Can you make a gift today and join the Individual donors who are fueling the movement for justice reform?
by Peter Wagner,
October 6, 2014
As we wrote in our brand new annual report, this has been an especially prolific year for the Prison Policy Initiative. For example, in addition to our ongoing campaign work, we were frustrated that major data gaps were holding back the movement for justice reform. So, we stepped up to the plate by creating our first National Incarceration Briefing Series: four ambitious reports (and 50 state incarceration profiles) that reveal the current state of the U.S. carceral crisis.
These publications — funded entirely by individual donor support — were so popular that they overwhelmed our server and sparked more media attention than we could keep track of.
We’re just getting started. We’re primed to start working on a follow up Briefing Series, on top of keeping up the momentum on our major campaigns, but we need your help. Can you take a minute today to propel the movement for justice forward by making a gift to support our work?
Your generous gift will be doubled thanks to a matching challenge sponsored by other donors. Thank you for your partnership in this movement for justice.
A year and a half of hard work has brought a big win for local families.
by Leah Sakala,
October 3, 2014
This week brought great news for families in Santa Barbara County, California: the local jail has decided to end its ban on all incoming letters from families and friends. Previously, people who wanted to write to incarcerated loved ones were only allowed to use postcards.
As our report found, letter bans jeopardize family ties that are key to reducing recidivism, running contrary to correctional best practices (you can also check out our short video for more info on letter bans). Furthermore, a federal court found that banning letters from home was unconstitutional.
We were deeply concerned when we learned of Santa Barbara County’s plans to institute the letter ban a year and a half ago, so we immediately organized a sign on letter with more than 50 local and national organizations urging the county to reconsider. Local community members in Santa Barbara have also been hard at work organizing the Right to Write Campaign to overturn the ban (here’s a powerful video they put together about their work).
Now, Santa Barbara has joined the growing number of counties that have decided that letter bans are a step in the wrong direction. Congratulations to the Right to Write Campaign, sign on letter participants, and everyone else whose hard work brought about this big win for families in Santa Barbara County!
Center for Public Integrity releases first part of a series on web of prison bankers, private vendors, and corrections agencies profiting off families of the incarcerated.
by Bernadette Rabuy,
September 30, 2014
Daniel Wagner and Eleanor Bell of the nonprofit investigative news organization, the Center for Public Integrity, have recently released “Prison bankers cash in on captive customers” and the video Time is Money, part one of a two-part series on the growing web of prison bankers, private vendors, and corrections agencies that profit off the backs of families of the incarcerated.
The Center for Public Integrity’s six-month investigation found plenty of families making necessary sacrifices in order to support and maintain contact with their incarcerated loved one. In order to send money to their incarcerated loved one, family members would sometimes be forced to forego medical care, skip utility bills, and even limit visits with their loved one. Meanwhile, corporations such as JPay, which handles deposits into incarcerated individuals’ accounts, generated well over $50 million in revenue in 2013. Vincent Townsend, president of prison phone company, Pay-Tel Communications, agrees that there’s something wrong with this, telling the Center for Public Integrity, “My industry has abused the public and I’m willing to admit that.” And beyond prison vendors’ profits, there is still the share of profits that gets returned to corrections agencies, often called commissions or kickbacks.
Stay tuned for part two, which will run this Thursday!
by Peter Wagner,
September 29, 2014
We just released our 2013-2014 Prison Policy Initiative Annual Report, which I’m thrilled to say details greater progress on more fronts than ever before. A combination of new and ongoing partnerships has allowed us to win solid victories on our ongoing campaigns, step up to the plate on new issues, and also work on strengthening the reform movement by filling in some major national data gaps.
Here are just a few campaign highlights:
- We made headway towards a national solution to prison gerrymandering, joined with our allies in a lawsuit to protect the voting rights of the citizens of Cranston, RI, supported the new Massachusetts resolution urging the Census Bureau to count incarcerated people at home, and continued to build momentum in state-based campaigns around the country.
- Our research and advocacy urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to protect the families of incarcerated people from the predatory prison and jail phone industry helped to win historic FCC regulation. We’ve continued to generate public support for further reform, including a petition with our partners at SumOfUs that collected 23,585 signatures.
- We expanded our research on overreaching geography-based penalties to release an in-depth report on sentencing enhancement zones in Connecticut, which helped rally support for reform in the state’s legislature.
- We took on additional issues, including releasing the first-ever report to document the problem of driver’s license suspensions for drug offenses unrelated to driving, and helping Massachusetts to become the 21st state to ban practice of unnecessarily shackling women who are giving birth while incarcerated.
Generous individual donors’ support also allowed us to bring in new allies to the criminal justice reform movement and fill major data gaps that had been holding the movement back. For example:
Other highlights from the past year include hiring our new Policy & Communications Associate Bernadette Rabuy and bringing several accomplished new board members on board.
While the most recent national statistics on prison population increases were sobering, our accomplishments over the past year are a testament to the collective strength of the national movement for criminal justice reform. I’m so grateful to the partners and supporters who make our work possible. If you are able to join them in making a tax-deductible contribution to our work, your support will go twice as far thanks to a match commitment from a small group of other donors like you.
Thank you! We can’t wait to see what this coming year will bring!
Ionia County Jail in Michigan to ban letters from home starting today. What a horrible idea.
by Peter Wagner,
September 28, 2014
A draconian new policy in Michigan’s Ionia County Jail that would ban letters from home is scheduled to take effect today. I just got word that my letter to the editor about this appeared in Friday’s Ionia Sentinel-Standard:
Postcard-only jail mail policy should be canceled
Dear Editor,
The Ionia County Jail’s plan to ban letters from home and instead restrict correspondence to postcards should be canceled. [“Postcards only to jail inmates“, Sept 22]
My organization’s report released last year, “Return to Sender: Postcard-only Policies in Jail,” found that banning letters interrupts the reentry process and increases the chances that people will reoffend in the future. Such policies also present a significant burden to the disproportionately low-income families of people in jail.
All major corrections professional associations know that the social science research is clear: Communication between people in jail and their families and communities should be encouraged, not stifled. No state prison bans all letters, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s national standards explicitly prohibit postcard-only mail restrictions in jails that hold their detainees.
Banning letters is not just bad policy. It’s also unconstitutional. In March, a federal judge in Oregon declared a jail mail letter ban unconstitutional and ordered the county to pay $802,000 in legal fees to the publisher who brought the lawsuit.
Ionia County Sheriff’s Department should honor their commitment to public safety by canceling its postcard-only policy before it goes into effect on Sunday and does real damage.
Peter Wagner
Executive Director
Prison Policy Initiative
Governor Brown signs California prison anti-sterilization bill into law.
by Bernadette Rabuy,
September 26, 2014
Yesterday, Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 1135 (Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson), putting an end to sterilization abuse in California prisons. This is a well-earned victory for our friends at Justice Now, whose hard work allowed the bill to pass unanimously out of both the Senate and Assembly.
“This bill not only affects those still inside prisons and the thousands of women who will go through prisons and jails in the near future; but most importantly it protects generations of children to come who otherwise might not have had an opportunity to exist” says Kelli Dillon who was sterilized in her early 20’s while incarcerated at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. Kelli, however, goes on to say “we still need an apology and acknowledgement of what was done to us.” While this bill comes a long way in addressing the abusive and coercive conditions under which sterilizations were happening it is a reminder that work still needs to be done to properly address those who had their ability to have children so callously and egregiously taken away.
We are glad that Governor Brown has taken a step toward reversing California’s shameful legacy of eugenics, and we are hopeful that this bill will support California prisons in more effectively protecting the human rights of the incarcerated.
"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but today we prepare to take the next critical step toward reducing the high price paid by inmates and their families to communicate"
by Aleks Kajstura,
September 26, 2014
Yesterday, Chairman Wheeler and Commissioner Clyburn issued the following joint statement regarding the circulation to their fellow commissioners of proposals for further reform of the inmate calling regime:
The wheels of justice turn slowly, but today we prepare to take the next critical step toward reducing the high price paid by inmates and their families to communicate.
Our recent reforms have reduced interstate long-distance inmate calling rates by nearly 40%, and that is a very positive development. But many families of inmates still face exorbitant rates for in-state calls, not to mention punitive and irrational fees—all of which make the simple act of staying in touch unaffordable.
The Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking we are circulating today proposes a simple, market-based solution to address all these problems. It proposes rules that will ensure that ALL Americans – including inmates and their families – have access to phone service at rates that are just, reasonable and fair. We look forward to working with our colleagues to adopt permanent reform as soon as possible.
Two commissioners circulate a proposal that would extend last year's historic ruling protecting some families from the predatory prison and jail telephone industry.
by Peter Wagner,
September 25, 2014
Federal Communications Commissioner Clyburn and Chairman Wheeler are circulating to their colleagues a new proposal to regulate the prison and jail telephone industry.
There aren’t a lot of details in the Commission’s press release, but it appears the Commissioners want extend their earlier progress to:
- Extend the regulation and price caps on interstate calls to the vast majority of calls home from prisons and jails that are to numbers within the same state.
- Further restrict the industry’s payments that can be made to the facilities as these payments drive up the cost of a call.
- Fully address the ancillary charges for opening, having, funding and closing accounts. Beyond the actual costs of the call, ancillary charges consume an estimated 400 million dollars per year.
The draft isn’t available yet, but when it is, we’ll have a full analysis and be working with our friends to encourage public comment on it. For background, see our phones page.
Martha Wright and her fellow petitioners mine prison phone companies' state-mandated disclosures to submit rate data to the FCC when the companies refuse answer the basic questions themselves.
by Aleks Kajstura,
September 23, 2014
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been seeking information on the interstate rates charged by the prison phone companies, but the companies have been stalling. Now the FCC is considering regulation of intrastate rates as well. Martha Wright and her fellow petitioners don’t expect the companies to cooperate here either, so the petitioners took the task up themselves and submitted the companies’ publicly disclosed rates to the FCC:
While the provided information is not exhaustive, it does illustrate the widely-divergent rates for the three classes of Intrastate ICS calls. The wide range of rates cannot be explained solely by looking at whether a call is local, IntraLATA, or InterLATA. Moreover, since most every ICS call is routed to calling centers outside the originating state, the artificial differences in rates among Local, IntraLATA and InterLATA calls are simply unnecessary. While ICS providers have previously attempted to divert the FCC’s attention from reviewing their tariffed rates, in light of the ICS providers’ past refusal to provide this information, and the fact that these providers went to the extreme measure of obtaining a court order staying the effectiveness of [the FCC’s request for information published in] 47 C.F.R. §64.6060 so that they would not have to provide this information, the ICS providers cannot now argue that the FCC should merely ignore the publically-available information.
The full filing with the attached rates is available in 7 parts on the FCC’s website — take a look at the companies’ disclosures yourself:
Rachel Bloom, Director of Membership and Special Projects, Funders' Committee for Civic Participation , shares her thoughts on her work and why she joined PPI's board.
by Peter Wagner,
September 22, 2014
Next up in our blog series introducing several accomplished new members of the Prison Policy Initiative board: Rachel Bloom. Rachel is Director of Membership and Special Projects at the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation. We are so glad to have her on our team here at PPI.
Why did you decide to join the PPI board?
Rachel Bloom: I have long been an admirer (and colleague of PPI) and have worked with them over the years. I was working on state criminal justice reform for several years at the national office of the ACLU. As I transitioned to a new job I wanted to continue to work on criminal justice reform. Joining the PPI board seemed like the perfect step.
What does your work focus on? And what’s the connection between that work and PPI?
RB: I work at the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation, a philanthropic network for foundations that support civic engagement work. Two of the issues I focus on supporting our membership with are the census and redistricting. I find it fitting that the issues that first introduced me to PPI — felony disfranchisement and prison gerrymandering — are still ones that I work on now 8 years later.
What do you think is most unique about the Prison Policy Initiative and the projects it takes on?
RB: I think that PPI has taken on some very distinct projects that no one else was willing to step up to the plate on. I am so proud of PPI for working on such important issues and moving the needle forward on them.
What’s something that you wish more people knew about the Prison Policy Initiative?
RB: I wish that people understood just how broad of a reach PPI has, how many issues we work on and how impactful we are – especially considering the size of our staff and budget. I was first introduced to PPI while working on felony disfranchisement and prison gerrymandering and thought that was the sum total of PPI, little did I know how wrong I was.
