A new report by the Fair Punishment project at Harvard Law School, along with the Immigrant Defense Project and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, identifies concrete policy changes cities and states can take to protect immigrants and other oppressed communities, looking beyond ‘Sanctuary...
The vast majority, or about 86%, of the over two million people locked up behind bars in the United States are under state or local control. They were arrested by state or local police, prosecuted by state or local prosecutors, sentenced by...
Today at 1:30 PM I’ll be delivering the following testimony to the Boston City Council’s Committee on Public Safety and Criminal Justice. The Committee is meeting to vote on approving a $14 million DHS grant to the Metro Boston Homeland Security Region,...
Earlier this week, I had the peculiar experience of watching my colleagues try to convince the state’s highest court that when the government wrongfully convicts tens of thousands of people, it’s up to the government to right those wrongs. The prosecutors representing...
Tomorrow is Election Day—finally. There’s a lot at stake in this contest, but no matter who wins, those of us who care about civil rights and civil liberties will continue to have our work cut out for us. Here are three...
Opponents of Question 4 in Massachusetts have suggested concerns about racial disparities in marijuana policing are overblown, because no one is really getting arrested or going to jail because of weed in our state. Adults who want to smoke marijuana in their...
Journalist Kenneth Lipp with the major scoop: The AT&T pay-to-play surveillance service scheme called Project Hemisphere is much bigger than original reports suggested. Lipp writes in the Daily Beast: Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call...
We’ve long known that the war on drugs is a major driver of not only mass incarceration but also excessive government surveillance and other Fourth Amendment violations. Here in Massachusetts, the latest example of government overreach in the war on drugs astounds:...
Last week, Massachusetts State Police officials working in tandem with National Guard drug eradication agents flew a black helicopter above the Cape and Islands and then raided an elderly Martha’s Vineyard farmer’s property to seize his marijuana plants. The man, 81 year-old Paul Jackson,...
In conversations about civil liberties reform, we often come face to face with the inescapable fact that our world and our issues are interconnected. It’s not possible to fully address systemic racism in the criminal system without also addressing economic injustice. Drug...