May 3, 2019, inside the Ash Street Jail in New Bedford, a city by the bayline in Bristol County, southeast Massachusetts. He was 59, pronounced dead the same day he was set to appear before a judge in a rape case.

This wasn’t an unusual scene in Bristol County, where at least 22 people have taken their own lives while in jail since 2006. Lawsuits against the sheriff’s office, which runs the local lockups, have for years alleged the kind of degrading conditions and neglect that can increase the risk of suicide behind bars. 

The local news made Trafton’s death sound unavoidable, writing that he’d indicated no suicidal ideation when meeting earlier that week with a mental health profressional and his attorney, and that he did not “exhibit any suicidal behaviors or statements since he arrived in custody” in September of 2018. The New Bedford Guide quoted Tom Hodgson, the Republican sheriff in charge of the jail since 1997, who offered condolences to Trafton’s family and said, “we’re keeping not only them but everyone involved in this incident in our prayers.” 

But Richard Saunders, who was incarcerated with Trafton at the Ash Street Jail, told Bolts that Trafton was obviously suicidal and spoke often of killing himself. Through tears, Saunders recalled how others incarcerated with Trafton worried he would act on the threats—and said at least three people warned guards about it—when he scribbled suicidal thoughts on the wall in his cell, and started calling a drawstring from his laundry bag his “hanging rope.” 

Saunders said he was horrified, but not surprised, when he heard guards rush into Trafton’s cell before dawn, then the beeping and static crash of a defibrillator before he saw his friend whisked out under white cloth. 

Hardly two months passed before another person died by suicide in another Bristol County jail—again portrayed as an unavoidable tragedy, with Hodgson telling the local news, “There was absolutely no indication to anyone. This was a shock.” 

Jail suicides under Hodgson have long been shown to surpass those in other counties. According to a statewide review of jail suicides in Massachusetts by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, Bristol County, home to about 8 percent of the state’s population, accounted for nearly a quarter of its jail suicides between 2006 and 2016.

Lawsuits and protests over dangerous jail conditions, malnutrition and medical neglect have made Hodgson infamous among many jail watchdogs.

“He’s earned the nickname ‘The Arpaio of the East’,” said Elizabeth Matos, executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, referencing Joe Arpaio, the rightwing strongman and former sheriff of Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona, whose brutal jails and discriminatory policing practices were so egregious as to earn him unusual national scrutiny and a criminal conviction.

“I don’t know why he’s not as famous as Arpaio,” Matos said of Hodgson in Bristol County. “But he should be.”

There are plenty of similarities: Both are staunchly anti-immigrant strongmen deeply embedded in far-right networks. Both support the movement of “constitutional sheriffs,” which preaches that sheriffs have ultimate authority within their counties. Both tied themselves closely with Donald Trump once he came to power in 2016. And both are also known for scandals and inhumane treatment inside their jails, and have faced heaps of lawsuits over dangerous conditions.

“Jail shouldn’t be a country club,” Hodgson has said, a longtime mantra that nearly mirrors an infamous Arpaio catchphrase. 

Hodgson, Massachusetts’ longest-serving sheriff, is again seeking re-election on Nov. 8. He has defended his oversight of the jail, including releasing his own internal report on jail suicides that absolves his department of responsibility while ignoring key details. He has pushed back against a state probe into his jail practices, calling it a “political witch hunt.” After the most recent suicide on his watch, earlier this month, Hodgson said his staff had gone “above and beyond” to help the man, and should be applauded.

There are no consistently Republican counties in Massachusetts, but Bristol County, where Trump claimed 43 percent of the vote in 2020, is widely considered to be the state’s most conservative. Hodgson’s Democratic opponent Paul Heroux, the mayor of Attleboro, a small and largely working-class city near the state’s Rhode Island border, is running with support from the state’s Democratic establishment. His campaign recently released an internal poll showing him within two percentage points of Hodgson. 

Heroux, who is Hodgson’s first election opponent in twelve years, criticized the sheriff’s treatment of incarcerated people. “How can anybody say that’s a good idea, to have this type of person, with his mindset, being our chief jailer?” he said. 

But Heroux added he has struggled to rally interest since entering the race in January. “A lot of people told me this race would get national attention,” Heroux told Bolts in mid-September. “I was told I was going to get a million dollars in my campaign account from donations all over the country. … Right now, I’m struggling to raise money. People don’t really care about a sheriff.”

Hodgson was appointed sheriff in 1997 by Governor William Weld, a Republican who compared himself to Attila the Hun on crime issues, and said prisoners should be made to break rocks. Since then, he has won re-election four times, most recently in 2016 in an uncontested race. 

In his more than two decades in power, Hodgson has worked to build a brand as a tough-on-crime community protector. The responsibilities of sheriffs in Massachusetts, unlike in many states, are largely limited to overseeing jails; they do not have regular patrol or arrest duties. But Hodgson has repeatedly sought to have his office patrol the county, drawing pushback from local officials. In 2003, for instance, he declared New Bedford a “killing field” and sent his deputies to “the troubled areas” of town. The mayor asked a judge to block Hodgson’s patrols in the city while the district attorney at the time publicly criticized the sheriff’s plan, telling the Boston Globe, “You can’t have the guy who was serving mashed potatoes to inmates last week calling himself a drug detective this week.”  

Matos, who grew up in Bristol County as Hodgson rose to power, says the sheriff has a charming public persona that belies the callous indifference to human suffering that occurs inside his jails. Dangerous conditions and far-right politics are common in American sheriff’s offices, but Matos, who has helped sue jails and prisons across Massachusetts, said conditions inside the Bristol County jails stand out. “Folks who are incarcerated who we’ve interviewed consistently say that (Bristol’s) is by far the worst they’ve ever been in,” she said. “It’s intentionally dehumanizing.”

Matos’s organization is currently suing Hodgson in a state court on behalf of three people with mental illness who allege they were placed in solitary confinement inside Bristol County jails with little treatment for their conditions. The suit accuses the sheriff of tolerating an “alarmingly high” suicide rate—twice that of other Massachusetts county correctional facilities and three times the suicide rate for jails nationally, according to the lawsuit—and argues that “harsh and humiliating” jail policies “discourage prisoners from reporting thoughts of self-harm or suicide.”

The lawsuit also alleges squalid conditions in solitary confinement. “Prisoners describe a pervasive stench when disturbed prisoners flood their cells and their floods with human waste,” it states. “All too often, correctional staff respond to such events with verbal or even physical abuse.” The suit says people confined to solitary are allowed outside their cells for only about five hours per week, for recreation “alone in small pens resembling dog cages.”

Hodgson declined through spokespeople to be interviewed for this story and didn’t respond to written questions from Bolts. The sheriff, who on his podcast once said, “I never, have ever, denied any outlet an interview, … because I felt like I’m in a public position, I have an obligation to answer,” has suggested that people who complain about treatment in his jails are liars. He told The Boston Globe in response to the solitary confinement lawsuit, “Surprise, surprise, we might have people in our facilities who are not telling the truth.”

Hodgson has also pushed back against critics by citing his department’s stellar ratings from accreditation inspectors at the American Correctional Association. But Matos said that people incarcerated in the Bristol County jails tell Prisoners’ Legal Services the inspections are easy to pass. “We have heard consistently that there is plenty of notice when inspections happen, and incarcerated people almost always know because things are suddenly getting painted and patched,” she told Bolts. “Then things go back to normal after the dog-and-pony show.”

Saunders said he was scared to speak up when inspectors came by. “You want to talk to them, but they’re walking with lieutenants and you know that if you say anything, you’re going to the hole,” he told Bolts. “And they (the inspectors) don’t even look in the cells. My ceiling was falling down. The mice had eaten into my ceiling, and there was mold. There’s toilets coming off the wall. There was an opossum that came through. They didn’t look in.” 

Saunders, who was released from the jail earlier this month, said that he experienced extreme temperatures during his four years at the Ash Street Jail; he said his cell, which was near an open door to the building, once started to fill with snow. He said the food was barely edible and often comprised mostly carbohydrates like unseasoned, nearly raw potatoes, meant to meet minimum calorie standards without providing much nutrition. “Everyone gets a belly in there,” Saunders said. “Even the guys who work out seven hours a day.” 

Saunders said the plumbing at Ash Street often fails, with pipes bursting regularly. He recalled one time feces exploded from a pipe into a living area. He remembered the solitary confinement cells being even worse. “There’s feces rubbed on the walls,” he said. “Nobody cleans it. They throw you in there and they disrespect you. They don’t give you your property.”

Kellie Pearson said she recalls her former partner, Michael Ray, describing extreme medical neglect at the Bristol County jail campus in Dartmouth. He once suspected he had a staph infection, she said, and called her inconsolably upset: “He said, ‘Kellie, I’m worried I’m going to die and they won’t listen to me. They gave me a cream, they told me it was like a bug bite.’” 

Pearson said she tried every phone number she could locate for the jail, and finally, after threatening to sue and to whistle-blow in the press, she convinced a nurse to call him down for treatment. “When they checked him he needed to be rushed to hospital,” Pearson said. “The doctor told him that he might have died if he hadn’t come in.”

Ray’s incarceration ran almost two years, before he hanged himself in his cell in 2017. Pearson unsuccessfully sued Hodgson in 2018 over the high cost of phone calls from jail, explaining that the financial stress inhibited Ray’s ability to communicate with her.

Stories like these abound in Bristol County. The Standard-Times of New Bedford reported in 2018 that people incarcerated in Bristol were receiving no fresh fruits or vegetables—until the newspaper began investigating, at which point the sheriff’s office “changed its policy to allow each person two apples a week.”

People detained there have mounted hunger strikes to protest lack of medical care, overpriced commissary items and unsanitary facilities. And lawsuits against Hodgson piled up to the point that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey called for a state investigation into his office in 2018.

“Recent lawsuits have raised serious allegations about the conditions of confinement at Bristol County jails,” Healey wrote in a letter to state law enforcement officials. “ Among other things, these lawsuits allege that inmates with mental illness are routinely segregated for unreasonably long periods of time, exposed to unnecessarily harsh conditions, and denied access to basic programs and services.” She said the lawsuits were consistent with complaints her office had received about “inadequate mental health screening and treatment, denials of medical care, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, poor nutritional services.” 

In December 2020, Healey’s office released a long report detailing civil rights violations committed under Hodgson against immigrants detained at his department’s Dartmouth campus. It investigated a clash early in the COVID-19 pandemic between staff and detainees who were scared of how they would be treated in quarantine and refused to be removed from their units. 

According to the report, one detainee said that Hodgson personally shoved him while he was phoning his attorney, an allegation Hodgson has denied. The report says that the scene dramatically escalated as Hodgson’s staff overwhelmed detainees with dogs and so much pepper spray that two men were hospitalized and another needed an emergency procedure, performed in the jail, to be revived. After he was revived, Healey’s office wrote, the man “was not taken to the hospital for a medical evaluation or assessment, but was instead placed in solitary confinement.”

Prior to the incident, Hodgson had multiple partnerships with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One was a contract to detain immigrants in ICE’s custody; the other was membership in the 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act on ICE’s behalf within jails. A staunch defender of ICE detentions, Hodgson has repeatedly traveled to Washington, D.C., to champion stricter immigration enforcement, and he once offered to send Bristol County detainees to the U.S.-Mexico border to help build Trump’s wall.

But the attorney general’s investigation in 2020 found that Hodgson’s staff had shown “deliberate indifference” to the safety of detained immigrants, and recommended that the federal government break off its partnerships with him. The Biden administration agreed, terminating the 287(g) and detention contracts last year. (Neighboring Barnstable County, home to Cape Cod and immediately to Bristol’s east, is now the only county in all of New England involved in 287(g).)

Albert Orlowski, a retired longtime deportation officer with ICE and a Dartmouth resident who says he advised Hodgson’s staff on immigration enforcement, described Hodgson as unprofessional and unreliable in an interview with Bolts. Orlowski aired some of his criticism in the local press in 2017, and Hodgson replied by accusing Orlowski of lying about their prior relationship.

“You do not use tear gas on detainees. You do not use canines,” Orlowski told Bolts about the 2020 events. “If you go into a facility, which is a closed environment, and you throw tear gas and send in barking, vicious dogs who are trained to react, how do you think people are going to behave in that situation?”

The man running to unseat Hodgson calls his jails revolting and inhumane, arguing that people under the sheriff’s custody deserve better medical care and services. 

“His attitude is to make life miserable for you,” Heroux said. “My attitude is that we’re going to address your needs, your drug addiction, mental illness.” He also vows to increase the transparency of the office. 

A report released this year by a special commission on correctional funding convened by the Massachusetts legislature found that Bristol County spends far less on programming for detainees than the other eleven counties studied, and roughly a third as much as the next highest county. In 2017, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting found that Bristol had just three mental health clinicians for a jail population averaging about 1,350 people; by comparison, Hampden County (Springfield) had ten for roughly the same average jail population. 

Saunders told Bolts that few efforts are made to help the people detained in Bristol County—almost all of whom are there pretrial, and will eventually reintegrate in the community—prepare for release. “There is absolutely zero success stories, and everything Hodgson says is a lie,” Saunders said. The sheriff’s office lists dozens of programs, ranging from religious meetings to vocational classes. “There is no such training. There are no programs available,” said Saunders, who added that most people locked up in Bristol County spend at least about 21 hours a day in their cells.

Pearson similarly told Bolts that she never heard her former partner mention being involved in a single program while he was locked up.

Hodgson has blamed his office’s lack of investment in jail services on state funding, while also bragging that he’s simply good at cutting costs and saving taxpayer money. Court documents show his office has collected millions in kickbacks from Securus Technologies, the private company that charges incarcerated people to make phone calls. He also spent at least about $2 million early in his tenure on a “homeland security force,” even though he has little authority beyond his jails—the money reportedly covered a $500,000 “mobile command center,” and a set of miniature fire trucks and police cars meant for simulations of terrorist events.

In conversation with Bolts, Heroux did not detail many policy changes he would make to improve conditions at the jail. Asked about local advocates’ longtime push to close the jail on Ash Street, Heroux did not stake a position, other than to say he’d be wary of shutting it down without first freeing up new bed space somewhere else. He also did not name any offense for which people are presently jailed that he believes should not carry jail time; more reform-minded figures in the state have tried to move Massachusetts away from arresting and incarcerating people for drug offenses and other actions typically deemed “low-level.”

Heroux also said that he is “indifferent” toward the 287(g) program, though he added that he feels local law enforcement should not do the federal government’s job. He said he “would entertain it” if ICE made any request of him, including if it asked him to share information on detainees or to keep people detained past their release dates. 

Asked about the push to make phone calls from jail free, Heroux initially was under the false impression that the legislature already eliminated those costs. But a legislative proposal died earlier this year, after heavy pushback from the state’s sheriffs. Once corrected, Heroux added that the issue called for legislative action so that the costs are incorporated into the state budget. “We shouldn’t obstruct an inmate’s ability to call home to stay in contact with friends and family,” he said. Massachusetts sheriffs in 2021 jointly announced they would cap the cost of phone calls but opposed making them free; Hodgson himself has fought a lawsuit to eliminate fees in Bristol.

Heroux is backed by local activists who have organized against Hodgson for years, penning endless guest columns in local media, publishing deep opposition research and staging protests. Several activists told Bolts that it’s been hard to get voters to care about abuses at Hodgson’s jails. 

“The average person doesn’t want to know what brought somebody to jail. Their attitude is, you made your bed, it’s not my concern, you did this to yourself,” said David Ehrens, a member of the citizen group Bristol County for Correctional Justice and a prolific anti-Hodgson writer. 

Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization founded by Michael Bloomberg, began digital advertising against Hodgson earlier this month, NBC News reported.

Pearson, the former partner of Michael Ray, is among those Bristol County residents who cannot afford to ignore the topic of jail conditions. As a mental health clinician, Pearson told Bolts that she is well positioned to understand that Ray should have received special care when in jail. She spoke of his lengthy history of mental illness history and of another suicide attempt years before he was locked up in Bristol County.

Never far from her mind is something Ray wrote to her in a letter before he took his own life in Hodgson’s custody: “If something happens to me, I want people to know I’ve been getting no help.”

The post ‘The Arpaio of the East’ Faces His First Opponent in 12 Years. Is Anyone Watching? appeared first on Bolts.

He got the room grinning and then paused the song. “This show made me crazy,” said Hall, who used to be a prosecutor and is running for district attorney this fall in Plymouth County. “It didn’t look anything like the reality I was dealing with on a day-to-day basis.”

Hall spent the next hour fleshing out what frustrates him about the disconnect between what prosecutors do on the TV show and the reality of the criminal legal system. He argued it’s outrageous that people are kept behind bars because they’re too poor to make bail. He highlighted glaring racial disparities in the Massachusetts prison population. He railed against mandatory minimum sentences for people convicted of drug-related offenses.

Those problems persist, Hall added, in large part because of the real-life versions of Law & Order’s righteous characters. “There are a whole host of things that DAs stand in opposition to that are trying to make the system better for everyone,” he said. “But they consistently say no.” 

Some Massachusetts prosecutors took a different, more progressive approach in recent years. The 2018 election saw watershed victories for reform-minded candidates Rachael Rollins in Suffolk County (Boston) and Andrea Harrington in the Berkshires. They pushed far-reaching changes, for instance by teaming up and testifying in the legislature in favor of raising the age of juvenile prosecution to 21. At home, they decreased the prosecution of low-level offenses that stem from poverty, substance use, and mental health. 

But neither Harrington nor Rollins will be in office come 2023, weakening the clout of reform proponents in Massachusetts. 

Rollins was promoted U.S. Attorney by President Joe Biden, and confirmed by the Senate in December, a first for her cohort of so-called progessive prosecutors. But that created a vacancy in the DA’s office. Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, replaced her with Kevin Hayden, who has since rolled back some of her signature policies. Hayden beat a progressive challenger beset by assault allegations in a Democratic primary on Sept. 6. That same day, Harrington was ousted in a Berkshire County primary, losing to a trial attorney who faulted her for pushing reform too far and not prosecuting some drug cases.

This has left Massachusetts progressives orphaned when it comes to local prosecutors, at least for now. It’s “really kind of sad,” said former Rollins staffer Nasser Eledroos, who is now managing director of the Center for Law, Information and Creativity at Northeastern School of Law. “We’ve won the creation of a large body of research supporting progressive policies, but, in terms of electoral power, we have in many ways regressed.” 

Hall is hoping to reignite the reform torch in November by taking over the DA’s office in Plymouth, a county south of Boston of roughly 530,000. He is challenging longtime Republican incumbent Tim Cruz.

“The voices that would normally push for these types of reforms within the system aren’t there,” Hall told Bolts. “I see it as my responsibility and duty to be, for lack of a better phrase, the voice crying out in the wilderness saying that there is another way,” he added. 

“There’s a more just, a more fair and more equitable way to deal with harm and disruption in community that doesn’t overcriminalize and overburden people–particularly poor people and people of color–and still find ways to make sure people are safe and healthy,” he said.

This is not Hall’s first run-in with Cruz. The ACLU of Massachusetts sued the DA’s office last year, challenging its demand that the ACLU pay $1.2 million to obtain public records that Hall had requested over prosecutorial policies and racial disparities; Cruz ended up releasing the records for free, an ACLU spokesperson said. 

Over his 21-year tenure as DA, Cruz has been a stalwart opponent of progressive reforms and, after 2018, he emerged as a determined antagonist to Rollins.

“They talk about reimagining criminal justice, and I say this: you don’t have to reimagine anything,” Cruz said on a talk radio program in August. Data collected by the Vera Institute for Justice shows that Plymouth County’s prison admission and incarceration rates are higher than the rest of the state.

Early in the pandemic, Cruz fought the release of medically vulnerable people from jails and prisons–a position Rollins denounced as inhumane; the Plymouth jail suffered COVID outbreaks amid broader complaints about detention conditions. In 2020, Cruz also mounted an unsuccessful effort with three other DAs to intervene in a Boston case where Rollins was looking to increase the age below which youth cannot be sentenced to life without parole. “It seems nowadays the defendants are being treated as victims, and the victims are invisible,” he said. Despite this tough-on-crime persona, The Boston Globe reported in 2015 that Cruz faced a staff revolt for making deals with defendants accused of violent crimes to secure their collaboration in other cases, including using public funds to bail someone out of jail.

Neither Cruz’s office nor his campaign responded to requests for comment from Bolts.

Another DA who played a lead role in criticizing Rollins’s approaches, Michael O’Keefe of the neighboring Cape and Islands district (Barnstable, Dukes, and Nantucket counties), is not seeking re-election this year. O’Keefe allied with Cruz, and also denounced Rollins’s “decline to prosecute” policy in the press, saying she was overstepping her role. Democrat Robert Galibois and Republican Daniel Higgins, who is endorsed by O’Keefe, are facing off in that district. Cape and Islands and Plymouth are hosting the only two contested general elections for DA anywhere in the state.

But it is the Plymouth race that has become the primary concern for state progressives, including prominent public officials. Hall is notably endorsed by U.S. Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren.

Plymouth voted for Biden in 2020 by 17 percentage points. But in this deep-blue state, the county is more prone than others to voting for a Republican. It is the only county that Warren lost in her 2018 Senate race, by one percentage point. Hall is also defying the weight of incumbency: Cruz has already won five elections.

In fleshing out his platform, Hall says change on some issues would have to wait. He told Bolts he believes that cash bail should eventually be banned but also that the general public is not ready for that step yet so he’d want to approach the matter “more pragmatically.” This would mean requesting cash bail in certain cases, he says, but also taking “gradual steps” toward its elimination. (Rollins faced severe criticism from court watchers over breaking a campaign promise to end cash bail.)

But he is also embracing Rollins’s signature reforms. Rollins made waves during her run for Boston DA when she rolled out a list of 15 low-level offenses that she would by default not prosecute, such as low-level drug possession or breaking into a vacant property; she argued that those behaviors should be addressed through other public services, an approach that has since spread elsewhere. 

Hall says he, too, would establish a list of charges that his office would have a presumption of not prosecuting. These charges would include simple possession of all drugs and drug paraphernalia, driving-related offenses like driving with a suspended license, trespassing, and breaking and entering for the purpose of finding shelter. He estimates this would apply to at least 30 percent of charges being filed in a given year in Plymouth County. 

“Many people, particularly in the city of Brockton, have been overburdened with the weight of this system,” Hall told Bolts. Hall makes the case that accountability and criminal punishment are too often treated as synonymous; he says he also wishes to expand restorative justice programs to reach resolutions outside the courtroom.

There is evidence that decline-to-prosecute policies have been conducive to public safety. Rollins’s team pointed to the declining rate of violent crime in Boston during her tenure. And a 2021 study by researchers at three different universities, who combed through two decades of data in Boston, found that it reduces crime when prosecutors decline to prosecute low-level offenses. “Keeping these individuals out of the criminal justice system… seems to stop the path of criminal activity from escalating,” said New York University Professor Anna Harvey, one of the researchers.

Hall also says he would aggressively review past cases and seek to change sentences for people he determines have been unfairly prosecuted. He says he would look not only at those who are demonstrably innocent, but also at victims of overzealous policing, racial injustice, and constitutional violations. This would distinguish Hall’s approach from the “conviction integrity units” proliferating nationwide, including in Cruz’s office, that typically focus only on innocence claims. (Some California DAs have created sentencing review units since a change in state law in 2019.) Even where “conviction integrity” units exist, they are rarely prioritized, says Daniel Medwed, an expert on wrongful convictions at Northeastern. 

“It’s really hard to look back at your own decisions and think that your own decisions were flawed,” Medwed said.

Hall joined Medwed at a Boston bookstore on Sept. 21 to headline an event celebrating Medwed’s new book on wrongful convictions. Once a conviction is in the books, Hall told the audience, DAs offices often prefer keeping a case close to pursuing justice. “Just as a candidate for DA, the number of people who have reached out to me raising concerns about the wrongful convictions they’re trying to fight tells me how much of a problem this is.”

This is no abstract issue in Plymouth County. Two years ago, the lawyers for a woman named Frances Choy, who spent 17 years in prison after being convicted of setting her home ablaze and killing her parents, revealed serious prosecutorial misconduct in the case: false evidence, key witnesses never called. 

In declaring a mistrial and freeing Choy, the judge in the case also cited racist emails by Cruz’s staff. One prosecutor wrote to a colleague that she would “show up (in court) wearing a cheongsam and will be the one doing origami in the back.” Other emails showed prosecutors mocking Asian stereotypes and jokingly using broken English.

Cruz declined to seek a new trial against Choy, and applauded her exoneration.

But critics stress that his office consistently avoids transparency. In 2020, one year before the ACLU’s lawsuit against Cruz, The Enterprise newspaper reported that his office does not keep what’s known as a Brady list, a tally of police officers whose records indicate potential credibility issues as witnesses in court to be communicated with the defense. Cruz’s office told The Enterprise that the office examines Brady concerns on a “case-by-case basis” and complies with the law, which does not require publication of the list.

Hall says he would publish it. He also said he would create and publish a “do-not-call” of police officers that he would never call on as a witness due to past misconduct; he said many on the Brady list would be on the “do-not-list,” though not all.

That would mark a break with the prevailing climate in Plymouth. One defense attorney who said he’d handled more than 300 cases in Plymouth County told The Enterprise in 2020 that local prosecutors there have a “symbiotic relationship with police.” As he seeks a sixth term this year, Cruz boasts endorsements from 34 different police unions. 

Reform-minded candidates are often plagued by poor relationships with police and law enforcement once in office, and Hall says he’s trying to smooth things over up front. After announcing his candidacy, he said, he reached out to the police chiefs from all 27 communities in Plymouth County. 

As of late last month, he told Bolts, “I’ve heard back from maybe four.”

The post Civil Rights Attorney Vies to Pick Up the Torch of Reform Prosecutors in Massachusetts appeared first on Bolts.

Editor’s note (Jan. 7, 2023): Donna Buckley won the sheriff election on Nov. 8, and she terminated the Barnstable County contract with ICE on Jan. 4, her first day in office.

Barnstable County, which comprises Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is known for its beautiful coastal scenery, busy summers and snug, sleepy off-seasons. 

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor earlier this month sent about 50 Venezuelan migrants on a plane to Martha’s Vineyard who were then promptly transferred to Cape Cod. Local politicians decried the stunt as a cruel attempt to expose the area’s immigrant-friendly self-image as fraudulent, but refused to take the bait.  “We are going to take care of these people,” state Senator Julian Cyr, a Democrat, told reporters. Articles about the open-armed response abounded.

But Barnstable also has another distinctive feature: an unusually tight relationship with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

It is the only county in all of New England that has an active contract with ICE’s 287(g) program. This program, which is typically up to sheriffs to opt into, deputizes local officers to assist ICE in sharing data about, questioning, and detaining people suspected to be unauthorized immigrants. 

“It just makes everyone feel worse, afraid. Afraid to be deported any time,” Katia Regina Dacunha, a Brazilian immigrant and Barnstable resident, told Bolts. She moved to this country 18 years ago and gained citizenship seven years ago. “ The level of anxiety and tension is huge in our community.” 

Among more than 3,000 sheriff’s offices in the country, only about 130 have this arrangement with ICE. Of this sliver of 287(g) participants, sheriffs are up for election this November in 39 counties—34 of which voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. 

Barnstable is one of the exceptions. It favored Joe Biden over Donald Trump by nearly 25 points. Once a Republican stronghold, it has voted for Democrats in every presidential election since 1992. Most local politicians, including every county commissioner, is a Democrat, though the outgoing sheriff is a Republican and the GOP has held the district attorney’s office for the last 51 years.

Immigrant rights advocate Mark Gabriele, a member of the community group Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities, says people in the county don’t particularly favor punishing non-citizens, but rather many in the resort communities that dot this part of southeastern Massachusetts simply aren’t aware of the program that lumps additional anxiety onto an immigrant community already on high alert.

“It never dawns on a lot of people that we have this active 287(g) thing, this certainly unfriendly atmosphere,” he said. 

The sheriff who signed this agreement, Republican James Cummings, has for years published demographic information about the people his office refers to ICE each month—in total, more than 300 people since 2018. (A Syracuse University national database shows that ICE placed detainers on people held in the county jail during the partnership, though not all may have been deported.)

This could all change soon, though. Cummings is retiring after 23 years on the job, and in November voters are set to choose a replacement in a contest where cooperation with ICE has become a faultline. Republican lawmaker Tim Whelan wants to preserve the ICE partnership, and Democratic attorney Donna Buckley says she’d “rip up” the 287(g) agreement on her first day in office.

Buckley, who served as general counsel for Cummings for the last four years, says she only decided to run this spring because, she said, she lacked confidence in Whelan to reform an office she’s observed as failing to prepare incarcerated people for success after release. Her entry into the race gave voters an affirmative choice in a contest that otherwise would be unopposed.

“The sheriff’s office should not be doing ICE’s job,” Buckley said. “The sheriff’s office should be focusing on all of the people who come out (of jail) and make sure they do not commit more crimes, that they do not have more victims, that they don’t overdose and die, that they don’t put our police at risk.”

“[The 287(g) agreement] has nothing to do with correction, rehabilitation and treatment of people who are sent to the custody of the sheriff, and it needs to go,” Buckley added.

But it speaks to Gabriele’s point about the relative apathy on this issue that even Buckley emphasizes her position on immigration enforcement is not a defining part of her platform. She describes the 287(g) involvement as merely symptomatic of what she alleges to be a broader problem of mismanaged priorities in the office, as opposed to casting it as a matter of social or racial justice. She also says the issue does not come up much on the campaign trail.

“One thing I’ve definitely noticed,” said Sarang Sekhavat, political director at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, “is that immigration, for folks who support immigration and pro-immigrant policies, is a low priority. It’s not the kind of thing they’re usually calling their legislators about.”

Many in Massachusetts may also have no idea where a sheriff fits in on immigration enforcement. A recent survey by the firm Beacon Research showed most in the state don’t know the name of their sheriff and don’t understand well what the job entails.

Whelan, who didn’t respond to requests for an interview for this story, told The Provincetown Independent that 287(g) is “a tool by which we can keep Cape Codders safe.” Proponents of 287(g) often cast it as a crime-fighting measure, since it consists of researching people after they are brought into a jail—though nationwide data shows that 287(g) is typically used against people arrested for low-level offenses or traffic infractions. Cummings, who is currently being sued over the program by Lawyers for Civil Rights and Rights Behind Bars, also defends it.

“What we’re doing is working, and it’s not costing us a lot of money and all the things they’re saying about immigrants’ rights, it’s all B.S.,” Cummings told The Cape Cod Times.

The lawsuit argues it is, in fact, costing taxpayers money, and draws on the Cape Cod Times reporting that showed the sheriff’s office spending more on overtime pay even as the number of people jailed there fell in the pandemic. The suit notes that some sheriff employees who’d earned the most in overtime were also among the handful who’d been specifically trained and deputized under 287(g). One of them, Corrections Officer Kevin Fernandes, had a salary of $85,050 last year and made another $60,476 in overtime, the lawsuit states.

Critics like Gabriele also fault the program for perpetuating racial disparities within the legal system.

Barnstable County is about 92 percent white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities has compiled a running tally of Cummings’ published demographic information, showing that Black men comprise the plurality of those the sheriff has reported.

According to this data, out of the more than 320 people Cummings has listed over the years, at least 98 are from Jamaica—easily the largest share by country of origin.  The largest group of immigrants on the island by far is Brazilians, but there are about half as many people from Brazil as from Jamaica in Cummings’s published statistics.

Said Buckley of Cummings’s policy to publish information about jailed immigrants, “It’s making them look like these bad scary people and not acknowledging the fact that they’re no different than anyone else” incarcerated in Barnstable County.

In Massachusetts, unlike in many other states, sheriffs are almost singularly empowered to run jails. They do not have regular patrol and arrest duties. In her interview with Bolts, Buckley pointed out that she would have no control over deciding which people end up in custody.

Still, the participation in 287(g) exacerbates a problem of disproportionately harsh policing and incarceration that affects Black men in Barnstable as well as in the state at large. A 2020 report by the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School documented large racial disparities in Massachusetts throughout the stages of the criminal legal process, fueling huge differences in the incarceration rate among white, Latinx, and Black residents.

“There are all these layers of where the problem could be originating,” Gabriele said. “It could be in (racial disparities in) accusations, in prosecution. You don’t get screened for the 287(g) until you’re actually on the premises of the jail, so the overrepresentation of Jamaicans could’ve originated earlier in this whole criminal prosecution process.”

Whether or not Buckley wins, there are signs that 287(g) may be on its last legs in Massachusetts. It exists now in just two areas: in Barnstable, and in an agreement between ICE and the state prison system. 

County-level agreements have already been reversed in neighboring Plymouth County, where the sheriff voluntarily ended the program a year ago, and in Bristol County, where the Biden administration terminated the 287(g) contract after a scathing state investigation into a violent episode in 2020 in that county’s now-shuttered ICE detention center. The office of Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey found the Bristol County officers had committed civil rights violations and recommended the termination.

Healey, a Democrat, is running for governor this year and heavily favored to win. Her campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether she’d preserve the state prison system’s 287(g) agreement.

If she wins, she would succeed Republican Governor Charlie Baker, who this year vetoed a bill to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. The Democratic legislature overrode his veto, but opponents collected enough signatures to force a referendum in November on whether to repeal the new law.

Dacunha argued that the changes that this election may bring would make Barnstable County a safer home. 

“People want to pay taxes, contribute to the communities, get their status, not be afraid to do that,” she said. “Somehow, they are here. So what are we going to do about it? Close our eyes and abuse them?”

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