Hello!
Well. This past month has been a long year. It’s hard to know where to start – the Trump administration’s “flood the zone” strategy for inundating us with an onslaught of new executive orders and memos and disappearing data sets and slashed budgets and general chaos is working in the sense that most of us feel overwhelmed and scattered.
We want to try and help y’all cut through the noise, to the extent that we can, when it comes to what’s happening within the criminal legal system. Trump has long been promising to make…uh, sweeping changes, some of which he began implementing on his first day in office.
So far, the implementation of the policies has been spotty, to say the least. Some have already gotten ensnared in the courts, causing more confusion on the ground – read this from The Marshall Project on the chaos and uncertainty that transgender people in federal prisons have been subjected to after an EO prohibiting the use of federal funds for gender-affirming care was temporarily blocked. The Laken Riley Act is sure to generate even more horrors, as it requires DHS to detain certain undocumented people who are arrested for, charged with, or convicted of certain crimes, including shoplifting, until their immigration case is resolved. Apparently the law is so broad that even many within ICE think it goes too far. This all begs the question: where…are those people going to go? Federal prisons? Guantanamo? County jails who decide to contract with ICE? Tent cities in the desert?!
We’re also going to spend some time in this issue talking about lead poisoning in the US, and how to investigate/report on it. The chaos of this administration makes it easy to take our eyes off the ball when it comes to other harmful things that happen irrespective of who is in the White House. We’ll try to walk the line re: illuminating federal action while also highlighting other things that impact people’s safety around the country. One last quick note before we get into the rest of it – a new Trump administration means a new media ecosystem, and that often trickles down to your local city and state, too. Are there things that aren’t getting covered that you believe deserve more attention? Let us know what’s going on.
OK. There are a million questions to ask, and we’re going to try to answer some big broad ones with The Center for Just Journalism’s very own Laura Bennett:
How has criminal legal policy changed since Trump’s second inauguration?
The president and members of his administration have made a number of changes to criminal legal policy that seem to be united by two broad goals: 1) increasing punitiveness and 2) using the country’s massive policing apparatus to target immigrants and other groups of people who are out of favor with the administration.
First: punitiveness. Last week, AG Pam Bondi instructed federal prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” and explicitly discouraged plea bargains that result in downgraded charges. Trump ordered DOJ officials to seek the death penalty in every possible case and is also looking to expand eligibility for the death penalty to some drug-related crimes. Trump also cleared the way for the DOJ to begin housing people in private prisons again, which have repeatedly been found to be more dangerous than already-very-dangerous public prisons, and to house transgender women in men’s prisons.
Second: refocusing the machinery of the criminal legal system. Administration officials, including the president himself, have also been quite clear that they want local, state, and federal police and prosecutors to focus their vast resources on immigrants (a priority reinforced by the recently passed Laken Riley Act) and people they view as political opponents. Bondi’s memos indicate that the administration will use grant funding and investigations as leverage to ensure compliance with their priorities at the state and local levels. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I think it captures the overall thrust of what’s happened in the last month.
Are there any legal obstacles to the proposed changes?
The administration’s order to relocate transgender women to men’s prisons and discontinue gender-affirming care has been challenged in court. If federal prosecutors seek the death penalty in so-called “drug kingpin” cases, that will also likely generate a court challenge, given the Supreme Court’s ruling that the death penalty is unconstitutional in cases in which no one is killed. More legal challenges may come as federal officials begin to implement Trump and Bondi’s orders, along with the Laken Riley Act’s provisions around mandatory detention for undocumented people charged with certain crimes, including shoplifting.
What other criminal legal policy changes has the administration signaled it might be considering?
Trump talked about a bunch of different criminal legal policies on the campaign trail, including investigating “radical leftist prosecutor’s officers” and requiring local police agencies to have a stop-and-frisk policy in place in order to receive federal grant funds. Given the chaos surrounding federal funding, these policies are worth watching closely, as important changes may get lost in the shuffle of competing and ever-changing priorities.
Is there any precedent in US history for the changes that the Trump administration has made or proposed?
Because of the pace and tone of recent administrative actions, it’s easy to feel like we’re in unprecedented territory, and, in some ways, we are. But in other ways, the second Trump administration’s criminal legal priorities are better described as a dramatic doubling down on the most draconian aspects of the country’s vast policing, prosecution, and prison systems. The preexisting size and strength of those systems will make Trump’s orders easier to implement and more likely to succeed. (It’s easier to detain millions of immigrants if you’ve already got a huge number of jails, prisons, and detention centers scattered across the country and even overseas.) On the other hand, more people are aware of the folly and cruelty of the country’s criminal legal and immigration systems than they were 40, 20, or even 10 years ago, because of the hard work of impacted people, defense attorneys, and advocates. The steps that people take to push back on these orders are worthy of the focused, careful attention of journalists.
Lead Poisoning
Now for something completely different:
Lead has been understood to be exactly what it is – a highly toxic element with no safe levels of exposure – by medical and other professionals for over a century. It’s a neurotoxin that can lead to attention and other behavioral issues in children who are exposed to it. This can lead to an increased risk of interactions with the criminal legal system (there’s a large, settled body of research on this. In the words of this NIH meta-analysis: “Our review, in conjunction with the available biological evidence, suggests that an excess risk for criminal behavior in adulthood exists when an individual is exposed to lead in utero or in the early years of childhood.”) In addition to these neurological effects, lead also causes heart problems and chronic kidney disease.
This, obviously, is a public safety issue. It certainly seems like the kind of thing that governments should direct some money towards eradicating, if they care about safety.
Many American cities were already starting to ban the use of lead in water pipes starting in the mid 1900’s – NYC stopped installing lead lines in 1961, and Madison, Wisconsin, stopped in 1928. Chicago went the other way, actually mandating the use of lead in the construction of water pipes up until Congress banned new lead lines in 1986 (if you’re curious about this mandate, there’s some real rabbit holes to go down about the lead lobby). Lead paint was banned federally in 1978 but millions of people live in houses that predate this ban, and many of those homes still have lead paint.
Opportunities for Reporting
For our readers and writers in, to name a few, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Flint, New Orleans, New York, Chicago, DC, (this is just a handful of the places severely impacted by lead) some of your community members are dealing with lead poisoning and facing serious health risks, and a big infrastructure task is ahead of you.
Track the process of lead remediation in water pipes. Thanks to new federal regulations, most cities are on a sped-up timeline to get rid of their lead pipes. Monica Eng did great reporting on how various municipalities are tackling the problem (we love a solutions lens) in 2019, for WBEZ.
There are a lot of complicating factors in doing this remediation, from the physical - ( it requires digging up yards and breaking basement foundations) to the practical (if you’re a renter and your landlord is uninterested, it’s not easy to advocate for lead remediation) to the budgetary (many cities just don’t have the money to address this.) Talking to community members who have gone through the remediation process can help demystify it (or even have suggestions on how to make it easier.) You should also talk to people who have been unsuccessful - especially people who requested help to no avail. And, of course, talk to your local elected officials about funding.
Follow what’s happening with lead paint across the country, with a focus on those most vulnerable to it – including renters and Black and brown neighborhoods.
Cleveland is a prime example of the difficulties inherent to getting rid of lead paint. Thanks to their older housing stock, lead poisoning (particularly in kids) is getting worse, not better. Last year, there were 11 instances of lead poisoning happening in homes that had been officially deemed “lead safe.” The current Mayor has realized that there actually isn’t any solution other than total abatement, which likely means replacing entire walls, baseboards, doors, window frames – anything with lead paint on the surface. Signal Cleveland has been doing a great job tracking what the city is doing to try and fix the problem, including prosecuting landlords.
In your own community, see if landlords are being prosecuted for lead in paint. Find out what your local regulations are. Look into groups that do lead testing (some are nonprofits that will do it for free – look into testing buildings like public schools, or even jails).
Focus on renters – almost across the board, they are bearing the brunt of lead poisoning more than people who own their homes. It’s not the only way lead exposure is not evenly spread across populations — there’s a ton of evidence that Black and brown communities face a much higher risk than their white counterparts. This will be true in your city too, more than likely — use old redlining maps as your guide for which neighborhoods are likely most impacted, and start talking to people there.
Follow the story of people who have been impacted by lead poisoning, if you can — this Washington Post story by Amudalat Ajasa and Carolyn Van Houten was so moving and so well done.
Talk to experts in the impacts of lead poisoning, like Tomás Guilarte, or Marissa Hauptman. Talk to experts in the link between lead exposure and criminal legal system involvement, like Maria Jose Talayero Schettino. Other experts? Pediatricians in your community! Parents! Community organizers!
That’s it for now. Again, let us know what we should be talking about/what we’re missing/what’s going on with y’all at a local level. Hang in there, friends.