Our election takeaways

Plus some great journalism to check out

Hello! 

It’s been a few weeks since the election, and we imagine you, like us, are feeling overwhelmed and trying to figure out what the results mean for the issues you cover and care about. The next few years are likely going to be extra challenging for journalists, people in the criminal justice reform world, and, especially, incarcerated people and their families. In some ways, we expect the criminal legal system to be front and center for its role in everything from deportations to enforcing abortion bans. But in other ways, the lives of the millions of people incarcerated in American jails and prisons every year are in danger of being overlooked in a sea of competing priorities and diminished reporting resources. We’re thinking hard about how to be most useful to you right now. While we’re still ironing out the details, we expect to be using this platform more than ever to share ideas, analysis, and reporting. 

TWO quick notes on that! 

First, we’d like to get this newsletter into as many hands (inboxes?) as possible. It’s always free to subscribe, so please! Share with your friends, family, classmates, work spouse, attorney, and so on and so on. (If you’re a journalist, an advocate, or a public defender, do us a favor and send this to at least three colleagues! Or better yet, your office listserv!)

Second, we would love to hear your ideas, thoughts, tips, and questions! Are you a journalist who wants to know more about something you’re thinking about covering? Are you a public defender who has noticed a troubling pattern in your jurisdiction? Feel free to comment or email us. We’re also on Signal.  If you want to reach out to us anonymously, that’s also welcome. (Rest assured that we won’t share your information publicly unless you request that we do.) 

---

OK, on to the main event. We’re going to process some of the election results through the lens of the interviews we published in the run up to the big day. 

On crime as an electoral issue: Overall, it seems that crime was not a top issue for voters. According to exit polls from CNN, Trump voters ranked immigration and the economy as the most important issues, while Harris voters said abortion and democracy.¹ Usually that sort of high-level information is all we’d get, but this year Vera Action conducted their own exit poll specifically about public safety issues. In their survey, voters ranked homelessness and public drug use as their top concerns when it comes to crime. We’ve heard before about the relationship between disorder and people’s perceptions of safety, and it seems this is a thread worth following for journalists. Read the full election breakdown from Vera Action here. 

Source: Vera Action

On criminal justice reform at the ballot box: In California, two reform DAs were ousted, and Prop 36 – which ratchets up punishment for low-level offenses like theft and drug possession – passed, while Prop 6 – which would have ended slavery in prisons and jails– did not. In Arizona, Prop 314 – which allows local police to get involved in immigration enforcement – passed. Voters in Colorado approved a ballot measure that will lengthen prison terms for some crimes. It wasn’t all losses for reform though: some prosecutors who ran on reform platforms won (in Savannah and Houston and Orlando and—in the primary and general election—Albany), and two reform-minded judicial candidates won seats on the bench in LA. Per usual, to understand these seemingly contradictory results, it helps to follow the money. In California, supporters of Prop 36 and more punitive DA candidates majorly outspent their opponents. For example, challenger Nathan Hochman outspent incumbent Los Angeles DA George Gascon almost 9 to 1. Our takeaway isn’t that voters changed their minds and want to return to ‘90s-style punitive policymaking. (Polling and reform wins in red, blue, and purple states belie that explanation.) It’s that well-funded fearmongering still works in some places some of the time. There are endless opportunities for journalists to help people make sense of these results, and we’re happy to make connections to smart people we know thinking about them (like Zoë, Jhumpa, and Daniel from our interview series).

---

And now for some interesting stuff we’ve been reading: 

• This article from Andrew Deck at Nieman Lab is useful for thinking about FOIA over the next four years. First, it’s worth noting that we’re not exactly in amazing territory now – the typical wait time for a request over 50 pages is more than 2 years – but there are reasons to think some requests could get harder federally (and, as we talked about in a past newsletter, also in many states). Some of the expected federal slowdown will be because of a potential deluge of requests, which also happened in 2016. Andrew also points out that it’s hard to talk about FOIA requests as a monolith, because there’s so much variation from agency to agency. Anyway, give it a read, and let us know what you’re thinking about w/r/t records requests, both locally and federally. As always, let us know if we can help in any way (we genuinely ❤️ records requests).

• This AJC investigation by Allie Gross is a bleak look into many Georgians’ final years, spent in nursing/care homes. Allie’s piece delves into “elopements” (a nice way of saying folks with memory issues who wander off) and makes clear that the current system for rating these facilities is not telling the whole story. If this issue isn’t already being covered in your community, maybe you could look into it. If we’re lucky, we’re all going to get old.

• We really liked this piece by Lea Skene at the AP looking into a dramatic decline in homicides in one Baltimore neighborhood. The historic drop in murders that we’ve seen across 2023 and 2024 deserves lots more coverage like this.

• Remember when NYC tried to ban physical mail from Rikers Island, and jails commissioner Louis Molina dramatically passed around a child’s drawing of a reindeer that allegedly came into Rikers “soaked” in fentanyl? Well, that was basically junk science. It turns out those fentanyl test strips had a pretty shocking false positive rate of 85%, and the reindeer drawing didn’t have any fentanyl on it at all.

• Speaking of junk science, be on the lookout for news stories about “mobile ballistics labs” like this one that ran in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. It’s likely that they’re talking about ballistics testing (running tests to determine which gun a bullet was fired from), which is also a fairly well established junk science (some states don’t even allow it as evidence in court – like Maryland).     

That’s all from us this week. Back with more soon.

—Hannah & Josie

1. More on the inaccurate perceptions of immigration driving crime in a later newsletter.