All States

At a jail in San Francisco, architects, academics, designers, and incarcerated men work together to design spaces that match the tenets of restorative justice. A class on space design was led by Oakland-based architect/designer Deanna VanBuren and academic Barb Toews as part of a four-day workshop on restorative justice. The workshop was composed of 18 men, most charged with violent crimes, who agreed to participate in a program called “Resolve to Stop the Violence,” which emphasizes restorative justice, focused on healing victims and offenders alike, as an alternative to the traditional criminal punishment model.

A recent national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that there are stark racial differences in reactions to the Aug 9 shooting of unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. In fact, blacks were found to be twice as likely as whites to say the shooting “raises important issues about race that need to be discussed.” The survey also asked questions regarding the response of the police in the aftermath of the shooting, which revealed that 65% of blacks thought the police response to the shooting aftermath “has gone too far” compared to only 33% of whites. The racial divide continued in individual’s response to their confidence in the police investigations of the shooting: 52% of whites say they have “great deal/fair amount” of confidence in the investigations compared to 18% of blacks (76% of blacks described their confidence as “not too much/none at all”). The national survey was conducted by telephone interview Aug 14-17, 2014 among 1000 adults.

According to an infographic by The Public Administration, in most states, more money is spent on incarceration and corrections than on higher education. In fact, as the chart displays, it costs the state of New Jersey more money to incarcerate someone for a year than to fund a student’s tuition at Princeton. One year at Princeton University: $37,000. One year at a New Jersey state prison: $44,000. The chart also shows that, compared to the rest of the world, the United States ranks sixth in terms of degree attainment but first in rate of incarceration. Out of all the states, California has the highest population, the most students in college, and the most people in prison; if it emptied its prisons today and sent every person incarcerated to a college or university, it would save almost $7 billion a year.

On Wednesday July 16th, 2014 California’s death penalty system was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney declared the system arbitrary and in violation of the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Read Carney’s official ruling of Jones vs. Chappell at http://www.scribd.com/doc/234138113/Jones-vs-Chappell.

In an Open Letter to the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), UC Berkeley researcher Christopher Petrella asks the CCA to stop citing the 2013 Temple Study; a study which is not only misleading and inaccurate, but was also commissioned and funded by the CCA and two other for-profit private prison companies.