News & Commentary

Alabama. Arkansas. Kentucky. Ohio. And today, Georgia. That’s the list of states where the ACLU has had to go to court over the last few months to challenge laws banning abortion. The Georgia law bans abortion at six weeks of pregnancy and is in c

At the first checkpoint at Tennessee Prison for Women, there was a large, scrolling television screen behind the desk displaying the image of two pairs of hands – one pair with a key and one pair in handcuffs. The message read, “You can either be one of us or one of them.” I had been working in the facility for less than a year, but this message exemplified an uneasiness I had long felt without articulating: The prison’s façade of “rehabilitation” masked a system so blatantly punitive and practically ineffective that the choice itself was impossible, offensive, and encapsulated all that was wrong with this failed iteration of the carceral state.   As a senior clinical therapist at the prison, I provided mental health services to women in solitary confinement. Initially, and admi

Across the country, extremist politicians emboldened by President Trump’s agenda have passed a tsunami of abortion bans and restrictions, each one more cruel and outlandish than the last. Elected officials in Arkansas have the shameful distinction of having been at the forefront of this nationwide crusade to criminalize abortion, and the ACLU has gone to court again and again to block these laws from taking effect. This year, Arkansas politicians sank to a new low with a trifecta of unconstitutional laws designed to elim

This morning, the Supreme Court told the country what we and our clients have long known: that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross provided a false reason for his decision to add a citizenship question to the Decennial Census. The court explained that the Trump administration’s stated reason for adding a citizenship question—enforcement of the Voting Rights Act—was “contrived.” The justices could not “ignore the disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given.” Bottom-line, this decision prevents addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Census based on the administration’s lies. As we explained in our complaint and

Last night’s Democratic presidential debate shined an unlikely spotlight on a little-known section of the federal code — 8. U.S.C. 1325. This law makes crossing the border without legal authorization a federal misdemeanor. Its counterpart, 8 U.S.C. 1326, makes re-crossing the border a felony. They are the laws the Trump administration has leveraged to take thousands of children from their parents at the border. Recall their explanation: They claimed they had

The ecological destruction of Arizona, New Mexico, and California hangs in the balance as courts decide whether to block President Trump’s abuse of emergency powers to secure funds for a border wall Congress denied. On Feb. 15, 2019, President Trump declared a national emergency so that he could raid the milita

Illinois just passed what may be the most progressive marijuana legalization bill in America. Gov. Pritzker’s didn’t surprise anyone by signing the bill yesterday (he campaigned on the issue), and with the work of the state legislature Illinois is the 11th state to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use. This is a deceptively momentous criminal justice reform whose nuances show just why there cannot be justice in drug laws without equity. While a single bill cannot undo the damage rained by the war on drugs, and it cannot halt mass incarceration in a given state, in these 439 pages Illinois legislators not only called out the havoc of counter-productive drug enforcement but promised that the benefits of this important reform will be felt by the individuals and communities most harmed by the war on drugs, namely people of color and people with low incomes. Marijuana legalization will touch thousands upon thousands of people. In Illinois alone, almost half of all drug arrests were for cannabis-related offenses. In 2010, two years before Chicago City Council decriminalized pot, over 33,000 arrests were made for marijuana possession. That’s 91 arrests for pot per day – the highest in the country, and most of these were for 10 grams or less. And while arrests rates for folks smoking weed has plummeted in Chicago (Illinois’ largest city) during the last few years, the rates of the disproportionate application of enforcement has remained atrocious. In fact, despite constituting 36 percent of the population of Chicago, in 2016 78 percent of all marijuana arrests were of Black people and less than 5 percent were of white people. Unfortunately, this is par for the course in America;

It’s been half a century since the Stonewall uprising began on June 28, 1969, the reason we celebrate Pride each June. But there’s another fitting date to commemorate this month, and it falls just two days before the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. June 26 marks the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 2003 striking down

With legislative sessions winding down across the country, states have an opportunity to explore an often untapped resource for ending mass incarceration and addressing racism in the criminal justice system: the power of Governors. The power of the executive presents significant and often untapped opportunities to shrink the jail a