Everyday Injustice

This week on Everyday Injustice we talk with Jamarr Brown, a seasoned campaign strategist, proven political executive and commentator. Jamarr serves as the Executive Director of Color Of Change PAC where he leads the fundraising and program operations to support candidates that will bring about essential and transformative changes within the criminal justice system.

In the second Trump administration, President Trump initiated a series of executive actions aimed at dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives across federal agencies and contractors.

The Trump administration justified the rescission by labeling DEI programs as “radical and wasteful,” asserting that they fostered preferential treatment and deviated from merit-based hiring practices.

The impact of these executive orders extended beyond the federal government, influencing private sector entities and educational institutions. Many organizations, in response to the administration’s stance, began reevaluating or scaling back their DEI efforts to align with the new federal directives.

Listen as we discuss with Jamarr the importance of these moves and the importance of DEI in general, and the misperceptions of the programs that lead to the rollback by the right.

This week on Everyday Injustice we talk with Nasser Eledroos, Policy Strategist at Color Of Change, where he spearheads initiatives to develop and implement technology policies aimed at safeguarding the rights of Black individuals across the United States at both federal and state levels.

Eledroos has played a pivotal role in the creation of the Black Tech Agenda, where he was responsible for conducting extensive research and writing. His work focuses on ensuring that technological advancements contribute positively to Black communities and address systemic injustices. Through his efforts, Nasser aims to create a more equitable technological landscape that uplifts and protects marginalized groups.

Color Of Change (COC), the largest online racial justice organization in the U.S., has unveiled its updated Black Tech Agenda, a strategic initiative aimed at ensuring that technology and artificial intelligence (AI) systems serve, rather than harm, Black communities. This new agenda builds on COC’s 2022 framework, addressing pressing issues such as protecting Black workers from biased AI, ensuring fair compensation for Black artists, and preventing harmful infrastructure projects in Black neighborhoods.

The agenda calls for robust regulations that define how AI should be ethically employed and outlines consequences for tech companies that fail to comply. COC emphasizes that technology should be a tool for justice, advocating for equitable access, representation, and control over technological developments across all communities.

Listen as Nasser discusses the Black Tech Agenda and its importance for the Black communities.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we talk with UC Davis Law Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin about the new Trump administration, Court Challenges, and potential unconstitutional actions.

Chin is a teacher and scholar of Immigration Law, Criminal Procedure, and Race and Law. His scholarship has appeared in the Penn, UCLA, Cornell, and Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties law reviews and the Yale, Duke and Georgetown law journals among others.

Among the areas of discussion: (1) birthright citizenship, (2) the Trump administration’s policies, (3) USAID, (4) mass deportation.

One question that emerges to what extent the courts will choose to stop Trump’s agenda and to what extent the Trump administration will succeed in altering the balance of power.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we talk with Amanda Hall, who as the Senior Director of National Campaigns, she leads strategic efforts to shape national drug policy within expansive coalitions and advocates for the voices of those directly impacted.

Hall recounted her journey to incarceration, sharing how witnessing her mother’s arrest as a child negatively impacted her mental health and led her to experiment with drugs. Amanda struggled with drug-related charges throughout her late teens and early twenties, frequently finding herself in jail. Now, as a member of Dream.Org, she is spearheading the national Public Health is Public Safety Campaign, advocating for legislation that focuses on people and promotes recovery rather than harshly punishing individuals without offering them a chance at rehabilitation.

Listen as Amanda Hall talks about the opioid crisis, how we can utilized smart on crime tactics, and the barriers to such solutions.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we talk with Johanna Lacoe, research director at the California Policy Lab on a recent study that looked at the short-term impacts of bail policy on crime in Los Angeles. There has been an emergency bail schedule instituted twice in Los Angeles since 2020.

Lacoe also co-authored a report for California Policy Lab on the effect of bail reform in San Francisco after the Humphrey decision.

“The In re Humphrey decision required the San Francisco County criminal court to set bail levels based on defendant ability to pay rather than the county bail schedule. Under this new policy, the rate of pretrial detention fell by 11%,” the study found.

“We find defendants released pretrial were less likely to be convicted (a decline of 3 percentage points) in the post-Humphrey period. This decline in conviction rates was driven primarily by a reduction in the likelihood of plea bargaining,” it continued.

Finally the study found, “There was no consistent, statistically significant change in subsequent arrests or convictions post-Humphrey across the estimation strategies.”

Listen as Johanna Lacoe discusses the policy implications of the bail findings in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, and their applicability to California and bail policy in general.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we talk with Katie Dixon, head of Closure is Possible campaign, and Renae Badruzzaman project director at Health Instead of Punishment nonprofit about the problems facing women who are incarcerated at women’s prisons.

The Crisis to Care Report ( https://humanimpact.org/hipprojects/healthnotwomensprisons/) was released in February 2023, and represented a collaboration with “Californians United for a Responsible Budget; California Coalition for Women Prisoners; and Transgender, Gender-variant, and Intersex Justice Project to create a research report, fact sheet, and social media tiles about the harms of women’s prisons.”

This report exposed “the catastrophic health harms of incarceration in women’s prisons and provides evidence in support of investments in health-promoting social determinants of health instead of incarceration.”

From Crisis to Care outlines how incarceration worsens health via multiple pathways:

• Medical neglect — including failure to provide medical examinations, stopping needed prescriptions, and long delays in treatment — is common in prison.

• Alongside the violence of the criminal legal system itself, people incarcerated in women’s prisons also experience and witness high rates of interpersonal physical, emotional, and sexual trauma and violence.

• Environmental conditions in prisons seriously endanger the health of incarcerated people, by exposing them to infectious disease, extreme heat and cold, inadequate food, foodborne illness, mold, toxic drinking water, and more.

• The use of solitary confinement can lead to increased psychological distress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, paranoia, agitation, sleep deprivation, and prescription of sedative medications, alongside physical ailments.

• Separating people from their families and communities has destructive and far-reaching consequences that harm health.

Listen as our guests discuss this report, the problems of trauma and misconduct in women’s prisons that led to the closure at FCI Dublin, why women’s prisons have more harm and trauma than in men’s prisons and why we should aim ultimately at abolition.

The November 2024 Election was a wipeout for progressives on criminal justice reform. Joining Everyday Injustice to discuss it is Michael Collins from Color of Change.

Listen as Michael Collins discusses the recall of Pamela Price in Alameda County. What it means for criminal justice reform. The larger picture formed by the results of the national election and the loss of George Gascon in Los Angeles. And this means for the future of criminal justice reform.

Elizabeth Hinton along with several other esteemed academics and scholars recently agreed to serve as advisors for the Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild.

Ten incarcerated writers will be trained and platformed as part of the guild.

Hinton is a Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is the Co-Director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, and the author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960’s (2021), and From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016).

Hinton talks with Everyday Injustice about the upcoming project and her role in it.

As Hinton explains: “the Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild is something that is completely one of a kind and that it's amplifying original on the ground reporting by people who reside in confinement.”

She adds, “I think one of the things that's really exciting about it is that it's not just targeting people on the outside, but it's also seeking to inform and ground conversations and movements, ideas that are happening on the inside.

“Because there are intentional barriers erected between people who reside in the carceral state and those of us who live outside of it. It's really hard to get a sense of what is going on. I think most people who aren't connected to people who are incarcerated have no idea the kinds of conditions that are maintained, have no idea the kinds of violence that structures the entire system in every iota and every form. Have no idea the kinds of human rights abuses that are happening and the politics that are happening, as well as the amazing initiatives, the self activity that's going on inside prisons.”

Listen as Elizabeth Hinton discusses the importance of carceral journalism and what this project will mean.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we talk with Alissa Skog, who was lead author on the October report that found that nearly 2.5 million Californians are eligible to have their convictions automatically relieved under a little know law that allows for automatic expungement.

“A criminal record can have profound and lasting impacts on people, affecting key areas of their life such as employment, parental rights, stable housing, access to safety-net benefits, and voting,” California Policy Lab noted.

To address these “follow-on” punishments, the California legislature has enacted the most comprehensive automatic record relief laws in the country.

Under these laws, all non-convictions (arrests that do not lead to a conviction), most misdemeanor convictions, and many low-level felony convictions are eligible for automatic relief after people complete their sentences and specified waiting periods.

On Everyday Injustice, Alissa Skog discussed the upside of the law allowing people to get out from under collateral consequences of past convictions, but also some of the drawbacks including the lack of notifications.

The report estimates the number of people likely to maintain a clean slate over the following five years.

In 2015, Jill Leovy wrote a book: Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.”

“Ghettoside,” a blend of street reporting and scholarship, introduced and elaborated the idea that high-crime communities are simultaneously under-policed and over-policed. It further broke ground by locating the causes of urban violence in problems of law, not in family structure, culture, psychological differences or other familiar scapegoats. “

Listen as Jill Leovy talks about her book nearly a decade later, talks about crime reporting and the problems of policing urban violence.