Oh brother. OK, so first someone with "Attorney for the State" in their bio asked me for...an example of there being a chasm between what the law allows and what justice would be. Which is a bit surprising to me, so I kinda ignored it. But you guys want it, here we go.

https://twitter.com/XavierA68344818/status/1782030725576876223

The person I'm quoting here informed me that the law is clearly written on paper, and any American can understand it, which...well...I wish that was the case, because then lawyers and courts wouldn't be as necessary (no more statutory interpretation!). BUT...

This article is so good and so thorough and so sad

newrepublic.com/article/176854… It's not just that college graduates bring vital services to a state like medical care and high-end tech work and innovation and development. It's also that it's hard to get valuable businesses to move to a state with horrible schools bc they will struggle to retain talent.

Hey hey hey everyone, it's that time again! Your weekly @PFJ_USA video on something gross about your criminal legal system.

This week: the "Brady" rule, or, why oh why do prosecutors have such a hard time handing over evidence of innocence? So basically, when a person is accused of a crime, the rules of our court system say that prosecutors have to turn over "discovery," which is the evidence they have against the person.

Makes sense, right? If they think someone is guilty, they should be able to show why.

I promised you that every week I would tell you something you don't know (but should) about criminal courts. Today, let's talk about #debt. What follows below are things I have learned from @FinesandFeesJC, @PSARATHYJONES, @JuvLaw1975 as well as deep research through @pfj_usa on this issue.

OK... here we go. Yesterday I did a poll asking if folks would want short video explainers about things. People did, so here you go. Juror restrictions are really racist. Let's talk about it. I want to be really clear, there are 4 levels of problem here

1. Who even gets called to jury duty is influenced by lists of potential jurors being drawn from the DMV and voter rolls, restricting eligible people to people who engage with bureaucracy on this level

OK so…what if I told you that there is a thing that @PFJ_USA and public defenders can do together that gets cases *dismissed*...over 70% of the time. And 87% of the time, this same thing takes jail and prison sentences off the table.

Read on. So, as you probably know if you follow me, the criminal legal system is full of…well, there’s a lot of noise in the machine. A huge number of cases are over-charged, meaning prosecutors laid the heaviest charges they could on a person instead of more accurate allegations.

Many of you saw that video of police facing off with a school principal who wouldn't let them in.

But do you know how bad police encounters are for education? Very. Some facts: In one key study, having an official interaction with police (through an arrest or simply a recorded police contact) decreased the odds of a child graduating from high school by more than 70%.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

So, I know not many people out there are like PELL GRANTS FOR PEOPLE IN PRISON IS MY NUMBER ONE POLITICAL ISSUE.

I know, I know--it's kind of niche. But I think maybe you don't realize the magnitude of what this policy change is going to do. Quick stats: So, once folks in prison are eligible for Pell Grants (starting this summer) employment rates in the states they return post-release are expected to increase by 10%.
vera.org/downloads/publ…

I'm going to bring this up again: broken windows policing, which arrests people for low-level things, takes exactly the wrong message from the "broken windows" idea. They got it really violently backwards. Threadette: In fact, if there is any message to take from the idea of broken windows spurring more misconduct in run-down neighborhoods, it's this: the government should invest more in fixing up people's neighborhoods. Not as altruism. As safety. Want receipts? Read on.

Yesterday, I told @RobertGarcia I'd love to talk about how transit policy can be used to aid in the dismantling of American mass incarceration.

Today, I figured I might as well kick off the conversation here. With a thread. That you all can add to at will :) There are SO MANY WAYS that transit intersects with the punishment system. One of the first things that comes to mind is transit as a locus of arrest.

Let's start small, because the system does: the vast majority of arrests are for low-level crimes. realclearpolitics.com/2022/11/20/its…

Hey yes I am still using twitter to tell people things they might not know about American punishment. Like how we hear about the sudden and traumatic deaths in custody, and the death-penalty cases, but rarely about how incarceration follows people home to kill them slowly there. Being imprisoned makes you sick. People who have had to live in prison have higher rates of hypertension, asthma, stress-related disease, mental health issues, etc. Mariame Kaba calls them "death-making institutions."

Just spent 40 minutes filming cops in Redwood City CA. Let me tell you what I saw. My husband and I were coming home from a workout and saw two young men of color pulled over by San Mateo County Sheriffs.

Phenomenal: new polling shows that a bipartisan majority of votes want a better, smarter criminal legal system. Check out these stats (and I'll thread below)

fwd.us/news/2022-crim… 80% of likely voters support criminal justice reform and 58% of voters would be more likely to vote for a candidate who support criminal justice reform (compared to only 13% who would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supports criminal justice reform)

This weekend, let's think about the fact that Steve Bannon was released w/o bail on allegations of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars while other people all across the country sit in jail for petty shoplifting.

Bail isn't about safety. It's about race, wealth, and power. BTW to be extra clear: release was the *right* call here. But release is also the right call in the vast majority of cases where no release is granted. Where low-income Black and Brown people are separated from their families for unproven allegations of minor misconduct.

OK so full disclosure, I hate cannabis. I don't smoke it, the smell makes me queasy, and my HS boyfriend was always an asshole to me when he was stoned.

IT SHOULD BE FULLY LEGAL AT A FEDERAL LEVEL.

A thread.

thehill.com/homenews/campa… 1st, it's massively popular. The boost @POTUS got from debt relief? Think that but bigger. 60% of Americans think it should be fully legal and another 30% think it should be medically legal between fewer than 10% of people think it should be illegal .tinyurl.com/4rc2nkdm

My mom asked me for a take on the debt relief, which is not my field. However, I'm a millennial, a voter, and a person who works in poverty law, so...here goes. A few thoughts. @jorie_graham here you go. First of all, I'm a person who had astronomical debt and, through a combination of loan forgiveness/repayment assistance and plain payment, paid it off.

So let's start here: I am really, really happy at the thought that others might not have to do that.

Just opened a box from my grandmother's basement and here is a photo labeled "Jack's Photos Of Atom Bomb" and... apparently my great uncle was able to capture this. In Nevada. He died of cancer and we right it was from smoking

Thinking about Sarah Mayeux's Free Justice and how there were like decades where the East Coast legal community was fighting tooth and nail about what a public defender could even be while LA county (and CA) were just over there having a public defender with no drama New York: maybe a defender is like an extra judgey half lawyer? Or like maybe volunteers?

CA: dude we have had this since 1913

Oh good an email from my kid's old dr: they are only giving Pfizer because there's "virtually no difference" btwn the two.

My dudes, if your shots come in on Wednesday, Moderna will have my kid fully vaxxed by the end of July.

Pfizer won't protect my kid until mid September. I am very very conflicted about whether it's worth tagging this medical practice to point out that

1. 3>2
2. School starts in August
3. Kids under 5 lick things ergo every second counts

WTF

Another day in America of adjusting 4yo's mask, dropping her off at school, checking local covid bc no vax for her, opening Twitter, reading about #Uvalde, thinking of kids hiding in each other's blood w/ police *stopping* any rescue, feeling nauseous, logging off, going to work. Even if I close Twitter there's a news alert noting climate change might prove more rapid than anticipated. The war in Ukraine might prevent wheat from reaching people in time to prevent mass starvation. An abortion clinic in Wyoming is set on fire. A new ban in Oklahoma.

When I was little, I was in a shooting. The role of police in #Uvalde is making me think of my mom today, who saved her kid and others. Short thread.

https://twitter.com/nczeitgeist/status/1529785171586727936

In November of 1991, I was 8 years old. With a few other elementary school friends, I was taking a science class my mom had arranged at Van Allen hall, at the University of Iowa. That was the day a 28 year old graduate student entered the building with two guns.