Racial Disparity in Marijuana Policing in New Orleans

In national research, self-reported marijuana use is similar across races, but in New Orleans, black people are disproportionately arrested for marijuana offenses, including simple possession. While some states have legalized marijuana in recent years, the consequences for marijuana possession in Louisiana remain severe—under state law, repeated convictions for simple possession are punishable by multi-year prison sentences. This report illuminates through quantitative analysis the persistent racial disparities in marijuana policing from 2010 to 2015, and discusses the impacts of statutory and policy reforms the city has implemented to date. Through these findings, the report aims to guide state and local policymakers toward further improvements to lessen the harm even seemingly minor police encounters inflict on black communities, and inspire other jurisdictions to examine their own practices

Past Due: Examining the Costs and Consequences of Charging for Justice in New Orleans

In 2015, government agencies in New Orleans collected $4.5 million in the form of bail, fines and fees from people involved in the criminal justice system and, by extension, from their families. Another$4.7 million was transferred from the pockets of residents to for-profit bail bond agents. These costs have become the subject of considerable public attention. Because many "users" of the system have very low incomes or none at all, there is growing concern that charging for justice amounts to criminalizing poverty, especially when people who can't pay become further entangled in the justice system. In 2015, the city spent $6.4 million to incarcerate people who couldn't pay bail or conviction fines and fees. By focusing on bail decisions and fines and fees assessed at conviction, Past Due, and its accompanying technical report, reveals the costs and other consequences of a system that tries to extract money from low-income people and then jails them when they can't pay

Power Amidst Renewal: Foundation Support for Sustaining Advocacy After Disasters

Follows up a 2007 report on the effectiveness of foundations and nonprofits in advocating for systemic changes in the Gulf Coast and lessons learned. Calls for collaboration, regionalizing agendas, and integrating advocacy into missions and grant periods

New Orleans: Who's in Jail and Why?

Everyone in New Orleans deserves to be safe. We rely on our criminal justice agencies—the police, the courts, and the jail—to ensure public safety, so we should ask ourselves regularly: how well is our system working? By looking at who we hold in our jail and why, we can begin to understand the role of detention in keeping our community safe and inform what our jail needs are, both now and going forward.Until recently, New Orleans led the nation in jail incarceration: before Katrina, we jailed people at a rate five times the national average. The consequences were dramatic for the tens of thousands of people booked into the jail each year who lost their jobs, homes, and even custody of their children. Instead of making us the safest city in America, this over-use of detention destabilized communities.How are we using detention today? Generally, people are held in jail for any number of reasons. Therefore, unfortunately, there is no simple answer to the question of "who is in our jail?" This report aims to advance an important public conversation about how we are using our jail and how it impacts safety in our city

The New Orleans Criminal Legal System: A Flowing River

Ask anyone from New Orleans and they will tell you the city has not been the same since the storm. Although the city has persevered through many storms and hurricanes in its three-hundred-year history, this particular storm—Hurricane Katrina—is notorious for the transformation it brought to New Orleans in the years that followed. The makeup, culture, and rhythm of New Orleans have changed, but so too have the various systems that give the city its tempo—particularly the criminal legal system. Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that revealed deficiencies, abnormalities, and injustices in the New Orleans criminal legal system. Some responses to these revelations were criticized and some were supported, and what we have today in 2020—fifteen years after the storm—is a city that is not the same. To understand the change in the city’s criminal legal system, we will start by looking at how the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) came to work in New Orleans, then we will review Vera’s involvement in various efforts to reduce the jail size—in population and in structure. Finally, we will list some lessons learned since Vera began its work in New Orleans

Evolution and Denial: State Sentencing after Blakely and Booker

Justice Louis Brandeis famously described the states as laboratories where individual jurisdictions can experiment with various legal strategies. In the wake of Blakley v. Washington, and United States v. Booker those laboratories have been working overtime. Since June 2004, both state legislatures and state courts have grappled with the significance of the United States Supreme Court\u27s treatment of the Sixth Amendment in sentencing. It is unsurprising, given the extraordinary significance and potential reach of Blakely and Booker, that this Herculean task has produced divergent results. Although there are many potential ways to sort those results, for the purposes of these observations, we have divided them into states of “evolution” and states of “denial.” Evolution states have read Blakely and Booker fairly, accepted that Blakely controls what is permissible within their sentencing regimes, and responded in ways that best fit their circumstances. Still, there are differences in how these jurisdictions have evolved. Many of the states responding to Blakely (particularly those with active sentencing commissions) have retained their more presumptive sentencing systems. Others have followed Booker toward a more advisory system of guiding judicial discretion at sentencing. In contrast, denial states, acting through their state supreme courts, have found ways to repudiate that Blakely even applies to their systems, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. California is probably the most notable of the denial states and, consistent with our views but after these observations went to press, it attracted the Supreme Court’s attention in Cunningham v. California. We conclude with a look toward the future and a plea for states to strengthen their sentencing commissions

Evolution and Denial: State Sentencing after Blakely and Booker

Justice Louis Brandeis famously described the states as laboratories where individual jurisdictions can experiment with various legal strategies. In the wake of Blakley v. Washington, and United States v. Booker those laboratories have been working overtime. Since June 2004, both state legislatures and state courts have grappled with the significance of the United States Supreme Court\u27s treatment of the Sixth Amendment in sentencing. It is unsurprising, given the extraordinary significance and potential reach of Blakely and Booker, that this Herculean task has produced divergent results. Although there are many potential ways to sort those results, for the purposes of these observations, we have divided them into states of “evolution” and states of “denial.” Evolution states have read Blakely and Booker fairly, accepted that Blakely controls what is permissible within their sentencing regimes, and responded in ways that best fit their circumstances. Still, there are differences in how these jurisdictions have evolved. Many of the states responding to Blakely (particularly those with active sentencing commissions) have retained their more presumptive sentencing systems. Others have followed Booker toward a more advisory system of guiding judicial discretion at sentencing. In contrast, denial states, acting through their state supreme courts, have found ways to repudiate that Blakely even applies to their systems, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. California is probably the most notable of the denial states and, consistent with our views but after these observations went to press, it attracted the Supreme Court’s attention in Cunningham v. California. We conclude with a look toward the future and a plea for states to strengthen their sentencing commissions