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.
"Kentucky is joining a national movement called 3DaysCount, which is aimed at improving pretrial justice. Supporters say the initiative offers a path to fairer outcomes, greater public safety and better use of public resources."
WDRB Louisville
June 6, 2018
Read More"Ending mass incarceration will require a fresh and holistic look at our societal values and priorities. Our challenge is to overcome the ideology that made it so easy for states to create the system of mass incarceration."
Prison Policy Initiative
June 5, 2018
Read More"Pew's analysis found Utah's prison population dropped 9 percent from 2015 to 2017. But just a few years earlier, the state's prison population had been increasing at a rate five times the national average. Adam Gelb, director of Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project, says it's clear the state's criminal justice reform law, passed in 2015, was successful at reversing the trend."
Utah Public News Service
June 4, 2018
Read More"Senate Bill 556 would allow most alleged criminal offenders to be released by police departments on personal recognizance, unless a judge determined they were a danger to themselves or the community. The legislation would require that those accused of Class B misdemeanors be allowed no-cash, no-condition bail unless safety circumstances intervened. Supporters have hailed the bill as a comprehensive means to reduce cash bail, which they say can trap low-income people unable to post bond in jail, regardless of innocence."
Concord Monitor
May 24, 2018
Read More"Massachusetts, which has one of the oldest prison populations in the country, is looking to reduce the number of incapacitated or terminally ill inmates, potentially saving taxpayers millions of dollars. Governor Charlie Baker signed legislation in April that will allow some of the state’s sickest inmates to be released if they can prove they are no longer a safety risk."
Boston Globe
May 21, 2018
Read More"In the U.S. today, jails and prisons have become our mental asylums. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that some 365,000 American adults with serious mental illness are behind bars and an additional 770,000 are on probation or parole. A 2017 Justice Department study estimates that some 37% of all prison inmates suffer some mental illness and that 26.4% of jail inmates suffer from a psychosis."
The Wall Street Journal
May 18, 2018
Read More"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"Kids, especially, are deeply impacted by criminal justice policies, which is why OICA considers these reforms a top priority. Sending a parent to prison is one of the most traumatizing things one can do to his or her child."
Oklahoma City Sentinel
May 16, 2018
Read More"Citizen Virtual Patrol allows the public to watch the livestreams of dozens of surveillance cameras across the city. If Newark’s mayor gets his way, these cameras will be the first of several hundred. These cameras are unlikely to reduce crime. What’s more likely is that they will establish a neighborhood panopticon manned by nosy residents thrilled at the prospect of being informants or vigilantes."
Cato Institute
May 11, 2018
Read More"Young brains are still evolving. One prison is trying to take advantage of that."
The Marshall Project
May 8, 2018
Read More"Legislators ignored the warning and instead made cuts, leaving the agency with a $79 million deficit in its $2.3 billion budget, and not enough money to pay for inmate healthcare, which the state is legally required to provide. To make up the shortfall, Corrections Secretary Julie Jones announced last week she was cutting substance abuse and mental health treatment programs and eliminating re-entry and work-release services that prepare high-security inmates for life out of prison."
Tampa Bay Times
May 6, 2018
Read More"The riot last week at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, which left 7 dead and 22 seriously wounded, is only the latest evidence of a failing system that not only perpetuates a criminal lifestyle, but can leave parolees suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and serious trust issues."
Charleston Post and Courier
April 22, 2018
Read More"P.A.C.T., opened in February, was born out of a collaboration between Middlesex County and the Vera Institute of Justice, a non-profit research group based in New York City. The premise of the unit is to reflect life on the outside. Inmates there have more freedom."
WGBH Boston
April 4, 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"Changing the system in this way means Alaska judges will now have better, more risk-sensitive information with which to determine sentencing and bail amounts on a case-by-case basis. While money bail is a useful tool for those that prove unlikely to show up for their day in court, low-level offenders should not be jailed based on their wallets."
Right on Crime
January 9, 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"The new law requires prosecutors to keep thorough records of all jailhouse informants they use — the nature of their testimony, the benefits they received and their criminal history. This information must be disclosed to defense lawyers, who may use it in court to challenge the informant’s reliability or honesty, particularly if the informant has testified in other cases."
New York Times
July 15, 2017
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