After nine months of extensive, unprecedented analysis of Michigan's county jail populations, a specially formed task force has delivered 18 recommendations to the Legislature designed to improve state policies and curb rising jail incarceration rates.
 The bipartisan task force's work reflects concerns in Michigan about the impact of a growing jail population, which has occurred even amid big drops in the state's total crime rate (see line graph).
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The State and Local Legal Center’s (SLLC) Supreme Court amicus brief in Lomax v. Ortiz-Marquez argues that a dismissal without prejudice for failure to state a claim counts as a strike under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). Less technically, the SLLC brief is aimed at decreasing meritless prisoner litigation...
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A new working group in Iowa will look for ways to reduce recidivism among former offenders and eliminate racial bias from the state’s criminal justice system.
Gov. Kim Reynolds asked the group, chaired by Lt. Gov. Adam Gregg — a former state public defender — to deliver recommendations by December, to inform several proposals she will submit to legislators when they reconvene in January.
The racial disparity in Iowa’s criminal justice system is indicated by Bureau of Justice Statistics and census data from 2017 — black Iowans are incarcerated at a rate 9.5 times higher than white Iowans, which is tied with Nebraska for the second highest rate in the Midwest. Both states trail Wisconsin (11.7), and are just ahead of Minnesota (9.2) and Illinois (8.2).
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Wisconsin remains on a path to dramatically overhaul its juvenile justice system, but to get to the finish line, the state may need to find more money than originally expected.
AB 953, a bipartisan bill passed in 2018, aims to keep most young offenders in smaller, regional facilities, rather than locked up in a larger, faraway youth prison in northern Wisconsin. That goal aligns with research on how to best rehabilitate young people, says Mary Jo Meyers, director of the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services.
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Chapter 9 of The Book of the States 2019 contains the following tables:
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Three years ago, with their passage of SB 367, Kansas legislators remade the state's juvenile justice system.
A correctional facility for juveniles would soon close, the state would rely much less on “group homes” to house low-level offenders, and several alternatives to incarceration would be introduced into the system.
The result: Between 2015 and 2018, the monthly average of Kansas’ juvenile custody population dropped by 63 percent.
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Prison overcrowding is one of the most persistent and confounding problems facing state criminal justice systems, and the issue is especially pertinent in the Midwest — home to three of the nation’s five most overcrowded prison systems. ...
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Bail, in its most ideal form, serves two purposes. First, it maintains the American ideal of innocent until proven guilty by allowing suspects to continue their daily lives as normally as possible while they await further court actions. Second, it incentivizes the...
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The Michigan Legislature has codified the use of an objective, evidence-based scoring system that determines a prisoner’s probability of parole success. Under ...
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Following Nebraska’s first execution of a death-row inmate in 21 years, some legislators are calling for statutory revisions that would change who witnesses the death and what they are able to see. “If the state is going to do something as serious as taking a person’s life, we need to be transparent,” Nebraska Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks says.
Carey Dean Moore was put to death on Aug. 14 for the murder of two cabdrivers nearly 40 years ago. He died by lethal injection, the first time that Nebraska used this method of execution. (In 2008, the state Supreme Court ruled electrocution to be unconstitutional.) The four-drug combination used by Nebraska had never been used by any other state: a sedative, an opioid pain killer (fentanyl) and a paralyzing drug, followed by potassium chloride, a drug that causes heart failure.
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