From the Desk of John McLees…
One way to dedicate ourselves to fighting for the principle that black lives do indeed matter is to continue to learn about how the criminal justice system operates and about what we can do to address the moral crisis of mass incarceration, which has such a terribly disproportionate impact on the lives of so many black and brown people and their families.
The Reports in the section of the website containing links to “Other Sources of Ideas and Information” now include:
- The Final Report of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Pretrial Practices Concerning Pretrial Reform in the Illinois Criminal Justice System, and
- The Prison Policy Initiative’s Legislative Guide for Winnable, High-Impact Criminal Justice Reforms, and
- Two recent reports of the John Howard Association:
- its IDOC-wide Survey on COVID-19 inside Illinois Prisons and
- its report: COVID-19 Exposes the Detrimental Impact of Housing Restriction Laws on Releasing People from Prison.
We hope that you will take a look at some of these and other resources that continue to be linked there, in whatever time you have that is not taken up with the proliferating Zoom meetings and webinars.