The chief justice of New Jersey’s Supreme Court, Stuart Rabner, has been on a years-long campaign to stop using our jails to punish people for being poor; what amounts to a debtor’s prison.

He started by making our state a national model for bail reform, locking up dangerous people awaiting trial but releasing those stuck behind bars because they can’t afford to pay their way out.

Now he’s seeking to reform our municipal court system for lower-level offenses, which brings us to the new policy announced last week for all New Jersey cops and courts: You can no longer arrest people for minor fines like an unpaid parking ticket or hold them in jail because they can’t pay.

In an effort to plug a years-long teacher shortage aggravated by the Coronavirus pandemic, Newark public schools will boost starting pay by $8,000 this fall, or about 15%, the district and local union announced.

The hike in starting pay to $62,000 a year for rookie teachers in the state’s largest school district is among several pay-related changes intended to attract new teachers and retain veterans.

Election officials say they’re ready for just about anything this primary after rising to the challenges thrown their way these last few years, first with the coronavirus pandemic and then with the hastened rollout of early voting in New Jersey.

“They’ve been throwing us a lot of curveballs,” said Passaic County Clerk Danielle Ireland-Imhof.

Ireland-Imhof is one of a half dozen election officials NJ Advance Media interviewed ahead of the June 7 primary, who said their counties were prioritizing training, education, and transparency in order to avoid the technology glitches and long lines that plagued the general election last fall. Whether voters will actually turn out for the primary — in which voters will weigh in on mid-term Congressional races and about 100 contested county and municipal races — and put their preparations to the test, remains to be seen. During the last mid-term primary in 2018, only 11% of registered voters cast a ballot and that figure was even lower at 6.6% in 2014.

By Matthew J. Platkin

Gun violence in America is a public health crisis. Just this month alone we have seen mass shootings at a supermarket, a church and an elementary school. In each tragic case, the victims were simply performing ordinary activities — shopping for groceries, attending church services, and enjoying what would have otherwise been an ordinary school day. The perpetrators of these atrocities appeared to have one thing in common: ready access to firearms.

According to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control report issued earlier this month, deadly shootings accounted for 79% of homicides nationwide in 2020 — a 35% increase from the prior year and the highest firearm homicide rate in more than two decades. New Jersey, unfortunately, is not insulated from the national uptick in gun violence: in 2020 there were 330 homicides in our state, 25% more than the year before, and two-thirds of those deaths involved a firearm.

The Attorney General’s Office has a long history of working closely with law enforcement partners at all levels of government to keep our residents safe, including through smart and evidence-based police work that leads to the arrest and prosecution of individuals, gangs, and gun traffickers who violate New Jersey’s commonsense gun laws, and who bring danger and chaos to our communities.