Houston has come up with a new way to make life harder for people leaving prison on parole: by forcing the programs that provide them with housing, often paired with job placement and other services, to move outside the city limits.

At the end of March, the city council approved an ordinance that imposes new regulations and inspections designed to improve safety conditions in boarding houses and other facilities. But it also requires housing for people on parole — known as “alternative housing” — or correctional facilities to be located at least 1,000 feet from parks, schools, daycares, and other re-entry housing.

Jeff Reichman, a principal with data consulting firm January Advisors, created a map at the request of advocates with public data on Houston parks and schools that drew a red dot for each school or park. There’s virtually nowhere in the city’s center where re-entry housing can now be located. “The only place they’re leaving for expanding or building new housing for these folks is out in the sticks, in the boonies,” said Jay Jenkins, Harris County project attorney at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.

While these types of residency restrictions are generally associated with people on the sex offender registry, other cities in Texas have also moved to isolate parolees. Similar laws exist in Dallas and San Antonio.

CrossWalk Center, which offers a number of services to help people released from prison and jail re-enter society, says the new restrictions will make life harder for its clients — and for the organization itself. Last September, it committed to opening five re-entry facilities by the end of August. In October, it secured a lease for the first facility, but it has been waiting for approval from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to be added to the official list of housing providers for people leaving prison so it can begin accepting residents.

In that time, of course, the new ordinance was developed and passed. Kathy Vosburg, executive director of CrossWalk Center, didn’t find out about the process until after stakeholder meetings were already over. She was informed in December that the application for her first facility, along with all other pending applications, was put on hold until the city council voted on the ordinance.

“We got caught in between getting our house approved and the ordinance,” Vosburg said. And shortly after the vote in March, TDCJ called to say it was denying CrossWalk’s application because of it. The good news is that she has been told by city officials the newly leased house will be grandfathered in, allowing it to stay in its current location despite failing to meet the 1,000-foot distance requirement. But her organization still has to go through a new and lengthy approval process. The house will have to be inspected by the city, after which it will get an occupancy certificate, which will allow it to eventually get a housing permit. She’ll also have to write a letter to TDCJ in order for the house to be grandfathered in despite the new ordinance.

“Our hope and our prayer is that everything goes well,” Vosburg said. “Because we’ve had it up and running [without residents on parole] and we’re paying for everything.… We’re in the red right now because this set us back.”

Meanwhile, CrossWalk’s other four facilities are going to have be placed elsewhere. “Where we’re going to have to go is outside the city limits into unincorporated areas,” Vosburg said. That presents big challenges. Houston is a sprawling city with little public transportation infrastructure and most parolees don’t have cars. It can easily take an hour and a half one way to get into the city center to, for example, meet with a parole officer — a meeting that itself can take a couple of hours. “What employer is going to hire you if it’s taking five hours weekly to get to parole and back?” she wondered.

So her organization is setting aside additional funds to buy a van and hire a driver to transport residents to the nearest public transportation.

“We won’t give up continuing to look inside the urban center,” she said. “But it was hard [to find space there] before.” Now it could be nearly impossible.

In 2016, about 67,000 people were released from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, about 35,000 of them are on parole or supervision. Each year, around 14,000 formerly incarcerated people will come back to Harris County, which includes Houston. That’s a lot of people who need somewhere to live, especially given that parole officers often won’t allow them to stay with family and friends and it can be nearly impossible to rent an apartment with a criminal conviction. “We don’t have enough housing to house those folks as it is,” Jenkins said. “So eliminating housing is obviously not very prudent.”

The location of the housing could also impact parolees’ ability to reintegrate into society. “For [re-entry housing] to be successful, it has to be centrally located, has to be located near public transportation, has to be located near health care with access to food,” Jenkins said. “We know that when you put folks who are re-entering away from public transportation and services … they are much more likely to fail.”

Advocates aren’t the only ones concerned about what the ordinance will do. Criminal District Court Judge Kristin M. Guiney wrote a letter to the city council as it debated the ordinance, arguing that the distance requirement will hurt re-entry efforts. “As a matter of public safety, it is imperative that we all support the reintegration of formerly incarcerated individuals,” she wrote. “There are few outcomes more detrimental to public safety than further limiting the housing options for people who already face barriers to housing and employment.”

Several fires in unregulated, multi-resident housing facilities, one of which killed three people, originally spurred the ordinance. The city council at first said it was “about safety and regulations at rundown homes that are putting people in harm’s way,” explained Natalia Cornelio, criminal justice reform director at the Texas Civil Rights Project.

And some of the housing for parolees is, in fact, overcrowded, unsanitary, or dangerous. “We applaud the bad ones going away,” said Vosburg.

But somehow the location requirement got tacked on. “The 1,000-foot [rule] is precluding those of us that are doing this above board and with integrity and with the person at heart and not profit,” Vosburg said. “It’s going to make it really, really hard to replace all the bad ones.” If parolees can’t find anywhere to live, they could be sent to a transitional facility — which is more like a jail than an apartment complex, Vosburg said — or end up homeless and eventually get re-incarcerated for violating parole.

When Councilmember Brenda Stardig was asked for a response to these concerns, given that she was a main sponsor of the ordinance, her chief of staff Amy Peck responded, “Council Member Stardig is extremely concerned with the safety of those living in and around boarding homes/correctional facilities/alternative housing facilities/lodging facilities. The ordinance changes were aimed at identifying these homes and to make sure that they are safe.”

Advocates say they didn’t even find out the ordinance was under consideration until December or January, after the stakeholder meetings were already completed. “None of the providers that we dealt with heard about” the meetings, Jenkins said. Of the providers on the city’s own list of re-entry housing providers, “most don’t even know that the ordinance is a thing,” Cornelio said.

The first chance any of them got to give feedback was at public comments sessions in March just before the council voted. But Vosburg and other providers were relegated to last place in the lineup, despite being the first to sign up, and given just 10 minutes each to speak, with few follow-up questions from the council. “They didn’t really want to hear it,” Vosburg said.

“There were numerous stakeholder meetings, community meetings, and a committee meeting,” Peck said in response.

The city also wasn’t responsive to requests for analysis or evidence to back up the need for the ordinance. “We asked for a public safety rationale,” Jenkins said. None was given. No experts testified in favor of the restriction and no evidence was entered into the record that indicated a need for the distance restrictions, Jenkins said.

“It just seems like it was orchestrated from the start that it was going to pass regardless of what questions were asked and what issues were raised,” Jenkins said. “The quickness with which they were labeling these folks nuisances, it made all of us feel very bad, but also very angry.”

Advocates say this feels part and parcel with the way the city has reacted to other social problems — such as its criminalization of the homeless. “It just seems consistent with the culture of criminalizing something that’s difficult to deal with,” Cornelio said, “instead of providing a solution and investing in it.”

Houston Is Forcing Its Parolees Out of City Center and into ‘the Boonies’ was originally published in IN JUSTICE TODAY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When Benjamin Dunning was homeless on the streets of Denver, Colorado for four and a half years, his number one priority was trying to stay out of sight.

“My biggest job … was to find someplace to hide where I wouldn’t have contact with the police, wouldn’t have contact with a security guard, wouldn’t have contact with Parks and Rec,” he said. For a while he had a regular spot to sleep where he was left alone — only to have a newly hired security guard find him one night and tell him he couldn’t sleep there anymore.

But security guards are one thing and police are another. “You do risk going to jail,” said Dunning, who now works with Denver Homeless Out Loud, an advocacy group.

That’s because sleeping outside is one of many activities deemed illegal in parts of Colorado. The state’s 76 largest cities have collectively passed 351 ordinances that target the homeless, from bans on camping to sitting or lying down in public to simply sharing food outside. Advocates say that’s how cities in Colorado have, for the most part, opted to deal with their homeless populations: by passing and enforcing ordinances that criminalize basic acts of life and wasting resources that could otherwise be spent on services, making life even harder for those without homes.

“It’s illegal to stand still, it’s illegal to sit down, it’s illegal to lay down, it’s illegal to eat,” said Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project. “You’re breaking the law as soon as you stop walking.”

If someone is cited, they first face a fine and a court date. But most homeless people can’t afford to pay a fine and can’t make it to court. It’s a “cycle of criminalization,” said Nantiya Ruan, who leads the Homeless Advocacy Policy Project at the University of Denver. “People get a citation, they can’t pay it, they get a warrant for their arrest … then they spend anywhere from two to three days in jail. Then they can’t get a job because they have a criminal background.”

The ordinances could, on their face, apply to anyone. But that’s not how they’re enforced. “A high, high percentage of people who have gotten tickets under these ordinances are homeless,” Ruan said. For example, most of downtown Boulder has a smoking ban that should impact anyone who lights up a cigarette, and yet the vast majority of people given citations for smoking between 2015 and 2017 were homeless, according to Ruan’s team, which researches laws that target the homeless. Similarly, over half of all the trespass citations Denver issued between 2013 and 2014 were for homeless residents, even though homeless people represent just 0.6 percent of the population.

“Cops are only going to enforce [ordinances] against those guys and those people who are ‘the problem,’” Boden said. “Homeless people are not the only motherfuckers sitting on a sidewalk, but we’re the only ones going to jail for it.”

Colorado’s cities appear to be particularly vigorous in their enforcement. Video from 2016 showed Denver police officers taking blankets from people in freezing November weather. And it’s only intensifying. Ruan, whose team has done public records requests in the state, has found that citations and “move along” orders are increasing.

That may be because the state’s homeless population is increasing, due to a lack of investment in public housing, coupled with skyrocketing home prices. There are just under 11,000 homeless people in Colorado, nearly 4,000 of whom have nowhere to sleep at night. That’s up from about 2,300 homeless people in 2008, 1,800 of whom had no shelter. Existing shelters usually don’t have enough capacity to give everyone a bed, plus many people can’t comply with all of the rules regarding who’s allowed in and where. As of 2016, Boulder had only 280 shelter beds for its 440 homeless people.

“Cities have not been able to effectively support their homeless communities,” Dunning said, “so [instead] they try to scare them off.”

Criminalizing people’s attempts to survive outside, however, only makes it harder for them to get indoors. Landlords “do rent checks in ways that filter people out if you’ve got any [criminal] history,” Dunning pointed out. “It raises the bar that much higher.” It also makes finding a job or even accessing public benefits — such as subsidized housing or, in some places, food stamps — nearly impossible.

Criminalizing homeless people can also make them less likely to take advantage of the services that might be available. “When you give police officers the power to ticket and arrest and put people in jail … they’re no longer seen as someone providing services,” Ruan pointed out. “That’s what disrupts [homeless people] getting services.”

But the state’s homeless population and their allies aren’t letting the situation stand. For four years in a row, advocates have pushed for what’s been dubbed the Right to Rest Act in the state legislature, which would give homeless people the right to move freely in public spaces, eat and accept food, occupy a vehicle, and protect their personal property.

Boden’s organization was behind the original bill and has been aggressively lobbying for its passage. “We want to frame it as a social justice and a human rights issue for people’s ability to live with full protections in the local community of their choice,” Boden said. “No local communities should be able to pass ordinances that criminalize the presence of people they don’t like.”

And yet Colorado lawmakers have been slow to sign on. The bill had a hearing this month in the Colorado House of Representatives, but it again failed to get enough support to move out of committee. Most Republicans voted against it; only one Republican has ever voted in favor of it in the four years it’s been considered, Boden said.

“Instead of acknowledging their dignity and right to respect,” noted Darren O’Connor, one of the students who works on the Homeless Advocacy Policy Project, “our legislature voted out of fear of allowing people to be in public space.”

But the math is on the advocates’ side. Ruan’s team found that just six Colorado cities spent at least $5 million enforcing these ordinances over five years. “Criminalization pushes people down at the same time they’re trying to lift people up with services … and that money could be spent in a better way,” Ruan said.

The group’s calculation doesn’t even take into account the health impacts of these laws, which further drain resources. The lack of sleep due to a constant worry of being rudely awakened and hassled by police — not to mention the actual experience of being kicked awake by an officer — can quickly run someone down. Coupled with a poor diet of cheap food handouts and the effects of sleeping in the cold, that stress takes a heavy toll on the body. “Your immune system begins to break down so you get more colds, or if you’re susceptible of being diabetic, you’ll go diabetic,” Dunning said.

Some consequences are even more severe. One homeless man in the state who was woken up by police and told to move along went into an alley and was struck and killed by a truck, according to advocates. Some women have reported being raped when they were forced to leave well-lit or patrolled areas.

Even though the Right to Rest Act didn’t pass this year, momentum is building. “When we first introduced it, it was just us and service providers,” Dunning recalled. But now faith groups, business groups, and even some in law enforcement have backed the bill. “It just keeps growing and growing, and at some point, these guys won’t be able to get away with not supporting it.”

Boden agrees and says poor and homeless people will keep fighting. “We figure no meaningful civil rights legislation is easy or this would have been done already,” he said. “We’ll just keep coming back with it. If you know in your heart you’re fucking right, it doesn’t matter how many times they say no. The last thing they’re going to say is yes.”

‘You’re Breaking the Law As Soon as You Stop Walking’: How Colorado Cities Criminalize Homelessness was originally published in IN JUSTICE TODAY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of a growing push to end the use of cash bail, a national movement is calling attention to the plight of defendants held in jail simply because they can’t afford to pay their way out.

Last month, it launched the next phase of its work: the Black Love Bail Out, timed to intersect with both Black History Month and Women’s History Month, including today’s celebration of International Women’s Day.

The National Bail Out Collective works with local groups in communities around the country to raise money from the public to free people held on bail. As with last year’s Mama’s Day Bail Out, this one is focused on getting women, femmes, and women-identified people out of jail. Organizers are highlighting the needs of Black women, in particular.

“We wanted to bring an intersectional lens to this conversation and into our movement,” explained Arissa Hall, project manager with the National Bail Fund Network, which is part of the collective. Given how male-focused much of the conversation around criminal justice reform tends to be, the aim is to “lift up how Black women are affected and impacted by the criminal justice system as well, whether it’s folks that are incarcerated or who are left to raise babies and take care of the families.”

“Organizing from the margins is important,” she added. “Once marginalized people are free, then everyone will be.”

The collective is comprised of about 20 organizations, including bail funds, community groups and Black Lives Matter affiliates. Overall, it’s raised close to a million dollars to bail people out and provide them with services. Last year’s first national bailout, the Mama’s Day Bail Out, freed over 100 people. After that, advocates staged a number of other events timed to holidays such as Father’s Day, Juneteenth, and Pride, bailing out at least 100 people more.

This time, organizers are including an important new element: a toolkit to help communities across the country start their own bailouts. As the collective worked with new groups during its bailouts last year, it realized there was a need for a resource outlining the steps and best practices for those wishing to launch their own. So the group has created a document that includes checklists for getting started, what to do on the day of the bailout, and how to follow up after the event itself is over. It also includes a wealth of information on what bail is and how it works, as well as guiding principles for participating in the national coalition.

“The toolkit is intended as an invite for folks to join us on Mother’s Day and beyond,” said Scott Roberts, senior campaign manager at Color of Change, which is part of the national coalition. “We want everyone who feels inspired by this to go out there and do it.”

He hopes the toolkit will also reinforce the values that undergird the bailout movement. “We wanted to make sure that as people replicated [bailouts], they were replicating the entire thing,” Roberts said. “The message was about ending money bail, not this being a charity or direct service operation.”

While some bail reform measures have only eliminated bail for non-violent, low-level offenses, the coalition wants to take a broader approach. It is careful not to discriminate between the different people who need to be bailed out — those charged with violent versus nonviolent crimes, straight versus queer people, old versus young, or those struggling with addiction or other issues. “We wanted to make sure people were embracing our values of inclusivity,” Roberts said.

The toolkit also makes clear that a bailout alone is not enough — it needs to be accompanied by other services and assistance. “Most of the time you can’t just bail someone out and say, ‘Hey good luck with your life,’ and expect that they are going to have a lot of very different outcomes,” Roberts said. Many people need immediate help with housing, food, and healthcare, as well as help returning for court dates, such as transportation or childcare.

“We would be doing a disservice to folks to minimize the amount of work and time and energy that went into having these bailouts, because it was no small feat,” Hall said. It also reflects the fact that “there is no one right way” to do one, she said.

The actual freeing of jailed people for the Black Love Bail Out began with nine people released in Philadelphia last month. Advocates in the city plan to keep bailing people out through March so long as they can raise enough money.

The February bailout came just after the Philadelphia City Council unanimously voted in favor of a resolution calling on the district attorney, state legislature, and courts to end the use of cash bail, and the subsequent announcement from District Attorney Larry Krasner that his office would stop seeking cash bail for 25 low-level misdemeanor offenses.

Reuben Jones of the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund credits his city’s bailouts with helping propel that action. “When we first started talking about cash bail four years ago, we didn’t have political support,” he said. But some of the city’s elected officials actually donated to the bailout last year. “Bailouts were a way to put pressure on the city to show that people don’t have to be confined pretrial to get to court [and] that holding people hostage with bail is inhumane.”

So the recent changes “were huge for us,” Jones said. But he and other advocates also plan to keep pushing forward. “For us, that’s not the end goal,” he said. “We want to … eliminate cash bail.”

“The city was willing to stick its neck out for lower-level offenses, which is a safe choice,” he added. But “we don’t make a distinction between violence versus nonviolence. We want it to be about the practice, not just for low-level misdemeanors.”

Next up will be San Antonio, Texas, where advocates are planning to bail out 20 people later this month. With an upcoming race for district attorney in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, advocates hope the bailout will help push the new DA to prioritize bail reform. Advocates in Dothan, Alabama will also get in on the action, with plans to bail out around 10 people, as will those in Memphis, Tennessee.

This year’s Mother’s Day bailout promises to be huge. More than 40 organizations have already expressed interest in doing their own bailouts or solidarity actions, roughly double last year’s count. Last week, the coalition held its first webinar with about 35 people to launch the toolkit and it will hold more specific ones in the lead-up to May 13.

Apart from helping individuals, the bailouts aim to further the larger goal of eliminating cash bail by giving advocates more expertise in how the system works. Mary Hooks, co-director of Southerners On New Ground, a group focused on LGBT organizing the South, helped originate the Mama’s Day Bail Out last year. After their bailouts, she and her organization were able to use what they learned firsthand to advocate for bail reform in Atlanta. On February 6, Atlanta’s mayor signed an ordinance eliminating cash bail for some low-level offenders in municipal court, and later that month the Georgia Senate unanimously passed a proposal giving judges more freedom to avoid cash bail for nonviolent offenses.

The upcoming Mother’s Day bailout is meant to accomplish similar goals. It “will help put this on the map for [participants],” Hall said. “Once people are interacting with the bail system in different ways — paying bail and talking to folks that are in jail because they don’t have the money to pay bail — folks are moved to do something.”

Hall hopes that will lead to bigger changes, and ultimately an end to cash bail. The bailouts are “harm reduction,” she said. “They’re not the solution.”

The Black Love Bail Out Aims to Free Poor Defendants — And Teach Others To Do The Same was originally published in IN JUSTICE TODAY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In early February, the Philadelphia City Council made history: It voted unanimously in favor of ending the use of cash bail.

The resolution, passed February 1, urges the district attorney’s office and the courts “to institute internal policies that reduce reliance on cash bail” and called on the state legislature and state Supreme Court to eliminate cash bail statewide.

The Council’s vote doesn’t have legal force; the state legislature would have to act in order to end the use of cash bail in Philadelphia or anywhere else in Pennsylvania. But advocates say it is still important — and signals that more meaningful action may be on the way.

“Even if it doesn’t have legislative heft, it’s always helpful to have such vocal support from the [city] legislature,” said Julie Wertheimer, chief of staff of the Philadelphia mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. “It just means that all three branches of government in Philadelphia are on the same page in terms of the direction we’re moving in as a city, regardless of what the state decides to do.”

Paul Heaton, academic director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at University of Pennsylvania Law School, agreed. “The City Council vote is not merely symbolic,” Heaton said in an email. “The recent vote signals some openness by the Council to consider budgetary or legislative requests from agencies that would support policies or programs that reduce cash bail, and this should encourage those interested in reform.”

Even without action from the state legislature, he said, the City Council, courts, and DA’s office can decrease the use of bail. “There is no ‘magic bullet’ solution that is going to allow the city to end cash bail,” said Heaton. “It is going to require parallel efforts across a variety of domains involving the entire criminal justice system.”

The city could provide earlier representation for detainees in the pretrial process, for instance, so attorneys could more effectively argue for release instead of bail. Judges and magistrates could use risk assessments to allow more people to be released. Perhaps most importantly, Heaton said, there should be fewer arrests in the first place, particularly for low-level offenses.

The City Council has already taken some legislative action: In 2016, it changed some low-level nuisance offenses, such as disorderly conduct or public drunkenness, into civil code violations, meaning that those who are charged are issued tickets instead of arrested. Advocates want even more offenses to be categorized as civil code violations so they result in summonses instead of arrests, effectively ending cash bail for those types of charges.

Meanwhile, municipal court has the power to formulate bail guidelines that focus on releasing people on unsecured bail — which doesn’t require arrestees to pay anything up-front to be released, only if they fail to return to court — or on non-monetary conditions, such as monitoring or drug tests. “If the president judge of the municipal court and a majority of the municipal court bench agreed on a set of guidelines making money bail an option of last resort, that could change overnight,” noted Arjun Malik, a board member of the Philadelphia Bail Fund.

“Discretion really does lie with these local actors — the courts, the district attorney’s office — to change their policies as they stand today,” added Malik.

Local actors include District Attorney Larry Krasner, who was elected in November on a pledge, among others, to end the use of cash bail. “There’s clearly vocal support from him to accelerate this work,” Wertheimer noted.

Ben Waxman, communications director for Krasner’s office, is enthusiastic about the City Council’s recent vote. “We view it very much as a positive step forward towards [the] consensus that is building around the issue,” he said. Even a few years ago, he added, bail reform wasn’t an issue that galvanized many voters; now it’s a widely discussed issue citywide.

The DA’s office plans to take action on bail reform soon, although Waxman couldn’t share specifics yet. “What we are engaged in at the moment is an internal review of current district attorney polices around how we ask for bail and for what amounts and for what types of offenses,” he said. In the next few weeks, he said, his office will have some “pretty significant announcements” coming out that will “outline a plan to move forward to turn that vision to reality.”

“Expect to see some changes,” he added.

The city’s push for bail reform got a boost in 2016, when Philadelphia was awarded a $3.5 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to reduce the number of people held in its jails. Since then, its jail population has dropped by about 17 percent. Still, about a quarter of the people held in city jails are there because they can’t make bail. Wertheimer said it takes time to move from a grant to large-scale changes. “As you can imagine, these things, even with the funding and outside support in place, take a while to actually operationalize,” Wertheimer said.

One important change that resulted from the MacArthur grant is that if a defendant is given a bail amount of $50,000 or less for a nonviolent offense, he or she gets a review hearing five days later. According to Malik of the Philadelphia Bail Fund, about 90 percent of people who have review hearings are then released, which means they are now spending less time in jail due to an inability to afford bail. “But that’s not good enough,” he argued. “Putting them in jail for five days is incredibly destabilizing to their lives and there’s no real justification for it.”

“I don’t want to discount how much good it’s done compared to the previous status quo,” he added. “But it’s not anywhere near ending money bail. It’s not good enough.”

Ultimately, Malik hopes the City Council’s vote will help build momentum for reform. “It certainly helps put pressure on both the DA’s office and the court system, and even the state legislature, in saying, ‘Hey, Philadelphia wants to change and you need to catch up,’” he said.

Indeed, there is already pressure on the state legislature to eliminate cash bail altogether. “We’re watching to see if the state actually moves on it,” Wertheimer said. While bail reform bills have thus far been introduced but not enacted, she said, “that could change at any time.”

Philadelphia City Council’s Vote in Favor of Ending Cash Bail Bolsters Citywide Push was originally published in IN JUSTICE TODAY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Prisoners in Florida are in the midst of a huge and risky protest: They started a strike and boycott on Martin Luther King Jr. Day meant to last through the month.

The protest challenges exorbitant prices at canteens; urges Florida to extend parole, as an incentive for good behavior, to all prisoners; and demands payment for prisoners’ labor. But the tactic has sparked heavy pushback from the Florida Department of Corrections. Prisoners have told outside strike organizers that the department is trying to stifle the strike by retaliating against those who are participating and cutting off their communications with each other and with family and friends on the outside.

In their original statement outlining the motives for the strike, posted on the website of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, Florida prisoners said they would stop working their prison jobs and boycott the canteens starting January 15 “until the injustice we see facing prisoners in the Florida system is resolved.” That includes what the prisoners describe as the “current slave arrangement,” in which they are made to work without pay.

According to data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative, jobs that support prison facilities in Florida can pay as little as nothing at all; at most, prisoners make 32 cents per hour for work such as laundry, maintenance, or food service, and a high of 55 cents per hour for producing goods, such as sewn products or farm crops, that are sold to government agencies and outside businesses.

Apart from the obvious injustice, prisoners say, empty pockets make reentry difficult. Prisoners who are released are given just $50 and a bus ticket. “[T]he reality is it’s not enough to do anything with!” they argue in their statement. Getting paid for work, on the other hand, would allow them to save up for life after prison.

Prisoners are also protesting marked-up prices at the canteen, where, for example, they say a case of soup costs $17. In a San Francisco Bay View article about the action, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, who is incarcerated at Florida State Prison, wrote that items like a stick of deodorant, toilet paper, and packs of oatmeal cost significantly more in Florida prisons than in the Texas prison system, where he was previously held. According to Johnson, a bottle of water costs more than six times more in Florida than in Texas — 99 cents versus 15 cents.

“Coupled with Florida prisoners receiving no wages, [prisoners] must purchase basic hygiene supplies, seasonal clothing, shoes and supplemental foods and beverages from a grossly overpriced commissary and package system, which weighs heavily on their loved ones,” Johnson wrote. “Otherwise prisoners must do without.”

“We intend to sit down and refuse to work, have an economic protest,” one in-prison organizer said in an audio interview shared with The Nation ahead of the action. “We want to create an environment where someone can do their time, be rehabilitated, and enter into society with some type of hope.”

It’s been difficult for organizers to get a full count, but people confined in at least 14 Florida prisons have participated in the strike, according to Karen Smith of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, one of the groups that helped organize the strike. “As far how many people are participating, there’s just no way of knowing,” she told In Justice Today. “All we see is the letters we get back.”

Smith’s organization has gotten multiple reports through letters from incarcerated people that the Florida Department of Corrections has taken steps to repress the strike, including putting people in solitary confinement and shutting down phones. Prison officials have even threatened those who communicate with her organization and other outside entities with “Security Threat Group” status, which would label them as part of a gang for the remainder of their sentences, limiting their placements and privileges.

Johnson recently wrote in a second San Francisco Bay View article about a warden “unleash[ing] swift retaliation” against him because of his first article on the strike, which prison officials said in a disciplinary report amounted to “inciting a riot.” Johnson sent a letter to the Abolitionist Law Center saying he was being “literally tortured” by being denied heat in 30-degree weather and given a non-working toilet.

Smith says the crackdown reflects the movement’s increasing power. “Prisoners are just getting organized, so the state is just starting to use these tactics,” Smith said.

In response to an inquiry from In Justice Today about the use of confinement and threats of Security Threat Group status, a spokesperson for the Florida DOC said, “Inmates are rarely put into single man cells. However, inmates will receive a disciplinary report should they refuse to do their assigned work duties.” The spokesperson also asserted, “No Florida inmates participated in work stoppages or strikes. All daily operations are continuing as normal, including inmate phone privileges.” The spokesperson confirmed that prisoners “are not paid” for laundry, cooking, and maintenance duties.

Smith is confident the DOC won’t be able to stop the strike, nor to stem the growing tide of organizing inside prisons. “I don’t think any of their tactics are going to make it impossible for this movement to continue on,” she said. “In recent years, it’s just been growing.”

“We intend to sit down and refuse to work, have an economic protest…. We want to create an environment where someone can do their time, be rehabilitated, and enter into society with some type of hope.”

Even prisoners who have been put on lockdown say they’re still participating in the protest. “We’re getting word back that there’s whole camps on lockdown,” said Smith. “Any amount of lockdown time is a win for a prison strike, because officers are triple-staffed and performing duties that the prisoners would have, and that’s expensive. That’s the whole point of this disruption: to disrupt their business as usual and hurt their profits.”

Prison uprisings have a long history in this country, with a swell of organizing in recent years. In 2016, on the 25th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion, people confined in state and federal prisons in 24 states, including Florida, went on strike to protest what they called slave labor conditions. Prisoners make, on average, just 14 cents to $1.41 an hour across the country, and in many prisons earn nothing at all. In August, in response to organizing for another protest, all of Florida’s prisons were put on lockdown, an unprecedented step.

Smith says one reason the current strike might not be making headlines is that it’s less visible than some other prison protests. “Some actions of the past were really visible because things were literally on fire and there were major physical uprisings, dorms were torn down,” Smith said. The Florida prison strike, by contrast, is harder to track because the prisoners are engaging in non-violent protest. Smith also noted that the DOC can transfer inmates from other locations who may not be part of the strike to have them perform work duties. It’s “a replaceable workforce,” she said. “So it’s a challenge.”

But, she argues, people housed in Florida prisons will continue to fight against exploitative labor practices. Currently, her organization, Support Prisoners And Real Change, and another called the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons are working on next steps for the rest of the year. “Right now, the focus is economic,” she said. “The way you do that is with strikes and boycotts.”

“This isn’t a one-and-done, one-day mission accomplished,” she said. “This is going to be a lot of work.”

The “Humble Beginnings” of the Sweeping Bail Reforms Enacted by New Jersey

Florida Prisoners are on Strike to Protest Price Gouging and Their ‘Current Slave Arrangement’ was originally published in IN JUSTICE TODAY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It happened with scant fanfare, but January 1st marked an important step on the path to eliminate the country’s money bail system: it all but disappeared in the state of Alaska.

The state’s reform law passed with bipartisan majorities and was signed into law back in July 2016, but it has now finally taken effect. Before New Year’s Day, the vast majority of people arrested in Alaska had to post bail, usually an amount in the thousands of dollars, in order to be released ahead of their trials. As a result, people without resources overwhelmingly ended up behind bars. Those with money walked free.

With the dawn of the New Year, the state changed over to a completely different system. Now, when someone is charged with a low-level crime, he need not scrape together cash or secure a bail bond to get out of jail. Instead, the state’s newly created Pretrial Enforcement Division, housed in the Department of Corrections, will generate a risk assessment for him using a point system that is meant to determine whether he will be likely to show up to subsequent court appearances and unlikely to commit crimes while released. The assessment produces a “risk score,” using an algorithm created by an institute in Boston based on how frequently he’s failed to appear in court previously, the number of prior arrests or convictions, how many times he has been jailed and/or on probation, the crime he was arrested for, and the age of his first arrest.

Judges then review defendants’ risk scores. The law requires pretrial officers to make certain recommendations to judges based on a defendant’s charge and score, although prosecutors and defense attorneys can still argue for harsher or lighter restrictions on release, such as requiring drug tests or electronic monitoring. But secured bail bonds can only be set for those charged with violent offenses and with high scores. The law requires courts to release on recognizance those charged with nonviolent misdemeanors and class C felonies with low scores, and there is a presumption of release for everyone who falls in between.

Defendants who are released will then be monitored by pretrial service officers. “More people will be out, but more people will have supervision,” Nancy Meade, general counsel of the Alaska Court System, told Juneau Empire.

Risk assessment tools have been implemented in a number of jurisdictions that have reformed bail, such as Kentucky and New Jersey. While advocates generally favor their use over bail, many express serious reservations about the tools. For example, people fear the tools can be discriminatory because they rely on past criminal history — which itself is already skewed, given how much more likely people of color are to be stopped by police and arrested in the first place. Casey Reynolds, communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, told the Fairbanks Daily News Miner that his organization supports replacing cash bail with the new point system because bail “puts people’s rights in a situation where it’s predicated on how much money you have.” But, he added, they will monitor to make sure that the new system is effectively administered. “We, like a lot of other people, have questions about how the new methodology is going to work and how it’s going to play out in practice, and we are watching it closely, but it’s probably going to take six months to see exactly how it’s working.”

Alaska’s decision to end the reliance on money bail came at a time of widespread concern in the state about its skyrocketing incarcerated population and the subsequent costs. Between 2005 and 2014, the state’s jail and prison population increased 27 percent, nearly three times faster than overall population growth. The prison population’s growth was directly related to the widespread use of bail, according to research by the PEW Charitable Trust. In the same time period, the pretrial incarcerated population — people waiting in jail for court hearings after their arrests — increased 81 percent. In a study of five courts across the state, the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission and PEW Charitable Trust found that money bond was required in two-thirds of cases, with about 40 percent of bonds set at $2,500 or more. When high bail bonds were set, defendants were less likely to walk free and ended up spending longer durations behind bars than those with smaller amounts.

Meanwhile, the state’s correctional budget grew 60 percent over the same time period. It had to go so far as to open a new correctional center in 2012 that cost $240 million. Without any changes in state policies, the population of incarcerated people was set to grow another 27 percent by 2024, adding $169 million in costs. The growth would have required the state to reopen a closed facility and possibly build a new one.

With the new reforms in place, PEW estimates that the number of inmates will decrease by 13 percent and that the state will save $380 million. The state plans to reinvest $98 million of that total over six years in crime victim services, pretrial services and supervision, re-entry support, substance abuse and mental health treatment in both prison and communities, and violence prevention.

The new law that took effect at the beginning of the month didn’t just do away with bail; it also included other significant reforms. Law enforcement officers are now given greater latitude to issue citations for a number of low-level offenses with a summons to appear in court, rather than arresting people, thus diverting more people from jail in the first place. Defendants will now wait for shorter periods of time before their first court appearance; now they must appear before the court within 24 hours of arrest unless there are compelling reasons to delay it. And it prohibits the use of third-party supervision when defendants are released if pretrial services are available, while mandating that courts send defendants reminders at least 48 hours before required appearances.

Many — including those who might not be natural advocates of criminal justice reform — believe that both safety and fairness will be better served in the new regime. “Reducing our state prison population is vital to making conditions inside the facilities safer, both for prison inmates and correctional officers,” Department of Corrections Commissioner Dean Williams said when the bill was signed. It “will reduce unnecessary pretrial detention and also strengthen alternatives to prison for those convicted of nonviolent offenses.”

“This was an enormous achievement that will reduce recidivism, hold offenders accountable, and get the most public safety out of each dollar spent on our criminal justice system,” said Republican Senator John Coghill, a sponsor of the original law.

Alaska itself, a deeply red state, may not seem like a likely candidate for leading the charge on bail reform. But the issue has attracted supporters from disparate political stances. New Jersey’s Republican governor helped champion a law that ended bail in the state. Kentucky was an early adopter, directing judges to release all low-risk defendants beginning in 2011. Meanwhile, some deep blue states, such as California and New York, are still working toward reform.

This Deep Red State Just Ended Cash Bail was originally published in IN JUSTICE TODAY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bail has been operating differently in Harris County, Texas, lately. In April, a judge issued an injunction in response to a lawsuit filed against the county by nonprofits Civil Rights Corps and Texas Fair Defense Project and law firm Susman Godfrey alleging that its practice of jailing people who couldn’t pay bail was unconstitutional. Under the injunction, no one is supposed to be kept behind bars because they’re too poor to afford bail.

Now, some people deemed to be low-risk through an assessment are getting released on a personal bond, or a promise to pay a certain amount if they fail to appear in court, without having to post it up front. Other defendants are given a secured bond, but must be released from jail within 24 hours if they say they can’t pay.

County officials are arguing that the new system isn’t working. Late last month, they shared data with the Texas Tribune, and more recently with In Justice Today, showing that nearly 45 percent of people released from jail after 24 hours failed to return to court for subsequent hearings.

But those numbers are not what they seem. Local public defenders and criminal justice advocates argue that judges and county officials themselves shoulder much of the blame.

“All of the failure to appear problems go back to the county,” Jay Jenkins, project attorney for Harris County with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, argued.

It used to be that defendants were typically required to return to court for a hearing seven days after being released. But earlier this year, the courts changed the rules to require misdemeanor defendants booked in the jail to come back within one business day. According to advocates and attorneys, the change was meant to improve due process by offering people a full hearing shortly after arrest.

But the requirement that defendants return within one business day of being booked has presented two challenges. One is technical: The county is trying to update its information system, but the system is still automatically, but incorrectly, setting arraignments for those charged with misdemeanors for seven days after release in the computer system, according to Alex Bunin, Chief Public Defender for Harris County.

So jail employees often tell people that they have to return in seven days, as it says in the computer, not one business day, said Sarah Wood, another public defender. Defendants take those instructions to heart, sometimes more than what’s on their physical paperwork, which should contain the correct date. “They’re very insistent: ‘No, the jailer told me it’s next week.’ They defer to authority,” she said. Others may have trouble understanding the paperwork, which can often be difficult to read due to small type, handwriting, legalese, and confusing instructions. Even “lawyers have a hard time figuring it out,” Wood said.

“The reason that [the failure to appear rate] is not higher is because lawyers working the bail hearings have been actually telling their clients, ‘I don’t care what the sheriff tells you… I don’t care what the court system says online when you look it up — your date is the next day,’” Jenkins of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition said.

The county disputes this account. “I don’t think that the high failure rate has anything to do with confusion over court dates,” said Ed Wells, court manager for Harris County. He contended that if judges or court staff discovered that a defendant was given paperwork with a different court date, they would reset the hearing for that date. That wouldn’t necessarily account for those who are still being told by jailers to come back in seven days, even if their paperwork says one business day. But Wells argued he doesn’t think that’s occurring, although he noted the sheriff’s office would better be able to respond. (The sheriff’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.) “All of the bond documents I’ve seen, when the sheriff is putting in that court date, they circle it and bring it to the attention of the person,” Wells said.

Even if everyone received a correct court date, many would still risk missing their hearings, since it can take as long as 20 hours for someone to be processed and released from jail.

“We had a person in court a few weeks ago … who was granted a personal bond [and released] at 7am inside the jail, and when they were filling out his bond paperwork they were putting the court date on there of the same day,” Wood said. “We were like, ‘Well how do you expect him to appear when you’re telling everyone it’s going to take five or six hours to process out of the jail?”

Emails reviewed by In Justice Today showed public defenders discussing clients who were still being processed at 3:30 a.m., even though their court hearings were later that morning. Given that the clients still had eight to 12 hours to go before getting released, there was no way they could make their scheduled hearings.

Wells argued that that this issue wasn’t common. “I don’t think it’s the norm at all,” he said.

Even if defendants get released early in the morning, that gives them little time to go home and then return. After a night in jail, many will want to sleep and shower. It can be tough to get back quickly if they don’t have cars or money to pay for a cab, according to Elizabeth Rossi, an attorney with Civil Rights Corps.

Meanwhile, because the judges aren’t yet comfortable with the new system, they’re more likely to release someone who is deemed to be low risk on a personal bond. That person can then access pretrial services. But that means the higher-risk people, who may face barriers to returning to court, are being booked into the jail. After 24 hours, if that person can’t afford bail, he’s released — but typically without any conditions or services like text message reminders that could help him come back.

“Any problems with nonappearance simply indicate that the county needs to figure out a better system for accurately informing people of their court dates, providing reminders of those court dates, and providing transportation or services to people who have trouble getting to court,” Rossi said. “The answer is not to lock up those people who can’t pay money bail until they plead guilty in order to get out.”

Wells declined to comment on the risk levels of people failing to appear. “That is something we’ll be looking at,” he said.

The data itself may also be misleading. In a letter to Harris County Attorney Vince Ryan reviewed by In Justice Today, Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who had received a copy of the report, raised questions about how failures to appear were being calculated. “While the data in this report is interesting, it lacks some key context that would be useful for interpretation,” including how bond failures were defined and reported, he wrote.

Wells acknowledged that a person who failed to show up for a single court hearing over one arrest would be counted as multiple failures to appear if he or she faced multiple charges — one count for each charge, if each was assessed with a bond, which is typical. “I don’t know how you would count that differently,” he said.

But that means the failure rate isn’t just counting individuals — instead, a small group could be driving up the numbers. “Just a small population of people are really making the percentage extremely high,” Bunin, the public defender, said. He noted one client was facing three charges for the same incident, and when he missed three court dates, that was counted as nine failures to appear. Yet it was just one person and one case.

And many of the people failing to come back to court are the public defenders’ homeless or severely mentally ill clients. “Those people cycle through our system constantly,” Bunin said. “I think if you took those people out of the mix, the number would drop down quite a bit.”

Some advocates see the county’s data, and the practices driving the numbers up, as a form of opposition to the court order reforming Harris County’s bail system. “The judges are doing this to make the failure rates high so when the case comes up they can say, ‘See, we tried and it didn’t work,’” Jenkins argued. “This is sabotage.”

The data also belies the positive side of the story: fewer people behind bars. “We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that more than 6,000 people have gone home to their families and homes and communities as a result of this order,” Rossi said.

Are Harris County Officials Trying to “Sabotage” Bail Reform with Misleading Data? was originally published in IN JUSTICE TODAY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

New Jersey has become a national leader in criminal justice reform, particularly around the hot button issue of requiring cash bail. When it passed the Bail Reform and Speedy Trial Act last year, it became one of only three locations in the United States that have virtually eliminated bail as a condition for release when someone is charged with a crime. Yet the state literally stumbled into these efforts, almost by accident, in 2012.

That was the year the Drug Policy Alliance obtained data from the state’s court system as part of its study on drug sentences. As they analyzed the data, the researchers were astonished to find that almost ¾ of individuals incarcerated in state jails hadn’t been sentenced. Of those, nearly 40 percent were in jail solely because they could not afford the bail that had been set. About 800 were being held on bail of $500 or less. The majority had been charged with a nonviolent crime such as drug possession or traffic violations. Yet they were incarcerated, on average, for about three months. 71 percent of the jail population was black or Hispanic.

Drug Policy Alliance staff quickly realized that the state’s cash bail system was the cause not only of New Jersey’s extreme prison overcrowding, but of gross injustice. Whether one had to sit in jail for months, or could return home and resume a relatively normal life until appearing in court, was determined solely by one’s ability to afford bail. Bail reform had not yet become a rallying cry. “It was really an emerging issue,” noted Roseanne Scotti, New Jersey director for the Drug Policy Alliance.

The organization published a report in March 2013, concluding that “the greatest opportunities to responsibly reduce New Jersey’s jail population are related to more efficiently and effectively managing the pretrial population.” These findings were hardly surprising to many who are engaged on a regular basis with the state’s criminal justice system, such as prosecutors, public defenders, and judges. Those people had become familiar with, and perhaps even inoculated against, the idea that money was the difference between going free or sitting behind bars. For those who weren’t deeply involved in how bail operated, however, the findings came as a shock. “It was very public and very powerful,” stated Alexander Shalom, senior staff attorney at the ACLU-NJ.

The report lit a fuse and hastened a public outcry. “It’s literally the most unsexy reading material ever,” noted Insha Rahman, project director at the Vera Institute. But it “galvanized [the organization’s] advocacy and lobbying efforts.” After its release, the Drug Policy Alliance quickly built a coalition of civil rights, community groups and faith leaders to push for reform.

The report also attracted the attention of the Chief Justice of New Jersey’s Supreme Court, Stuart Rabner. Judge Rabner gave a speech calling for widespread reform of the system, citing the Drug Policy Alliance’s finding that more than 1,500 people were sitting in jail just because they couldn’t afford bail of $2,500 or less. “That’s not a healthy practice for a system of justice,” he said.

“There was no way to read that report and not see it as a stain on the justice system at which he was at the helm,” Shalom explained. Rabner created the Joint Committee on Criminal Justice, consisting of a “who’s who of power players” from across the system, in Shalom’s words, including representatives from all three branches of the state government, prosecutors, public defenders, the attorney general, Shalom, and the chief justice.

“They’re the kind of folks who couldn’t agree about what to order for lunch together,” Scotti observed. Yet on the first day, the group voted unanimously to fundamentally transform the system, rather than attack the issues piecemeal.

“It was no longer a debate over is there a problem,” Shalom said. “The only reasonable thing that people of good faith could debate was how to fix it.”

Over the next several months, the group reached consensus on enough proposed reforms to release a report. The recommendations contained in the report formed the basis for the legislation that eventually became the Bail Reform and Speedy Trial Act. The Drug Policy Alliance quickly put its coalition to work to convince a majority of legislators to vote for the bill. “You just go out there and do the really hard, on-the-ground work of scheduling meetings, pitching ed[itorial] boards, talking to reporters, trying to get hearings,” Scotti said.

The support of the Republican governor, Chris Christie, turned out to be pivotal. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, was familiar with the federal system, which doesn’t typically rely on cash bail. “It was helpful that Christie understood the system,” Scotti said. Christie was most interested in the preventative detention piece — giving judges the power to jail people for public safety reasons instead of relying solely on bail amounts. Still, in the end, he became a leading proponent of the entire package of reforms.

Christie’s endorsement helped accelerate the momentum for the bill’s passage. “Because the governor was supportive, we had a lot of Republicans willing to look at this,” Scotti said. “All in all it took two years, which sounds like a lot of time, but as legislation goes it was actually one of the quicker pieces of legislation we had.”

The most vigorous opposition came from the powerful for-profit bail industry. Representatives argued that bail bondsmen are small business people who would be badly hurt by the legislation, and that implementing a new system would be costly. Yet most bond companies are owned by a handful of prosperous insurance companies, and their cost estimates were always highly inflated. “The bail industry, whose mendacity is truly spectacular, made up numbers…based on nothing,” Scotti said. “For the bail industry, it’s data be damned.”

Scotti described one informational hearing featuring an expert from Kentucky who discussed the state’s experience banning commercial bondsmen and implementing risk assessments. The expert said that the cost of setting up its pretrial services program had been in the tens of millions of dollars. Later in the day, a representative from the bail industry “started talking about how Kentucky was a disaster, cost hundreds of millions of dollars,” Scotti recalled. The woman from Kentucky was aghast. “She turned to me and she said, ‘I’m in the room, but it doesn’t matter.’”

Despite hiring three lobbying firms, the bond industry was ultimately unable to derail the reform movement. The combined impact of the Drug Policy Alliance report, the Joint Committee’s report, and the efforts of a large, diverse and bi-partisan coalition of stakeholders pushing for reform proved to be more powerful.

“The legislature wasn’t taking [the bail industry] seriously when they said things like everything is fine,” Shalom added. “The onus was in many ways on them to propose a better solution… And they didn’t have one.”

The legislation that eventually passed made sweeping changes. It requires that anyone who is issued a complaint warrant and arrested must receive a risk assessment within 48 hours, followed by “mini trial,” in Scotti’s words, with a defense attorney present. At that time, a judge either releases that person or holds him or her, based on risk. The legislation also increases the number and types of offenses for which summonses are to be used instead of arrests. This keeps more people out of the system altogether. For certain offenses, police must now seek permission before making an arrest.

“One of the things that really makes New Jersey unique is we did such a complete system overhaul,” Scotti said. “We deprioritized money bail, did a risk assessment, did pretrial services, and increased the use of summonses all at once.”

The impact of this legislation has already been significant. Data released this summer showed that the number of people in state jails who hadn’t yet been sentenced fell 26 percent between July 2016 and July 2017. The numbers have fallen even more precipitously — 34 percent — since 2015.

“We’ve spoken to people whose lives have been demonstrably changed by the fact that though they were arrested…they were able to get out and lead productive lives while their case was pending,” Shalom said. “They were allowed to stay employed, keep their home and housing situation, family situation.”

The reforms are attracting attention from other states. “We field calls all the time,” Scotti said. She has spoken to individuals from California, Connecticut, Florida, and Texas, among others.

“It seems unquestioned that New Jersey has started a conversation,” Shalom said. “Other states are looking to experiment and try things New Jersey has tried, and hopefully they try things that are bolder or different.”

The scope of New Jersey’s reforms should not be underestimated. It was “the biggest change in the criminal justice system in New Jersey in many decades,” Shalom said. “I wonder if the Drug Policy Alliance could have predicted the power of that report,” Rahman mused. “But it is really things like that that galvanize change.”

The “Humble Beginnings” of the Sweeping Bail Reforms Enacted by New Jersey was originally published in IN JUSTICE TODAY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.