For a dozen years, Missouri Governor Mike Parson was a rural sheriff whose job was catching and locking up citizens who broke the law. Now, Governor Parsons is the face of a slightly different sort of justice and an example for a nation grappling with a fine line between cracking down on crime and offering second chances through redemption and restoration for victims and offenders alike.

In July, the Alabama parole board voted against releasing 96% of eligible applicants. One of them was Richard Kinder, who amassed a stellar record during his roughly 40 years in prison.

Ohio lawmakers are considering a bill that would end the practice of suspending a person’s driver’s license for non-driving, non-public safety related reasons, such as unpaid parking tickets. Over 60% of the 3 million license suspensions that occur in Ohio each year are for debt-based reasons. Advocates (myself included) emphasize the bill's potential to address the disproportionate impact of license suspensions on those with financial challenges and minor infractions unrelated to dangerous driving.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the state's Clean Slate Act into law this week, making New York the 12th state to enact automatic expungement legislation in recent years. The bill is projected to benefit as many as two million individuals convicted of crimes in New York State.

A Senate resolution introduced by Sen. Marsha Blackburn is threatening to send thousands of individuals who have been living in their communities for three years back to federal prison. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly 13,000 individuals were released from federal prisons to home confinement under the federal CARES Act, and the U.S. Justice Department affirmed this year that this population could remain on home confinement following the expiration of the covered emergency period.

The Denver police have achieved remarkable success in increasing clearance rates of nonfatal shootings following the creation of a dedicated police unit to investigate such cases, known as the Firearm Assault Shoot Team (FAST). This approach has led to the clearance of a significant number of nonfatal shootings, addressing the gap between police resources dedicated to solving shootings that result in homicides versus nonfatal shootings.

After 18 years of struggling with employment due to her criminal record, Vickie Rice learned she was eligible for a pardon in her home state of Pennsylvania at a screening of the documentary ‘Pardon Me’ by the Pardon Project of York County and York County Bar Association. Pardons have quietly become a leading method of criminal justice reform in Pennsylvania, offering hope to millions of individuals with criminal records.

The FBI released its annual crime report this week, which shows that murder rates in the United States dropped by over 6% in 2022. Overall, the data presents a mixed picture for politicians who have sought to make crime a central election issue. 

A North Carolina teenager was hoping to get her life back on track after a state judge ordered a man who sexually abused her to pay her $69,000. Instead, police seized that money through asset forfeiture and the victim was left with nothing.

New data from Minnesota shows that the state has seen a significant decline in asset forfeitures by law enforcement agencies, with a 35% drop over the last five years and a 15% decrease since 2021. This comes after legislation was passed in 2021 to limit police from seizing cash amounts less than $1,500 and making certain vehicle forfeitures without a criminal conviction.

A court case involving language in the nation's most prominent federal bipartisan criminal justice reform will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this fall, and the dispute at hand involves how to interpret the word 'and' in the law. The issue in the case, Pulsifer v. United States, is how to determine ineligibility for the sentencing safety valve—or departure from a mandatory minimum sentence—and whether meeting of any the three criteria is enough to disqualify someone from the safety valve, or if they must meet all three criteria to be ineligible. 

new task force on violent crime met for the first time this month in Louisiana, giving a preview of what many advocates and insiders in the state expect to be a tough-on-crime legislative session next year. Created by legislative resolution, the group has taken aim at reforms passed as a part of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative in 2017, a package of legislative accomplishments advocates point out were focused on diverting nonviolent and low-level drug offenders from prison and not intended to deal with violent crime, which is the task force's main focus. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on prison oversight this week where they questioned Bureau of Prisons Director Collette Peters on whether she's adequately delivering on promises to turn the BOP around and expressed discontent with the timeliness of responses to requests for information. The hearing came amid widespread scrutiny over prison conditions covered in previous Five Things emails, including sexual misconduct by corrections officers at numerous federal facilities, and a desire for change represents an area of strong bipartisan agreement.

his week, a panel of federal appellate judges unanimously ruled officials in Wayne County, Michigan are violating citizens’ 14th Amendment rights by seizing their vehicles for months without an opportunity to contest the seizure. The 6th Circuit ruled that Wayne County must provide car owners a post-seizure court hearing within two weeks.

In the late 80's and early 90's, beltway politicians undertook a radical crackdown on crime that shifted American's perception of the role of prisons and incarceration. The result: exploding prison populations, ever expanding corrections budgets, and voters who lost faith in the system.

This week, the New York Times delved into the once commonly used practice of sentencing youths–some as young as 13-years-old—to life-without-parole sentences in Philadelphia, and some of the individuals subject to those sentences who have earned a second chance. Of the more than 300 child-lifers, all but a dozen have been resentenced.

Most Americans have to drive to get to work, shuffle kids back and forth to school, to buy groceries, and more—and that's especially true in states like Ohio. Yet, a new investigationpublished by The Marshall Project and News 5 Cleveland this week found that more than 200,000 Ohioans have their licenses suspended every year for non-driving related reasons, such as failure to pay a traffic ticket or child support.

The U.S. prison population is rapidly aging, and care for elderly inmates is expensive—costing taxpayers around $70,000 per prisoner annually. Meanwhile, some 50,000 people are serving sentences of life without parole, regardless of the progress they've made towards rehabilitation behind bars.

A federal judge ruled that a common traffic stop technique used by Kansas Highway Patrol unconstitutional last week. U.S. District Court Judge Kathryn Vratil said that the "Kansas two-step" approach, where a state trooper re-approaches a vehicle they have pulled over after the apparent purpose of the stop has been accomplished, is a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on searches and seizures.

The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the recently enacted SAFE-T Act which reforms the state’s pre-trial system this week, finding that Democratic legislators acted properly when they passed the law. As a result of this ruling, the use of cash bail as a condition of pre-trial release will end in Illinois.