By the time singer-songwriter Fiona Apple introduced the practice of courtwatching to millions of Americans last year, urging them to go observe the basic machinery of the criminal legal system at work, these programs had emerged all over the nation. Typically, they’re piloted by people critical of mass incarceration who hope to shed light on the everyday abuses defendants suffer when nobody’s looking. In Los Angeles, organizers visit one of the county’s 36 courts twice a month. In Baton Rouge, the Reverend Alexis Anderson is at the local courthouse almost every day. “Everywhere you’ve got a court, somebody needs to be watching it in real time,” she told me.

A new courtwatching effort has sprung up in San Francisco in recent years. Like the other groups, Stop Crime SF volunteers attend hearings and take notes. They emphasize the importance of transparency and public accountability. “San Francisco courts are notoriously opaque,” the group’s founder, Frank Noto, told me.

But Stop Crime SF is approaching courtwatching from essentially the opposite direction. Noto and his fellow members want harsher sentences for people with repeated violations, and they’re highly critical of judges who let people out on their own recognizance, meaning without money bail, to await trial. “At a time when drug overdose deaths are at an all-time high, many chronic drug dealers and other repeat violent felons are free on our streets because of overly lenient court rulings,” the group said in an August statement.

Now, as California’s March 5 elections approach, Stop Crime SF’s sister c(4) organization, Stop Crime Action, is jumping into the city’s judicial races and working to oust two sitting judges whom it says are fueling this crisis, Michael Isaku Begert and Patrick Thompson. The group, which is also led by Noto, is championing Chip Zecher and Jean Myungjin Roland, Begert and Thompson’s challengers, who are also running with heavy tech and venture capital money and support from the local police union. 

The response from Bay Area progressives has been furious, with City Supervisor Aaron Peskin urging voters to “reject this right-wing attack on San Francisco’s judiciary.” LaDoris Cordell, a former superior court judge in Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco, said she worries that “you may see a sea change in how judges behave” if Stop Crime SF’s effort succeeds and Begert and Thompson are removed. 

“These judges are going to start handing down harsher sentences and who is it going to impact?” Cordell told Bolts. “Poor people, people of color, and here we go again.”

San Francisco has in recent years been embroiled in an intense debate over policing and incarceration that attracted national attention when the city elected and then quickly recalled progressive DA Chesa Boudin. In the years since, Boudin’s critics have continued blaming progressive reforms for crime and drug problems in the city, benefiting from an alliance with a fleet of billionaires who have used their considerable resources to boost politicians and legislation with a more punitive approach.

The latest offensive against San Francisco’s judges fits into this broader playbook. Still, the fact that advocates for greater punishment are using an approach crafted by proponents of criminal legal reform renders it more confounding. On its own, courtwatching is essentially neutral, and its empirical nature seems to render it trustworthy. The question is: Who’s watching? And what happens next?

The California prison population ballooned from just over 21,000 in 1978 to over 175,000 at its peak in 2006, driven in part by some judges’ tendency to maximize sentences. And the perception that voters would only support tough-on-crime officials has also shaped how the judiciary has approached its work. 

“When I started as a baby judge, and I was first appointed, one of the older judges came to me and said, ‘Look, if you don’t want to get reversed in criminal cases, just throw the book at everybody,’” Cordell recalls. 

Later, when she ran for reelection, Cordell was attacked for being too soft with defendants. “My opponent was this hard-nosed DA, and he put out, ‘she’s just a Rose Bird clone,’” she told me. That’s a reference to former California Chief Justice Rose Bird, who faced years of reprisals from conservative groups for overturning death sentences as unconstitutional. In 1986, residents voted decisively to remove her from office. 

Cordell prevailed and secured reelection, though, ultimately staying on the Santa Clara superior court from 1988 to her retirement in 2001.

These battles have picked up in recent years. Santa Clara voters recalled Judge Aaron Persky in 2018 after he gave Stanford student Brock Turner a three-month sentence for sexual assault. Turner was required to register as a sex offender for life, but after the case made national news, some onlookers found the sentence unforgivably light and levied a campaign against the judge. 

Inversely, also in 2018, four San Francisco public defenders ran from the left against sitting superior court judges; all lost, though one of them was elected the following cycle. In 2022, Angelenos elected a public defender to the bench who ran on a goal of lowering incarceration rates and criticized sitting judges for stubbornly resisting sentencing reforms. 

Progressives’ wins in judicial races came alongside their takeover of DA offices in San Francisco in 2019 with Boudin and Los Angeles in 2020 with George Gascón, outcomes that intensified pushback from critics of criminal justice reform. 

Noto, a former lobbyist for real estate developers, started Stop Crime SF as a neighborhood group back in 2017, advocating for more resources for police and new legislation to prevent car break-ins. The group promptly took on Boudin after his election and later supported the effort to recall him. That November, Joel Engardio, who was Stop Crime SF’s executive director, ousted an incumbent supervisor. 

During this time, the group expanded its scope to scrutinize the bench, building a courtwatch program to get volunteers to study how judges responded to property crimes. “We wanted to make sure that judges understood, that the district attorney understood, that these are important too and they just couldn’t ignore this,” Noto told me. Eventually they began tracking responses to violent crime and drug offenses as well. 

Stop Crime SF’s approach gained a powerful ally when Brooke Jenkins was appointed DA by Mayor London Breed to replace Boudin. Before her appointment, Jenkins was paid over $150,000 to consult for Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a group that heavily supported the recall effort and has also backed Stop Crime SF. 

Jenkins promptly clashed with local judges. When she said she would prosecute some 16 and 17 year olds as adults, the lowest age state law would allow, a veteran judge, J. Anthony Kline, refused to send any young people into the adult court system. In response, Jenkins’ office began blanket-challenging him, which effectively removed Kline’s entire case load. Jenkins also told ABC that “judges are refusing to make sure that these individuals stay in custody, and that has to change.” At a town hall in the summer of 2023, the DA excoriated local judges for releasing defendants with multiple drug offenses pre-trial, rather than keeping them locked up. 

Zecher, one of the candidates endorsed by Stop Crime Action, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was inspired to run by a comment Jenkins made urging challenges to sitting judges. Zecher, a corporate lawyer on the board of UC Law San Francisco, did not agree to a request for an interview for this article.

Boudin believes his successor has been “scapegoating” judges to deflect from her own responsibility, also pointing to Breed, an ally of Jenkins who last year vociferously criticized a federal judge for upholding a ban on of homeless encampments as long as the city lacks sufficient shelter beds. “They both leaned so heavily into the doom-loop, fearmongering approach to defining San Francisco as a way to get me out of office, and now they own the problems and the perceptions,” he told Bolts. “They can’t shake it and so they’re looking for someone else to blame.”

Breed, who like Jenkins is up for reelection in November, is also championing a wide-ranging ballot measure on March 5, Proposition E, that would expand the powers of the local police; Stop Crime Action has endorsed it. Another measure, Proposition B, would increase the size of the police force, but only if the city creates new taxes to pay for it, a condition that troubles police advocates; one of its chief opponents, Axios reports, sits on the board of Stop Crime SF.

Over the last year, Stop Crime SF’s courtwatching program, and its accusations that the local bench is fostering crime, have morphed into an effort to outright remove two local judges whom the group says exemplify this behavior. Noto wrote in the organization’s newsletter in November that Begert and Thompson “have a demonstrated track record of releasing serious and dangerous offenders back into the public.”

Begert presides over several of San Francisco’s collaborative courts, where judges either try to formulate a treatment plan for people who are jailed, or get people into services as an alternative to incarceration. He also oversees San Francisco’s CARE court, where people close to someone with substance abuse or mental health issues can petition the court to mandate treatment—a program that has also proved controversial on the left because of concerns around civil rights.

Begert told Bolts in an interview that he believes he is being targeted because of his work on the collaborative courts, alleging that his critics are pursuing an agenda that’s single-mindedly punitive.

“Why me?” he asked. “Because I’m running these treatment courts, and these treatment courts are built on trying to address the underlying causes of criminal behavior, to increase public safety by reducing future conduct. And if your primary motivation is to impose punishments on people, or to accomplish what we call in legal philosophy retribution—that’s not furthering your objectives.”

Noto rejects the notion that he’s politicizing the judiciary. He says his group is largely looking to promote transparency, and that its decisions about which judges to target stem from external feedback.

In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, Stop Crime Action released what it called a judicial “report card” that rated judges whose terms end in 2024, and gave both Begert and Thompson (and no one else) failing grades. According to The San Francisco Standard, the group drew on cases that were tracked by courtwatchers and a variety of other factors, including a survey the group sent out to local trial attorneys. 

But the group only received roughly 25 answers—most of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, from prosecutors rather than judges and defense lawyers. Mission Local reported that the group misrepresented a single person’s assessment in a way that implied numerous negative reviews. 

“I have no objection to engaging with the public and having people see what we do,” Begert told Bolts. “I think we should have more of that. My objection is to coming into the project with a political agenda.”

The other targeted judge, Patrick Thompson, handles preliminary hearings; he evaluates evidence to determine whether the case will continue to trial. Much of the criticism against him in the Stop Crime Action report card centers on cases where he released defendants with past convictions on their own recognizance pending their trial. 

The San Francisco Chronicle found this month that, in a number of the cases, Thompson’s decision to release received no objection from the prosecutor on the case, meaning that all parties agreed the defendant should be released pending trial. Lara Bazelon, a law professor who advocates for criminal justice reforms in San Francisco, says pretrial detention is legally considered a final course of action. “It’s the resort only after every other less restrictive alternative has been considered and rejected,” she said. “And that’s because when you lock someone up pretrial, you’re taking someone that is presumed innocent, and taking away their freedom for weeks or months or even years at a time.”

Thompson did not respond to a request for an interview, nor did his opponent Roland, who currently works as a prosecutor in Jenkins’s office. 

The San Francisco Bar Association, the more traditional rating system for local judges, rates each of Thompson and Begert as “well-qualified.” Zecher and Roland received no ratings from the bar association because they declined to participate in the process, an unusual decision.

The president of the association told KQED in December that she’s worried about attacks on “the independence of the judiciary.” Boudin echoed that concern, telling Bolts that judges are constrained in how they can defend themselves; he pointed to state rules known as the judicial canons that prohibit judges from talking about the cases in front of them. “Unsurprisingly, they’ve chosen people who are uniquely vulnerable,” he said. 

Courtwatchers on the left view judges as too prone to detain defendants pretrial and throw the book at them—even beyond what the law requires. Stop Crime SF, meanwhile, sends its members into courtrooms to observe criminal cases with a form asking them to rate whether “defendants were held accountable for their actions by the court.” The form defines accountability, among other things, as whether a judge sets money bail and ultimately sentences someone at—or beyond—sentencing guidelines. 

Progressive courtwatchers elsewhere have taken note of the effort in San Francisco. And while their goals differ significantly, some say they support more scrutiny on the courts on principle, since they believe courts’ opacity to the public has produced harmful results overall.

Courtwatch LA also has a website, Rate My Judge, where community members and lawyers can weigh in on their experience in court. A lot of the negative reviews center on judges’ treatment of the people in their court, but some are outcome-focused, too—one judge’s page has several comments alleging that he categorically denies resentencing petitions. They also plan to challenge judges in the future, though they would not consider a score statistically significant until it was composed of at least 45 reviews.

“I think it is something the left has to sort out or at least accept as inevitably a two way street,” said Bazelon. “Courts are open to the public. There’s nothing unlawful or untoward about going and observing what happens in court. And I don’t think it should come as any surprise that it’s going to be a tool that both sides are going to use.”

The Los Angeles organizers tend to also distrust the assessments by professional groups like the bar association, arguing that while they’re purportedly neutral, they’re biased against candidates of color and women, and against lawyers opposed to the status quo. They say their approach brings in a different, necessary perspective.

“At the end of the day, it is a community tool,” said Titilayọ Rasaki, policy and campaigns strategist for La Defensa, the Los Angeles organization that runs Courtwatch LA. “I think it’s just a question of who’s in and who’s out in your community.” She noted that many of Courtwatch LA’s volunteers have had past contact with the criminal legal system. For these people, she said, “it’s a kind of reclamation, or a way of shifting your relationship to the criminal legal system that has probably impacted your life in vastly different ways.”

Rasaki and her colleague Gabriela Vázquez, deputy director of La Defensa, told me that they weren’t threatened by Stop Crime SF’s use of a similar playbook. In their eyes, the problem with what’s happening in San Francisco is not that incumbent judges face scrutiny or opponents; it’s the “scare tactics” employed against them. “If we have a drug overdose epidemic, the easy way out is just criminalizing people, or attacking judges,” Vázquez said. “What we’re seeing in the Bay Area is that they’re trying to take the easy way out and find scapegoats.”

Still, Rasaki said she welcomes anyone to courtwatch. If they feel comfortable with how poorly people are treated and how easily they’re incarcerated, she said, “that’s a value judgment for them… We can disagree and we can use different organizing strategies and the ballot box, I guess—this is where we’re duking it out. It’s a contention of ideals.” 

“If it gets more people in the courts, if it gets more discourse about what it is that the courts are up to, and whether or not they’re meeting the needs of our society—that’s a conversation I’m really trying to start,” she said.

The post In Pursuit of Harsher Punishments, San Francisco Courtwatchers Target Judges appeared first on Bolts.

In December 2020, on the eve of taking the reins as the district attorney of Los Angeles County, George Gascón was up late trying to make a decision. He’d been elected weeks earlier on promises to change Los Angeles’ approach to criminal punishment, but he was hesitant on how much to shake up the system. “10, 11 o’clock at night, the night before I was being sworn in, I’m looking at two versions of what I’m going to say,” Gascón recalled in a recent interview at his office in Downtown LA. His first speech articulated a more incremental approach, but the more he looked at it, the more he became convinced that it would risk “business as usual.” 

He chose the second speech. 

The following day, Gascón announced a sweeping set of categorical, or ‘blanket’ policies, his office would adopt: no death penalty, no charging minors as adults, no life without parole sentences. Not rarely, or selectively—never, under any circumstances. Perhaps most consequentially, he vowed that prosecutors in his office would not seek enhancements, special circumstances that can add decades to someone’s sentence and affect tens of thousands of cases each year in Los Angeles County. 

Prosecutors are typically reluctant to delineate such clear-cut policies, preferring to protect the boundless discretion of their office. Even those who vow reform tend to merely promise to deprioritize certain practices without ruling anything out. But Gascón told me that it was important for him to draw clear lines in the sand, in part because he knew that he’d be walking into an office whose management team largely opposed his plans. “I wanted to make sure that this was going to be just not a bunch of political promises—this was going to be a real thing,” he said.

Nearly immediately, the new DA found himself under fire, including from staff in his office who bristled at being told not to use some of their regular tools. Almost as quickly, he announced a tweak to his enhancements policy, allowing exceptions for hate crimes and offenses against children and the elderly. And that was just the beginning. Many of the biggest inflection points of Gascón’s first term have revolved around the use of blanket policies: one court battle after his own deputies filed suit claiming that his directive to not seek enhancements violated the law, one protracted media storm involving a case that seemed to challenge the principle of never trying young people as adults, and two fizzled recall attempts by adversaries who said he was neglecting the duties of his office. 

Now, Gascón is defending his seat against 11 challengers, nearly all of whom are running to his right in the March primary. (The top two candidates will head to a November runoff unless someone clears 50 percent of the vote.) Many of his opponents are attacking the very idea that a DA should ever issue categorical policies. In fact, a number of them have contested his approach ever since 2020. The field includes four line prosecutors working in his office, several of whom are highly involved in the union that sued him and one who says she was demoted for questioning his directives; and a former attorney at the firm that filed the lawsuit.

At first glance, blanket policies might seem like an intuitive tool for reform prosecutors because they both embody a clear vision of change and help to enact that vision. “They’re actually very useful, smart policies to implementing what we care about, which is a less racist, more fair system where also we can put more resources into very, very serious cases,” said Jessica Brand, founder of the Wren Collective, a national organization that researches criminal legal policy and helps advise reform prosecutors. 

But Brand said she’s nonetheless hesitant about recommending such policies: “They’re latched onto in these hyper political ways.” Blanket directives like Gascón’s tend to become lightning rods for controversy, especially given that so much of criminal legal policy—and debate around that policy—in the U.S. is defined by the specter of extreme cases. 

One of the most indelible examples of this dynamic in modern American politics happened just across town from the Los Angeles DA’s office.

During a 1988 presidential debate held at UCLA, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, was asked if he would change his mind about capital punishment if his own wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered. His immediate answer—that he wouldn’t, given his deeply felt principles on the matter—is widely considered to have harmed his presidential bid; it remains seared in the minds of a generation of political observers, a cautionary tale about the perils of ruling anything out when it comes to criminal punishment.

Over 30 years later, Gascón ran on the gamble that the politics of crime had changed enough for him to rule out quite a bit more than just the death penalty, and he won in 2020 after making blanket promises as part of his campaign pitch. But the ensuing years only raised the stakes of that gamble, leading the DA to hedge in certain ways and double down in others. As he embarks on a difficult reelection campaign, I wanted to understand what Gascón’s tenure has revealed about the politics of transforming prosecution, especially in a place as vast and complex as Los Angeles. How do you set about making big changes to an entrenched system without sparking so much resistance that your ambitions founder? What does it take, in other words, to dispense with business as usual?

To understand why a reform DA would insist on a blanket policy despite the political risks, you first have to understand the status quo they’re fighting against. “This is an arcane system, and it’s not going to go gently and quietly into the night,” Cynthia Roseberry, acting director for the ACLU’s Justice Division and a former public defender, told me. “We’ve got to be bold in our strokes to change it.”

For reform DAs like Gascón, blanket policies are an effort to disengage from practices that they consider simply unconscionable: outdated, racist, overly harsh, or morally dubious. Gascón cites data showing that the death penalty is riven with errors and racial bias. He points to the fact that young people sent into the adult system can spend decades in prison for a mistake they made as a teenager. And he has underscored that sentencing enhancements, a product of the tough-on-crime era, can add many years of incarceration onto whatever baseline punishment has been determined to fit the underlying crime. “Do we send somebody to prison for way beyond their natural life, or do we send them for a period of time where they may be able to redeem themselves and come back?” Gascón asked me.

Blanket policies can put clear guardrails around a DA’s charging decisions, instead of them telling the public: just trust me. If you believe that the state shouldn’t be in the business of taking a life or that young people’s developing brains leave them fundamentally unable to grasp consequences the way an adult can, there’s no sense in judiciously applying the death penalty or charging juveniles as adults, the thinking goes—it simply shouldn’t be done at all. 

“When we think about removing something like enhancements, what we’re also saying is we know that they’ve been used improperly and there’s not a way to correct them in isolation,” said Roseberry. Mona Sahaf, who runs the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, thinks that “it’s a big opportunity to shrink the footprint of the system.” 

Reformers also make the case that prosecutors have had a key role in exacerbating mass incarceration. Discretion is the lifeblood of their trade, but historically, prosecutors have almost always used that freedom to move in one direction—towards harsher punishment, even above and beyond what the law requires. Over and over again, they come down on some people harder than others: 45 percent of people serving a life sentence in California under the Three Strikes law are Black, as Gascón’s enhancements directive noted. Maria Gonzalez, the legal clinic coordinator at Los Angeles’ Youth Justice Coalition, has a loved one doing 100 years on an enhancement case. “That life is done. It’s gone,” she told me flatly. 

Other prosecutors who say that they share Gascon’s opinions about the death penalty, or that sentencing enhancements are broken, still prefer to say they’ll assess each case on its own, rather than draw a clear line in the sand. But to organizers like Melina Abdullah, a leader of Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter, this is just a way “to not make any commitments.” 

“You can’t just make decisions on a case-by-case basis,” she told me. “You have to have a set of legal principles that you adhere to.”

After all, DAs aren’t running around trying cases themselves—rather, they oversee large offices of deputies responsible for the day-to-day work of prosecution, who can easily ignore vague principles from up top. In fact, given that the professional norms of prosecutors tilt towards punitive sentencing, reform prosecutors have found themselves undermined by staff resistant to carrying out their changes. 

Announcing blanket policies, then, is a way for reform DAs like Gascón to use the power they do have to limit the power of their own office, and to tie the hands of the vast bureaucracies they oversee. Prosecutors don’t have the ability to directly stop police from racially profiling young men of color, or to edit the penal code, or to rectify the socioeconomic inequalities that can lead to gang involvement. What they can do is order their own staff to stop using gang enhancements. 

Or can they? Less than one month after Gascón took office, his line prosecutors took him to court, contending that his enhancements directive was forcing them to break the law. Legislators passed the STEP act, which established sentencing enhancements for gang affiliation, and Californians approved a “three strikes and you’re out” sentencing scheme; the lawsuit argued it simply wasn’t in Gascón’s power to forbid his deputies from using those tools. Gascón replied that voters elected him to upend the status quo, and that his role allowed him to direct his own staff. 

In February 2021, a judge ruled that Gascón did not have the authority to bar his prosecutors from seeking enhancements for prior strikes, or serious felony charges. As long as California’s “three strikes” law was on the books, it wasn’t up to him whether to enforce it. But the judge’s decision did leave him free to bar his prosecutors from seeking other forms of enhancements in new cases. Gascón argues that this ruling wasn’t a major blow to his plans because it only affected a share of enhancement cases.

“Quite frankly, it’s a very small piece, not only of the policy, but of the work,” he told me. At that point in 2021, the bulk of his vision remained intact. 

The backlash to blanket policies is politically and geographically contingent. In red states, even the appearance of one has led to preemption or removal by state officials, meaning that DAs trying to do things differently are often forced to be a bit cagier about their plans, while prosecutors in blue states tend to have more leeway. 

In 2017, Orlando’s prosecutor, Aramis Ayala, was taken off some high-profile murder cases by the Florida governor after she announced she would never seek the death penalty. In San Francisco, meanwhile, former DA Chesa Boudin encountered comparatively tepid criticism for his ban on death penalty cases, in part because two predecessors—Gascón and Kamala Harris—had already paved the way. “It was well within the heartland of San Francisco politics,” Boudin, who now runs UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center, told me. 

In liberal Los Angeles, Gascón’s death penalty ban has also not been seriously contested, even though the county lacks the precedent that San Francisco had; his predecessor, Jackie Lacey, was notorious for her embrace of capital punishment, and helped make LA County one of the nation’s leading counties in handing out death sentences. But Gascón went further. By attempting to address lengthy sentences for people who commit violent crimes, he struck what has long been a third rail in reform debates, even among people who agree that mass incarceration is a problem: questioning very lengthy sentences for people who commit violent crimes. 

The U.S. has often fashioned its approach to punishment in direct reaction to especially heinous or high-profile crimes—California’s ‘three strikes’ law, for instance, was motivated by the abduction and murder of nine-year-old Polly Klaas—and these crimes have animated debates around sentencing policy in a more ambient way, too. We have no shortage of infamous cases to draw from—serial killers, mass murderers, bizarre cases like Charles Manson or the Unabomber—and these people tend to loom very large in the popular imagination, even as they represent a microscopic percentage of Americans who commit crimes. This has meant that extreme outcomes—sentences of decades or even hundreds of years—have become commonplace, far more so than the extreme offender they were initially designed for. 

Today the specter of the “worst of the worst” continues to haunt criminal legal debate, often putting politicians who favor major policy upheavals on the defensive, like Dukakis answering Bernard Shaw’s question in 1988 in front of tens of millions of Americans. This is particularly fraught within the juvenile justice system, where the increasingly popular slogan that we should treat children as children, in accordance with newer research showing that brain development continues into the mid-20s, exists alongside the possibility of truly extreme cases. 

In Sahaf’s time working with reform prosecutors at Vera, she has observed that “it’s very difficult to make an absolute pledge never to charge a child as an adult and then carry through on it, because you see these exceptions happen…children do sometimes commit really atrocious crimes.” And eventually just such a case would land on Gascón’s desk: Hannah Tubbs. 

Tubbs’s case seemed to span the gamut of aggravating factors: here was someone who had sexually assaulted a child in a restaurant bathroom stall less than a year before turning 18, who was 26 by the time she was caught and facing punishment, who had already racked up an extensive criminal record, and who mocked the victim and expressed no remorse. “Nothing is ever unique, but it was as close to unique as you could [get],” Gascón told me. But he added that there were mitigating circumstances, too. His commitment to keeping the case in the juvenile system led to internal clashes, and then public opprobrium after jailhouse recordings of calls between Tubbs and her father were leaked to Fox News. 

“This clearly shows you the dangerous aspect of the blanket policies of George Gascón,” Jonathan Hatami, a prosecutor in the DA’s office and frequent critic who’s now running against him, told the LA Times—which, along with other local media, covered the case extensively. 

Facing the biggest fracas of his tenure, Gascón announced in February 2022 that he would alter his directives on life without parole sentences and charging juveniles as adults: instead of total bans, he was establishing two committees to consider “extraordinary” cases that might merit such special circumstances. Each committee would be staffed by three senior advisors, including one who publicly stated she didn’t agree with his about-face.

This approach, his office said, would “create a different pathway for outlier cases, while simultaneously creating protections to prevent these exceptions from becoming the rule.”

These tweaks may seem minor, since “extraordinary” cases are by definition rare and since Gascón created a structured process to evaluate them. But to some, their vague quality signaled a worrisome retreat from the principles the DA had run and won on. 

For the ACLU’s Roseberry and local advocates like those at the Youth Justice Coalition, even one minor charged as an adult is one too many. “The idea that we would approach them in any respect as irredeemable is a frightening prospect,” said Roseberry. “These children come to us having been shaped by circumstances and environments that are beyond their control.”

Other reform DAs have tried for a similar balance as Gascón: Boudin’s sentencing directive in San Francisco, for instance, created a presumption against enhancements but left room for them in “extraordinary circumstances,” as long as he or a deputy signed off. “From a legal standpoint, we were on stronger ground by writing into the policy discretion to make exceptions,” he told me. (Boudin did maintain a blanket prohibition against charging juveniles as adults throughout his two and a half years in office.) 

Still, Youth Justice Coalition communications director Emilio Zapién stressed that using edge cases to guide criminal legal policy making is destructive to the chances of the young people the Youth Justice Coalition works with. “For every really horrific case, like the one you’re talking about, the Tubbs case, there are 15 to 20 others [that show] transformation,” he told me. 

Zapién added that he found the whole debate around Tubbs to be cynical: “The folks that are arguing for more criminalization and incarceration of young people of color after the mainstream media sensationalizes one case as a political tactic… those folks already had those beliefs before.” 

At the time of the Tubbs case, Gascón had already weathered one recall campaign motivated by aspects of his categorical policies. One of the public faces of the recall was a woman, Desiree Andrade, whose son Julian had been brutally murdered. Under Lacey, his killers faced the death penalty or life without parole; once Gascón took office, those options were off the table. The words “Gascon [sic] REFUSES to prosecute juveniles as adults under any circumstances, even rape, murder or other heinous crimes, even if days shy of turning 18” were front and center on the campaign’s website. 

That recall attempt imploded after organizers failed to garner enough money or signatures–but they swore they’d be back, and some recall proponents took up the Tubbs case as a rallying cry. The second recall campaign that resulted also fizzled out about a year later. Ironically, it’s been the intensity of the opposition to Gascón, more than anything else, that has vindicated what many of his allies have said all along: prosecution is political.

Now the energy behind those efforts has been channeled into the upcoming election, with a number of Gascón’s loudest critics and recall supporters returning to run against him.

Nathan Hochman, a former Republican candidate for California attorney general, writes on his campaign website that Gascón’s blanket directives “demonstrate distrust in his prosecutors” and promises to restore prosecutorial discretion. His website names the elimination of blanket policies as a crucial component in his “blueprint for justice.” 

John McKinney, a prosecutor in the DA’s office, said at an October debate that he’d “repeal and replace” every directive Gascón announced on his inauguration day. Hatami, the frequent critic, has said that “blanket policies should all be revoked,” telling Los Angeles Daily News “I believe in discretion.” Eric Siddall, another prosecutor in Gascón’s office and the former vice president of the deputy DA union, has also vowed to make the issues targeted by most of Gascón’s blanket policies subject to a “case-by-case analysis” instead. Maria Ramirez, yet another prosecutor in the office, has used similar language. 

I reached out to the campaigns of a handful of the candidates for their thoughts on blanket policies. None responded by the article’s deadline. Jeff Chemerinsky’s campaign reached out after publication to say that Chemerinsky, a former federal prosecutor, would never seek the death penalty as DA, but that he would eschew other blanket directives.

Siddall, who has also insisted he is not opposed to progressive reform while criticizing Gascón for taking a “defendant-centered approach,” has made the same key concession to Gascón’s model, vowing to forgo the death penalty. Other candidates, meanwhile, have not ruled it out. It may not be to his advantage, but Gascón’s blanket policies set the terms of the debate.

Gascón has made more than a few political calculations of his own over his three years in office. As he approaches his first reelection test in March, he has kept in place some of his initial blanket directives, like his commitment to never seek the death penalty. During the tenure of his predecessor Lacey, 22 people were sentenced to death in LA, all of them people of color, but Gascón has never tried. His administration has also worked to resentence people who are already on death row to life without parole; his office told me it has secured that change for 29 people as of this week.

Meanwhile, the DA has altered some directives to define a process for considering “exceptional” cases, while preserving the central presumption of the policy. He has walked farther back from others, maintaining the goal of avoiding certain enhancements but without clear guidelines. And he’s been barred by the courts from pursuing still others. 

This convoluted landscape reflects Gascón’s concessions to his critics from the right, to be sure. But his case to progressives has also evolved: His record shows, he argues, that blanket policies altered by carve-outs can also accomplish his decarceral goals. “Do I think this has made a difference?” he asked me when we spoke. “I think it’s made a tremendous difference.”

Gascón softened his blanket prohibition against charging minors as adults, for instance, but this has not opened the floodgates to adult prosecutions.

As a result of his original policy, Gascón said that hundreds of teenagers per year who might otherwise have been sent to an adult prison are now being treated in the juvenile system. To Gonzalez, who spends her days in court advocating for young people on behalf of the Youth Justice Coalition, the change has been palpable. 

“LA County has made so much progress on helping our youth,” she said. “I’ve seen young people be under diversion and continue to go to school, graduate from school. Last year, we had two graduates that could have easily just been in a cell.” (Like her colleague Zapien, Gonzalez disagrees with Gascón’s decision to modify this policy).

Since Gascón modified his blanket prohibition in February 2022, the Juvenile Alternative Charging Committee had recommended that ten cases be transferred to adult court, according to the DA’s office. In the first transfer hearing to take place, the judge, J. Christopher Smith, actually overrode the committee, ruling that the teenage defendant wasn’t beyond rehabilitation and noting that he had cognitive deficiencies and a history of childhood abuse. The ruling echoed Gascón’s initial absolute commitment to the possibility of personal transformation even in cases where a young defendant had done something heinous; in doing so, Smith brought into sharper relief Gascón’s decision to retreat from that principle. 

Gascón told me that he actually agreed with the judge’s decision. But he also defended his office’s charging committee, saying they may have been influenced by the gravity of the crime, a double murder, and invoking the value of outsourcing these evaluations to an independent body. “I gave the committees full freedom to decide,” he told me. 

Separately, he called it “affirming” that state law had nearly caught up to his December 2020 blanket policy: In 2022, the California legislature raised the bar to try minors as adults, reflecting the changing consensus on juvenile culpability. (Gascón wrote a letter in support of that effort).  

Similarly, Gascón set up a charging committee tasked with determining whether a case merits a possible sentence of life without parole, and this committee has given prosecutors the go-ahead to seek that sentence some 23 times since February 2022, according to information gathered on the DA’s website. The office has applied a “special circumstances” enhancement, which requires a sentence of life without parole in the event of a conviction, in two recent high-profile and especially gruesome cases: a man who allegedly serially targeted and killed homeless people, and the son of a famous Hollywood agent who is accused of killing and dismembering his wife and her elderly parents. 

Gascón may have gotten what he wanted out of these cases: They are being widely covered in local media, but seemingly no one has invoked them in order to criticize the DA for being soft on crime. By opening the door to some life without parole sentence in high-profile instances, the DA had perhaps freed himself up to avoid that sentence in the vast majority of cases with far less scrutiny or blowback.

But just how far can he take this approach? The judge who ruled on the deputy prosecutors’ lawsuit in 2021 gave Gascón carte blanche to maintain his initial blanket policy barring other sorts of new enhancements—special allegations that would add on extra time for gang involvement or the presence of a weapon, for example. The DA’s office says it has maintained a blanket prohibition on gang enhancements. 

But on gun enhancements, Gascón has retreated from his initial categorical policy in a murkier way. In November, he told me that his office had been adding gun enhancements on a case-by-case basis, allowing line prosecutors to seek them if they get management approval.  

“We are selectively using those enhancements but it’s being done, again, much more thoughtfully,” Gascón said. 

I later asked Gascón’s chief of staff, Tiffiny Blacknell, why Gascón retreated from this blanket policy voluntarily. “It’s reasonable that there should be some exceptions to some of these directives, with the exception of the death penalty,” she said, adding that the DA had over time erected a management structure that he trusted to carry out his vision. “We’re using a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.” The office does not have a written policy governing when it’s appropriate for prosecutors to seek these enhancements. Blacknell said bureau directors make the final decision based on factors such as the severity of the crime and past criminal history. 

On this front at least, the DA’s current stance sounds a lot more like the “case-by-case” rhetoric of his challengers. This risks a return to the starting point that local progressives hoped to get away from: just trust me, I’m the one who can use this tool wisely. 

And that argument, Gonzalez said, wouldn’t slide with the people who elected him in the first place. “The community is bigger than the pushback he’s getting right now,” she told me. “The community is gonna stand up and say, ‘I don’t believe you.’”

Gascón says it’s easy to distinguish his commitment to reform from opponents who only pay lip service to it during campaign season, pointing to his record in office.

For organizers who work closely on policing, prisons, and sentencing in Los Angeles, there is a continuous need to decide whether they buy the DA’s revised case for change. Are his carve-outs a strategically savvy response to the backlash, or are they a retreat to punitive conventions? What’s the line between preserving some space for extraordinary cases and mirroring old paradigms of boundless prosecutorial discretion? In that ongoing assessment, many are balancing their frustration over Gascón’s walkbacks with an awareness of what he’s up against—what it takes to change an intractable system under the ever-present specter of Michael Dukakis. 

“I’m never a fan of a prosecutor because I think the system is fundamentally set up against Black and brown and Indigenous and poor people,” Abdullah told me. But she noted that the DA has pursued goals she sees as critical, including prosecuting law enforcement officers who engage in violence or corruption. “I think what he’s demonstrated is that chipping away at unjust systems can be helpful as we work towards transformation.” Gascón is walking a tightrope, she said: “How do you hold on to the principles that you say you believe in without losing your seat? And how do you balance the two?”

“Someone like me, I don’t believe in life without the possibility of parole. I don’t believe in ever trying a child as an adult,” Abdullah said. “But again, I’m not running for prosecutor.” 

This article has been updated with a response, received after publication, from the campaign of Jeff Chemerinsky on his policy views.

The post Under the Shadow of the Extreme Case appeared first on Bolts.

“People are talking about how life-changing it’s been inside to be able to make some choices about what they’re watching on TV, or what music they’re listening to—to be able to listen to music at all,” Kinnon said. Plus, incarcerated people have tens of thousands of choices within the free eBook and audiobook library, which contains more than 63,500 titles. Some inmates with vision issues can now read almost anything in large print, when they were previously limited to the small selection of large-print books. Other inmates with low levels of literacy take advantage of audiobooks to open up the world of books to them.

Media services like these are often offered in other jails, but as they’re typically controlled by for-profit prison telecom companies, they’re often exorbitantly expensive. In most places any form of communication used to keep incarcerated people connected to the outside world, be it phone calls or tablets, has also been used to control incarcerated populations and generate profits for jails and their contractors.

San Francisco has offered jail tablets and their content at no cost to incarcerated people, part of a wave of institutions starting to decouple carceral communications from a profit motive. The free tablet program was introduced in May of 2023, a logical follow-up to San Francisco making jail phone calls free in 2020, the first county in the country to do so and the second city after New York.

Before 2023, the San Francisco jails had never implemented any tablet program for all inmates. When the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department decided to dip its toes into providing the devices, Michelle Lau, the acting director of the Financial Justice Project within the San Francisco treasurer’s office, recalls that the very first iteration of the bid request was similar to others across the country—riddled with charges for tablet services.

She remembered thinking, “We just did this whole thing with jail phone calls—why are we doing basically the same thing on a tablet?” The San Francisco Jail Justice Coalition, a coalition of community groups, pushed for a completely free tablet program. “Some [community members] even said if there were any charges, they would prefer no tablet, rather than one with high charges,” Lau said.

Tablets have been trickling into prisons and jails over the past several years, with the devices first launched in 2012 by prison communications company JPay, now owned by prison telecom giant Securus. Soon prisons and jails began hailing “free” tablets for their inmates, as these companies would indeed often distribute tablets to inmates at no cost. But once incarcerated people actually used the tablets, they were far from free.

Music might be $1.99 per song, as it is for the most expensive songs in Washington State. In Pennsylvania state prisons, eBooks cost between $2.99 and $24.99. E-messaging can be as much as Arkansas’s $0.50 per message. Or, tablet costs may rack up based on how much the tablet is used; in Minnesota’s Fillmore County, tablet use costs $0.25 for each minute, which adds up to more than $30 to watch a typical movie on a tablet screen.

Meanwhile, most incarcerated people earn little money, if any, to pay for these services. As a result, families, many of whom are indigent themselves, may support them financially. And because of the disproportionate share of Black inmates in prisons and jails, much of these fees are paid by low-income Black women, either mothers or girlfriends or wives.

Over the past two and a half years, five states have made prison phone calls (though not necessarily jail phone calls) free. The latest one, Massachusetts, just passed a law in November. A handful of major cities in addition to San Francisco have also made jail phone calls free, including New York, Miami, Louisville, and Los Angeles. 

Change will soon happen on the federal level, too. In early January 2023, President Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022, which allows the FCC to regulate in-state prison and jail phone calls as well as out-of-state phone calls. Under federal regulation, which is set to begin sometime in the latter half of 2024, the price of prison and jail phone calls nationwide will likely fall significantly. 

In San Francisco, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto had already supported free phone calls, so it wasn’t surprising when his office ultimately released a request for proposals for a completely free tablet program. Alissa Riker, the sheriff’s office’s director of programs, said free tablets were “a long time coming” given the office’s “philosophy of not charging the folks in custody and their families.”

Lau says San Francisco received bids from the two major prison telecoms, Securus and ViaPath (formerly GTL) for the project. They also received one from Nucleos, a new company focused on prison education programming that seemed excited about a free tablet program. The company recently transitioned to a public benefit corporation, which requires it pursue both profits and positive social benefits.

In the end, Nucleos won the contract. 

Most jails and prisons, however, are contracted with either Securus and ViaPath for their tablets. Together, the companies hold roughly 80 percent of the prison communications market valued at more than $1 billion. And Securus and ViaPath have been tracking the recent and growing trend toward free phone calls

“Some of the companies running jail phone calls, they see the writing on the wall” about the looming unprofitability of jail phone calls, said Joanna Weiss, co-executive director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. “They are often making up the money through the use of tablets.”

In 2015, a Securus presentation to potential investors noted that the company has “successfully decreased its exposure” to new regulation by “investing in businesses that are not regulated.” These businesses are any number of ancillary services like e-messaging, eBooks, movies and TV show rentals, and music that the company can then charge inmates to use on a tablet. (The Martha Wright-Reed Act clarifies that the FCC may now regulate video calls.)

But companies aren’t the only ones that profit—prisons and jails can earn commissions on tablet services just as with phone calls. “We’re always looking for ways to bring in additional money to the county,” Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County Jail Warden John Walton told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, commenting on the jail bringing in $161,000 in tablet commissions in 2019.

Riker, from the San Francisco sheriff’s office, noted that this is what sets San Francisco’s free program apart. “Money is why other sheriff’s offices aren’t doing it,” she said. 

Typically, an institution’s profits from jail communications, whether via tablets or phones, are intended to fund inmate programming (though they sometimes simply shore up budgets or go to dubious purchases). Riker told Bolts that she’s gotten calls from people working at other jails who were astonished that San Francisco could afford to fund free tablets and give up that funding stream—regardless of the fact that the money is sourced from vulnerable prisoners and their families. 

In 2023, the mayor’s office committed to using approximately $500,000 annually from the city’s general fund to support free tablet services for people in jail. As the San Francisco sheriff’s office’s annual budget is just under $300 million, the tablet program makes up roughly 0.2 percent of the department’s total budget.

The move has been part of a citywide shift away from prison profiteering. In 2020, San Francisco’s board of supervisors passed an ordinance to bar the city from profiting off of goods and services purchased by prisoners, which led to free jail phone calls as well as the end of markups on commissary items.

But even as tablets may be an important tool for people behind bars to connect with the outside world, carceral institutions also use them to replace in-person services like classes and visitation, and even to help better control a jail or prison population. Miami-Dade County jails, like many jails across the country, suspended in-person visitation during the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic. But also like many other jails, Miami-Dade has yet to reinstate in-person visits almost four years later.

“Visitation right now is only video calls,” said Katherine Passley, the co-executive director of Beyond the Bars, a Miami activist group organizing families of incarcerated people and pushing for changes at the jails. Passley’s father is incarcerated at a Miami-Dade County jail. Even though the county offers free 15-minute video calls, the service itself is “horrible,” Passley said, not only because of Miami’s internet connection problems—the National Digital Inclusion Alliance ranked Miami one of the worst cities in the country for internet connectivity—but also because the video contract with ViaPath precludes the use of Apple iPhones for video calling. The vast majority of Beyond the Bar’s membership can’t even access video calls, she said.

As for prison programming, the sheriff’s office in San Francisco considers the tablets a supplement to in-person classes and programming and explicitly refuses to use them as a replacement. This is not necessarily the case in other jurisdictions, which may see tablet services as an affordable replacement for educational programming. Low staffing issues in South Carolina prisons partly inspired a tablet program with educational services so the state could “use technology to deliver services to these folks in their cells,” as Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling told the Greenville News. 

Plus, many wardens have extolled the virtue of tablets for keeping incarcerated people busy—and keeping them under their thumbs. “It’s a great tool for us, because number one it keeps them occupied, but number two it’s something that we can take away from them for behavior modification purposes,” Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County Jail Warden Tim Betti told The Scranton Times-Tribune in 2020.

In Miami, Beyond the Bars has concentrated on tackling fee elimination in the jails, following in the footsteps of San Francisco. For instance, they’ve successfully advocated for the county to get rid of a $2 daily fee that pushed inmates into debt and commit to providing free 90-minute phone calls each day for people in jail. The group is currently working to reintroduce in-person visitation in the jails to ensure that incarcerated people and their families aren’t only able to see their loved ones through a screen.

Beyond the Bars has also recently pushed for free tablet services in Miami-Dade County jails. The tablet program outlined in the county’s request for proposals is not quite as ambitious as San Francisco’s but is better than that of the vast majority of jails nationwide. When the Miami-Dade County jails implement the program, the plan is for inmates to get their own free tablets with access to a limited number of free resources, such as an eBook library and one free movie a month. More specific details of the tablet program, however, will likely be up to the as-of-yet unannounced contractor. Beyond the Bars reached out to the local public library, which has agreed to work with them similarly to the San Francisco library—but it’s unclear if the library will ultimately be part of the program.

Kinnon, the San Francisco librarian, said she’s fielded inquiries “every week or two” from libraries interested in replicating San Francisco’s model. But she notes most of these libraries are in jurisdictions contracted with Securus or ViaPath—companies that would have to give up their profits on books and music, unlike the newcomer Nucleos. Kinnon said that from what she understands, ViaPath and Securus “have not expressed any openness or interest in working with public libraries.” Kinnon mused that one possible, though clunky, workaround would be for carceral systems to offer two tablets, one with free library services and one with the telecom provider’s services.

Companies like ViaPath and Securus “need to feel pressure…to be more open to do this and make it work,” said Kinnon, adding that San Francisco and Nucleos needed to work together to find creative ways to make the free tablet project happen. 

“But we did it,” she said. “And that means it could happen anywhere.”

The post San Francisco Expands Free Jail Communications by Adding Tablet Services appeared first on Bolts.

When Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva lost his reelection bid in November 2022, it seemed to mark a default cessation of hostilities between him and the Board of Supervisors, the county’s five-member governing body. The conflict spanned his four-year tenure, from an early clash over Villanueva’s rehiring of a deputy fired for allegations of domestic abuse to his dispatching a team of deputies armed with battering rams to raid one of the supervisor’s homes just before the 2022 election. There was no shortage of choice words, either: At one point, the sheriff said the supervisors “need to be taken to the shed and they need to be beat down so they start doing their job.” 

Recently, though, Villanueva has reemerged from retirement with a novel provocation: He is seeking to join the ranks of the body he long antagonized. In September, he announced his bid for county supervisor, running against Janice Hahn, a centrist Democrat with deep roots in LA politics. Perhaps predictably, the other four sitting supervisors have endorsed Hahn, who promptly issued a statement calling Villanueva “a fraud and a failure.” In response, Villanueva told Bolts: “Janice Hahn is a fraud and a failure, hands down.” 

All this feuding can seem petty, but the stakes are quite literally life and death for some Angelenos. 

Jail deaths steadily increased each year Villanueva was in power. “Under Villanueva, the conditions in the jails deteriorated significantly,” said Claire Simonich, associate director at Vera Action, “[there were] people with serious mental illness being chained to chairs for days at a time, dozens of people being crammed together in overcrowded facilities.” 

In response to a request for comment on the jail deaths, Villanueva emailed Bolts: “Aw gee, did something called the pandemic happen during my tenure?” He also touted his efforts to reduce the jail population during the pandemic. However, a UCLA report found that despite an initial decline in the population, overall people were actually held in custody pretrial longer during the pandemic, in part due to the sheriff department’s practices. 

But the crisis has continued since Villanueva’s exit. At least 46 people have died inside LA County jails or elsewhere in the sheriff’s custody thus far in 2023. These numbers make the jails in Los Angeles deadlier than Rikers Island, the New York lockup that frequently makes national headlines for its intolerable conditions. An 18-year-old also died in one of the county’s juvenile detention facilities in May.

Part of the responsibility falls on Villanueva’s successor, Sheriff Robert Luna. But the county’s Board of Supervisors also possesses an extraordinary amount of power over this situation: it sets the county’s $46.7 billion budget, including how much money goes toward incarceration and how much goes to alternatives to incarceration like inpatient mental health treatment, and holds oversight power over county jails and the sheriff’s department.

“On the flip side,” Simonich said, “the board does have responsibility to build up the types of services that will prevent crime from happening in the first place and invest in housing, invest in mental health care, invest in substance use disorder treatment.” The supervisors have dragged their heels on funding for the mental health beds the county desperately needs, and continuously failed to close the dangerous and dilapidated Men’s Central Jail, a move they first committed to in 2019.

The showdown between Hahn and Villanueva, then, underscores just how drastically the sheriff’s department and the board alike have failed to protect the people in their care.

Their race may be resolved as early as the March 5 primary if a candidate receives more than 50 percent across District 4, an area in the county’s southern part. That’s a strong possibility, with only two lower-profile candidates in the race. Otherwise, Villanueva’s comeback bid may continue into a Top 2 runoff in November.

But local advocates are also eying the two other seats on the board that Angelenos will decide this election, hoping to put in place a stronger alliance next year willing to finally flex the board’s power to improve jail conditions. 

“The Board of Supervisors, apart from when they are forced to discuss in-custody deaths, have been entirely silent,” said Ambrose Brooks S., the campaign and advocacy manager for Dignity and Power Now, a member of the Justice LA Coalition. “This is urgent, this is an emergency, and their silence is not going to make us stop advocating for them to do something.” 

Thanks to a state transparency law that went into effect on New Year’s Day, 2023, the LASD now maintains an in-custody death tracker. As of December 18, the list includes 45 names: men between the ages of 20 and 91, most of them pretrial, who allegedly died by suicide, because of illness, or a drug overdose, or, in three instances, at the hands of another person. But the majority of deaths listed are attributed to “natural causes” or are pending a final autopsy report.

There is at least one person whose death is nowhere to be found on that list: Stanley Tobias Wilson, Jr. Wilson was a talented athlete who attended Stanford and went on to play football in the NFL. But unresolved trauma from childhood sexual abuse combined with CTE from years of football proved devastating to his mental health, his mom, Dr. D. Pulane Lucas, told Bolts. Last November, Wilson was deemed incompetent to stand trial for a recent break-in. Unbeknownst to Lucas, a judge ordered that her son be moved from where he was being held at Twin Towers, the county’s second largest jail, to Metropolitan State Hospital, which specializes in psychiatric care, by no later than Dec. 5. 

Nearly two months later, he was dead. A County Medical Examiner employee initially told Lucas he’d been found unconscious in his cell. “And then the story changed,” Lucas said. Now, they were telling her he’d fallen out of a chair and died of a pulmonary embolism while waiting to be admitted to Metropolitan. Lucas, who runs a policy nonprofit in Virginia, flew to Los Angeles to try to figure out what had happened, visiting the sheriff’s department to request records, then to Metropolitan, where her son had allegedly collapsed. “And that’s when they told me that they’ve never had anyone by the name of Stanley T. Wilson Jr. admitted,” she said. “I was blown away…now all of a sudden to get the message in person that Stanley did not die there and was never a patient there?”

Lucas sought another autopsy. “There’s blatant evidence of violence against him,” Jason Major, an autopsy technician who performed the independent death review, told Bolts. “He had a footprint on his face that’s clearly visible…he had abrasions on his knuckles, on his knees.” 

To Lucas, it is impossible to square the simple answer for her son’s death—a pulmonary embolism—with the errors, shifting narratives, and obfuscations surrounding Wilson’s death that she received from the County Medical Examiner’s office. (The office did not respond to a request for comment). Major and Lucas both believe that the truth is closer to the County Medical Examiner’s original version of the story; that Wilson collapsed and possibly even died at the jail, and that deputies transported him to the hospital after realizing that they were in flagrant violation of the judge’s order to transfer him months earlier. “They never even checked him in,” Major said. “He basically was dropped off, like Weekend at Bernie’s.” 

Nick Shapiro, the director of the Carceral Ecologies lab at UCLA, says that Wilson’s case is characteristic of jail deaths in LA County. Fatalities that get chalked up as natural often stem from a complicated interplay of factors such as poor mental health treatment, racialized violence, and negligence, he told Bolts. “The Black population has been subject to specific racial violence from deputy gangs [within the jails]… there’s been very long-term, documented gang related activity in the mental health ward.” 

In a 2022 analysis of 58 autopsies of people who died in LA county jails between 2009 and 2018 (just a small fraction of the total number owing to the county’s refusal to release most records), Shapiro and his co-author, Terence Keel, the founding director of the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies, found that more than half of the deaths classified as “natural” exhibited signs of violence on the body. They also found that Black people’s deaths were much more likely to be categorized as “natural” than those of other races. “There’s a problem in thinking about ‘natural death’ being the same for incarcerated populations that have no free will to choose what they eat, to choose what they drink, to bathe themselves on their own schedules, to wear appropriate clothing for the weather,” said Shapiro. In a recently published follow-up report, the researchers conclude that these classifications serve to downplay the responsibility of deputies and other jail staff for these deaths, whether through negligence and deprivation of care or outright violence—essentially blaming incarcerated people for their own demise. 

“What we’re looking at is really capital punishment through other means,” Keel told Bolts. 

To Lucas, one of the most suspicious aspects of her son’s death was how the official story changed and coalesced over time: “They’re telling their story after the fact and it appears that they’ve all gotten together because they’re all saying the exact same little story, you know, word for word.” (Lucas said that LASD has refused to release video footage she’s requested). 

Lucas told Bolts that Wilson’s omission from the official LASD tracker leads her to suspect that there are other deaths missing, too. (She recently wrote an editorial for The Appeal exploring this issue). “Within one month of when they started counting—here’s Stanley,” she said. “The beacon to say: look, some of us aren’t being counted. And here’s Stanley with a mama who’s not just going to accept the medical examiner’s statement of how he died.” 

In September, Lucas flew once more to Los Angeles to attend a vigil for those lost inside county jails. The following day, she gave public comment at the Board of Supervisors meeting. “While it’s too late for Stanley, I’m here to speak to the importance of providing needed services for inmates with mental health services, and also to support alternatives to incarceration,” she told the board. 

The board has a complex record on both of these issues. “Historically, the board has taken first steps to establish ‘care first’ practices in Los Angeles,” said Simonich of Vera Action. They’ve pledged to shut down Men’s Central Jail, established an “Alternatives to Incarceration” working group to explore implementing a variety of services that can preclude jail time, and created a Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department to one day move pretrial services out of the Probation department and instead develop community programs to support people awaiting trial. “Where the board continues to falter is on follow-through.” 

Simonich told Bolts she wanted to see the board immediately commit to a clear timeline to close Men’s Central Jail, which has been responsible for a disproportionate share of deaths this year. “It’s now been more than two years since the board commissioned the report on how to close Men’s Central Jail, and no actual plan has been adopted. No timeline has been put in place,” she said. 

For Brooks S. of Dignity and Power Now, the single most important intervention to alleviate the jail death crisis would be for the Board of Supervisors, in collaboration with the County CEO, to fast-track funding for more county mental health beds. Dignity and Power Now has been working with a woman whose son was jailed about a year ago while suffering from paranoid schizophrenia ; a judge ordered him released to inpatient mental health treatment this fall, but he’s still in jail, and won’t be released until sometime this month because there are so few spaces available. “If there was no waitlist, all of the people who were ordered by the court for mental health diversion could go the day that the order is made,” Brooks S. said. “That would drastically decrease the jail population.” 

The board could see a serious shakeup in several directions during the 2024 elections, from the arrival of Villanueva to the replacement of its most conservative member by a staunch progressive. Two supervisors besides Hahn are up for reelection: Holly Mitchell, whom Justice LA considers the foremost champion of the ’Care First, Jails Last’ agenda, and Kathryn Barger, the board’s lone Republican. 

Mitchell faces three challengers, at least one of whom is questioning her support for criminal justice reforms; the consensus among local observers is that she’ll be the clear favorite in a district that covers South Los Angeles and western portions of the county.

Barger, whose district encompasses LA County’s relatively conservative, exurban Northeast but also includes left-leaning cities like Pasadena and Burbank, faces a challenge from two progressive Democratic candidates, Assemblymember Chris Holden and Burbank Mayor Konstantine Anthony. Two other candidates, Perry Goldberg and Marlon Marroquin, are also in the race. (Here too, the top two candidates will face off in November if no one receives more than 50 percent on March 5.)

Though Hahn has dismissed Villanueva’s candidacy, her political choices in recent months appear directly influenced by his presence in the race. After the former sheriff blamed her for voting for a hiring freeze on deputies in 2022, Hahn spoke emphatically at a recent event against defunding the sheriff’s department, noting that the Board has increased LASD funding by over a billion dollars over the past decade, even boasting that her office had stepped in to pay for extra patrols in some unincorporated communities. Recently, she cast the lone vote against moving parking enforcement out of the sheriff’s department and into the department of public works, which would remove some funding from the sheriff. “To me, that suggests Hahn tacking to the right and specifically playing into law enforcement,” Brooks S. said. 

A spokesperson for Hahn emphasized to Bolts that the supervisor was concerned about rushing the measure without prior study. She added that fully funding LASD and investing in mental healthcare, job training, and youth programs was “not a contradictory effort.” 

One of Hahn’s other challengers, Rancho Palos Verdes City Councilor John Cruikshank, is also running to her right, calling for more detention and support for sheriff officers.

Meanwhile, Barger has recently demonstrated more serious interest in investing in mental health care in the county. But the supervisor has also long expressed support for building a locked mental health facility in place of Men’s Central Jail, which organizers have denounced as a jail by another name. When Supervisors Hilda Solis and Lindsay Horvath introduced a motion seeking to immediately reduce the jail population in April, both Barger and Hahn expressed their opposition, citing public safety concerns. (Solis ultimately withdrew the motion). “We are desperate for Supervisor Hahn and Supervisor Barger to take the situation in the jail seriously,” said Brooks S. 

In a statement to Bolts, Barger reemphasized her stance on closing the jail. “I believe Men’s Central Jail should be permanently closed and I stand by my belief that we need to replace it with a state-of-the-art facility that is secure, safe, and provides high quality care for those who pose a danger to themselves and the community,” she wrote.

Anthony, the Burbank mayor running against Barger, criticized her record in an interview with Bolts, including her support for a locked mental health facility to replace Men’s Central Jail. “On day one, if it hasn’t been agendized, I will agendize the closing of Men’s Central Jail,” he said. “I will absolutely vote for a speedy timeline. It’s well overdue.” Anthony also told Bolts he’d move to fast track mental health beds, as long as they weren’t supplied through Care Courts, a novel form of court-ordered mental health treatment championed by Governor Gavin Newsom that has drawn criticism from disability rights and civil liberties advocates. “We can build outreach centers…that the county simply funds, and [are] run by the local city or jurisdiction. We need to spread out the help,” he said. 

Holden, Barger’s other challenger, didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. He has supported police and prison reform at the state level, writing a bill known as the “George Floyd law” to establish greater consequences for police who fail to intervene when a colleague is using excessive force, and most recently sponsoring the Mandela Act, which would bring California in line with U.N. restrictions on the use of solitary confinement—including in the local Los Angeles jails. 

Anthony said he hoped to hasten the Board of Supervisors’ halting advancements towards a county system that prioritizes care over incarceration. “By running in this race and getting elected, I’ll be able to flip one of the seats that is preventing a lot of this progress, and hopefully that will get rid of many of the barricades that we’re seeing,” he told Bolts. 

Los Angeles faces the strange possibility of emerging from these elections with four supervisors who have expressed a commitment to advancing criminal legal reform at the county level—and Alex Villanueva. And while it may seem that just one supervisor couldn’t do much to throw a spanner in the works, Simonich of Vera Action cautioned that each member of the Board holds enormous power, from choosing what to place on the agenda for public hearings, which can have significant policy ramifications, to appointing commissioners, including to two separate boards with oversight power over LASD and the jails—and positions such as the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner. 

Keel, the UCLA researcher, hopes that the March primaries spur a broader reconsideration of how the county responds to these deaths. He wants the Board of Supervisors to establish an independent medical board to provide a secondary autopsy for everyone who dies in state custody, “whether that’s in jail, or on the streets.” 

 “We are not helping to create a better county if we continue to just assume these people died as a result of their own will and their own poor biology, rather than saying, No, we’re culpable, we’re accountable,” he said. “We need to be thinking differently about inequality—and how the ultimate cost of inequality is death.” 

Correction (Jan. 2024): This article has been updated to reflect the final version of Terence Keel’s and Nicholas Shapiro’s report on LA County Jail autopsies.

The post As Los Angeles Politicians Trade Barbs, Jail Deaths Keep Mounting appeared first on Bolts.

By international human rights standards, Jack Morris was tortured by the state of California for almost four decades. 

Morris mostly lived in solitary confinement from the time he went to prison in 1978, the year “Grease” was released, until he got out in 2017—alone 23 hours a day inside a cell the size of a parking space, shut off not just from the outside world, but also from the bonds and makeshift society that develop behind prison walls. He was only allowed phone calls whenever a close family member died. Over time, his sensory perception changed and small sounds made him jump. He stopped caring to watch TV, and eventually shifted from desperately craving human contact to withdrawing into himself and no longer wanting to speak with others. 

“It’s a slow, torturous event that slowly deteriorates you, both physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually, until you no longer exist,” Morris told Bolts.

In 2013, while still imprisoned, Morris took part in a historic hunger strike protesting the pervasive use of solitary confinement inside the California prison system. “We all understood that if there wasn’t something done, we would all simply die inside those cells,” he said. Pelican Bay State Prison, the supermax facility where Morris spent much of his incarceration, had around 1,100 solitary cells in its “Secure Housing Unit,” or SHU, at the time of the hunger strike, with more than 500 people confined there for over a decade. People accused of belonging to a gang could be held in solitary indefinitely. The 2013 strike, organized by four prominent gang leaders who had been isolated for decades inside the SHU, saw some 30,000 prisoners from around California participate on its first day. Some managed to stretch the protest out for sixty days and ultimately helped push the state to agree to new limits on the use of solitary confinement, like more out-of-cell time and programming. 

Morris still remembers the morning the 2013 hunger strike began. It was early, and he was still lying in bed when a friend yelled through the bars and told him to look at the TV. 

“I look at the ticker tape at the bottom, and right there it said on national news, ‘30,000 California prisoners on hunger strike,’ and it was—it was amazing,” Morris told Bolts. It was their third hunger strike in recent years, but this one felt different, he said, with more coordination between prisoners and allies on the outside. With the whole country watching, change finally felt possible. “We were fortunate to have litigation taking place and family members yelling at the top of their lungs on the street corner and we finally got legislators to listen when the news broadcasted that 30,000 prisoners were not gonna eat no more,” Morris said. 

Last year, the California legislature last year took action to restrict the use of solitary confinement in the state by passing the Mandela Act, legislation that would curtail solitary beyond 15 consecutive days and no more than 45 days in a 180-day period. The bill seeks to codify the United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules, adopted last decade to define solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days as torture, so named in honor of the South African leader who spent 18 years languishing in isolation while imprisoned.

But California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the Mandela Act last September, arguing in his veto statement that the new restrictions “could risk the safety of both the staff and incarcerated population within these facilities.” Newsom, who acknowledged “the deep need to reform California’s use of segregated confinement,” said that he would also direct the state’s prison system, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), to “develop regulations that would restrict the use of segregated confinement except in limited situations.” 

That still hasn’t happened. CDCR told Bolts that the department merely plans to file a draft of new solitary regulations with the state by the end of 2023.

With no movement since lawmakers passed the solitary reforms last year, advocates for ending the practice—including Morris and other survivors of prolonged solitary confinement—are once again urging Newsom to support the Mandela reforms, which have been filed again for this legislative session under Assembly Bill 280.

Pasadena Assemblymember Chris Holden, who sponsored both bills, said he wants to bring California in line with international standards on imprisonment. His bill, like last year’s version, aims to end prolonged solitary in state prisons as well as local jails, which are run by county sheriffs, and immigrant detention centers, which are often run by private companies. 

Holden told Bolts that he has been discussing the bill’s language with Newsom’s office and that the legislation could still change depending on what the governor supports. As written, the bill would ban the use of solitary entirely for young and very old prisoners, people who meet the state’s criteria for physical or mental disability, and those who are pregnant or recently postpartum. But Holden said that he was willing to budge on some of these categorical exclusions after Newsom’s office communicated that the governor would still not support them. 

While Holden said he’s open to “reasonable” proposals from Newsom or CDCR to tweak the bill, he vowed to persist in making significant changes to solitary confinement as it is presently used. “The current system, as we speak, it meets the definition of torture,” Holden told Bolts. 

Experts who have studied the decade-long movement to end solitary in California prisons say it’s unrealistic to expect CDCR, which resisted full implementation of policy changes wrought by the 2013 hunger strike, to reform the practice on its own. “Day to day, when you look at solitary confinement use, the state is still putting big numbers of people in solitary confinement for long periods of time, under new names, in new places,” said Keramet Reiter, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who wrote a book about long-term isolation at Pelican Bay. “In practice, these institutions are just incredibly resistant to reform.” 

As solitary confinement grew more controversial in recent years, California prison officials have labeled prolonged isolation “administrative segregation” or a host of other terms that have helped conceal the reality and scope of the practice. The Mandela Act seeks to cut through this obfuscation by clearly defining it: isolation without programming for more than 17 hours a day. 

“What’s really interesting and almost comical if it wasn’t so horrific is the way that [authorities] and law enforcement play this like cat-and-mouse game about solitary confinement and pretend like solitary confinement doesn’t exist because they call it all these different names,” said Hamid Yazdan Panah, an attorney and the advocacy director at Immigrant Defense Advocates, which has been pushing for the Mandela reforms. 

In the years leading up to the 2013 hunger strike, nearly 12,000 people were held in solitary at any given time across the California prison system. Immediately after the strike forced some changes, prisoners at Pelican Bay filed a class action lawsuit trying to end the practice of indefinite isolation for alleged gang members, who were named as such via a shadowy process called “validation” that could take as proof a person’s tattoos, clothing, or someone else’s confidential testimony. While the prison system technically re-evaluated such prisoners every six years, the plaintiffs said that there were only three ways out of isolation—snitch, parole, or die —and one of those routes, becoming an informant for CDCR, could carry fatal consequences.

That lawsuit ended in a settlement with the state prison system, which promised to end the practice of indefinite isolation and release almost all of the people in prolonged solitary confinement back into the general population. But today, though there are many fewer people in prolonged isolation than before, advocates point out that solitary confinement is still widely used in California. As of the end of April 2023, CDCR reports that 3,446 people are in some form of isolation, and that’s not counting the many people in jail or immigration detention who also find themselves in solitary. 

While opponents of the Mandela Act argue that solitary is a necessary tool to protect prisoners and guards from violent individuals, advocates for ending it say isolation is imposed on an array of vulnerable people behind bars. Eric Harris, director of public policy at Disability Rights California, one of the organizations leading the fight for the Mandela Act, says isolation is often a default response to people seen as different or disruptive, including people with mental illness, physical disabilities, and gender-nonconforming people. 

“When you look at folks who are often mistreated in these settings, or misunderstood in these settings, most of them have some form of disability, whether it’s been diagnosed or not,” Harris told Bolts.

It’s not uncommon for prison guards to wield solitary confinement as retaliation against people who agitate for their rights on the inside. “A lot of the folks that I’ve seen that were put in solitary were jailhouse lawyers to silence them,” Mike Saavedra, who was held in long-term isolation for over a decade, told Bolts. “They’d threaten you once you file a 602 [complaint about prison conditions] or any type of lawsuit to throw you in the hole.” Once there, he said, “they can control your litigation because now you have minimal access to the law library…you’re only allowed a small number of books.” 

Saavedra, who is now the co-director of legal support at the Los Angeles-based abolitionist organization Dignity and Power Now, says he was put in isolation after he was elected to an advisory council tasked with communicating fellow prisoners’ concerns to prison leadership. “Those that got that position were typically then labeled as shot callers and sent to solitary,” he said. Undeterred, Saavedra kept filing lawsuits disputing the conditions of his confinement, as well as the validation process that kept him there.

As hard as it is to track isolation practices in CDCR, it’s even more challenging in California’s jails, which are overseen by the state’s 58 county sheriffs rather than one state department, and have no shared guidelines or metrics for the use of solitary confinement. Sacramento and Alameda counties are both under federal consent decrees owing in part to their use of solitary confinement for people in jail with mental health conditions, with the practice emerging as a focal point in last year’s election for Alameda sheriff. 

The Mandela Act would make California the first state to restrict solitary confinement inside immigration detention, where it is also frequently used, and bring the practice into compliance with international standards. “They just put people back there for any reason,” said Salesh “Sal” Prasad, who was turned over to ICE for deportation after being released from CDCR custody, despite having lived in the U.S. since he was six years old. Prasad spent around four of the 15 months he was in immigration detention in solitary confinement, including a time when guards put him there “for his own protection” after his mother got COVID-19 and passed away suddenly. He never got to see her. 

In solitary, Prasad found himself overwhelmed by grief, and unable to suppress a fountain of traumatic memories from his childhood. “The negative thoughts start coming in and it takes over your mind,” he told Bolts. 

Isolation can also be used to quell protests inside immigration detention. Last summer, guards responded to a labor strike by Prasad and other immigrants detained at two facilities in California’s Central Valley by throwing some of them in solitary. And both Prasad and Yazdan Panah say that isolation is often employed to encourage people to give up fighting their immigration cases. “We see that time and time again—people are placed in really inhumane conditions, in part because they want to build pressure to get people to self-deport and to continue to sort of keep the conveyor belt going,” Yazdan Panah told Bolts. 

Last session, Yazdan Panah said, opponents of the Mandela Act were able to sow doubt about the bill by advancing the narrative that the only two options for incarcerated people are solitary confinement or the general population. “The hypothetical that they love to give is that according to our bill, someone can kill their cellmate and the facility can put that person in solitary confinement for 15 days, and then after that, they would have to go back to the general population to ‘kill again,’” he said. In fact, Yazdan Panah said, someone who engaged in violence toward others could still be housed individually; the bill merely stipulates that the prison must increase the person’s amount of meaningful human contact and out-of-cell activities. 

The bill was also hampered by high-cost estimates and the charge from detractors that it would require massive new construction across CDCR. “It’s sort of an interesting and diabolical argument because no one in California wants to expand or build new prison space,” said Yazdan Panah, whose organization has countered that the bill would only require an expansion in programming, and would save the state money in the long term.  

Advocates for reform say that continuing to lean on solitary confinement only perpetuates the harms from which it claims to shield people. Reiter noted that the emotional and psychological damage that isolation engenders, especially the way it has been used in juvenile facilities, contributes to a more dangerous and volatile environment for people in prison. Harris told Bolts that no one makes it out of solitary unscarred. “Every single person that we’ve been working with who’s a solitary survivor, has said that they have some form of mental health disability, whether it’s PTSD, whether it’s anxiety, depression,” he said.

Though Prasad has been out of ICE detention for nearly six months and recently won his asylum case, he’s often brought back to those long months in isolation—the cold, the walls closing in, the smell of human beings living confined in such small spaces. “It weighs on you,” he said. “Those are four months that I can’t get back.” Prasad called his months in solitary confinement “dead time.” 

As the 10th anniversary of the 2013 hunger strike approaches this summer, Newsom’s veto of the Mandela Act last year looms over discussions for how to curb solitary confinement. Advocates maintain the veto doesn’t necessarily mean Newsom won’t budge on the issue this time around, stressing increased attention on curtailing solitary both in Sacramento and around the country. 

“We have over 20 states working on legislation or litigation around the use of solitary confinement, in some states even holding bipartisan support,” said Dolores Canales, the co-founder of California Families Against Solitary Confinement, who is herself a survivor of solitary confinement. Canales’ son was also in the Pelican Bay SHU during the 2013 hunger strikes. 

Newsom’s office didn’t answer questions about how he’s approaching the Mandela reforms this year or whether his position has changed since last year, with a representative for the governor telling Bolts that his veto message “speaks for itself.” CDCR told Bolts that the department “anticipate[s] filing draft regulations with the Office of Administrative Law by the end of the year,” but did not respond to a follow-up question asking for more detail on the content of the regulations. 

To Yazdan Panah, these promises were cold comfort. “The issue of solitary confinement has been front and center in California now for more than a decade,” he said. “CDCR has been unable—or unwilling is maybe a better term—to comply with the terms of the Ashker settlement that they themselves agreed to in 2015.” And the governor, he said, had “completely punted on the issue of jails and private detention facilities.”

Even if the Mandela Act becomes law, enforcing it will present considerable challenges. In 2021, New York’s HALT Solitary Confinement Act outlawed solitary confinement for more than 15 consecutive days, and otherwise greatly limited the practice, but today, over a year after it took effect, the law is far from fully implemented. The same year, voters in Pittsburgh overwhelmingly approved a ballot referendum to ban solitary in the county jail, which has been accused of continuing the practice in violation of the new law. 

“The good that the act is doing is keeping the conversation going and the spotlight shining on them,” said Reiter. “In practice, it’s a sweeping reform that will be hard to implement and track.” 

Enforcing the law in immigration detention, which is technically overseen by the California attorney general but generally operates farther outside the purview of the state, would be particularly challenging. And, as it has done again and again, CDCR could always find new ways to skirt the definitions imposed by the Mandela Act if it passes. But activists for ending solitary take the long view, saying the Mandela Act is a critical next step in their much longer fight against a tortuous and intractable practice. 
“When we first got involved, I remember families used to tell us, ‘Oh, my loved one’s never gonna get out’ or ‘My loved one says nothing’s going to change,’” recalled Canales. “And I thought to myself, it has to change. And as long as we keep thinking that it’s not, that’s how it will be.”

The post Survivors of Solitary Confinement Face the California Governor’s Veto Pen appeared first on Bolts.

“It’s just heartbreaking to me,” April Green, O’Neil’s aunt, told Bolts. “He just gave free will to shoot [to] any officer that feels any kind of fear — he’s not going to prosecute.”

For years now, O’Neil’s family has been caught between San Francisco’s shifting politics around prosecution and police accountability. George Gascón, who was district attorney when the killing happened, declined to prosecute Samayoa, but after Chesa Boudin took over the office, he announced that he would be charging the officer. Boudin, who heralded the prosecution of Samayoa as “historic,” had sought to expand and bolster the Independent Investigations Bureau (IIB), a division of his office dedicated to investigating and prosecuting police brutality. 

But Bolts reported last year that, after Boudin was recalled by voters and replaced by Brooke Jenkins, the new DA quickly fired or demoted the IIB’s lawyers and installed a deputy who lambasted the work done under Boudin. 

Jenkins, who won a special election last November to fill the remainder of Boudin’s term, announced in February that she was dismissing the case against Samayoa because she believed Boudin had brought it “for political reasons and not in the interests of justice.” 

The overhaul of the IIB under Jenkins has alarmed families of people killed by San Francisco police who believed that they might see justice under Boudin’s IIB. Her actions since then have confirmed their worst fears. 

Sean Moore was an unarmed Black man who was shot by police in 2017 while suffering a mental health episode in his own home. (His death, three years later, was determined to be the direct result of his wounds). According to Emily Lee, the co-director of the progressive group San Francisco Rising, who has been supporting Moore’s family, Jenkins’ office has continued to decline to object whenever the defense requests delays in the case, and last month chose to turn over Moore’s medical records to the defense, which she was not required to do. (Jenkins’ spokesperson has not responded to a request for comment as of publication).

“The Moore family has been very skeptical that you know, is the DA really representing their family, or are they actually supporting the defense?” Lee said. After Cleo Moore, Sean’s elderly mother, made a “personal plea” to the judge during an April 28 court date the judge scheduled a date to set a preliminary hearing, where the relevant evidence in the case would be made public for the first time. 

When Boudin was recalled last year, his IIB was on the verge of pursuing charges against officers for the 2016 police killing of Luis Góngora Pat, an unhoused Mayan Mexican man; police claimed he was threatening them with a knife, but multiple eyewitnesses reported that he was sitting on the ground and far from officers when they started shooting—first with bean bag rounds, and then real bullets. Adriana Camerena, a family friend and advocate for the Góngora Pat family, told Bolts that they have heard nothing from the office since Jenkins won the special election. “No reach out. No interest. No care,” she said. 

Recently, Jenkins also announced that she would not be pursuing charges against the Walgreens security guard who shot and killed Banko Brown, provoking outrage from many community members who saw a throughline between the case and the DA’s dithering on the police prosecutions.

While in the state legislature, Bonta supported efforts to increase police accountability, including a bill that requires the AG’s office to take over investigations of unarmed civilians. He said at his confirmation hearing in 2021 that he would take greater action to hold police accountable. 

“If not these elected officials, then who is willing to actually say to the public that police, security officers, armed vigilantes cannot kill unarmed black men?” Lee told Bolts. “And I just don’t think we have an answer for that question, because so far we have not seen any accountability for the violence that was perpetrated against Keita O’Neil, Sean Moore, Banko Brown.” 

Bonta’s office responded to a request for comment by directing Bolts back to his letter declining to take the case.

The stalling of cases against San Francisco officers who killed people highlights why such cases are rarely prosecuted, as well as how even officials who outwardly champion police accountability can still justify alarming individual acts. Bonta’s memo echoed many of the same reasons that Gascón’s office initially declined to charge Samayoa, who was a probationary officer on his fourth day of the job in 2017 when he fired through the window of his vehicle, killing O’Neil, who was suspected of carjacking and had led police on a chase, but was unarmed. 

In his memo, Bonta writes that Samayoa, who was later fired by the department for his actions, had participated in a simulation “eerily similar” to the O’Neil shooting just three weeks earlier, in which “suspects” exiting their car during a routine traffic stop immediately fired at Samayoa, hitting him in the head with a paintball. Bonta pointed to the exercise in concluding that Samayoa shooting O’Neil “was reasonable given his training and experience.” 

Green had urged Bonta to pick up the case after Jenkins dropped it and is now alarmed by what his refusal signals. “What is this message?” Green asked, saying that Bonta “just opened the door up” for any officer to use the artificial situations they’re put in as a routine aspect of their training as justification for killing someone. 

Green has said she has been fighting for her sister, O’Neil’s mother, who has dementia but still remembers the loss of her son. When asked if she had told her sister about Bonta’s decision, Green responded immediately: “No and I never will.” 

“I’m not going to have her relive it,” she said. 

The post California AG Ends San Francisco’s First Prosecution for an On-Duty Police Killing  appeared first on Bolts.

The Riders Scandal rattled the city of Oakland in 2001, leading to a historic prosecution, a massive civil-rights lawsuit, and decades of federal oversight. As investigative reporters Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham detail in The Riders Come out at Night, their exhaustive new history of the Oakland Police Department, the fate of the men on trial essentially hinged on a central question: were these officers bad apples, or were their actions evidence of a far deeper rot?

The Alameda County DA’s prosecution strategy relied on painting the “Riders,” as the gang came to be known, as rogue cops within an otherwise functional system. It’s not hard to imagine why the DA might be invested in excising the Riders from the rest of the OPD. I noticed the same dynamic during the trial of Derek Chauvin: other cops testified over and over that his actions were against procedure. By proving the aberrance of the few, the state can demonstrate guilt—and preserve the good name of the many.

Meanwhile, in arguing that the Riders’ actions were within procedure, the defense advanced a far more damning indictment of the OPD, inadvertently making an argument more common among abolitionist critics of American policing. The Riders’ lawyer, Winston and BondGraham write, called the Oakland police chief to the stand, then used his testimony to “show the jury a picture of a city where cops had been told to be aggressive, put their hands on suspects, hit the corners, and attack the drug trade head-on. Their actions, no matter how egregious, were all in the name of public safety and hitting the mayor’s magic 20 percent crime drop.” The Riders, in other words, “weren’t rogue cops; they were following orders.” The fact that the case would end in two separate mistrials, with one officer ultimately acquitted, suggests that the bad apple theory failed to sufficiently compel jurors. And though Winston and BondGraham argue repeatedly that the Riders were far from rogue cops, the real question they’re interested in exploring is slightly different.

What are the preconditions that allow a group like the Riders to flourish, the journalists ask, and what can be done to preclude those conditions? Or, in plainer language: why are police the way they are—and is it possible for them to change?

Winston and BondGraham answer the first half of this question clearly, devoting a considerable amount of Riders to the OPD’s 19^th-century origins as a violent and graft-prone institution that exploited and suppressed minority groups. 

“During the first century of the department’s existence, custom and practice condoned the quick use of the nightstick and revolver to control restive populations: labor unions, the Chinese, and white ethnic immigrants who upset the city’s image of itself as a pious, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon settlement,” they write. Dozens of Oakland police officers were members of the KKK; at one point, Winston and BondGraham refer to the Klan as night riders, wording that draws a direct line between the Riders and these grim forebears, especially given the supposed origin of the nickname (a Black man who’d been stopped for a traffic violation allegedly thanked the officer for being respectful, and added, “This isn’t at all what it’s like at night. At night, the Riders come out.”)

When African Americans started arriving in Oakland during the Great Migration, the combative, us-vs.-them mentality the OPD had cultivated against immigrants and radicals was neatly transposed onto this new population, with a heaping dose of anti-Black racial hatred thrown in to boot. In 1950, during one of the city’s first panels on police brutality, a local civil rights attorney testified that “the Negro citizens of Oakland live in daily and nightly terror of the Oakland Police Department.” The chief of police, meanwhile, dismissed this criticism as a Communist plot. 

Whether police can change, though, is a trickier question—and a divisive one, especially on the left. The reporters lean into this tension. To say that reform is impossible, they argue, discredits the painstaking work of activists, lawyers, journalists, and ordinary people to expose the department’s abuses and bring it to heel. For evidence of this truth, look no further than Riders itself, which would not have been possible without both authors’ years of dedicated reporting on the OPD, statewide legislative reforms that required law enforcement to turn over more internal records, and the hard work of an attorney who sued on behalf of the two journalists, forcing OPD to comply with these new laws. To contend that nothing can be done would be to imply that there is no reason to fight.

But there are limits, and Winston and BondGraham, who spent years covering the OPD as local investigative journalists, explore them in excruciating detail. Take the Riders whistleblower Keith Batt, a rookie whose testimony allowed the case to go to trial and was key in establishing the federal consent decree that’s covered the department since. On its face, the story pits the Riders’ “bad cops” against Batt, a “good cop” who did the right thing under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But without negating anyone’s agency or moral culpability, Winston and BondGraham show how it’s ultimately less about the individual will of the officers than what the system they work within condones—and encourages. The department rewards and promotes aggressive, confrontation-prone cops, and constrains ethical ones: taking them off assignments, making their work lives hell, and often driving them to quit. Two Black officers who are presented as critics of the OPD’s practices eventually leave; one ends up writing a sociology dissertation about the force’s endemic racism. 

For every Batt, there are dozens of officers depicted in this book who look the other way, and face few consequences for it. The whistleblower ultimately served just 17 days in the OPD. He was harassed relentlessly, essentially forced to resign, and found himself threatened by other cops when they crossed paths afterward—even as one of the Riders successfully sued the city for wrongful termination, walking away with $1.5 million in damages. Someone illegally pulled Batt’s DMV records, accessing his home address and other personal information. And with the scariest of the Riders remaining a fugitive from justice today, Batt is probably still looking over his shoulder more than two decades later.

Riders begins with the book’s eponymous scandal, then zooms out to capture the historical and political context that led up to it, the fight to prosecute the officers at its center, and two prominent local civil rights lawyers’ simultaneous efforts to hold the department accountable. The result: a federal consent decree—a court-enforced reform agreement—from which the department has still not emerged, two decades later.

Winston and BondGraham make the stakes clear. The consent decree is the external accountability tool for reforming American police departments, and Oakland has been under one longer than anyone—even LA, where the Rampart scandal, which came on the heels of the Rodney King beating, occasioned one in 2000. “More has been done to try to reform the Oakland Police Department than any other police force in the United States,” they write.

From the beginning, though, the authors sow doubt as to whether the OPD will ever be able to fully comply with the terms of the decree, a comprehensive settlement agreement that required the OPD to overhaul its training and internal investigations, implement an ‘early warning system’ to root out problem officers, and make sure all officers were supervised in an attempt to avoid the lack of oversight that led to the Riders’ abuses. 

Many in the department are openly hostile toward its imposition. (“You’ve got to stop using that word reform,” a captain nicknamed ‘Maniac’ tells one of the external monitors, suggesting that his men will bristle at even the mention of change.) There is a culture of silence and internal loyalty around officer misconduct that extends even to the most egregious cases. To call OPD’s Internal Affairs team merely feckless feels charitable; the division often gives the impression of actively stonewalling investigations. Punishments, when they are occasionally meted out, are downgraded, and then downgraded again; it’s not uncommon for officers to resign rather than accept their slap on the wrist. The department’s union, the Oakland Police Officers Association, is willing to spend whatever it takes to defend its men, which often results in cops who brutalize and kill civilians getting their jobs back through arbitration.

And Winston and BondGraham also show how opportunities for change have been thwarted by historical vicissitudes: the war on drugs; state and municipal budget crises; the subprime mortgage crisis, which disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx homeowners; the leadership of politicians like Jerry Brown, whose lefty-radio vibes quickly morphed into law-and-order rhetoric in order to win his mayoral race in the late ‘90s. The book doubles as a rich political history of Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a city that has been repeatedly devastated by austerity and racist policies. 

“So long as Oakland and the rest of America is riven by extreme racial and class inequalities and the power of the federal government is not brought to repair the economies of destitute cities and rural areas, and deal with the intergenerational trauma that leads to despair and hopelessness,” they write, “then it’s very likely the police will continue serving more or less the same function they have for well over a half century: containing and repressing the symptoms of broader social problems through violence.”

The second half of the book explores OPD’s glacial progress post-consent decree, which is continually marred by the revelation of scandal after scandal. At one point, Winston and BondGraham describe this advancement as “two steps forward, and one step back.” Often, reading Riders, it felt more like the other way around.

There’s a moment around 2014 where things are starting to look up: For the first time in decades, the OPD had a chief interested in reform and willing to stand up to the police association. The department was finally making good progress on its settlement agreement tasks. “In just a year, the Oakland PD went from utter failure to a national leader in policing reforms,” the journalists write.

Reading this feels sort of like watching the beginning of a horror movie: you suspect that something awful is coming, even as the characters remain unaware. And the next scandal to be revealed is one of the most stomach-churning in the book: the Celeste Guap case. Guap was the pseudonym of a young woman named Jasmine Abuslin who was groomed, abused, and pimped out, both before and after her 18^th birthday, by multiple OPD officers as well as cops from a laundry list of other departments in the region.  

Cases like Abuslin’s stand out for their shock value. The abuse was discovered when a cop who groomed and statutorily raped the girl shot himself in the head and left a damning suicide note. That decision unleashed a chain of events that eventually lead investigators to realize that the cop had most likely killed his wife several years earlier, staged it as a suicide, and had the whole thing covered up by the department. This was after Abuslin revealed the abuse directly to an OPD sergeant, who responded to her by writing “tell me you were an adult.” The internal investigation went nowhere. 

But the individual instances of cruelty, incompetence, misconduct, and malfeasance detailed in Riders can start to blur together. In a way this is the point. The book does center the Riders scandal, but it doesn’t argue for its exceptionalism; those officers’ wrongdoing is presented alongside many, many more examples big and small, lurid and mundane.

One in particular struck me. It could have happened in any police department in the country. It’s the case of Spencer Lucas, a young Black man who was stopped by OPD officers while driving to a friend’s house in 2005. Lucas was just 30 days away from completing a three-year parole term when he was pulled over. He was essentially homeless, but otherwise doing well. The cops seemed to want to mess with him. When they found out he was on parole, they got their chance. They strip-searched him in broad daylight, finding nothing. Even after calling his parole officer and finding out he’d been complying with all his terms, they forced him all over the city in handcuffs, trying to find something that would constitute a violation of his parole. After hours of this, they showed up at the home of his estranged wife, searched it, and found a BB gun.

In this brief anecdote, we see this institution, even under federal decree to do better, return to familiar habits: doing nothing to keep people safe, but instead intruding greedily into their private lives, searching for ways to snatch them back within its clutches, and fostering only rage and humiliation and despair in those it targets. As a result of that encounter, Lucas ended up going back to prison for almost a year.

The post Oakland’s “Riders” Scandal and the Fraught Road to Police Reform 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.

The result was pandemonium. Police helicopters hovered overhead long into the night. On the ground, LAPD surrounded and kettled protestors and journalists alike and commenced with mass arrests, including at least 16 members of the press; an officer broke one protestor’s arm with his baton. A year later, a UCLA report would confirm the protestors’ worst suspicions about the approach: vanishingly few of the unhoused residents of Echo Park Lake had been placed in long term housing, the whereabouts of many were unknown, and at least six people had died since being evicted from the encampment.  

To Hugo Soto-Martinez, then a union organizer, Echo Park Lake evinced everything wrong with his representative’s approach to homelessness. “This was, without a doubt, the most egregious abuse of power that I’ve ever seen, exhibited by a council member to the most vulnerable community of our city,” he told Bolts. Soto-Martinez decided to challenge O’Farrell, casting the incumbent’s actions as a symbol of the cruelty and ineffectiveness of the city’s response to its ever-growing unhoused population. He won his election decisively last month, beating O’Farrell by 16 percentage points, and was sworn in as city council member on Sunday.

Soto-Martinez joins a new, three-member bloc of progressives on city council who vocally oppose criminalizing homelessness and support expanding tenant protections and deeply affordable housing. Nithya Raman, a former urban planner who joined the council two years ago, has been defending such an approach since then. And Eunisses Hernandez, an abolitionist organizer, won this year against sitting council member Gil Cedillo, who had deployed a similar strategy of encampment sweeps at his district’s MacArthur Park. Raman and Hernandez both supported Soto-Martinez’s campaign, and all three beat incumbents to secure their seat, a rare feat in LA politics; Raman’s win in 2020 marked the first time it had happened on the council in 17 years.

This week, in their first council session, Soto-Martinez and Hernandez quickly paired up to try to extend the city’s eviction moratorium. And Raman’s team is hopeful there will be strength in numbers going forward. “We’re hoping with some of these new friends in the city council, we can work with them to create a more citywide approach to the issue,” Josh Scarcella, Raman’s homelessness deputy, told Bolts.

These council members are coming to power in a city context that has been transformed by the election of Karen Bass as LA mayor and by the recent passage of Measure ULA, a high-value property sale tax that will fund tenant protections, affordable housing, and homelessness support to the tune of nearly a billion dollars per year. “This is a very unprecedented amount of funding that will enable the city to address the housing crisis at its roots—by both providing housing as well as preventing homelessness in the first place,” said Laura Raymond, the co-chair of the committee behind the measure. Its implementation will be overseen by a 15-person committee, and Raymond said that the coalition that fought for Measure ULA is recommending candidates like housing organizers, formerly homeless people, and tenants who have lived in affordable housing units. 

Meanwhile, Bass, who had made housing affordability and humane solutions to homelessness a cornerstone of her campaign, declared a state of emergency on homelessness this week as her first official act as mayor, a move that allows the city to expedite affordable housing and homeless housing projects, among other things. She committed to getting 17,000 people off the street in her first year, saying the city would “make sure we are using every resource possible at the scale that is needed to save lives and restore our neighborhoods.” The progressive council members have expressed support for Bass’s approach, though some local organizers warn that it may put too much emphasis on speedy solutions rather than the long-term planning that may be needed.

With this sea change, Angelenos are facing an extraordinary opportunity to implement alternative models on housing and homelessness—and with that comes intense pressure to prove that their approach carries a better chance of getting more people off the street, humanely, than the city’s current methods of criminalizing homelessness. 

Eric Ares, Hernandez’s incoming director of housing and homelessness, wants to undo what he sees as the prevailing framework by which people conceive of the city’s homelessness crisis. “There’s this false choice: either you accept the status quo, which is the tents as they are in our streets, or you criminalize,” he said. “The people that got voted on to join city council, many of them got voted on to explicitly explore the things that weren’t being addressed:Increasing tenant protections, building more housing intentionally at all affordability levels, especially for those who need it most, non-law enforcement crisis response.”

For much of the past two years, the city council’s work on homelessness has been consumed by fierce debate over the existence and expansion of anti-camping ordinance 41.18, which outlaws the presence of encampments near shelters, parks, schools, bridges, and other infrastructure. (An analysis by the recently elected left-leaning city controller, Kenneth Mejia, estimates it now stretches to include 20 percent of the city’s territory.) Only Raman and now-former councilmember Mike Bonin have consistently voted against 41.18. Council members can also propose individual 41.18 locations within their district, which must be approved by council. 

In one meeting, Hernandez’s predecessor Cedillo successfully lobbied for 28 new enforcement zones in his district; meanwhile, Raman has never proposed a 41.18 zone in her district.

“In the past year, it’s a little bit of ‘every council district for themselves’ when it comes to homelessness,” said Scarcella. Within her district, Raman has established a homeless outreach team, including staff who work on legislation, liaise with service providers, and do direct outreach to encampments. 

The council’s three left-leaning members met regularly in advance of the new session, which began December 13, and both Hernandez and Soto-Martinez are taking cues from Raman’s approach: hiring staff dedicated to homelessness and housing, establishing direct connections to homeless constituents and encampments, and expanding access to public restrooms, a stunning privation for most unhoused people in LA. 

Both newcomers also denounced 41.18 on the campaign trail, and their offices told Bolts that they will not establish new 41.18 zones in their districts. “It just simply doesn’t work,” Soto-Martinez told Bolts. He also is advocating to stop using armed officers in encounters with unhoused people as a matter of course, and for the establishment of an unarmed response team, similar to Denver’s STAR program. 

But both offices will have to quickly figure out how to respond to the daily displacement to which homeless people in LA are subject. During his campaign, Soto-Martinez promised to end the practice of comprehensive sanitation cleanings, often called “sweeps,” which regularly dislocate unhoused people, lead to the destruction of their belongings, and often involve police. But on December 13, Soto-Martinez’s first week in office, the mutual aid group LA Street Care noted on Twitter that the new council member had not acted to cancel a number of sweeps that were scheduled to take place in his district the following day, despite dangerously low temperatures. Within hours, Soto-Martinez’s office had downgraded the sweeps to a so-called “spot-cleaning,” according to LA Taco reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray, a designation that means that nobody is moved and that the LAPD is not involved. 

Kris Rehl, an organizer with LA Street Care, went to all three sites, and was heartened to discover that the office had kept its word. “All three were just cleanings, what was reported,” Rehl said. “The fact that he was so responsive so quickly has made us really optimistic.”

Things get murkier when it comes to the 41.18 zones that Soto-Martinez and Hernandez’s predecessors have already established in the two districts. Scarcella said that the council office doesn’t control whether police enforce the anti-camping zones that exist in Raman’s district owing to the city-wide elements of the ordinance; the office is still trying to determine the best way to handle these situations. “Our goal is to work diligently with the individuals, provide outreach, and try to get them indoors,” he told Bolts, noting that LAPD is more likely to hold off on enforcement “if they see that there’s work being done, and there’s outreach being conducted.” Ares echoed that view. “The plan is to work with all the different partners that we have to ensure that whenever possible, we are leading with care and with services,” he said. 

For all three council members, the end goal is to craft policy for the entire city based on the care-centered models they implement within their own districts. 

The most critical element will likely be proving that they can get people off the streets and into housing.

Raman’s office has prioritized non-congregate housing like motel rooms, rather than shelter beds, in its efforts to get people into the pipeline to long term shelter. Her office was the only one to open a temporary housing site in 2021 called Project Roomkey, a former hotel with nearly 100 rooms, and residents were both allowed to stay as long as they needed and offered assistance on-site in seeking permanent housing. They have successfully rehoused 55 people through the site, which is temporarily closed pending a funding extension, are currently converting a recently purchased site for their permanent housing initiative, Homekey. “Her office has made tremendous improvements in connecting people with housing,” said Rehl. 

Roomkey shut down in late 2022, which Soto-Martinez has criticized, calling it “LA’s most effective sheltering program” and arguing for it to be extended and improved. Bass wants to extend the program, which was federally funded. 

Soto-Martinez also hopes to implement adaptive reuse (renovating existing infrastructure) as a quicker solution alongside building permanent housing—and eventually, social housing. He has his sights set on St. Vincent Medical Center, a massive, vacant hospital complex in his district. “We can refurbish these buildings much faster,” he told Bolts. 

Hernandez told Bolts in February that she would fight to ensure that new developments in her district contained more units for low-income tenants. Ares spoke of the importance of having a joint strategy: speeding up the process of building new affordable housing while preserving the many existing affordable units in danger of expiring, using public land to build social housing, expanding access to temporary shelter, and keeping people in their homes in the first place. “We have to do all those things at once or else we’re not going to see the changes that everyone wants,” he said, invoking Measure ULA’s comprehensive approach to the city’s housing crisis. The measure devotes the bulk of its funds to affordable housing, including construction, adaptive reuse, and preservation, but also covers emergency rent relief and other tenant protections. 

To make citywide changes, they will have to convince other council members of their approach. 

Bonin, who was for some time the lone voice against criminalization on council, declined to seek reelection this year; the district’s new councilmember, Traci Park, is a firm supporter of 41.18, along with several colleagues. But there are a number of other council members who could side with the bloc on issues of housing and homelessness. And the balance of power could shift more fundamentally as well: in the wake of a leaked conversation filled with racist comments between three members of the LA city council and a union leader, Nury Martinez resigned as council president, leaving her seat up for grabs; Kevin de León, meanwhile, is desperately clinging to power amidst universal calls to resign and a recall attempt. 

On the first day of the new session, that tenuous state of play was succinctly illustrated by Soto-Martinez’s first motion in council, which Hernandez co-presented, to remove the Jan. 31 end date from the ongoing pandemic emergency that has protected renters from eviction. They needed eight votes for it to pass, and three other council members joined with Raman to support the motion. With de León absent and Martinez’s seat lying vacant, though, they fell short by just two votes. 

With the outgoing council having voted to end the city’s eviction moratorium on Jan. 31, thousands of tenants who are behind on their rent could lose their apartments. “We definitely know that the increase in homelessness in LA is very much directly tied to the need for expanded tenant protections,” Ares said. Raymound said Measure ULA will allocate enough money to fully fund access to a lawyer for tenants facing eviction; such counsel can greatly increase the chances of people being able to stay in their homes but is not currently mandated in LA the way the right to a public defender in criminal law cases is. Both Soto-Martinez and Ares told Bolts that their offices want to codify a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction this session. 

Jacob Woocher, a tenant lawyer who organizes with the LA Tenants Union, says the council needs to go even farther to support tenants. He pointed to Raman’s touting of a universal just cause ordinance passed in October. “Just cause without rent increase protections—I don’t want to say it’s meaningless, but it’s much weaker,” he said. “If the landlord can’t get you out for any ‘just cause,’ what they can do is give you an $1,000 rent increase, wait 90 days for that to take effect, and then when that takes effect, and you can’t pay your rent—then you’re kind of screwed.”

Woocher said that he wanted to see the new city council members prioritize the needs of rent-burdened tenants and the homeless community over their relationships with their counterparts on council. “I just hope that they are willing to rely on the communities that put them in office and not be afraid to challenge their colleagues—and know that if they do go out on a limb, for tenants and for unhoused people, that the communities and organizations that have been organizing around these issues will have their back.” 

The post New Progressive Bloc on LA Council Wants to Reshape How City Responds to Homelessness appeared first on Bolts.

Compared to the larger electorate that votes in a presidential or midterm year, off-cycle elections tend to see depressed turnout and draw a wealthier and whiter electorate, which can skew whose interests are spoken for in local politics, research shows.

“This reform makes it such that the power of the people is shared among the whole community,” Chelsea Castellano, an organizer who helped champion Ballot Question 2E to move city council elections in Boulder, Colorado, from odd- to even-numbered cycles, told Bolts. She said the status quo was “keeping voter turnout small and low and among certain groups that are typically pretty well represented on our council.” Question 2E passed easily, with almost two-thirds of the vote.

Election data show that turnout in Boulder hasn’t topped 51 percent in any of the odd-numbered years, when its municipal elections were held, between 2013 and 2021. In the even-numbered years of that same span, city turnout averaged 83 percent.

The drop-off is similarly dramatic in jurisdictions around the country that elect local leaders in odd-numbered years. In San Francisco, which also just passed a ballot measure to move its local elections to even-numbered years, turnout averaged 43 percent in off-cycle years but 80 percent in presidential election years.

Voters in nine other localities also approved measures this year to move their elections to even-year cycles, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia. They Include St. Petersburg, Florida; in King County (Seattle), Washington; and in San Jose, Long Beach, and five other California cities. 

This wave of changes came among a series of reforms to election procedures that voters approved last week with an aim of increasing voter participation and turnout. In Connecticut and Michigan, voters codified more days of early voting into state constitutions. Voters in Oakland, California passed two measures enabling noncitizen voting in certain elections and creating a public funding program that allows more voters to financially back candidates of their choice.  

In Boulder, Castellano and her allies hope that moving municipal elections away from off-cycles will engage more people of color, low-income earners, and students (Boulder is home to the University of Colorado), making for an electorate more reflective of the actual populace. Another local progressive organizer, former city council candidate Eric Budd, said he hopes this encourages candidates to run on issues that matter to a larger and more diverse set, as opposed to catering to the narrower group of off-cycle voters.

“Back when I was running,” in 2017, Budd said, “a lot of people were giving me the advice that you need to run a really moderate message, to appeal to homeowners.” Looking back at his own platform from that campaign makes him cringe, he added: “The way I was talking about occupancy limits was very guarded, the way I was talking about duplexes. … I think (2E passing) really shifts not only the people that are running, but the platforms that we’re running on.”

Budd and Castellano advocate for housing density and more flexible zoning as tools to build a larger, more transit-oriented housing stock in the name of climate action and improved socioeconomic and racial diversity, and to address the unaffordability of Boulder, where the median home listing tops $1 million. The other, unofficial political party in Boulder has worked to beat back density and development, prizing so-called “neighborhood character” above affordability strategies and has dominated most of the modern era until recently. The pro-density urbanists previously battled the city council to place a measure on the ballot to relax occupancy limits in Boulder, then lost in the off-cycle 2021 election. Budd said they started organizing for 2E three days after that defeat.

John Tayer, head of the local chamber of commerce, which took a neutral position on Question 2E, believes that progressives are more likely to hold onto power moving forward, with the help of voters more likely to turn out in the city’s new even-year election cycle. “There’s no question that this will—and I think it’s the intended purpose of the initiative—draw out a voter pool that would skew toward the youth, lower-income and renter populations, which would then probably align with candidates of a similar character,” Tayer told Bolts.

Opponents of 2E argued that off-cycle elections mean an electorate that is more involved. “Maintain an informed vote!” argued one longtime council member in the opinion pages of Boulder’s Daily Camera newspaper. Similar cries echoed from opponents of various related measures around the country.

For evidence that a larger and more diverse electorate can indeed change political makeup, the pro-2E organizers have looked to cities like Berkeley, California, and Ann Arbor, Michigan—like Boulder, two wealthy, small cities with major universities, where municipal elections have flipped from odd- to even-numbered years.

In Ann Arbor, this change has had the effect of wiping out all council members who strongly resist housing density and development. That city also requires partisan markers for local candidates which means that, in even-numbered years with higher turnout, conservatives have an even harder time winning in the liberal stronghold. One former Ann Arbor council member, a longtime Republican, said in 2020 that she registered as a Democrat just to have a chance. She lost by 20 percentage points that year. (Boulder’s elections remain non-partisan, though there are so few Republicans in town that one needn’t squint to discern most candidates’ affiliations based on their policy proposals.)

Surveying the nation, researchers at the University of California, San Diego found shifts in power are not surprising, given the “unequivocal” finding that, “Across the nation, turnout in cities with on-cycle elections is dramatically higher than those with off-cycle elections.” Moving municipal elections to presidential years produces an average turnout boost of 29 percent, the researchers wrote, as higher-profile races draw more people to ballot boxes in those years.

Inspired by this data and the passage of 2E, Colorado state Representative Judy Amabile, a Democrat of Boulder, told Bolts she is now working on a bill to lift the state prohibition on school board elections in even-numbered years. 

And just to the east, in the city of Aurora, progressive council member Juan Marcano is pushing for changes that he believes will better align the local government with its broader citizenry. Aurora, with a population of nearly 400,000 people and greater racial and ethnic diversity than any other city in the state, is clearly liberal: Its congressman, U.S. Representative Jason Crow, is a Democrat who just coasted to reelection. Its state legislative delegation is almost entirely Democratic. And yet the city council, elected in non-partisan races in odd-numbered years, is controlled by conservatives. In the most recent municipal election there, turnout was only at 30 percent, city data show. Nearly three times as many registered Aurora voters turned out for the 2020 presidential election, the Sentinel newspaper reported.

Aurora has had some exceptionally close local elections in recent years—most notably, the former Republican U.S. Representative Mike Coffman won the 2019 mayoral race by about 200 votes over Democratic local NAACP chapter president Omar Montgomery—and Marcano believes his side stands a good chance at flipping power in November of 2023. If it does, he said, he’d like to refer to voters amendments to the city charter that would make local elections partisan and place them on even-numbered years. 

“They know that if we had the opportunity to actually have more attention shown to municipal elections, coinciding with when more people are turning out, that they would likely not prevail, to put it politely,” Marcano told Bolts. “They’re relying on low turnout and the disproportionate white, wealthy and conservative voters that turn out for municipal elections.”

The idea, he said, is to meet voters where they’re at. He likened it to designed sidewalks and bike trails.

“You’re going to find the social trails out in the world, and that tells you where the sidewalks should be,” Marcano said. “What we’re seeing from our residents is they want to vote in even years. That’s when they turn out, so it’s our responsibility to allow people to follow the path of least resistance and to be heard when they want to be heard.”

Marcano won his race, in 2019, by 232 votes, or less than 2 percent. The state representative whose district roughly overlaps with his Aurora ward, a Democrat named Iman Jodeh, just won re-election by 28 percentage points.

Those striking numbers aren’t lost on Republican Dustin Zvonek, an Aurora council member who opposes even-numbered and partisan local elections. He said such changes would make municipal politics less personal and more nationalized, and rob city campaigns of the spotlight they presently enjoy during off-cycle elections.

“If you’re just about getting partisan majorities, I understand why you’d want to do this,” he told Bolts. “You can say there are more people that vote overall, so that’s better. But I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.”

Were Aurora to make the moves Marcano seeks, Zvonek added, there is little question that this liberal city with conservative local leaders would elect a more progressive council. “I absolutely believe that,” he said.

The post To Boost Turnout, Some Cities Just Synced Up Their Local Elections With National Cycles appeared first on Bolts.