Tweet

More from @GalvinAlmanza

Emily Galvin-Almanza

@GalvinAlmanza

2 Dec

Good morning. It's Thursday and I want to talk to you about how our punishment system is not just ineffective, but destroying the health of entire communities (and making your healthcare cost more). You in? Cool, let's go.

Incarceration, like socio-economic status, is considered a “Fundamental Social Cause of Health Inequalities” because it is related to multiple disease outcomes, related to multiple risk factors of disease, affects access to resources.

Incarceration destroys health in two ways: directly and indirectly. An example of directly would be that incarceration causes chronic health problems *no longer how long or short a person is locked up* ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Read 36 tweets

Emily Galvin-Almanza

@GalvinAlmanza

29 Aug

So one single narcotics detective has finally been caught testilying, and now hundreds of cases are in question. I want to tell you about my personal experience with this fool, and about how the scale of impact here is much, much bigger than it seems. nytimes.com/2021/04/06/nyr…

I tried a case with this guy involved. My client had to go to trial because he was completely innocent, had no drugs on his person or in his home (where he was arrested, in front of his kids), no money, no scales, no nothing. But charges were still pressed...

They were still pressed because this one undercover--the guy in the NYT story above--insisted he bought drugs from the guy with no drugs. It was the Bronx, and NYT has effectively no speedy trial rule, so this case lingered for OVER A YEAR.

Read 14 tweets

Emily Galvin-Almanza

@GalvinAlmanza

27 Aug

https://twitter.com/BrendonWoodsPD/status/1431326861280399372

You know what would create a massive, system-wide push in juvenile justice, sentencing, restorative justice work, &the criminalization of poverty?

Resourcing public defense equally to prosecution.

Instant impact for people actually ensnared in our legal system.

https://twitter.com/BrendonWoodsPD/status/1431326861280399372

Equal pay ≠ enough. We need staffing, infrastructure, funding for collaborations & community facing initiatives. For policy work informed by real world experience. For training. For technology. For case loads that allow us to have all the time to do all the things clients need.

People in the policy/legislative world often don't realize how hard it is to make great policy actually reach the people it is supposed to reach. That's that's the role of those of us on the ground. And to ensure we can fulfill that role, we need to #FundPublicDefense

Read 21 tweets

Emily Galvin-Almanza

@GalvinAlmanza

24 Jul

@JoshuaBHoe

So, I'm learning a lot from today's #TwitterThon with @JoshuaBHoe asking the President to commute the sentences of the 4,500 people who were safely released--pre-screened--and who have been living without incident at home for over a year. A thread.

I have thought a lot about what this system does to the people in it. After all, I have worked in it--in various roles--for about 10 years. And so when I think of accused people, I don't think of "offenders," but rather of very real people I know well and care about deeply.

So the group of people who we could classify as system users--the accused--are as varied a group as any group of humans. Some have caused harm. Many haven't. Few have caused as much harm as they're accused of. And all are actively being harmed, to extreme degrees, by our system.

Read 17 tweets

Emily Galvin-Almanza

@GalvinAlmanza

24 Jul

@JoshuaBHoe

Good morning everyone. I'm joining @JoshuaBHoe to stage a 24 hour effort calling on @POTUS to #KeepThemHome. You may not know this, but several thousand people were screened to be sent home from prison to weather the pandemic. forbes.com/sites/walterpa…

@POTUS

Now, @POTUS is signaling that they will be sent back--many for years. These are folks who were screened for safety, released, and have had a 99.9% success rate. They have jobs, families, lives. There is zero safety reason to return them to prison. forbes.com/sites/walterpa…

If this seems unfair to you. If this bothers you.If you want to end mass incarceration. If you want kids to be with their parents. If you want families intact. If you want more potential workers in a community. Join us in asking to #KeepThemHome.

Read 28 tweets

Emily Galvin-Almanza

@GalvinAlmanza

19 Jul

@tribelaw

This is an important perspective on the Westfall Act. But it's also much more than that, in the way @tribelaw speaks on the relationship between access to justice and the health of a democracy (indulge me in a super short thread where I relate this back to public defense)

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1417161457427525641

The law is only the law in that it is *perceived* as the law. The way people *experience* our legal structures is, in fact, the way they exist in the real world--and the way most people experience the law is as byzantine, protective of the powerful, oppressive to the powerless.

The subject matter here is the limit of "official duty" and of course we know that Trump stretched that notion harder than he stretches his golf pants, and this resulted in the widespread perception that the law is nothing more than tool of the ruling class.

Read 10 tweets

Share this page!

Emily Galvin-Almanza

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @GalvinAlmanza

Emily Galvin-Almanza

Emily Galvin-Almanza

Emily Galvin-Almanza

Emily Galvin-Almanza

Emily Galvin-Almanza

Emily Galvin-Almanza

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Like this author's thread?