Rina Palta's blog

Photo by Callie Shanafelt

On October 14 young men from rival Richmond neighborhoods showed up unexpectedly at the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS) at Richmond City Hall. They got into a fistfight that ended after one young man’s nose was broken.

This past week media coverage of the incident dubbed it a “bloody gang fight“ and focused on the fact that ONS staff weren’t telling the police department who was involved.

Valley State Prison for Women could be on the chopping block.

Texas recently made the headlines for doing something it has never done since gaining statehood in 1845: it closed a prison. Now, it seems California could follow suit.

Mike Kline

Anticipating a protest during the commute hours Thursday evening, BART Police took the unprecedented step of shutting down cellular service at the Civic Center Station. For unknown reasons, the protest–an planned action reportedly in response to the shooting death of San Francisco’s Charles Hill–never ended up happening.

Jeanne Woodford started at San Quentin State Prison as a correctional officer in 1978, weeks after graduating from college. She rose through the ranks, eventually becoming warden of the prison, and director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. She returned to the Bay Area in 2006 to work as Chief of Adult Probation in San Francisco, and says she left the public sector because she was tired of managing shrinking budgets and ready to work on reforming the system.

Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, worked in and around the criminal justice system for years–clerking for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman, and leading the ACLU of Northern California’s Racial Justice Project. Last year, she published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which has become the Bible of a social movement devoted to reducing the nation’s reliance on prisons, jails, and the criminal justice system in general.

A fascinating post over at Discover reflects on a movement called “legal realism“–a mode of thinking that “holds that the law, being a human concoction, is subject to the same foibles, biases and imperfections that affect everything humans do.” Example: judges, the arbiters of reason in the judicial system, are not above the influence of mood swings, fatigue, and as this graph suggests, hunger.

Photo by Ali WInston

A piece of proposed legislation at the California State Assembly’s Public Safety Committee today would expand the list of crimes that can be charged as “gang-related” in California. Currently, 33 offenses can result in extra punishments if they’re found to be gang-related, including homicide, arson, selling drugs, looting, car-jacking, carrying a concealed firearm, and fraud. The new bill, AB 918, would add pimping, pandering and human trafficking to the list.

DEA

About 9,000 inmates in California prison are there on charges of “simple possession” of an illegal drug. And according to a new poll, commissioned by the ACLU of Northern California, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, the NAACP, and the Drug Policy Alliance, most Californians don’t think they should be there.

John Burnett’s recent Morning Edition piece covered some Texas towns’ disillusionment with private prisons and jails. Texas has more privately run correctional facilities than any other state.