Thread: AG Lynch Threatens Courts With Loss of Funds

To example, public urination would not be an offense & outstanding warrants ignored......society wants the raising of decency levels not the lowering of them......

AG Loretta Lynch wants to let nation break law without consequences

By Paul Sperry 3/27/16 | 6:00am
see also....Black Democrats pitch Loretta Lynch for Supreme Court



As New York moves to decriminalize low-level offenses, arguing enforcement is “rigged against communities of color,” other large cities are coming under pressure from the Justice Department to do the same thing.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has issued a warning to municipal and state judges across the country that their courts could lose federal funding if they don’t ease up on fines and arrest warrants for minor crimes involving poor offenders, indigent minorities in particular.

In lieu of fines and jail time, Lynch urges the nation’s 6,500 municipal courts to provide an avenue for offenders to perform “community service” or take advantage of “amnesty days,” whereby outstanding arrest warrants are cleared for nominal fees.

Failure to comply with these policies could trigger a Ferguson-style discrimination investigation. Already, Lynch says she’s “evaluating discrimination complaints against several court systems.”

A strongly worded “guidance” letter, written by her civil-rights team, warns that a local court policy of enforcing warrants for failure to pay court fines and fees can have an adverse “disparate impact” on African-Americans, who are fined and/or arrested for outstanding warrants at “disproportionate” rates versus whites.

Federal data also show that blacks tend to break both felony and misdemeanor laws at a disproportionate rate. Even if applied evenly across all races and in neutral, color-blind fashion, such policies could be found by Justice to be discriminatory.

“In court systems receiving federal funds, these practices may also violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when they unnecessarily impose disparate harm on the basis of race,” the nine-page letters states.

“It’s a slippery slope to clemency for criminals, large and small.”

This is the same dubious legal threat the administration is using to force the nation’s public schools to back off suspending unruly — even violent — black students, and to force cops to avoid stopping, frisking and arresting minority offenders.

The Supreme Court has ruled that disparate impact doesn’t violate Title VI, only “intentional” discrimination does. “The administration is quite wrong to say that Title VI incorporates a ‘disparate impact’ standard,” Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity points out. “The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that it does not.”

This new court “reform” will only exacerbate the crime problem. Studies show ignoring low-level crimes like warrant violations only leads to bigger crimes.

Under Mayor de Blasio, the NYPD has scaled back its aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses only to see both minor and serious crime rebound. Already cops have backed off public urination and other public nuisance violations, while overlooking outstanding warrants for many other misdemeanor crimes.

Even a senior Justice Department official predicts the
decriminalization-cum-deincarceration movement will backfire in higher crime nationwide. “In five years the crime rate is going to be crazy again,” he said.

The official, who oversees probation of felons paroled from federal prisons and who requested anonymity, worries the new department policy will be abused.

“I don’t see liberal judges even attempting to make people pay or spending the time making an accurate determination of a person being ‘indigent,’ ” he said. “It’s another way of not holding people accountable for their actions.”

The Justice guidance defines “indigent” as anybody who might be “eligible for public benefits,” but not actually receiving them.

“Jurisdictions may benefit from creating statutory presumptions of indigency for certain classes of defendants,” the source said.

The administration claims cops and courts conspire to exploit poor blacks to generate city revenue in some kind of shakedown. But data show blacks fail to pay their fines at far greater rates than whites, so why not target whites if cash extortion is the objective?

Many of the cities with the highest fines, such as Philadelphia, are run by Democrats; and the Justice Department is no piker when it comes to levying fines.

“US attorneys always want fines and restitution amounts in the millions from people who have little chance of ever paying it back,” the department official said.

Liberals are actually to blame for the trend they’re trying to reform. Court fines and fees help pay for all the new costs liberals have added to the system, such as drug counseling and home electronic monitoring. They’ve also pushed judges to assess more fines in lieu of incarceration, especially for drug offenders.

Yet now they claim the whole court fine and bail system is racist.
Former federal civil-rights attorney Hans Bader, now with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, describes the latest reforms as a “massive assault on the criminal justice system.”

It’s a slippery slope to clemency for criminals, large and small.

http://nypost.com/2016/03/27/ag-lore...-consequences/

Philadephia wins $3.5M grant to cut inmate numbers


Updated: April 13, 2016 — 1:08 AM EDTby Chris Hepp, Staff Writer

Philadelphia has been awarded a $3.5 million MacArthur Foundation grant to fund an aggressive plan to reduce its prison population by 34 percent over three years while

If the plan is successful, Philadelphia would offer a national model for criminal justice reform while ending its dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of any big city in the nation.

"It is a bold and ambitious plan that is also sound, practical, and reasonable," said Laurie Garduque, director of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation justice reform program. "In terms of the kinds of changes Philadelphia needs to make, it rose to the top."

The foundation chose Philadelphia from among 191 applicants, including New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston, for what is its largest justice reform award this year.

"This is a huge achievement that we have been selected," said Julie Wertheimer, chief of staff for the city's deputy managing director for criminal justice and director of the grant project. "It provides us an opportunity to continue the work we have been doing, and it shows that a third party, a respected national foundation, believes we can achieve our goals, which go beyond reducing the prison population. Equally important is having a more fair and just criminal justice system."

With the grant, which is being announced Wednesday, the city will employ a variety of strategies to keep appropriate nonviolent offenders out of the criminal justice system, move those already in prison more quickly back to the community, and use alternatives to incarceration for others.

The plan relies in part on diversion programs, alternatives to cash bail, and early intervention by public defenders, police, and mental-health professionals. To reduce racial inequities, there will be bias training across the criminal justice system.

The plan's success requires unprecedented cooperation among the numerous and often competing entities that make up the criminal justice system.

There is absolutely no question that where the rubber meets the road will be in the implementation of what the grant promises," said Benjamin Lerner, the deputy managing director for criminal justice, who in the past has led the Defenders Association and served as a Common Pleas Court judge. "But we can do it. I've never seen, in 40 years in this system, this degree of collaboration."

The city's winning proposal was the product of a months-long effort - one that straddled two mayoral administrations - by representatives of the District Attorney's Office, Police Department, Managing Director's Office, Defenders Association, Philadelphia Prisons, and the city's courts.

They set out to attack one of the city's most intractable problems - a burdensome prison population that now stands in excess of 7,000.

According to the grant proposal, city inmates are held in custody an average of 95 days, four times the national average. Sixty percent are simply awaiting trial. Seventy-two percent are black, in a city where 54 percent of the population is black.

The MacArthur proposal would address that racial disparity in a number of ways, including systemwide training to identify and avoid bias.

The city's police, beyond bias training, would receive guidance in using the civil rather than criminal code when confronted with low-level nonviolent violations such as public drinking and smoking on SEPTA platforms, according to Mark Houldin, policy director at the Defender Association.

Rather than arrest, violators would face citations.

In addition, two adjoining police districts with high rates of minority incarceration will be chosen to train officers in identifying low-risk offenders who would be better served by mental-health or substance-abuse treatment than arrest.

The MacArthur proposal also provides a range of strategies to reduce the overall number of inmates.

Those include developing an objective way to identify defendants unlikely to miss court appearances and thus good candidates for release; increasing the use of alternatives to bail, such as house arrest and GPS monitoring; and providing earlier intervention by public defenders to improve a defendant's chance of being released on low or no bail.

The city will expand felony diversion programs for those arrested for selling drugs, including crack cocaine and heroin. Many of those arrested for such crimes are nonviolent offenders with no previous history of felonies.

"We are being very deliberate in who we target, because we want this program to work," said Derek Riker, chief of the diversion unit for the District Attorney's Office. "We want to be sure we are targeting the right individuals, those who would be amenable to changing their life."

The total cost of the project is $6.1 million, of which $2.1 million will be covered by the city. The remaining $500,000 will be raised from private sources, Wertheimer said.

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Keir Bradford-Grey, chief defender of the Defenders Association, offered her summation of the project's aspirations.

"We want to make sure we are not making people more desperate by coming into the system, to make sure we are fundamentally fair," she said. "I am optimistic we can have a system that the public can trust, that they can rely on. I think we can do more than just reduce the prison population. We can have an outcome that will be even better."

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20...HmzioDCXsip.99

11 US jails win millions in grants to overhaul operations


Updated: April 13, 2016 — 6:18 AM EDT by JAKE PEARSON, AP

NEW YORK (AP) - Eleven U.S. jail systems will receive millions of dollars in grants to overhaul operations in order to reduce their overall inmate populations - some by as much as one third, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced Wednesday.

The two-year grants of between $1.5 million and $3.5 million to jails in big cities like New York and smaller ones in places such as Charleston County, South Carolina, are meant to upend how jails function nationwide to reduce unnecessary incarceration, said Laurie Garduque, who is heading the Chicago-based charitable group's initiative.
"The foundation's goal is to change the way the nation thinks about and uses jails," she said. "The whole idea of the initiative is to model best practices, have models of reform, so that other jurisdictions can implement them on their own."

There are about 12 million admissions annually across the more than 3,000 jails in the country. While inmates inside state and federal prisons have recently been the focus of sentencing and other reforms, how local lockups operate has received far less attention.

Most jails hold people accused of a crime before a trial, and experts say too many of those held are there on nonviolent offenses because they can't afford bail, have serious mental illnesses or suffer from drug addictions.

Almost 200 jurisdictions in 45 states and territories applied for MacArthur funding after the foundation announced last year it planned to spend $75 million over five years to make the criminal justice system fairer.

The nine other jurisdictions receiving the MacArthur funding are:
- Pima County, Arizona, which includes Tucson.
- Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston.
- Connecticut, where all jails are run by the state.
- Philadelphia.
- New Orleans.
- Lucas County, Ohio, which includes Toledo.
- Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.
- Spokane County, Washington.
- St. Louis County, Missouri.

In St. Louis County, which includes Ferguson among the nearly 30 townships across its 500-square-mile border, officials hope to shrink the 1,300-person county lockup's inmate population by as much as 20 percent over three years, said Beth Huebner of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who is working on the effort.

They'll do that by simplifying county court websites so that the thousands of residents who get traffic tickets every year know where and when to appear to pay their fines and by focusing on pretrial release for low-level offenders, such as those who violate probation, who stay in jail longer than others, Huebner said.

"Our goal is to focus on procedural justice ... which is basically how justice is served," she said. "Who are we afraid of versus who are we mad at?"

In New York, where the overall number of inmates sent to the city's notorious Rikers Island jail complex has already shrunk in recent years, officials said they hoped to reduce the roughly 9,000-inmate population by another 20 percent in the next five years, said Elizabeth Glazer, who heads the mayor's office of criminal justice.

"The big things are who goes in and how long they stay," said Glazer, describing a problem that will require officials to examine everything from how it transports inmates to courthouses to what programs it can create for low-level offenders with serious drug problems.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20...uppJXozpPbv.99