Oregon passes legislation to rein in racial disparities in criminal law; which state will be next?

Evaluating legislation before it is passed is the best way to avoid harmful racial disparities down the line.

by Leah Sakala, July 9, 2013

Last week Oregon made great strides towards racial justice when Governor Kitzhaber signed SB 463 into law, a bill that enables the legislature to evaluate whether a bill or human service program is likely to lead to increased racial disparities. The bill, sponsored by Senator Chip Shields and Representative Gallegos, passed both chambers with overwhelming bipartisan support.

This law gives legislators the tools they need to be able to avoid passing legislation that unintentionally increases racial inequality. It has two different provisions:

• Any two legislators, as long as they are from different parties, can ask the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission to evaluate proposed legislation or ballot measures and issue a statement on the expected impact on racial disparities. For ballot measures, the statement must also be printed in voter information pamphlets.
• State agencies awarding grants for juvenile court or child welfare services must require grant applicants to include racial impact statements in their applications.

This bill is designed to foster informed criminal justice policymaking. Preparing racial impact statements for proposed legislation means that policymakers and voters can consider the larger impact of a bill before it is passed, rather than discovering any racially disparate consequences only after the damage has been done.

Prospective evaluations of racial impact are especially critical in the criminal justice context. The U.S. prison system is infamous for perpetuating fundamental racial inequalities. Nationally, Black people are incarcerated nearly six times as much as White people are, and Latinos are incarcerated nearly three times as much as Whites:

The racial disparities on the state level, too, are stark. In Oregon, for example, Black people make up 1.6% of the total population but more than 9% of the prison population. Latinos are 9% of the total population, but more than 13% of the prison population.

It’s impossible pinpoint a single reason for such stark racial inequality, but social scientists generally point to a complex combination of social disparities, policy decisions and systemic biases. Racial impact statements are a preventative measure to ensure that at least one critical factor in that equation — policy decisions — doesn’t unintentionally make things worse.

Not only are racial impact statement policies good for racial justice, but ensuring that bills are likely to do only what they are intended to do is just plain smart government policy. As SB 463 sponsor Rep. Gallegos said, “racial and ethnic disparities suggest that we are using state resources inefficiently and ineffectively.”

Bills like Oregon’s help policymakers:

• Ensure that legislation is narrowly targeted to have its intended effect.
• Consider the full impact of a measure before it is enacted.
• Avoid the expensive and time-consuming process of adapting existing legislation after the fact to remove unintended harm.
• Reduce the chances that new criminal justice policy in Oregon will increase the state’s significant racial disparities in the incarcerated population.

Oregon’s new law makes good common sense, but Oregon is only the third state to pass racial impact legislation, following on the heels of Iowa and Connecticut. It’s time for the rest of the states to join them.

We’ve been working on a comprehensive research review in order to help more states adopt similar racial impact statement policies. We aim to make two main contributions to the discourse on these useful policy tools:

1. Racial impact statements fit entirely within a long and respected tradition of legislators requesting experts to evaluate proposed legislation for unforeseen impacts. It’s very common, for example, for legislators to ask for information on how a proposed bill is likely to affect the budget or the environment. Our movement needs to properly situate racial impact statements in the broader arsenal of smart and common policymaking practices.
2. We should use the data we already have to make racial impact statements as useful as possible. Beyond the three states with racial impact legislation, a number of other states routinely request similar racial impact evaluations as part of the legislative process. Each state’s procedure is different, from the conditions that have to be met before a request can be made, to the nature of the information requested, to the time allocated for the request to be fulfilled. By doing a comprehensive review of current racial impact measures and how they are used, we can suggest best practices that will make similar legislation in other additional states as effective as possible.

The criminal justice system is at a crossroads right now, and evaluating legislation before it is passed is the best way to avoid harmful racial disparities down the line. By establishing that racial impact statements are a common-sense tool for rational policymaking, and giving lawmakers some clear best practice guidelines, we can pave the way for more states to follow Oregon’s lead.

But we need financial support to bring this project forward.

If you can support this research project to help bring racial justice to criminal justice in more states, or know of anyone who can, please get in touch.

And congratulations to Oregon!

Were your headphones made in prison?

A new Forbes piece explores the international market for products made in prison, citing to our publication "The Prison Index."

by Leah Sakala, June 29, 2013

It’s really exciting to see our work being used in creative and compelling ways. For example:

A new Forbes piece reveals that major international corporations are buying products, such as in-flight airline headphones, manufactured in inhumane Chinese work prisons.

While most people would rightly conclude that profiting from abusive forced labor is unconscionable, the author points out that this might also be a good time for some self-reflection. U.S. consumers regularly buy products from private U.S. corporations that capitalize on prison labor, and there’s a frightening push in this country to cut costs by replacing public sector jobs with work crews of incarcerated people. Citing to the “Prison Labor” section of our publication, The Prison Index, the author warns:

It’s not clear… whether U.S. citizens would feel comfortable using products that were made by prisoners making $0.13 cents per hour. But if U.S. citizens for some reason do become comfortable with it, there are plenty of companies and prison administrators worldwide who would be happy to oblige them.

We released the The Prison Index over ten years ago in order to give a broad overview of the criminal justice system by compiling reliable data on a wide array of criminal justice topics. We anticipated that it would have a shelf life of about two years, but, lo and behold, we’re thrilled that it’s still regularly cited by journalists, activists, and policymakers more than a decade later.

We’re working on raising the funds we need to update and expand The Prison Index. But in the meantime, check it out!

The Death Penalty: 60 Years After the Rosenbergs’ Execution

At sundown 60 years ago today, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were wrongfully executed by the U.S. Government. What have we learned since?

by Leah Sakala, June 19, 2013

At sundown 60 years ago today, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were wrongfully executed by the U.S. Government after courts found them guilty of espionage. Now, six decades later, we know that their execution was a direct result of the mass hysteria about the dangers of communism at the beginning of the Cold War.

But what have we learned in the six decades since the Rosenbergs’s wrongful execution? Thanks to the tireless work of organizations like the Innocence Project and pro bono law clinics, the list of innocent people who have been exonerated from death row is steadily growing.

But, as the below graph shows, the struggle to abolish the death penalty still has a long ways to go:

Mass. Legislature should pass Innocence Commission bill

We just submitted a letter in support of Bill H. 1638, “An Act to establish the Massachusetts innocence commission.”

by Leah Sakala, June 18, 2013

We just submitted a letter to the Massachusetts Joint Committee on the Judiciary in support of Bill H. 1638, “An Act to establish the Massachusetts innocence commission.”

We wrote:

The experience of incarceration has a profound and lasting negative impact on any person’s life. Passing H. 1638 would be an important step to ensure that innocent people are kept out of the Massachusetts justice system. Furthermore, conviction errors not only destroy lives, but they also waste precious tax dollars that should instead be used to invest in the future by keeping communities safe and healthy.

There is no question that the criminal justice system will make mistakes. The question is whether Massachusetts will put in place a system to ensure that we learn from those mistakes and make wrongful convictions less likely in the future.

Want to get involved? The Massachusetts Conference of United Church of Christ Innocence Commission Task Team is doing great organizing to support this important bill.

The Phone Corporations That Ruined Fathers Day

On Sunday, some families had to choose between wishing dad a Happy Father’s Day on the telephone and putting food on the table.

by Peter Wagner, June 18, 2013

On Sunday, some families had to choose between wishing dad a Happy Father’s Day on the telephone and putting food on the table. These days, most telephone calls are practically free, but for the 2.7 million kids in the United States who have an incarcerated parent, a call home can break the bank.

Most prisons and jails give their telephone contract to a single company that charges up to $17 for a 15 minute call. Phone bills are high in part because the prisons and jails demand that the phone companies kick back up to 84% of the revenue to the facility, and in part because the Federal Communications Commission has stalled on regulating the industry for more than a decade.

Securus agrees that it’s ripping customers off via outrageous prison phone fees

But will they take their own advice and stop charging customers to get their own money back?

by Leah Sakala, June 11, 2013

Yet another phone company is recognizing the broken nature of the prison phone industry, and this time it’s a big one.

In a letter filed yesterday with the FCC, the second-largest phone company in the prison phone industry, Securus, has agreed that, “certain practices, which serve to artificially inflate the cost of prison phone calls, are egregious and should be eliminated.”

Which practices? For example, Securus writes, charging customers extra fees to refund their money is “restrictive and unwarranted.”

The fact that Securus officials are speaking out against exploitative industry practices is great news. But will they take their own advice and stop charging customers $4.95 just to get their own money back? Only time will tell.

Unlocking the FCC data at Hack for Western Mass

A team of civic-minded hackers in Western Massachusetts have built a tool to make it easier to access documents about the FCC proceeding on regulating the prison telephone industry.

by Peter Wagner, June 3, 2013

Challenge representative Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative explaining how the FCC organizes data by separate “proceedings”. (Photo: Stephen Brewer)

Sondra Morin, Gyepi Sam, and Al Nutile exploring the name space of the FCC’s database structure. (Photo: Stephen Brewer)

Al Nutile (center) sharing an idea with Gyepi Sam (left) and Peter Wagner (right). (Photo: Stephen Brewer)

John Tobey and daughter weigh in on the database structure. (Photo: Stephen Brewer)

Jake Mitchell reviewing the project plan. (Photo: Stephen Brewer)

The team listening to the ideas of Aaron Smith (rear, left) about his discoveries on how the FCC was organizing their data. (Photo: Molly McLeod)

Gyepi Sam explains the team’s code to the Hack for Western Mass group. (Photo: Molly McLeod)

A team of civic-minded hackers in Western Massachusetts have built a tool to make it easier for advocates, policymakers and journalists to access documents and weigh in on telecommunications debates currently before the Federal Communications Commission.

Critical debates about telecommunications policy are archived in plain sight on the FCC’s website, but they are organized in a way that’s extremely difficult to use. Focusing on just one issue currently before the FCC — the possible creation of price caps to reduce the $1/minute cost of phone calls from prisons and jails — the team created an alternative interface for the FCC’s data. This dataset was particularly challenging because it includes the comments of about 100,000 people in approximately 7,000 pdf files, and the content ranged from well-formatted pdf files to bad scans of handwritten letters from incarcerated people.

On the first morning of Hack for Western Mass, I made a short pitch about the prison phone industry and the need to make the data more accessible. A team was formed to make this data searchable and to add some basic tag support so that journalists and others could more easily find relevant filings.

The software written by the team scrapes the FCC website for new comments, downloads the pdf files, extracts or OCRs any text, and stores that text in a database so that it can be searched. When someone finds a document of interest we then link back to the original PDF on the FCC’s website.

Our software also imports all of the meta data currently available on the FCC website (submitter, date, address etc.) and contains a tagging system so that documents can have metadata added that is useful to the people interested in a specific proceeding. For example, the FCC scans in all letters that come in to proceeding in batches and labels them all with the author “numerous”. To fix this, our system allows users to manually tag each page with two pieces of meta data: the state of origin and one of a number of different content types: whether the document or page is from telephone companies, correctional system administrators, state regulators, incarcerated people or the people who aren’t incarcerated and have to pay the high rates required by the monopolistic contracts. With these tags, users can search for keywords and filter by the existing tags. In this way, a journalist or a member of Congress could quickly find the comments of people from their particular area.

Current progress

The basic structure of the site and tool is done, but the data is still being processed. The scraper was written in Python, and a series of Python scripts then convert PDFs to the portable network map format, clean the images using OnPaper, and perform the optical character recognition using GOCR. Rails manages the database and ActiveAdmin GEM provides an interface to manage content for authenticated users. Solr is setup as well for fast search results. The scripts to download and process PDFs from the FCC website work, and thousands of documents are currently being processed. Tagging has already begun in a spreadsheet, and when the data is fully imported, we’ll set it up to add new FCC entries nightly and we’ll make an interface so that the tagging can be crowdsourced.

Future work and adaptability of the code

This project was conceived to empower people concerned about prison telephone regulation to have better access to this data. But it could be readily adapted to other issues of concern at the FCC. (And could, perhaps, inspire some improvements in how the FCC manages and publishes public comments.)

One idea we didn’t get to — and can’t until the text importation is complete — is to use our database of the text of the filings to perform various kinds of statistical analyses about who is making which arguments.

A final website with the data will be unveiled soon after the data processing is complete. The team’s code is available now on Github.

Many thanks to this weekend’s team:

• Jennie D’Ambroise
• Sam Duncan
• Jonathan Hills
• Jake Mitchell
• Sondra Morin
• Alfred Nutile
• Gyepi Sam
• Aaron Smith
• John Tobey

Stay tuned for the public launch of the FCC tool!

Thoughts on processing fees in the jail telephone industry

Some additional observations about prison phone fees, based on discussions we had with the phone companies after the report’s release.

by Peter Wagner, May 29, 2013

In our report, Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates, and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry, we catalog the many fees customers pay at every step of the way, including fees for making deposits, keeping accounts open, and getting refunds. Our report puts these fees in a larger context, and discussions we’ve had since the report’s release lead us to some additional observations about fees. In our report, we wrote:

To be sure, businesses in many industries incur some processing costs by accepting credit or debit cards in person, via the internet, or over the telephone.⁶⁵ Businesses usually respond by setting minimum purchase levels for a take out food order, charging a slightly higher rate per gallon of gasoline, or by simply writing it off as the cost of doing business. But this section of the report suggests that prison telephone companies may be approaching the question from the other end: providing telephone services in order to make money by charging extra fees. Indeed, because the commission system reduces the potential for corporate profit from the telephone calls, fees that should be no more than supplemental income are turned into a central source of profit.

Our report leads two phone companies to clarify & improve policies

As a result of the report, at least two companies, Turnkey and NCIC, made several clarifications and improvements to their fee policies.

by Peter Wagner, May 28, 2013

Several phone companies have been keeping busy in the couple of weeks since we released our new report exposing the hidden fees in the prison phone industry, mostly for the better.

I’m proud to report that, as a result of the report, at least two companies, Turnkey and NCIC, made several clarifications and improvements to their fee policies:

Massachusetts residents say NO to prison visitor dog sniffing policy

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security claim that “the department has received no public feedback about the plan” to begin using dog sniff searches to screen prison visitors is, at best, incorrect

by Leah Sakala, May 23, 2013

We were concerned as soon as we heard about the Massachusetts Department of Corrections’ plans to start using dogs to screen families and friends visiting loved ones in prison. After all, encouraging in-person visits is key to allowing incarcerated people to maintain the family and community ties that are central to success after release. Using dogs to search family members, friends, clergy, volunteers, and other visitors is deeply invasive and degrading, and can turn essential family visits into potentially traumatizing experiences.

We (along with many other concerned Massachusetts residents) told the Department of Corrections, the Executive Secretary of Public Safety, and the Governor’s Office that the dog sniffing policy is a terrible idea. And on April 10th, the Boston Globe Editorial Board warned the Department of Corrections about the grave consequences the policy could have.

So, we were very surprised to read in a recent Valley Advocate article that Terrel Harris, spokesman for the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, claims that “the department has received no public feedback about the plan.” It’s clear that this statement is, at best, incorrect, as we’ve clarified in a Letter to the Editor printed in this week’s issue.

The message is being sent loud and clear: the public knows that this policy will unnecessarily deter family visits and thereby make it harder for people released from custody to successfully rejoin their communities. The dog sniffing policy has already been put on hold; it should be canceled outright.