Pamela Oliver
Columnist Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the news last week that Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Patience Roggensack has been sitting on a year-old study that showed a clear pattern of racial disparity in Wisconsin prison sentences. Specifically, the study shows substantial racial differences in the likelihood
Jeanne Theoharis. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Beacon Press. Kindle Edition) [E]ven those civil rights heroes we recognize today were reviled in their day and made to feel crazy. Today’s lamentation—that we need another King—misses the fact that we have many
In New York in 1992, about 4000 off-duty police officers and their supporters rioted against then-mayor David Dinkins (who is Black) for his advocacy of an all-civilian review board to monitor police misconduct. Rioting police broke down police barricades, damaged vehicles, and blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge for an
Much excellent work has been written about the need for systemic reform of policing in the US, the discrimination and inequalities faced by Black Americans, and the brave struggles of anti-racist protesters amidst the ongoing police repression and the unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic. As social movements go, the ongoing mobilizations
Chloe Haimson, University of Wisconsin-Madison, haimson@wisc.edu Note: This piece is based on research collected for a forthcoming paper in Mobilization. In recent weeks, heated interactions nationwide between protesters and police, were sparked by the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American, by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin.
Note: This post originally featured on scatterplot. Over the past 4 years, I’ve studied community perceptions of the Minneapolis Police Department. With a team of students, we conducted qualitative interviews with over 100 residents and 20 leaders of police reform/transformation/abolition groups; tracked reform efforts by the MPD; and attended city
The huge wave of protests against police violence that is happening this week has new features tied to the current moment, but is grounded in a movement that has been building for decades. Its direct ties to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014-2016 should be obvious, but that movement,
Pamela Oliver, PhD in collaboration with Eric Howland Local activist groups such as Madison’s MOSES are concerned about reducing the number of people in jail. As part of this effort, activists use technology to automate the collection of public data to monitor local authorities. Eric Howland has been collecting data
Dane County Jail Downsizing: How was it accomplished and who was still in on May 9, 2020? Link to PDF version of this report Author: Pamela Oliver, analyzing data collected by Eric Howland. Data source: Scraping daily web reports of Dane County Jail. In custody status as of 6:30 a.m.
December 2019 This report is my summary of the August 2019 “Analysis of the Dane County Jail Population” written by James Austin, Roger Ocker, and Wendy Naro-Ware of the JFA Institute (note1). The JFA report concludes that the best way to reduce the jail population is to speed the processing