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.
"In 2017, the U.S. prison population dropped below 1.5 million people for the first time since 2004, according to a new report by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice. A decline in several states with large prison populations, including Maryland, Louisiana and Illinois, is responsible, along with a drop in federal prisoners."
The Marshall Project
May 18, 2018
Read More"It really shifts the balance of power when you count them in the wrong place, because all of a sudden you have 2,000 extra people just in one little neighborhood."
Huffington Post
February 8, 2018
Read More"...Two Democratic senators are proposing to use federal law to target the key driver of the growth in national prison population: state incarceration rates. On June 28, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut introduced the Reverse Mass Incarceration Act...."
Vox
September 26, 2017
Read More"For the last two decades D.C.’s felons have been turned over to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons upon being sentenced, which then holds them at any of 122 institutions it operates. The prisoners can be housed as close to the city as as Cumberland, Maryland (136 miles from D.C.), as far as Victorville, California (2,586 miles), or anywhere in between."
WAMU--American University Radio
August 10, 2017
Read More