What We Read, March 5-9, 2012

Weekly Round-Up

Links of interest for this week. Don’t forget to set your clocks forward this weekend!

 

Judicial Elections and Judiciary Reform:

  • Colorlines discusses new voter identification laws, as we head up to super Tuesday. On Wednesday this week, a court in Wisconsin temporarily blocked a new voter identification law. According to the Chicago Tribune, fifteen states currently have voter ID laws, and pending legislation in 31 states includes proposals to introduce voter ID laws or strengthen existing ones.  According to the Brennan Center,  11% of eligible voters do not have government-issued ID which would satisfy voter ID laws, and that this percentage is even higher for seniors, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students.

 

Criminal Justice Reform:

  • The House in Missouri has backed a bill to shorten sentences for probation and parole violations in order to reduce costs. The Missouri Senate has endorsed its own version of the legislation. The Pew Center has a brief report on Missouri’s earlier efforts on reforming its system for handling technical violations of probation and parole.
  • Speaking of sentence reform, the Vera Institute has released a report on sentence reform, looking at 14 states facing budgetary concerns and the reforms they have passed.

 

Community Justice:

  • A group of teens in the South Bronx have a list of demands for quality public education in their community. For information on public school funding in New York, check out the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which led a 13-year court battle to reform the school finance system to ensure adequate resources and the opportunity for a sound basic education for all students in New York City.
  • Making the rounds this week is an engaging and moving Ted Talk, by Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which works to fight poverty and challenges racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.  “What if the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth? What if it’s justice?”

 

Other Links of Interest: