media and criminal justice
Picturing Prisons
Published November 24, 2009 @ 06:55AM PT
Prisons and prisoners are often invisible to the general public, and governments do everything they can to keep it that way. We usually won't raise a stink over something -- or somebody -- we can't see.
For years, Nick Szuberla and his colleagues at Thousand Kites have worked tirelessly to bring prisoners’ stories to light through their radio shows and film projects. Now, they’re calling on all of us to help build a crowdsourced database of prison imagery -- shining a light on the thousands of hidden, sprawling prisons and jails across our country.
Thousand Kites' Incarceration Nation project asks the community of criminal justice reformers to post images of prisons -- exteriors, interiors and aerial images -- to create a image bank for bloggers, researchers, activists and interested members of the public to draw upon. It aims to use technology such as Google Earth to pinpoint prisons and remind us what these human warehouses look like. If you have an image to contribute, please visit the Thousand Kites sites and post it -- this project will only be a success if we participate.
I discussed the project with Szuberla this week, and he told me that Incarceration Nation grew to fill a need for images of invisible spaces:
After several years of being chased of by corrections officials for filming exteriors, at one point we rented a helicopter to get images, we decided to begin using available technologies, Google Earth, to explore the criminal justice stories.
There are often strict regulations around film outside and certainly inside prisons. We believe that sunlight is the best sanitizer for human rights violations, and it is often not in a state's interest to provide access. In Virginia, where we are based, they literally moved the prison gate back, from where you could film, as media scrutiny increased. Prisons are often in rural, hard to reach places. One reason for this is to support faltering rural economies, but the other is an out of sight, out of mind mentality.
Crowdfunded Court Reporting
Published November 20, 2009 @ 06:15AM PT
This week, a reporter from San Francisco public radio station KALW is spending her days in Oakland courtrooms, taking in all of the action (and inaction). She's reporting for a story funded by individuals through the website Spot.us, on the daily activity in a criminal court -- and she's blogging about what she sees, letting us in on both the process of reporting a story like this and the day-to-day workings of a court that the media usually misses in its 800-word story about a murder conviction.
So far, reporter Rina Palta has seen some high-level cases, more than one might expect from the daily grind of a criminal court. She wrote on Tuesday about watching arguments from both sides of a death penalty sentencing hearing. The proceedings piqued her curiosity about jury selection and she spent the next day watching lawyers interview potential jurors in a case where the state was seeking to label a man a sexually violent predator, making him eligible for lifetime civil commitment.
Together, Spot.us and KALW are exploring a new method of covering our criminal justice system, and there's great potential here. Criminal justice reform can't happen until the system's failures and successes become human stories to which we can connect. Crowd-funded reporting offers a chance to shine a spotlight on the invisible people within the system.
Open-Sourcing Our Courts
Published November 18, 2009 @ 06:04AM PT
Most records and documents created and filed within court systems and police departments in the U.S. are public. And Google is trying to make it feel that way.
The company that conquered the web and coined the phrase “Don’t Be Evil” announced yesterday in a blog post that it was adding full-text decisions from federal and state legal courts to Google Scholar.
This announcement means the free web becomes a richer source not only for education and research, but also for those of us trying to overturn injustice through the court system.
The law is still a paper profession. It’s changing, but slowly. Google’s move only covers opinions filed by courts; those are currently among the easier documents to find. For real reform, we need a sea change in the way the law looks at data. We need to bring the digital revolution to the courtroom and the police station. During the Presidential campaign last year, Barack Obama talked about a Google for Government. He’s right. We need to Google-ize our courts.
Global Bloggers Under Threat
Published November 08, 2009 @ 08:20AM PT
Popular Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez was stopped and beaten by police this week on her way to an anti-violence rally in Havana. She was one of three bloggers reportedly detained and assaulted by Cuban officers -- probably for their outspoken online criticism of the country's political rulers. Global Voices has an excellent roundup of the incidents and Sanchez wrote about the incident and posted video of the anti-violence rally she missed.
Also this week, Tunisian blogger and theater professor Fatma Riahi was imprisoned for three days and could face defamation charges for allegedly writing poltical satire and commentary on her blog. She was freed yesterday, but her laptop was confiscated, and advocates fear she could be arrested again once officers dig up evidence that she criticized the state. A community of bloggers has rallied around her, and Global Voices and the LA Times have reported on her situation.
There's great promise in new media to challenge oppressive regimes around the world and bring sunlight to unjust practices of dozens of world governments. That's why these governments crack down on bloggers like Riahi and Sanchez -- they're scared of the power of blogs to bring international attention to their actions.
The CSI Effect, Fact or Fiction?
Published November 02, 2009 @ 06:39AM PT
The overwhelming popularity of crime and forensics TV shows like CSI, Law & Order and NCIS is having a profound impact on how our society views crime, but the storied effect of these shows on juries may be a myth.
A new study shows that watching these shows leads us to drastically overestimate the frequency of violent crime in our country.
The new research, from Purdue University, finds that frequent TV crime viewers estimated that the number of murders was 2-3 times higher than it is in reality. But true-crime junkies also think cops and lawyers are everywhere. They guessed that each group made up more than 16 percent of the American workforce. They're really less than one percent each.
So how does this altered perception of crime translate to the courtroom?
