THE BEST OF THE MARSHALL PROJECT

Flip a coin. About 50% of all murders in the U.S. went unsolved in 2020, a historic low. Police clearance rates, sometimes used to measure the effectiveness of both homicide detectives and police departments, have steadily decreased over the past four decades. In 2020, for example, police officers solved more murders than they had since 1997. But the 2020 murder rate also rose so sharply the clearance rate actually declined. Manslaughter cases are solved at the highest rates, while the clearance rates on property crimes are much lower. TMP’s Weihua Li and Jamiles Lartey crunched FBI data and explain why even the definition of what it means to “clear“ a case is debated.

“First you have to admit you have a problem.” We asked six federal prisoners and a prison worker this week what they’d like to see in a leader to run the Bureau of Prisons now that director Michael Carvajal has resigned. “We need a director who believes that prisoners can be rehabilitated,” said Rachel Padgett, serving time in Florida. “I hope the new director will get control of the virus,” said Rhonda Flemining, who is also incarcerated at the federal women’s prison in Tallahassee. “I’ve never seen morale as low as it is,” said Aaron McGlothin, a prison union official in California. TMP’s Keri Blakinger brings us these voices and more in the latest installment of our “Life Inside” series.

Biden gets a BOP reset. The White House will bolster its popularity among justice reformers, corrections officers, and incarcerated people by selecting a new federal prisons director to replace the departing Michael Carvajal. The new director will be eager to implement sweeping reforms, improve the agency’s response to the coronavirus, efficiently implement the First Step Act, fix chronic understaffing problems, and make prisons safer for both prisoners and guards. So say some of the sources TMP’s Keri Blakinger reached out to for the latest installment of our “Inside Out” series in collaboration with NBC News.

Paying for their own foster care. In the latest installment of “Inside Story,” The Marshall Project’s video series for people in prisons and jails, we look at how state foster care agencies collect and keep federal funds owed to children in the system. TMP’s Lawrence Bartley speaks with Malerie Shockley, who spent years in Alaska’s foster care system and discovered only by chance that the state was collecting benefits owed to her. There is now pending legislation designed to better protect people like Shockley.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff.

My favorite read of the week came from The Washington Post’s new investigation into how the history of slavery shaped the U.S. Congress and the nation. Using census records, they identified more than 1,700 lawmakers who onced owned enslaved people some of whomwere still serving in Congress all the way into the 1920s. Their investigation reveals some thorny moments in history, like how the first woman to serve in the Senate was also its last enslaver. –Weihua Li, data reporter