New York Times Archives - Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

Field Testing in Drug Arrests

Earlier this month, both The New York Times and The Marshall Project ran excellent stories on how a roadside field tests for drugs can return false positives that send innocent people to jail or even cause them to plead guilty when they did not possess drugs. The articles highlighted alarming uses o...

The Capacity Problem: What Cook County Can Do To Move Toward NYC’s Plan To Keep The Mentally Ill Out of Jail

The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, recently unveiled a plan to reduce the number of mentally ill people kept in jail. The plan hopes to address a common and malignant feature of criminal justice systems throughout the country: that jails have been become--in many places--the only public hou...

The Coming Fees Crisis: Poverty Capitalism in the Courts

This past week, two important pieces have appeared on NPR and the New York Times bringing attention to the increased practice of levying exploitive fines and fees on indigent people passing through the criminal and civil justice system. The first piece from NPR, based on a report of a S...

Criminal Court Reform Featured in the New York Times

Chicago Appleseed's groundbreaking reform and advocacy work was featured in the New York Times article "Judge Provides Impetus for Cook County Jail’s ‘Virtual School’."Read the full article here....