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4 weeks ago | 
boltsmag.org | Camille Squires |Piper French
When Louisiana reversed its “Raise the Age” law in early 2024, moving all 17-year-olds back into the adult criminal system, it became the first and only state in the nation to enact such a reform, intended to shield youth from adult prisons, only to then repeal it. Since then, sheriffs of some of the biggest parishes in the state have struggled to accommodate the influx of minors into their jails.
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1 month ago | 
boltsmag.org | Camille Squires |Piper French
This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and Mother Jones. On a Saturday morning in December 1993, Jimmie Christian Duncan ran to his neighbor’s house and frantically banged on the door, pleading for help. He was holding the limp body of a toddler in his arms. The child, named Haley, belonged to Duncan’s then-girlfriend. The girl’s hair was wet. She wasn’t breathing. And even after one of the neighbors tried CPR, she wouldn’t wake. Duncan, who goes by Chris, had just turned 25.
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1 month ago | 
boltsmag.org | Camille Squires |Piper French
California Attorney General Rob Bonta stunned the Los Angeles political and criminal justice communities in April 2024 with his decision to prosecute Diana Teran, an advisor to then-District Attorney George Gascón, over her efforts to track cops with a history of misconduct.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
boltsmag.org | Camille Squires |Piper French
Cynthia Mendoza’s first pregnancy, in the free world, was a time of enveloping love and anticipation. But in 2006, six months into her second pregnancy, Mendoza was arrested and jailed pre-trial in a Lynwood facility overseen by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Once there, she was sent to solitary confinement, where every good thing she remembered about pregnancy became a horror. “I had nobody to talk to, I had nobody to comfort me,” she told me.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
boltsmag.org | Camille Squires |Piper French
Voters in Southern California and the East Bay have ousted two of the boldest reform DAs to hold office since the “progressive prosecutor” movement began. In Los Angeles County, George Gascón lost his reelection bid to Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor and 2020 Republican candidate for state attorney general who has vowed to undo all of Gascón’s changes to the role. In Alameda County, DA Pamela Price was recalled alongside Oakland’s mayor Sheng Thao after just two years in office.
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
boltsmag.org | Camille Squires |Piper French
This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts andThe Nation. Last July, in the hillside neighborhood of Montclair, California, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price faced a church overflowing with people, many of whom blamed her for the crime in their neighborhoods, and said: “I am the person who is not supposed to be here.”Price was talking about her childhood.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
boltsmag.org | Camille Squires |Piper French
Flojaune Cofer, the epidemiologist and leading candidate in Sacramento’s mayoral race, will always remember watching her father die from congestive heart failure in 1993. She was 11, the same age he’d been when he started smoking cigarettes back in the late 1950s, when little was known about the health impacts of tobacco. By the time the Surgeon General issued the first report on the negative effects of smoking, it was too late for Cofer’s dad; he was already hooked.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
boltsmag.org | Daniel Nichanian |Piper French
Last fall, Los Angeles started using new bail guidelines that required judges to set bail at affordable rates, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from sitting in court all day. In conjunction with her pretrial justice clinic, UCLA law professor Alicia Virani spent part of October 2023, the first month LA’s new bail schedule was in effect, observing court proceedings that seemed as quick and rote as an assembly line at LA’s largest courthouse.
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Feb 23, 2024 | 
boltsmag.org | Daniel Nichanian |Piper French
By the time singer-songwriter Fiona Apple introduced the practice of courtwatching to millions of Americans last year, urging them to go observe the basic machinery of the criminal legal system at work, these programs had emerged all over the nation. Typically, they’re piloted by people critical of mass incarceration who hope to shed light on the everyday abuses defendants suffer when nobody’s looking. In Los Angeles, organizers visit one of the county’s 36 courts twice a month.
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Feb 9, 2024 | 
boltsmag.org | Camille Squires |Piper French
This article is produced as a collaboration between Bolts and Mother Jones. On January 29, two activists locked themselves to construction equipment belonging to the main “Cop City” , shutting down the work site in downtown Atlanta for hours. “Myself and countless other residents have tried every legal avenue to Stop Cop City—but the City government has stonewalled us every step of the way,” an activist called Temperance said in a press statement.
