They packed the courtroom early, filling so many seats that a line stretched out the door of the building in downtown Raleigh that houses the North Carolina Supreme Court. In years past, many of the onlookers had been in handcuffs, jails and prison cells. Now they wanted access to the ballot box. Those in line were told the courtroom was full shortly before oral arguments began. The overflow crowd walked down the street to First Baptist Church to watch the hearing streamed live in a basketball gym. Below the projection screen was a sign with a simple demand: “Unlock Our Vote.”

Senate Judiciary Committee questions Todd Ishee before voting on his appointment later today. As state senators peppered him with questions gauging whether he should be the secretary of the new Department of Adult Correction, Todd Ishee repeatedly returned to the same point: education and vocational programs are important for many those among the roughly 30,000 people held in the state’s prisons, 95% of whom will be released someday.

All that separated Reece from freedom was just $300. But he couldn’t afford to post the bond, so on the morning of Jan. 25 he appeared via video, streamed from the Buncombe County Detention Center to the courtroom of Chief District Court Judge James Calvin Hill.

Anita Earls touts progress in combating criminal justice inequities, calls for work at state and local levels to continue When Anita Earls moved to Charlotte in 1988, one of the first people who welcomed her to the Queen City was the chair of the Charlotte League of Women Voters. Earls credits the chapter with helping her grow as an attorney and inspiring her through its work in support of maintaining racial integration in the city's schools.

The proposals were included within the final report written by the Juvenile Jurisdiction Advisory Committee. A committee of juvenile justice experts has recommended legislators approve a step pay plan for employees who work at juvenile detention centers. The proposal comes a month after Deputy Secretary of Juvenile Justice Billy Lassiter told committee members North Carolina’s juvenile detention centers were understaffed and over-capacity...

Lawsuit involves a disabled man sedated against his will after he complained his cell wasn’t compliant with federal law. The system that allows people incarcerated in North Carolina’s prisons to register complaints about how they are treated is a confusing and confounding process that can be so opaque it raises the question of whether the incarcerated can even access it, according to a ruling issued last week by the U.S Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

One of the first things I did after starting at Policy Watch last summer was ask the Department of Public Safety to give me tours of a few of the state’s 53 prisons. I’d done the same thing at my last job, in Connecticut. My thinking is, if I’m going to write about a state’s prison system, I owe it to readers and those locked within to see some those places firsthand. A guided tour is not the best way to get a sense of how incarcerated people are treated each day, but it has some advantages. While prison officials can present a sanitized version of their correctional facilities, they cannot change each building’s architecture, the layout of the housing units or the size of the cells in which the incarcerated live, locked away for years at a time.

I’ve gone to a lot of committee hearings over the course of my career. They’re mostly insider baseball, in-the-weeds conversations between policy wonks and department heads. One time, I watched a virtual committee hearing live on YouTube that had one other viewer.

Nearly 13,500 teenagers had their crimes adjudicated in the juvenile justice system; under the old model these youths would have pled their cases in adult courts.  In 2019 North Carolina followed the rest of the country’s lead  and raised the age of juvenile jurisdiction for nonviolent crimes to age 18, meaning many 16- and 17-year old children would be spared punishment in the adult justice system.

Detention centers are badly overcrowded and under-resourced, according to a committee presentation last week. There are so many vacant positions in North Carolina’s juvenile detention centers that officials are using the money that would pay the salaries of new employees as an incentive to get existing staffers to report to their shifts.