Maya Simkin -Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

About Maya Simkin

Maya Simkin (they/them) is an Appleseed Network Collaboration for Justice Fellow with Chicago Appleseed and a recent graduate of Chicago-Kent College of Law. They have a background in farming and permaculture, and love studying Jewish liturgy and other radical texts. Maya is committed to abolition and is interested in learning how efforts in public interest law can contribute to liberation. There are lots of damsons to pick, pit, and preserve into compote this week and Maya continues to be impressed by the small fruit’s magic blues and purples, and even greens. View all posts by Maya Simkin →

Help Stop the “Draconian Clampdown” on Mail, Books, and Paper Products in Cook County Jail

Last year, when he was unable to "keep the people in his custody safe," Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart implemented punitive measures like prohibiting visitors to Cook County Jail from bringing in paper, attributing overdose deaths to paper soaked with narcotics and poisons. There were 17 deaths in 202...

“Haste Makes Waste” in Courtrooms Too: Balancing Quality with Quantity in Response to the Immigration Backlog

Since 2017, the backlog of pending immigration cases in the United States has been growing exponentially. Today, there are over two million pending cases in the U.S. immigration court system. Over the past few months, the situation has significantly worsened, with a record-breaking number of new dep...

Pretextual Vehicle Stops—A Pipeline to Police Testilying

Our January 2023 police perjury report convincingly demonstrates that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has a culture that condones dishonesty, prevalent lying in court (“testilying”) and, false report-writing by police officers. Along with recommendations to improve transparency (some of which ha...

Getting and Posting Bond for Incarcerated Immigrants Increasingly Difficult

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse published a new report last month analyzing the latest immigration court records including 19,000 bond hearings this year, showing how outcomes for incarcerated immigrants seeking release on bond varied widely between states. Overall, the national a...

Prison Reform Advocates Call to End Civil Commitment in Illinois

A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) focusing on U.S. systems of confinement calls for the end of civil commitment. Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts supports this call. In Illinois, for example, the Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities are overseen by the John...

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