Because 90% of all prisoners in the United States are in state facilities, the work that states are doing to reduce their prison populations is crucial. Attempting to end mass incarceration necessitates realizing this is a situation requiring not one national solution, but fifty state solutions. Below are current state solutions that could be effectively modeled by other states for meaningful reform.
“It’s a riddle at the heart of Michigan’s efforts to reform its criminal justice system: How can it be that the state’s county jail population has tripled over the past 50 years even as crime rates have plunged to levels not seen in generations? Nobody seems to know. One major reason is nobody at the state level knows much about the inmates being housed in county jails, or why they are there.“
Bridges Magazine
July 24, 2019
Read More“Governors in most states have the power to pardon or commute sentences, either at their sole discretion or with some level of input from a commission. Since most convictions occur at the state level, some governors can wield even greater influence on criminal justice than the president can. But most governors rarely use this power, and few have made it a mainstay of their tenure in office—a major missed opportunity for justice and the public good.“
The New Republic
January 4, 2019
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