https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/ending-mass-incarceration-ideas-todays-leaders
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/2019_EndingMassIncarceration_digital.pdf
AUTHORS INCLUDE:
CORY BOOKER
SHERROD BROWN
JULIÁN CASTRO
TA-NEHISI COATES
ALICIA GARZA
KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND
KAMALA HARRIS
SHERRILYN IFILL
VAN JONES
AMY KLOBUCHAR
JARED KUSHNER
BETO O'ROURKE
RASHAD ROBINSON
TOPEKA K. SAM
BERNIE SANDERS
ELIZABETH WARREN
Ending Mass
Incarceration:
Ideas from Today's Leaders
EDITED BY Inimai Chettiar AND Priya Raghavan
FOREWORD BY NAACP President Derrick Johnson
BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE
AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW
Ending Mass Incarceration:
Ideas from Today's Leaders
Edited by
Inimai Chettiar and Priya Raghavan
Associate Editor
Adureh Onyekwere
© 2019. Other than the essay entitled "Start by Ending the Failed War on Drugs," this
book is covered by the Creative Commons "Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial"
license (see http://creativecommons.org). It may be reproduced in its entirety as long
as the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law is credited, a link to the Center's
web pages is provided, and no charge is imposed. The book may not be reproduced in
part or in altered form, or if a fee is charged, without the Center's permission. The essay
"Start by Ending the Failed War on Drugs" is reprinted with permission from the Houston
Chronicle and the author.
Table of Contents
FOREWORDS
Michael Waldman
President, Brennan Center for Justice
at New York University School of Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii
Derrick Johnson
President and CEO, National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
IDEAS FROM TODAY'S LEADERS
1. Pass the Next Step Act
Cory Booker, U.S. Senator from New Jersey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Provide Fair Wages for All
Sherrod Brown, U.S. Senator from Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
3. Provide Fair Housing to Advance Justice Reform
Julián Castro, former U.S. Secretary of Housing
and Urban Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
4. Dramatically Reduce the Incarcerated Population
Inimai Chettiar, Director of the Justice Program,
and Priya Raghavan, Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice
at New York University School of Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
5. The Power of Myth
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Author, Journalist, and Distinguished
Writer in Residence at New York University's
Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
6. Respect Black Lives and Restore Justice
to Those Made into Criminals
Alicia Garza, Cofounder of Black Lives Matter
and Principal of Black Futures Lab. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
7. End the Over-Incarceration of Women
Kirsten Gillibrand, U.S. Senator from New York. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8. Stop the Over-Policing of Communities of Color
Vanita Gupta, President and CEO of The Leadership
Conference on Civil and Human Rights. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
9. Harness the Momentum for Bipartisan Reform
Holly Harris, Executive Director of the Justice Action Network. . . . . . . . . 33
10. Strengthen Resources for Public Defenders
and Hold Prosecutors Accountable
Kamala Harris, U.S. Senator from California . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37
11. The Conservative Case for Reform:
Equal Rights, Public Safety, and Redemption
Mark Holden, Senior Vice President, General Counsel
and Corporate Secretary of Koch Industries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41
12. Recognize Black Humanity
Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel,
and Jin Hee Lee, Senior Deputy Director of Litigation,
NAACP Legal Defense Fund. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
13. Cut 50 Percent of the Prison Population
Van Jones, Cofounder of #cut50 and CEO of REFORM Alliance. . . . . . . . 49
14. Provide Treatment for Addiction
Amy Klobuchar, U.S. Senator from Minnesota. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
15. The Trump Administration's Commitment to Justice Reform
Jared Kushner, Senior Adviser to U.S. President Donald J. Trump . . . . . . . 57
16. Start by Ending the Failed War on Drugs
Beto O'Rourke, former U.S. Representative from Texas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61
17. Reshape Public Perception of Our Justice System
Rashad Robinson, President of Color Of Change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
18. Mass Incarceration Is a Women's Issue
Topeka K. Sam, Founder and Executive Director of
The Ladies of Hope Ministries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
19. Abolish For-Profit Prisons
Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73
20. End the Two-Tiered System of Justice
Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
ENDNOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
ABOUT THE BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
vii
Foreword
Michael Waldman
President, Brennan Center for Justice at
New York University School of Law
How can we end mass incarceration in America? By now, the
debate is over: our nation grossly over-incarcerates its people.
The United States has less than five percent of the world's
population and nearly one-quarter of its prisoners.1 Astonishingly, if
the 2.3 million incarcerated Americans were a state, it would be more
populous than 16 other states.2 All told, one in three people in the
United States has some type of criminal record.3 No other industrialized
country comes close. This system grew over decades in plain sight,
and only a broad and bold national response will end it.
Mass incarceration has crushing consequences: racial, social,
and economic. We spend around $270 billion per year on our criminal
justice system. In California it costs more than $75,000 per year
to house each prisoner — more than it would cost to send them
to Harvard.4 Mass incarceration exacerbates poverty and inequality,
serving as an economic ball and chain that holds back millions,
making it harder to find a job, access public benefits, and reintegrate
into the community.
Most disturbingly, the system profoundly discriminates against
people of color at every juncture. African Americans are more likely
to be stopped by police, arrested, detained before trial, and given
harsher sentences than whites.5 As a result, they are imprisoned at
more than five times the rate of whites. In some states, this disparity
is more than ten to one.6 For too long, we have tolerated this civil
rights crisis.
viii Foreword
And mass incarceration simply is not necessary to keep our
communities safe. Today, crime and murder rates remain near record
lows nationwide. Our cities — many of which suffered under a wave of
violent crime in the early 1990s — are largely safer than they have been
in years. No one is entirely sure what caused the steady crime decline
of the past two and a half decades. But it is clear that it owes little to
harsh policies and the resulting increase in incarceration.7 In fact, 27
states have reduced both imprisonment and crime together from 2006
to 2014.8 It is increasingly clear that reform and safety go together.
For all these reasons, the politics of crime and punishment have
changed fundamentally, in ways hard to imagine in an earlier era.
Today, polls show widespread support for a less punitive approach.9
Once incendiary moves such as marijuana legalization or an end to the
death penalty are finding political success and rising popularity. In red,
blue, and purple states, lawmakers are beginning to respond and act.
At long last, a vibrant public conversation is underway. A 2015
Brennan Center publication, Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out
on Criminal Justice, offered proposals from a bipartisan array of elected
officials and advocates and helped move criminal justice reform to
the center of the 2016 election. Since then, the nationwide consensus
in favor of a new direction has only hardened. For the first time, the
opportunity for truly transformative change is in view.
Last year, Congress took a step forward by overwhelmingly passing
the bipartisan First Step Act. It shortened some of the most extreme
federal drug sentences and expanded programming for incarcerated
people. But in recent years, we've also seen the country's leadership
take grave steps back, from expanding immigration detention to reinstituting
draconian federal charging policies. The First Step Act —
which needs to be fully funded and implemented — will not fix our
deeply broken system. But with both Democrats and Republicans
committed to reform, it represents a new baseline. This breakthrough
shows it is possible to make even bigger changes — and that the politics
can align.
And federal policy matters. While the vast majority of the nation's
prison population is held in state facilities, what happens at the federal
level sets the stage for the rest of the nation. Federal reforms can spur
national culture change to end mass incarceration, and federal incentive
funding can help states to decarcerate and provide support for
innovative new ideas.
Michael Waldman ix
So, now, what's the next step?
We need stronger, more comprehensive, and more far-reaching
solutions from our nation's leaders to address mass incarceration. It
would be a missed opportunity to aim for anything less than fundamental
change.
That's why, in advance of the 2020 presidential election, we have
again asked leaders representing communities most harmed by mass
incarceration, as well as top policymakers, to offer their solutions.
And we've urged them to think big. Each author has contributed an
essay highlighting their own ideas for reform. Neither the Brennan
Center nor I agree with all the content of the essays in this book, and
each author would likely say the same. The Center sought to create a
nonpartisan forum for sorely needed ideas to be publicly shared.
Over the past few years, the Brennan Center has outlined some key
steps toward ending mass incarceration in the United States. To start, if
the federal government and every state ended imprisonment for lowerlevel
crimes and reduced overly long sentences for other crimes, we
could safely cut the nation's prison population by 40 percent. Second,
if Congress passed a "reverse" of the 1994 Crime Bill to incentivize
states through federal grants to decarcerate rather than incarcerate, it
could spur nationwide change. Finally, federal lawmakers could transform
how prosecutors operate by rewarding U.S. Attorneys' offices that
reduce incarceration and recidivism in their districts. These policies
would bring down the federal prison population while encouraging
states to do the same.
Reform, of course, goes beyond criminal law and the justice system
itself. Unwinding the system of mass incarceration requires a new focus
on spurring economic growth in low-income communities, addressing
systemic racism, building a better system to address mental health,
and more. In the essays that follow, authors lay out thoughtful paths
for holistic reform.
Mass incarceration grew over decades. It may seem a permanent
fact. But public awareness, public anger, and public commitment have
begun to change that. All of us must ensure that we do not subject
another generation of young people of color to a destructive cycle of
incarceration and poverty. We need solutions as far-reaching as the
problem they address. Only then can we build a more equal, more
democratic, and more united America. Few tasks could be more urgent.
xi
Foreword
Derrick Johnson
President and CEO, National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People
Our American criminal justice system is broken. Eric Garner,
Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile
— these names just touch the surface of the multitude of Black
lives lost at the hands of the police or while in police custody.
Our system is biased because the people administering the system
are biased, and this is clearly reflected in the data. African Americans
are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites and
face disproportionately tough sentencing in relation to whites.10 This
dynamic is exacerbated by the current political climate, which continues
to devalue Black lives by reviving the same failed policies of the
war on drugs that fueled mass incarceration.
Between 1980 and 2015, the number of people incarcerated in this
country increased from roughly 500,000 to more than 2.2 million,
making over-incarceration one of the greatest civil rights travesties
facing our nation.11
Rather than provide much-needed reform, our so-called justice
system has often functioned as a purveyor of mass injustice by consistently
perpetuating racial inequities and corroding the civil liberties of
communities of color. This consistent perpetuation of racial inequalities
within all aspects of our society, particularly in the criminal justice
system, forces us to contemplate whether true justice is possible. It
causes us to question whether law enforcement and our legal system
can move beyond racism and implicit bias in ways that generate trust
in our communities.
xii Foreword
In the face of these daunting questions, the future seems bleak.
However, the NAACP has, from its very inception more than 110 years
ago, strived for fairness and equality in our criminal justice system by
working to tackle seemingly intractable issues.
We have overutilized mass incarceration as a means of social
control in lieu of true economic opportunity, educational equity, or
justice. To end this overutilization, effective police and criminal justice
reform is urgent and necessary. The United States has a duty to end
its ignominious reign as a world leader in mass incarceration, and
to do so, we must listen to the voices of those who have been most
impacted by this crisis.
Comprehensive change is required to create the climate of trust
that is needed for both the community and police officers to be safe.
Our communities need law enforcement that is held accountable for
misconduct, that has strong policies against over-policing, that offers
relevant training and a system in which the community plays an active
role.
Over the past 30 years, there has been growing awareness of
the importance of community perceptions to effective policing. Law
enforcement agencies have created police partnerships within communities
to engage in dialogue with leaders. These efforts have shown us
that police officers cannot do their jobs well without strong relationships
within the communities they serve.
We need each other.
In December 2018, President Trump signed the bipartisan First
Step Act into law. Although not perfect, it represents a much-needed
beginning in efforts to reform our nation's sentencing laws and prison
terms and to create effective rehabilitation programs.
From the expansion of the "safety valve," which will give judges
more sentencing discretion, to the reformation of the two- and threestrikes
laws, to the elimination of the "stacking" provisions that
resulted in unreasonably long prison sentences for many, the act,
including a prohibition on detaining youth in solitary confinement
and a ban on shackling female inmates who are in labor, is a far cry
from the dehumanizing and unjust police practices that were once
the rules of the land.
However, the act excludes too many people from earning time
credits, including those convicted of immigration-related offenses. It
does not retroactively apply its sentencing reform provisions to people
xiii
convicted of anything other than crack offenses. It also continues to
allow for-profit companies to benefit from incarceration, it expands
electronic monitoring, and it fails to address parole for juveniles serving
life sentences in federal prison.
In short, the First Step Act lives up to its name — it is just the
first in a series of efforts needed to improve and reform the federal
criminal justice system. Congress must do more to push for transformational
change and create a system that is equitable, significantly
reduces the number of people who are sent to prison unnecessarily,
eliminates racial disparities, and creates opportunities for genuine
second chances.
As the season to choose our next president approaches, we need
to hear from our nation's leaders on this challenge. This book from
the Brennan Center features essays from today's leading politicians
sharing their plans to reform our broken justice system, as well as
from civil rights allies urging lawmakers to create transformational
change. We need true leadership to address mass incarceration: both
a commitment to prioritizing the problem and the advancement of
comprehensive reforms to begin to solve it.
The NAACP believes in fair, results-based criminal justice policies.
We are hopeful that the Brennan Center, the authors of this book, and
our allies will bring forth not only the necessary dialogue but the policies
that will fix our justice system.
Derrick Johnson
xv
It would be a tragic mistake to treat criminal justice
reform as an agenda limited to certain communities.
All Americans have an interest in living in safe and vibrant
neighborhoods, in raising their children in a country of
equal treatment and second chances, and in entrusting
their liberty to a justice system that remains true to
our highest ideals. We simply cannot afford to spend
$80 billion annually on incarceration, to write off the
seventy million Americans — that's almost one in three
adults — with some form of criminal record, to release
600,000 inmates each year without a better program
to reintegrate them into society, or to ignore the
humanity of 2.2 million men and women currently
in U.S. jails and prisons and over 11 million men and
women moving in and out of U.S. jails every year.
In addition, we cannot deny the legacy of racism
that continues to drive inequality in how the justice
system is experienced by so many Americans.
How we treat citizens who make mistakes
(even serious mistakes), pay their debt to society,
and deserve a second chance reflects who we are as
a people and reveals a lot about our character
and commitment to our founding principles.
And how we police our communities and the kinds
of problems we ask our criminal justice system
to solve can have a profound impact on the extent
of trust in law enforcement and significant
implications for public safety."
— Hon. Barack H. Obama, 44th President of the United States12
1
1
Pass the Next Step Act
Hon. Cory Booker
United States Senator from New Jersey
On the morning of January 10, 2019, Edward Douglas woke
up in a federal penitentiary in Pekin, Illinois, where he had
spent the past 15 years, serving a lifetime sentence for selling
140 grams of crack cocaine. By dinnertime, he was home with his
family in Chicago.
That morning, Edward received a call from his lawyer, MiAngel
Cody of the Decarceration Collective, informing him that, thanks to
a new law that had taken effect on December 21, 2018, he would be a
free man in a matter of hours. The new law — the First Step Act — was
the most sweeping overhaul of the criminal justice system in a decade
and included a provision making retroactive a 2010 law that reduced
the egregious discrepancies between sentences for crack cocaine and
powder cocaine. This provision meant that Edward would be immediately
released from prison.
Upon hearing the news over the phone, Edward broke down and
wept. "I don't know what to say. I'll be glad to see my mom and my
kids."
Earlier this year, Edward was my guest at the State of the Union
address in Washington, D.C., just weeks after his release, and his story
captures both the deep unfairness that exists within our broken criminal
justice system and the transformative impact legislation can have
on people's lives. Thanks to the First Step Act, thousands of Americans
like Edward, who were sentenced under unfair and unjust guidelines,
will be eligible for freedom.
2 Pass the Next Step Act
But it's important to remember that this piece of legislation is just
that — a first step.
Despite being home to only five percent of the world's population,
the United States houses 25 percent of the world's prison population.13
Since 1980, our federal prison population has exploded by almost 800
percent, largely a direct result of the War on Drugs — a government
policy that mandated longer, more punitive sentences, often for nonviolent
crimes.14 These laws not only have wasted precious resources by
locking people up for low-level crimes instead of focusing on rehabilitation,
but have been overwhelmingly disproportionately applied to
black, brown, and lower-income Americans.
The data is clear: even though there is no real difference in drug
use or dealing between blacks and whites — in fact, whites are more
likely to sell drugs — blacks are 3.6 times more likely to get arrested for
selling drugs.15 And black men are 75 percent more likely than similarly
situated white men to be charged with federal offenses that carry harsh
mandatory minimum sentences.16 Unaddressed, implicit racial bias in
our justice system at all levels — from law enforcement encounters to
sentencing — and the unequal application of our laws have created a
justice system where inputs and outcomes are often more dependent
on race and class than on guilt or innocence.
As a result, today, one in 13 black Americans is prevented by law
from voting, and black citizens are four times more likely to have their
voting rights revoked. Black Americans are more likely to have to
endure the 40,000 or so collateral consequences that come with a
criminal record, including barriers to public services, education, and
employment.17
It is painfully clear that something needs to change, and while
the First Step Act was a meaningful step forward, there is much more
work to do.
That's why earlier this year, I introduced the Next Step Act. Building
off the momentum behind criminal justice reform, the Next Step
Act would make far-reaching reforms to police encounters, sentencing,
prison conditions, and reentry efforts.
The bill's sentencing reforms include reducing the disparity
between crack and powder cocaine sentences from 18:1 to 1:1, reducing
harsh mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses, ending
the federal prohibition on marijuana, and reinvesting in the communities
most impacted by the failed War on Drugs.
Hon. Cory Booker 3
The bill would aid reentry efforts by reinstating the right to vote
in federal elections for formerly incarcerated individuals; "banning the
box" — that is, prohibiting federal employers and contractors from
asking job applicants about their criminal history until the final stages
of the interview process; creating a federal pathway to sealing the
records of nonviolent drug offenses for adults and automatically sealing
(and in some cases expunging) juvenile records; removing the lifetime
ban on federal TANF and SNAP benefits for former nonviolent
drug offenders; removing barriers that prevent people with criminal
convictions from receiving an occupational license for jobs, such as
hairdressers and taxi drivers; and ensuring that anyone released from
federal prison receives a photo ID, birth certificate, and Social Security
card.
The Next Step Act would improve police encounters by prohibiting
racial profiling by law enforcement agencies; improving the reporting
of police use-of-force incidents; and providing better implicit racial
bias, de-escalation, and use-of-force training for law enforcement officers.
The bill would also improve the ability of those behind bars to
stay in touch with their loved ones. Last, it would incentivize states
through federal grants to decrease both their prison populations and
crime, given 87 percent of those incarcerated are held in state facilities.
For too long our broken criminal justice system has been a cancer
on the soul of this country, a cancer that has preyed on our most
vulnerable citizens. The system as it currently stands is an affront to our
most fundamental values of freedom, equality, and liberty. It's time we
take the next step toward a more equal, more fair, and more just nation.
5
2
Provide Fair Wages for All
Hon. Sherrod Brown
United States Senator from Ohio
Mass incarceration in the United States has destroyed families
and limited opportunities for generations of African
Americans and poor people. The "lock them up and throw
away the key" ideology has left people spending far too much of their
lives incarcerated for crimes that were far less serious than their
sentences suggest.
Too often, the system imposes another sentence on top of whatever
the law hands down — life with limited opportunity, not only for
the person incarcerated but for entire families.18
For the better part of the past decade, Congress and states have
worked to undo the effects of harsh, ineffective policies through
solutions that improve the criminal justice system for people already
trapped in it — modernizing sentencing laws, investing in reentry
programming, and working to "ban the box" in hiring and academic
admissions. These reforms are necessary, and overdue. But they aren't
enough.
By the time a person is in a position to benefit from criminal justice
reform, society has already failed them.
We have to make our justice system fair and make it less likely that
poor people and people of color will be disproportionately tangled
up in it in the first place. We cannot end mass incarceration without
addressing the systemic racism and economic inequities that lead to it.
Centuries of racism have robbed generations of African Americans
of economic opportunity. We need significant, deliberate investment
6 Provide Fair Wages for All
in communities of color to help right these wrongs — in early childhood
development, job training, public schools, local infrastructure,
and much more.
We must address lending discrimination and reverse redlining that
remain all too real. Decades of housing policy segregated communities
of color and restricted their ability to build wealth through homeownership.
Over the past two decades, predatory mortgage lending plagued
these same communities and contributed to higher foreclosure rates.
During the financial crisis, communities of color were robbed of the
wealth they had finally been able to build in the last decades of the
20th century. Most still have not recovered. And we know continued
financial and housing discrimination have a direct impact on families'
abilities to choose where they live and on the tax revenue that is used
to fund schools and other vital local community resources.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has chipped away at the
Fair Housing Act and undermined legal protections against discriminatory
lending.
We must also make hard work pay off for everyone, no matter
what kind of work they do.
The research is clear: the likelihood of Americans offending is
lower when they are employed and not living in poverty.19 And, of
course, parents' economic status impacts their children — children
of parents in poverty are more likely to have interactions with juvenile
justice systems, many of which are still designed to pull children into
the system instead of diverting them away from it. This increases the
chances of those children ending up in the adult system later in life. 20
These correlations aren't surprising — but they are a reminder of
the generational factors that contribute to mass incarceration. Society
tells families to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but that's
impossible when their hard work doesn't pay off.
That means we cannot accept a second class of "low-wage jobs."
Dr. King taught us that all labor has dignity and that "no labor is
really menial unless you're not getting adequate wages."21 We need to
raise the minimum wage, ensure workers are paid the overtime they
earn, and make it easier for workers to join a union to collectively
bargain for better pay and benefits. By increasing the federal minimum
wage to $15, more than 40 million Americans — many living below
the poverty line — would get a raise.22 And by ensuring that workers
are protected from retaliation if they discuss their salaries in the work7
place, we can help close the pay gap for women and for people of color.
We need to overhaul our tax code — it's one of the best tools we
have to influence businesses and put money back into the pockets of
people. We should dramatically expand the Earned Income and Child
Tax Credits and make millions more people eligible.
These steps should be coupled with incentives for companies to
pay workers more — we need a Corporate Freeloader Fee, requiring
corporations to reimburse taxpayers if they pay employees so little that
those workers are forced onto public assistance. This would encourage
corporations to increase wages. And because it's based on corporations'
wages, not workers' reliance on public assistance, it wouldn't
stigmatize workers or discourage them from applying for the help
they need.
We know families are struggling — the cost of housing, child care,
and education have all gone up, while wages are largely flat. That's what
these policies aim to combat.
When work has dignity, you can afford health care and child care
and put food on the table without working two jobs. When work has
dignity, you have power over your own schedule and can take time off
to care for yourself and your family. When work has dignity, all families
can build wealth through homeownership and join the middle
class. When work has dignity, black women and white men are paid
the same wages for the same work.
Of course, these ideas aren't comprehensive — no single policy
proposal will right centuries of wrongs — and they must be coupled
with more direct reforms to our justice system. Our country's refusal
to adequately address economic issues that disproportionately affect
poor people and people of color has resulted in people from these
communities being disadvantaged at every stage in life. Taken together,
these ideas would be an important step forward in investing in people
and communities who have been left behind. We have to rethink how
our society invests its resources to reflect the dignity of every citizen.
Hon. Sherrod Brown
9
3
Provide Fair Housing to
Advance Justice Reform
Hon. Julián Castro
Former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Addressing mass incarceration extends far beyond simply
reforming our criminal laws. We must reimagine entirely our
conception of justice. Even our common parlance — "the criminal
justice system" — reveals the disconnect between how we currently
approach it as a matter of public policy and how we should approach
it. Criminal justice is not housed within a single institution. Rather, it
is a constellation of overlapping policies, structures, and systems that
intersect to form a web that impacts people and communities in ways
far beyond what we typically associate with criminal justice.
When I was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under
President Obama, I challenged my team to identify ways to advance
criminal justice reform through housing policy. Through that process,
I learned that housing policy is criminal justice reform. Some of the
most urgent issues facing people interacting with our criminal justice
systems can be targeted and addressed through federal housing policy.
For example, racially segregated communities are much more
likely to be over-policed. Predominantly black and brown communities
experience a disproportionate police presence, and the result is
a higher-than-average rate of arrest.23 Where someone lives dictates
the likelihood that they will have interactions with the criminal justice
system. As such, policies like Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing
(AFFH), a long-awaited rule we accomplished during my tenure at
10 Provide Fair Housing to Advance Justice Reform
HUD aimed at encouraging local jurisdictions to take affirmative steps
toward desegregating neighborhoods, can reduce inequalities in the
criminal justice system. AFFH is good housing policy, good civil rights
policy, and good criminal justice policy.
One of the most significant barriers for formerly incarcerated
people reentering their communities is a lack of housing. Many people
who leave correctional facilities are effectively homeless, though they
are often not designated as such for official counts.24 The formerly
incarcerated are nearly ten times more likely to experience homelessness
than the general public. And nearly twice as many formerly incarcerated
people as are homeless are housing insecure. This means that
they are living in temporary or unstable settings — a rooming house,
hotel, or motel — and have no guaranteed place to live.25 A number of
limitations and restrictions — including affordability; the need to live
close to employment opportunities, family, and parole officers; and
restrictions around residing with others who have criminal histories
— significantly limit housing options.
Within that incredibly limited universe, returning citizens often
have to contend with another restriction: many landL-rds enact blanket
bans against anyone with arrest or conviction records without regard
to mitigating factors that should be considered. These bans fail to take
into account, for example, the difference between a mere arrest and an
actual conviction, and where there is a conviction, the seriousness of
the crime and its relevance to residing at a particular place.
The problem is that people with a criminal background are not
considered a protected class under the Fair Housing Act, so there are
no explicit federal protections against this discrimination. While some
jurisdictions have enacted their own state or local laws aimed at guarding
against this discrimination, the result is a patchwork of protections
that vary significantly depending on where one lives. For these protections
to be meaningful, they must be reliable and consistent. We need
federal protection for people with records.
While I led HUD, we worked to provide that protection. Thanks to
a Supreme Court case we participated in called Texas Department of
Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project,
Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Fair Housing Act not
only prohibited intentional housing discrimination, but also protected
against housing practices that had an impact of discriminating against
protected groups.26
Hon. Julián Castro 11
This theory, known as "disparate impact," is a critical legal principle
that lies at the core of our ability as a nation to enforce civil rights
law and guarantee all people equal access and equal opportunity. It
was this theory that allowed us to issue historic guidance in 2016 to
provide greater protections to renters and buyers with criminal arrest
records. That guidance clarified that blanket bans against renting or
selling to anyone with a criminal arrest record are prohibited under
the Fair Housing Act because of the disparate impact such policies
have on folks of color.
That legal principle — and our ability to meaningfully ensure
civil rights — is under grave threat from the Trump administration.
Recently, Trump directed his senior officials to consider how to roll
back civil rights enforcement efforts under the disparate impact theory.
At HUD these efforts are already underway, and a proposed rule is
being developed to undermine the disparate impact theory.
Such a critical tool shouldn't be left to the whims of a single
administration or an increasingly political Supreme Court. That is why
it's time to amend the Fair Housing Act and formalize this theory so
that the Fair Housing Act will explicitly protect against practices with
a discriminatory impact, including those that victimize people with
criminal records.
This is bigger than a legal principle. It undergirds the way we talk
about discrimination against marginalized communities in the 21st
century. Discrimination doesn't happen only when we mean for it to
happen. Unconscious biases, deep-seated stereotypes, and assumptions
that we don't even know we hold play a part in all of our decision
making — including the web of decisions that produced and perpetuate
our unfair justice system and resulted in a crisis of mass incarceration
that continues to plague our communities.27
13
4
Dramatically Reduce the
Incarcerated Population
Inimai Chettiar
Director of the Justice Program
Priya Raghavan
Counsel
Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law*
Locking up 2.3 million people, devastating communities, and
costing $270 billion annually, the American criminal justice
system is wildly out of balance.
The sheer size of the prison population, larger than 16 states, is the
single most dire fact of our failed national effort to address crime.28 To
truly transform the system, the next wave of reform must above all aim
to shrink the tumor of incarceration. We must dramatically reduce the
number of people behind bars in this country.
The burdens of mass incarceration fall disproportionately on people
of color. African Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the
rate of whites.29 And while study after study shows that African Americans
and whites use drugs at similar rates, African Americans are nearly
four times as likely as whites to be arrested for drug offenses and six times
as likely to be imprisoned.30 Our justice system sets up children of color
for prison: black children are five times more likely to be incarcerated
than white children.31 This is a far cry from equal justice under the law.
* This essay was prepared with Ames Grawert, senior counsel and John L. Neu
Justice Counsel in the Brennan Center's Justice Program.
14 Dramatically Reduce the Incarcerated Population
Just as the 2016 election spurred a national awareness of mass
incarceration, the 2020 election provides an opportunity to chart
a course for transformative reform. Contenders for the presidency
should be prepared to tackle this civil rights crisis, with solutions as
sweeping as it demands.
Momentum has been slowly building for years. Since 2007, states
from California to Texas have significantly overhauled their justice
systems. And just last year, Congress passed the First Step Act, a bipartisan
prison and sentencing reform bill.
But these modest reforms are not nearly enough. The next wave of
change should focus on a key overarching goal: significantly reducing
the incarcerated population.
Why this goal? Because of the sheer number of people — overwhelmingly
people of color — whose lives are destroyed by incarceration.
African Americans make up 40 percent of the incarcerated
population — nearly one million people — while constituting only 13
percent of U.S. residents.32 And incarceration doesn't only affect those
who are locked up; it rips apart families and communities, helping to
perpetuate America's chronic racial inequality. Reducing the staggering
number of people behind bars should be the lodestar for reform going
forward. This means reducing the vast influx of people heading into
prisons and releasing many of those who are there already.
The Brennan Center has outlined some key solutions focused on
strategically reducing the incarcerated population, starting with leadership
in Washington. Even though the overwhelming majority of prisoners
are held in state systems, federal leadership can drive national
change, with Congress leading by example or using the power of the
purse to drive state action.
If the federal government and every state took two simple steps —
ending imprisonment for lower-level crimes and reducing overly long
sentences for other crimes — we could safely cut the nation's prison
population by 40 percent.
We currently use prisons as warehouses for people who need help.
Nearly 80 percent of those in prison suffer from mental health issues,
substance abuse issues, or both.33 Unsurprisingly, given that prisons
isolate people from their support networks and generally provide insufficient
programming and training, our prisons can be counterproductive
when it comes to both rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.
There is a better way. One out of every four people currently in
Inimai Chettiar and Priya Raghavan 15
prison is incarcerated for a lower-level crime. For these individuals,
alternatives to prison like treatment, community service, or probation
would work better to rehabilitate and reduce recidivism. An estimated
additional 14 percent of the prison population has already served long
enough behind bars and could be released with little risk to public
safety. The federal government can implement these two steps, setting
the stage for states to do the same.
Also, Congress can use federal funds to encourage states to reduce
their prison populations. Federal policymakers helped contribute to
the growth of mass incarceration, using funding to encourage states
to increase arrests, prosecution, and imprisonment. The 1994 Crime
Bill, for example, incentivized states to lengthen prison sentences and
build prisons. Though that grant expired, Washington still allocates
billions of dollars annually to state and local justice systems largely on
autopilot, often cutting against rather than supporting reform efforts.
To unwind these incentives, Congress can pass a "reverse" of the
1994 Crime Bill — an act to reverse mass incarceration — which would
provide funding to states that successfully reduce imprisonment and
crime together. Most federal proposals only impact federal prisons,
leaving nearly 90 percent of the national prison population untouched.
But by using federal funds to drive nationwide changes, this proposal
would reach further, underwriting a national reduction in incarceration.
This federal support would help push states across the finish line,
encouraging innovation and helping offset the cost of vital alternatives
to incarceration, like substance abuse treatment.34
Additionally, among other solutions, lawmakers can change how
prosecutors operate, using budgetary incentives to reward prosecutors'
offices that reduce incarceration and recidivism.35 Congress and the
states can also abolish money bail, a practice that punishes poverty
and turns what should be a public safety decision into a decision based
on wealth.
But we can't stop there. Decades of over-incarceration have impoverished
communities of color, reinforcing the intergenerational wealth
gap and creating a destructive cycle of incarceration and poverty.
Reducing the prison population alone will not end this cycle, and it
won't eliminate the racial disparities that plague our justice system.
We must address the structural inequities that result from and perpetuate
mass incarceration. We need solutions to combat racism both
within and beyond our justice system, stimulate economic growth in
16 Dramatically Reduce the Incarcerated Population
neglected communities, provide adequate housing and education for
all, and much more. These may seem daunting, but we can start by
reducing the number of people put behind bars.
Americans overwhelmingly seek both a smarter approach to crime
than we've seen in the past and sustained policy changes to promote
racial equality.36 It's up to our leaders to make this happen.
17
5
The Power of Myth
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Author, Journalist, and Distinguished Writer in Residence, New York
University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute†
This is 2019. This is the 400th year of the African American
community in North America. We arrived in Virginia in 1619. We
are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. Anti-African
American and anti-black sentiment is foundational to the country. It
literally would not exist without it. It's impossible to try to imagine the
country without slavery.
Unfortunately, the same may be true of mass incarceration. If you
look at the early 1970s, America is basically where the rest of the industrialized
world is in terms of mass incarceration. Fast-forward to 2015,
and we incarcerate more than 600 people out of every 100,000 adults.
For blacks the rate is five times as high.37 But to get the country back
to where it was in 1970, and then to actually repair the damage that
was done — is that going to happen?
And that is to say nothing of the whole Michelle Alexander question,
which is, is this actually the system working as intended?38 The
black incarceration rate under Jim Crow was actually not that bad in the
South, but it was really bad in the North. But immediately after integration,
the South became even with the North.39 What this showed was
† This essay is excerpted from oral remarks given at A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi
Coates and Melissa Murray at NYU School of Law, January 31, 2019. The full
conversation can be found here: https://www.brennancenter.org/conversation-tanehisi-
coates-and-melissa-murray.
18 The Power of Myth
that Jim Crow was actually the system of social control in the South —
they didn't have to have mass incarceration. It wasn't necessary. Prisons
are now the system of social control, revealing a kind of psychology
about how we should deal with black folks. We now see huge numbers
of black males who have not graduated from high school bound to do
some sort of time in prison — that's the way we've chosen to address
that population of people. That's a choice that we've made.
I fear that what we are now seeing will become a permanent
feature in America, that it is too much to disentangle. We have created
a structure that is so large, so sprawling, with independent interests,
unions, a private prison industry. How does this get un-spooled? I'm
not convinced that it will be. The incredible sociologist Devah Pager, in
her book Marked, wrote that enough people are released from prison
each year to fill every fast-food job opening in America five times over.40
What are we going to do with these people?
I understand that there are reforms happening across the country,
especially at the state level. Giving felons back the right to vote is
really important. It's part of integrating people back into society. We
also saw action in the last administration in terms of crack cocaine.
All of that's good. But solutions have to go beyond decarceration. We
have to figure out why we chose prison as a solution in the first place.
We have to figure out why we look at certain populations of people,
see mental health issues, chemical dependency issues, employment
issues, or a lack of education, and decide that the endpoint for them
should be prison. Even if we could decarcerate, how do we know that
there wouldn't be some other punitive form of justice that we would
choose after that?
Prison is now a social service provider, whether you like it or not.
It's a punitive one, not the kind we would want. And there are embedded
presumptions of black people, I would argue of poor people, in
that approach — that I have to help you by pointing a gun at you.
People who are weak, we tend to use the stick of the state in order to
"help" them. But we don't do that with people who are strong. Punitive
justice is so often directed toward black people, and punishment
is often seen as a solution. If you believe somebody's less human, that
becomes a lot easier to do.
How do we decide who's human? How do we reify those beliefs?
Where does the dialogue happen? It happens in the world of narrative.
It happens in the world of story. Those of us who are in the world
Ta-Nehisi Coates 19
of policy deeply, often, underestimate the power of myth. When they
were trying to get the statue of Lee taken down in Charlottesville, some
said, "We're not going to focus on these symbolic issues; we're going
to focus on policy." But symbols define what your imagination is. Your
imagination, therefore, bounds what possible policy you can have. It's
not a mistake that those statues went up during the early days of Jim
Crow. It's intentional. It was a statement on what they thought about
the humanity of black people. If I don't think you're a human, there's
only a certain range of policy that I'm going to apply to you.
I would argue that myth is ultimately the source of the punitive
justice that's so often directed toward black people. People who are
kids today will decide who's going to be human 20, 30, 40, 50 years
from now.
We have to fight the battle at the level of myth. It will bound what
policies are possible. If there's any sort of hope for unwinding mass
incarceration, it begins there.
21
6
Respect Black Lives and
Restore Justice to
Those Made into Criminals
Alicia Garza
Cofounder, Black Lives Matter
Principal, Black Futures Lab
More than 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United
States.41 That's 2.3 million families that have been torn
apart, and 2.3 million people who spend 24 hours a day in
cages. These people are held involuntarily in state prisons, federal
prisons, juvenile correctional facilities, local jails, Indian Country
jails, military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment
centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and the prisons of U.S.
territories.42
For decades, reformers have led efforts to reverse the epidemic
of mass incarceration. The Black Lives Matter movement helped give
oxygen to these efforts, making visible the impacts of our country's
system of mass punishment. But bolder solutions are necessary to
ensure that we value the lives our criminal justice system upends.
We need to transform the way we think about punishment and rehabilitation
in America and end the racial inequities that have come to
define the country's justice system. We are leading, and it's time for
lawmakers to lead, too.
The current criminal system does not achieve justice. Instead, it
exacerbates injustice.
22 Respect Black Lives and Restore Justice to Those Made into Criminals
Our criminal system punishes poverty. Of the more than two
million people who are currently incarcerated, more than 450,000
are in jail awaiting trial.43 They have not even been convicted of a crime;
they have only been suspected of committing one. Many languish
behind bars because they cannot afford to pay the bail that would buy
their way to freedom. The criminal system also relies on funding from
fines and fees collected from defendants. These fines and fees create
a vicious cycle of debt and incarceration for those unable to pay them.
Our criminal system also deepens racial inequity. Racism permeates
every aspect of the system. Forty percent of those incarcerated
are Black, even though Black people make up only 13 percent of the
U.S. population. Black people are five times more likely to be incarcerated
at some time in their lives than their white counterparts.44 Latinx
people are twice as likely to be incarcerated as their white counterparts.
45 Black women are the fastest growing incarcerated population,
and nearly half of all Black women have a family member or loved one
behind bars.46
It's time to acknowledge that punishment and incarceration have
not solved problems. They have only exacerbated them. We deem
poverty, intimate partner violence, drugs, gangs, immigration, and so
much more as "criminal." But these issues cannot be solved by locking
up more people. Incarceration leads only to more criminalization,
more people behind bars, and more precious resources being spent on
short-term solutions that do not solve long-term problems.
According to Narcotics Anonymous, the definition of insanity
is "repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results."47
Over the past few decades, billions of dollars have been invested in
the carceral state. It costs up to $75,000 per year to incarcerate one
person.48 Meanwhile, cities and states struggle to fund vital programs,
from education and mental health services to childcare and housing.
It's time for a bold plan to decarcerate America.
Such a plan should first include robust sentencing reform, abolishing
mandatory minimums and enhancements to sentences. Second,
it should include a federal program to provide incentives to states to
decarcerate, while imposing stiff penalties for states that continue to
mass incarcerate.49 Third, it should invest as much money as has been
invested in incarceration into strengthening and expanding mental
health services and critical safety net programs. Fourth, such a plan
must eliminate bail and fines and fees charged to defendants. Finally, it
Alicia Garza 23
must completely rethink our systems of policing and prosecution, so that
they work to uplift communities of color rather than tear them down.
To decarcerate America, we must advance new ways to address
harm. Decarceration requires a shift from punishment to restoration
and rehabilitation. Accountability for engaging in harmful practices can
be accomplished without devastating families for generations. Instead,
we should restore the bonds that are broken when harm is done and
change the conditions that caused the harm to occur in the first place.
These ideas are far from utopian. Across the nation, cities and
states are experimenting with new approaches to addressing harm,
recognizing that punishment is not a deterrent. They are redirecting
resources previously used to place people in cages to new approaches
that serve needs and get to the root causes of what drives people to
commit harm in the first place.
At a time of much political turmoil, the time is ripe for bold, scalable
ideas that can, once and for all, resolve an epidemic that has for
too long been a stain on American democracy. We can choose to keep
repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results, or we can
choose a new direction and a smarter approach. The epidemic of mass
incarceration and the inequity inherent in the criminal system can
only be addressed by attacking the root causes of the problem, not by
tinkering with it. A re-investment in families and communities — and
strengthening the bonds that make them whole — is the only way to
dismantle the carceral state, once and for all.
25
7
End the Over-Incarceration
of Women
Hon. Kirsten Gillibrand
United States Senator from New York
Our criminal justice system is broken. From arrests to
sentencing to treatment in prison, the system is discriminatory,
inconsistent, and ineffective. It has taken years for
Congress to wake up to this fact, but millions of American families have
already learned this the hard way from their own painful experiences.
While much of the criminal justice reform discussion in Washington
has rightly centered on reducing the prison population as a
whole, we can't ignore the unique challenges our criminal justice
system creates for women. Over the past few decades, the number of
incarcerated women has grown at almost twice the rate of incarcerated
men, and today, more than 200,000 women are behind bars.50 Most
are mothers.51 About two-thirds are women of color.52 And study after
study shows that our justice system is weighted in favor of wealthy,
male, Caucasian offenders — which means many women are suffering
unfairly. 53
That is not equal justice under the law. It is the opposite: unequal
and unjust.
The good news is that Congress recently enacted major bipartisan
reforms to our criminal justice system with the First Step Act. The law
made many welcome improvements that will change people's lives for
the better, but it is aptly named because it is only a first step — one that
does not address many of the injustices women face in the system.
26 End the Over-Incarceration of Women
Here are the next steps we must take.
First, we must stop the abuse of pregnant women in prison. The
First Step Act ended two indignities that have caused women in federal
prisons to suffer: banning the shackling of pregnant women and ensuring
that all incarcerated women have access to menstrual hygiene
products. But this is not enough. In many states, incarcerated pregnant
women can still be restrained or placed in solitary confinement without
access to adequate medical and nutritional care.54 This is cruel, and it
does nothing to rehabilitate people.
As a mother with young children, I know firsthand that pregnancy
takes an enormous physical and emotional toll on women's
bodies. It requires consistent medical attention and unobstructed
access to a doctor. Our country needs a national standard of care
for pregnant women who are serving time in prison, and that's why I
co-wrote a bipartisan bill called the Pregnant Women in Custody Act.
My bill would create that national standard of care and protect pregnant
women from the cruel and unusual punishment that so many of
them are forced to suffer through now.
Second, we need to end the cash bail system. Cash bail keeps many
low-income people in jail just because they can't afford to pay. Here's
how it works: if you've been accused of a crime — just accused — the
court sets an amount you need to pay to be released before your trial.
What happens if you and your family are living paycheck to
paycheck? You have three options: You can take a plea deal, giving up
your right to defend yourself at trial even if you're innocent. You can
pay exorbitant fees to a bail bondsman. Or you can stay in jail until your
court date, which can take weeks, months, or even years.55
Americans all over our country who are struggling to get by, including
many women who already are held back by the gender pay gap,
face these terrible options. Four in ten Americans don't have enough
savings to cover a $400 emergency.56 The median reported amount of
savings for young African American and Hispanic women is between
$100 and $120.57 How are they supposed to pay $1,000 in bail?58 The
cash bail system is a disaster, and that's why I'm fighting to end it
altogether.
Third, we need to use alternatives to prison for lower-level, nonviolent
crimes. Research has conclusively shown that sentences such as
treatment and probation work better than incarceration to rehabilitate
and reduce recidivism for nonviolent offenders.59 According to a
Hon. Kirsten Gillibrand 27
Brennan Center study, nearly 25 percent of prisoners nationwide are
incarcerated for lower-level, nonviolent offenses, and sentencing them
to alternatives would not affect public safety.60
If someone is suffering from drug addiction and charged with
possession for the first time, they should go to a drug treatment
program — not prison — for counseling and support. People suffering
from mental health issues would be better served by mental health
courts, where they can access healthcare providers, or probation that
can link them to social services. Drug treatment programs and mental
health courts as alternatives to prison can reduce rearrests by half and
save taxpayers thousands of dollars — while helping to rehabilitate
people too.61 Instituting alternatives to prison for lower-level, nonviolent
offenses would result in thousands fewer federal prisoners without
compromising public safety. And if the states adopt this policy too, we
could safely reduce the national prison population by nearly 25 percent.
Alternatives to incarceration would especially help women in
the criminal justice system. Studies have found that the majority of
women currently in prisons and jails are there for nonviolent offenses.
62 They are often primary caretakers of their children, and many
have suffered through sexual violence or exploitation, addiction, or
mental health issues.63 These women don't need to be isolated from
society; they need support, training, or rehab, so they can contribute
to their communities and families in the best way possible. Congress
must lead the charge on solving this problem, and I am proud to take
on this fight in the Senate.
Our criminal justice system has been ripping apart families and
destroying communities for years. We must fix this. We should protect
incarcerated pregnant women, end our cash bail system, and find new
and better alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenses. This is how
we will make our communities safer. It's time to repair our broken
criminal justice system once and for all.
29
8
Stop the Over-Policing of
Communities of Color
Vanita Gupta
President and CEO, The Leadership Conference on
Civil and Human Rights
After Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer
in Ferguson, Missouri, the public demanded accountability.
People marched in the streets and blocked traffic on highways.
The Movement for Black Lives forced a national conversation about
public safety, community trust, and racial justice.
I began my tenure as head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice
Department just two months after Michael's death. Tensions were high
in St. Louis and across the country. Every week, it seemed, another
video of police violence went viral.
The following year, in 2015, President Obama's Task Force on 21st
Century Policing released a report with recommendations to ensure
fair and effective policing. The Civil Rights Division was also deeply
involved in a handful of jurisdictions to address discriminatory policing
and systemic civil rights violations.
From Ferguson to Baltimore to Chicago, I met with impacted families,
concerned residents, and law enforcement officers. Everywhere
I traveled, I was struck by the wide gap in empathy and the absence
of common language to discuss the profound pain and frustration.
The moment called for a moral reckoning. Solutions for fair policing
required — and continue to require — confronting the sources of
mistrust between communities and police.
30 Stop the Over-Policing of Communities of Color
The fraught relationship is partly a product of the historical role
that law enforcement has played in enforcing and perpetuating injustice:
slavery, the Black Codes, lynchings, Jim Crow segregation, and
the war on drugs.
Mistrust is, of course, also based on lived experience and the interactions
people have with law enforcement — something as traumatic
as being racially profiled and mistreated during a traffic stop to the
repeated tragedies of officer-involved shootings of unarmed Black men.
We also must take seriously our nation's dependence on criminalization
and its corrosive impact on communities of color, people with
disabilities, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and people living in
poverty. We have too often relied exclusively on the criminal justice
system to address social and public health problems. Every day, children
are arrested in schools simply for adolescent behavior. People are
imprisoned for being poor or arrested for being homeless. Men and
women experiencing mental health crises or substance use disorders
are treated as threats, instead of people deserving of care and support.
In too many communities, police officers are the first responders to
social crises, which many officers agree they never envisioned being
part of their job. As a society, we share a collective responsibility to
ensure people in crisis receive care from medical professionals and
community-based interventions.
The over-policing of some communities is a deliberate policy
choice made by public officials over the past several decades. And it
significantly contributes to our country's outsized and racially disparate
arrested and incarcerated population. We bear the responsibility
to confront the consequences and correct course.
But we also cannot just talk about the problems without charting
the way forward. The Leadership Conference launched the New Era of
Public Safety initiative in March of 2019 to build on a decade of policing
reform and go a layer deeper with concrete recommendations for
police and communities to achieve justice — together.
Under the Trump administration, the federal government has
largely receded from — and even been antagonistic to — policing
reform. But communities and people directly impacted have always
led this work. That is why our initiative aims to equip communities
with the tools to advocate for change from the ground up. These tools
represent a shared vision and offer co-produced solutions for a new
paradigm of public safety.
Vanita Gupta 31
No two communities, police departments, or cities are the same.
Nor is there one panacea for all harmful policing practices. Our New
Era of Public Safety report contains innovative, data-driven strategies
on issues from community policing to use of force to accountability
that jurisdictions can fit to meet their needs. It recommends several key
changes to police departments, including embracing procedural justice
as a guiding principle that informs policies, practices, and trainings;
and developing departmental policies and trainings, while including
community members in the delivery of community policing, biasfree,
and use of force trainings. It further recommends supporting the
development of and investment in community-based support services
to prevent and respond to crises; increasing community oversight of
misconduct; and collecting, analyzing, and publicly reporting data to
inform policy and address practices that have a disparate impact on
marginalized communities.
By bringing people with diverse perspectives to the decisionmaking
table, communities can disrupt the systems that drive criminalization
and racial disparities in policing. Further, data empowers people
with the tools to identify and address problems — as well as develop
informed, creative solutions that support impacted communities.
Fair policing and community trust are intrinsically tied to public
safety. That means police departments must develop policies, practices,
and priorities that support fairness, equity, procedural justice, legitimacy,
transparency, and accountability. These are shared values. And
they will build trust, restore confidence, and, ultimately, heal wounds.
Federal, state, and local lawmakers, too, must commit to transformative
change. Co-producing public safety will require investing
real dollars to make a difference. Elected leaders must set the tone at
the top by selecting law enforcement leaders, from police chiefs to the
U.S. attorney general, who will create a culture that reflects the values
of the communities most acutely impacted by criminalization, overpolicing,
and violence. To do this, leaders must require the collection
and reporting of law enforcement activities in order to keep departments
and officers accountable for misconduct. They must also prioritize
diverting state and federal funding away from criminalization and
toward strengthening our schools, job and housing opportunities,
public health services, shelters, and health care. And the Department
of Justice should use its available tools — funding, technical assistance,
and civil rights enforcement — to promote change from within.
32 Stop the Over-Policing of Communities of Color
A new era of policing will not be achieved by tinkering at the
edges. It will require a reimagining of public safety. It will require daring
leadership, persistence, and partnership — a partnership committed
to safe, fair, and effective policing. A partnership committed to data
and transparency and racial justice. And a partnership committed to
ending our nation's overreliance on criminalization and incarceration.
Our communities deserve nothing less.
33
9
Harness the Momentum
for Bipartisan Reform
Holly Harris
Executive Director, Justice Action Network
In December 2018, Congress passed and President Trump signed
into law a groundbreaking criminal justice reform bill, the First
Step Act. Now, states all over the country are moving their own
"first step" bills. Veterans' groups, business and trade associations,
faith voices, and key law enforcement leaders are working alongside
conservative and progressive advocacy groups and impacted voices to
change laws and change lives. The criminal justice reform movement
is broad, and the future is bright.
In this era of entrenched partisan politics, how did we achieve a
bipartisan win in Washington?
I remember sitting in Beltway strategy meetings in late fall as
time was running short to pass the First Step Act. I was shocked
at how little discussion was devoted to the one person who would
determine whether this legislation would receive a vote on the
floor of the United States Senate: Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell.
When our team at Justice Action Network (JAN) met with him,
the Leader was very clear that he would not put his thumb on the
scale. He was open to a vote but made no promises. To me, the glass
was half full: "So you're telling me there's a chance?"
To get McConnell to commit to the floor vote we needed, we
developed a strategy that would emphasize influential voices focused
34 Harness the Momentum for Bipartisan Reform
on building support in McConnell's home state of Kentucky, and his
Republican caucus on Capitol Hill.
We worked with State Senator Julie Raque Adams, a popular
Kentucky lawmaker from Louisville, McConnell's backyard. Adams
had sponsored and passed the country's first "dignity bill," commonsense
legislation that eliminated the shackling of pregnant women and
improved health and sanitary conditions for incarcerated women.64
Adams was the only Republican to win reelection in her district — a
victory that proved, we said, that justice reform makes for good policy
and good politics.
Next, JAN commissioned a public opinion poll that found significant
majorities of Republican and Democratic voters in Kentucky
supported criminal justice reform. We held press calls to publicize
these findings, joined by Senator Rand Paul, a pioneering supporter of
criminal justice reform, and Jared Kushner.65 We secured editorials in
favor of the bill from local papers. But the story that mattered most to
the Leader was published in his hometown paper, the Courier Journal,
highlighting our Kentucky polling numbers.66
JAN kept the pressure on in Louisville, hosting a panel with the
conservative Federalist Society, the progressive American Constitution
Society, and law enforcement, at McConnell's undergraduate alma
mater, the University of Louisville.67
And just as support for criminal justice reform reached a zenith
in Kentucky, JAN and its valued partners were hard at work back in
Washington, making the case for reform and urging the president
to lean in.
Groups from across the ideological spectrum acted together
toward this goal. The Brennan Center worked to ensure that sentencing
reforms were included in the final package, through direct outreach to
lawmakers and a flurry of news articles. FreedomWorks and the American
Conservative Union fired up their grass roots and sent thousands of
calls and emails to key Hill offices. The Faith and Freedom Coalition
activated thousands of faith leaders, while #cut50 and Families
Against Mandatory Minimums blanketed the Capitol with stories of
unfair sentences and impacted families.
Finally, the president took to Twitter with uncharacteristic positivity,
publicly urging Leader McConnell to put the First Step Act to a
vote: "Go for it, Mitch!" With local support clear, and with cover from
the Republican president, "go for it" he did. On December 11, 2018,
Holly Harris 35
Leader McConnell announced the First Step Act would go to a vote
in the Senate.68
For the first time in decades, we've turned away from the lockthem-
up-and-throw-away-the-key policies of the 1980s and 1990s,
specifically the 1994 Crime Bill. But the First Step Act is just the beginning;
there is much left to do.
Our jails and prisons remain overcrowded, and we are locking
away too many people for too long without the public safety return we
deserve. We should spend our resources more wisely, focusing on the
most dangerous crimes instead of locking people up for minor drug or
other nonviolent offenses. And currently, our criminal justice system
forever punishes those with criminal histories. We need to break down
barriers for the one in three American adults with a criminal record
who are trying to find jobs and rebuild their lives. The list goes on,
from reforming our bail system to slowing the staggering growth of
the population of incarcerated women.
Safely reducing incarceration is supported across the ideological
spectrum, but hailing from red state Kentucky, I was sold on the
conservative arguments. Reforms have proven to make our system
more efficient and effective, while lifting up opportunities for redemption
and lowering crime and recidivism rates. I am proud to see fellow
conservatives play a leading role at the federal, state, and local levels,
working alongside progressive leaders. Every single American family is
impacted by our broken justice system, and most believe that it needs
significant transformational change. Americans no longer believe a
prison cell is the only answer for people who make mistakes; nearly
90 percent of voters want the federal government and the states to
shift money toward alternatives to incarceration.69
It's time to put people over partisanship. We can build on the First
Step Act's success to win future victories in states across the country.
With ever-growing momentum for bipartisan reform, we urge leaders
across the country to be on the right side of history, and join us as we
offer second chances, and make our country safer.
37
10
Strengthen Resources for
Public Defenders and
Hold Prosecutors Accountable
Hon. Kamala Harris
United States Senator from California
The United States currently incarcerates more of its citizens
than any other nation in the world. The U.S. has five percent of
the world's population, but nearly 25 percent of its prisoners.70
These astounding figures have required us to acknowledge mass incarceration
and the events that lead to mass incarceration every day in
courtrooms across America.
As a prosecutor for most of my career, I know our legal system can
provide justice, particularly when we stand up for victims of murder,
rape, and other serious crimes. However, I also have seen the flaws
in the criminal justice system — especially in its ability to ensure that
defendants receive a fair trial and due process, as guaranteed by our
Constitution. I strongly believe we must institute transformative structural
changes to uphold these guarantees.
Traditionally, prosecutors have been rewarded for securing more
convictions and longer sentences, but we now understand this kind
of focus is harmful. Prosecutors should shift success measures to
more modern metrics, such as reducing unnecessary imprisonment,
reducing racial disparities, and lowering recidivism rates — moving
towards a culture of reducing mass incarceration. Lawmakers can
encourage this shift by using budgetary incentives to help reorient
38 Strengthen Resources for Public Defenders and Hold Prosecutors Accountable
prosecutorial practices. And while there are other mechanisms in
place to hold prosecutors accountable, much more can and should
be done — from collecting data on charging decisions and outcomes,
to ensuring that defense attorneys have greater access to a prosecutor's
case file.
However, prosecutors are only half of the adversarial equation.
Another important way to safeguard our system is to equip public
defenders with the resources they need to do their jobs well.
In 1963, the Supreme Court famously held in Gideon v. Wainwright
that state courts are required to provide counsel to criminal defendants
unable to pay for an attorney.71 But Gideon alone does not guarantee a
fair process for defendants who cannot afford a lawyer. The daily work
of upholding the rights of the accused falls on our public defenders.
And a truly fair process requires that defendants have lawyers who have
the funding and resources to challenge the prosecution.72
When I was a prosecutor, I knew that the public defender's office
— led by my friend the late Jeff Adachi — fought hard for funding
and resources. The same fight is being mounted by many other public
defenders' offices, and with good reason: only 21 percent of statebased
public defender offices are able to handle their caseloads with
attorneys working at recommended levels.73 For example, in Florida,
the annual felony caseload per attorney is 500.74 The typical public
defender in Colorado, Missouri, and Rhode Island carries two to three
times the recommended workload.75 In Louisiana, public defenders
have almost five times the recommended workload, which led one
federal judge to declare that "the state was failing miserably at upholding
its obligations under Gideon."76
Time and resource constraints discourage public defenders from
taking cases to trial. The vast majority of felony convictions are now the
result of plea bargains — by some estimates, as much as 94 percent at
the state level and 97 percent at the federal level.77 These statistics must
lead us to wonder whether a guilty plea is truly a result of evidence of
guilt or the lack of resources to mount a meaningful defense.
Finally, between housing, child care, and student loan debt, young
public defenders often have a hard time covering the cost of living and
get pulled to more lucrative jobs. In Deschutes County, Oregon, the
starting salary for a deputy district attorney is about 34 percent higher
than the starting salary for a public defender.78 Brooklyn Defender
Services conducted interviews and a focus group, and found that public
Hon. Kamala Harris 39
defenders wondered whether their jobs were compatible with reaching
financial stability and starting a family.79 That is simply unacceptable.
When the salaries of dedicated public defenders do not allow them to
cover the cost of living, they cannot do the job that their clients deserve
and our Constitution requires.
On the civil law side, we have made great strides in recognizing
that access to justice depends on access to counsel. However, the
constitutional right to counsel does not extend to civil cases related to
housing, health care, and domestic violence. In 1974, Congress established
the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) to provide legal assistance
to low-income Americans who face serious civil matters.80 Seventy
percent of LSC clients are women. Almost one-third of all cases
closed by LSC grantees are family law cases. Housing and foreclosure
cases make up the second largest category of cases closed.81 In 2018,
Congress appropriated $410 million for LSC.82 We celebrate this progress
on the civil side but must acknowledge that it makes the case for
improvement on the criminal side even more compelling.
When I was a law clerk in the Alameda County District Attorney's
Office, I saw the tremendous power of prosecutors and judges. With
the swipe of a pen, these individuals could make decisions about someone's
life and liberty.
But in our adversarial system, true justice requires balance. And we
cannot secure justice with such an extreme imbalance of resources. It
is not enough just to have a lawyer; defendants in criminal cases need
lawyers who have enough time, money, and resources to unearth all
of the facts and exculpatory evidence in their cases. They need lawyers
who can stand up in court, fully prepared to challenge the prosecution.
We can and must deliver on Gideon's promise.
41
11
The Conservative Case for
Reform: Equal Rights, Public
Safety, and Redemption
Mark Holden
Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary, Koch
Industries
Ever since I was young, I've been interested in fixing the criminal
justice system. I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts,
during the advent of the War on Drugs in the 1970s and '80s.
While working as a guard in a local prison to pay for college, I oversaw
many of my former classmates. I had my whole life ahead of me;
their lives were already ruined. A lack of education and resources, little
family support, substance use disorders, poor decision-making, and an
absence of treatment programs all led them to deviance. Seeing how
our paths had so sharply diverged was definitely a "there but for the
grace of G-d go I" moment.
In 1995, I began my career at Koch Industries. I'm fortunate to still
be at Koch for many reasons, primarily for the chance to implement our
Chairman and CEO Charles Koch's vision of a free and more just society.
That requires removing barriers, like outdated and ineffective criminal
justice policies that prevent people from reaching their potential.
I strongly believe that criminal justice reform is a core conservative
issue. While the cost savings are often what attracts conservatives,
those who have come to the table have stayed for the salvation. I also
view the issue as one that can transcend politics and unite everyone —
42 The Conservative Case for Reform: Equal Rights, Public Safety, and Redemption
even those who share little else in common — toward a higher purpose.
At Koch, we view criminal justice reform from a moral, constitutional,
and fiscal perspective, with an eye toward equal rights, public
safety, and redemption.
The moral case is simple: we have a two-tiered justice system
where people with resources often receive better outcomes than those
who are less affluent. We criminalize poverty through an outdated
pretrial justice system that incarcerates people who aren't a public
safety threat but can't afford bail. Once saddled with a criminal record,
these people then face more than 40,000 collateral consequences
preventing them from ever obtaining jobs, housing, education, licenses,
loans, employment, and voting rights.83 To endlessly punish those who
have paid their debt to society is simply immoral.
From a constitutional perspective, almost half of the Bill of Rights
deals with criminal justice. The Founders witnessed abuses of justice
in their home countries and were warning that such overreach would
pose the greatest threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Finally, the fiscal case. More than a decade ago, Texas wisely
decided against spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a new prison.
Instead, the state embarked on a plan to keep out of prison certain
individuals who were not a threat to public safety, via specialty courts
and probation. And for those sentenced to prison, Texas created access
to rehabilitation programs that reduced recidivism by equipping incarcerated
individuals with the therapy and skills needed to succeed after
their eventual release.
To date, these reforms have saved the Lone Star State more than
$3 billion, led to the closing of several prisons, and reduced crime to
levels Texas hasn't experienced since the 1960s.84 This smart-on-crime,
soft-on-taxpayers approach became a model for dozens of other states
and for Washington, D.C., which passed the First Step Act late last year.
To build on last year's progress, here are four ideas that will help
our country take the next step on criminal justice reform:
We should revamp the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Through no fault
of its own, the Bureau of Prisons needs a makeover. First, it should be
renamed the Bureau of Corrections and Rehabilitation (BCR), a name
that reflects its objective. The goal of prison should be to correct illegal
behavior and rehabilitate people to keep them from reoffending.
Next, the bureau should be housed outside the Department of Justice.
With all due respect, the Department of Justice's mission isn't to rehaMark
Holden 43
bilitate people who commit crimes; it's to prosecute and put them in
prison, often for long periods of time. If we're serious about keeping
federal inmates from returning to prison, we should place BCR under
the supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services,
which is better suited to rehabilitate those in need.
We should reform collateral consequences. While there can, at
times, be reasons to block people with criminal records from certain
opportunities, we should eliminate one-size-fits-all prohibitions on
access to jobs, housing, loans, education, voting rights, and licenses.
Washington and the states should enact "clean slate" legislation (like
the law passed last year in Pennsylvania) that automatically provides
record clearing for eligible individuals who remain crime-free over a
specified period.85
We should reform asset forfeiture laws. Civil forfeiture violates
the Fourth and Fifth Amendments by allowing law enforcement to
seize and retain assets from citizens who haven't been charged with
a crime. It shifts the burden of proof from the government to individuals
whose property was (illegally) seized and requires individuals to
sue to get their property back. It's inconsistent with the proper role of
police in our society, increases tensions in communities, and creates
perverse incentives for law enforcement, who are often able to use the
proceeds to fund their activities.
We should honor the Sixth Amendment by requiring access to
effective counsel for anyone charged with a felony or misdemeanor.
States routinely prosecute defendants while failing to provide them
with effective counsel; where public defenders exist, they are overworked
and underfunded. As 80 percent of those accused require a
court-appointed lawyer, this is a serious constitutional crisis that must
be addressed.86 Until then, the government should not be allowed to
prosecute defendants who lack an effective advocate.
As we enter the 2020 election season, I hope that leaders and
lawmakers across the political spectrum embrace the cause of justice
reform. Last year, we achieved an incredible victory with passage of the
First Step Act, the biggest justice reform in a generation, spearheaded
by both Republicans and Democrats. I look forward to the victories
that lie ahead.
45
12
Recognize Black Humanity
Sherrilyn Ifill
President and Director-Counsel
Jin Hee Lee
Senior Deputy Director of Litigation
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
"In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay
ourselves the highest tribute."87 The late Supreme Court Justice
Thurgood Marshall — the first African American member of
the United States Supreme Court and the founder of our organization,
the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) —
penned these words in his condemnation of the death penalty. But
they apply equally to what is, at heart, the solution to mass incarceration:
embracing and elevating the humanity of those subject to the
criminal justice system.
There are approximately 2.2 million people in American prisons
and jails — a nearly 500 percent increase in 40 years. More than 60
percent of the incarcerated population are people of color, with the
Black community bearing the greatest burden. Black men are six times
more likely than white men to be incarcerated, and among Black men
in their thirties, one in 12 is in prison or jail at any given moment. One
in three Black men born since 2001 will likely be incarcerated at some
point in his life.88
This mass incarceration of Black people is not a product of chance.
Rather, it is the inevitable outcome of our national legacy of dehumanizing
Black communities since the arrival of the first Africans in bondage.
This dehumanization did not end with emancipation, however, but
46 Recognize Black Humanity
continued with convict-leasing that substituted prison labor for slave
labor, Black codes that criminalized the movement and presence of
Black people as "vagrancy" or "loitering," Jim Crow laws that delineated
all aspects of social life along racial lines, the racial terror of lynchings
that evolved into the modern-day death penalty, and now the mass
incarceration of generations of Black families.89
The dehumanization inherent in mass incarceration must be
viewed in the context of other forms of dehumanization experienced by
Black families. The number of racially segregated schools has doubled
in the past 20 years, and Black children are disproportionately subject
to excessive school discipline, thus feeding the school-to-prison pipeline.
90 Discriminatory barriers to employment opportunities, credit
access, and affordable housing prevent Black families from achieving
financial security or, in many instances, the ability to sustain a livelihood.
After the Supreme Court's decision invalidating a key provision
of the Voting Rights Act, people of color face new obstacles — like
extreme, racially targeted photo-ID laws — to exercise their hard-won
right to vote.91 And the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement put a
public spotlight on a reality known to Black communities for generations:
that the police, sworn to protect and serve, can at times be a
source of fear and violence.
In essence, the dehumanization of Black men, women, and children
renders Black people unable to effectively exercise the rights of
full citizens. Entrenched, structural racial discrimination persistently
disadvantages Black families and communities. This is even more acute
for formerly incarcerated people, who are often stripped of their right
to vote and deemed ineligible for many educational, employment, and
housing opportunities due solely to their conviction. With the cards so
inequitably stacked, Black people who are formerly incarcerated are
often set up for a life sentence of marginalization and subordination.
In the face of this reality, it is naive to believe that legislation like
the First Step Act, which was signed by President Trump in late 2018,
will solve the problem of mass incarceration. While LDF supported
its enactment, we viewed it for what it was named: the first of many
necessary steps to achieve reform. But to truly end mass incarceration,
our government policies must affirm and protect all aspects of
Black people's humanity. In this regard, the Trump administration has
failed miserably and shockingly. Indeed, the Trump administration has
repeatedly taken actions that are at odds with recognizing the humanSherrilyn
Ifill and Jin Hee Lee 47
ity of people — especially people of color — trapped within the injustices
of the criminal justice system.
President Trump publicly supports the execution of drug traffickers,
even praising similar comments by President Rodrigo Duterte of
the Philippines, who is accused of serious human rights violations in
his crusade against drug crimes. In just his second month in office,
President Trump resumed reliance on private prisons despite evidence
that they do not meet federal standards for safety and accountability.
President Trump's Department of Justice also rescinded the "Smart on
Crime" initiative, reverting to the now widely criticized practice of seeking
the most severe sentence possible for even low-level, nonviolent
offenses. The Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services no longer conducts investigations and public reporting
of systemic problems within state and local police departments; in fact,
upon his departure as attorney general, Jeff Sessions issued a memorandum
curtailing the use of consent decrees to remedy systemic constitutional
violations perpetrated by police. And the Departments of Justice
and Education rescinded their joint guidance that had helped schools
and school districts eliminate racial disparities in school discipline and
ensure that no student is discriminated against on the basis of race.
Through both words and actions, the current administration not
only has failed to affirm the humanity of Black people but in fact has
actively worked against it. In promoting policies that criminalize adults
and children of color, the administration continues the well-trodden
path of funneling them into an unjust criminal justice system. In failing
to protect people of color from the abuses of law enforcement
agencies and prison systems, the administration signals an appalling
disregard for their welfare.
Ending mass incarceration requires a full commitment to embracing
the humanity of those most at risk within the criminal justice
system. The Trump administration has utterly failed in that regard.
Any real attempt to substantially reform our criminal justice
system requires an administration at the federal level that is committed
to more than cosmetic changes and marginal investments. It requires
an administration that stands ready to offer meaningful incentives to
state and local law governments to adopt transformative policies and
practices.
True reform also requires fundamental shifts in our national narratives
about criminality and about the humanity of Black families and
48 Recognize Black Humanity
communities. Words matter, and how we talk and think about the
integrity and citizenship of Black people will continue to shape our
approach to mass incarceration.
We cannot count on current leadership in Washington, D.C. to
shift this narrative. Instead, it will require the ongoing and unrelenting
demand of Black people in communities around this country, whose
willingness to openly and aggressively challenge mass incarceration
sparked the reform moment, and whose voices will continue to play a
critical role in its progress.
49
13
Cut 50 Percent of
the Prison Population
Van Jones
Cofounder, #cut50
CEO, REFORM Alliance
With the Iowa Caucuses on the horizon, reporters and
candidates are already hard at work learning everything
they can about the state. A tragic fact that they'll uncover is
that African Americans represent just under four percent of the state's
inhabitants but 25 percent of its prison population.92 Iowa's example is
not unique: our justice system disproportionately arrests, prosecutes,
and imprisons African Americans across the country, tearing families
apart and perpetuating the ugly legacy of racism.
There is no easy solution to this crisis. But candidates vying for the
presidency, and the current incumbent, must confront it head-on —
not with platitudes, but with ambitious plans to attack the root causes
of injustice in America. By offering a plan to turn solutions into reality,
candidates can show that they won't shrink from big problems and
that they understand the facts about race in America.
Those facts still stagger. More than 50 years after the end of legal
segregation, massive disparities still separate whites from African
Americans. The average white family holds roughly seven times more
wealth than the average black family.93 And African Americans are
incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites.94 These facts are
almost certainly related: black unemployment has always been high
compared to the rest of the country but after taking into account incar50
Cut 50 Percent of the Prison Population
ceration, the unemployment rate for black men is triple the rate of
white men.95 The racial wealth gap — and the racial prison gap — are
part of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and a testament to our long
history of denying basic dignity to people with darker-colored skin.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans and Democrats divide sharply over
how to address the entrenched racism in our policies and our culture.
But this past year showed that criminal justice reform is a rare piece
of common ground, making it a promising place to begin repairing the
broken bonds between us.
That's one of the reasons I spent the past five years building
#cut50, a bipartisan initiative to cut crime and the incarcerated
population in half. When I started #cut50, I knew that liberals,
conservatives, and everyone in between were disturbed by the crisis
of over-incarceration. And I believed that this consensus could be
turned into an alliance, and then a coalition, some legislation, and
eventually new laws that would put us on a better path. Many doubted
this course — and sometimes I doubted myself — but last year we
succeeded, together. The First Step Act, which will reduce the federal
prison population and help people return home to their families and
communities job-ready, was passed on a massive, bipartisan vote
through both chambers of the U.S. Congress and signed into law.
But the act's title is no joke. Everyone involved knew we couldn't fix
everything wrong about our criminal justice system in a single day.
That's why it's time to start talking about bigger, bolder second
steps that get us closer to fulfilling the promise in #cut50's name — a
50 percent reduction in incarceration nationwide.
If the federal government and every state adopted two simple policies
— ending the use of prison for lower-level crimes and shortening
sentences for others — we could reduce the number of people in prison
by more than 40 percent. That's more than 550,000 people who could
be freed from prison safely, returning to their families and communities
to live productive lives.96 Some critics assume there's not a way to do
this safely. But research from the Brennan Center and others shows
that, if done right, this can be done without any risk to public safety.
These solutions mean connecting people who suffer from
substance abuse disorders with treatment — rather than incarcerating
them and separating them from their support networks. People of
all colors know all too well the pain of addiction and the slippery slope
from addiction to crime to imprisonment. Anyone who has experiVan
Jones 51
enced the pain of watching a loved one suffer through this knows that
prison does not help. We can truly save lives with a better approach.97
That's a legacy worthy of any leader.
We should also add compassion and individual understanding
back into the criminal justice system. That means getting rid of mandatory
minimum sentences. The laws behind these sentences handcuff
judges and require them to impose cookie-cutter punishments regardless
of the circumstances of the crime or the individual. Mandatory
minimums started as a way to reduce racial disparities in sentencing
— but as we all know by now, they've done just the opposite. We should
recognize this set of laws as the failed experiment it is.
Finally, we should build more exit ramps to help people leave the
criminal justice system. Last year, President Trump commuted the
sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a great-grandmother serving decades
in prison for a drug offense.98 There are thousands of people like her
still in prison, and they shouldn't have to wait for a pardon. To help
them, we should restore federal parole — providing a way for people
to leave prison when they're ready, not after some arbitrary period of
time. We should also cap the amount of time someone has to spend
in prison before their first parole hearing. Pairing these changes with
sentencing reforms would dramatically shorten the time people spend
behind bars unnecessarily. It would add humanity back into the justice
system. The same caps should also be placed on probation, parole,
and other forms of supervision. These supervisory sentences often
become another shackle or a trapdoor to failure — instead, we should
offer springboards to success.
Mass incarceration has devastated our communities, torn apart
families, and ruined too many lives. Though this system is simply too
interconnected and complex to fix in one fell swoop, if we continue
working to change hearts and minds, we can build the next steps that
accomplish even more for our communities. Here too, we'll find more
friends than enemies willing to help along the way.
53
14
Provide Treatment
for Addiction
Hon. Amy Klobuchar
United States Senator from Minnesota
It has become increasingly clear that there are two systems of
justice in America — one built for crimes committed in the boardroom
and another for crimes on the street corner. That has to
change.
Just look at Paul Manafort, who was initially sentenced to just
under four years in prison — well short of the sentencing guidelines
for his numerous felonies — by a district court judge in Alexandria,
Virginia. Many wonder whether offenders on the opposite end of the
socioeconomic spectrum would have been given the same leniency.
That's not justice.
I headed the largest prosecutor's office in Minnesota for eight
years. My team adhered to one very important principle: we were
ministers of justice. Our job was to convict the guilty and protect the
innocent. Today the scales of justice are off-kilter. It's up to us, the policymakers
and decision makers, to change that.
We need a criminal justice system that works for everyone and
ensures the fair administration of justice while also keeping our
communities safe.
We took an important first step with the passage of the aptly
named First Step Act, bringing important reforms to federal prisons
and making needed changes to our sentencing laws. The legislation
is just a beginning, and we have more work to do.
54 Provide Treatment for Addiction
The concept is this: for nonviolent, low-level drug offenders,
there are more effective and innovative solutions than long prison
sentences. Why? People are capable of change, and many deserve a
second chance.
My family knows the power of second chances. I am the daughter
of an alcoholic, and after a number of DWIs, my dad was finally
required to take part in treatment and changed his life. In his own
words, he was "pursued by grace." As a country, we need a criminal
justice system that allows more people to be pursued by grace.
One way to do that is to address one of the underlying causes of
rearrest and recidivism: addiction. One of the most important lessons
I learned as Hennepin County Attorney is that you can't break the cycle
of drug abuse and destructive behavior just by locking a person up.
We need smart solutions that drive people toward treatment and
recovery rather than an endless cycle of arrest and incarceration. That's
why, as both a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a prosecutor,
I have fought to expand funding for and access to drug courts.
Drug courts — which divert nonviolent, substance-abusing offenders
from prison and jail into supervised treatment — offer one of the
best opportunities to ensure that those struggling with addiction get
the help they need while preserving public safety. We know there is
racism in our criminal justice system, but these courts offer a lifeline
for all low-level drug offenders regardless of race, socioeconomic class,
gender, or politics. Studies have indicated that drug courts save money,
reduce recidivism, and give low-level, nonviolent drug offenders a
second chance at becoming productive members of society.
Minnesota took advantage of this model and established its first
drug court in the state's most populous county in 1996, shortly before
I became the Hennepin County Attorney. When I took over, I used to
say that my goal was to run our office like a business, with one significant
exception: we didn't want repeat customers.
During my tenure, we looked to alternatives to incarceration for
the mentally ill and serious substance abusers. We found that these
offenders did not typically meet the bar for court-ordered institutional
treatment but were in desperate need of additional treatment
options. As a result, the County Attorney's office worked with the
county to create programs that provide specialized supports for those
with mental illness and chemical dependency. In urban, suburban, and
rural areas, the state has now utilized specialty courts — including
Hon. Amy Klobuchar 55
drug, DWI, veterans, family dependency, juvenile, and hybrids — serving
more than 30 counties.
These courts work. According to a study by the National Association
of Drug Court Professionals, 75 percent of drug court graduates
had not been arrested again, compared with 30 percent of those
released from prison.99 They save money, too. The most comprehensive
study on drug courts to date concluded that they save an average
of $6,000 per person.100 In fact, every $1 invested in drug courts saves
more than $3 in criminal justice costs alone.101
Given the strong case for these courts, I have led a bipartisan group
of senators for the past several years in urging the Senate Appropriations
Committee to provide strong funding for drug courts and veterans'
treatment courts as part of the appropriations process. These
efforts have yielded results. Last year we funded drug courts at a record
level of $75 million, an increase of $32 million over the previous year.102
But to truly help close the revolving door of our nation's criminal
justice system, we also need to curb substance abuse on the front end.
The bipartisan Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA)
was signed into law in 2016 and encourages states and local communities
to pursue a full array of proven strategies in the fight against
addiction — including expanded access to treatment programs. We
now need to take a step further and pass CARA 2.0, which dedicates
$1 billion in resources to further support evidence-based prevention,
enforcement, treatment, and recovery programs.103
When I think about reforming our criminal justice system, I
remember when I was in high school and my dad convinced me to
spend a morning sitting in a courtroom watching a state court district
judge handle a routine calendar of criminal cases. In an essay about
that day, I wrote that "to be part of an imperfect system, to have a
chance to better that system was and is a cause worth fighting for."
We still have an imperfect system. But we must commit to bettering
the system, to being ministers of justice. That is a cause worth
fighting for.
57
15
The Trump Administration's
Commitment to Justice Reform
Jared Kushner
Senior Adviser to United States President Donald J. Trump
The U.S. criminal justice system faces many challenges,
including high recidivism rates, high financial and social costs to
the American taxpayer, overpopulated prisons across the country,
and overall reduced public safety. Additionally, the 1994 Crime Bill,
signed into law by President Bill Clinton, disproportionately impacted
communities of color and accelerated mass incarceration.104
Addressing these challenges requires significant reform. Last
year, President Trump and our administration determined we could no
longer maintain the status quo and took action. Drawing from successful
reforms in states across the nation, the administration worked
closely with Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate
Judiciary Committees to pass the First Step Act, which revitalizes our
criminal justice system to be tough on crime but also smart on crime.
The president's move shocked cynics, many of whom saw his election
as the end of any hope for criminal justice reform. But President
Trump believes our criminal justice system can be budget-smarter,
fairer, and can better protect public safety.
Our current high recidivism rates alone underscore the need
for change. Ultimately, 95 percent of state prisoners will one day be
released from prison.105 However, 77 percent of state inmates and
45 percent of federal inmates will be rearrested within five years.106
Inmates are learning to become better criminals rather than better
58 The Trump Administration's Commitment to Justice Reform
citizens. In federal prisons, an astonishing 27 percent of inmates are
first-time offenders.107 The current system succeeds at detention but
fails at rehabilitation and helping inmates become self-sufficient when
they reenter society. The United States has five percent of the world's
population, but its prison system holds nearly 25 percent of the world's
prison population.108 This is simply unsustainable.
The fiscal conservative case for reform is also strong. The country
pays a very high and unnecessary cost to fund the current system.
Additional damages associated with crime in the form of medical
costs, property loss, and loss of life impose an even greater burden on
American society. Maintaining a system that simply fills prisons across
the country is not acceptable. The objective must shift to lowering the
overall number of nonviolent inmates and, perhaps more important,
efficiently applying recidivism reduction programs to place them on a
pathway to success rather than a return trip to prison.
Recognizing the need for reform, states have worked to address
these problems. For example, Texas, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina,
and Mississippi have implemented policies that drastically improved
their prison systems, cut costs, and lowered crime rates significantly.109
These state successes demonstrate that appropriate legislative action
can indeed reform a broken system.
In designing the First Step Act, President Trump and congressional
leaders sought to draw from these examples. The legislation incentivizes
nonviolent and low-risk inmates to participate in evidence-based
recidivism reduction programs and earn time credits toward prerelease
custody. The First Step Act promotes programs to prepare inmates for
a productive life outside prison, such as vocational training, education
coursework, faith-based programs, mental health treatment, and drug
rehabilitation.110
The act also reforms mandatory minimums, similar to those from
the 1994 Crime Bill, which created racially discriminatory outcomes
and contributed to mass incarceration. The First Step Act achieved
sweeping bipartisan support and was endorsed by major law enforcement
organizations, civil rights groups, and conservative and faithbased
groups. It was the most substantial criminal justice reform
legislation passed in decades.
Moving forward, the Trump administration will continue its
commitment to criminal justice reform. We will work to fully implement
the First Step Act, ensuring it delivers in practice the reforms it
Jared Kushner 59
promises.111 Further, as indicated in the name of the legislation, this
bill is only the "first step" to reform. The administration also plans to
pursue additional reforms to better the system. Foremost, we will work
to provide and expand opportunities for former inmates to successfully
reenter society. One of the most important things we can do is
to create a great economy and work environment for all Americans,
including former prisoners. It is crucial that we help prisoners who are
motivated to live law-abiding lives contribute to society after they are
released. The administration will work fervently alongside business
leaders to promote fair-chance hiring for former inmates, an essential
element for successful reentry.
Few would have predicted that President Trump would be the
difference maker to finally deliver the long-sought reforms embodied
in the First Step Act. The fundamental values in this movement are
forgiveness and looking for the best potential in every person. These
values, along with our commitment to ensuring public safety, drive
President Trump and our administration in our efforts to reform the
criminal justice system. I am proud to work alongside the president,
reformers, and the formerly incarcerated in the fight for this crucial
cause. This historic success is a reminder to us all that fighting yields
less than reaching across the aisle to build trust and find common
ground. When the democratic process works the way it should, the
country wins.
61
16
Start by Ending the Failed
War on Drugs
Hon. Beto O'Rourke
Former United States Representative from Texas‡
Twenty-three years ago, I was arrested for jumping a fence at
the University of Texas at El Paso. I spent a night in the El Paso
County Jail, was able to make bail, and was released the next
day. Three years later, I was arrested for drunk driving — a far more
serious mistake for which there is no excuse.
My encounters with the criminal justice system did not ultimately
define me or stop me from contributing to my family and community —
as a father, small business owner, city council member, and congressman.
But that isn't the case for far too many of our fellow Americans,
particularly those who don't look like me or have the same privileges
that I did. Instead, too many people are languishing behind bars for
nonviolent crimes, often unconvicted and only there because they
cannot afford bail.112 This leaves them unable to work, pay taxes, raise
their kids, or contribute to our society.
They are part of the world's largest prison population.113 One
comprised disproportionately of people of color; built on prosecuting
‡ This essay draws from Mr. O'Rourke's opinion editorial published on August 27,
2018 in the Houston Chronicle, and can be found at https://www.houstonchronicle.
com/opinion/outlook/article/Beto-ORourke-Texas-criminal-justice-reformjail-
13181472.php. It is drawn upon here with the permission of the author and
notification to the Houston Chronicle.
62 Start by Ending the Failed War on Drugs
some communities for nonviolent drug offenses and not others, even
though people of all races use illegal drugs at roughly the same rate.114
A prison population perpetuated by a school-to-prison pipeline that
starts as early as kindergarten, where a black child is five times as likely
to be suspended or expelled as a white child.115
Many have called this the New Jim Crow, and for good reason. Our
criminal justice system is stained by the same prejudices embedded in
our history — that some people are less human, less equal than others.
If we are to end mass incarceration, we must squarely confront the
fact that every arm of the system is shaped by this legacy — from the
over-policing of black and brown neighborhoods, to a judicial process
marked by unequal resources, to prisons that set people up for failure
rather than productive reentry.116 What we're left with is a system that
grossly overincarcerates. Even by conservative estimates, at least 40
percent of the prison population could be released without compromising
public safety.117
Across the country, brave students, activists, and advocates are
laying bare this history and pointing the way forward. They continue
a proud American tradition, building on the struggles of abolitionists
and Freedom Riders, those who sat at the lunch counters in Greensboro
and those who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. They
remind us that our progress has been purchased not by politicians,
but by those who have forced the conversation and galvanized the
conscience of this country. Because of their efforts, I believe we have
the chance to rebuild our criminal justice system. Here is how we make
the most of this moment.
First, we must end a failed war on drugs that has long been a war
on people, waged on some more than others.118 Who is going to be the
last man — more likely than not a black man — to languish behind bars
for possessing marijuana when it is legal in some form in more than
half the states? We must end the federal prohibition on marijuana and
expunge the records of those who were locked away for possessing it.
As part of this effort, we must also stop using mandatory minimum
sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses — a practice that costs us
dearly in both shackled human potential and a federal prison budget
that has nearly doubled in the past two decades.119 Instead, we should
begin treating addiction like the public health concern it is.
Second, we should eliminate private, for-profit prisons. There is
no place in our society for a multibillion-dollar industry that profits
Hon. Beto O'Rourke 63
off human suffering — one that, compared to its public counterpart,
often costs more, pays employees less, provides less security, and fails
to maintain basic standards of care.120 We cannot outsource imprisonment
to corporations that have a perverse profit incentive to put more
people behind bars.
Third, we can disrupt the cycles of poverty that trap people in a
criminal justice system where they do not belong. On any given day,
nearly half a million people are in jail — many for misdemeanors —
because they cannot afford to post bail as I did more than 20 years
ago.121 Let's end the use of cash bail and provide states grants to replace
these systems. I also support decriminalizing truancy. States like Texas
have taken the first step by repealing laws that would allow children
to be prosecuted for truancy,122 but the $500 fines their parents face
still loom large in a system that disproportionately targets black and
brown students.
Fourth, we must ensure that all people are given an equal opportunity
to have their rights respected by our legal system. This means
reopening the federal Office of Access to Justice, launched to provide
greater resources for indigent litigants in civil, criminal, and tribal
courts.123 It means taking on prosecutorial and police misconduct with
a fully-staffed Department of Justice that can conduct investigations,
provide de-escalation trainings across police agencies, and institute
community-based review boards to ensure accountability and transparency.
And it means being vigilant about new mediums of bias, such
as facial recognition technology and algorithmic sentencing.
Finally, we should provide meaningful reentry reforms to help
reduce recidivism. That starts with strong rehabilitation services, counseling,
and access to preventative health care. It continues by banning
the box on job applications so the formerly incarcerated can work and
pay taxes, returning drivers licenses, allowing them to apply for loans
that can unlock skills trainings, and ensuring their constitutional right
to vote is protected.
At the end of the day, this is about ensuring that every single one
of us — regardless of race, ethnicity, or class — can live to our full
potential with equal rights and equal dignity. If we are willing to listen
to our fellow Americans and reckon with our history, we can build a
future that is more just, more fair, and more prosperous for every single
person. The time to act is now.
65
17
Reshape Public Perception
of Our Justice System
Rashad Robinson
President, Color Of Change
Most decarceration solutions presently considered bold by
the public should not be considered bold at all. Abolishing
prisons — that's bold. Legislating that judges and prosecutors
be held accountable for racial equity outcomes — that's bold.
But the changes we most immediately want implemented should
be perceived as common sense. It's the policies that got us here that
should be perceived as radically implausible and wildly unsustainable.
We need to do a much better job of popularizing an understanding
of the criminal justice system as mostly harmful and ineffective if we're
going to expect people to get on board with making major changes.
In reality, most legal mechanisms that drive mass incarceration
make as much sense as laws against gay people having sex or people
of different races getting married, or laws allowing forced child labor
or the beating of students by teachers. Yet too many people think of
our criminal justice system as having eliminated practices that are
senseless and unjust, rather than being defined by them.
It's long past time for lawmakers and government officials to catch
up to common sense and make our system just. Since most aren't, we
need to create the level of public demand that will compel them to.
End money bail. End prison labor. End the treatment of kids
and people with mental illness as if they are not kids or people with
mental illness. End prosecutions for no-harm offenses like standing on
66 Reshape Public Perception of Our Justice System
a street corner, playing music loudly, or smoking marijuana — so-called
offenses that "offend" the sensibilities of puritans and no one else and
are selectively applied to people of color. End the use of senselessly
severe sentences as the main criterion of prosecutor performance. End
harsher sentencing for people of color, routinely practiced by prosecutors
and judges. End the ability of any entity to profit from a role in
the system that produces unjust and ineffective outcomes. Overall,
don't put people in situations that make them worse and not better.
The practices above serve no purpose whatsoever, certainly not
public safety; science, budget analyses, history, and millions of people's
lives have proved that. Even lawmakers privately admit it. But most
people do not believe it. We should be focusing our criminal justice
system on the people who create unjust and unsustainable inequality,
not those trapped in it. Yet most people do not believe that, either.
It is no surprise to Black people, or anyone else who studies or is
targeted by it, that the criminal justice system we fund and promote
today produces more harm than justice. Destroys more than it builds.
Costs — in every sense — more than it yields. Makes communities
more vulnerable than safe. Yet the truth about the system remains
inconvenient to those who exploit it for gain. They work to keep misunderstandings
in place, keeping public support for the system's core
principles intact.
Television is helping them do it. The reality of the criminal justice
system is hidden from view in entertainment and local news television,
even as they communicate about the justice system more than anything
else in society, often speaking as the mouthpiece of law enforcement.
We cannot blame people for not caring about or not believing in
problems they do not see.
Deep cultural interventions focused on reshaping popular understandings
about the justice system en masse — in a way that makes
the status quo intolerable — may get us farther than traditional policy
advocacy, and get us there faster.
Specifically, radically changing the storytelling conventions of
crime procedurals, local news, reality television, and daytime talk —
the most far-reaching purveyors of misinformation (or any information)
about our criminal justice system — might bring about changes
we would not otherwise be able to achieve.
These shows are not analogous to Fox News denying climate
change. They are analogous to The Weather Channel denying climate
Rashad Robinson 67
change. Their propagation of bogus science, racist stereotypes, a
post-racial world, misinformation about human motivations and
punishment, lies about the manageability of experiencing the justice
system, and so much more, is truly off the charts. And genuine debate,
alternative practices, different perspectives, and models of accountability
are nowhere to be seen.
Many people learn to think and feel about the law, crime, and the
justice system — as well as all the people involved in it — by way of
these shows. They set the standard for what we expect from judges,
prosecutors, police, and others; what is right and necessary in terms
of punishment; and so many other attitudes and understandings, most
of which presently depress demand for reform.
The crime procedural genre, for example, represents a huge missed
opportunity. Unlike other genres — such as hospital dramas that may
help reorient public understandings of addiction — crime procedural
shows are not leading. They are following orders rather than reason
or justice.
There is actually a host of practice and policy changes that are
focused on these major influencers of public perception. One example
is tax incentives for diversifying the writers and directors who
make these highly popular shows, offered by the states in which
they are produced. We know that writers who are people of color
and women, and who have direct experiences to draw from, write
different storylines, different characters, and different assumptions
into their shows when representing what is just and unjust about the
system. They shape what we perceive as normal, and we need to make
decarceration normal.
We must make it a serious priority to hold major cultural outlets
accountable to standards of accuracy — eliminating dehumanizing
stereotypes about Black people and others, eliminating flat-out lies
about the system and its real-world effects, and incentivizing the
promotion of healthy, up-to-date, and accurate ideas that normalize
reform and help America become better and stronger. These shows
should be helping to drive society forward, not serving as a roadblock
by propagating the very kind of misinformation that stalls progress.
Without popular culture on our side, it will take much longer for the
major changes we need to feel intuitive and urgent among a winning
majority of people. And certain aspects of our vision for transforming
the justice system will remain a fiction.
69
18
Mass Incarceration
Is a Women's Issue
Topeka K. Sam
Founder and Executive Director, The Ladies of Hope Ministries
Formerly incarcerated women are the experts on transforming
the criminal legal system. We need to be. We are the ones
who are breaking new ground, telling our stories and translating
them into new policies and new laws. We believe that ending
the incarceration of women and girls opens the door to ending mass
incarceration.
Focusing on women and girls means looking at our homes and
communities and the harm that sexual and physical violence creates
and perpetuates — for both the people who have been harmed and
those who have caused harm. It means looking at how we have come
to rely on the police and, at the same time, how the police have become
an occupying force in Black and Brown communities. Focusing on how
women and girls are criminalized helps us understand how gender
roles constrain and limit everyone. And looking at how the state dehumanizes
incarcerated women, the majority of whom are Black and
Brown, reveals how Black and Brown women are treated by the state
in the "free world."
Between 1980 and 2016, the number of incarcerated women
increased by more than 700 percent. Incarcerated women cannot be
treated as an afterthought by the criminal legal system.124
The majority of women entrapped in the criminal legal system
have experienced zero-tolerance policies in school, been funneled
70 Mass Incarceration Is a Women's Issue
through the school-to-prison pipeline, and faced racism, misogyny,
domestic violence, sexual abuse, poverty, community violence, police
violence, and extreme policing. For girls and women, drugs and alcohol
are the limited and harmful alternatives available to manage the pain
of daily life. Their incarceration often exacerbates past violence and
trauma, both physical and emotional. Incarcerated women are shackled
during labor and childbirth, face sexual assault and coercion by
guards, undergo voyeuristic and invasive strip searches, and are given
only limited access to sanitary products, appropriate gynecological
care, and more.125
Almost every formerly incarcerated person experiences huge challenges
upon release from jail and prison, but formerly incarcerated
women face additional challenges. We are more likely to be homeless
than formerly incarcerated men. Add to this that the median wealth
of a Black woman prior to incarceration is only $200.126
Women face the additional unique challenges of healing from
separation from their children, often for many years; the bureaucratic
and legal challenges of reunification with their children; lack of support
from a former partner; fewer opportunities for work that pays a living
wage, in part due to the lack of relevant job training while incarcerated;
and the greater societal stigma criminalized women are burdened with.
While dealing with all these challenges, many formerly incarcerated
women are working their way through the probation and parole
systems. There are 113,200 women on parole and 947,400 women
on probation, far more than the number of women incarcerated. 127
While decarceration through probation and parole can release women
months or years earlier than their full sentence, it comes with serious
burdens: at-will intrusions into home and work life by a parole or
probation officer, privatized day reporting, enormous privatized "halfway
houses," and the huge increase of privatized electronic monitoring
("e-carceration"). Parole, probation, and e-carceration also come
with high fees and the potential for even higher fines. Long parole
and probation can lead to greater vulnerability to being caught in the
revolving door of incarceration. They also lead to greater law enforcement
intrusion and surveillance of poor communities and communities
of color already caught in the wide net of policing.
To help with these challenges, I created Hope House, a safe housing
space for women, based on my experience and the experiences
of many other formerly incarcerated women. I know how crucial it is
Topeka K. Sam 71
to have a home that meets the basic needs of food and shelter and
provides a safe and loving environment to become economically
empowered and improve physical and mental health. Hope House is
a place to heal from the trauma that landed women in prison and the
trauma of prison.
My experience on federal "parole" — supervised release at the
federal level — also led me to create the Parole and Probation Accountability
Project. We work to challenge and change the parole and probation
systems, which can deny basic human rights to the people they
serve.§ Through the Parole and Probation Accountability Project,
lawmakers, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, probation and parole officers,
and the public are learning how these seemingly positive systems
control the lives of women and their families at every moment.
But there's much more that needs to be done. In the immediate
term, we must end money bail. Most women in jail are there only
because they can't afford their bail. Their unnecessary incarceration
causes a tidal wave of negative consequences including loss of housing,
jobs, and even custody of their children. Parole and probation must
be drastically curtailed, and fees and fines must be eliminated. Electronic
monitoring should be used only in the rarest of circumstances.
Community-based, community-run alternatives to incarceration —
especially for primary caretakers of dependent children — must be
instituted in every court in the country.
Other steps to end mass incarceration will take longer, but we
don't have to wait to begin these reforms. They include using jail and
prison only for people who commit the most serious crimes. Research
shows that nearly 40 percent of our prison population could be safely
released by providing alternatives and treatment for people convicted
of lower-level crimes and by reducing extreme sentences.128 We should
invest the billions we will save in health and mental health care and
treatment on demand for people with substance use disorders. And
for those few people we incarcerate, prisons must be places of rehabilitation,
not sources of more trauma and pain. We need to demilitarize
and limit the police and invest some of the $100 billion a year we
§ To help incarcerated individuals and those directly impacted by incarceration
better understand the workings and consequences of probation and parole, Hope
House published the first of five Know Your Rights Guides. It is available at http://
www.thelohm.org/the-parole-and-probation-accountability-pro.
72 Mass Incarceration Is a Women's Issue
currently spend on policing in quality education, child care, job training
for the 21st century, and affordable, quality housing.129
We must end mass incarceration and end the mass criminalization
of poverty and people of color. Investing in women and girls is the best
next step. As the 2020 election approaches, I encourage our lawmakers
and presidential candidates to take on this critical challenge.
73
19
Abolish For-Profit Prisons
Hon. Bernie Sanders
United States Senator from Vermont
The United States imprisons more people than any other
country on earth. Year after year, we continue to exceed every
nation — including authoritarian governments like China,
Russia, North Korea, and Iran — for the highest incarceration rate in
the world.130 And we will never be able to end mass incarceration until
we ban private prisons and make it clear that our justice system exists
to rehabilitate people, not to make money for corporations.
It is no secret that racial disparities are deeply ingrained in our
criminal justice system. In comparison to just one in 17 white men, as
many as one in three black men and one in six Latino men are likely
to be incarcerated at least once in their lives.131 Since we began the
so-called War on Drugs, imprisonment rates in the United States have
skyrocketed, exacerbated in part by sentencing laws aimed at locking
up men of color. And we are just now starting to reckon with and undo
the legacy of the "tough on crime" 1980s and 1990s. Imprisonment
rates in the United States have increased by a dramatic 700 percent
since 1970 due to draconian sentencing policies, causing unnecessarily
overcrowded prisons across the nation.132 Rather than reduce overcrowding
by amending sentencing laws, federal and state governments
decided to contract with private prisons.
The two largest companies in the for-profit prison industry,
CoreCivic and GEO Group, own the lion's share of private prisons
in America — and they are growing off the backs of the current
administration's appalling immigration policies. During fiscal year
74 Abolish For-Profit Prisons
2017, the vast majority of immigrant detainees were held in private
facilities.133
Any system that continues to keep human beings behind bars and
in prison beds as a revenue stream is a system that must be drastically
overhauled. Private prisons have a greater interest in filling the pockets
of their shareholders by perpetuating imprisonment than they do
in spending money to rehabilitate and educate.
Financial motives have corrupted our justice system. Perverse
incentives fuel the unnecessary caging of our fellow human beings
at every step. Along with the private prison industry, these incentives
range from our money bail system exploiting and jailing the poor while
it frees the rich, to police officers being rewarded based on number
of arrests, to prosecutors getting promoted for securing convictions
and harsh prison sentences, to billions in federal grants going to states
and cities running on autopilot to drive more arrests, convictions, and
prison sentences.
There are many ways we must go forward to fix our criminal
justice system: abolishing cash bail and civil asset forfeiture, ending
the school-to-prison pipeline, and making it easier for formerly incarcerated
people to reintegrate into society, for starters. But we absolutely
must end the existence of the private for-profit prison industry.
To keep costs down, for-profit prisons pick and choose prisoners
who require fewer services. Despite their claims, they do not lower
recidivism rates — in fact, it's in their interest to keep their beds full
because they earn more money that way. Several years back, the inspector
general for the Department of Justice found that private prisons
allow a greater number of safety and security incidents.134
These findings are no surprise given the private prison industry's
racist roots in American chattel slavery. Prison privatization expanded
rapidly when the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery but continued
to permit unpaid penal labor, was ratified during the aftermath of
the Civil War. Due to an extreme shortage of labor caused by the emancipation
of slaves, former Confederate states exploited the legalization
of penal labor by incarcerating newly freed black people.
States imprisoned black people mainly by enacting unjust vagrancy
laws, essentially making it a crime to be unemployed and poor. In
many regards, black people were suppressed into the same inhumane
and backbreaking plantation work they had previously done while in
chains and shackles.
Hon. Bernie Sanders 75
In the decades after the Civil War, state-operated prisons reaped
extreme profits from the free labor of black people, and as prison rates
increased over decades, an incentive developed for private prisons to
enter this barbaric market. Our criminal justice system must make
amends with this grim and racist past.
In 2016, the Obama administration took a strong step in the right
direction by announcing a plan for the federal government to wean
itself from its reliance on private prisons. It should astonish nobody
that President Trump's Department of Justice rescinded the 2016 plan
by the Obama Administration to phase out private prisons. In just a
single month after President Trump assumed office, the stock of GEO
Group increased 98 percent, and CoreCivic increased 140 percent.135
This reprehensible reversal comes as our incarceration system faces
mounting problems like the aging of already outdated facilities and a
maturing inmate population. We cannot rely on the industrial complex
of the private prison system to address these challenges in good faith.
The federal government must take several immediate steps to
abolish the for-profit prison industry. Initial actions should include
barring federal, state, and local government contracts with private entities
that operate prison and custody facilities, ending family detention
by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and ensuring the
humane treatment of detainees by implementing third-party audits
of detention centers. I have previously introduced legislation, called
the Justice Is Not for Sale Act, which would accomplish all of these
urgent steps.
But while we must take these steps to end the private for-profit
prison industry, we must also address the harder, core problem of mass
incarceration and greatly reducing the prison population. And that is
why simultaneously reinstating the federal parole system while abolishing
all mandatory minimums is also necessary. By doing this, we
will provide a real incentive for prisoners to engage in good behavior
and get out of prison sooner.
The bottom line here is that we need major reforms in our criminal
justice system. Making sure that corporations are not profiteering
from incarceration is an important step forward. Justice cannot be a
board game for billionaires.
77
20
End the Two-Tiered System
of Justice
Hon. Elizabeth Warren
United States Senator from Massachusetts
Four words are etched above the doors to the Supreme Court:
"Equal Justice Under Law." That simple principle should be the
foundation of our criminal justice system. But the hard truth
is that America has two separate and very unequal justice systems.
The first is a justice system exclusively for the wealthy and the well
connected. For decades, Washington has let powerful corporate
executives escape accountability, even when they scam millions of
Americans or crash the U.S. economy. If prosecutors go after these
corporations at all, they recover puny fines and get pinkie promises
not to break the law again — deterring no one and leaving American
families at risk for the next hit.
Take the 2008 financial crisis, when brazen risk-taking and illegal
behavior robbed millions of Americans of their homes, their jobs, and
their savings. It cost the American economy $23 trillion.136 A decade
later, not a single big bank CEO has gone to jail, and prosecutors have
become even more lenient on corporate criminals. My office recently
released a new report highlighting that white-collar crime enforcement
activity has hit a 20-year low since President Trump took office.137
The second criminal justice system — the system for everyone else
— looks very different. In that system, "tough on crime" is the catchphrase
of choice. Low-income individuals end up with criminal records
or jail time because they can't afford bail or hefty fines and fees. Young
78 End the Two-Tiered System of Justice
people who commit low-level, nonviolent crimes spend too many years
behind bars. Struggling parents, domestic violence survivors, opioid
users, and individuals with mental illness are hauled off to jail without
treatment or assistance. And after they return to their communities,
too many former inmates are locked out of jobs, housing, and any
chance to rebuild their lives and support their families.
That second criminal justice system disproportionately targets
and punishes black and brown Americans. African Americans account
for only 12 percent of adults in the United States, but they make up 33
percent of the incarcerated population.138 And the data show that for
exactly the same crimes, black people are more likely to be arrested,
prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced more harshly than
their white counterparts.139
Terri Minor Spencer experienced that second criminal justice
system up close and personal. At age 29, Terri was arrested and charged
with possession of and conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. Due to
mandatory minimums and discriminatory sentencing requirements
that treated offenses involving crack cocaine more harshly than
offenses involving powder cocaine, Terri was facing a life sentence if
convicted. Instead, she accepted a plea deal that landed her a 13-year
prison sentence.
Over the course of the next 13 years, Terri was placed in facilities
hundreds of miles from her home and family. She says she got to see
her family only once while she was incarcerated. She didn't get to see
her daughter grow up, and she missed the births of her grandchildren.
Since her release, Terri says she has dedicated her life to saving
others from what she went through. She founded a nonprofit group,
got involved with her church, and began volunteering in her community.
She even ran for local office — and won.
Terri survived our deeply rigged criminal justice system, but there
are far too many people just like Terri sitting in state and federal prisons
today. The dream of equal justice will become a reality only if we
reform our criminal justice system, top to bottom.
Start by holding corporate criminals accountable. Last year, on
the 10th anniversary of the collapse of Bear Stearns, which kicked off
the financial crisis, I introduced the Ending Too Big to Jail Act, a bill
that would make it easier to bring criminal charges against bank executives
whose organizations defraud consumers. In April, I introduced
the Corporate Executive Accountability Act, legislation that would
Hon. Elizabeth Warren 79
make executives of big corporations criminally liable if their companies
commit crimes, harm large numbers of people through civil violations,
or commit a new violation while under the supervision of the court
or a regulator for a previous violation. We should pass these bills, and
more like them.
Getting serious about corporate crime is only one part of the solution.
It's also time to change the way our criminal justice system treats
those without money and power. Last year Congress passed the First
Step Act, a bipartisan prison and sentencing reform bill that includes
many of the reforms I've championed, like banning the practice of
shackling pregnant prisoners, requiring federal prisons to provide feminine
hygiene products for free, and taking steps to keep moms like Terri
closer to their families.
As important as these steps are, there's so much more to do. We
can start by ending mandatory minimums for individuals — the cruel
sentencing requirements that could have caused Terri to be sent to
jail for life.
We also need to end the practice of jailing people because they
can't afford bail or other fines and fees. We should legalize marijuana
and wipe clean the records of those who have been unjustly jailed for
minor marijuana crimes; end private prisons and the profit incentives
that pervert the goal of our justice system; provide more help for people
struggling with domestic abuse, substance use disorders, and mental
illness; and end the practice of branding the formerly incarcerated
with a scarlet letter that closes doors to education, employment, and
opportunity.
Reforming our criminal justice system won't be easy. It will require
fighting for a comprehensive group of proposals that will reorient our
criminal justice system toward meaningful change. Yes, it will be a
tough fight, but it is the moral obligation of every lawmaker to commit
to building a justice system that lives up to those four simple words
written above the door to the Supreme Court.
81
Endnotes
Waldman (Foreword)
1 Michelle Ye Hee Lee, "Does the United States Really Have 5 Percent of the
World's Population and One Quarter of the World's Prisoners?," Washington
Post, April 30, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/
wp/2015/04/30/does-the-united-states-really-have-five-percent-of-worldspopulation-
and-one-quarter-of-the-worlds-prisoners/.
2 "Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1,
2018," U.S. Census Bureau, December 2018, https://factfinder.census.
gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=PEP_2018_
PEPANNRES&prodType=table.
3 The Sentencing Project, "Americans with Criminal Records," 2015, https://
www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Americans-with-
Criminal-Records-Poverty-and-Opportunity-Profile.pdf.
4 Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Perspectives on Incarceration and
the Criminal Justice System, Executive Office of the President of the United States,
2016, 43, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/
files/20160423_cea_incarceration_criminal_justice.pdf; "At $75,560, Housing
a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard," Los Angeles
Times, June 4, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-prison-costs-
20170604-htmlstory.html.
5 Leah Sakala and Nicole D. Porter, "Criminal Justice Reform Doesn't End
System's Racial Bias," USA Today, December 12, 2018, https://www.usatoday.
com/story/opinion/policing/politics-policing/2018/12/12/racial-injusticecriminal-
justice-reform-racism-prison/2094674002/. See also Jessica
Eaglin and Danyelle Solomon, Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Jail:
Recommendations for Local Practice, Brennan Center for Justice, 2015, 17, 20,
http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Racial%20
Disparities%20Report%20062515.pdf; United States Sentencing Commission,
Demographic Differences in Sentencing: An Update to the 2012 Booker Report,
2017, 2, https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/
research-publications/2017/20171114_Demographics.pdf.
82 Ending Mass Incarceration: Ideas from Today's Leaders
6 The Sentencing Project, The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity
in State Prisons, 2016, 3, https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/
uploads/2016/06/The-Color-of-Justice-Racial-and-Ethnic-Disparity-in-State-
Prisons.pdf; John Gramlich, "The Gap Between the Number of Blacks and Whites
in Prison Is Shrinking," Pew Research Center, January 12, 2018, https://www.
pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/12/shrinking-gap-between-number-ofblacks-
and-whites-in-prison/.
7 James Austin and Lauren-Brooke Eisen, How Many Americans Are
Unnecessarily Incarcerated?, Brennan Center for Justice, 2016, 5, https://
www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Unnecessarily_
Incarcerated_0.pdf; Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn, eds., The
Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences,
National Research Council (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press,
2014), 138; Steven Raphael and Michael A. Stoll, A New Approach to Reducing
Incarceration While Maintaining Low Rates of Crime, The Hamilton Project
(Brookings Institution), 2014, 9, http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/legacy/
files/downloads_and_links/v5_THP_RaphaelStoll_DiscPaper.pdf. See also
Oliver Roeder, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Julia Bowling, What Caused the Crime
Decline?, Brennan Center for Justice, 2015, 7-8, https://www.brennancenter.org/
publication/what-caused-crime-decline.
8 Austin and Eisen, How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?, 5.
9 Senate Committee on the Judiciary, "Poll Shows Americans Overwhelmingly
Support Prison, Sentencing Reforms: Majority of Republicans, Democrats
& Independents Approve of Reforms Before Congress," August 23, 2018,
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/poll-shows-americansoverwhelmingly-
support-prison-sentencing-reforms. See also Lydia Wheeler, "Poll:
3/4 of Americans Support Criminal Justice Reform," The Hill, January 25, 2018,
https://thehill.com/regulation/370692-poll-3-4-of-americans-support-criminaljustice-
reform.
Johnson (Foreword)
10 NAACP, "Criminal Justice Fact Sheet," https://www.naacp.org/criminaljustice-
fact-sheet/.
11 Ibid.
Obama (Quote)
12 Barack H. Obama, "The President's Role in Advancing Criminal Justice
Reform," Harvard Law Review 130 (2017): 812, 815, https://harvardlawreview.
org/2017/01/the-presidents-role-in-advancing-criminal-justice-reform/.
Booker: Pass the Next Step Act
13 Lee, "Does the United States Really Have 5 Percent of the World's Population
and One Quarter of the World's Prisoners?" Washington Post.
Endnotes 83
14 Ibid.; Equal Justice Initiative, "Private Prison Population Skyrockets," August
8, 2018, https://eji.org/news/private-prison-population-skyrockets.
15 Jonathan Rothwell, "How the War on Drugs Damages Black Social Mobility,"
Brookings Institution, September 30, 2014, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/
social-mobility-memos/2014/09/30/how-the-war-on-drugs-damages-blacksocial-
mobility/.
16 Sonja B. Starr and M. Marit Rehavi, "Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal
Sentences," Journal of Political Economy 122 (2014): 1323, https://repository.law.
umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2413&context=articles.
17 Jean Chung, "Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer," The Sentencing
Project, July 17, 2018, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/felonydisenfranchisement-
a-primer/.
Brown: Provide Fair Wages for All
18 Devah Pager, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," American Journal of Sociology 108
(2003): 960, https://scholar.harvard.edu/pager/publications/mark-criminal-record.
19 Adam Looney and Nicholas Turner, Work and opportunity before and after
incarceration, The Brookings Institution, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/wpcontent/
uploads/2018/03/es_20180314_looneyincarceration_final.pdf; U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development
and Research, "Neighborhoods and Violent Crime," 2016, https://www.huduser.
gov/portal/periodicals/em/summer16/highlight2.html.
20 Rudolph Alexander, Jr., "The Impact of Poverty on African American Children
in the Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice Systems," Forum on Public Policy 2010
(2010): 14, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ913052.pdf; Anna Aizer and Joseph
J. Doyle, "Juvenile Incarceration, Human Capital and Future Crime: Evidence from
Randomly-Assigned Judges," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 130 (2015),
abstract, https://www.nber.org/papers/w19102.pdf.
21 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Other America" (speech, Local 1199 Salute to
Freedom, New York, NY, March 10, 1968).
22 David Cooper, Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would lift pay
for nearly 40 million workers, Economic Policy Institute, 2019, 2, https://www.epi.
org/files/pdf/160909.pdf.
Castro: Provide Fair Housing to Advance Justice Reform
23 Vera Institute of Justice, "Research Confirms that Entrenched Racism
Manifests in Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in Criminal Justice System,"
news release, May 3, 2018, https://www.vera.org/newsroom/press-releases/
research-confirms-that-entrenched-racism-manifests-in-disparate-treatment-ofblack-
americans-in-criminal-justice-system.
24 Lucius Couloute, Nowhere to Go: Homelessness Among Formerly
Incarcerated People, Prison Policy Initiative, 2018, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/
reports/housing.html.
84
25 Ibid.
26 Texas Dep't of Hous. & Cmty. Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., 576
U.S. ___, 135 S. Ct. 2507, 2526, 192 L. Ed. 2d 514 (2015).
27 Lee, "Does the United States Really Have 5 Percent of the World's Population
and One Quarter of the World's Prisoners?" Washington Post.
Chettiar and Raghavan: Dramatically Reduce the Incarcerated
Population
28 U.S. Census Bureau, "Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1,
2010 to July 1, 2018," December 2018.
29 NAACP, "Criminal Justice Fact Sheet."
30 The Sentencing Project, The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in
State Prisons; NAACP, "Criminal Justice Fact Sheet."
31 Equal Justice Initiative, "Black Children Five Times More Likely Than White
Youth to Be Incarcerated," September 14, 2017, https://eji.org/news/blackchildren-
five-times-more-likely-than-whites-to-be-incarcerated.
32 Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019,
Prison Policy Initiative, March 19, 2019, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/
pie2019.html.
33 Austin and Eisen, How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?
34 E. Ann Carson, Prisoners in 2016, United States Department of Justice, Bureau
of Justice Statistics, January 2018, tbl. 2, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/
p16.pdf; Lauren-Brooke Eisen and Inimai Chettiar, The Reverse Mass Incarceration
Act, Brennan Center for Justice, 2015, 1, http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/
default/files/publications/The_Reverse_Mass_Incarceration_Act%20.pdf.
35 See Ames Grawert, Bryan Furst, and Cameron Kimble, Ending Mass
Incarceration: A Presidential Agenda, Brennan Center for Justice, February 21,
2019, https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/ending-mass-incarcerationpresidential-
agenda.
36 Pew Research Center, "The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even
Wider," October 5, 2017, 31, https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/4-raceimmigration-
and-discrimination/.
Coates: The Power of Myth
37 The Sentencing Project, "Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections," June
2018, 1, 5, https://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trendsin-
US-Corrections.pdf; NAACP, "Criminal Justice Fact Sheet"; Lorna Collier,
"Incarceration Nation," Monitor on Psychology 45 (2014): 56, https://www.apa.
org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration.aspx.
38 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
Ending Mass Incarceration: Ideas from Today's Leaders
85
39 Christopher Muller, "Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in
American Incarceration, 1880–1950," American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012):
281-285, http://users.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/Muller_AJS_12.pdf.
40 Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass
Incarceration (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 28.
Garza: Respect Black Lives and Restore Justice to Those Made into
Criminals
41 Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019,
Prison Policy Initiative, March 19, 2019.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Leah Shakala, Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census: Stateby-
State Incarceration Rates by Race/Ethnicity, Prison Policy Initiative, May 28,
2014, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/rates.html.
45 Ibid.
46 Hedwig Lee, Tyler McCormick, Margaret Hicken, and Christopher
Wildeman, "Racial Inequalities in Connectedness to Imprisoned Individuals in the
United States," Du Bois Review, May 2015, 12(2): 269-282, https://www.psc.isr.
umich.edu/pubs/abs/9460.
47 Joseph Coohill, "Albert Einstein: The Definition of Insanity," Professor Buzzkill
podcast, May 29, 2017, http://professorbuzzkill.com/einstein-insanity-qnq/.
48 Associated Press, "At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs
more than a year at Harvard," Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2017, https://www.
latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-prison-costs-20170604-htmlstory.html.
49 Hilary O. Shelton and Inimai Chettiar, "Want to shrink prisons? Stop
subsidizing them," Washington Post, November 1, 2016, https://www.
washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/11/01/want-to-shrink-prisonsstop-
subsidizing-them/?utm_term=.843231d7713a.
Gillibrand: End the Over-Incarceration of Women
50 Aleks Kajstura, Women's Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2018, Prison
Policy Initiative, 2018, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018women.html.
51 Elizabeth Swavola, Kristine Riley, and Ram Subramanian, Overlooked: Women
and Jails in an Era of Reform, Vera Institute of Justice, 2016, 7, https://storage.
googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/overlooked-women-andjails-
report/legacy_downloads/overlooked-women-and-jails-report-updated.pdf.
52 Ibid., 11.
53 Radley Balko, "There's Overwhelming Evidence That the Criminal-Justice
System Is Racist. Here's the Proof," Washington Post, September 18, 2018, https://
wapo.st/2QFXdvC?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.51020f69b8a1.
Endnotes
86
54 American Civil Liberties Union, "ACLU Briefing Paper: The Shackling of
Pregnant Women & Girls in U.S. Prisons, Jails & Youth Detention Centers," 2012,
1, https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/anti-shackling_
briefing_paper_stand_alone.pdf; Ginette G. Ferszt, Michelle Palmer, and Christine
McGrane, "Where Does Your State Stand on Shackling of Pregnant Women?,"
Nursing for Women's Health, February 2018, 18, https://nwhjournal.org/article/
S1751-4851(17)30335-5/pdf.
55 Jennifer Gonnerman, "Before the Law," New Yorker, October 6, 2014, https://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law.
56 "Federal Reserve Board Issues Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S.
Households," 2018, accessed April 10, 2019, https://www.federalreserve.gov/
newsevents/pressreleases/other20180522a.htm.
57 Vera Institute of Justice, "Women Behind Bars," https://www.vera.org/thehuman-
toll-of-jail/inmate-turned-advocate/women-behind-bars.
58 Insha Rahman, "Chipping Away at New York City's Unjust and Misguided Bail
System," Vera Institute of Justice, Think Justice Blog, April 29, 2016, https://www.
vera.org/blog/chipping-away-at-new-york-citys-unjust-and-misguided-bail-system.
59 Austin and Eisen, How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?, 25.
60 Ibid.
61 Shelli B. Rossman et al., The Multi-Site Adult Drug Court Evaluation:
Executive Summary, Urban Institute, 2011, 8, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/
grants/237108.pdf.
62 Swavola, Riley, and Subramanian, Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of
Reform, 9.
63 Vera Institute of Justice, "Women Behind Bars"; Swavola, Riley, and
Subramanian, Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform, 11.
H. Harris: Harness the Momentum for Bipartisan Reform
64 S.B. 133, 2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Ky. 2018), https://apps.legislature.
ky.gov/recorddocuments/bill/18RS/sb133/bill.pdf.
65 "Jared Kushner Is Surprise Participant on Press Call with Sen. Rand Paul,
Justice Action Network & FreedomWorks to Release New Kentucky Criminal
Justice Poll Results," Justice Action Network, August 30, 2018, http://www.
justiceactionnetwork.org/jared-kushner-surprise-participant-press-call-senrand-
paul-justice-action-network-freedomworks-release-new-kentucky-criminaljustice-
poll-results/.
66 Phillip M. Bailey, "Rand Paul Was Talking Prison Reform When Jared Kushner
Jumped on the Call," Courier Journal, August 30, 2018, https://www.courierjournal.
com/story/news/politics/2018/08/30/kentucky-polling-prison-reformcatches-
jared-kushners-attention/1142761002/.
67 Shannon Marie Keene and David R. Woolums, "Broken Criminal Justice
System Needs Help from All Political Parties," Courier Journal, October 9, 2018,
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/10/09/
broken-judicial-system-needs-help-all-political-parties/1581483002/.
Ending Mass Incarceration: Ideas from Today's Leaders
87
68 Nicholas Fandos, "Criminal Justice Bill Will Go Up for a Vote,
McConnell Says," New York Times, December 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/12/11/us/politics/criminal-justice-reform-bill.html.
69 Holly Harris, "The American people have spoken: Reform our criminal justice
system," The Hill, February 11, 2018, https://thehill.com/opinion/criminaljustice/
373315-the-american-people-have-spoken-reform-our-criminal-justice-system.
K. Harris: Strengthen Resources for Public Defenders
and Hold Prosecutors Accountable
70 "Mass Incarceration," Equal Justice Institute, accessed April 12, 2019,
https://eji.org/mass-incarceration.
71 Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 83 S. Ct. 792, 9 L. Ed. 2d 799 (1963).
72 Thomas Giovanni and Roopal Patel, Gideon at 50: Three Reforms to Revive the
Right to Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice, 2013, 1, https://www.brennancenter.
org/sites/default/files/publications/Gideon_Report_040913.pdf.
73 Justice Policy Institute, System Overload: The Costs of Under-Resourcing
Public Defense, 2011, 11, http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/
documents/system_overload_final.pdf.
74 Alexa Van Brunt, "Poor People Rely on Public Defenders Who Are Too
Overworked to Defend Them," The Guardian, June 17, 2015, https://www.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/poor-rely-public-defenders-toooverworked.
75 Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Jugal K. Patel, "One Lawyer, 194 Felony Cases,
and No Time," New York Times, January 31, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/
interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-defender-case-loads.html.
76 Ibid.
77 Emily Yoffe, "Innocence Is Irrelevant," The Atlantic, September 2017,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocence-isirrelevant/
534171/.
78 Bulletin Editorial Board, "Editorial: Fix Pay Disparity for Public
Defenders," The Bulletin, October 27, 2018, https://www.bendbulletin.com/
opinion/6628115-151/editorial-fix-pay-disparity-for-public-defenders.
79 Danielle Regis, "BDS Testifies Before the NYC City Council Committee on
Justice System Oversight," Brooklyn Defender Services, October 25, 2018,
http://bds.org/bds-testifies-before-the-nyc-council-committee-on-justicesystem-
oversight-hearing-on-pay-hearing-and-retention-rates-for-adas-andpublic-
defenders/.
80 Alan W. Houseman and Linda E. Perle, Securing Equal Justice for All: A Brief
History of Civil Legal Assistance in the United States, Center for Law and Social
Policy, 2007, 1, https://www.clasp.org/sites/default/files/public/resources-andpublications/
files/0158.pdf; "Legal Services Corporation," accessed April 1, 2019,
https://www.lsc.gov/about-lsc.
81 "What Is Legal Aid," Legal Services Corporation, accessed April 1, 2019,
https://www.lsc.gov/what-legal-aid.
Endnotes
88
82 Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, Pub. L. No 115-141, Division B, Title
IV, "Related Agencies" 87 (2018).
Holden: The Conservative Case for Reform: Equal Rights, Public
Safety, and Redemption
83 United States Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, "National
Inventory of the Collateral Consequences of Conviction", November 14, 2018,
https://www.nij.gov/topics/courts/pages/collateral-consequences-inventory.aspx.
84 Jason Pye, "Savings from Prison Reforms in Texas Top $3 Billion, Crimes
Rates Hit Lowest Point Since 1968," FreedomWorks, July 6, 2015, https://www.
freedomworks.org/content/savings-prison-reforms-texas-top-3-billion-crimesrates-
hit-lowest-point-1968.
85 S.B. 529, 2017 Leg., Reg. Sess. (Pa. 2017), https://www.legis.state.pa.us/
CFDOCS/Legis/PN/Public/btCheck. cfm?txtType=PDF&sessYr=2017
&sessInd=0&billBody=S&billTyp=B&billNbr=0529&pn=0854.
86 Van Brunt, "Poor People Rely on Public Defenders Who Are Too Overworked
to Defend Them," The Guardian.
Ifill and Lee: Recognize Black Humanity
87 Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 92 S. Ct. 2726, 33 L. Ed. 2d 346 (1972).
88 The Sentencing Project, "Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections."
89 An excellent overview of this history is the essay by Bryan Stevenson,
"A Presumption of Guilt: The Legacy of America's History of Racial Injustice," in
Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment, ed. Angela J. Davis
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2018), 3-31.
90 Will Stancil, "School Segregation Is Not a Myth," The Atlantic, March 14, 2018,
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/03/school-segregationis-
not-a-myth/555614/; U.S. Government Accountability Office, K-12 Education:
Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilities, 2018,
13-15, https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-18-258.
91 Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529, 133 S. Ct. 2612, 186 L. Ed. 2d 651
(2013).
Jones: Cut 50 Percent of the Prison Population
92 Data through 2016 drawn from "National Prisoner Statistics, 1978–2016,"
Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018, https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/
NACJD/studies/37003; population demographic data drawn from "U.S. Census
Bureau QuickFacts: Iowa," United States Census Bureau, 2018, https://www.
census.gov/quickfacts/ia.
93 Janelle Jones, "The Racial Wealth Gap: How African-Americans Have Been
Shortchanged Out of the Materials to Build Wealth," Economic Policy Institute,
February 13, 2017, https://www.epi.org/blog/the-racial-wealth-gap-how-africanamericans-
have-been-shortchanged-out-of-the-materials-to-build-wealth/.
Ending Mass Incarceration: Ideas from Today's Leaders
89
94 James Cullen, Despite Progress, Prison Racial Disparities Persist, Brennan
Center for Justice, August 19, 2016, https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/
despite-progress-prison-racial-disparities-persist.
95 Jeff Guo, "America Has Locked Up So Many Black People It Has Warped
Our Sense of Reality," Washington Post, February 26, 2016, https://www.
washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/26/america-has-locked-up-somany-
black-people-it-has-warped-our-sense-of-reality/.
96 Austin and Eisen, How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?, 7.
97 Van Jones, Beyond the Messy Truth (New York: Ballantine Books, 2017), 148.
98 Peter Baker, "Alice Marie Johnson Is Granted Clemency by Trump After Push
by Kim Kardashian West," New York Times, June 6, 2018, https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/06/06/us/politics/trump-alice-johnson-sentence-commuted-kimkardashian-
west.html.
Klobuchar: Provide Treatment for Addiction
99 National Association of Drug Court Professionals, "Drug Courts in the
U.S. Cutting Crime, Saving Money," 2018, https://www.nadcp.org/wp-content/
uploads/2018/11/US-Drug-Court-Fact-Sheet-2018.pdf.
100 Rossman et al., The Multi-Site Adult Drug Court Evaluation: Executive Summary, 8.
101 National Association of Drug Court Professionals, "Drug Courts," 2018, 4,
https://www.nadcp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NADCP-Brief.pdf.
102 Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, Pub. L. No. 115-141, 132 Stat. 348,
422 (2018), https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1625/text.
103 CARA 2.0 Act of 2018, S. 2456, 115th Cong. (2018), https://www.congress.
gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2456/text.
Kushner: The Trump Administration's Commitment to Justice Reform
104 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Pub. L. No. 103-322
(1994), https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/3355/text.
105 Timothy Hughes and Doris James Wilson, "Reentry Trends in the U.S.," U.S
Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice statistics, https://www.bjs.gov/content/
reentry/reentry.cfm.
106 Mariel Alper and Matthew R. Durose, 2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism:
A 9-Year Follow-up Period (2005-2014), U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau
of Justice Statistics, May 2018, tbl. 2, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/
pdf/18upr9yfup0514.pdf; Kim Steven Hunt and Robert Dumville, Recidivism
Among Federal Offenders: A Comprehensive Overview, United States Sentencing
Commission, March 2016, 15, https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/
recidivism-among-federal-offenders-comprehensive-overview.
107 Tracey Kyckelhahn and Emily Herbst, The Criminal History of Federal
Offenders, United States Sentencing Commission, May 2018, 3, https://
www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/researchpublications/
2018/20180517_criminal-history.pdf.
Endnotes
90
108 Lee, "Does the United States Really Have 5 Percent of the World's
Population and One Quarter of the World's Prisoners?," Washington Post.
109 Adam Gelb and Jacob Denney, "National Prison Rate Continues to Decline
Amid Sentencing, Re-Entry Reforms," The Pew Charitable Trusts, January 16, 2018,
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2018/01/16/
national-prison-rate-continues-to-decline-amid-sentencing-re-entry-reforms.
110 First Step Act of 2018, Pub. L. No. 115-391 (2018), https://www.congress.
gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/756/text.
111 President Donald Trump, "Remarks by President Trump at 2019 Prison
Reform Summit and FIRST STEP Act Celebration" (Washington, D.C., April 1,
2019), https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-presidenttrump-
2019-prison-reform-summit-first-step-act-celebration/.
O'Rourke: Start by Ending the Failed War on Drugs
112 Austin and Eisen, How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?
113 World Prison Brief, "Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Rate," accessed
April 12, 2019, http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_
population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All.
114 The Hamilton Project, "Rates of Drug Use and Sales, by Race; Rates of Drug
Related Criminal Justice Measures, by Race," The Brookings Institution, October 21,
2016, http://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/rates_of_drug_use_and_sales_by_
race_rates_of_drug_related_criminal_justice.
115 The Sentencing Project, "Black Disparities in Youth Incarceration,"
September 2017, https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/
uploads/2017/09/Black-Disparities-in-Youth-Incarceration.pdf.
116 Elizabeth Kai Hinton, LeShae Henderson, and Cindy Reed, An Unjust Burden,
Vera Institute of Justice, May 2018, https://www.vera.org/publications/for-therecord-
unjust-burden.
117 Austin and Eisen, How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?.
118 Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, "Four Decades and Counting: The
Continued Failure of the War on Drugs," CATO Institute, April 12, 2017, https://www.
cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/four-decades-counting-continued-failurewar-
drugs.
119 Pew Charitable Trusts, "Federal Prison System Shows Dramatic Long-Term
Growth," February 2015, https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/02/
pew_federal_prison_growth.pdf.
120 Megan Mumford, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Ryan Nunn, The
Economics of Private Prisons, The Hamilton Project, October 21, 2016, https://
www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/es_20161021_private_
prisons_economics.pdf.
121 Zhen Zeng, "Jail Inmates in 2016," U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, February
2018, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ji16.pdf.
122 The Associated Press, "Texas Law Decriminalizes School Truancy," New
York Times, June 20, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/texas-lawdecriminalizes-
school-truancy.html.
Ending Mass Incarceration: Ideas from Today's Leaders
91
123 Katie Benner, "Justice Dept. Office to Make Legal Aid More Accessible
Is Quietly Closed," New York Times, February 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/02/01/us/politics/office-of-access-to-justice-department-closed.html.
Sam: Mass Incarceration Is a Women's Issue
124 Natasha Camhi, Women's Experience Behind Bars, Brennan Center for
Justice, August 24, 2018, https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/womensexperience-
behind-bars.
125 While the First Step Act eliminated some of these practices in federal
prisons, they persist in many state facilities.
126 Couloute, Nowhere to Go: Homelessness Among Formerly Incarcerated
People; Mariko Chang, Women and Wealth: Insights for Grantmakers, Asset
Funders Network, 2015, 6, https://assetfunders.org/wp-content/uploads/
Women_Wealth_-Insights_Grantmakers_brief_15.pdf.
127 See "Read About the Data" in Aleks Kajstura, Women's Mass Incarceration:
The Whole Pie 2017, Prison Policy Initiative, 2017, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/
reports/pie2017women.html.
128 Austin and Eisen, How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?, 7.
129 Niall McCarthy, "How Much Do U.S. Cities Spend Every Year
on Policing?" Forbes, August 7, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/
niallmccarthy/2017/08/07/how-much-do-u-s-cities-spend-every-year-onpolicing-
infographic/#11d1f819e7b7.
Sanders: Abolish For-Profit Prisons
130 Matthew Cooke and Adrian Grenier, "3 Things You Can Do to End Police
Killings and Fix the Criminal Justice System," HuffPost, December 10, 2014,
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-cooke/3-things-you-can-do-toen_
b_6301470.html.
131 Saki Knafo, "1 in 3 Black Males Will Go to Prison in Their Lifetime,
Report Warns," HuffPost, October 4, 2013, https://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2013/10/04/racial-disparities-criminal-justice_n_4045144.html.
132 ACLU, "Mass Incarceration," accessed February 27, 2019, https://www.aclu.
org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration.
133 Tara Tidwell Cullen, "ICE Released Its Most Comprehensive Immigration
Detention Data Yet. It's Alarming," National Immigrant Justice Center, March
13, 2018, https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/ice-released-its-mostcomprehensive-
immigration-detention-data-yet.
134 U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Review of
the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Monitoring of Contract Prisons, 2016, 14,
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/e1606.pdf.
135 Heather Long, "Private Prison Stocks Up 100% Since Trump's Win," CNN,
February 24, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/24/investing/private-prisonstocks-
soar-trump/index.html.
Endnotes
92
Warren: End the Two-Tiered System of Justice
136 Regis Barnichon, Christian Matthews, and Alexander Ziegenbein,
"The Financial Crisis at 10: Will We Ever Recover?," Federal Reserve Bank of
San Francisco, August 13, 2018, https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/
publications/economic-letter/2018/august/financial-crisis-at-10-years-will-weever-
recover/.
137 Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren, "Rigged Justice 2.0: Government of
the Billionaires, by the Billionaires, and for the Billionaires," https://www.warren.
senate.gov/download/rigged-justice-20-government-of-the-billionaires-by-thebillionaires-
and-for-the-billionaires.
138 Pew Research Center, "Blacks and Hispanics Are Overrepresented in U.S.
Prisons," January 12, 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/12/
shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/ft_18-01-10_
prisonracegaps_2/.
139 U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in
the United States, 2016 (Washington, D.C., 2017), tbl. 21, https://ucr.fbi.gov/
crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21;
Eric P. Baumer, Reassessing and Redirecting Research on Race and Sentencing,
University at Albany School of Criminal Justice, 2010, https://www.albany.edu/
scj/documents/Baumer_Race.pdf; Besiki Kutateladze, Vanessa Lynn, and Edward
Liang, Do Race and Ethnicity Matter in Prosecution? A Review of Empirical Studies,
Vera Institute of Justice, 2012, https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/
downloads/Publications/do-race-and-ethnicity-matter-in-prosecution-a-reviewof-
empirical-studies/legacy_downloads/race-and-ethnicity-in-prosecutionfirst-
edition.pdf; Samuel R. Gross, Maurice Possley, and Klara Stephens, Race
and Wrongful Convictions in the United States, Newkirk Center for Science and
Society, 2017, https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/
Race_and_Wrongful_Convictions.pdf; U.S. Sentencing Commission, Demographic
Differences in Sentencing: An Update to the 2012 Booker Report, 2017, https://
www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/researchpublications/
2017/20171114_Demographics.pdf.
Ending Mass Incarceration: Ideas from Today's Leaders
93
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors thank Michael Waldman for his strategic guidance,
invaluable input, and editing for this book. The editors also thank the
following Brennan Center colleagues: John Kowal and Vivien Watts
for their input and support; Ames Grawert and Sunwoo Oh for their
vital research, drafting, and editing; Jessica Flaherty, Bryan Furst, Cary
Holley, Cameron Kimble, Taryn Merkl, Michael Quinn, Ruth Sangree,
and Ruponthi Sheikh for their research and outreach; Zachary Roth and
Brennan Center's Communications & Strategy team for their guidance
and editing; and Spencer Boyer, Kirstin Dunham, Jaemin Kim, Mellen
O'Keefe, Katherine Storch, Anthony Thomas-Davis, and Jennifer Weiss-
Wolf for their outreach.
The editors are especially grateful for the assistance of Stephanie
Akpa, Nathan Barankin, Michael Bosworth, Tenicka Boyd, Tona Boyd,
Whitney Brennan, Marissa Brogger, Maura Carey, Terrel Champion,
Caryn Compton, Sakira Cook, Jeff Cook-McCormac, Blake Deeley,
Zachary Doenmez, Jonathan Donenberg, Cassidy Dumbauld, Aqueelah
Dunaway, Veronica Duron, Dave Dziok, Sarah Edwards, Lisa Ellman,
Elizabeth Farrar, Shomari Figures, Rob Friedlander, Jacob Fromer, Jeff
Giertz, Alex Guidich, Hannah Hankins, Geoff Holtzman, Josh Hsu,
Helena Huang, Lori Kearns, Matt Klapper, Daniel Loeb, Alexandra
Lowe-Server, Kristin Lynch, Lauren Moore, Taris Mullins, Sheronda
Patton, Octavia Ridout, Mai Rosner, Maya Rupert, Trisha Russell, Kevin
Seifert, Jessica Jackson Sloane, Daniel Smith, Rae Steward, Kelly Stranz,
Jessica Thompson, Corbin Trent, Nick Turner, Katie Quintela, Darren
Walker, Rebecca Wexler, and Ashley Woolheater.
Finally, they extend their sincere gratitude to the authors of the
forewords and essays for their contributions to this book and their
dedication to ending mass incarceration.
DISCLAIMER
The ideas expressed in the essays in this book are those of each author
alone. The Brennan Center for Justice does not endorse the views
of any author in this book. The aim of publication of these essays
is to provide a nonpartisan forum for today's leaders to share their
approaches to ending mass incarceration.
ABOUT THE BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law is a nonpartisan
law and policy institute that seeks to improve our systems of
democracy and justice. We work to hold our political institutions and
laws accountable to the twin American ideals of democracy and equal
justice for all. The Center's work ranges from voting rights to campaign
finance reform, from ending mass incarceration to preserving constitutional
protection in the fight against terrorism. Part think tank, part
advocacy group, part cutting-edge communications hub, we start with
rigorous research. We craft innovative policies. And we fight for them
— in Congress and the states, in the courts, and in the court of public
opinion.
ABOUT THE BRENNAN CENTER'S JUSTICE PROGRAM
The Brennan Center's Justice Program seeks to secure our nation's
promise of equal justice for all by creating a rational, effective, and fair
justice system. Its priority focus is to reduce mass incarceration while
keeping down crime. The program melds law, policy, and economics
to produce new empirical analyses and innovative policy solutions to
advance this critical goal.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Priya Raghavan is Counsel in the Justice Program at the Brennan
Center.
Inimai Chettiar is Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan
Center.
Adureh Onyekwere is a Research and Program Associate in the Justice
Program at the Brennan Center.
94
The American public has decisively
concluded that our approach to
criminal justice isn't working.
Mass incarceration is the civil rights crisis of our time. The racial
disparities pervasive in our justice system compound at every juncture:
African Americans are more likely to be stopped by police, arrested,
detained before trial, and given harsher sentences than whites. Worse,
the disparities in our justice system perpetuate racial inequity in our
society more broadly.
In this remarkable collaboration, the country's most prominent
lawmakers and activists join together to propose ideas for transformative
change. In these essays, they lay out their proposals to reduce the
prison population and challenge our very conception of justice reform,
paving the way for far-reaching political and cultural change. Marking a
clear shift from the draconian rhetoric of the past, these essays take on
the web of harmful policies that fuel mass incarceration and diminish
opportunities for communities of color.
How do we achieve change? From eliminating prison for lower-level
crimes to incentivizing states to decarcerate, from ending money bail to
abolishing private prisons, from reforming housing and employment
laws to changing the public perception of the justice system and
cultivating respect for all lives, the ideas in this book offer a path forward:
one rooted in fairness, equality, and humanity. The second volume in the
series, Ending Mass Incarceration: Ideas from Today's Leaders aims to
further the momentum needed to achieve that vision. It builds on the
2015 Brennan Center publication profiling the Voices of national leaders,
Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice.
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