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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
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Results for mass incarceration
47 results foundAuthor: Harcourt, Bernard Title: Reducing Mass Incarceration: Lessons from the Deinstitutionalization of Mental Hospitals in the 1960s Summary: In 1963, President Kennedy outlined a federal program designed to reduce by half the number of persons in custody in mental hospitals. What followed was the biggest deinstitutionalization this country has ever seen. The historical record is complex and the contributing factors are several, but one simple fact remains: This country has deinstitutionalized before. As we think about reducing mass incarceration today, it may be useful to recall some lessons from the past. After tracing the historical background, this essay explores three potential avenues to reduce mass incarceration: First, improving mental health treatment to inmates and exploring the increased use of medication, on a voluntary basis, as an alternative to incarceration; in a similar vein, increasing the use of GPS monitoring and other biometric monitoring, and moving toward the legalization of lesser controlled substances. Second, encouraging federal leadership to create funding incentives for diversionary programs that would give states a financial motive to move prisoners out of the penitentiary and into community-based programs. Third, encouraging impact litigation of prison overcrowding, as well as documentaries of prison life, as a way to influence the public perception of prisoners. With regard to each of these strategies, however, it is crucial to avoid the further racialization of the prison population and merely transferring prisoners to equally problematic institutions. Details: Chicago: University of Chicago Law School, 2011. 36p. Source: Internet Resource: University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 542 University of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 335: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1748796 Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1748796 Shelf Number: 122414 Keywords: DeinstitutionalizationImprisonment (U.S.)JailsMass IncarcerationMental HealthMentally IllPrisons |
Author: Evans, Douglas N. Title: Punishment Without End Summary: Criminal justice punishments are an investment that societies make to protect the safety and order of communities. Following decades of rising prison populations, however, U.S. policymakers are beginning to wonder if they have invested too much in punishment. Policies adopted in previous decades now incarcerate large numbers of Americans and impose considerable costs on states. Mass incarceration policies are costly and potentially iatrogenic-i.e. they may transform offenders into repeat offenders. Public officials and citizens alike often assume that known offenders pose a permanent risk of future offending. This belief entangles millions of offenders in the justice system for life, with little hope of being fully restored to a non-criminal status. Yet, research indicates that risks posed by ex-offenders decline over time. At some point, which this report terms "risk convergence," the probability that an ex-offender will commit a new offense reaches a level that is indistinguishable from the general public. Societies gain nothing from ineffective and inefficient criminal justice policies that impose punishments on offenders far beyond the point of risk convergence. These policies waste resources and hinder ex-offenders struggling to rebuild legitimate lives when they pose no greater risk to the public safety than any of their neighbors. There are, of course, solutions to this problem. This report addresses some of the solutions being implemented across the country. Details: New York: John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Research & Evaluation Center, 2014. 21p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed July 16, 2014 at: http://jjrec.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/jf_johnjay1.pdf Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://jjrec.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/jf_johnjay1.pdf Shelf Number: 132688 Keywords: Mass IncarcerationPunishmentSentencing |
Author: Natapoff, Alexandra Title: Misdemeanor Decriminalization Summary: As the U.S. rethinks its stance on mass incarceration, misdemeanor decriminalization is an increasingly popular reform. Seen as a potential cure for crowded jails and an overburdened defense bar, many states are eliminating jail time for minor offenses such as marijuana possession and driving violations, and replacing those crimes with so-called "nonjailable" or "fine-only" offenses. This form of reclassification is widely perceived as a way of saving millions of state dollars - nonjailable offenses do not trigger the right to counsel - while easing the punitive impact on defendants, and it has strong support from progressives and conservatives alike. But decriminalization has a little-known dark side. Unlike full legalization, decriminalization preserves many of the punitive features and collateral consequences of the criminal misdemeanor experience, even as it strips defendants of counsel and other procedural protections. It actually expands the reach of the criminal apparatus by making it easier - both logistically and normatively - to impose fines and supervision on an ever-widening population, a population who ironically often ends up incarcerated anyway when they cannot afford the fines or comply with the supervisory conditions. The turn to fine-only offenses and supervision, moreover, has distributive implications. It captures poor, underemployed, drug-dependent, and other disadvantaged defendants for whom fines and supervision are especially burdensome, while permitting well-resourced offenders to exit the process quickly and relatively unscathed. Finally, as courts turn increasingly to fines and fees to fund their own operations, decriminalization threatens to become a kind of regressive tax, turning the poorest populations into funding fodder for the judiciary and other government budgets. In sum, while decriminalization appears to offer relief from the punitive legacy of overcriminalization and mass incarceration, upon closer inspection it turns out to be a highly conflicted regulatory strategy that preserves and even strengthens some of the most problematic aspects of the massive U.S. penal system. Details: Los Angeles: Loyola Los Angeles School of Law, 2014. 63p. Source: Internet Resource: Loyola-LA Legal Studies Paper No. 2014-43 : Accessed September 11, 2014 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2494414 Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2494414 Shelf Number: 133276 Keywords: Alternatives to IncarcerationDecriminalizationJail OvercrowdingMass IncarcerationMisdemeanors (U.S.)Prison OvercrowdingPunishment |
Author: Phelps, Michelle S. Title: Mass Probation: Toward a More Robust Theory of State Variation in Punishment Summary: Scholarship on the expansion of the criminal justice system in the U.S. has almost exclusively focused on imprisonment, investigating why some states lead the world in incarceration rates while others have restrained growth. Yet for most states, the predominant form of punishment is probation, and many seemingly progressive states supervise massive numbers of adults on community supervision. Drawing on Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 1980 and 2010, I analyze this expansion of mass probation and develop a typology of control regimes that theorizes both the scale and type of formal punishment states employ. The results demonstrate that mass probation rearranges scholars' conclusions about the causes and consequences of the penal state. Details: Unpublished paper, 2014. 41p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 1, 2014 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2476051 Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2476051 Shelf Number: 133534 Keywords: Community CorrectionsMass ImprisonmentMass IncarcerationProbation (U.S.)Punishment |
Author: Cloud, David Title: On Life Support: Public Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration Summary: Each year, millions of incarcerated people-who experience chronic health conditions, infectious diseases, substance use, and mental illness at much higher rates than the general population-return home from correctional institutions to communities that are already rife with health disparities, violence, and poverty, among other structural inequities. For several generations, high rates of incarceration among residents in these communities has further contributed to diminished educational opportunities, fractured family structures, stagnated economic mobility, limited housing options, and restricted access to essential social entitlements. Several factors in today's policy climate indicate that the political discourse on crime and punishment is swinging away from the punitive, tough-on-crime values that dominated for decades, and that the time is ripe to fundamentally rethink the function of the criminal justice system in ways that can start to address the human toll that mass incarceration has had on communities. At the same time, the nation's healthcare system is undergoing a historic overhaul due to the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Many provisions of the ACA provide tools needed to address long-standing health disparities. Among these are: Bolstering community capacity by expanding Medicaid eligiblity, expanding coverage and parity for behavioral health treatment, and reducing health disparities. Strengthening front-end alternatives to arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. Bridging health and justice systems by coordinating outreach and care, enrolling people in Medicaid and subsidized health plans across the criminal justice continuum, using Medicaid waivers and innovation funding to extend coverage to new groups, and advancing health information technology. There is growing interest among health and justice system leaders to work together in the pursuit of health equity, public safety, and social justice. In many states and localities, efforts are already underway. While challenges remain, including regional differences in using the ACA, the combination of political will, public support, and increased access to healthcare funding presents a momentous opportunity to address the impacts of mass incarceration on community health, develop policy and programmatic reforms to undo the damage, and rethink the core values and goals of the American justice system moving forward. Details: New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2014. 34p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed November 20, 2014 at: http://www.vera.org/pubs/public-health-mass-incarceration Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://www.vera.org/pubs/public-health-mass-incarceration Shelf Number: 134162 Keywords: Health Care (U.S.)Mass IncarcerationMedicaidMedical CareMental HealthPrisoners |
Author: Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Title: Unequal Justice: Mobilizing the Private Bar to Fight Mass Incarceration Summary: This report marks the beginning of Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law's Criminal Justice Initiative, created to mobilize the private bar in the fight against mass incarceration. Mass incarceration - a term that refers to the cluster of issues associated with the historic scale of present-day American incarceration - presents the greatest contemporary threat to civil and human rights in the United States today. Two key facts about this phenomenon gird its importance to the Lawyers' Committee's mission: (1) mass incarceration is a racially, spatially, and socioeconomically targeted phenomenon that disproportionately affects lower-class African-American and Hispanic residents of degraded urban spaces, and (2) mass incarceration results in large part from aggregate policy choices, rather than from poor personal decisions or increases in overall levels of crime, meaning solutions too will be legal and policy in nature. There is no single solution to the problem of mass incarceration. This is because there is no single cause. Many issues are subsumed under the heading of "mass incarceration," some with deep historical roots. It is the combination of various factors working in tandem that produces the result. There is consensus that the criminal justice system is broken. Or in the words of one participant at a listening session, the criminal justice system does exactly what it is designed to do: to punitively punish large swaths of society's most disadvantaged individuals. Experts, academics, practitioners, and formerly incarcerated individuals alike agreed that the criminal justice system is unnecessarily punitive, fails wholesale to rehabilitate through its method of incarceration, destroys any opportunity for success after release from incarceration due to the thousands of collateral consequences, decreases public safety, and undermines public trust in the ability of the system to deliver justice. A key fact will guide the Lawyers' Committee's work in this area: nationally, 95% of criminal cases end in guilty pleas; of cases in the federal court system, that figure is 97%. In considering how best to harness the resources of the private bar, the importance of the criminal justice system's negotiated nature cannot be overstated. Glaring racial disparities are often absent from reform discourse. There is no question that the criminal justice system treats individuals differently based on the color of their skin. This is especially true when combined with other disadvantage factors like income, education, geography, and access to healthcare. However, this fact is often absent in public discourse and almost never formally addressed in reform efforts. This is particularly troubling since racial disparities in incarceration are often the result of implicit racial bias and structural or institutionalized racial discrimination, deep-rooted species of dysfunction which can only begin to be addressed by the acknowledgement and recognition that it exists. Details: Washington, DC: The Committee, 2015. 87p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 9, 2015 at: http://www.lawyerscommittee.org/admin/site/documents/files/0553.pdf Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: http://www.lawyerscommittee.org/admin/site/documents/files/0553.pdf Shelf Number: 135537 Keywords: Criminal Justice ReformImprisonmentMass IncarcerationRacial BiasRacial Disparities |
Author: Monahan, John Title: Risk Assessment in Criminal Sentencing Summary: The past several years have seen a surge of interest in using risk assessment in criminal sentencing, both to reduce recidivism by incapacitating or treating high-risk offenders and to reduce prison populations by diverting low-risk offenders from prison. We begin by sketching jurisprudential theories of sentencing, distinguishing those that rely on risk assessment from those that preclude it. We then characterize and illustrate the varying roles that risk assessment may play in the sentencing process. We clarify questions regarding the various meanings of "risk" in sentencing and the appropriate time to assess the risk of convicted offenders. We conclude by addressing four principal problems confronting risk assessment in sentencing: conflating risk and blame, barring individual inferences based on group data, failing adequately to distinguish risk assessment from risk reduction, and ignoring whether, and if so, how, the use of risk assessment in sentencing affects racial and economic disparities in imprisonment. Details: Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia School of Law, 2015. 57p. Source: Internet Resource: Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper, No. 53 : Accessed September 21, 2015 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2662082 Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2662082 Shelf Number: 136838 Keywords: Mass IncarcerationOffender RehabilitationRisk AssessmentSentencing |
Author: Eisen, Lauren-Brooke Title: The Reverse Mass Incarceration Act Summary: Leaders across the political spectrum agree: The United States must end mass incarceration. But how? What bold solutions will achieve this change? Our prison crisis has many causes. One major contributor: a web of perverse financial incentives across the country that spurred more arrests, prosecutions, and prison sentences. A prime example is the 1994 Crime Bill, which authorized $12.5 billion ($19 billion in today's dollars) to states to increase incarceration. And 20 states did just that, yielding a dramatic rise in prison populations. To reverse course, the federal government can apply a similar approach. It can be termed a "Reverse Crime Bill," or the "Reverse Mass Incarceration Act." It would provide funds to states to reduce imprisonment and crime together. The United States has 5 percent of the world's population, yet has 25 percent of the world's prisoners. If the prison population were a state, it would be the 36th largest - bigger than Delaware, Vermont, and Wyoming combined. Worse, our penal policies do not work. Mass incarceration is not only unnecessary to keep down crime but is also ineffective at it. Increasing incarceration offers rapidly diminishing returns. The criminal justice system costs taxpayers $260 billion a year. Best estimates suggest that incarceration contributes to as much as 20 percent of the American poverty rate. During the crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s, lawmakers enacted stringent laws to instill law and order in devastated communities. But many of these laws went too far. The federal government played an outsize role by financially subsidizing states to incarcerate more people. Today, the federal government sends $3.8 billion to states and localities each year for criminal justice. These dollars are largely focused on increasing the size of our justice system. But times have changed. We now know that mass incarceration is not necessary to keep us safe. We now know that we can reduce both crime and incarceration. States like Texas, New York, Mississippi, and California have changed their laws to do just that. For the first time in 40 years, both crime and incarceration have fallen together, since 2008. How can this momentum be harnessed into action? Just as Washington encouraged states to incarcerate, it can now encourage them to reduce incarceration while keeping down crime. It can encourage state reform efforts to roll back prison populations. As the country debates who will be the next president, any serious candidate must have a strong plan to reform the justice system. The next president should urge Congress to pass the Reverse Mass Incarceration Act. It would encourage a 20 percent reduction in imprisonment nationwide. Such an Act would have four components: -A new federal grant program of $20 billion over 10 years in incentive funds to states. -A requirement that states that reduce their prison population by 7 percent over a three-year period without an increase in crime will receive funds. -A clear methodology based on population size and other factors to determine how much money states receive. -A requirement that states invest these funds in evidence-based programs proven to reduce crime and incarceration. Such an Act would have more reach than any of the other federal proposals. It could be implemented through budgeting procedures. It could be implemented as a stand-alone Act. Or, it could be introduced as an amendment to a pending bill. Details: New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2015. 32p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 15, 2015 at: http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/The_Reverse_Mass_Incarceration_Act%20.pdf Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/The_Reverse_Mass_Incarceration_Act%20.pdf Shelf Number: 136980 Keywords: Costs of CorrectionsCosts of Criminal JusticeCriminal Justice ReformMass IncarcerationPrison PopulationPrisoners |
Author: Subramanian, Ram Title: In Our Own Backyard: Confronting Growth and Disparities in American Jails Summary: The fact that the United States-with less than 5 percent of the world's population but nearly 25 percent of the world's prisoners-has a serious problem with mass incarceration is by now well beyond partisan debate. In recent years, lawmakers, policymakers, and criminal justice practitioners from across the political spectrum have joined forces to pursue efforts, large and small, to reduce the number of people we send to and hold in state and federal prisons. Jails-with 11 million admissions annually and a third of all Americans behind bars on a given day-are increasingly recognized as a key engine of mass incarceration. Yet research and data about jail use are scarce. (See "What is Jail?" below.) Moreover, much information about incarceration either conflates prison and jail incarceration, excludes jail incarceration entirely, or inadequately examines how local justice systems have contributed to the overuse of incarceration in the United States over time. Few counties publicly report their own jail population and admissions data.4 And while federal data on jails do exist and are publicly available, the ways in which the data are collected and stored make it difficult to answer even simple questions about jail use in a given county or discern similarities or differences across the approximately 3,000 counties in the United States. Details: New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2015. 20p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed January 13, 2016 at: http://www.vera.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/incarceration-trends-in-our-own-backyard.pdf Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: http://www.vera.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/incarceration-trends-in-our-own-backyard.pdf Shelf Number: 137475 Keywords: Jail InmatesJailsMass IncarcerationRacial Disparities |
Author: Austin, James Title: Eliminating Mass Incarceration: How San Francisco Did It Summary: San Francisco has rapidly reduced its jail and prison populations with a series of "best practices" innovations that have built on California's well-publicized legislative reforms enacted since 2009. Since 2009, California has reduced the size of number of people in prison, jail, felony probation and parole by nearly 150,000. At the same time, the state's crime rate has dramatically declined and is now lower than what was in 1960. If the rest of the country could match San Francisco's rates, the number of individuals under correctional supervision would plummet from 7 million to 2 million. Details: Washington, DC: JFA Institute, 2015. 30p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed January 13, 2016 at: http://www.jfa-associates.com/publications/reduce/Reforming%20San%20Franciscos%20Criminal%20Justice%20System-JA4.pdf Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: http://www.jfa-associates.com/publications/reduce/Reforming%20San%20Franciscos%20Criminal%20Justice%20System-JA4.pdf Shelf Number: 137564 Keywords: Correctional InstitutionsCorrectional PoliciesCorrectional ReformCriminal Justice ReformMass IncarcerationPrison Reform |
Author: Ridolfi, Laura John Title: Decriminalizing Childhood for Youth of Color Summary: From the day children are born, we dream of their bright future and imagine that their lives are ripe with opportunities to thrive. We send them off to elementary school with aspirations of one day attending their college graduation and celebrating their journey toward self-sufficiency. We envision them growing into young adults with access to opportunities to create a good life. However, for far too many, this is a dream deferred. For youth of color, the journey along the path of opportunity toward self-sufficiency is frequently derailed by criminalization, arrest, and incarceration. One reason is that the margin of error that our society grants to youth of color is razor thin. This is true for youth of color who are simply exhibiting normal childhood behavior, as well as those who commit crime. The American justice system, reflecting societal values and norms, has a long and unconscionable tradition of using policing and incarceration as a form of social control for children of color. It is imperative that we protect their right to childhood by reforming the justice system in ways that strive for structural racial equity. The racial and ethnic disparities that exist in youth justice today are symptoms of a system that, from inception, treated children of color poorly and that continues to use misguided and ineffective approaches. There are nearly 1 million young people involved in the youth justice system today. The overwhelming majority are youth of color. On an average day in 2013, nearly 55,000 young people across the United States were incarcerated - 87 percent were for nonviolent offenses. Youth of color were significantly more likely to be incarcerated; black youth were more than six times as likely to be incarcerated as white youth. The American emphasis on incarceration as a response to misbehavior and misconduct by youth of color is punitive, deficit-based, and ultimately counterproductive. This "mass incarceration" has come under public scrutiny in the United States in recent years. Across party lines, our nation agrees, the "American experiment in mass incarceration has been a moral, legal, social, and economic disaster." But mass incarceration is more accurately described as hyper-incarceration because communities of color experience excessive incarceration disproportionately. Details: Chicago: Urban America Forward, 2016. 4p. Source: Internet Resource: Civil Rights Roundtable Series: Policy Brief: Accessed March 29, 2016 at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5OY2mjuvIznSDhsTkU2LVV3SkU/view?pref=2&pli=1 Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5OY2mjuvIznSDhsTkU2LVV3SkU/view?pref=2&pli=1 Shelf Number: 138472 Keywords: African AmericansDisadvantaged YouthEthnic DisparitiesMass IncarcerationRacial Disparities |
Author: Schaffer, Adam Title: Between Rhetoric and Reform: Criminal Justice Reform in the United States Summary: After decades of implementing-and exporting-"tough on crime" policies that prioritize arrest and incarceration for even minor drug offenses, the United States is reconsidering its criminal justice system. These reforms should be noted in Latin America, a new report released today argues, as the region faces surging prison populations driven in part by draconian U.S.-sponsored policies. From 1973 to 2009, the total U.S. prison population increased over seven-fold as more low-level offenders were incarcerated-instead of receiving non-prison punishments-and a range of offenses garnered significantly longer sentences. Much of the change came as part of the "War on Drugs," and arrest and incarceration rates for drug offenses saw a particularly marked rise. From 1980 to 2010, the imprisonment rate for drug crimes grew from 15 per 100,000 to 143 per 100,000; a nearly ten-fold increase. Yet in recent years, the United States has begun to see a paradigm shift. Proposals are emerging to replace zero-tolerance policies, which sought to criminalize all aspects of drug-related behavior, with alternatives to incarceration and more fair sentencing policies. Calls for reform have spanned the political spectrum, as liberal groups call attention to the racial and socioeconomic disparities in the enforcement of drug laws, while conservative groups question the enormous financial costs (and questionable benefits) associated with mass incarceration. There is emerging bipartisan agreement that current drug laws-and sentencing practices more broadly-are ineffective, wasteful, and unjust. Details: Washington, DC: Washington Office of Latin America, 2016. 21p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 12, 2016 at: http://www.wola.org/sites/default/files/Between%20Rhetoric%20and%20Reform_Web.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: http://www.wola.org/sites/default/files/Between%20Rhetoric%20and%20Reform_Web.pdf Shelf Number: 138637 Keywords: Criminal Justice ReformDrug Policy ReformMass Incarceration |
Author: Byrd, Renee M. Title: 'Punishment's Twin': Theorizing Prisoner Reentry for a Politics of Abolition Summary: Punishment's Twin: Theorizing Prisoner Reentry for a Politics of Abolition investigates prisoner reentry as a discursive formation which shores up the naturalization of the contemporary prison as a means of managing populations deemed disposable through the vicissitudes of neoliberal globalization. Using a combination of ethnography and critical discourse analysis, my project argues that prisoner reentry is deployed using a vocabulary, which mimics a critique of mass imprisonment, in order to expand the punishment system and render it more flexible, cost effective and legitimate. In the chapter, titled "`Where Ministry and Economics Meet': The Convergence of Neoliberal and Evangelical Rationalities within Prisoner Reentry," I analyze how neoliberal and evangelical Christian rationalities come together in prisoner reentry discourse. I intervene in the theorization of neoliberal political rationalities by showing how neoliberalism borrows from other ideologies in order to find purchase in a particular locale and that this borrowing is profoundly implicated with regimes of race and gender. Drawing on interviews with formerly imprisoned women in the Twin Cities, Chapter Three grapples with the politics of representation in prison activist scholarship. This chapter highlights two key findings from my interviews: 1) Using Priti Ramamurthy's concept of subjects-in-perplexity, I argue that the representation of the women's prison as an empowering space in Minnesota, as opposed to the disciplinary nature of residential reentry programs, naturalized the prison as the proper place where women prisoners could find help, healing and support; and 2) I found that the barriers attached to felony status often (re)produce the very vulnerability expected in accounts of imprisoned women's lives. Finally, the dissertation argues that in order to genuinely transform the conditions of mass imprisonment's emergence, prisoner reentry must be situated within a politics of abolition. Chapter Four provides a broad critique of `prisoner reentry' as a discursive formation. Chapter Five theorizes the concept of "abolitionist reentry praxis." "Punishment's Twin..." serves as a call to prison activists to be alert to the potentially dangerous development that mainstream articulations of prisoner reentry represents and imaginative in constructing reentry work for a world without prisons. Details: Seattle, WA: University of Washington, 2013. 113p. Source: Internet Resource: Dissertation: Accessed July 11, 2016 at: https://gwss.washington.edu/graduate/punishments-twin-theorizing-prisoner-reentry-politics-abolition Year: 2013 Country: United States URL: https://gwss.washington.edu/graduate/punishments-twin-theorizing-prisoner-reentry-politics-abolition Shelf Number: 139594 Keywords: AbolitionMass IncarcerationPrisoner Reentry |
Author: Indianapolis Congregation Action Network Title: The People's Agenda for Ending Mass Incarceration and Mass Criminalization in Marion County Summary: Marion County has a long history of overly aggressive policing and prosecution strategies that have entangled far too many Black and Latino men and women in the criminal justice system, without making the community safer. County officials have long failed to follow best practices for preventing violence, diverting people out of the criminal justice system, and reducing the number of people behind bars, - Between 1985 and 2014 the per capita jail population in Marion County doubled, from 1.1 to 2.14 people incarcerated per 1,000 residents. - The number of women incarcerated increased by 145% between 1985 and 2014. - Extraordinarily high rates of incarceration are concentrated in a small number of zip codes with high Black and Latino populations - Blacks in Marion County are 3.1 times more likely to be in jail than Whites. - Unlike most other counties, Marion fails to transparently report basic data on the Annual Survey of Jails, including the number of inmates in county jails who have not been convicted of any crime, as well as the racial demographics of the jail population. - Many people found innocent or whose charges are ultimately dismissed, are spending long periods of time in jail in Marion County, More than 44% of people who had their charges dismissed or were found innocent spent more than 30 days behind bars, with more than 5 percent spending more than 6 months. These figures are extraordinarily high. Marion County's elected officials are responsible for the safety and wellbeing of all people in the county. But historically they have pursued policies that cycle large number of Black and Latino men and women through the criminal justice system and effectively criminalize whole communities. Mayor Hogsett's public recognition that the criminal justice system in Marion County is broken and his commitment to make major policy changes in this area, represents an important opportunity to improve life in Indianapolis for all residents. Details: Indianapolis: Indianapolis Congregation Action Network, 2016. 82p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed September 14, 2016 at: http://www.indycan.org/resources/document/Indycan_Peoples-Agenda-to-End-Mass-Incarcertion-in-Marion-County_Final2016.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: http://www.indycan.org/resources/document/Indycan_Peoples-Agenda-to-End-Mass-Incarcertion-in-Marion-County_Final2016.pdf Shelf Number: 147870 Keywords: Criminal Justice PolicyCriminal Justice ReformMass Incarceration |
Author: Mungan, Murat C. Title: Disenfranchisement and Over-Incarceration Summary: Disenfranchisement laws in many states prohibit convicted felons from voting. The removal of ex-convicts from the pool of eligible voters reduces the pressure politicians may otherwise face to protect the interests of this group. In particular, disenfranchisement laws may cause the political process to push the sentences for criminal offenses upwards. In this article, I construct a simple model with elected law enforcers who propose sentences to maximize their likelihood of election. I show, with the help of the median voter theorem, that even without disenfranchisement, elections typically generate over-incarceration, i.e. longer than optimal sentences. Disenfranchisement further widens the gap between the optimal sentence and the equilibrium sentence, and thereby exacerbates the problem of over-incarceration. Moreover, this result is valid even when voter turnout is negatively correlated with people's criminal tendencies, i.e. when criminals vote less frequently than non-criminals. Details: Arlington, VA: George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School, 2016. 15p. Source: Internet Resource: George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 16-43 : Accessed November 21, 2016 at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2863035 Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2863035 Shelf Number: 140231 Keywords: Collateral ConsequencesFelony DisenfranchisementFelony OffendersMass IncarcerationVoting Rights |
Author: Austin, James Title: How Many Americans are Unnecessarily Incarcerated? Summary: Nearly 40 percent of the U.S. prison population - 576,000 people - are behind bars with no compelling public safety reason, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The first-of-its-kind analysis provides a blueprint for how the country can drastically cut its prison population while still keeping crime rates near historic lows. In 1963, the March on Washington marked a turning point in the long fight for civil rights for African Americans. A century after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, hundreds of thousands converged at his memorial to celebrate a century of liberation and to protest what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. In the intervening fifty years, we have come a remarkable distance, but the shackles of systemic racism continue to bind communities of color. We stand on the frontlines in the fight to build a society free from racial discrimination. In 2015, we honored the sacrifices of our forbearers and galvanized international attention to systemic discrimination with a "Journey for Justice from Selma, Ala. to Washington, D.C. While national support for this effort provides hope the tide may be turning, it also belies a sad truth: Many of the grave inequalities we fought decades ago still persist, more than fifty years after the Civil Rights Act. The single greatest injustice that threatens our safety and hinders our progress? Mass incarceration. People of color bear the brunt of our criminal justice system in disproportionate and devastating numbers. This is in part because racial disparities exist at all stages of the system, which relies on corrosive practices that harm people of color. Our communities have already suffered from historic and systemic economic injustice and racially targeted criminal justice policies. These wounds have not healed and have been aggravated by the staggering number of people trapped in prisons over the past forty years. Today, an estimated 2.2 million people are locked inside jails and prisons. African Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population but 37 percent of the nation's prisoners. People with dreams and aspirations suffer in airtight cells of prison and poverty. But the injustice does not end there. More than half of formerly incarcerated Americans are unemployed a year after release. Communities of color are over policed, over-prosecuted, over-incarcerated and yet underemployed. If we do not take steps now, Americans of color will forever be relegated to a penal and permanent underclass, and mass incarceration will continue to cage the economic growth of our communities. We have reached a crisis point, and we need solutions. This groundbreaking report from the Brennan Center for Justice offers a pathway to reduce our prison population and its tragic racial disparities. It documents the number of people behind bars without rationale, and reveals the unnecessary trauma this causes. It recommends real solutions that can help end over-incarceration. I urge lawmakers to give deep consideration and deeper commitment to this report's findings and recommendations. This nation must continue to march forward, toward a day when all people are treated based not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character, uncolored and un-stigmatized by a criminal record. It is time that we end the plague of mass incarceration Details: New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2016. 80p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed December 9, 2016 at: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Unnecessarily_Incarcerated.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Unnecessarily_Incarcerated.pdf Shelf Number: 145623 Keywords: Correctional Institutions Correctional Policies Correctional ReformMass IncarcerationPrison ReformPrisoners |
Author: Communities United Title: The $3.4 Trillion Mistake: The Cost of Mass Incarceration and Criminalization, and How Justice Reinvestment Can Build a Better Future for All Summary: Imagine if, back in 1982, our federal, state, and local policymakers had assembled the U.S. public and offered us a choice between two paths that we could take over the next 30 years. Path One would involve using our tax dollars to invest in the massive expansion of our justice system and a tripling of our incarcerated population, but would not substantially improve public safety. Path Two would make the same level of investment in providing tens of millions of youth with higher-quality educational and developmental opportunities, creating millions of living-wage jobs, dramatically expanding the availability of affordable housing and first-rate healthcare, and making meaningful advances in addressing the effects of environmental degradation, while keeping the justice system at the same size. Would anyone have chosen Path One? Nevertheless, that is effectively what we did. Over the last 30+ years, the U.S. has invested heavily in police, prosecutors, courts, jails, and prisons to address not only public safety issues but also public health concerns such as the effects of poverty, mental illness, and drug use. As a result, the justice system now intersects with our lives far more often, and far more harshly, than ever before, and there are many millions more people that are either under the control of, or employed by, that system. For example, in 1982, the U.S. already had an expansive justice system, totaling $90 billion in justice spending, including police, corrections, judicial/legal, and immigration enforcement expenditures. Indeed, our incarcerated population then – 621,885 – would still rank as third-highest in the world today, behind only China and Russia. Nevertheless, we continued to aggressively expand both the size and role of our justice system, particularly as a result of the escalation of the “War on Drugs” and the increased use of the "tough on crime" approach. Thus, by 2012, total justice spending had increased by 229% to nearly $297 billion. Even more staggering is the cumulative impact of those shifts in resources. Over the 30-year period from 1983 to 2012, we spent $3.4 trillion more on the justice system than we would have if it had stayed the same size as it was in 1982. This "surplus justice spending" turned our already-huge justice system into the one we have today, in which there are nearly eight million adults and youth behind bars or within the probation and parole systems in the U.S. In other words, 1 in 40 U.S. residents is either in prison, in jail, on probation or parole, or otherwise under control of the justice system. For communities of color that have been devastated by decades of over-investment in flawed and ineffective criminal justice strategies and racially discriminatory policing – and under-investment in meeting critical community needs – the impact has been particularly severe. For example, approximately 1 in 18 Black residents, and 1 in 34 Latino residents, were under the control of the justice system in 2013 (compared to 1 in 55 White residents). However, despite the massive investment in the expansion of our justice system, it is not at all clear that this approach has been effective at promoting public safety. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that it has been far less effective than other public safety strategies available to us. Moreover, there is an enormous amount of research demonstrating that the harms caused by this approach far exceeded whatever benefits have been realized, particularly with regard to the low-income communities of color that have been suffocating under extreme versions of these mass incarceration and criminalization approaches. Details: s.l.: Communities United, Make the Road New York, Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, and the Right on Justice Alliance , 2016. 28p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed February 22, 2017 at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57dadad0e58c62763389db93/t/57fe699c440243a439dcc3d6/1476290979801/FINAL+Report+-+hi+res.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57dadad0e58c62763389db93/t/57fe699c440243a439dcc3d6/1476290979801/FINAL+Report+-+hi+res.pdf Shelf Number: 141175 Keywords: Costs of CorrectionsCosts of Criminal JusticeJustice ExpendituresJustice ReinvestmentMass Incarceration |
Author: Bellin, Jeffrey Title: Reassessing Prosecutorial Power Through the Lens of Mass Incarceration Summary: Prosecutors have long been the Darth Vader of academic writing: mysterious, all-powerful and, for the most part, bad. This uber-prosecutor theme flows like the force through John Pfaff's highly-anticipated new book, "Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration - and How to Achieve Real Reform." The book concludes that police, legislators, and judges are not to blame for Mass Incarceration. Instead, "the most powerful actors in the entire criminal justice system" (prosecutors) have used their "almost unfettered, unreviewable power to determine who gets sent to prison and for how long." Locked In's data-driven thesis aligns neatly with the academic consensus. If prosecutors are the most powerful actor in the criminal justice system, they must be responsible for its most noteworthy product - Mass Incarceration. The only problem is that it probably isn't right. While Pfaff's empirical findings have been embraced by the media, the legal academy, and even former President Obama, they are grounded in questionable data. With these flaws exposed, the familiar villains of the Mass Incarceration story reemerge: judges and, above all, legislators. This reemergence provides a very different focus for reforms designed to unwind Mass Incarceration. It also says something profound about prosecutorial power. Prosecutors possess substantial power to let people escape from an increasingly inflexible system. But decades of academic claims suggesting that prosecutors are equally powerful when acting in the opposite direction - to dictate sanctions - fold under scrutiny. When it comes to imposing incarceration, prosecutorial power is largely contingent on the actions of other, more powerful criminal justice actors. Details: Unpublished paper, 2017. 32p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 10, 2017 at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2930116 Year: 2017 Country: United States URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2930116 Shelf Number: 150548 Keywords: JudgesMass IncarcerationProsecutors |
Author: Mai, Chris Title: The Price of Prisons: Examining State Spending Trends, 2010-2015 Summary: After decades of a stable rate of incarceration, the U.S. prison population experienced unprecedented growth from the early 1970s into the new millennium - with the number of people confined to state prisons increasing by more than 600 percent, reaching just over 1.4 million people by the end of 2009. The engine driving this growth was the enactment and implementation over time of a broad array of tough-on-crime policies, including the rapid and continuous expansion of the criminal code; the adoption of zero-tolerance policing tactics, particularly around minor street-level drug and quality-of-life offenses; and the proliferation of harsh sentencing and release policies aimed at keeping people in prison for longer periods of time (such as mandatory minimum sentences, truth-in-sentencing statutes, and habitual offender laws). Unsurprisingly, this explosion in the use of incarceration had a direct financial influence on state budgets. Creating and sustaining such a sprawling penal system has been expensive. With more people under their care, state prison systems were compelled to build new prison facilities and expand existing ones. To staff these new and expanded facilities, they also had to hire, train, and retain ever more employees. In addition to expanding the state-operated prison system, some states also began to board out increasing numbers of people to county jails, privately-run facilities, and other states' prison systems. After hitting a high of 1.4 million people in 2009, however, the overall state prison population has since declined by 5 percent, or 77,000 people. Lawmakers in nearly every state and from across the political spectrum - some prompted by the 2008 recession - have enacted new laws to reduce prison populations and spending, often guided by a now-large body of research supporting alternative, more effective responses to crime. In addition to fiscal pressures, the push for reform has been further bolstered by other factors, including low crime rates; shifting public opinion that now favors less incarceration and more rehabilitation; and dissatisfaction with past punitive policies that have failed to moderate persistently high recidivism rates among those sent to prison. With these various political, institutional, and economic forces at play, most states have adopted a variety of different policies, including those that increase opportunities to divert people away from the traditional criminal justice process; expand the use of community-based sanctions; reduce the length and severity of prison sentences for certain offenses, including the rollback of mandatory penalties; increase opportunities for people to gain early release; and better provide enhanced reentry support for those leaving prison or jail. In light of nearly a decade of broad-based criminal justice reform, this report seeks to determine where state prison spending stands today and how it has changed in recent years. In particular, if a goal of recent reforms has been to make deep and lasting cuts to prison spending by reducing the prison population, have states who have witnessed the desired downward shift in prison size also witnessed it in spending? To answer this question, researchers at the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) developed a survey to measure changes in state prison population and expenditures between 2010 and 2015, and conducted follow-up interviews with state prison budget officials to better understand spending and population trends. Vera's study confirms that prisons remain an expensive enterprise, despite the success of many states - including Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and South Carolina - in simultaneously reducing their prison populations while achieving budget savings. The first part of this report describes 2015 prison expenditures, identifying the main driver of corrections spending across responding states. The second half of the report then discusses how changes in prison populations during the study period, and other trends largely outside the control of departments of corrections have affected prison spending. What is clear is that increased spending is not inevitable, since nearly half of states have cut their spending on prisons between 2010 and 2015. But while one might expect that states with shrinking prison populations are uniformly spending less on prisons, or conversely that states with growing populations are spending more, Vera's findings paint a more complicated picture. Indeed, often there is no single reason that explains a rise or fall in spending, but a multitude of factors that push and pull expenditures in different directions. Details: New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2017. 28p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 25, 2017 at: https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/legacy_downloads/the-price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends.pdf Year: 2017 Country: United States URL: https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/legacy_downloads/the-price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends.pdf Shelf Number: 145794 Keywords: Costs of CorrectionsCosts of Criminal JusticeCriminal Justice ExpendituresMass IncarcerationPrisons |
Author: Grawert, Ames C. Title: A Federal Agenda to Reduce Mass Incarceration Summary: This report sets forth an affirmative agenda to end mass incarceration and reform our criminal justice system. Bipartisan momentum has been growing for years. We must keep it going. The United States has less than five percent of the world's population, but nearly one quarter of its prisoners. Mass incarceration contributes significantly to the American poverty rate. Conservatives, progressives, and law enforcement leaders now agree that the country must reduce its prison population, and that it can do so without jeopardizing public safety. In the last decade, 27 states have led the way, cutting crime and imprisonment together. Of course, because 87 percent of prisoners are housed in state facilities, changes to state and local law are necessary. But history proves that decisions made in Washington affect the whole criminal justice system, for better or worse. Federal funding drives state policy, and helped create our current crisis of mass incarceration. And the federal government sets the national tone, which is critical to increasing public support and national momentum for change. Without a strong national movement, the bold reforms needed at the state and local level cannot emerge. In a divisive political environment, it is tempting to assume that progress toward federal reform is impossible. But even today, the need to confront problems in the way we arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate remains a rare point of trans-partisan agreement. Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders alike acknowledge that unnecessarily long federal prison sentences continue to impede rehabilitation, driving recidivism and economic inequality. And according to a new poll from the Charles Koch Institute, 81 percent of Trump voters believe criminal justice reform is a "very important" or "somewhat important" issue. More than half know someone who is in or has been to prison. Even with broad public support, addressing the problems in our criminal justice system will not be easy. For the last eight years, the White House and Justice Department supported this important work. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions appears opposed to efforts to reduce unnecessarily harsh charging and sentencing. While President Donald Trump's own views remain unclear, key advisers such as Vice President Mike Pence, senior adviser Jared Kushner, and Gov. Chris Christie all support efforts to reduce imprisonment. To help bridge that divide, this report offers solutions that would keep crime rates low and show support for law enforcement, while reducing mass incarceration. The strongest of these policies require congressional action. Others could be implemented by a sympathetic administration. Taken together, these policies form the core of a national agenda for federal leaders to make our country safer and fairer. They also serve as models for state and local action. Legislation End the Federal Subsidization of Mass Incarceration: Federal grants help shape criminal justice policy at the state and local levels. For decades, these grants have subsidized the growth of incarceration. For example, the 1994 Crime Bill offered states $9 billion in funding to build more prisons. Today, $8.4 billion in federal criminal justice grants flow from Washington annually, largely on autopilot, encouraging more arrests, prosecution, and incarceration. To bring accountability to this flow, Congress can pass a "Reverse Mass Incarceration Act" that would dedicate $20 billion over 10 years to states that reduce both crime and incarceration. This would spur state and local action across the country. End Federal Incarceration for Lower-Level Crimes: Our criminal justice system relies heavily on prison, using it as the default punishment for most crimes. But research has shown that unnecessary incarceration is costly and ineffective at preventing recidivism and promoting rehabilitation. Early estimates show that approximately 49 percent of the federal prison population is likely incarcerated without an adequate public safety reason. Congress can pass legislation to eliminate prison terms for lower-level offenses and shorten prison terms for other crimes. In doing so, it can safely, significantly cut the prison population, saving around $28 billion over 10 years, enough to fund a Reverse Mass Incarceration Act. Institute a Police Corps Program to Modernize Law Enforcement: The country faces a national crisis in policing. Some believe that overly-zealous enforcement has reached a breaking point. Others believe police are not adequately funded or supported. All can agree that something needs to change. To advance a twenty-first century police force, Congress can allocate $40 billion over five years to recruit new officers and train them in modern policing tactics focused on crime prevention, as well as techniques to reduce unnecessary arrests, uses of force, and incarceration. Enact Sentencing Reform: While lawmakers should aspire to the bold changes to federal sentencing described above, Congress can start with a milder first step: reintroducing and passing the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015. This proposal would cautiously reduce prison sentences for some nonviolent crimes. A bipartisan group of senators, led by Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), have already committed to reintroducing the bill this session. The White House has expressed cautious support. Executive Action Redirect Federal Grants Away from Mass Incarceration: Since many of the harmful incentives in federal criminal justice grants are written into law, truly ending the federal subsidization of mass incarceration will take congressional action, as laid out above. But the Justice Department can take the first step, by changing performance measures for grants to reward states that use federal funds to reduce both crime and incarceration. Institute New Goals for Federal Prosecutors: The Justice Department should ensure that scarce federal criminal justice resources are focused on the most serious crimes, and evaluate U.S. Attorneys nationally based on their ability to decrease both crime and incarceration. Commute Sentences to Retroactively Apply the Fair Sentencing Act: In 2010, Republicans and Democrats joined together to pass legislation to reduce the disparity between crack and powder cocaine crimes as the drugs are scientifically equivalent. But more than 4,000 federal prisoners remain incarcerated under outdated drug laws. Future presidents can bring justice to these prisoners by identifying clemency petitions meeting certain criteria, fast-tracking them for review, and granting clemency. Details: New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2017. 30p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed June 20, 2017 at: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law Year: 2017 Country: United States URL: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law Shelf Number: 146308 Keywords: Criminal Justice ReformMass IncarcerationPrison ReformSentencing Reform |
Author: Scissors, Ben Title: Women in Prison in Oregon: Data, Pathways into Incarceration, and Characteristics of Women Prisoners Summary: Mass incarceration has at last moved to the top of the agenda not only for those working within the justice system but also for many people outside it. Those caught up in the system would no doubt say this increased awareness has been a long time coming but it is still welcome. What we have seen less of, however, is attentiveness to the mass incarceration of women. Indeed it is arguable that women have been greater victims of the trend toward incarcerating a larger number of Americans since their prison numbers have seen faster growth than men's. Oregon is no exception to this trend. Facing Oregon's female prison system is a number of troubling issues, including: facility and housing deficiencies for both women and girls, increasingly untenable costs due to housing and health care issues, a lack of programming, potential human rights violations, and significant racial and ethnic disparities. National data indicate that "[i]ncarcerated women are disproportionately women of color...from low-income communities who have been subjected to a disproportionately high rate of violence." This report seeks to provide the necessary national context for understanding Oregon's incarceration of women. It will also synthesize the various available data, news and academic reports on Oregon trends in the incarceration and treatment of women in prison. The goal is to provide a one-stop destination for anyone seeking up-to-date information on the women in Oregon's prisons. It is also important to understand what this report is not. We have confined ourselves to gathering and presenting information on women imprisoned in Oregon, but not those serving time in jail or in community or alternative sentencing programs. Also, we have not sought to put forward solutions to rapid growth in the numbers of women imprisoned in Oregon within this document. We want this report to provide context to the solutions we are proposing to the over-incarceration of women and we want it to remain relevant and useful for as long as possible. We believe this will be easier to achieve by confining this document to highlighting the data we have - and the missing data we need - about Oregon's incarcerated women. Details: Portland: Oregon Justice Resource Center, 2016. 20p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 5, 2017 at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/524b5617e4b0b106ced5f067/t/57d9abb8ff7c50695a731406/1473883072267/women+in+prison+in+oregon+FINAL+VERSION.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/524b5617e4b0b106ced5f067/t/57d9abb8ff7c50695a731406/1473883072267/women+in+prison+in+oregon+FINAL+VERSION.pdf Shelf Number: 146738 Keywords: Female Inmates Female Offenders Female Prisoners Mass IncarcerationWomen Prisoners |
Author: Schanzenbach, Diane Whitmore Title: Twelve Facts about Incarceration and Prisoner Reentry Summary: Over the past several decades the national experience of crime and incarceration has fluctuated dramatically. Crime rose between the 1960s and 1980s, but has declined since 1990. Incarceration began rising sharply in the 1980s and peaked in the 2000s before starting to fall. The high rates of incarceration over the last three-and-a-half decades have resulted in a large population of formerly incarcerated individuals across the United States. For these Americans, it can be challenging to come home and integrate into their communities while also trying to reenter the labor force. Successful reintegration is not just a concern for those who return from prison: it is also a matter of public safety and economic necessity. Accordingly, a criminal justice system that emphasizes incarceration but does not support the journey home does a disservice to the formerly incarcerated as well as to the public. Reducing recidivism is critical for community safety; providing effective rehabilitation and skill development for those incarcerated and formerly incarcerated is critical to strengthening households and the economy. Understanding both the criminal justice system - in all of its state and local variations - and the individuals who interact with it is essential in order to devise policies that will be effective in promoting successful reintegration into society. With almost 7 million Americans living under correctional supervision in 2014, and tens of millions more who have exited supervision, the potential benefits of effective reentry policies are far-reaching. In order to create effective reentry policies and programs, we must assess the characteristics of the currently incarcerated population and the population of individuals who are reentering the community. These two groups are different in ways that matter for policy. Those who are incarcerated are serving longer average sentences, often for crimes that involve violence. By contrast, parolees are much more likely to have been sentenced for a drug-related or other nonviolent crime. Details: Washington, DC: Brooking Institute, Hamilton Project, 2016. 24p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed September 14, 2017 at: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/thp_20161020_twelve_facts_incarceration_prisoner_reentry.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/thp_20161020_twelve_facts_incarceration_prisoner_reentry.pdf Shelf Number: 147243 Keywords: Mass IncarcerationPrisoner Reentry Recidivism Reintegration |
Author: Roodman, David Title: The impacts of incarceration on crime Summary: When it comes to locking people up, the United States is a world champion. In 1970, 196,000 people resided in American prisons, and another 161,000 in jails, which worked out to 174 inmates per 100,000 people. In 2015, 1.53 million people languished in US prisons and 728,000 in jails, or 673 per 100,000. Only North Korea, among major nations, may surpass the US in this regard. Such statistics are almost always invoked and graphed when initiating discussions of criminal justice reform. Figure 1 and Figure 2 depict them afresh with photographs taken at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. That fortress-like complex is now a museum, a window onto a criminal justice reform movement of some two centuries ago that sought to replace corporal punishment with solitary confinement, which was seen as humane and rehabilitative. The Open Philanthropy Project has joined a latter-day criminal justice reform movement. It too is motivated by the belief that something is wrong with the state's use of punishment to combat crime. Something is wrong, in other words, with those pictures. Higher incarceration rates and longer sentences, along with the "war on drugs," have imposed great costs on taxpayers, as well as on inmates, their families, and their communities. Yet even though the 59% per-capita rise in incarceration between 1990 and 2010 accompanied a 42% drop in FBI-tracked "index crimes," researchers agree that putting more people behind bars added modestly, at most, to the fall in crime. Yet even if rising incarceration has not been a major factor behind falling crime, it might still have been a factor - and enough so that it ought to give pause to those pushing to reverse the rise. This report works to check that possibility, by reviewing empirical research on the impacts of incarceration on crime. It asks whether decarceration should be expected to increase or decrease crime. With the Open Philanthropy Project making grants for criminal justice reform, this review of the research is an act of due diligence. Any discussion of the impacts of incarceration should specify the alternative: incarceration as opposed to what? This review focuses mainly on studies that compare incarceration to ordinary freedom or traditional supervised released (probation and parole), as distinct from alternatives such as in-patient drug treatment and restorative justice conferences. Those options may offer promise, and deserve more research and evidence reviews. Nevertheless, as a practical matter, if incarceration falls substantially in this country, ordinary and traditional supervised release will probably emerge as the main alternatives. That appears to have been the case in trend-setting California after decarceration reforms in 2011 and 2014. Thus this review remains highly relevant to likely policy choices. For manageability, this review restricts it to "high-credibility" studies: ones that exploit randomized experiments, or else "quasi-experiments" that arise incidentally from the machinations of the criminal justice system and ideally produce evidence nearly as compelling as experiments do. Further, in distilling generalizations and performing cost-benefit analysis, the review relies more heavily on the eight studies that I could replicate by accessing the underlying data and computer code. Replication and subsequent reanalysis of these eight revealed significant econometric concerns in seven and led to major reinterpretations of four. That experience led to an unexpected conclusion about the conduct of social science generally. For it raised doubts about the rest of the high-credibility studies included in this review, the ones that could not be so closely examined. It forced me to conclude that even the best studies on incarceration and crime are less reliable than they appear. And, like a car whose brakes fail once, this raises questions about the reliability of published social science generally. To put that more constructively, the scrutiny that research undergoes to appear in social science journals falls short of the optimum for policymaking. Perhaps the gap needs to be filled outside the normal academic research process, such as through reviews like this one. Details: San Francisco: Open Philanthropy Project, 2017. 142p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed September 27, 2017 at: http://blog.givewell.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/The-impacts-of-incarceration-on-crime-10.pdf Year: 2017 Country: United States URL: http://blog.givewell.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/The-impacts-of-incarceration-on-crime-10.pdf Shelf Number: 147466 Keywords: Alternatives to IncarcerationCosts of Criminal JusticeCriminal Justice ReformInmatesMass IncarcerationPrison PopulationPrisoners |
Author: Petteruti, Amanda Title: Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies Summary: Communities are bearing the cost of a massive explosion in the jail population which has nearly doubled in less than two decades. The research found that jails are now warehousing more people--who have not been found guilty of any crime--for longer periods of time than ever before. Due to the rising costs of bail, people arrested today are more likely to serve jail time before trial than twenty years ago, even though crime rates are at the lowest levels years. Details: Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute, 2008. 38p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed December 7, 2017 at: http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08-04_rep_jailingcommunities_ac.pdf Year: 2008 Country: United States URL: http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08-04_rep_jailingcommunities_ac.pdf Shelf Number: 110493 Keywords: Jails Mass incarceration |
Author: Sawyer, Wendy Title: The gender divide: tracking women's state prison growth Summary: The story of women's prison growth has been obscured by overly broad discussions of the "total" prison population for too long. This report sheds more light on women in the era of mass incarceration by tracking prison population trends since 1978 for all 50 states. The analysis identifies places where recent reforms appear to have had a disparate effect on women, and offers states recommendations to reverse mass incarceration for women alongside men. Across the country, we find a disturbing gender disparity in recent prison population trends. While recent reforms have reduced the total number of people in state prisons since 2009, almost all of the decrease has been among men. Looking deeper into the state-specific data, we can identify the states driving the disparity. In 35 states, women's population numbers have fared worse than men's, and in a few extraordinary states, women's prison populations have even grown enough to counteract reductions in the men's population. Too often, states undermine their commitment to criminal justice reform by ignoring women's incarceration. Women have become the fastest-growing segment of the incarcerated population, but despite recent interest in the alarming national trend, few people know what's happening in their own states. Examining these state trends is critical for making the state-level policy choices that will dictate the future of mass incarceration. Details: Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Initiative, 2018. 25p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed February 8, 2018 at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/women_overtime.html Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/women_overtime.html Shelf Number: 149040 Keywords: Female Inmates Female Offenders Female Prisoners Mass IncarcerationWomen Prisoners |
Author: Zeng, Zhen Title: Jail Inmates in 2016 Summary: Presents data on inmates confined in local jails between 2000 and 2016, including population counts and incarceration rates, inmate demographic characteristics and conviction status, average daily population, rated capacity of local jails and percent of capacity occupied, and turnover rates by jurisdiction size. Findings are based on data from BJS's Annual Survey of Jails. Unlike prisons, jails are locally administered correctional facilities that typically house inmates with a sentence of 1 year or less; inmates pending arraignment; and individuals awaiting trial, conviction, or sentencing. Highlights: County and city jails held 740,700 inmates at midyear 2016, down from a peak of 785,500 inmates at midyear 2008. In 2016, jails reported 10.6 million admissions, continuing a general decline since 2008. The jail incarceration rate declined from a peak of 259 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents at midyear 2007 to 229 per 100,000 at midyear 2016. At year-end 2016, non-Hispanic blacks (599 per 100,000 black residents) were incarcerated in jail at a rate 3.5 times that of non-Hispanic whites (171 per 100,000 white residents). The total rated capacity of county and city jails reached 915,400 beds at year-end 2016 Details: Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018. 13p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed February 27, 2018 at: Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: Shelf Number: 149263 Keywords: Inmates Jail Inmates Jails Mass Incarceration |
Author: Subramanian, Ram Title: Divided Justice: Trends in Black and White Jail Incarceration, 1990-2013 Summary: The story of mass incarceration in the United States is a story about race. As incarceration rates soared in jails and prisons through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to reach historically unprecedented heights, the burdens of that growth did not fall equally on all communities. For black people in particular, the impact has been devastating, cutting a swath of destruction through the economic and social fabric of communities, ensuring the persistence of systemic inequality that undermines our country's bedrock values. Like all stories about race in America, however, the chronicle of incarceration's shifting path is a complicated one, and we are only just beginning to understand and reckon with it in full. This report sheds a bright new light on a key chapter of that story: the changing picture of race in America's local jails, the municipal and county facilities that hold, primarily, people who have been charged with offenses but have not yet been found guilty. Using the Vera Institute of Justice's (Vera) Incarceration Trends data tool, Vera staff analyzed jail incarceration trends by race nationally as well as by region and jurisdiction size. What we found is that black people continue to be vastly over-represented in the nation's jails, in every region of the country. This is despite declines in incarceration rates for black people in the past 10 years, most significantly in large urban and suburban areas. But this isn't the only story the data tells. In fact, a new headline is that white incarceration rates have increased, particularly in smaller jurisdictions. With the opioid crisis constantly in the news, it is tempting to assume that this epidemic, which has impacted white communities more so than others, explains the growth in jail incarceration for white people. And while it may be a contributing factor, we simply don't know the reasons underlying these trends. As this report notes, a number of understudied phenomena could be influencing the numbers. Is the misidentification of Latino people as white in some jurisdictions masking white incarceration trends? Are criminal justice reforms differently impacting jail incarceration rates for black and white people? Are jail capacity issues including the outsourcing of jail beds from one county to another- impacting racial trends in those areas? To answer these and other questions, researchers and policymakers will need more comprehensive data, because data about race and jails is incomplete, and its collection uneven across jurisdictions. Understanding the changing narrative about race in local justice systems -and how it varies from place to place - is a critical task not only for those who study the justice system and seek to improve it. It matters equally, or even more so, for those on the ground, inside and outside government, who care about equity, justice, and safety. The reasons for the differences in jail incarceration rates between white and black people are more likely because of the criminal justice policies and practices of particular localities. Community stakeholders need to ask how their local trends are measuring up, whether policy choices or practices may be contributing to racial disparities or changes in incarceration rates by race or ethnicity, and why. But to fully answer all of these questions goes beyond what current data can tell us. Further race data and analyses-including qualitative data to measure and understand the racial and ethnic impact of discretionary decision making along the criminal justice continuum-are needed to explain intergroup differences in jail incarceration trajectories. Because race and ethnicity play such a big role in the ways in which localities use their jails, overcoming these gaps in knowledge will be integral to criminal justice reform efforts aimed at reducing the overuse of jails and incarceration generally. Details: New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2018. 48p. Source: Internet Resosurce: accessed February 28, 2018 at: https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/divided-justice-black-white-jail-incarceration/legacy_downloads/Divided-Justice-full-report.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/divided-justice-black-white-jail-incarceration/legacy_downloads/Divided-Justice-full-report.pdf Shelf Number: 149284 Keywords: Jail InmatesMass IncarcerationRacial DiscriminationRacial Disparities |
Author: Sentencing Project Title: Can We Wait 75 Years to Cut the Prison Population in Half? Summary: While most states have downsized their prison populations in recent years, the pace of decarceration is insufficient to undo nearly four decades of unrelenting growth. The U.S. prison population grew by more than 600% between 1973 and 2009-from 200,000 people to 1.6 million. Tough-on-crime policies expanded the number of imprisoned people even while crime rates plunged to 40% below their levels in the 1990s. In recent years, policymakers and criminal justice professionals have implemented reforms to correct the punitive excesses of the past. By yearend 2016 the number of people held in U.S. prisons had declined by 6% since a 2009 peak, and crime rates have continued to decline. But the overall impact of reforms has been quite modest. With 1.5 million people in prison in 2016, the prison population remains larger than the total population of 11 states. If states and the federal government maintain their recent pace of decarceration, it will take 75 years-until 2093-to cut the U.S. prison population by 50%. Expediting the end of mass incarceration will require accelerating the end of the Drug War and scaling back sentences for serious crimes. Details: Washington, DC: Sentencing Project, 2018. 6p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 16, 2018 at: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/can-wait-75-years-cut-prison-population-half/ Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/can-wait-75-years-cut-prison-population-half/ Shelf Number: 149495 Keywords: Mass IncarcerationPrison PopulationPrisoners |
Author: Columbia University. Justice Lab Title: Too big to succeed: The impact of the growth of community corrections and what should be done about it Summary: The recent sentencing of Philadelphia rap artist Meek Mill to two to four years in prison for probation violations committed a decade after his original offense has brought the subject of America's expansive community supervision apparatus and its contribution to mass incarceration into the public spotlight (NBC News 2017; Jay-Z 2017). Founded as either an up-front diversion from incarceration (probation) or a back-end release valve to prison crowding (parole), community corrections in America has grown far beyond what its founders could have imagined with a profound, unintended impact on incarceration. With nearly five million adults under community corrections supervision in America (more than double the number in prison and jail), probation and parole have become a substantial contributor to our nation's mass incarceration dilemma as well as a deprivation of liberty in their own right (Kaeble and Bonczar 2016; Kaeble and Glaze 2016). The almost fourfold expansion of community corrections since 1980 without a concomitant increase in resources has strained many of the nation's thousands of community supervision departments, rendering some of them too big to succeed, often unnecessarily depriving clients of their liberty without improving public safety (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1995; Kaeble and Bonczar 2016; Pew Center on the States 2009; Klingele 2013; Doherty 2016). This paper offers a way out of "mass supervision." Authored by leading representatives of our nation's community corrections field, our conclusion is that the number of people on probation and parole nationally can be cut in half over the next decade and returns to incarceration curbed, with savings focused on providing services for those remaining under supervision. This would reduce unnecessary incarceration and supervision, increase the system's legitimacy, and enhance public safety by allowing probation, parole and community programming to be focused on those more in need of supervision and support. Details: New York: The Justice Lab, 2018. 16p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 29, 2018 at: http://justicelab.iserp.columbia.edu/img/Too_Big_to_Succeed_Report_FINAL.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: http://justicelab.iserp.columbia.edu/img/Too_Big_to_Succeed_Report_FINAL.pdf Shelf Number: 149617 Keywords: Alternatives to IncarcerationCommunity CorrectionsMass Incarceration |
Author: Pew Charitable Trusts Title: More Imprisonment Does Not Reduce State Drug Problems: Data show no relationship between prison terms and drug misuse Summary: Nearly 300,000 people are held in state and federal prisons in the United States for drug-law violations, up from less than 25,000 in 1980.1 These offenders served more time than in the past: Those who left state prisons in 2009 had been behind bars an average of 2.2 years, a 36 percent increase over 1990,2 while prison terms for federal drug offenders jumped 153 percent between 1988 and 2012, from about two to roughly five years.3 As the U.S. confronts a growing epidemic of opioid misuse, policymakers and public health officials need a clear understanding of whether, how, and to what degree imprisonment for drug offenses affects the nature and extent of the nation's drug problems. To explore this question, The Pew Charitable Trusts examined publicly available 2014 data from federal and state law enforcement, corrections, and health agencies.4 The analysis found no statistically significant relationship between state drug imprisonment rates and three indicators of state drug problems: self-reported drug use, drug overdose deaths, and drug arrests. The findings-which Pew sent to the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis in a letter dated June 19, 2017-reinforce a large body of prior research that cast doubt on the theory that stiffer prison terms deter drug misuse, distribution, and other drug-law violations. The evidence strongly suggests that policymakers should pursue alternative strategies that research shows work better and cost less. Details: Philadelphia: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2018. 19p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 4, 2018 at: http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2018/03/pspp_more_imprisonment_does_not_reduce_state_drug_problems.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2018/03/pspp_more_imprisonment_does_not_reduce_state_drug_problems.pdf Shelf Number: 149676 Keywords: Drug Abuse and AddictionDrug Abuse and CrimeDrug OffendersMass Incarceration |
Author: Eisen, Lauren-Brooke Title: Criminal Justice: An Election Agenda for Candidates, Activists, and Legislators Summary: This report sets forth an affirmative agenda to end mass incarceration in America. The task requires efforts from both federal and state lawmakers. Today, criminal justice reform stands on a knife's edge. After decades of rising incarceration and ever more obvious consequences, a powerful bipartisan movement has emerged. It recognizes that harsh prison policies are not needed to keep our country safe. Now that extraordinary bipartisan consensus is challenged by the Trump administration, through inflammatory rhetoric and unwise action. Only an affirmative move to continue reform can keep the progress going. The United States has less than five percent of the world's population, but nearly one quarter of its prisoners. About 2.1 million people are incarcerated in this country, the vast majority in state and local facilities. Mass incarceration contributes significantly to the poverty rate. It is inequitable, placing a disproportionate burden on communities of color. It is wildly expensive, in some cases costing more to keep an 18-year-old in prison than it would to send him to Harvard. Our criminal justice system costs $270 billion annually, yet does not produce commensurate public safety benefits. Research conclusively shows that high levels of imprisonment are simply not necessary to protect communities. About four out of every ten prisoners are incarcerated with little public safety justification. In fact, 27 states have reduced both imprisonment and crime in the last decade. A group of over 200 police chiefs, prosecutors, and sheriffs has formed, whose founding principles state: "We do not believe that public safety is served by a return to tactics that are overly punitive without strong purpose . . . we cannot incarcerate our way to safety." In cities, states, and at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats have joined this effort. They recognize that today's public safety challenges demand new and innovative politics rooted in science and based on what works. The opioid epidemic, mass shootings, and cyber-crime all require modern responses that do not repeat mistakes of the past. Crime is no longer a wedge issue, and voters desire reform. A 2017 poll from the Charles Koch Institute reveals that 81 percent of Trump voters consider criminal justice reform important. Another, from Republican pollster Robert Blizzard, finds that 87 percent of Americans agree that nonviolent offenders should be sanctioned with alternatives to incarceration. And according to a 2017 ACLU poll, 71 percent of Americans support reducing the prison population - including 50 percent of Trump voters. But the politician with the loudest megaphone has chosen a different, destructive approach. Donald Trump, and his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, falsely insist there is a national crime wave, portraying a country besieged by crime, drugs, and terrorism - "American carnage," as he called it in his inaugural address. But, crime in the United States remains at historic lows. While violent crime and murder did increase in 2015 and 2016, new data show crime and violence declining again in 2017. The national murder rate is approximately half of what it was at its 1991 peak. Those who seek to use fear of crime for electoral gain are not just wrong on the statistics; they are also wrong on the politics. Now, to continue the progress that has been made, it is up to candidates running for office to boldly advance policy solutions backed by facts, not fear. This report offers reforms that would keep crime low, while significantly reducing incarceration. Most solutions can be enacted through federal or state legislation. While most of the prison population is under control of state officials, federal policy matters too. The federal government's prison population is larger than that of any state. Further, Washington defines the national political conversation on criminal justice reform. And although states vary somewhat in their approach to criminal justice, they struggle with similar challenges. The state solutions in this report are broadly written as "models" that can be adapted. Steps to take include: Eliminating Financial Incentives for Incarceration Enacting Sentencing Reform Passing Sensible Marijuana Reform Improving Law Enforcement Responding to the Opioid Crisis Reducing Female Incarceration Details: New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2018. 60p. Source: Internet Resource: Solutions 2018: Accessed April 5, 2018 at: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Criminal_Justice_An_Election_Agenda_for_Candidates_Activists_and_Legislators%20.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Criminal_Justice_An_Election_Agenda_for_Candidates_Activists_and_Legislators%20.pdf Shelf Number: 149699 Keywords: Criminal Justice PolicyCriminal Justice ReformMass IncarcerationOpioid CrisisSentencing Reform |
Author: Schweitzer Smith,, Myrinda Title: Reinventing Juvenile Justice: Examining the Effectiveness of the Targeted RECLAIM Initiative Summary: The juvenile justice system has had a place in America since the late 19th century. While the goal has always been to reform wayward youth, the system has implemented various strategies over the years. During a growing movement in the 80s to "get tough" on crime, the country relied heavily on state run institutions and experienced a steady rise in the number of incarcerated youth. Ohio was no exception to this "get tough" movement, with thousands of youth in the custody of the Ohio Department of Youth Services (DYS) by the mid-90s. Ohio's response to the mass incarceration of youth ultimately led to a unique large-scale reform movement. This movement included initiatives that ranged from providing incentives to local courts to serve youth locally, creating and implementing a standardized risk assessment tool, and providing evidence-based services for youth. Among these reform initiatives, was Targeted RECLAIM; the focus of this study. The goal of Targeted RECLAIM was to further reduce admissions to DYS by providing juveniles with evidence-based services in their local community as alternatives to incarceration. Targeted RECLAIM initially targeted the six largest counties in Ohio, but since expanded to now include 15 counties across the state of Ohio. This study examined whether Targeted RECLAIM has been successful in reducing commitments to DYS and ultimately diverting youth from state institutions. The data revealed that Targeted RECLAIM appeared to have an effect on the number of youth committed to DYS and moreover, that youth could be effectively diverted without compromising public safety. The study also determined that the diverted youth were not simply being placed in a CCF or waived to the adult system as a way to undermine the goal of Targeted RECLAIM. Finally, conclusions were drawn so that the results might inform juvenile justice systems on how to work towards ending the problem of mass incarceration. Details: Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati, 2016. 126p. Source: Internet Resource: Dissertation: Accessed April 25, 2018 at: http://cech.uc.edu/content/dam/cech/programs/criminaljustice/Docs/Dissertations/schweiml.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: http://cech.uc.edu/content/dam/cech/programs/criminaljustice/Docs/Dissertations/schweiml.pdf Shelf Number: 149888 Keywords: Alternatives to IncarcerationJuvenile DiversionJuvenile JusticeJuvenile Justice ReformJuvenile OffendersMass Incarceration |
Author: Gamblin, Marlysa D. Title: Mass Incarceration: A Major Cause of Hunger Summary: Mass incarceration has far-reaching effects in the United States. It poses a significant barrier to ending U.S. hunger and poverty by 2030-a goal the United States adopted in 2015. But the connection is not always obvious. This paper explains how mass incarceration increases hunger. In a study by the National Institutes of Health, 91 percent of returning citizens reported being food insecure. Many face difficulty securing a place to work and live after being released. In addition, 75 percent of returning citizens report that it is "extremely difficult" or "impossible" to find a job post-incarceration. Even once formerly incarcerated people manage to find jobs, they suffer a permanent reduction in their lifetime earning potential, by nearly $180,000. This explains why 1 in 4 households headed by a returning citizen lives in deep poverty. In addition, incarceration frequently leads to hardships for their families. According to one study, almost 70 percent of households reported having difficulty meeting basic needs, such as food and housing, when a family member was incarcerated. Details: Washington, DC: Bread for the World, 2018. 12p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 4, 2018 at: http://www.bread.org/sites/default/files/downloads/briefing-paper-mass-incarceration-february-2018.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: http://www.bread.org/sites/default/files/downloads/briefing-paper-mass-incarceration-february-2018.pdf Shelf Number: 150063 Keywords: HungerMass IncarcerationPoverty |
Author: Novisky, Meghan A. Title: Aging in Prison as a Collateral Consequence of Mass Incarceration Summary: The United States has been characterized by an era of mass incarceration since the 1970's. With decades of research now in place, it is clear that in addition to the financial costs of housing so many men and women behind bars, incarceration carries with it a multitude of collateral consequences. These consequences are extensive and include the reproduction of racial and social class inequalities, weakened neighborhoods and families, and diminished social standing and health. One area that is particularly important yet underdeveloped in the literature involves understanding how incarceration is impacting a new and growing population of prisoners: the elderly. Older prisoners are now the fastest growing age group within our prison system and they are at risk for a variety of negative health outcomes, accelerated aging, and premature mortality. Given the dearth of empirical attention in the literature regarding this class of prisoners, the focus of my dissertation was to address what it means to age within environments (prisons) that are inherently depriving, status stripping, and coercive. To answer this question, I collected original quantitative and qualitative data from interviews with 279 older, incarcerated men who were housed across three varying security level state correctional institutions. These data allowed me to concentrate on three different but related components of aging for prisoners: overall health, chronic disease management, and end-of-life planning. Results show that deprivation was an important predictor of health outcomes and end-of-life planning preferences among this sample of older prisoners. Additionally, cultural health capital was central to prisoners' abilities to manage their chronic health conditions, providing further evidence of the stratifying nature of the incarceration experience. This dissertation contributes to a growing body of research by highlighting the barriers of aging in prison are yet another collateral consequence of mass incarceration. Details: Kent, OH: Kent State University, 2016. 212p. Source: Internet Resource: Dissertation: accessed May 9, 2018 at: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=kent1470057807&disposition=inline Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=kent1470057807&disposition=inline Shelf Number: 150134 Keywords: Collateral ConsequencesElderly InmatesMass IncarcerationPrisoners |
Author: Urban Justice Center. Corrections Accountability Project Title: The Prison Industrial Complex: Mapping Private Sector Players Summary: This report exposes over 3,100 corporations across twelve sectors that profit from the devastating mass incarceration of our nation's marginalized communities. It aggregates critical information about these corporations to help advocates, litigators, journalists, investors, and the public fight the commercialization of justice. Details: New York: Urban Justice Center, 2018. 113p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed June 1, 2018 at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e127cb1b10e31ed45b20f4/t/5ade0281f950b7ab293c86a6/1524499083424/The+Prison+Industrial+Complex+-+Mapping+Private+Sector+Players+%28April+2018%29.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e127cb1b10e31ed45b20f4/t/5ade0281f950b7ab293c86a6/1524499083424/The+Prison+Industrial+Complex+-+Mapping+Private+Sector+Players+%28April+2018%29.pdf Shelf Number: 150426 Keywords: Mass IncarcerationPrivate Prisons Privatization |
Author: Gluckman, Peter Title: Using evidence to build a better justice system: The challenge of rising prison costs Summary: 1. Crime, especially violent crime, hurts individuals and society. Both direct and indirect victims of crime may suffer untold consequences that can endure for years and can even affect next generations. Those who do not suffer personally may nonetheless acquire negative perceptions of people or places because of criminal activity. The net effect of such perceptions can change societal attitudes creating a more negative environment. This is a loss for everyone. These perceptions can be disproportionately magnified by advocacy groups, media and political agendas. 2. Policy responses are often viewed in binary terms: tough or soft on crime. This simplistic duality has long had political resonance, but its impact on our prison system is a major concern. The New Zealand prison population is increasing and is one of the highest in the OECD at a time when crime rates are actually decreasing. This can only be explained by the systemic and cumulative impact of successive policy decisions over time, often in response to public demand and political positioning. 3. Successive governments of different political orientations have supported a progressively retributive rather than a restorative approach to crime with unsupported claims that prisons can solve the problems of crime. As a result, the costs of prisons far exceed those justified by the need to protect the public. We keep imprisoning more people in response to dogma not data, responding to shifting policies and media panics, instead of evidence-based approaches to prevention, intervention, imprisonment and rehabilitation. This does not diminish the importance of incarceration for a subset of individuals so as to protect the public. 4. The strong evidence base related to what fuels the prison 'pipeline' suggests that prisons are extremely expensive training grounds for further offending, building offenders' criminal careers by teaching them criminal skills, damaging their employment, accommodation and family prospects, and compounding mental health and substance use issues. On release, even after a short period of imprisonment, for example on remand, offenders have been found to reintegrate poorly to the community. Furthermore, this does nothing to reassure victims that the risk of harm is being effectively managed by the justice system. 5. It is now well understood that prisons act as recruitment centres for gangs (especially for young offenders) and underpin the illegal drug trade. Imprisonment leaves those incarcerated with high rates of undiagnosed and untreated alcohol/drug addictions and mental illness. They have a negative impact on the next generation, given that a high percentage of people in prison are parents. These issues disproportionately affect Māori. 6. Other countries, such as Finland, have significantly reduced their incarceration rates without crime rates rising. There is strong scientific evidence for putting resources into crime prevention, early intervention (identifying and mitigating risk), and a smarter approach to rehabilitation and subsequent social inclusion for those already in the criminal-justice system - not for building more prisons. 7. To assist in such an approach, there must be adequate investment in piloting and evaluating early intervention and prevention initiatives. With leadership and knowledge, we can fundamentally transform the justice system, reduce victimisation and recidivism and make prisons only a part of a much more proactive and effective systemic response to a complex problem. Details: Auckland, NZ: Office of the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor, 2018. 30p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed June 5, 2018 at: http://www.pmcsa.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/Using-evidence-to-build-a-better-justice-system.pdf Year: 2018 Country: New Zealand URL: http://www.pmcsa.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/Using-evidence-to-build-a-better-justice-system.pdf Shelf Number: 150471 Keywords: Costs of CorrectionsCosts of Criminal JusticeEarly InterventionEvidence-Based PracticesMass IncarcerationPrisons |
Author: Eisen, Lauren-Brooke Title: Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration Summary: The American criminal justice system is replete with fees that attempt to shift costs from the government to those accused and convicted of breaking the law. Courts impose monetary sanctions on a "substantial majority of the millions of U.S. residents convicted of felony and misdemeanor crimes each year." Every aspect of the criminal justice process has become ripe for charging a fee. In fact, an estimated 10 million people owe more than $50 billion in debt resulting from their involvement in the criminal justice system. In the last few decades, additional fees have proliferated, such as charges for police transport, case filing, felony surcharges, electronic monitoring, drug testing, and sex offender registration. Unlike fines, whose purpose is to punish, and restitution, which is intended to compensate victims of crimes for their loss, user fees are intended to raise revenue. The Justice Department's March 2015 report on practices in Ferguson, Mo. highlights the over-reliance on court fines as a primary source of revenue for the jurisdiction. The New York Times noted that the report found that "internal emails show city officials pushing for more tickets and fines." Fees and debts are increasing partially because the criminal justice system has grown bigger. With 2.2 million people behind bars, courts - and all the relevant agencies - have expanded as well. Since the 1970s, incarceration in the U.S. has risen steeply, dwarfing the incarceration rate of any other nation on Earth. The U.S. added about 1.1 million incarcerated people, almost doubling the nation's incarcerated population, in the past 20 years. The fiscal costs of corrections are high - more than $80 billion annually - about equivalent to the budget of the federal Department of Education.6 A recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that corrections is currently the third-largest category of spending in most states, behind education and health care. In fact, somewhat disconcertingly, 11 states spent more of their general funds on corrections than on higher education in 2013. Fees already on the books have increased. And, these fees are extending into state and local corrections. As a result of these runaway costs, counties and states continue to struggle with ways to increase revenue to pay for exorbitant incarceration bills. In 2010, the mean annual state corrections expenditure per inmate was $28,323, although a quarter of states spent $40,175 or more. Not surprisingly, departments of corrections and jails are increasingly authorized to charge inmates for the cost of their imprisonment. Although this policy is alarming, less widely understood but equally troubling is the reality that these incarceration fees perpetuate our nation's addiction to incarceration. This policy brief exposes how the widespread nature of charging fees to those who are incarcerated connects to the larger problem of mass incarceration in this country. Details: New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2015. 18p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed June 6, 2018 at: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/blog/Charging_Inmates_Mass_Incarceration.pdf Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/blog/Charging_Inmates_Mass_Incarceration.pdf Shelf Number: 150496 Keywords: Costs of CorrectionsCourt Fines and FeesCriminal FeesCriminal FinesCriminal Justice DebtMass Incarceration |
Author: Clayton, Gina Title: Because She's Powerful: The Political Isolation and Resistance of Women with Incarcerated Loved Ones Summary: Is mass incarceration the largest barrier to gender justice today? In the current age of mass incarceration, at least 1 in 4 women has an incarcerated loved one. Women are being incarcerated more frequently today than ever before. Women's lives are defined and confined by criminal justice control. Given that incarceration's harm radiates from inside prison walls to well beyond them, a large number of women are directly suffering the consequences. This report asks and answers the question, what is mass incarceration doing to millions of women who have loved ones behind bars? Our research concludes that mass incarceration is (1) a direct cause of significant to extreme psychological distress and trauma, and (2) a serious obstacle to the financial health and economic agency of women with incarcerated loved ones. This report concludes by positing a new analysis: that the sum total effect of the social condition of women with incarcerated loved ones is most accurately described by what we call "political isolation." Despite these startling impacts, few critical analyses of either the incarceration system or gendered oppression in the United States are informed by the experiences of women with incarcerated loved ones. The insufficiency of data and analysis on women and incarceration has left a significant gap in our understanding of obstacles to gender equity facing women today. Moreover, without a complete view of the direct harm incarceration causes to large groups of historically marginalized people - be they women or communities Black and Brown - our analysis of mass incarceration's root causes and ability to identify solutions remains incomplete. Details: Los Angeles and Oakland, CA: Essie Justice Group, 2018. 95p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed June 25, 2018 at: https://www.becauseshespowerful.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Essie-Justice-Group_Because-Shes-Powerful-Report.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://www.becauseshespowerful.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Essie-Justice-Group_Because-Shes-Powerful-Report.pdf Shelf Number: 150646 Keywords: Families of Inmates Mass Incarceration |
Author: Levin, Benjamin Title: The Consensus Myth in Criminal Justice Reform Summary: It has become popular to identify a "bipartisan consensus" on criminal justice reform, but how deep is that consensus, actually? This Article argues that the purported consensus is largely illusory. Despite shared reformist vocabulary, the consensus rests on distinct critiques that identify different flaws and justify distinct policy solutions. The underlying disagreements transcend traditional left/right political divides and speak to deeper disputes about the state and the role of criminal law in society. The Article offers a typology of the two prevailing, but fundamentally distinct, critiques of the system: (1) the quantitative approach (what I call the "over" frame); and (2) the qualitative approach (what I call the "mass" frame). The "over" frame grows from a belief that criminal law has an important and legitimate function, but that the laws operations have exceeded that function. This critique assumes that there are optimal rates of incarceration and criminalization, but the current criminal system is sub-optimal in that it has criminalized too much and incarcerated too many. In contrast, the "mass" frame focuses on the criminal system as a socio-cultural phenomenon. This reformist frame indicates that the issue is not a mere miscalculation; rather, reforms should address how the system marginalizes populations and exacerbates both power imbalances and distributional inequities. To show how these frames differ, this Article applies the "over" and the mass critique, in turn, to the maligned phenomena of mass incarceration and overcriminalization. The existing literature on mass incarceration and overcriminalization displays an elision between these two frames. Some scholars and reformers have adopted one frame exclusively, while others use the two interchangeably. No matter how much scholars and critics bemoan the troubles of mass incarceration and overcriminalization, it is hard to believe that they can achieve meaningful reform if they are talking about fundamentally different problems. While many reformers may adopt an "over" frame in an effort to attract a broader range of support or appeal to politicians, "over" policy proposals do not reach deeper "mass" concerns. Ultimately, then, this Article argues that a pragmatic turn to the "over" frame may have significant costs in legitimating deeper structural flaws and failing to address distributional issues of race, class, and power at the heart of the "mass critique". Details: Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, School of Law, 2018. 60p. Source: Internet Resource: U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 18-17: Accessed July 2, 2018 at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3135053 Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3135053 Shelf Number: 150752 Keywords: Criminal Justice Policy Criminal Justice Reform Criminal Law Criminal Procedure Mass IncarcerationPrisons Punishment |
Author: Delaney, Ruth Title: Reimagining Prison Summary: This document-unlike anything we have ever produced at the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera)-is about the possibility of radical change. It asserts a dramatic reconsideration of the most severe criminal sanction we have: incarceration. It articulates a view that is sure to be alien to many. Yet we need not accept as a given the way we do things now, and we encourage you to envision a different path. Indeed, our vision has concrete reference points. It is in the hope, daring, and promise of a small unit for young adults in a Connecticut maximum security facility. It is inspired by what we learned studying and visiting prisons in Germany, where the very conditions and operations of that entire system are defined by a commitment to uphold human dignity-a commitment born of that country's coming to terms with the Holocaust. And it is rooted in our own obligation-now physically exhibited in a museum and memorial in Montgomery, Alabama-to acknowledge and atone for our brutal history of dehumanization and racial oppression and to understand how it has shaped what we do today in our justice system. Our mission is to link these things and suggest a path forward that is as much about reconciliation as it is about criminal justice reform. In October of last year, John, a young adult in Cheshire Correctional Institution- where most people spend 22 hours a day in their cells-was accepted into a new small housing unit. Though the unit is within the same facility, John was handcuffed and shackled and placed in a prison van, subjected to strip searches, and given a medical assessment. In transit, John spent time in a kind of purgatorial interstitial space, waiting in what he described as "a full cage from top to bottom, something like on the show Lockup or Hard Time." But once inside the new unit, John entered a different world. The corrections officers greeted him and shook his hand. They asked him and the other young men in the unit serious questions about their goals and expressed genuine interest in their thoughts, feelings, and plans. In a letter to his family, John described this place as "not a regular prison environment [but] an open, caring, hopeful environment." He began to develop relationships both with older men who act as mentors in the unit and corrections officers, with whom he played chess, talked, and reflected on visits with his family. Each day, John attends group discussions with other young men and older mentors, he participates in town hall meetings where everyone gathers to talk about and resolve issues, and he joins programs that teach him about conflict resolution and money management. He spends the majority of his days outside his cell-attending programs, moving freely around the unit, and playing basketball in the outside courtyard. John, like all the men in the unit, is learning about responsibility and actively working to become a better person for himself and society. John's prison experience spans two possible futures for America's prison systems: the continuation of the punitive, retributive, and dehumanizing routines of the past; and the possibility of a reimagined future built on a wholly different set of foundational principles, designed to promote safety and success. The new unit John found himself in-called T.R.U.E., an acronym that stands for Truthfulness (to oneself and others), Respectfulness (toward the community), Understanding (ourselves and what brought us here), and Elevating (into success)-is a groundbreaking model in which we and our partners in Connecticut reimagine incarceration for young men aged 18 to 25. It was inspired by a visit to a young adult facility in Germany, where corrections officials from Connecticut were first exposed to what could be, not just what had always been. It represents a hopeful possibility for change in the way America handles incarceration. According to one of its participants, "the T.R.U.E. program is dedicated to the reclamation of moral integrity," inherent in which "is the recognition of the dignity of all prisoners in general." Unfortunately, while T.R.U.E. has inspired several other similar efforts, at the moment its goals and practices are shared by only a tiny fraction of prisons in America. At the vast majority of the facilities in the massive network of prisons across the country, people spend endless days in cells; they are marched to and from their limited activities; and their names and identities are lost, replaced with numbers, uniforms, and a stultifying idleness and isolation that impede cognition and fundamentally alters social-psychological processes. And for those who work behind the walls, the daily existence can hardly be described as enviable. It is telling that in American prisons, staff count down the years to retirement using the same language as those they are paid to keep locked up. In prison, everyone is serving a sentence. Details: New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2018. 136p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 24, 2018 at: https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/reimagining-prison-print-report/legacy_downloads/Reimagining-Prison_FINAL3_digital.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/reimagining-prison-print-report/legacy_downloads/Reimagining-Prison_FINAL3_digital.pdf Shelf Number: 153068 Keywords: Criminal Justice ReformMass IncarcerationPrison ReformPrisonersPrisons |
Author: Kajstura, Aleks Title: Women's Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2018 Summary: With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women's experience with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? And why are they there? How is their experience different from men's? While these are important questions, finding those answers requires not only disentangling the countrys decentralized and overlapping criminal justice systems, but also unearthing the frustratingly hard to find and often altogether missing data on gender. This report provides a detailed view of the 219,000 women incarcerated in the United States, and how they fit into the even broader picture of correctional control. This 2018 update to our inaugural Women's Whole Pie report pulls together data from a number of government agencies and calculates the breakdown of women held by each correctional system by specific offense. The report, produced in collaboration with the ACLU's Campaign for Smart Justice, answers the questions of why and where women are locked up. Details: Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Initiative, 2018. 6p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed January 12, 2019 at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018women.html Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/11/13/mass-incarceration-women-2018/ Shelf Number: 154084 Keywords: Campaign for Smart JusticeCorrectional InstitutionsFemale InmatesFemale OffendersJailsMass IncarcerationPrison Policy InitiativePrisonsWomen Prisons |
Author: Ristroph, Alice Title: Farewell to the Felonry Summary: Bastard. Idiot. Imbecile. Pauper. Felon. These terms, medieval in origin, have served as formal legal designations and also the brands of substantial social stigma. As legal designations, the terms marked persons for different sorts of membership in a political community. The rights and privileges of these persons could be restricted or denied altogether. Today, most of these terms have been abandoned as labels for official classifications. But the terms felon and felony remain central to American criminal law, even after other developed democracies have formally abolished the felon/felony category. "Felony" has connotations of extreme wickedness and an especially severe crime, but the official legal meaning of felony is a pure legal construct: any crime punishable by more than a year in prison. So many and such disparate crimes are now felonies that there is no unifying principle to justify the classification. And yet, the designation of a crime as a felony, or of a person as a felon, still carries great significance. Even beyond the well-documented "collateral" consequences of a felony conviction, the classification of persons as felons is central to the mechanics of mass incarceration and to inequality both in and out of the criminal justice system. American law provides the felonry - the group of persons convicted of felonies - a form of subordinate political membership that contrasts with the rights and privileges of the full-fledged citizenry. The felon should go the way of the bastard, into the dustbins of legal history. If that outcome seems unlikely, it is worth asking why a category long known to be incoherent should be so difficult to remove from the law. This Article examines felony in order to scrutinize more broadly the conceptual structure of criminal law. Criminal laws, and even their most common critiques and arguments for reform, often appeal to the same naturalistic understanding of crime and punishment that gives felon its social meaning. When we imagine crime as a natural, pre-legal wrong and the criminal as intrinsically deserving of suffering, we displace responsibility for the law's burdens from the community that enacts the law and the officials that enforce it. To bid farewell to the felonry could be a first step toward reclaiming responsibility for our criminal law. Details: Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Law School, 2018. 56p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed January 18, 2019 at: http://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ristroph.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3280347 Shelf Number: 154259 Keywords: ClassificationFelonFelonyIdentityLabeling TheoryMass IncarcerationSocial Stigma |
Author: Hutchinson, Darren Lenard Title: Who Locked Us Up?: Examining the Social Meaning of Black Punitiveness Summary: Mass incarceration has received extensive analysis in scholarly and political debates. Beginning in the 1970s, states and the federal government adopted tougher sentencing and police practices that responded to rising punitive sentiment among the general public. Many scholars have argued that U.S. criminal law and enforcement subordinate people of color by denying them political, social, and economic well-being. The harmful and disparate racial impact of U.S. crime policy mirrors historical patterns that emerged during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman, Jr. demonstrates that many blacks supported aggressive anticrime policies that gave rise to mass incarceration. On the surface, this observation potentially complicates arguments that conceive of U.S. criminal law and enforcement as manifestations of white supremacist political power. Forman's failure to provide a comprehensive analysis of the racist dimensions of punitive sentiment makes his research subject to such an interpretation. A deeper analysis, however, reconciles Forman's research with anti-racist accounts of U.S. crime policy. In particular, social psychology literature on implicit bias, social dominance orientation, and right-wing authoritarianism provides a helpful context for situating black punitive sentiment within anti-subordination criminal law theory. These psychological concepts could link punitiveness among blacks with out-group favoritism and in-group stigma that derive from structural inequality and anti-black social stigma. The social psychology of punitive sentiment, resilience of white supremacy, and conservative political ideology will likely present substantial barriers to the merciful approach to criminality that Forman proposes. Details: Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida, Levin College of Law, 2017. 60p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed January 20, 2019 at: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/review/who-locked-us-up Year: 2017 Country: United States URL: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/Hutchinson_qd156n1o.pdf Shelf Number: 154257 Keywords: Anti-Crime PoliciesMass IncarcerationPunitive SentimentRace and CrimeSentencing PracticesWhite Supremacy |
Author: Acker, Julia Title: Mass Incarceration Threatens Health Equity in America Summary: With approximately 2.2 million U.S. adults and youth behind bars, the United States incarcerates many more persons-both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population-than any other nation in the world. Mass incarceration disproportionately impacts lower-income communities, communities of color, and persons with disabilities, creating a barrier to achieving health equity. People who are incarcerated face greater chances for chronic health conditions, both while confined and long after their release. Incarceration exposes people to a wide range of conditions, such as poor sanitation and ventilation and solitary confinement, that are detrimental to long-term physical and mental health. After release, previously incarcerated individuals often face higher mortality rates and experience limited opportunities for gainful employment, stable housing, education, and other conditions needed for good health. Mass incarceration's reach extends far beyond the jail cell, impacting not only those behind bars, but their families, their communities, and the entire nation. Almost 10 million children have experienced having one or both parents incarcerated at some point in their lives - impacting their health and future opportunities. Within communities, mass incarceration disrupts social and family networks and economic development while across the country it consumes large portions of government budgets with negligible impact on crime rates. Produced in partnership with the University of California, San Francisco, this report examines the links between mass incarceration and health equity. Through pairing data with examples of successful approaches, this report shows how mass incarceration negatively impacts everyone's health and well-being and also suggests solutions for reducing both incarceration and crime rates and increasing opportunities for all. Details: Princeton, NJ: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2019. 33p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed February 21, 2019 at: https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2019/01/mass-incarceration-threatens-health-equity-in-america.html Year: 2019 Country: United States URL: https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2019/01/mass-incarceration-threatens-health-equity-in-america.html Shelf Number: 154679 Keywords: Health InequitiesHealth ServicesInmate HealthMass IncarcerationPrisoner Health |
Author: Reclaim Chicago Title: Exercising Full Powers: Recommendation to Kim Foxx on Addressing Systemic Racism in the Cook County Criminal Justice System Summary: In 2016, Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx was elected in a landslide victory that was widely seen as a referendum on Cook County's criminal justice system. Voters rejected the "tough on crime" stance of Anita Alvarez as well as her cover-up of the police murder of Laquan McDonald. Voters chose, instead, a candidate who ran on a platform of holding police accountable and reversing some of the policies that led to massive increases in the number of African American and Latinx people incarcerated in Cook County. Changing practices in such a large criminal justice system is a big order. The People's Lobby and Reclaim Chicago - which organized a significant portion of Kim Foxx's electoral operation - have been working with Chicago Appleseed to report regularly on Foxx's progress to reduce incarceration. The following is a report on the first nine months of 2018 data released by the State's Attorney's Office. It includes key recommendations for how Foxx can strengthen her decarceration efforts and be a leader in rolling back the failed policies of over-policing and mass incarceration. In this report we evaluate the performance of Foxx's State's Attorney Office on four major criteria we believe are vital to the advancement of criminal justice reform and overturning decades of systematic racism in the Cook County court system. We look at the role of felony charging by the prosecutor's office and highlight limited successes in a context of rising felony charging by Foxx's office. How people are charged within the criminal justice system has far reaching consequences not just for sentencing, but also for people's ability to avoid pre-trial detention. We analyze how wealth and class effect pre-trial detention in light of recent reforms by Chief Judge Evans and attempts by Foxx to find alternatives to incarceration. This type of research and evaluation is only possible with regular, detailed access to data from the court system, so we evaluate Foxx's efforts at transparency in a court system renowned for antiquated and incomplete record keeping. The most recent data release also provides a clearer window into how gun crimes are charged and adjudicated. The data suggest that a "war on guns" is now adding to the "war on drugs" with equally disastrous results. Details: Chicago: Authors, 2019. 12p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed February 25, 2019 at: http://www.uupmi.org/uploads/1/1/2/1/112170071/2019-report-kim-foxx_forweb.pdf Year: 2019 Country: United States URL: http://www.uupmi.org/uploads/1/1/2/1/112170071/2019-report-kim-foxx_forweb.pdf Shelf Number: 154739 Keywords: Criminal Justice ReformDiscriminationMass IncarcerationRacial BiasRacism |
Author: Thompson, Darrel Title: No More Double Punishments: Lifting the Ban on SNAP and TANF for People with Prior Felony Drug Convictions Summary: Introduction Individuals with prior felony convictions, incarcerated or not, often face "collateral consequences," which are significant barriers imposed in addition to their sentences that can range from being denied employment to losing voting rights. Some states subject people with a drug-related felony conviction to restrictions or complete bans on food assistance under SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps), cash assistance through TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), or both. This practice began in 1996 under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The act imposes a lifetime ban on SNAP and TANF for those with a previous drug felony conviction, whether they have completed their time in jail or prison or received a lighter sentence due to the nonviolent and/or low-level nature of the offense. States, however, can opt to remove or modify the ban. And all states except three and the District of Columbia have either modified or removed the ban for at least one program, recognizing that it is not an effective crime deterrent, fails to address substance use disorders, and impedes reconnecting formerly incarcerated people to their families and communities. Successful reentry into society from the criminal justice system requires access to basic needs such as food, healthcare, and housing as well as employment and training services. Some individuals may also need childcare and/or mental health and substance use disorder treatment. Denying access to basic needs programs such as SNAP and TANF makes it harder for returning citizens to get back on their feet. And such exclusions are especially punitive for communities of color. Over the last four decades, the War on Drugs has engendered uneven enforcement of drug laws and targeting of low-income communities of color, resulting in the conviction and incarceration of disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino people, especially Black men. According to the Sentencing Project, one in three Black males born in 2001 will be imprisoned at some point in their lives, compared to one in six Latino men and one in 17 White men. When considering educational attainment, young men of color, especially Black men, without a high school diploma are most at risk of incarceration. In 2010, for instance, nearly one-third of Black males ages 25 to 29 who dropped out of high school were incarcerated or institutionalized. For women, incarceration rates have risen exponentially in recent years. While fewer women than men are incarcerated, the number of women in prison "has been increasing at twice the rate of growth for men since 1980." Women, too, are more likely than men to be convicted of a drug offense: Twenty-five percent of incarcerated women were convicted of a drug offense in 2016, compared to 14 percent of men, according to the Sentencing Project. Details: Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy, 2019. 10p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 3, 2019 at: https://www.clasp.org/sites/default/files/publications/2019/01/2019_%20nomoredoublepunishments.pdf Year: 2019 Country: United States URL: https://www.clasp.org/sites/default/files/publications/2019/01/2019_%20nomoredoublepunishments.pdf Shelf Number: 154751 Keywords: Drug Felony ConvictionsLow-Income Communities of ColorMass IncarcerationNon-Violent OffendersSNAPTANFWelfareWelfare Eligibility |
Author: Sakala, Leah Title: Smart Reforms to Prison Time Served Requirements in Florida Summary: This report examines how adjustments to Florida's length of stay requirements would reduce the state's prison population with minimal impact on additional justice system contact. One in three people in the Florida prison population (34%), if released immediately, would experience no additional justice system contact during the balance of their original prison terms, even with no additional reentry support. Adjustments to reduce time served requirements, including minor ones, would have a significant impact on reducing Florida prison population. If the time served requirement dropped from 85% to 80%, for example, the prison population would instantly decline by 5%, and 98% of those released would experience no increased likelihood of rearrest. Drawing from the sentencing reform strategies of other states, the report concludes with recommendations for specific policy options that Florida could employ to revise its time served policies. Details: Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2019. 9p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 2, 2019 at: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/100040/smart_reforms_to_prison_time_served_requirements_in_florida_0.pdf Year: 2019 Country: United States URL: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/100040/smart_reforms_to_prison_time_served_requirements_in_florida_0.pdf Shelf Number: 155271 Keywords: Correctional Administration Criminal Justice Reform Mass IncarcerationSentencing Reform |