Welcome, Leah Wang!

Welcome to Research Analyst, Leah Wang.

by Jenny Landon, May 19, 2021

We’re excited to introduce Prison Policy Initiative Research Analyst, Leah Wang! Leah holds a M.S in Sustainability Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a B.A in Economics and Environmental Studies from Bowdoin College. Prior to joining the Prison Policy Initiative, Leah was an analyst at the Massachusetts Department of Correction, and has worked in agriculture, local food systems, and outdoor education. Leah has spent several years teaching and working with prison and jail education programs, like Petey Greene and The New Garden Society.

Welcome to the team, Leah!

Welcome, Naila Awan!

Please join us in welcoming Naila Awan, our Director of Advocacy.

by Jenny Landon, April 14, 2021

We are excited to welcome Naila Awan, who will serve as the first-ever Director of Advocacy at the Prison Policy Initiative. Naila is a civil and human rights lawyer with years of experience collaborating with, supporting, and representing Black- and Brown-led grassroots organizations in policy reform and litigation efforts. Prior to joining Prison Policy Initiative, Naila worked for multiple civil rights organizations and served on the legislative staff for Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin.

Most recently, Naila served as Senior Counsel at Dēmos, where her work centered on combating voter suppression and expanding access to the ballot for traditionally marginalized communities. In this role, she led a cross-functional project to end the disenfranchisement people experience when then come into contact with the criminal legal system, testified before Congress, and served as counsel in A. Philip Randolph Institute v. Husted, a U.S. Supreme Court case challenging Ohio’s voter purge practices, and Mays v. LaRose, a class action seeking to expand access to the ballot for voters detained in jail. She also co-authored Enfranchisement for All: The Case for Ending Penal Disenfranchisement in Our Democracy and How to End De Facto Disenfranchisement in the Criminal Justice System.

Naila holds a L.L.M in International Studies from the New York University School of Law, a J.D from the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, and a B.A from Miami University of Ohio.

Welcome, Naila!

Welcome, Mike Wessler!

Please welcome Communications Director, Mike Wessler!

by Jenny Landon, April 2, 2021

We are excited to welcome our new Communications Director Mike Wessler. Mike has more than a decade of experience helping campaigns, political parties, nonprofit organizations and elected officials accomplish their goals through strategic communication. Mike has done communications work at the Massachusetts Office of the State Auditor and the Office of the Montana Governor, as well at the Montana Department of Labor and the Montana Democratic Party. Mike has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Florida State University.

Welcome, Mike!

Calling for ballot access for eligible voters held in Massachusetts jails

Election officials in Massachusetts need to ensure voting access for people in jail.

by Jenny Landon, October 2, 2020

The vast majority of people held in Massachusetts jails maintain the right to vote, but they are often de facto disenfranchised because of a lack of access to voting systems and voter registration.

We’ve joined a coalition of organizations across the state calling on the Secretary of the Commonwealth to secure access to the ballot for people who are eligible to vote but face barriers because they are in jail. You can read the full letter we signed on to here, which outlines in detail the specific barriers faced by people detained or serving sentences in Massachusetts jails.

For a deep-dive into voting eligibility and de facto disenfranchisement in jails across all 50 states, check out our new report Eligible, but excluded: A guide to removing the barriers to jail voting.

Hey Massachusetts state legislature, please pass S.2846!

S.2846 will make phone calls free of cost for incarcerated people and their families in Massachusetts.

by Jenny Landon, September 4, 2020

The Prison Policy Initiative joined a coalition of over 100 organizations, legal service providers, public defenders, social workers, and directly impacted people to sign on to a letter urging the Massachusetts State Legislature to pass S.2846, a bill that would make phone calls free of cost for incarcerated people and their families.

The burden of expensive phone calls overwhelmingly falls on family members, especially on women: in Massachusetts, families pay $24 million per year to stay connected to their incarcerated loved ones, and a national study found that the cost will put one in three families into debt. Black and brown people in Massachusetts are disproportionately criminalized and targeted by police, so expensive phone calls to correctional institutions disproportionately strip money out of the pocketbooks of families of color.

Before the pandemic hit, more than 50 percent of families with an incarcerated loved one struggled to pay for basic housing and food needs. With the economic hardship brought on by COVID-19, it is now urgent that Massachusetts stops subsidizing our exploitative and expensive carceral system with regressive costs that fall on the most impoverished in the state.

In Massachusetts, there are thousands of people held in jails pre-trial because they cannot afford bail, and their phone calls are the most expensive of all incarcerated people in the state. When people can’t get together the funds to get out of jail, exorbitant phone rates only make a difficult time even harder. Not only do people held pre-trial need to coordinate childcare or elder care, make arrangements for missing work, have prescriptions brought to the facility, or simply have someone to talk to while incarcerated, they also have to organize their defense.

People detained pretrial are more likely to plead guilty just to get out of jail, more likely to be convicted, and more likely to get longer sentences. Costly phone calls play a central role in this injustice by limiting how often and how long pretrial detainees can talk to their families and friends in the service of their defense. As a result, pretrial detainees often present a weaker defense than they would have if they had been able to make calls freely. On a systemic level, high phone rates from jails hurt indigent defendants by draining already-scarce resources from public defenders’ offices.

As written in the full letter:

As a result of the work of Black organizers, constituents across the Commonwealth understand that no-cost calls are about keeping families together. People should not be forced to pay for a lifeline, nor the programs offered by the DOC and county facilities. It is unconscionable that in this moment a mother is forced to choose between buying groceries and talking to her incarcerated child or that a child would need to forego hearing his incarcerated mother’s voice when they most need comfort. The Commonwealth must intervene to ensure that corporations can no longer profit from lines of communication that are critical to creating the support networks necessary for success upon reentry. We respectfully ask you to pass S. 2846 this session!

For these reasons and many more, we urge the Massachusetts State Legislature to pass S.2846. Are you in Massachusetts and want to support this bill? Call your representatives and senators!

Welcome, Ginger Jackson-Gleich!

Please welcome Ginger Jackson-Gleich, the new Prison Policy Initiative Policy Counsel!

by Jenny Landon, September 1, 2020

Ginger is joining the Prison Policy Initiative for a year to help advance our campaign to end prison gerrymandering. Ginger has been involved in criminal justice reform for over 15 years and joins us in the interim period between clerkships. As a Harvard Law School student, Ginger interned at the Criminal Law Reform Project of the ACLU, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office. She also represented low-income clients with the Harvard Defenders and the Criminal Justice Institute and served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Welcome, Ginger!

Welcome, Andrea Fenster!

Please welcome Andrea Fenster, who will join us as the Prison Policy Initiative Staff Attorney!

by Jenny Landon, September 1, 2020

We are excited to welcome Andrea Fenster to the Prison Policy Initiative as a Policy Analyst, who will transition to the Staff Attorney role upon admission to the bar. Andrea is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, where she served as a student attorney in the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and a Notes Development Editor for the American Criminal Law Review. Andrea comes to the Prison Policy Initiative with extensive experience in both direct service and impact litigation, and has interned at organizations including the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, Equal Justice Under Law, and the Prison Law Office. Andrea holds a B.A. from American University, and is committed to dismantling mass incarceration.

Welcome, Andrea!

Welcome Tiana Herring!

Please welcome Tiana Herring, our newest Research Associate!

by Jenny Landon, July 22, 2020

We’re super excited to welcome our newest Research Associate, Tiana Herring. Tiana is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she studied Political Science and Contemporary European Studies. For her honors thesis, she conducted research on state laws regarding prison reentry services and their impact on recidivism rates. In the few short months that she has been with us, Tiana has already published How inflation makes your state’s criminal justice system harsher today than it was yesterday and contributed heavily to our Virus Response work. In her spare time, Tiana is into furniture restoration and painting.

Welcome, Tiana!

Why the Senate should pass the Driving for Opportunity Act

Suspending drivers license for unpaid fines and fees creates an unnecessary cycle of punishment and poverty.

by Jenny Landon, July 22, 2020

When someone’s driver’s license is revoked, you might assume that it’s because they committed a serious driving-related offense, like reckless driving, leaving the scene of an accident, or driving while impaired. While that is often the case, a full 40% of license suspensions are for reasons totally unrelated to driving. Most states suspend driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines and fees or for failure to pay child support. (Some states even suspend licenses for littering, burning trash, skipping school, unpaid student loans, and – as we have written about before – drug offenses unrelated to driving).

11 million people have had their licenses suspended because they could not afford to pay court fines and fees. The Driving for Opportunity Act would encourage states to stop suspending driver’s licenses for unpaid fines and fees.

License suspensions create a cycle of punishment:

1. A person loses their license because they can’t afford court fines or fees.
2. The loss of a license makes it harder to get to work to earn the money needed to pay off their debt. Of course, it also makes it harder to take children to school, shop for groceries, get to medical appointments, make court dates, etc.
3. To meet these basic needs, 83% of people with suspended licenses continue to drive. Driving with a suspended license puts them at risk for even greater fines, or even incarceration, which is incredibly expensive for the individual as well as the taxpayer.

Suspending licenses for unpaid court fines and fees punishes people for being poor and traps them in a cycle of debt. Suspension laws disproportionately impact poor communities, communities of color, and communities that have few alternative means of transportation. Research in New Jersey found that while only 16% of the state population is low-income, 50% of the people who have their driver’s licenses suspended are low-income. And more than 40% of drivers lost their jobs after their license was suspended.

The harms of driver’s license suspensions extend beyond the individuals who lose their licenses. Motor vehicle administrators and law enforcement officials themselves have argued that “our limited resources should be focused on dangerous drivers.” Yet thousands of taxpayer dollars are spent punishing safe drivers who simply can’t afford to pay certain fines.

The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators collected data from their members on the hidden costs of suspending driver’s licenses:

• Colorado found that suspending driver’s licenses for offenses unrelated to driving consumed 8,566 hours per year of staff time — the equivalent of four full-time employees.
• Florida estimated that $72,000 a year is spent on paper, envelopes, and postage in order to correspond with people whose licenses were suspended for non-driving reasons.
• Georgia expected that reforming its non-driving suspension laws would save $80,000 a year in postage costs alone.

License suspension also doesn’t work as a means to get people to pay off their debt: The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators evaluated this claim, concluding: “there is no evidence which indicates that suspending a person’s driving privileges for social non-conformance reasons is effective in gaining compliance with the reason for the original non-driving suspension.”

For years, we’ve been successfully campaigning to get states to end the practice of suspending drivers licenses for drug offenses. You can learn more about that work in our report Reinstating Common Sense.

For these reasons and more, we gladly signed on to a letter (written by the Free to Drive Campaign) urging U.S Senate leaders to pass the Driving for Opportunity Act.

4 bills you should know about if you support criminal justice reform in Massachusetts

These four bills relate to decarceration in response to COVID-19, making phone calls from prison and jail free, strengthening visitation, and "raising the age."

by Jenny Landon, July 17, 2020

Uprisings for racial justice across the country have called for a long-overdue reckoning with the ways we police and punish. In Massachusetts, where the Prison Policy Initiative is based, there are a number of reform bills currently being considered (some better than others). In particular, there are four bills pending that relate directly to our current and past work, including decarceration in response to COVID-19, making phone calls from prison and jail free, strengthening visitation, and “raising the age” of juvenile court jurisdiction.

• H.4652: An Act regarding decarceration and COVID-19, which proposes to release people who are held pretrial or who are medically vulnerable to COVID-19. As of July 2020, nine of the ten largest outbreaks of COVID-19 in the country are in prisons and jails, and people in prison are dying from COVID-19 at a rate 3 times higher than the general population. In Massachusetts, thousands of people are held pretrial while legally innocent, and 15% of the prison population is over 55. The state must act now to prevent further tragedy inside our prisons and jails. See our letter of support here.
• S.2846 (previously S.1372): An Act relative to inmate telephone calls, which would make phone calls free for people in prisons and jails. In Massachusetts, phone calls from jail are almost 3 times more expensive than from state prisons, making it difficult for the thousands of pretrial defendants to prepare a successful defense while detained. Meanwhile, prison phone rates continue to strain the pocketbooks of many of our Commonwealth’s poorest residents.For more information, check out our past work on phone justice. See our letter of support here.
• H.2047: An Act to strengthen inmate visitation, which would loosen restrictions on visits, including irrational practices like turning away visitors based on dress code violations that pose no threat to security, refusing visitors solely because of their status as formerly incarcerated, or prohibiting incarcerated people from holding their children. As we have argued before, these unnecessary restrictions actually diminish public safety and punish family members— face-to-face visits with loved ones are shown to reduce recidivism. Incarcerated people who successfully maintain strong bonds with community members are more likely to succeed upon reentry. See our letter of support here.
• H.3420: An Act to promote public safety and better outcomes for young adults, which would shift young adults between the ages of 18-20 into the juvenile system, rather than the adult criminal justice system. Because juvenile courts are more likely to hand down sentences other than incarceration, the passage of this reform bill would reduce the number of people held in jail or prison. Moreover, brain development research shows that people in this age bracket (emerging adults) are still maturing, and are more effectively served by the more rehabilitation-oriented juvenile system. Young people in Massachusetts deserve a chance to develop into full adulthood without the additional trauma of incarceration or the stigma of a public criminal record. See our letter of support here.

Are you in Massachusetts and want to support the passage of these bills? Check out this guide for calling your legislators from the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition.