News & Commentary

As state legislators accept deep cuts to education and the safety net, the ACLU is challenging Californians to acquire a real-time sense of how the state's bottom line would fare if prisons and jails were placed at the center of the chopping block.

Why is the FBI spying on Occupy protesters? The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is determined to find out.

Mayor Ed Lee shocked the city when he suggested bringing New York's failed stop-and-frisk policy to San Francisco. The ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to Mayor Lee yesterday explaining why it's such a bad policy.

This month, California quietly shed an unwanted title, going from the largest prison system in the country to the second-largest after the state of Texas.

Today Oakland released a report it commissioned from the Frazier Group that reviewed police tactics in response to Occupy Oakland demonstrations. (The ACLU of Northern California widely criticized OPD for excessive force and violence against protesters, and along with the National Lawyers Guild, sued OPD. That lawsuit is ongoing.) The report is widely critical of the Oakland Police Department's tactics.

When we stop spending millions of dollars a year to incarcerate Californians whose only crime is addiction, we will free up funding that can be used to help more people get the treatment they need.

The long-awaited report on the infamous incident of UC Davis police pepper-spraying non-violent, seated student protesters has been released. It concludes what we all know from watching the shocking videos: "The pepperspraying incident that took place on November 18, 2011 should and could have been prevented." That's the opening to the report, which outlines the various ways that Chancellor Katehi, other Administration officials, and the UC Davis Police Department completely mismanaged the situation at every level.

After decades of tough-on-crime policies and draconian sentencing practices, California's correctional system - a state with one of the highest incarceration rates in a country with one of the highest incarceration rates - finally buckled under its own weight. Faced with last year's historic Supreme Court order requiring a reduction in prison overcrowding, the state enacted AB 109 to realign the criminal justice system. Under AB 109, most people convicted of low-level, non-violent offenses will no longer go to state prison. Instead, the new law encourages counties to employ alternatives to incarceration and provides options for holding individuals accountable through evidence-based approaches to public safety such as restorative justice, community sanctions, drug and mental health treatment and vocational programs.