In five Southern states, people released from jail, prison, probation or parole encounter laws that make it more difficult for them to get a job, find housing and access basic services due to their conviction – significant obstacles that must be removed to help people successfully return to their communities, the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a letter to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Mobile police likely violated people’s Constitutional rights when they conducted checkpoints that targeted crime in predominantly black neighborhoods – a practice that the department must stop, the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a letter to Mobile Police Chief Lawrence Battiste.
Louisiana may soon lose its title as the world’s leader in incarceration.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently directed all federal prosecutors to pursue charges for the “most serious possible offenses.”
Last week, police shot and killed an African-American teen in a Dallas suburb, where he was leaving a party that he was concerned was becoming dangerous. Fifteen-year-old Jordan Edwards was a passenger in a car full of teens, including two of his brothers.
The SPLC and allies asked a judge today to certify a lawsuit challenging Louisiana’s broken public defender system as a class action case – citing an expert report that describes how the state’s overburdened public defense system fails to protect indigent defendants’ constitutional right to counsel.
Hundreds of Louisianans gathered at the state Capitol in Baton Rouge this week as part of an effort by the SPLC and grassroots groups to show support for reforms aimed at ending the state’s status as the nation’s leader in incarceration.
By ordering the Justice Department to review all of its consent decrees with law enforcement agencies, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is illustrating exactly why we and other civil rights groups strongly opposed his confirmation.
