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Flint Kids Have So Much Lead in Their Blood That the Mayor Declared a State of Emergency. Thanks GOP.

by TeresaBirtles Posted on December 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Children in Flint, Michigan, have such high levels of lead in their blood that Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency on Monday, calling the situation a “manmade disaster.” The origins of the escalating situation in Flint go back to 2011, when Republican Gov. Rick Snyder appointed an emergency financial manager to balance Flint’s budget—largely by cutting costs on basic public services. Here’s what you need to know:


America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead


Is There Lead In Your House?


An Interview With Pioneering Toxicologist Howard Mielke


How Dangerous Is the Lead in Bullets?


Does Lead Paint Produce More Crime Too?


How Your Water Company May Be Poisoning Your Kids

More MoJo coverage of the dangers of lead.

What’s going on?

In April of 2014, Flint switched its water source from Detroit to the Flint River in an effort to save money. The decision, made by emergency manager Darnell Earley, was met with skepticism: Residents complained that the water was smelly and cloudy. Water tests have since shown high levels of lead, copper, and other bacteria, including E. coli. (GM started hauling in water to its remaining Flint plant last year after noticing that the Flint water was corroding engines.)

According to the Hurley Medical Center study below, the proportion of kids under five with elevated levels of lead in their blood has doubled since the switch to Flint River water, to roughly four percent. In some areas, that number has leapt up to more than six percent. “This damage to children is irreversible and can cause effects to a child’s IQ, which will result in learning disabilities and the need for special education and mental health services and an increase in the juvenile justice system,” wrote Weaver in the state of emergency declaration. In October, the city transitioned back to the Detroit water system, though lead levels still remain higher than the federal action level.

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Pediatric Lead Exposure Flint Water (PDF)

Pediatric Lead Exposure Flint Water (Text)

Why are the lead levels so high in Flint?

Flint, the birthplace of General Motors and once a prosperous city, has been in a state of decline for decades. The population has halved since its peak in the 1960’s and 70’s; by 2013, the city had lost roughly three quarters of its property tax base and suffered from a 16 percent unemployment rate. The problem has been met with austerity: Under a controversial law passed by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, who has been criticized for close ties with the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the state can now appoint emergency managers with the ability to override local policies and make sweeping decisions in the name of “fiscal responsibility”—a policy that stripped half of the state’s black residents of their voting rights.

Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley implemented steep budget cuts, including last year’s decision to save money by changing the city’s water source. In March, Earley nixed a city council vote to “do all things necessary” to switch back to the Detroit system in March, calling the decision “incomprehensible.” He stepped down the next month. The series of events has led to litigation: In November, Flint residents filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that the contaminated water caused them to experience myriad health conditions, including skin lesions, hair loss, depression, vision loss, and memory loss. The same month, the ACLU and Natural Resources Defense Council sued the city, governor, and public officials, claiming that public officials have known for years that drinking Flint River water could result in contamination problems. Michael Steinberg, legal director for the ACLU of Michigan, said, “In their short-sighted effort to save a buck, the leaders who were supposed to be protecting Flints’s citizens instead left them exposed to dangerously high levels of lead contamination.”

How are residents getting by?

Those who can afford it are buying bottled water, but Flint is one of the poorest cities in the nation—41 percent of residents live in poverty. Many still use city water for bathing and cooking.

What are the effects of lead poisoning?

It’s easy to diagnose someone with high lead levels—it simply takes the prick of a finger and a blood test. The symptoms manifest slowly, often years later. According to the World Health Organization, “Lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioural changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behaviour, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anaemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioural effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.”

What are state officials doing?

A pipeline connecting Flint and other central Michigan counties with Lake Huron is in the works and scheduled to be completed by late 2016. In the meantime, according to a recent Washington Post article, the state has offered more than $10 million to pay for the temporary switch back to the Detroit water system, in addition to covering the costs of water testing and water filters.

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Flint Kids Have So Much Lead in Their Blood That the Mayor Declared a State of Emergency. Thanks GOP.

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Company at Center of “Debtors’ Prison” Case Accused of Racketeering

by GabrielLancaste Posted on March 20, 2015

Mother Jones

Judicial Correction Services (JCS), the for-profit probation company at the center of the recently settled Georgia “debtors’ prison” suit, is now being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for violating federal racketeering laws in Clanton, Alabama.

In the federal lawsuit, SPLC accuses JCS and its Clanton manager Steven Raymond of violating the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, by threatening jail time for probationers who failed to pay their misdemeanor fines and probationer fees in a timely fashion. This, the group argues, is plain and simple extortion.

The suit also goes after the current contract between Clanton and JCS, alleging that their relationship violates Alabama law, which forbids city courts from charging individuals extra money for being on probation. Since 2009, Clanton has contracted with JCS to manage its pay-only probationers (individuals who are only on probation because they can’t pay their court fines upfront); however, the courts pay nothing for the for-profit company’s services. Rather, JCS makes money off of the additional fees it forces upon probationers. For example, JCS charges probationers a $10 “set up” fee and then an additional $40 a month for the privilege of having their money collected.

This system has been likened to now-illegal debtors’ prisons, and has raised questions about how misdemeanor courts are relying on small level crimes to bring in funds.

“We’ve seen over the past few decades local governments and state governments have turned increasingly to the criminal justice system to fund themselves where budgets have been cut for courts and jails,” ACLU attorney Nusrat Choudhury told to me.

Choudhury and the ACLU recently settled with DeKalb county in a case that also named JCS as a defendant. Filed on behalf of Kevin Thompson, a Georgia teen who was jailed for five days after failing to pay JCS fines and fees that originated from a traffic violation, the lawsuit argued that Thompson’s treatment violated the 14th Amendment. The judge never conducted an indigency hearing to determine whether the teen was able to pay his court fines and fees, and rather assumed his lack of payment was purposeful.

Chris Albin-Lackey, a Human Rights Watch researchers and author of a 2014 report entitled Profiting from Probation, explained to me that for a long time injustices within the misdemeanor courts have flown under the radar as our “national obsession with the criminal justice system” has been laser focused on felony courts and prisons.

But Albin-Lackey and other human rights advocates are hopeful that this will soon change as lower level courts come under increased scrutiny. Last week, Georgia’s House of Representatives passed a probation reform bill that aims to rein in some of the more egregious practices occurring within the state’s for-profit probation system. If it is approved by the Senate, it is expected to become model legislation that other states, such as Alabama, can turn to for guidance. Additionally, the ACLU settlement surrounding the Thompson case came with a number of reform measures, including a “bench card,” which reminds judges of their ability to sentence people to community service instead of jail time, and instructions on how to protect a probationer’s right to counsel.

And earlier this month the Department of Justice released a scathing report on the discriminatory practices utilized by the Ferguson, Missouri police force—specifically when it came to ticketing and raking in funds for petty fines. The news led to the resignation of two police officers, the city’s top court clerk, the city manager, and the Ferguson Police Department chief.

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Company at Center of “Debtors’ Prison” Case Accused of Racketeering

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Government Cancels Contract With Prison That Inmates Set on Fire

by CoySparkes Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Willacy County Correctional Center, the privately run Texas prison that inmates set on fire last month to protest inadequate health care, will no longer hold federal prisoners. The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has canceled its contract with the facility, it announced Monday.

According to a spokesman for Management & Training Corp., the company that owns the prison, the government just doesn’t need the space at Willacy anymore, thanks to a falling federal inmate population. But the contract cancelation follows years of complaints from prisoners about overflowing sewage in the tents where they slept, excessive use of solitary confinement, and medical staff who prescribed Tylenol for every ailment. The February protest was at least the second inmate uprising in two years.

“This prison has been a horror ever since it opened in 2006,” said Carl Takei, an ACLU lawyer who visited Willacy and wrote a report last year about the grim conditions there. “This is a measure of much-needed accountability.”

All 2,800 of Willacy’s inmates were moved out of the prison immediately after last month’s uprising, which left parts of the facility uninhabitable. Officials had expected to reopen the prison within six months.

The Bureau of Prisons isn’t the first federal agency to pull out of Willacy. Until 2011, the prison held people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But after reports of guard-on-inmate sexual violence and maggots in the food, ICE relocated its detainees, and Management & Training Corp. signed a contract with BOP instead.

Takei said the ACLU is concerned that instead of shutting down, Willacy will be able to secure yet another federal contract. MTC told a local newspaper that it’s working on exactly that.

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Government Cancels Contract With Prison That Inmates Set on Fire

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There Are Several Thousand Secret Photos of America’s Horrific Torture Program. Should Obama Release Them?

by xo1be9 Posted on December 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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“Sideburnz” posted this photo on an amateur porn site in 2005. Caption: “Cooked Iraqi.” NowThatsFuckedUp.com

You may recall, from the dark days of Abu Ghraib, that there was a batch of photos that was never released—images the Pentagon deemed so inflammatory that they needed to stay under wraps. The ones we saw were disturbing enough: the piles of naked Iraqi prisoners, the soldier giving a thumbs up next to an ice-packed corpse, the prisoners being menaced by dogs. And who can forget that iconic shot of a hooded man (his name is Ali Shalil Qaissi), standing on a box in a shower with wires attached to his fingers—a mock execution. There are as many as 2,100 additional images, according to the ACLU, which sued the government in 2004 demanding their release. President Obama has resisted the legal efforts, noting in a statement that to make the photos public would “impact the safety of our troops.”

Newsweek‘s Lauren Walker nicely summarizes the developments so far, some of which my colleague Nick Baumann has also covered, so here’s the upshot: In August, a federal judge gave the administration an ultimatum: either release the photos or provide evidence for each image explaining why publishing it would be detrimental to national security. On December 19, the administration indicated that it would take the latter course, and a hearing on the new evidence has been set for January 20.

In his earlier statement, Obama noted that “the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.” But here’s the problem: It wasn’t just a small number of individuals. Only the small fry were punished, to be sure, but the culpability extends way up the chain of command. So while another prominent photo release might inspire attacks on American interests, there’s a more fundamental question: Should our government be allowed to hide its fuckups just because our enemies might use them against us?

Because the concealed images, the ACLU told Newsweek, aren’t simply more examples of abuse:

“One of the reasons we’ve been fighting for so long for these photographs is because the official narrative following the disclosure of the Abu Ghraib photos was that those abuses were the result of a few bad apples,” says Alex Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney working on the case since 2005.

“These photographs come from at least seven different detention facilities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq…. We think this would once and for all end the myth that the abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib was an aberration,” he says. “It was essentially official policy. It was widespread at different facilities under different commanders.”

Even when there’s not a tacit mission to soften up prisoners for anonymous CIA operatives, as there was at Abu Ghraib, individual soldiers aren’t solely to blame for their odious behavior. By putting inadequately trained men and women into chaotic, high-stress, wartime situations with minimal oversight, the brass basically guarantees that this kind of thing is going to happen.

Consider this exchange between Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo and former Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick, who got an eight-year prison sentence for his role in the Abu Ghraib horrorshow. (He was the guy who staged the mock execution.) The interview is from Zimbardo’s 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect, which is about how good people placed in bad situations end up doing abhorrent things.

Zimbardo: Please tell me about your training to be a guard, a guard leader, in Abu Ghraib prison.

Frederick: None. No training for this job. When we mobilized at Fort Lee, we had a cultural awareness class, maybe it was about 45 minutes long, and it was basically about not to discuss politics, not to discuss religion, and not to call ’em “Aayrabs,” don’t call ’em “Camel Jockeys,” “Towel Heads” or not to call ’em “Rag Heads.”

Zimbardo: How would you describe the supervision you received and the accountability you felt you had toward your superior officers?

Frederick: None.

Frederick worked 12-hour shifts, Zimbardo noted, from 4 p.m. through 4 a.m. He worked seven days a week and at one point 40 days straight. After his shift, he would go off to sleep in a filthy cell in another part of the prison. His superior officer—and his boss, and his—almost never showed face on the prison tier while Frederick was working. But he offered them feedback anyway.

Zimbardo: You would make recommendations?

Frederick: Yes, about operation of the facility. Not to handcuff prisoners to cell doors, should not have prisoners nude, except for self-mutilators, can’t handle prisoners with mental conditions…One of the first things that I asked for as soon as I got there was regulations, operating procedures…I was housing juveniles, men, women, and mentally ill prisoners all in the same wing. It’s a violation of the military code.

Zimbardo: So you would try to get up the chain of command?

Frederick: I would tell anybody that would come in who I thought had some ranking…Unsually they would tell me, “Just see what you can come up with, keep up the good work, this is the way military intelligence wants it done.”

There are other horrific photos floating around, too. Back in 2005, when I was managing editor at the Oakland-based alt-weekly East Bay Express, reporter Chris Thompson came upon a shocking story that no other American media outlet had reported. Service members were posting grisly images of Iraqi corpses and body parts, many with demeaning captions, on a website in exchange for free access to porn. (One of the tamest is shown above.) “If accurate, these are gruesome depictions of deceased people in Iraq, and that violates the standards of our values, training, and procedures that we ask military personnel to observe and obey,” an Army spokesman told the Washington Post, which ran a followup piece.

The military struck a similar tone in January 2012, when then Mother Jones reporter Adam Weinstein and senior editor Mark Follman wrote about a YouTube video that showed a group of Marines urinating on enemy corpses in Afghanistan—a pretty clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. “The actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps,” a spokesman said.

Perhaps. Yet whoever trained those men, and whoever trained the guys who traded gore for porn, and whoever designed and oversaw that training failed to make the trainees understand that their unbecoming actions, even in a combat situation, could degrade America’s image and endanger the lives of their fellow soldiers as surely as if they’d handed the enemy a crate of AK-47s.

And there’s the real problem. Nobody wants to see more horrific images and nobody wants to put people’s lives at risk. But the national-security establishment has a record of creating the atmosphere for abuses and then throwing individuals under the bus when those abuses come to light. A new batch of photos, it seems, may be just what we need to confront these seemingly ceaseless failures of leadership.

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There Are Several Thousand Secret Photos of America’s Horrific Torture Program. Should Obama Release Them?

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Blame Spanking Advocates for Child Migrants’ Lack of Rights

by LorriKelso Posted on August 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Since last fall, tens of thousands of migrant kids have streamed across the southern US border fleeing violence in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. When they arrive, many are held in overcrowded, unsanitary, and freezing-cold detention centers, and most are left to fend for themselves in immigration hearings because they lack legal representation. The US treatment of migrant kids might be better if the country had ratified an international treaty called the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. That document that would have required lawmakers to consider the “best interests of the child” in crafting policy. But despite decades of pressure from human rights activists, the United States has refused to sign on to the treaty, largely because social conservatives believe it would force Americans to give up spanking.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis


Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?


Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island

See MoJo‘s full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has long been a conservative hobby-horse, an issue seized on by conservatives fired up by home-schooling advocate Michael Farris. Farris believes, among other things, that if the United States signed the treaty, “parents would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings to their children,” parents wouldn’t be able to keep their kids out of sex education, and that children could choose their own religion. Such issues are red meat for conservatives—so much so that treaty opposition is even a plank in the Iowa GOP platform. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney came out against it in 2012.

This kind of conservative opposition is one reason why the United States and Somalia are the only countries in the world that haven’t ratified the child-protection treaty. While conservatives’ fears of UN-mandated sex ed and spanking-free childhoods are largely hypothetical, the consequences of not supporting the treaty are now becoming ever more real as the US confronts the humanitarian crisis on its southern border.

Naureen Shah, a legislative counsel at the ACLU, says that if the United States had to conform to the convention’s “best interests” provision, the White House and Congress would be pressured to prioritize reuniting kids with their family members in the US, instead of rushing to deport them. Ratifying the treaty could also spur the US to improve the kids’ detention conditions so “they can get rest and access to education,” she says, as opposed to languishing in “detention conditions that are almost criminal.” Felice Gaer, the vice chair of the UN Committee Against Torture, agrees.

US law does not require undocumented children to be provided with an attorney to help them through immigration proceedings, leaving them vulnerable to judges rushing to send them back home. (President Barack Obama did recently request $15 million from Congress to provide some of the children legal counsel.) Under the treaty, children seeking asylum are supposed to be provided with legal representation, according to the panel that oversees implementation of the agreement. That’s one reason why ratifying it might “put more pressure on the State Department to take a much bigger role” to live up to these obligations, Shah says. The Obama administration has technically signed the treaty, signaling symbolic support for its child protection provisions, but the Senate has not ratified it, which would require implementing the treaty into enforceable domestic law.

Ratifying the treaty isn’t a sure-fire guarantee that migrant kids would get better treatment. After all, the United States is already in violation of other international human rights treaties it has ratified that prohibit the country from returning immigrants to countries where they will be tortured, persecuted, or killed, says Michelle Brané, an immigration detention expert at the Women’s Refugee Commission. Many of the kids crossing the US border are fleeing targeted violence. Nevertheless, “if we signed onto this children’s treaty,” the ACLU’s Shah says, “it would be even more crystal clear that the US has these obligations” to protect the child migrants. Right now, though, American politicians seem more interested in spanking kids than helping some of them.

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Blame Spanking Advocates for Child Migrants’ Lack of Rights

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Report: Solitary Confinement Used to Punish Female Prisoners Who Report Rape

by MilfordMnh Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

When an incarcerated pregnant woman in Illinois slept too long through mealtime, a guard decided to punish her by placing her in solitary confinement. While in isolation, the woman—who had a long history of depression—was denied access to her prenatal vitamins and was not given water for hours. She soon became highly anxious. This is one of the disturbing ways that US prisons treat incarcerated women who are pregnant, transgender, mentally ill, or who report that they are raped, according to a new report published Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Many of the reasons women are placed in isolation are highly subjective, the reports notes: “Because many cases come down to the word of a prisoner against the word of a corrections officer, a guard’s bad day can easily turn into a solitary confinement sentence for a prisoner for retaliatory reasons, such as a prisoner’s filing a grievance.”

Solitary confinement, where prisoners are isolated for 22-24 hours a day with greatly reduced human contact and access to sunlight, is common practice in US prisons, but its harmful effects are well-documented. A United Nations torture expert said in 2011 that solitary should never be used on people with mental disabilities, and should never last longer than 15 days. In February, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called for US prisons to stop using solitary confinement on vulnerable populations, including pregnant women. And recently, the Justice Department sued Ohio for placing mentally ill boys in solitary confinement for excessive amounts of time.

According to the ACLU report, guards sometimes use solitary confinement to retaliate against women who report rape by corrections officers. As we reported in 2010, Michelle Ortiz, who was serving one year at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, alleged that she was sexually assaulted multiple times by a guard. When she spoke out, she was allegedly placed in solitary confinement. In another case, a prisoner named Lisa Jaramillo served more than 100 days in solitary confinement for allegedly lying about incidents of sexual assault.

“Women who have been sexually abused by prison guards are…forced to decide between reporting the attack and risking retaliation, or not reporting it and risking further assault,” the report reads. The authors note that the lack of privacy in solitary cells can further victimize women. In solitary, a woman’s attacker can closely watch her sleep, use the toilet, or undress.

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Report: Solitary Confinement Used to Punish Female Prisoners Who Report Rape

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Charts: Catholic Hospitals Don’t Do Much for the Poor

by mlodyseo7 Posted on December 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Catholic hospitals have been on a merger spree over the last few years, as Mother Jones reported earlier this year. Ever-expanding swaths of the country are now served only by a Catholic hospital, where patients have no choice but to receive care dictated by Catholic bishops whose religious edicts don’t always align with what’s best for a patient. Catholic hospitals generally follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care, which restrict abortion even in cases where a fetus isn’t viable, for instance, a practice that has resulted in hospitals denying proper care for women suffering from miscarriages. The ACLU recently filed suit against the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on behalf of a Michigan woman who was suffering a second-trimester miscarriage and was sent home twice by a Catholic hospital, developing a serious infection because the hospital refused to even talk to her about the possibility of an abortion. Her baby died two hours after she miscarried.

Despite this heavy mixing of theology and health care, Catholic hospitals in 2011 received $27 billion—nearly half of their revenues—from public sources, according to a new report put out today by the American Civil Liberties Union and MergerWatch, a reproductive rights advocacy group. And that figure doesn’t even include other tax subsidies the hospitals receive thanks to their nonprofit status.

The hospitals have long justified their tax status and restrictions on care by pointing to their religious mission of serving the poor and their delivery of charitable care. But the new ACLU/MergerWatch report suggests, and the chart below illustrates, Pope Francis might be on to something when he’s said that the church needs to shift its priorities to focus less on abortion and more on the poor. MergerWatch data show that Catholic hospitals, where executives often earn multimillion-dollar salaries, aren’t doing any better providing charity care than other religious non-profit hospitals that don’t restrict care. They’re barely any better than ordinary secular nonprofits.

ACLU/MergerWatch

The charitable care figures also don’t give a complete picture of how well Catholic hospitals serve the poor and uninsured because it doesn’t include patients who are covered by Medicaid, the government health care plan for the low-income and disabled. As it turns out, Catholic hospitals, which in 2011 had more than $200 billion in gross patient revenue, had the lowest percentage of revenue from Medicaid of any type of hospital. Even for-profit hospitals earned more revenue from Medicaid than Catholic hospitals.

ACLU/MergerWatch

All of these numbers suggest that as Catholic hospitals have merged and expanded into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, they’ve moved far beyond their religious mission and become like any other large corporation. Given those trends, and the hospitals’ reliance on public funding, it’s hard to see how they can continue to justify their mixing of Catholic doctrine with health care, especially when it disproportionately violates standards of care for women.

The ACLU/MergerWatch report calls on the US Department of Health and Human Services to crack down on Catholic hospitals and to insist that they follow federal law requiring all hospitals that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding to provide emergency treatment to any patient, even if that care requires an emergency abortion. Other advocacy groups have made similar requests in the past few years, but HHS thus far has refused to pick a fight with the Catholic Church, which has turned into one of the Obama administration’s biggest foes thanks to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The church has proven to be a powerful enemy—a wealthy special interest in a holy war—and even the new Pope seems unlikely to persuade it to give up this particular fight.

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Charts: Catholic Hospitals Don’t Do Much for the Poor

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23 Petty Crimes That Have Landed People in Prison for Life Without Parole

by Ivan Nutter Posted on November 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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As of last year, according to a report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 3,200 people were serving life in prison without parole for nonviolent crimes. A close examination of these cases by the ACLU reveals just how petty some of these offenses are. People got life for, among other things…

Possessing a crack pipe
Possessing a bottle cap containing a trace amount of heroin (too minute to be weighed)
Having traces of cocaine in clothes pockets that were invisible to the naked eye but detected in lab tests
Having a single crack rock at home
Possessing 32 grams of marijuana (worth about $380 in California) with intent to distribute
Passing out several grams of LSD at a Grateful Dead show
Acting as a go-between in the sale of $10 worth of marijuana to an undercover cop
Selling a single crack rock
Verbally negotiating another man’s sale of two small pieces of fake crack to an undercover cop

comedy_nose/Flickr

Having a stash of over-the-counter decongestant pills that could be used to make methamphetamine
Attempting to cash a stolen check
Possessing stolen scrap metal (the offender was a junk dealer)—10 valves and one elbow pipe
Possessing stolen wrenches
Siphoning gasoline from a truck
Stealing tools from a shed and a welding machine from a front yard
Shoplifting three belts from a department store
Shoplifting several digital cameras
Shoplifting two jerseys from an athletic store

fanatics.com

Taking a television, circular saw, and power converter from a vacant house
Breaking into a closed liquor store in the middle of the night
Making a drunken threat to a police officer while handcuffed in the back of a patrol car
Being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm
Taking an abusive stepfather’s gun from their shared home

These are not typically first offenses, but nor are they isolated cases. The vast majority (83 percent) of life sentences examined by the ACLU were mandatory, meaning that the presiding judge had no choice but to sentence the defendant to a life behind bars. Mandatory sentences often result from repeat offender laws and draconian sentencing rules such as these federal standards for drug convictions:

Families Against Mandatory Minimums

The data examined by the ACLU comes from the federal prison system and nine state penal systems that responded to open-records requests. This means the true number of nonviolent offenders serving life without parole is higher.

What’s clear, based on the ACLU’s data, is that many nonviolent criminals have been caught up in a dramatic spike in life-without-parole sentences.

Among the cases reviewed, the vast majority were drug-related:

And most of the nonviolent offenders sentenced to life without parole were racial minorities.

All graphics by Associate Interactive Producer Jaeah Lee

Obviously, housing all of these nonviolent offenders isn’t cheap. On average, for example a single Louisiana inmate serving life without parole costs the state about $500,000. The ACLU estimates reducing existing lifetime sentences of nonviolent offenders to terms commensurate with their crimes would save taxpayers at least $1.8 billion.

In August, Attorney General Eric Holder unveiled a reform package aimed at scaling back the use of mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders. As Dana Liebelson noted:

Under Holder’s new policy, mandatory minimums as they apply to specific quantities of drugs will no longer be used against offenders whose cases do not involve violence, a weapon, and selling to a minor, and they will also not be used against offenders that do not have a “significant criminal history” and ties to a “large-scale” criminal organization.

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23 Petty Crimes That Have Landed People in Prison for Life Without Parole

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