A year ago, state Democrats blocked efforts to combat and prevent retail theft, but now the Legislature has created a select committee to study its cause. Last month, lawmakers sent 10 retail-theft-related bills to Gov. Newsom’s desk.
An anonymous tip on Jan. 3, 2023, alerted Kentucky corrections officials that prisoners had hacked state-issued, for-profit computer tablets and spent nearly $88,000 of fraudulent money on digital media products.
The databases are fraught with problems from due process to privacy rights to racial and ethnic disparities, raising the question of whether they really make cities safer.
The state is just one of 13 in which prosecutors can try children as adults without getting approval from a judge. Only 10 percent of the more than 20,000 children tried as adults in Florida were given juvenile sanctions from 2008 to 2022.
Bills addressing retail theft and car break-ins represented an attempt by Democrats to sway voters ahead of a ballot initiative that would stiffen penalties further. Some progressives objected.
Six years ago, state police made a big push to catch up on a massive backlog. Now, waiting times exceed eight months and the number of untested kits is three times higher than in 2019.
Transit police have issued more than 700 citations over the past two months. Instead of fines, riders who don’t pay are being sent to court.
A lawsuit alleges that the Department of Corrections failed to provide medical treatment to detainees thousands of times between June 2022 and present. The city maintains that the vast majority of missed appointments were due to detainees’ refusal.
As the transit agency publicly worked to ensure their riders felt safe during their daily commutes, top executives experienced an internal breakdown in communication so bad that it resulted in a wrongful-termination lawsuit.
The report identified issues of physical and sexual abuse, extended periods of isolation for the children, lack of mental health treatment and failure to provide adequate services for students with disabilities.
There are 898 inmates per 100,000 Alabama residents, a higher rate than any nation other than El Salvador. Five other southern states incarcerate more people, however, and Alabama is sending less people to prison than it was 10 years ago.
“Second look” laws allow courts or parole boards to re-evaluate a person’s long prison sentence. The bills often focus on older populations or those whose crimes might have mitigating factors.
As the Missouri attorney general continues against those with innocence claims, critics are wondering if Andrew Bailey, who is currently up for re-election, has crossed moral lines and damaged the credibility of the office.
Texas ranked 10th in the nation for auto thefts per capita last year and Dallas had the fifth-highest number of car thefts among U.S. cities. But early data from this year reports that thefts are down by about 7.25 percent so far.
A year after the controversial project’s completion, the Douglas County Youth Center remains empty. Even with that, there are more kids in custody than beds in the county’s controversial detention center.
A new law extends the state’s sexual assault evidence protections to cover DNA samples. But getting justice in hundreds of cold cases will require more than just testing, survivors say.
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