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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 8:26 pm
Time: 8:26 pm
Results for criminal justice policy, reform of
1 results foundAuthor: American Civil Liberties Union Title: Smart Reform is Possible: States Reducing Incarceration Rates and Costs While Protecting Communities Summary: Since President Richard Nixon first announced the “War on Drugs” forty years ago, the United States has adopted “tough on crime” criminal justice policies that have given it the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. These past forty years of criminal justice policymaking have been characterized by overcriminalization, increasingly draconian sentencing and parole regimes, mass incarceration of impoverished communities of color, and rapid prison building. These policies have also come at a great expense to taxpayers. But budget shortfalls of historic proportions are finally prompting states across the country to realize that less punitive approaches to criminal justice not only make more fiscal sense but also better protect our communities. This report details how several states with long histories of being “tough on crime” have embraced alternatives to incarceration, underscoring that reform is not only politically and fiscally viable, but that other states must also urgently follow suit. Between 1970 and 2010, the number of people incarcerated in this country grew by 700%. As a result, the United States incarcerates almost a quarter of the prisoners in the entire world although we have only 5% of the world’s population.1 At no other point in U.S. history — even when slavery was legal — have so many people been unnecessarily deprived of their liberty. Too often, lawmakers have devised criminal justice policy in emotional response to a highly publicized crime or perception of a crime trend. This misguided lawmaking has resulted in both overly punitive laws that cast too wide a net and inhumanely long prison sentences that have little to do with maintaining public safety. The massive explosion in our prison population has caused federal and state governments to dramatically escalate their spending on corrections. States have been spending an ever-increasing percentage of their budgets on prison related expenses, cutting into scarce dollars for public education and other vital services. The racial disparities resulting from this system have been staggering. Black individuals are imprisoned at nearly six times the rate of their white counterparts — and Latinos are locked up at nearly double the white rate. Most of this racial disparity is a result of the War on Drugs. While these groups engage in drug use, possession, and sales at rates comparable to their representation in the general population, the system disparately impacts people of color. For example, black individuals comprise 13% of the U.S. population and 14% of drug users, yet they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses and 56% of those incarcerated for drug crimes. For decades, the ACLU has been litigating and advocating to reform our criminal justice system into one that is both fair and effective. There are simply too many people in prison who do not need to be there, and whose long imprisonment does not serve society. Putting an individual behind bars should be an option of last resort, rather than a first response to social problems. Incarceration is often not necessary and can be detrimental to the widely shared goal of keeping our communities safe.In the past few years, the public and policymakers across the political spectrum have started to recognize that criminal justice reform is both necessary and politically viable. Lawmakers have steadily become interested in alternatives to incarceration that have proven to produce more effective public safety outcomes (“evidence-based” policies). “Get tough on crime” politicians are talking instead about being “smart on crime” and legislators are enacting bills supporting evidence-based programs — like diverting people charged with lower-level drug offenses into treatment instead of incarcerating them and imposing non-prison sanctions on those who violate the technical terms of their probation and parole instead of simply returning them to prison. Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court has also weighed in on the debate. In May 2011, in Plata v. Brown, the Supreme Court recognized the dangers of overcrowded prisons, mandating that the state of California enact reforms to reduce its prison population in order to alleviate unconstitutional overcrowding. Reforms that rely less on incarceration have long made economic sense, but dramatically declining state revenues are making changes to the criminal justice system more urgent. The state budget crunch has forced many to finally realize the economic necessity of and reasoning behind reducing this country’s unnecessary overreliance on prisons. Fiscal prudence has produced new allies who agree that the nation’s addiction to incarceration is bad public policy. The need for financial austerity has created an unprecedented opening for advocates to promote fair and more effective criminal justice policies that protect public safety, reduce recidivism, keep communities intact, and move away from our overreliance on incarceration, all while saving taxpayer dollars. Recent reform efforts in several states have undermined the erroneous and misguided notion that mass incarceration is necessary to protect our public safety. States like New York, which depopulated its prisons by 20% from 1999 to 2009, and Texas, which has stabilized its prison population growth since 2007, are presently experiencing the lowest state crime rates in decades. This report offers a selection of recommendations for legislative and administrative reforms that states should implement to reduce their incarcerated populations and corrections budgets, while keeping our communities safe. These recommendations cover: systemic reforms to the criminal justice apparatus as a whole; “front-end” reforms that focus on reducing the number of people entering jails and prisons; and “back-end” reforms that increase the number of people exiting and staying out of prison. These recommendations are by no means exhaustive, but aim to provide advocates and lawmakers with a few key evidence-based and politically-tested reforms from which to craft a state-specific legislative agenda for criminal justice reform. This report documents bipartisan criminal justice reforms in six states—Texas, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, and Kentucky—and ongoing efforts in four more—California, Louisiana, Maryland, and Indiana. Several other states have also recently enacted reforms but this report deliberately focuses on states that have long had reputations for being “tough on crime.” Each state profile describes how and why state lawmakers moved from escalating prison growth and costs to significant reforms that either have already or are projected to reduce the incarcerated population and save scarce public funds. These profiles are intended to provide lawmakers and advocates with a practical “how to” guide to reform state prison systems. This report describes each of the major legislative and administrative reforms adopted in the profiled states and identifies additional states that are on the cusp of significant reforms. While lowering costs, these reforms increased or had no detrimental effect on public safety in the states profiled. While this report highlights more rational, evidence-based criminal justice policymaking, it does not suggest that the reforms enacted in the profiled states are sufficient. Indeed, to return to the nation’s incarceration rates of 1970, we would have to release four out of every five current prisoners in the United States. Instead, this report offers the examples of these states to inspire further reform in those states, as well as to provoke reform in other states and the federal system. Details: New York: ACLU, 2011. 80p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 16, 2011 at: http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/smartreformispossible.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/smartreformispossible.pdf Shelf Number: 122413 Keywords: Costs of Criminal JusticeCrime Control PolicyCriminal Justice Policy, Reform of |