The Plea Bargaining Blog

The New York Times has an excellent series of articles discussing halfway houses in New Jersey. Below is a portion of one of the stories in the series. After decades of tough criminal justice policies, states have been grappling with crowded prisons that are straining budgets. In response to those pressures, New Jersey has become a leader in a national movement to save money by diverting inmates to a new kind of privately run halfway house.   At the heart of the system is a company with deep connections to politicians of both parties, most notably Gov. Chris Christie.   Many of these halfway houses are as big as prisons, with several hundred beds, and bear little resemblance to the neighborhood halfway houses of the past, where small groups of low-level offenders were sent to straighten up.   New Jersey officials have called these large facilities an innovative example of privatization and have promoted the approach all the way to the Obama White House. ...

The New York Times has a fascinating article about a plea deal that included a requirement that the defendant serve his time in solitary confinement. The plea bargaining was long and difficult. The defendant, Peter Rollock, the leader of a Bronx narcotics gang, had been charged in seven killings.   Federal prosecutors wanted the death penalty; any plea deal would have to include a mandatory life sentence.   But prosecutors had another demand: because Mr. Rollock, then 25, had been accused of ordering some of the killings from jail, he would be placed in solitary confinement and barred from communicating with virtually all outsiders.   Pistol Pete, as Mr. Rollock was known, agreed to the deal, and in late 2000, he was sent to the federal Supermax prison, as the Administrative Maximum, or ADX, facility in Florence, Colo., is known, and where some of the nation’s most infamous criminals are housed. With that, he might have retreated from public view forever. But...