PRESCOTT, Ariz. — A technical glitch in Arizona's medical marijuana law is landing some card-carrying cannabis patients in jail. But a proposed new law could address that pitfall.

Law enforcement officials in Yavapai County have arrested and convicted at least two people carrying state-issued medical marijuana cards on drug charges. Both were arrested for possessing a derivative of marijuana - not the plant itself, but still classified as cannabis.

An appeal of one of the convictions is pending before the state Supreme Court. But Analise Ortiz, campaign communications strategist with the ACLU of Arizona, said a bill pending in the state Legislature would resolve this legal technicality.

"Yavapai County Attorney Shelia Polk has continued to stand by these prosecutions, so people are still at risk of arrest and prosecution,” Ortiz said. “This bill proposes amending that definition, so that there is no distinction between marijuana and cannabis."

Ortiz explained the prosecutor is interpreting the current law as allowing the medical use of marijuana in its plant form, but not products made from it, which are classified as illegal cannabis. She said Yavapai County, a mostly rural area between Phoenix and Flagstaff, is the only jurisdiction in the state that, so far, has prosecuted medical marijuana patients under felony narcotics laws.

Ortiz added Polk was an outspoken opponent of medical marijuana when the measure was put on the ballot through a citizen's initiative.

"We believe that when the voters passed the Medical Marijuana Act in 2010, that they intended for patients to be able to use this medicine in the form that's most helpful to them and the easiest for them to consume,” she said. “And so, we believe that needs to be corrected."

Of the two people charged, one was convicted and is serving a three-year sentence, while charges are pending against the other. If convicted, that person could face up-to 10 years in jail.

The bill, HB 2149, has passed out of committee and is pending in the Arizona House of Representatives.


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As Mississippi grapples with chronic violence and unconstitutional conditions in its prisons, new research provides a roadmap for reducing harm and improving safety for both incarcerated individuals and staff.

Nancy Rodriguez, professor of criminology law and society at the University of California and study author, examined prison systems in seven states, highlighting the complex drivers of violence while offering evidence-based strategies to address them. Her findings show that there is a small fraction of people who will repeatedly engage in violence.

"Approximately about 10% of people who are in our prison systems will continue to engage in violence now if we know who these individuals are, state systems are able or have the capacity to identify them and target them in ways that would certainly reduce violence," she said.

That includes identifying high-risk individuals and providing them with targeted programming and case management. Rodriguez's findings come as the U.S. Department of Justice has condemned conditions in three Mississippi prisons, citing rampant violence, understaffing, and inadequate medical care.

The study also revealed that the harms of violence are often underreported. Rodriguez emphasized that violence in prisons is not isolated, and it impacts everyone, even beyond the prison walls.

"Violence is pervasive, and the harms of violence are profound, and we heard this both from incarcerated individuals, and we heard this from staff, and unfortunately, the data mechanisms that are in place, that should be capturing this are absent," she continued.

Rodriguez, part of the Prison Violence Consortium, found that 71% of violence occurs between incarcerated individuals, while 29% targets staff. In Mississippi, officials have implemented reforms such as increasing correctional staff, enhancing security, and expanding de-escalation training and mental health support, leading to reported reductions in violence. However, Rodriguez emphasizes that more can be done, including creating a uniform definition of prison violence and improving documentation of injuries.


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The ACLU of Ohio is calling for a repeal of the state's current death penalty laws, but some conservative state lawmakers have another idea.

House Bill 136, passed in 2021, prohibits the death penalty for offenders with a mental illness. Senate Bill 101, proposed in 2024, would abolish the death penalty.

Two Ohio senators with support from the Ohio Catholic Conference have introduced legislation which would combine death penalty revisions with restrictions on abortion and what they refer to as "assisted suicide," under one law.

Sean McCann, policy analyst for the ACLU of Ohio, said legislators acted this week.

"The bill that was announced by the group of lawmakers and the Catholic Conference of Ohio now has been introduced in the Ohio House as House Bill 72," McCann noted. "After reviewing the language, we remain steadfastly opposed to this attempt to tie the death penalty repeal to restrictions on abortion and medical aid in dying."

Proponents of the bill see it as tying the three policies under one "pro-life" umbrella. But under current Ohio law, medical aid in dying for people with terminal illnesses is not permitted, and state funding for abortion services is illegal. The bill would remove funding for abortion medications, which critics say would violate Ohio's Reproductive Freedom Amendment.

The Ohio Attorney General's Office Capital Crimes Report indicated between July 18, 1981, the state's last execution date, through Dec. 31, 2023, 336 people have received a combined 341 death sentences. Of those, 56 sentences have been carried out. The report also stated a condemned inmate spends more than 21 years on death row as attorneys file appeals.

McCann emphasized the ACLU of Ohio does not support adding issues like abortion to the debate.

"We certainly view these issues as two separate issues," McCann stressed. "And we would also remind legislators, Ohio voters did approve the reproductive freedom Amendment by an overwhelming 57% to 43% margin in November 2023."

McCann argued the numbers showed voters do not want the legislature to continue tampering with their reproductive freedom. The ACLU of Ohio supports a repeal of the death penalty with a replacement of a life sentence without the possibility of parole.


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By Justin A. Davis for Yes! Media.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Yes! Media-Public News Service Collaboration

On Sept. 17, 2024, hundreds of protesters swarmed the Sutter Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, New York, calling for an end to police violence on public transit and demanding free fares. Some protesters "distributed MetroCards and swiped commuters through the turnstiles," while others hopped turnstiles before filing into subway cars. The New York Police Department arrested at least 18 people.

The impetus for this protest came two days earlier, when NYPD officers confronted 37-year-old Derell Mickles for hopping a turnstile at the Sutter Avenue station. Mickles allegedly "charged" at officers with a knife, which police say led them to fire their guns in self-defense-though body cam footage shows Mickles "standing still, his arms by his side."

Officers shot Mickles, a fellow officer, and two bystanders. Mayor Eric Adams, a former transit officer himself, defended the NYPD's response by citing Mickles' arrest record and the necessity of fare enforcement. "If lawmakers want to make the subways and buses free, then fine," Adams said. "But as long as there are rules, we're going to follow those rules."

Incidents such as these reflect a long history of dangerous, and even fatal, interactions between NYPD and "fare evaders." Authorities have long conflated fare evasion with dangerous criminal behavior-using race- and class-based assumptions that minor infractions create an environment for violent crime (sometimes referred to as "broken windows" policing). Demands to reform fare enforcement have been a frequent part of the discourse around improving New York's transit system. But some abolitionist groups go further in calling for free fares as a step toward removing police from public transit entirely.

Militant protest against fare enforcement is part of an abolitionist struggle that often goes unnoticed and highlights how transit safety has shaped the look of modern policing.

Fare Boxes and Broken Windows

New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is in the midst of two connected crises: long-running fears about crime, and a massive budget deficit. MTA's budget woes have a number of causes, such as declining tax revenue and a controversial pause on congestion pricing, but the agency has long portrayed fare evasion as an "existential challenge." Fare box revenue represents 26 percent of MTA's budget. According to recent MTA data, as much as 48 percent of bus riders and 14 percent of subway riders board without paying, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue each year.

MTA has tried a number of strategies to reduce fare evasion, including redesigned infrastructure and aggressive messaging. But over the past five years, increased policing has become a catchall solution to stop fare evaders-and to make transit feel safer in the process. In 2023, NYPD issued more than 100,000 fare evasion tickets, and arrests have "more than doubled" during Adams' administration. Meanwhile, police raids have become increasingly common. In March 2024, NYPD announced an 800-officer surge at subway stations (dubbed "Operation Fare Play"), while MTA has used multiple surges of its "Eagle Team" (with assistance from NYPD) to check bus fares in the past two years.

In 2019, a group of riders founded Unfare NYC, a community network that uses social media to crowdsource alerts about police presence on public transit. Inspired by grassroots campaigns against fare enforcement in Montreal and Chile, Unfare's work reduces contact between officers and riders to promote a vision of "a ride without fares and a world with no police." Unfare member Daria says transit is an obvious place for abolitionist struggle: "It's a site where the city's working class is forced into contact with a police presence that keeps getting bigger and bigger." (Unfare members are using pseudonyms to protect their identities.)

Another group, Swipe It Forward, has been offering "a grassroots community response to broken windows policing" since 2016. They encourage riders to share fare cards.

For decades, New York's transit police have used turnstile hopping as a marker of dangerous or undesirable populations. Teams of officers began regularly sweeping subway stations in the 1990s, sometimes posing as civilians in "decoy operations." Former transit police chief Bill Bratton who served from 1990 to 1992, outfitted the force with new patrol cars, "commando sweaters," and, controversially, semi-automatic handguns. Bratton later served two non-consecutive terms as commissioner of the NYPD. As though foreshadowing the Sutter Avenue shooting, critics argued in 1990 that rapid-firing guns in crowded subways "would not only increase the risk of bystanders being shot but also of police officers wounding themselves or fellow officers."

"Law and Order" at the Turnstiles

In 1982, criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson proposed that visible signs of neighborhood disorder (such as graffiti, public intoxication, and vagrancy) could embolden criminals to commit more serious offenses and cause community members to retreat from public spaces. This so-called "broken windows" theory has become one of the most important frameworks of modern policing, especially in New York City. "Fare evasion has been the most common thing that someone gets arrested for in New York, I believe, for [more than] 20 years," says Eric Goldwyn, Ph.D., program director at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management.

Elected officials, police leaders, and pundits-conservative and liberal alike-continue to use "broken windows" rhetoric to justify greater fare enforcement. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas recently wrote in the New York Post that "the only thing that will change people's minds is if they know that a penalty will be swift, certain and actually collected." New York Times columnist Pamela Paul argued that "many progressives are still loath to admit that broken windows policing works," while suggesting that police abolition reflects "an elitist attitude that betrays a lack of experience with crime-ridden environments."

Who does fare enforcement benefit? Studies by the Community Service Society and the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center have found that fare enforcement occurs more frequently in low-income and majority-Black and Latinx neighborhoods. In 2023, nonwhite New Yorkers represented 82 percent of tickets and 92 percent of arrests, and criminal justice reformers have consistently pointed to wider racial disparities in Bratton's legacy.

In response to these critiques, community groups, politicians, and consultants have proposed reforms aimed at reducing race and class disparities in fare enforcement. In 2022, the Riders Alliance, a grassroots organization of MTA users, published "A Riders Plan for Public Safety," which recommends unarmed civilian personnel to check fares and expanded eligibility for fare discounts. A Blue-Ribbon Report commissioned by MTA leadership calls for "precision policing" that uses data to identify fare evasion hotspots and a "warnings-first approach to summonses for first-time evaders."

It's not clear whether punitive enforcement tactics actually reduce fare evasion. In a recent proposal for a behavioral consultant, MTA acknowledged that "these costly and sometimes controversial methods have had limited success in reversing the upward trend in riders who do not pay." What such tactics are effective at is sending large numbers of vulnerable people through the criminal justice system each year. They can trap people in dangerous and dysfunctional jail facilities, even putting them at risk of deportation.

Increases in transit policing have, in turn, energized abolitionist calls to remove police from MTA. When former Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced 500 new transit officers in 2019, groups like Swipe It Forward and Decolonize This Place, an anti-imperialist protest coalition, mobilized protesters to the subways. Anonymous activists called for fare-free, cop-free subways and put up dozens of mock ads that read "Don't snitch. Swipe."

Abolitionists have often grounded their critiques in the history of American policing, which is intertwined with chattel slavery and settler colonialism. A Swipe It Forward organizer recently told the press that "the NYPD ... are fixated on slave patrolling and quotas, and they use the transit system as one of their main iterations to do so." Writers Against the War on Gaza, a Palestinian solidarity coalition, echoed this language in a writeup of the Sept. 17 protest: "The NYPD protects property and capital, it funnels black and immigrant populations into endless cycles of immiseration and poverty and modern enslavement."

From Affordable Transit to Free Transit

There is precedent for free transit. MTA suspended bus fare collection for months in 2020 as a COVID-19 mitigation tactic and recently ended an 11-month pilot program suspending fare on five bus routes. According to MTA, that pilot led to "a 30 percent increase in ridership on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends." But the idea has yet to catch on as a permanent solution.

While transit agencies across the country have experimented with free fares in recent years to reduce congestion, encourage higher ridership, and address economic inequality, MTA increased fares by 15 cents in 2023. "The idea of fare free transit is worth debating, and the more experiments the better," says Kafui Attoh, Ph.D., associate professor of Urban Studies at the City University of New York. "At the same time, we [shouldn't] gloss over the potential drawbacks, in terms of funding and ridership."

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to a fare-free MTA is replacing fare box revenue in its budget and finding political support to do so. Research on fare-free transit tends to focus on smaller cities with lower ridership that don't rely heavily on fare box revenue. "There's something of a paradox here," says Attoh. "Where it is feasible, its impact will be limited, and where its impact would be the greatest, its feasibility is the most questionable." Goldwyn adds that without substantively addressing the budget gap, a move toward free fares could lead to service cuts, creating "even less frequency and worse reliability" for those who rely on transit.

In other words, if cities such as New York want to invest in making public transit free and accessible-in the same way that libraries and public schools are-they need to make it a priority in their budgets. Abolitionist groups advocate reductions in police funding to do so. MTA's "fiscal cliff" suggests a fundamental imbalance between expanding police and fully funding public services. Indeed, New York's fare crisis reflects a broader debate about the basic function of police in a city where nearly 20 percent of residents live below the poverty line.

The website 8 to Abolition, a resource of "non-reformist reforms" compiled in 2020, cast free public transit with investments in health care, education, and community-based food providers as two sides of the same coin. It is a way to "invest in care, not cops." No New Jails NYC, a former grassroots campaign to close the Rikers Island jail complex, echoes this, calling for removing all NYPD officers from the MTA and decriminalizing fare evasion to "pay the annual fares of all New Yorkers who cannot afford [it]."

Last year, when Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Adams' "Cops, Cameras, and Care" initiative sent more than 1,000 extra officers to patrol subways, NYPD overtime pay increased by $155 million-and the state reimbursed the city for less than half that amount. Meanwhile, Adams' administration proposed extensive budget cuts to libraries, parks, early childhood education, and more, many of which were reversed after public outcry. Unfare member Lou argues that fare evasion's outsized role in MTA's budget crisis reflects a "long history of stripping funding for these services and shifting the blame to 'crime' and the poor."

In fall 2024, the Sutter Avenue shooting sparked a new wave of spontaneous fare strikes, teach-ins, and "liberated train rides." As abolitionists scrutinize NYPD for student repression, corruption, and plans for a "Cop City" in Queens, they are using transit issues to advocate for a transformative vision of community safety-with a fare-free MTA at the center. A city without fares is "deeply connected to our collective freedom of movement more broadly," says Lou. "Being free to move through our city together means being free from police harassment and violence, from fines and incarceration."

By removing a key incentive to police subways and buses, transit agencies could meet the demand surging through New York's subways and realize the abolitionist call to "Live free, ride free.


Justin A. Davis wrote this article for Yes! Media.


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