Pick of the News

What comes after mass incarceration? Local incarceration. Officials in California are touting what they call “realignment,” reducing overcrowding in the state’s prisons by returning non-violent offenders to the counties. But the most dramatic result so far has been a massive boom in the building of local jails. Our Anat Rubin has been watching as “decarceration” unfolds. The Marshall Project

Cruel and all too usual. Housing juveniles in adult prisons is so widespread that it is not yet a central focus of prison reformers. Read this terrifying investigation into the lives of children in Michigan’s adult system, from Dana Liebelson. The Huffington Post

How the law adapts to legalization. Yesterday’s legalization of marijuana in Oregon raises all kinds of questions for law enforcement. Can you get your record expunged if you were convicted of possession before it became legal? Will drug-sniffing dogs be re-trained? How will cops identify drivers who are under the influence? And are officials in nearby states worried about what might soon be coming over the border? TMP has all your answers. The Marshall Project

The case for smoking in prison. When cigarettes are outlawed, only outlaws have cigarettes. Our Alysia Santo asks Ethan Nadelman of the Drug Policy Alliance why he thinks prisoners should be allowed to smoke. The Marshall Project

Second-class victims. When it comes to the suffering of crime victims, should jurors know all the specifics? Should jurors be kept apprised of all the medical bills that victims are having to pay? Should they be able to see the victims crying? The trial of James Holmes, the alleged Aurora movie theater shooter, has brought questions like these into focus. The New York Times

What was Justice Breyer up to? Was his methodical argument against the death penalty aimed at Justice Kennedy? Evan Mandery ponders. The Marshall Project Related: And Garrett Felber unearths a similar argument against capital punishment — from a young prison inmate named Malcolm X. The Marshall Project

Capital punishment for sale. Death penalty supporters in Nebraska — including Governor Pete Ricketts and his brother, the owner of the Chicago Cubs — haven’t given up yet, even though the death penalty was banned by the legislature back in May. In fact, they are personally raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to put the issue back on the ballot. But abolitionists are raising money too, and the fate of the death penalty in Nebraska may ultimately depend on who can bring home the cash. Buzzfeed

N/S/E/W

New details on the “10+ hour rampage” that spiraled out of control after too many inmates in a very-understaffed Nebraska prison were allowed out of their cells. Chicago Tribune

In northern California, the FBI is responding to a series of vandal attacks on underground Internet cables, including one just this Tuesday. But why is it so easy in the first place for vandals to knock tens of thousands of people off the grid? USA Today

Police vans in Baltimore, Maryland (like the one in which Freddie Gray was killed) will soon be equipped with cameras. Reuters Related: Police in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania will soon begin disclosing the names of all officers who discharge their firearms. Philadelphia City Paper

An inmate in Iowa, sick of languishing in jail, unable to pay his bail, pleads with a judge to get on with it and send him to prison. Des Moines Register

A former nurse at the Cook County Jail in Chicago, Illinois alleges that she was fired for siding with inmates whose narcotic and psychotropic medications were being stolen by Department of Corrections staff. 89 WLS-Radio

Video shows a cop in New Orleans, Louisiana using a pair of shackles to beat a 16-year-old (and bipolar) girl. The New Orleans Advocate

Commentary

I could’ve been Dylann Roof. A former white supremacist, who once almost burned a black family alive, says that the seed of his prejudice is in all of us. The Daily Beast Related: “Framing the white-power question in terms of rhetorically dramatic but ultimately marginal groups...suggests that racism is extraordinary, when in fact it is built into our society at a foundational level.” The Stranger

The War on Drugs is relenting, but the War on Sex has only just begun. It’s happening on campuses and also in the courts: The criminalization of sex acts once considered unsavory, not illegal. The New York Times Related: Yet one type of restriction on sex offenders — the so-called “residency requirement” that limits where offenders can live — is no longer in favor with judges, primarily because it doesn't seem to work. ABA Journal

SuperPACs prison. Did you think money and PACs in politics were already omnipresent? Meet Adam Savader, a former Romney and Gingrich campaign intern who is now starting a super PAC in prison. The Daily Beast

Death in a distant land. Hawaii abolished capital punishment over half a century ago — so why are prosecutors seeking the death penalty against two Hawaiian defendants? Because the state regularly ships hundreds of inmates to prisons in Arizona, where the two men are accused of killing a fellow inmate. Civil Beat

Talib Kweli on Ferguson, policing, and race in America. The famed rapper offers his thoughts on everything from Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Dream Defenders to the prison-industrial complex. Mic

Etc.

Roundtable of the Day: Both violent crime and violence by police affect black communities more than white. But why? Do we know why? Ta-Nehisi Coates joins Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, to discuss. The Aspen Institute

Statistic of the Day: In the six years since federal hate crime legislation was passed, the U.S. government has achieved only 29 hate crime convictions, in part because prosecutors turn down 87 percent of these cases. The Crime Report

Exorbitant Cost of the Day: Gawker sent a public information request to the city of McKinney, Texas, where a cop manhandled a black teenager at a pool party last month. Their request? Emails pertaining to the incident. The reply? McKinney officials demanded a whopping $79,229.09, the cost of the 2,231 hours of labor they claimed it would take to find the emails. Gawker

Scooter Cop of the Day: For quality-of-life policing at its finest, hitch a ride with NYPD Officer Joshua Vincek and watch as the “Dirty Harry of the Upper West Side” wages a one-man war against reckless, lawless cyclists. New York Post Related: If a city bus hits a biker or pedestrian, should the bus driver be held criminally responsible? StreetsBlog

Photo of the Day: This is how the body of an escaped murderer looks after he is tracked, found, and shot dead by the police. (Warning: graphic content.) WIVB4-TV