We find that a plurality of voters (41 percent) say that the court has had a negative impact on the everyday life of Americans.
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The Farm Animal Confinement Initiative (also known as Proposition 12, or Prop 12) is one of the strongest legal protections of animal welfare in the country and enjoys widespread popularity among California voters.
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Our survey of 19 reform-minded prosecutors identifies their approaches to community safety and the obstacles impeding their efforts.
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The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically and ominously shifted the scale of the eviction crisis in the United States.
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In recent weeks, the humanitarian disaster that doctors and public health experts predicted has turned into reality: coronavirus has reached prisons and jails in California and across the country, sparking outbreaks that threaten the lives of incarcerated people, staff, and surrounding communities. California’s elected prosecutors—the district attorney in each county—are uniquely positioned to address this crisis.
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The U.S. is a world-leader in incarceration, and the unprecedented number of people serving decades-long and life sentences is a major reason for America’s outlier status. In recent years, despite an emerging bipartisan consensus around the need for criminal justice reform, there has been insufficient action to address people serving lengthy sentences who no longer pose a serious risk to public safety. To gauge popular support for policies that provide opportunities for people serving long prison terms to seek release and return to their communities, we conducted a national survey of American voters.
Our results indicate that such policies have overwhelming support among American voters, regardless of ideology or party affiliation. Voters believe that sentencing policies and practices should be closely connected to public safety—and that people who can be safely returned to their communities should not be warehoused because of excessive prison terms that waste taxpayer dollars and fail to reflect current values. Voters believe that people deserve a second chance, and they support sentence-review policies that can provide it.
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