By Jean Trounstine and Christopher Zoukis A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision is a deceptively simple line that should affect, and in many cases, transform the way Americans think about juveniles who kill. At the heart of the 2012 groundbreaking case, Miller v. Alabama, said the Court, is the idea, proven by neuroscience and behavioral
An estimated 44,000 ex-felons in Maryland will have an easier time regaining the right to vote after being released from prison following the end of a heated fight between the state’s governor and its legislature. Without a vote to spare, backers of bills (SB 340, HB 980) to allow ex-felons’ voting privileges to be restored
UK Prime Minister David Cameron has offered a far-reaching proposal for improving what he describes as the “scandalous” failure of the English and Welsh prison system. Calling his plan the biggest overhaul to the national corrections system since the Victorian era, Cameron said he is the first prime minister to speak on the problem in
A little over a year ago, although arrests and reported crimes in Nebraska were continuing a decade-long decline, the state’s corrections system was badly overcrowded (at 159% of capacity, with estimates predicting 170% by 2020), with prisoners coming into the system faster than they were being released. So the state’s new governor, Pete Ricketts (R), and
How do you escape? Many people would say they’d mostly curl up with a good book, and so do we. Books are a way of getting away and seeing things from a new perspective no matter where you are, even more so if you don’t have the opportunity to do so otherwise. This is the
Midway through his first term as governor of California, in 1976 Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. signed into law a strict mandatory sentencing measure. The “determinate” sentencing bill set fixed lengths of time that had to be served before an inmate could be considered for parole. Now, almost 40 years later, Governor Brown has announced
The state of Georgia has earmarked education for prisoners as a top budget priority on two fronts – by enrolling more inmates in GED certificate programs and also by creating new job skills training to help prisoners find work once they are released.
In a January 19 appearance before the Joint Appropriations Committee of the Georgia state legislature, Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, now halfway through his second four-year term, outlined his plans to add almost $5.7 million to the budget in order to expand educational opportunities in the state’s jails and prisons.
A Montgomery, Ala.-based federal appeals court has refused to delay the execution of a state prisoner, even as his lawyers contended his conviction might be invalid in light of a recent Supreme Court decision and argued the execution ought to await the outcome of a lawsuit that could find executions in the state unconstitutionally cruel.
A recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated the way Florida imposes the death penalty, finding that it violates the Sixth Amendment. The action could spark new appeals by many of the nearly 400 prisoners in the state facing death sentences. In its 8-1 decision in Hurst v. Florida, issued earlier this month,
Every week, it seems, we hear a little bit more about the sweeping reforms needed to fix America’s broken criminal justice system. It’s encouraging to hear acknowledgment by U.S. government leaders – President Barack Obama, even – that the ‘lock them up and throw away the key’ mentality has failed not just incarcerated men and