West Des Moines Iowa Criminal Defense Law Blog

When someone is charged with a crime, bail is determined in part based on a risk assessment. The court decides whether the defendant, if allowed to go free, will fail to appear for trial or will commit another crime.

Unfortunately, defendants of color have historically been assessed as riskier than their white peers. That leaves people of color to languish in pretrial detention at greater rates than whites, putting their lives and livelihoods at risk.

With the rise of Big Data, it seemed like a more race-neutral risk assessment method could be devised. Groups have developed risk assessment algorithms meant to consider only factual data, although demographics are often used. For example, these tools might consider the defendant's history of arrests, charges and convictions, along with the seriousness of the crime they're currently charged with. 

A recent study released by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leading public interest law firm, calls into question a number of justifications for civil asset forfeiture. Contrary to claims by law enforcement, seizing property from criminal suspects does not appear to meaningfully reduce crime rates or lessen drug use. Far from being used to fight major drug traffickers, civil asset forfeiture is usually deployed against the poor and people of color.

Civil asset forfeiture is a process allowing police and prosecutors to seize money and property from criminal suspects, particularly in drug cases, when that property is tied to criminal activity. It came into fashion in the 1980s, when governments began emphasizing the War on Drugs.

The idea of parole and probation was to reduce the number of people in prison, but states are spending millions on incarcerating people for technical violations of their supervision agreements. In Iowa, for example, 40% of the prison population is made up of parole and probation violators. And, 56% of all new prison admissions are for supervision violations -- 22% of them technical violations.

Across the U.S., technical supervision violations account for a quarter of all state prison admissions. Iowa compares favorably to the national average, but it still ranks in the top third of all states for percentage of the prison population made up of parolees and probationers and new prison admissions for supervision violations.

As we discussed on this blog last December, the First Step Act was a bipartisan reform law that promised relief for federal defendants and prisoners in several areas. The Act was expected to be especially helpful to minority defendants, as minorities have traditionally been sentenced more harshly than whites for equivalent crimes. The first major overhaul of the federal criminal justice system in decades, the First Step Act was signed into law by President Trump on Dec. 21, 2018.

Initial results of the Act are just coming out. In the first four months of the law's application, 1,051 federal prisoners' resentencing petitions were granted. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the sentences were reduced by a mean average of 29.4%, or 73 months. More than 91% of those benefitting from resentencing were African-American.