Many issues that are primary drivers of mass incarceration cannot be remedied through government solutions alone. Issues such as broken families and mental health, both forever altered by over criminalization, cannot be simply be repaired through legislation. Civil Society has the unique capability to address certain social issues that government cannot, or to address them more effectively than government can. This section also addresses issues in which over-policing attempts to fix issues that should be handled through the community.
“Still, it’s taken a while for even post-incarceration enfranchisement to get on liberal legislators’ agendas, Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, told me. That’s gradually changing. In 2019 alone, state lawmakers introduced proposals in at least 16 states and Washington, D.C., to expand, study, or facilitate voting for people with felony convictions. In some places, this would apply to people still in prison.“
The Atlantic
September 6, 2019
Read More“Ralph Clark is an Oakland native and the CEO of ShotSpotter, a gunshot-detection-technology company. He believes that unreported gunshots don’t act just as symptoms of community mistrust of police—they reinforce it. “When communities see police not responding to these [gunshot] events,” he said over the phone, ‘but at the same time have the resources to respond to low-level arrests and intercepts for marijuana and stop-and-frisk, that’s a pretty cynical situation’.“
The Atlantic
November 6, 2018
Read More"Now more than 100 Slack employees have visited San Quentin to meet and mentor people enrolled in The Last Mile’s coding program. And Butterfield offered up his company as the test case for getting prison-trained coders into high-growth start-ups, something that has not really worked yet."
The Atlantic
August 29, 2018
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