Overcriminalization significantly undermines human flourishing and social well-being by harming the family, social networks, and social citizenship. Additionally, it prevents capable men and women from utilizing their creative capacities in the marketplace. This creates vast issues involving relations with family while incarcerated and reintegration into society after release. On the economic side, draconian cash bail systems undermine justice through basing someone's ability to attain pre-trial release upon their wealth, not their actual threat to society.
“Freedom and safety are too often imagined as being in opposition, but nothing could be further from the truth. Americans who have the most freedom — freedom to learn, freedom from illness, freedom of movement, freedom from violence — are invariably the safest, and the whitest, and the richest.“
Washington Post
October 28, 2019
Read More“The back-and-forth between candidates, 15 months before the 2020 presidential election, would have been unthinkable in the Democratic debates of 1988 or 1996 or 2004 or even 2012. Unthinkable for fear that a Republican president or presidential candidate would immediately pounce on these reform ideas as being "soft on crime," and thus dangerous and unpresidential. George Bush, the elder, used Willie Horton in 1988 to successfully stir up white fear of crime about his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Donald Trump has used “American carnage” and unfounded fear of the link between immigrants and crime as a primal theme.“
The Marshall Project
August 2, 2019
Read More“Given the internal incentives to keep jails full, change will have to come from outside the criminal justice system. The most obvious lever available, which is picking up steam in multiple states, is bail reform. States could simply mandate that individuals accused of low-level crimes are automatically released on their own recognizance before trial. Jurisdictions that have experimented with this approach have found rates of appearing at trial in excess of 98 percent.“
Washington Post
June 6, 2019
Read More“Formerly incarcerated citizen pledge: ‘I take responsibility for my choices and incarceration. I am accountable for my education, employment and successful reentry. As a formerly incarcerated citizen, I pledge to break the cycle of crime, violence and incarceration in my family and community’.“
Florida Times-Union
March 31, 2019
Read More“In Until We Reckon, Danielle Sered draws on her work as founder and director of Brooklyn-based Common Justice — the first victim services and alternative-to-incarceration program that focuses on violent felony crimes like gunpoint robberies, shootings and assaults, — to show how restorative justice is a process of charting ‘a course for repair.’ It helps survivors heal and makes us all safer, unlike the current criminal justice system.“
The Indypendent
March 30, 2019
Read More“Fifty-four percent of the people currently held in state prisons have been convicted of a crime classified as violent. We will never slash our prison population by 50 percent — the goal of a number of current campaigns — much less get back to levels of incarceration that we had before the race to incarcerate began in the early 1980s, without addressing the one issue most reformers avoid: violence.“
New York Times
March 3, 2019
Read More“According to the report, in 2017, 30 percent of those admitted into Wisconsin prisons committed a new crime, but 37 percent admitted were because of revocation. This means, tax payers’ dollars are paying for prison and jails to hold inmates who literally didn’t even commit a new crime, or any crime for that matter.“
Milwaukee Courier News
January 26, 2019
Read More“The results are in, according to a study from Justice Policy Institute (JPI), a Washington-based nonprofit. The Ungers, as they’re called, have clocked a recidivism rate of just 3 percent. Researchers have found that on average, two-thirds of the state prisoners in the United States are arrested again within three years of release; about half are reincarcerated. JPI estimates the state’s averted costs at close to $1 million per individual released.“
Philadelphia Inquirer
December 12, 2018
Read More“Crime rates have been decreasing nationally since the 1990s, but Americans' perception of nationwide crime has not always followed. Pessimism about nationwide crime peaked in 2009, when 79 percent said that crime was increasing despite a fourth year in a row of the FBI's violent crime rate dropping.“
The Hill
November 7, 2018
Read More“We only exorcise the principalities of mass incarceration by guaranteeing certain public economic trusts such as food, housing, and health care, and by reforming our grossly punitive culture of mandatory minimums and racialized sentencing disparities. An enduringly moral vision for a free society hinges on our will to divert and decrease incarceration, not merely resourcing prisons with programs that allegedly reduce recidivism.“
The Hill
October 4, 2018
Read More“Fiscal savings don’t come from reducing inmate populations—they come from reducing staffing. And the social costs of prisons and jails have little to do with budgets and far more to do with the physical, emotional, mental, and other harms incarceration imposes on inmates, their families, and their communities.“
The Appeal
September 20, 2018
Read More"The only way for states and the federal government to atone and begin to undo the damage is to commute their sentences, reverse their convictions, and pay these men reparations."
The Marshall Project
August 26, 2018
Read More"At first blush, the idea might seem fringe and unreasonable; where, for instance, would all the criminals go? What happens to rapists and murderers? But the movement’s backers counter that it is the only truly humane direction we can head in as a society—that is, if we really aspire to live in a world rid of interpersonal harm and racial inequality. And they might actually be making headway."
Politico
August 15, 2018
Read More"Redefining "tough on crime" required nothing new or groundbreaking. Instead, it meant simply applying longstanding conservative principles — fiscal discipline and bureaucratic accountability, chief among them — to the criminal justice system."
Tampa Bay Times
August 10, 2018
Read More"Yet CAP focuses its critique (as does the American Friends Service Committee) on the absence of democratic control and oversight over the commercial operations of mass incarceration, which is often detached from any reasonable public-justice priority and represents a wider pattern of corporate impunity across the criminal-justice system."
The Nation
August 9, 2018
Read More"'This is an outcome of a lot of pressure being put on police and prosecutors to ‘do something’ about the [overdose] crisis,' said Leo Beletsky, professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University. 'At the same time, it’s indicative of the unchecked power of these institutions in pursuing interventions they think are going to be useful'."
The Appeal
July 24, 2018
Read More"Liberals look at mass incarceration and see structural racism. Libertarians see the denial of civil liberties. Fiscal conservatives see wasted resources. Religious activists see inhumane conditions and damaged lives. All these convictions converge at one point: We should treat offenders as humans, with different stories and different needs, instead of casting them all into the same pit of despair."
Washington Post
July 5, 2018
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