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.
“Today, 200 Americans likely will die from a drug overdose. Most of them will die alone. The government's modern-day response to our nation's overdose epidemic has been woefully inadequate. Rather than relying on medical science, our leaders have been influenced by the same misguided approaches that undergirded the “war on drugs” in the 1980s — fear, stigma and racism. “
USA Today
November 1, 2018
Read More“We are told that there is a great divide in our country, and at the voting booth that is apparent. But in the jury room, we were just 12 random people pulled out of our daily lives and asked to administer the final decision in a case. It felt like our justice system at work. I’ll vote in November, and it will be important. But I don’t think I’ll ever feel as significant as a citizen as I did in that jury room.“
USA Today
October 16, 2018
Read More"Rather than reduce the number of innocent people sitting in jail cells, the new system has the potential to increase it, while entrenching racial disparities and hiding them behind the rhetoric of science. Taken together, these factors could create a system that is worse than what California had, in the heartbreaking name of bail reform."
USA Today
August 30, 2018
Read More"It can sometimes be hard to connect how our diplomats and international programs impact our everyday lives. But the heart-wrenching truth is that there is nothing “foreign” about what happened to Bailey Henke and his community in North Dakota, or to the hundreds of thousands of families across our nation who know the scourge of opioid addiction all too well. When it comes to combating the opioid epidemic, we simply don’t have the luxury of battling this crisis on the homefront alone."
USA Today
August 2, 2018
Read More"The RAND study found that every dollar spent on prison education could save up to $5 in costs during the first three years after a prisoner is released. A rigorous cost-benefit analysis of prison programs by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy found that the benefits of both post-secondary education for prisoners and vocational educational programs far outweighed the costs in that state. The institute found a benefit after costs of more than $24,600 per participant for programs run out of the state’s prisons."
USA Today
July 27, 2018
Read More"Prison gerrymandering, which counts prisoners as residents of their prisons rather than their home communities for the purpose of drawing political boundaries, stacks the political deck against medium size and large cities. The process effectively gives communities around prisons, which are disproportionately white and rural, additional representation while stealing people and votes from home communities, which are generally urban areas. This can produce results that are unfair, even absurd."
USA Today
July 25, 2018
Read More"With someone’s liberty at stake, what is the fairest, most humane way to assess whether those arrested should be released or kept in jail pending trial?"
USA Today
May 11, 2018
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