Lawmakers Visit Pennington County Care Campus
Lawmakers and staff from nine states were in Rapid City, S.D. last week to learn more about collaborative efforts in Pennington County to build a network of treatment and resources to better meet the behavioral health needs of the community and surrounding areas. Lawmakers visited the Care Campus which provides a full continuum of services to address substance use disorders and mental health conditions, Pivot Point a newly opened crisis stabilization center and OneHeart Mission, a transitional housing and services co-location campus. The work in Pennington County is connected to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, an initiative to change how jails are used and increase equity in the criminal justice system.
Community Supervision State Actions
Community supervision, encompassing probation and parole, is a perennial topic of interest for state legislatures. Thirty-two states passed 73 bills on the subject in 2022. NCSL’s new summary covers a year of enactments breaking down actions on conditions of supervision, length of supervision, violations, fees, eligibility and administration.
In the News
Illinois Supreme Court Upholds the SAFE-T Act
The Illinois Supreme Court issued a decision upholding provisions of the recently enacted SAFE-T Act, including provisions that will make Illinois the first state in the country to statutorily eliminate the use of financial conditions of release, or money bail.
Colorado Supreme Court Ruling Impacts Right to Bail
The Colorado Supreme Court determined that when the Colorado Legislature eliminated capital punishment in 2020, that change also impacted the state’s constitutional right to bail provision. Under the state constitution bond can only be denied in capital cases, which no longer exist in the state, meaning that all defendants are eligible to have conditions of release set. This doesn’t necessarily mean that defendants in serious cases are being released, but courts can no longer explicitly detain them before trial. Delaware faced similar issues after the elimination of capital punishment there which resulted in efforts to amend the state constitution.
Legal Deserts and the Impact on Public Defense
A local news report in Colorado highlighted that 23 of the state’s 64 counties are now categorized as legal deserts—predominantly rural areas with less than one attorney per 1,000 people. Colorado isn’t the only state to struggle with this issue and public defense systems from Oregon to Louisiana have struggled with large caseloads and too few attorneys.
Mid-Year 2023 Crime Trends Update
According to a newly released mid-year report on crime trends violent crime has started to decline, but there has been a notable increase in motor vehicle theft. There were 33.5% more motor vehicle thefts from January through June 2023 compared to the first half of 2022 in the 37 cities included in the report.
The Cache