A Second Look at Injustice

Link to Report

"Over 200,000 people in U.S. prisons were serving life sentences in 2020—more people than were in prison with any sentence in 1970.  Nearly half of the life- sentenced population is African American. Nearly one- third is age 55 or older....

Legislatorxs in 25 states, including Minnesota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Florida, have recently introduced second look bills. A federal bill allowing resentencing for youth crimes has bipartisan support. And, over 60 elected prosecutors and law enforcement leaders have called for second look legislation, with several prosecutors' offices having launched sentence review units....

[This] report presents in-depth accounts of three reform efforts that can be models for the nation."

Reimagining Prison Report
"Prison in America causes individual, community, and generational pain and deprivation. Built on a system of racist policies and practices that has disproportionately impacted people of color, mass incarceration has decimated communities and families. But the harsh conditions within prisons neither ensure safety behind the walls nor prevent crime and victimization in the community.

In this report, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) reimagines the how, what, and why of incarceration and asserts a new governing principle on which to ground prison policy and practice: human dignity. Basing American corrections practice on human dignity acknowledges and responds to the role formal state punishment systems have played in creating and perpetuating inequality. Vera proposes three practice principles to give life to this tenet: (1) respect the intrinsic worth of each human being; (2) elevate and support personal relationships; and (3) respect a person’s capacity to grow and change."

Link to Full Report
 
Related Report: What Incentives Work in Prison? A Prisoner Policy Network Consultation
 

Want to End Mass Incarceration? This Poll should Worry You

"Do Americans really want to end mass incarceration? Or do they simply want to cut prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders?

These are two different questions: Although much of the focus on prison reform over the past few years has gone to nonviolent drug offenders, the rapid growth of the US prison population since the 1960s — which put America above even Russia and China in incarceration — was actually driven by longer sentences for violent crime.

A new poll by Morning Consult and Vox gives some insight: Americans agree there are too many people in prison — but they’re only willing to cut sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, not violent criminals."

Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners
"The Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners were first adopted in 1957, and in 2015 were revised and adopted as the Nelson Mandela Rules. The revision process was initiated in 2010 when it was recognised that while the Rules were a key standard for the treatment of prisoners globally and were widely used, there had been major developments in human rights and criminal justice since 1957.

The Standard Minimum Rules are often regarded by states as the primary – if not only – source of standards relating to treatment in detention, and are the key framework used by monitoring and inspection mechanisms in assessing the treatment of prisoners.

The revised Standard Minimum Rules were adopted unanimously by the UN General Assembly (UN-Doc A/Res/70/175) on 17 December 2015. Read PRI’s news release on this historic occasion.

The revised Rules are now known as the ‘Nelson Mandela Rules’ to ‘honour the legacy of the late President of South Africa, Mr. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, who who spent 27 years in prison in the course of his struggle for global human rights, equality, democracy and the promotion of a culture of peace’."

View the Nelson Mandela Rules

Related Post:  Save the Date: Briefing on the Nelson Mandela Rules, Geneva

The Reverse Mass Incarceration Act
"More than 20 years after the 1994 'Crime Bill' directed federal funds toward building new prisons across the country, this report urges Congress to pass legislation that would do the reverse — use federal dollars to reward states that successfully reduce both crime and incarceration."

Download the Full Publication

What the U.S. can Learn about Prison Reform Efforts Throughout the World
"It should come as no surprise that with the worst incarceration rate in the world, the United States has a massive problem on its hands.

With roughly 716 of every 100,000 U.S. residents behind bars, the U.S. locks up nearly one-quarter of the entire world’s prison population. Worse yet, when American inmates are released, they are extremely likely to return. The most recent recidivism data for state prisoners, reported by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, shows 68 percent are back behind bars within three years.

Efforts to reduce the American prison population that are already underway, including a push for drug-sentencing reform and some new investments in rehabilitation programs, have had some success. Last year, the federal prison population declined for the first time in over a decade.

Still, there’s still a long way to go -- and a lot American policymakers could learn from progress made in other parts of the world. Here are some unexpected places where prison reform efforts are having an impact...."

5 Ways California Can Imprison Fewer People
In 2009, overcrowding in California’s prisons had gotten so bad—140,000 inmates crammed into prisons built to house just 80,000—that federal judges ruled it violated prisoners’ civil rights. Under order to reduce the state’s prison population, Governor Brown introduced realignment in 2011, a plan to send nonviolent inmates to county jails and probation departments rather than prison.

Rick Perry at CPAC Panel on Criminal Justice: ‘Shut Prisons Down. Save That Money.’

Pat Nolan strode to the podium and rattled off the facts: more than 2 million Americans are in prison, meaning one in every hundred adults is incarcerated. Fewer than half of those in prison are there for violent crimes; most are drug offenders; and state budgets are badly strained by maintaining this system. Then he read a quote: “Only a nation that’s rich and stupid would continue to pour billions into a system that leaves prisoners unreformed, victims ignored and communities still living in fear of crime.”

This wasn’t an ACLU convention nor an academic confab, however—it was the Conservative Political Action Conference, the infamous annual showcase of the far-right boundaries of the Republican Party. Just before this panel on criminal justice reform began, former governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was onstage accusing President Obama of lying about Benghazi and pronouncing that “the IRS is a criminal enterprise.”

Read on...

Fixing our prisons: Answers are complex and will take time, money, and a public that cares

Ask an NDP or Liberal corrections critic how to improve the federal prison system and the answer will be short, and political.

Turf the Conservative government and its tough-on-prisoners agenda.

The federal Conservatives, of course, will say the tough-on-crime agenda is keeping everyone safer.
Various solutions rest between the political extremes.

Here's a snapshot of some of the ways federal and provincial governments could, and in some cases, are trying to handle the growing and changing populations behind bars, as well as the federal government's response to questions about safety in Canada's prison:

TREAT THE ILL
Federal and provincial reports and inquests have long recommended governments improve services for mentally ill and addicted offenders, and training in those areas for correctional officers.

There's been sporadic progress but it's going to be a long haul.

Read on....

TV, gym, DVDs (and no 18-plus films)... prisoners will have to 'earn privileges' in jails as Government cracks down on lax regime

Prisoners will no longer have the automatic right to a television in their cell and could be barred from going to the gym, wearing their own clothes and watching DVDs unless they are prepared to work, the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling will announce today.


As part of a part of a package of measures to appease right-wing complaints that prisons are too lax inmates will be made to “earn privileges” that are currently automatic.

This will include an expectation that inmates will no longer be able to turn down prison work without consequences while perks such as pay TV will end altogether.

However prison reformers criticised the plans as “punishing people for an idleness that prisons encourage” and said it was “bizarre” to be introducing new layers of red tape which would add to the cost of prison and demands on staff time.

Read on....

Conrad Black: Views on improving prison system

Prison made Conrad Black a “better man,” said Judge Amy St. Eve upon sending him back in for another eight months.
By his own account the former media baron and member of the House of Lords was made “a humbler, more sensitive person” by his stay as inmate No. 18330-424.
And like Martha Stewart and Jonathan Aitken (a British cabinet minister imprisoned for perjury in 1999) before him, Black has become a passionate advocate for prison reform.
While his “victory lap” in a Miami prison ends Friday, here are some of his suggestions for improving the U.S. and Canadian prison system for those friends he leaves behind.
Scrap federal mandatory minimum sentencing:

Read on...

If Prison Is the Disease, Not the Cure, How Do You Treat It?

The breathtaking premise of Ernest Drucker's new book is that mass incarceration is an epidemic ravaging the country -- not a solution to a problem, but a problem in itself.

A longtime practitioner and scholar of public health, Drucker observed the explosive growth and unprecedented number of Americans being sent to prison beginning in the late 1970s and recognized the familiar characteristics of the spread of an epidemic disease: outbreaks and contagion, patterns of transmission, and human impact – tens of millions of years of life lost to incarceration.

"The paradigm shift here is really from looking at mass incarceration as a solution to social problems like crime and drugs to saying that that level of incarceration is itself a public health problem," Drucker says.

Once that happens, "then the objective shifts from 'how do you decrease crime and drugs?' to 'what can we do to have fewer people in prison?'" he says. "That's a totally different goal."

Read on....

Comic Books as a Path to Prison Reform: An Interview With Activist Lois Ahrens

"Comic books place an individual's experience in a political context by describing how the prison system is built on racism, sexism, and economic inequality," Ahrens says.

Photo Credit: The Real Cost of Prisons Project

Lois Ahrens is the Founder/Director of The Real Cost of Prisons Project (RCPP) and has been an activist/organizer for more than 40 years. First started in 2001, RCPP brings together justice activists, artists, justice policy researchers and people directly experiencing the impact of mass incarceration to work together to end the U.S. prison nation. RCPP created workshops, a website that includes sections of writing and ‘comix’ by prisoners, a daily news blog focused on mass incarceration and three comic books that were first created in 2005: Prisoners Town: Paying the Price, by artist Kevin Pyle and writer Craig Gilmore; Prisoners of the War on Drugs, by artist Sabrina Jones and writers Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens; and Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children by artist Susan Willmarth and writers Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens.

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California's Attempt at Prison Reform Looking Like an Attempt to Pass the Buck

All California has done is shift the burden of the state's corrections overcrowding to the counties, fails to fund crime prevention services like drug treatment, and more.

Faced with a staggering budget deficit and a prison overcrowding crisis, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and the state legislature have approved legislation that would shift responsibility for low-level, nonviolent offenders and parole violators from the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to the state's counties. But sentencing and drug reform advocates say the measure merely shifts the burden of the state's corrections overcrowding from the state to the counties, fails to fund crime prevention services like drug treatment, and fails to include real sentencing reforms.

On Monday, Gov. Brown signed Assembly Bill 109, the law shifting responsibility for many low-level offenders to the counties. The law is designed to stop the "revolving door" of low-level offenders cycling and recycling through the prison system, Brown said in a signing statement.

"For too long, the state’s prison system has been a revolving door for lower-level offenders and parole violators who are released within months -- often before they are even transferred out of a reception center," Brown said. "Cycling these offenders through state prisons wastes money, aggravates crowded conditions, thwarts rehabilitation, and impedes local law enforcement supervision."

But the law will not go into effect unless and until the legislature approves and funds a community corrections grant program, something Republicans in the legislature have opposed.

Read on...

Prison reform advocates press states to shift money out of corrections system

Advocates of overhauling the U.S. criminal justice system see a bright spot in the dire financial straits that states are facing: Politicians eager to trim budgets are willing to cut spending on prisons and corrections programs.

Several liberal and conservative groups have joined together to take advantage of the moment. A coalition that includes the evangelical Prison Fellowship Ministries, the NAACP, the American Conservative Union and the American Civil Liberties Union is working to push changes that they hope will lower the U.S. prison population.

“We find ourselves with a new crop of allies,” said NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. “This is a place where we’ve found commonality.”

His organization is to release a report Thursday, endorsed by conservative activists Grover Norquist and Pat Nolan, calling on states to cut spending on corrections and to direct that money to education. The study, which bemoans the increasing amount of money spent on incarceration, notes that state spending on prisons has grown at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20 years.

Read on...

Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?

By David Cole

With approximately 2.3 million people in prison or jail, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world—by far. Our per capita rate is six times greater than Canada's, eight times greater than France's, and twelve times greater than Japan's. Here, at least, we are an undisputed world leader; we have a 40 percent lead on our closest competitors—Russia and Belarus.

Even so, the imprisoned make up only two thirds of one percent of the nation's general population. And most of those imprisoned are poor and uneducated, disproportionately drawn from the margins of society. For the vast majority of us, in other words, the idea that we might find ourselves in jail or prison is simply not a genuine concern.

For one group in particular, however, these figures have concrete and deep-rooted implications—African-Americans, especially young black men, and especially poor young black men. African-Americans are 13 percent of the general population, but over 50 percent of the prison population. Blacks are incarcerated at a rate eight times higher than that of whites—a disparity that dwarfs other racial disparities. (Black–white disparities in unemployment, for example, are 2–1; in nonmarital childbirth, 3–1; in infant mortality, 2–1; and in net worth, 1–5^[1]).

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America's Shame: Can Jim Webb Fix the Prison Gulag?

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. Posted February 16, 2009.

An unlikely senator takes on the cause of reforming America's overloaded and barbaric jails.

Our criminal justice system is broken. The U.S. represents 5 percent of the world's population but accounts for nearly 25 percent of its prison population. We are incarcerating at a record rate with one in 100 American adults now locked up -- 2.3 million people overall. As a New York Times editorial stated simply, "This country puts too many people behind bars for too long."

But people who have been fighting for reform for decades are seeing new openings for change. The fiscal crisis has state governors and legislators looking for more efficient and effective alternatives to spending $50 billion a year on incarceration. At the federal level, there is reason to believe that the Obama administration and a reinvigorated Department of Justice will take a hard look at the inequities of the criminal justice system and work for a smarter and more effective approach to public safety. Finally, there are Congressional leaders -- none more prominent than Senator Jim Webb -- who understand that the system isn't functioning as it should and there is an urgent need for reform.

Read on...

A Silver Lining to the Economic Crisis: Less Money for Prisons

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted January 22, 2009.

As states grapple with record budget deficits, more politicians are looking toward criminal justice reform to cut costs.

If you're seeking a silver lining to the current economic crisis, this may well be it: As states across the country confront historic budget shortfalls, more and more politicians are looking toward long-overdue criminal justice reform as a way to cut spending. Suddenly, the money local governments stand to save by slowing down incarceration rates is trumping the political costs traditionally associated with it.

Good news, perhaps, this evolution in thinking, but it's hardly a burst of innovation (let alone political courage). The nation's prisons have been dysfunctional and overcrowded for ages, reaching emergency levels in recent years. Around this time last year, a study released by the Pew Center found that 1 in 100 Americans was behind bars, a sobering statistic that spurred calls for reform, from news articles to op-eds, to (briefly) Hillary Rodham Clinton's primary campaign. One year later, the economic crisis has given reluctant governors and state reps the political cover to initiate reforms that they previously would have considered too risky. Virginia and Kentucky are pondering early release for thousands of low-level prisoners and Michigan, one of four states that spends more on incarceration than education, is considering deep reforms as well.

Read on...