The race was a rematch of the county’s Democratic primary in May, when Dugan beat Zappala by about 10 percentage points. But Zappala soon flipped party affiliation and ran in the general election as a Republican after the local GOP, lacking its own DA candidate, organized a write-in campaign to make him its nominee. With nearly all ballots counted by early Wednesday morning, Zappala led Dugan 52 to 48 percent.

As Zappala clung to power this election, Allegheny County’s reform movement scored a significant win in the race for county executive: progressive Democrat Sara Innamorato, who has criticized mass incarceration and who favors overhauling the troubled local youth detention system, beat Republican Joe Rockey. The margin was tight: Innamorato was up about 2 percentage points—fewer than 10,000 votes—as of early Wednesday.

In a county that is very racially segregated and where Black and poorer residents face much higher rates of incarceration, Innamorato pledged a new vision. “We’re bringing together people who have been left out and pushed out and shut out of Allegheny County Government for too long,” she told supporters Tuesday night. “We will create compassionate solutions to addiction, violence, and poverty.”

Tanisha Long, an Allegheny County-based organizer with the Pennsylvania nonprofit Abolitionist Law Center, said Innamorato’s win is thrilling for those working in the Pittsburgh region to reduce incarceration and over-policing. Among other things, the new county executive will inherit power to nominate a new warden for the county’s deadly jail and will wield considerable influence over the board overseeing that jail; she will also be in charge of the city’s scandal-plagued youth detention system. “Those are real things, and there is real hope,” Long told Bolts. 

But Zappala’s victory places substantial limits on many moves toward more progressive criminal justice policy in Allegheny County through 2027, when he’d be eligible to seek an eighth term. 

He’s long been a staunch opponent of reform: He claims to hold police accountable but has seldom prosecuted any officers and, in one famous 2010 case, declined to file charges against a group of white officers who brutalized an unarmed Black teenager. In one year alone, The Appeal found, he prosecuted nearly 2,000 low-level drug possession cases. He mocks the idea of “conviction integrity” units in D.A. offices, which are meant to examine past cases in which innocent or overcharged people were imprisoned. A 2018 investigation found that the vast majority of children charged as adults by his office were Black. And two years ago, Zappala instructed his staff to offer no plea deals to the clients of a local Black attorney known for pursuing racial justice. 

Activists worked hard in recent years to win over voters in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, which lean whiter and more conservative than those in the city. An April Bolts analysis found that areas of Allegheny County that most acutely feel the weight of incarceration have clamored for reform in the DA’s office, but that Zappala has held onto power thanks to suburban voters, who generally have much less direct experience with the local criminal justice system.

That dynamic held on Tuesday night: Dugan dominated in the city of Pittsburgh, which has a population of about 300,000 people, but Zappala hardly lost a precinct in the suburbs, which represent about 900,000 people.

“It’s really disheartening and disappointing that a person who has shown that they have no regard for people of color in Allegheny County, for kids in Allegheny County, has been given another few years,” Long said. “As a Black voter, it feels like the county does not care about us.”

In his campaign, Zappala played up suburban antagonism toward the city. One of his recent television ads painted a grim picture of what Pittsburgh would look like with Dugan as prosecutor, using dark surveillance footage from other cities—gunmen on roadways and at a gas station in Philadelphia, an assault and a carjacking in San Francisco, a drug deal through a car window, a break-in at a jewelry store.

“I will never permit your safety to become an experiment,” Zappala said in the ad. In the days leading up to the election, Zappala reportedly threatened to sue to gain control of the city’s police force, which he has argued does not adequately respond to violent crime.

The public radio station WESA reported Zappala told supporters Tuesday night that this election was “a referendum on us as a community.” 

Rockey used rhetoric similar to Zappala’s in his campaign for county executive. “This is our home, not a laboratory for progressive experiments,” he said in a television ad, during which he also touted endorsements from local police leaders.

Activists had hoped the outcome of this year’s DA and county executive races would help them build on recent wins. The Pittsburgh region is far from the deep-blue bastion found to the east in Philadelphia, and Republicans held key positions in Allegheny County in the 1990s and 2000s, and Pennsylvania’s last GOP governor, Tom Corbett, carried the county as recently as 2010. But progressive-backed candidates have amassed substantial power this decade, winning races for Pittsburgh mayor, U.S. Congress and the county council. 

County Councilmember Bethany Hallam, who is among those Allegheny County progressives swept into office in recent years, told Bolts ahead of Tuesday’s election that Dugan and Innamorato represented the last major pillars in the local political makeover. “If progressives can win these two, we can show what we can do when we are finally in a position to implement our policies,” she said.

Instead, Hallam, Innamorato, and others looking to reduce incarceration and build a justice system in the Pittsburgh area that relies less heavily on punishment will have to contend, yet again, with a top prosecutor resistant to the very idea of reform.

“It’s going to make it very, very difficult to affect radical change, for a while,” Long said.

The post Anti-Reform DA Survives in Pittsburgh Region After Switching to GOP appeared first on Bolts.

After coasting to reelection for decades with barely any opposition, District Attorney Stephen Zappala lost the May Democratic primary against Matt Dugan, the county’s chief public defender. But Zappala is now running as a Republican in a rematch against Dugan.

Meanwhile, the county government agreed to a controversial contract this fall to reopen a youth detention center, even though the center’s fate had been a major issue in the open race for county executive. Local critics fault Rich Fitzgerald, the term-limited outgoing executive and a moderate Democrat, for tying his successor’s hands through the contract, which will span the next county executive’s entire term. Sara Innamorato, a progressive state representative, won the Democratic nomination to replace him in May, beating two centrist opponents who unequivocally favored reopening the center. 

Innamorato now faces Republican Joe Rockey, who, like Zappala in the DA race, is looking to stall criminal justice reforms. While Democrats typically dominate local politics and Joe Biden won Allegheny County by 20 percentage points in 2020, the GOP is hoping law-and-order messaging can deliver its candidates long awaited wins this fall. Recent polls released by the campaigns found tight margins in both races.

But champions of criminal justice reform have already made major strides in the region. Bethany Hallam, a progressive Democrat on the Allegheny County Council, points to other left-leaning candidates who have won recent elections in the area, including Ed Gainey, who became Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor in 2022, and Summer Lee, who won a congressional seat that covers the broader region in 2022 while calling for cuts to jail and prison spending. 

Gainey and Lee are now supporting Dugan and Innamorato, as are other prominent Democrats like U.S. Senator John Fetterman. Dugan and Innamorato have frequently appeared together at events this year. “We are very aware of the moment that we’re in right now,” Hallam told Bolts. 

She added, “If progressives can win these two, we can show what we can do when we are finally in a position to implement our policies.”

This county of more than one million is very segregated along racial lines, and Black residents are vastly more likely than white residents to be arrested and sentenced to prison. Many areas see virtually no incarceration while some neighborhoods, typically within Pittsburgh, have astronomically high imprisonment rates. 

In the run-up to the May primary, progressives worked on winning over the county’s suburban areas, which have less experience of incarceration and which have buoyed Zappala in the past. The last time he ran for re-election, in 2019, the DA received under 10 percent in some of the precincts that most acutely feel the weight of the local criminal system but nearly swept precincts along the outer ring of the county.

This year, Dugan and Innamorato triumphed within the city of Pittsburgh, but they also performed strongly enough in the rest of the county to secure the Democratic nominations. 

Rob Perkins, president of the progressive Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice, told Bolts on the night of this year’s primary election that the Dugan and Innamorato wins tell him “that more people from a broader swath of communities are starting to grasp that the criminal justice system is unfair, full of waste, and too often inhumane.” 

Hallam hopes that wins in November by Dugan and Innamorato will align the county government with Pittsburgh’s more progressive municipal leadership. The county council on which Hallam sits has of late displayed real appetite for more progressive policy-making, only to run into Fitzgerald’s veto pen; he sought to block council votes to raise the minimum wage and to ban fracking in most county parks. The city’s leadership is decidedly more progressive; Gainey has supported minimum wage hikes and fracking bans, for instance. 

Hallam believes that this tension has resulted in missed opportunities to fund programs meant to target root causes of crime. “We have a $1 billion Department of Human Services budget in the county, and we have a city that could really use some of those services to be provided, but it’s been such a head-butting, antagonistic relationship between the county and city,” she said. “It’s going to be transformative to finally have a collaboration.”

Zappala, who flipped parties after the primary, is betting on a reverse dynamic, fueling suburban antagonism toward the urban core to overcome the county’s partisan lean and secure a seventh term in November. 

A recent television ad by Zappala paints an apocalyptic picture of what Pittsburgh would look like under Dugan’s leadership, using dark surveillance footage from other cities—gunmen at a gas station in Philadelphia and a carjacking in San Francisco.

Rockey, the Republican candidate in the county executive race, is using a similar strategy. “This is our home, not a laboratory for progressive experiments,” Rockey says in a recent TV spot in which he touted that he is endorsed by local police and jail-staff unions.

But local advocates of criminal justice reform say Zappala and Rockey are shifting the blame. They attribute Allegheny County’s struggles with public safety to the “tough-on-crime” approach the county has pursued for decades, in large part under Zappala’s leadership. 

Richard Garland, a formerly incarcerated man who runs a program in Pittsburgh for people newly released from prison, says the county needs to invest more in the wellbeing of young people, particularly in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. And he assailed the local jail for failing to prepare people for what happens after they’re released. 

“I’m so frustrated,” he told Bolts. “When I go into the penitentiary it’s full of babies. Babies who don’t have any programs to go to, who are bored. And we expect these things to change? Do we expect society to change overnight?”

Zappala has in the past rejected arguments like Garland’s that strengthening public spending beyond law enforcement is relevant to improving public safety, while Dugan has said that tackling a wider range of economic issues could help disrupt gun violence. 

Over his six terms in office, Zappala has aggressively prosecuted low-level drug possession cases, and his critics point to the wide racial disparities in the cases prosecuted by his office. Zappala has said these disparities reflect who commits crimes in the community, not any policy choices he’s made. Dugan has promised to take the county in a different direction, including by seeking to reduce incarceration over low-level offenses and decrease the county’s use of cash bail and lengthy probation terms. 

He also pledged that he would set up a position in his office to review the cases prosecuted by Zappala for possible overcharging and innocence claims. The Allegheny County DA’s office currently does not have a conviction integrity unit. 

In their debate earlier this month, Zappala mocked a similar initiative set up by DA Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. Krasner’s unit has uncovered dozens of wrongful convictions since 2018. “How’s the conviction integrity unit working out for Philadelphia?” asked Zappala during the debate. “The conviction integrity unit in Philadelphia has exonerated over 30 people,” Dugan responded. 

After losing in the primary, Zappala’s ideas have found a cozy home in GOP politics. No Republican filed to run for DA, and party leaders organized a write-in effort to hand him the GOP nomination—a maneuver that comes with a relatively low threshold; Zappala accepted it after losing the Democratic primary. The DA has since aligned himself with GOP campaign firms—including one that worked with former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. The chairman of the Allegheny County GOP told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, of Zappala, “I think we have similar views on law and order.”

When they debated, Dugan accused Zappala of airing “right-wing GOP attack ads,” saying the incumbent’s tactics are a sign of desperation. Zappala attacked Dugan for receiving outside funding from George Soros, the billionaire who has supported reform candidates around the country. Zappala has the endorsement of Andrew Yang’s Forward Party, which has also endorsed Rockey in the county executive race.

Similarly to Dugan, Innamorato has pledged to tap into county coffers to better fund services that may reduce crime, such as behavioral health care and free recreational programs for kids. Ahead of her competitive primary this spring, she said this goal would be her north star when it comes to settling the heated local debates over youth detention. The local youth jail, the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, shuttered in scandal two years ago, and local politicians and organizers have fought over whether—and how—to reopen it.  

Innamorato did not take a definitive position in the runup to the primary on whether she would reopen Shuman, but her victory over candidates who were unambiguously in its favor created question marks over the future of the lock-up.

But this fall, Fitzgerald and local courts entered into a five-year contract with a private operator to reopen and run the Shuman Center. 

Innamorato and Rockey, the candidates running to replace him, have both criticized the contract. They have each disagreed with privatizing the detention center; and they’ve both said that the length of the contract will limit the options of the next executive. But they’ve both also said that they favor at least temporarily reopening Shuman; at minimum, they say, it’s a way to get kids out of the county’s adult jail, where they’ve often been warehoused since Shuman’s closing.

Innamorato and Rockey did not provide comment for this article. Fitzgerald declined to comment through a spokesperson on the contract. He also declined to endorse a successor.

The county council is now suing Fitzgerald over his decision, asserting that he overstepped his authority by making such an impactful move without the consent of the council. 

Reporting by local public radio station WESA confirms that Fitzgerald’s move will tie the hands of the next executive. The contract allows the county few options for termination, and it provides for little oversight beyond that conducted by the county controller, who is currently reviewing the contract and who has power to audit the facility.

Allegheny County’s controller, Corey O’Connor, assumed that position in 2022 when then-Governor Tom Wolf appointed him to fill a vacancy, and is now running for a full term this fall against Republican Bob Howard. O’Connor has used his first years in office to highlight the failings of the local criminal legal system, including by releasing an audit that underscored how thoroughly the county jail upends the lives of entire families. The audit blamed Allegheny County for doing very little in the way of outreach to the children of the adults it incarcerates, further destabilizing households. O’Connor’s office found nearly 12,000 children largely abandoned by the county in this way between January of 2021 and September of 2022.  

O’Connor, who has endorsed Dugan and Innamorato, told Bolts that he thinks the elections this year will further illustrate the county’s growing comfort with criminal justice reforms.

“Places that were predominantly Republican in the suburbs are starting to turn blue, and they’re turning blue not just in countywide races but council races, school board races,” he said. “It’s all about people organizing and getting people out to vote.”

The post In Pittsburgh Region, Criminal Justice Reformers Face Off Against Old Guard appeared first on Bolts.

In Allegheny County primary elections, Pittsburgh-area Democrats nominated candidates for two key local posts who vowed transformative change, voting to oust the punitive, longstanding district attorney  and selecting an anti-carceral Democratic socialist as county executive. 

In the Democratic primary for Allegheny County DA, public defender Matt Dugan beat incumbent Stephen Zappala easily, with over 55 percent of the vote as of press time. Dugan had focused his campaign largely on convincing more moderate suburban voters of the need to overhaul an office that has presided over vast inequalities in arrests and prosecutions, which disproportionately target majority-Black neighborhoods in the county.  

“From a criminal justice reform perspective, and more generally a social justice perspective, it tells me that more people from a broader swath of communities are starting to grasp that the criminal justice system is unfair, full of waste, and too often inhumane,” Rob Perkins, president of the progressive Allegheny Lawyers Initiative, told Bolts Tuesday night. “In other words, my suburban neighbors are starting to get it.”

But reform advocates aren’t celebrating just yet: Zappala, who has held the post since 1998, is headed for a rematch with Dugan in the November general election because local Republicans, lacking their own nominee for DA and aware that Zappala could lose in the primary, organized a write-in campaign for him in the GOP primary. GOP write-in ballots have not yet been tallied but an unusually large number were cast, indicating the effort likely succeeded; Zappala confirmed Tuesday he would accept the GOP nod.

“We haven’t really thought about November, but we fully expected him to do this,” Dugan told Bolts on Tuesday night, adding that the DA’s office would change under his leadership. “We’re going to talk about opportunities, not just prosecute. … We’re going to talk about building better systems such that folks don’t have to live with gun violence and criminal justice issues.”

The last time Zappala stood for re-election, in 2019, he was both the Democratic and Republican nominee. That year, reform advocates tried to unseat him in the primary and general elections, but had trouble convincing residents of more suburban, majority-white areas to pay attention to the deadliness of the local jail and the disproportionate punishment and incarceration in Allegheny County’s minority communities. 

As Bolts reported in April, the weight of the local criminal legal system is felt acutely in a handful of neighborhoods and towns that skew much poorer and have higher Black populations than in the rest of this highly segregated county—for example, the county jail population is 66 percent Black, though Black people account for only 12 percent of the overall county population.

“They don’t just take us one by one,” Terrell Johnson, a formerly incarcerated and wrongfully convicted Pittsburgh man told Bolts last month. “They can put an indictment down and get 15-20 Black men outside of their households. That’s what it is. It’s still that way.”

But in Dugan’s victory Tuesday, people working to upend this system see hope because he has promised to divert more people toward treatment and services and away from incarceration; pursue shorter sentences, including for parole and probation; dramatically reduce the local jail population; and interrogate questionable past convictions secured under Zappala.

“We’ve been thinking through these issues for a long time,” Perkins said. “This is a big night for us.”

As Allegheny County pivots now to what could be another competitive DA election in November, less mystery surrounds the critical county executive race after Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Sara Innamorato, a progressive state representative who was endorsed by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and won the Democratic nomination with 37 percent of the vote, as of press time, will face Republican Joe Rockey, who ran unopposed in the primary and who polling suggests is a longshot to defeat her. 

Allegheny is a blue-leaning county that voted for Joe Biden by more than 20 percentage points in 2020, making any Democratic nominee a strong favorite; still, Republican candidates retain much more of a path to victory than in other urban counties like Philadelphia.

As Bolts reported this month, the county executive race carries particularly high stakes for Allegheny County’s system of youth incarceration: the local youth lockup, the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, was shuttered in 2021 amid repeated violations of state standards, and the question of how—or whether—to open a new detention facility will fall largely to the next county executive. 

In contrast to Rockey and her two primary opponents, Innamorato has questioned whether Allegheny County needs a detention center for children. Amid calls from police and her opponents to reopen the shuttered youth jail, Innamorato told Bolts earlier this month, “I want to flip that conversation and say, ‘What do our young people need so they don’t end up in a detention facility?”

Jay Moser, the former principal of the school that operated inside Shuman, said he’s excited by Innamorato’s win.

“The problem is so much broader than just saying, ‘Oh, those kids are bad,’” Moser told Bolts late Tuesday. “There are issues that need to be addressed systematically: poverty, racism, lack of opportunity. With her philosophy on governing, there’s no doubt in my mind that she will usher in changes, that we won’t just focus on punishment first.”

One of Allegheny County’s loudest anti-carceral voices, county council representative Bethany Hallam, also won her countywide election Tuesday, crushing challenger Joanna Doven in a Democratic primary—a third critical victory for the left in the Pittsburgh region.

“It’s a strong rejection of the status quo,” abolitionist organizer Tanisha Long, who has been part of the years-long push to reduce incarceration, told Bolts on election night. “People are sick of feeling like Allegheny County is not for everyone.”

The article has been corrected on May 17 to clarify that write-in ballots in the Republican primary for DA have not yet been tallied.

The post Reformers Soar in Pittsburgh Primaries, Opening New Chapter for Decarceral Efforts appeared first on Bolts.

Allegheny County hasn’t operated a facility dedicated to youth incarceration since then, and instead has shipped kids to detention centers in other counties and sometimes even outside the state, while also implementing more at-home supervision like ankle monitors. 

Heading into Tuesday’s election for county executive, which could determine the future of youth detention in the Pittsburgh region, social workers and reform advocates who’ve worked closely with Allegheny County kids are imploring the leading candidates to reject any new youth jail and to support alternatives that keep kids in their homes and communities. 

“We want as few young people out of their homes as possible,” Sara Goodkind, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who co-authored a broad report about Shuman last year, told Bolts. “We know through decades of research that youth detention is associated with increases in recidivism, decreased chances of graduating high school and an increased chance of being arrested as an adult.”

The outgoing county executive, Rich Fitzgerald, cannot run for re-election. In February he announced his intent to “re-establish a county-run facility, or to create a public-private partnership” for juvenile detention in Allegheny County, but has not revealed any plan or proposed timeline since then. Fitzgerald’s successor will have a four-year term and will be instrumental in whatever happens next, as they will inherit broad power over contracts, administrative appointments, and capital budgeting for any potential new or repurposed facility.

The candidates looking to replace him have signaled they’d take the county in different directions. Two of the Democrats who lead in polling, John Weinstein and Michael Lamb, say Shuman should be reopened, though with structural improvements to the building, either for the long term or until the county can replace it with a better facility. 

A third frontrunner in the Democratic primary, Sara Innamorato, a progressive lawmaker who led the field in one public survey last week, has taken a more open stance, questioning whether the county really needs a juvenile lockup.

The Democratic primary victor will face Republican Joe Rockey, who declined to be interviewed for this story but who, according to the Pittsburgh radio station WESA, also believes the county must reopen a youth detention facility. He faces steep odds in this strongly Democratic area in the November general election, polling far behind his potential opponents.

Like the ongoing debates over the adult criminal legal system’s disproportionate impact on Black neighborhoods in this highly segregated area, the varying proposals for youth incarceration carry particularly high stakes for Black children and families in Allegheny County. The ACLU of Pennsylvania found that Black students grades 5-12 in Allegheny County were arrested at nearly nine times the rate of white students during the 2018-2019 school year, and that Allegheny County arrested students at more than double the statewide rate and nearly four times the rate in Philadelphia. 

As of Wednesday, 31 kids 17 or younger were incarcerated in the Allegheny County Jail, the adult facility, according to county reports. Twenty-eight of them were Black.

Weinstein, the Allegheny County Treasurer and one of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary for county executive, believes that closing Shuman sent a signal that children can commit crimes without threat of punishment. Youth gun violence has increased dramatically since 2020 in the area, and local police have pointed to examples of children sent home after being arrested and accused of violent acts.

“Kids are not stupid. They know there’s no Shuman Center and they’ll push the envelope,” Weinstein told Bolts. “There’s no fear now.” 

He continued, “The police officers know this. I’ve talked to judges, and they’re unbelievably frustrated by it. Even if they’re putting ankle bracelets on, the kids go out and commit the crimes with the bracelet on.”

Weinstein called for reopening Shuman with more mental health staff and workforce training than previously existed there.

“We’re gonna rebrand it, totally revamp it,” he said.

Lamb, the Pittsburgh City Controller and another leader in Democratic primary polling, says that Shuman likely needs to reopen, albeit maybe only in the near-term until Allegheny County can find a better facility to house children accused of violent crimes, like assault. 

“First and foremost, I do believe we need a center for juvenile detention,” Lamb told Bolts. He said it’s important that any new center not look or feel like a traditional jail—like Shuman, with its sally port entry, intake station, and cells with concrete floors, metal toilets, and skinny windows. 

Lamb criticized the current practice of shipping kids to other detention centers up to a three-hour drive away from Pittsburgh, but also said he wanted Allegheny County to make space to house children accused of crimes in some of the 55 out of 67 Pennsylvania counties that currently don’t have their own youth detention centers. According to a state report, the percentage of children detained more than 100 miles from home increased tenfold between 2012 and 2021, from 2 percent to 19 percent. 

Goodkind said she worries some county officials are too focused on how the next center should be designed.

“My concern is these proposals to build a fancy, new, kinder, gentler youth detention center,” she said. “I think we need a vision of a world where youth incarceration is obsolete. And to get there, we can’t be focusing on our efforts to have a better detention center.” 

Tammy Hughes, a school psychologist and professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, said officials don’t have to strain to imagine a world in which kids who break the law aren’t incarcerated. As in other states, many Pennsylvania counties have recently gotten rid of juvenile detention centers in favor of more home confinement or other in-the-community options. Fifteen juvenile detention centers around the state closed between 2006 and 2021, the state reported.

Hughes pointed out that non-white kids are referred to the juvenile justice system more often even though white youth often commit crimes at similar rates.

“This place really leans into punishing Black and brown kids,” Hughes said. “This starts in preschool. We see three-year-olds in our clinic, expelled for ripping papers off the wall, for noncompliance, talking back, not listening. That’s an application of rules gone awry. That’s ‘zero tolerance.’ But with white kids we give a lot of grace, like, ‘I know I made mistakes when I was 14.’”

Innamorato, a state Representative, is the only leading candidate in the Democratic primary for county executive who isn’t convinced Allegheny County needs to re-open Shuman or replace it with another detention center. She hasn’t committed to opening any particular facility, but says if the county does re-establish one under her watch, it would need to be non-carceral. She told Bolts that even children accused of violent crimes should not be held in traditional jail cells.

“I’m really trying to separate the two conversations,” she said. “We tend to talk about Shuman Center as a building that is there and should be repurposed and so what is it going to be? I want to flip that conversation and say, ‘What do our young people need so they don’t end up in a detention facility?’”

Innamorato told Bolts that the University of Pittsburgh research project Goodkind co-authored, titled “Post-Shuman Visioning,” was foundational to her current views on juvenile crime and detention in the county. In the absence of any firm plan for the future of youth detention in the county, Goodkind said, her team saw an opportunity to center the experiences of children who had been previously jailed inside Shuman. When asked about their time at Shuman, they overwhelmingly said they wished for more counseling and therapy, with specific resources for those who had experienced sexual violence and other forms of trauma. They asked for more structured activities, training in financial literacy and education on their own legal rights, and more opportunities to connect with their families. One child told the researchers that Shuman was a place that “grooms kids for crime, not healing.”

Innamorato told Bolts, “If we aren’t intentional about the way that we’re architecting this system moving forward, we’re going to continue to put kids through a system that hurts them further, and then put them out in the world where they don’t have access to resources. And we expect them to thrive?”

If Innamorato wins and charts a new path that doesn’t involve replacing Shuman with another youth lockup, it would build on other victories for criminal justice reformers in western Pennsylvania. In 2021, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to ban solitary confinement in Allegheny County, although the county’s adult jail has continued the practice. That same year, Pittsburgh elected Ed Gainey mayor after he ran on a platform of racial justice; local police accountability advocates say they have confidence in him. Other elections next week could change the course of the criminal legal system in Allegheny County: in addition to key county council races, the county’s longtime and punitive district attorney faces a public defender who has secured key endorsements and appears viable.

People who have worked with kids in Shuman and in similar settings told Bolts that next week’s election could signal another turning point for youth detention in Allegheny County. Jeff Shook, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh, said that he’s urging whoever wins to prioritize community investments that aren’t based in punishment and incarceration.

“If you invest in health care, people do better, and you have less crime,” Shook said. “If you invest in education, young people do better, and there’s less crime. We need to raise wages. We need to think about what the pathway is to good jobs, to jobs that are sustainable and promote wellbeing. I think those are the conversations we should be having, as opposed to asking, ‘What kind of center should we build?’”

The post Future of Youth Detention Hangs in Balance of Pittsburgh Election appeared first on Bolts.

It’s Election Day in Pennsylvania, and it’s a big one for criminal justice. Here’s your guide to how The Appeal has covered these elections in recent months.

Philadelphia is voting for its DA, and Larry Krasner’s reforms face a major test

Since he was elected district attorney of Philadelphia in 2017, former civil rights attorney Larry Krasner has become an emblem for the nationwide movement to upend the criminal legal system from the inside. The movement’s proponents have pointed to his victory and policies as inspiration; its detractors, which included officials in the Trump administration, have cited Krasner into one of their leading foils for progressive approaches to criminal justice.

Today Krasner faces a primary challenge from Carlos Vega, a former prosecutor whom he fired when he came into office. The Appeal delved into Philadelphia in recent months. Among its coverage is a three-part Political Report series delving into the contrasts and policy ramifications on three specific issues: probation, drug prosecutions, and immigration.

Pittsburgh is voting for its mayor, and the incumbent’s record faces scrutiny

Pittsburgh is experiencing a major housing crisis that the pandemic has aggravated. And the incumbent mayor faced a lot of criticism for his handling of the police response to protests last summer. Today those are major issues in the Democratic primary between Mayor Bill Peduto and state Representative Ed Gainey, who is running as a progressive.

Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) will also decide a referendum on prohibiting solitary confinement in jails

Solitary confinement is used in prisons and jails around the nation—plunging people into torturous conditions, often for very long periods—and it fuels the crisis of deaths in jails. To date few state or local governments have adopted restrictions on solitary confinement. (New York recently became the first state to ban its use for more than 15 consecutive days.) These abuses have led activists in Allegheny County to organize a ballot initiative to change jail conditions.

Progressives hope to make a splash in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia’s judge elections

Despite their tremendous power in the criminal legal system, local judges still largely escape the spotlight that has been turned in recent years on prosecutors. In 2020, though, progressive activists focused some of their energies on boosting judicial candidates who were often public defenders.  The candidates ran on reducing sentencing and avoiding bail, with some success in New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Las Vegas.

Will that budding movement continue gaining strength in Pennsylvania today? In Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) and Philadelphia, the state’s two most populous urban centers, activists have turned usually neglected judicial elections into key political battles. The Appeal covered their stakes—and explained what judges even do—in recent months.

The post Your Guide to Criminal Justice in Pennsylvania’s Elections Today appeared first on Bolts.

Andrews got into an argument with two guards and requested to file a grievance, but instead they locked her in a cell alone, causing her to have a panic attack.

“I was a kid in jail. I’m scared,” she said, recalling the painful experience. 

Andrews says her requests for help were met with suspicion, and she was told that she would go in “the hole”—solitary confinement—as punishment if the medical ward found nothing wrong.

“I was about to go to the hole because I wanted to see medical care. Because I said I couldn’t breathe, because I was having a panic attack. And I just couldn’t believe that,” Andrews told The Appeal: Political Report. 

When she was incarcerated at the jail again in 2019, Andrews was placed in solitary confinement. She says if it had happened to her the first time she might not have survived. The Allegheny County jail has a suicide rate more than 1.5 times the national average.

“Going to jail later and finding what all that really meant, if that would’ve happened to me when I was 18 and I first went to jail, I would have not made it. Like it’s that serious.” 

Now Allegheny County voters could ban solitary confinement in the jail. A ballot initiative sponsored by Alliance for Police Accountability and co-signed by over 25 other organizations, would prohibit holding people in a cell for more than 20 hours per day, with limited exceptions for health and security reasons. After receiving nearly 67,000 signatures, the initiative will appear on the ballot in the local election today. 

Brandi Fisher, president and CEO of the Alliance for Police Accountability, says the ballot initiative is the community’s way of addressing concerns about conditions in the jail. “The sole goal is to make sure that people are safe. Just because someone is accused of a crime doesn’t mean that we ignore their health issues and their health concerns. And Allegheny County Jail has a huge issue when it comes to being able to address people’s health concerns, and people are literally dying and losing their lives because of it.”

The jail has come under scrutiny for a range of problems, from reports of cells with frigid temperatures and cool air blowing from the vents during the winter, to COVID-19 outbreaks exacerbated by the notoriously poor medical care, to brutality and abuse. Pittsburgh’s Black residents are far more likely to face these conditions because of the jail’s racial disparities. Out of the roughly 1,700 people incarcerated at the jail each day, roughly two-thirds are Black, despite Black people making up only 13 percent of the population in the county.

Last year, the Abolitionist Law Center filed multiple lawsuits against jail officials over the facility’s lack of mental health care and the mistreatment of people who need it; 70 percent of the people incarcerated in the jail have been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.

A press release concerning a lawsuit the group filed in September states that “People with psychiatric disabilities are tased, sprayed with [pepper spray], beaten, and placed in restraint chairs for several hours for minor infractions and for simply requesting mental health care. They are commonly placed in solitary confinement for weeks and months on end, often without having a hearing, in conditions universally acknowledged by correctional experts, courts and the United Nations as torture.” 

In response, Allegheny County said that “Force is not used to punish inmates; it is used only when necessary for the safety and security of the staff and inmates.”

The lawsuit alleges that in solitary confinement, people are restricted to a 10-by-7-foot cell, that they can be deprived of soap, toothpaste or a toothbrush, and that they are often restricted from programs and services.  They only receive one hour outside of their cell, sometimes handcuffed to a table. Allegheny County denied that people in solitary are deprived of hygiene products.

According to the Abolitionist Law Center, the Allegheny County Jail’s track record of brutality, especially against women, far exceeds other jails in the state.  In 2019, there were 720 reported use-of-force incidents—a per capita rate twice as high as the state average— and people were confined to restraint chairs 339 times. In 2018, the staff even used pepper spray against a pregnant woman.

People who were placed in restraint chairs told Public Source, a local publication, that they were left without food or bathroom breaks, pepper sprayed, and covered with a spit hood that affected their breathing. Some said they were even left naked and exposed.

Allegheny County Jail warden Orlando Harper did not respond to a request for comment from the Political Report.

Andrews says she has experienced the restraint chair, solitary confinement, and other forms of brutality numerous times during periods of incarceration over the past three years. She believes that the jail’s practices are long overdue for change. 

“Just because you have the power to watch over these people and basically be their authority figure doesn’t mean you can take advantage of that power,” Andrews said. “And that’s basically what happens at that jail.” 

The county jail board, which oversees the facility, has stalled on addressing these problems. And legislation to limit solitary confinement hasn’t made it far in Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature. Fisher says the ballot initiative lets voters take the matter into their own hands. 

“It was a way to make change happen without permission, without the loopholes, without having to go through the institutions and structures that currently exist that we already know are rooted in racism and white supremacy,” she said. “We’re not ever gonna get the changes that we wanna see if we’re dependent on those folks to make it happen.”

Advocates for the ballot initiative acknowledge that incarcerated people could still be isolated for up to 20 hours a day if the measure passes. But Miracle Jones, the director of policy and advocacy at 1Hood Media, says that it is a place to start. “Legislation will not always be as all-encompassing as the most progressive of us want, but sometimes just the compromising solution is getting definitions that will not only allow for a referendum to be passed, but implemented.” 

Activists are rallying around other issues in this election, too. The ballot includes a Pittsburgh Home Rule Charter amendment to implement a version of Breonna’s Law, which banned no-knock warrants in Louisville, Kentucky. The amendment would require law enforcement officers to be in uniform or other identifiable clothing, record video using a body camera, and announce themselves when executing a warrant. They would also be required to physically knock and wait at least 15 seconds before entering a residence.

A high-stakes county sheriff’s primary election features former Pittsburgh police chief Dom Costa. After leaving law enforcement, Costa was elected to the state legislature, where he pushed for tough-on-crime legislation and once called people on death row “animals.” His opponent, Kevin Kraus, also has a background in law enforcement but is seen as more progressive.

In judicial elections, activists are backing candidates seeking to fill a quarter of the seats on the county’s Court of Common Pleas, where they could make a dent in mass incarceration. And organizers have brought issues like policing and gentrification to the forefront of the mayoral primary, where incumbent Bill Peduto faces a strong challenge from state Representative Ed Gainey. 

All of these races could alter the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and shift the political landscape toward racial and economic justice.

“Right now, we have an unprecedented moment to really rewrite and redefine what reform is and what liberation is for Black people in this city,” Jones said.

Fisher says the initiative to ban solitary confinement has catalyzed people who are affected by these issues to get involved. “It really showed people how we can govern ourselves, how we are the ones that make the decisions about our lives and our loved ones’ lives,” she said.

Andrews worked with the Alliance for Police Accountability to put the referendum on the ballot. She says sharing her story and advocating for change in the jail is part of her healing journey.

“I honestly don’t think I will be free from it until something’s done, until I make a difference. I don’t honestly think I will be able to breathe the same until everybody else can breathe the same. Because as of right now, somebody’s in that chair right now. Somebody’s in that restraint chair as we’re speaking. That’s how I look at life every day.”

The post Pittsburgh Voters May Ban Solitary Confinement in Jail Today appeared first on Bolts.

Their campaigns for seats on the County’s Court of Common Pleas—the primary trial court for criminal, civil, and family cases—could bring overwhelming change not only to that court but also to lower courts whose procedural rules are set by Common Pleas judges.

“This is an opportunity to be transformative in terms of how our courts look, how our courts feel for the public, and the types of policy reforms that can be implemented,” said Tiffany Sizemore, a professor at Duquesne University School of Law and former public defender who is part of the Slate of Eight. 

The Slate of Eight moniker comes from grassroots racial justice organizations that teamed up to decide who to endorse out of a pool of more than 30 candidates. The groups are planning to mount major volunteer mobilizations on behalf of their chosen candidates in the run-up to the May 18 Democratic primary. 

Nicola Henry-Taylor, Lisa Middleman, Mik Pappas, Zeke Rediker, Giuseppe Rosselli, Chelsa Wagner, and Wrenna Watson round out the slate; most are criminal defense lawyers or former public defenders. Organizers supporting the slate say they chose these candidates because of their commitment to reforms like reducing the use of cash bail, curtailing long sentences, diverting drug cases, and limiting the involvement of minors with the criminal legal system.

“The slate candidates all understand how mass incarceration is one of the leading issues in this country, that the issue of mass incarceration is a national embarrassment,” Wasi Mohamed, a founding organizer with UNITE, one of the organizations that endorsed the slate, told The Appeal: Political Report. 

“Historically judges have used the discretionary power of the Court of Common Pleas to breed this system of mass incarceration. Now we have people who are actually advocates against it wanting to take these seats,” Mohamed said. 

One of the factors motivating activists to mobilize around the Common Pleas races this year was the number of seats open—nine out of 34. Only three seats were open in the last two elections combined, and with judges serving 10-year terms, such an opening isn’t likely to arise again soon.

And reshaping the bench could have a trickle-down effect. Under Pennsylvania law, Common Pleas judges have the power to set countywide rules for the administration of the county’s court system.

Taking over nearly a quarter of the bench would enable the slate to “bring a cohesive force to making the changes that we need to make on a policy level,” said Middleman, a public defender. 

The sitting judges on the Court of Common Pleas may not be as reform-minded as the Slate of Eight, but Pappas said he’s confident they’d be able to work together to produce changes. “We all have a vested interest in improving the justice system in Allegheny County,” Pappas said. “I don’t doubt that there would be skepticism and perhaps even resistance, but I also know that they know there’s a lot of work to be done.”

Middleman said she hopes to scale back Allegheny County’s onerous system of court fees, which can keep people stuck in the legal system for years. That issue has also been a focus of Wagner, who is the current county controller. The slate could also significantly drive down the number of people in jail by changing cash bail policies, something that Sizemore and Pappas say they would advocate for.

Pappas has already tackled this issue as an Allegheny County magisterial judge, a position in which he oversees the initial stages of a criminal proceeding. An ACLU of Pennsylvania report analyzed 239 cases he oversaw in 2018 and 2019, finding that he set cash bail in just six of those cases. Pappas told the Political Report he would bring a similar approach to bail decisions on the Court of Common Pleas.

“People have a fundamental right to pretrial release just like they have a right to the assistance of counsel in their case, or to be presumed innocent,” he said.

Pappas said he would advocate for rules that allow pretrial services to replace burdensome cash bail with nominal payments or none at all. Instead of release being based upon an accused person’s ability to pay, that person could be referred to mental health and addiction treatment providers and other services to ensure they show up on their court date.

Drug prosecution could also be scaled back under the Slate of Eight. Middleman says one of her priorities is increasing options for people to receive treatment or services rather than incarceration. Especially for first-time defendants, she said, “Instead of involving them in the system, you could create a diversion program where the person would not have to plead guilty to get treatment and help that they needed.” 

Sizemore sees a similar need to change how the court deals with youth cases. Her work in the last decade has focused on juvenile justice; if she’s elected, she wants to end the prosecution of minors as adults in her courtroom. Pennsylvania law gives judges broad discretion on this issue for most felony cases.

“I don’t think that children should be tried as adults, ever,” Sizemore said. “What we know is that both the science and the United States Supreme Court have told us repeatedly that children are different. They tend to be less morally culpable; they tend to have greater prospects for reform.”

In her practice, Sizemore has fought the school-to-prison pipeline by working to keep children from being placed on probation due to infractions at school, a decision made by family court Common Pleas judges. “One way that courts frequently criminalize adolescents is by reflexively making this finding that, ‘Well, if you’re here and you took a dime bag of weed to school, you must need to be on probation,’” Sizemore said. 

Sizemore said she would dismiss the charges of minors who end up in court for infractions like this. “Most children actually don’t need probation or supervision,” she said.

Across the country, advocates for criminal justice reform have increasingly homed in on judicial elections as fertile ground for change. Last year, activists in New Orleans and Las Vegas backed judge candidates whose experience and priorities mirror the Slate of Eight. But in Allegheny County, the grassroots-style campaigns of the slate candidates are a departure from the norm.

“The traditional path has been to schmooze the Democratic committee members, and get the labor council endorsement, and the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police], because that’s what judges are supposed to do,” Middleman said. “We have not chosen that traditional path, because those are not the organizations that have been vocal or helpful in making the progressive change that is necessary.” 

Instead, the candidates are relying on the organizations that endorsed the slate to mobilize volunteers.

Straight Ahead, one of the endorsers, grew out of the Abolitionist Law Center’s court watch program. Participants observed judges adopting racist and discriminatory attitudes toward defendants, said Robert Saleem Holbrook, the executive director of Straight Ahead. “We recognized that ‘OK, we have to do something about these terrible judges,’” he added.

Straight Ahead’s organizing is focusing heavily on outreach to those directly affected by incarceration, including people who are currently locked up. Although people in Pennsylvania prisons are not eligible to vote, Holbrook said Straight Ahead will be encouraging them to ask their family members to vote for the slate. 

“We are going to be flooding the prison with [information about] this slate, and telling them to send it home to their communities, because our communities are going to be impacted by who sits on these benches,” Holbrook said. “We’re going to mobilize the communities that we’ve been representing for years, but just in a defensive position,” against police and correctional abuse, he added.

These efforts have met with a positive response so far, Holbrook said. “I’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm, because they’re feeling empowered, like ‘Yeah, we are now going to matter. We are now on the offensive, entering spaces where we previously weren’t even aware that we could make an impact.’”

Last year, 1Hood Power, another organization that selected the slate’s candidates, was heavily involved in organizing during both the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and the fall general election. Members of the group are now campaigning on behalf of the Slate of Eight with the skills they gained from organizing marches and mobilizing voters for top-of-the-ballot Democrats. “We did some stuff around helping with [the Senate elections in] Georgia, and now we’re like, ‘OK, we can actually affect right here where we live in a big way,” said founder Jasiri X.

1Hood Power is planning a big digital push for the slate as the election approaches, including a series of videos explaining the offices that will be on the ballot, including Common Pleas judge.

Voters will also have a chance to elect magisterial district judges and weigh in on a ballot initiative that would ban solitary confinement in the county jail, and another that would abolish no-knock warrants.

Mohamed said UNITE’s mobilization for the Slate of Eight has been boosted by its previous wins, which include getting multiple state representatives and local officials elected. “Every race, we build capacity, we build membership, we build interest and excitement around these races. And every victory made our members and those in the community realize that we could actually change and impact local politics,” Mohamed said. 

As homicide counsel at the Public Defender’s office, Middleman can already feel the change. “I’m used to my cause not being one that’s generally accepted or supported,” she said. “So the last several years have been amazing and inspiring. People and groups are interested, and they are supportive, and they’re willing to work really, really hard to make change.”

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