Overview of decarceration efforts
Decarceration includes overlappingOpposition
Opponents of decarceration include think tanks that assert mass decarceration would release violent criminals back onto the streets to re-offend; law enforcement organizations that argue drug decriminalization and legalization will escalate crime; prison guard unions that seek to preserve jobs and economic security; "tough on crime" lawmakers responding to public concerns about violent crime; andDecarceration in context of incarceration
Increased incarceration rates
According to 2018-2020 statistics, over 2.2million people in the U.S. are incarcerated in prison, jail and detention centers, with 1.3million inmates in state prison, 631,000 held in local jails under county and municipal jurisdiction, 226,000 in federal prisons and jails, 50,165 in immigrant detention centers and 48,000 in juvenile facilities. An additional 4.5 million people in the United States are under custodial supervision, eitherFederal and state prison populations
Decarceration proponents point to the U.S.'s high incarceration rates when pushing for reforms to reduce what they call a racially skewed prison population that sees African Americans incarcerated disproportionately at five times or more the rate of whites. In the most recent comprehensiveInmates held pre-trial
In 2020, the non-profitTranspartisan support for decarceration
In "The Politics of Decarceration" (''Yale Law Review'', 2016) professor Rachel Barkow asserts that the call to decarcerate transcends party politics, with ideologically driven liberals and conservatives agreeing for different reasons the U.S. must reduce its prison population. For liberals or progressives, Barkow writes mass incarceration was born from structural racism, capitalism, and social inequality; for conservatives, it was a product of federal over-reach and bloated budgets that consumed too many tax dollars. While liberals focused on steering inmates back into productive societal endeavors, Barkow writes that conservatives embraced the notion of spiritual redemption or reconciliation over retribution. In contrast to bipartisanship, in which entrenched politicians and party leaders reach a compromise, Barkow says trans-partisanship is "led by ideological true-believers on the back benches, and distinct factions that converge on shared policy positions through separate, independent routes." Barkow traces the pivotal moment in transpartisanship back to 2012, when conservative politicians Newt Gingrich andRecidivism
In the Justice Department's "2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism: a 9 Year Follow-up Period (2005-2014)" statisticians noted an 83% recidivism rate during a nine-year period following the 2005 release of prisoners across 30 states. An estimated 68% of released prisoners were arrested again within three years, with the highest recidivism rate among property offenders, who were more likely to be arrested than released violent offenders. To reduce the high rates of recidivism, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Prisons recommends correctional or carceral institutions adopt the following reforms to prepare early on for a prisoner's eventual re-entry into society: * Inventory the inmate's needs (treatment for substance use; educational needs, risk of recidivism). * Build a semi-autonomous school district within each prison (Prisoners who participate in high school, career, and technical programs have a 43% lower recidivism rate.). * Integrate online education with classroom instruction (Distribute tablets.). * Take advantage of the Second Chance Pell pilot program for educational opportunities. * Provide opportunities for inmates to develop marketable job skills ("inmates who worked in prison industries were 24 percent less likely to recidivate"). * Make mental health a priority and offer cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). * Ensure inmates receive treatment for substance use disorders, includingE-carceration
In response to the shift from brick and mortar carceral institutions to what law enforcement termed "community control" under electronic monitoring, an oppositional movement pushed back, describing a widening net of " mass incarceration to mass surveillance" that threatened privacy and individual freedom while reinforcing social stratification, disrupting an individual's connections to the community and resulting in a subgroup of second-class citizens in the U.S., where African Americans are imprisoned at nearly six times the rate of white people.Black Lives Matter
In 2016,Cancellation of LA County jail contract
In 2019, the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to cancel a near $2 billion contract to build a new 3,800 bed jail opposed by Black Lives Matter and other members of the grassroots organization Reform LA Jails.Defund the police
On June 7, 2020, in the wake of globalDecarceration during COVID-19 pandemic
Calls to reduce arrests; release inmates and detainees
Detention centers
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with thousands of immigrants locked up at 200 U.S. detention centers, Amnesty International called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to "grant humanitarian parole to immigration detainees except in the most extraordinary of circumstances requiring ongoing detention." The global human rights organization accused ICE of concealing the number of detainees who had been exposed or contracted the virus, keeping the detainees, their lawyers, family members and general public in the dark about the spread of infections. On March 26, 2020, ProPublica, a non-profit news agency, reported a confrontation occurred between guards and detainees at the SouthTexas Processing Facility, operated by federal contractor GEO Group, in which guards shot detainees with pepper spray after the detainees protested a lack of COVID-19 screening procedures for new arrivals. When contacted, "ICE referred reporters to a fact sheet, which provides information on how the detention center processes migrants" and said the staff daily reviews recommended guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on proper detention staff protocols. In a May 8, 2020, ''Washington Post'' opinion piece entitled "We were left to sicken and die from the coronavirus in immigration detention. Here's how I got out," Nicolas Morales, a 37-year old undocumented immigrant detained for five months in New Jersey's Elizabeth Detention Center, an ICE-contracted facility run by CoreCivic, a private for-profit corporation traded on the New York Stock Exchange, explains his five-month ordeal ended after a federal judge declared COVID-19 posed a serious health risk inside the detention center. "We shared toilets, showers, sinks, communal surfaces and breathing air. We did not have hand sanitizer or masks. We could not disinfect our shared surfaces. We could not maintain any meaningful distance among us, let alone six feet of distance. We were never permitted outside; there is no meaningful outdoor space," writes Morales who participated in a hunger strike to protest detention center conditions. As of May 8, 2020, ICE still had not halted transfers of immigrants from one detention center to another, according to a Politico article, "'Like Petri Dishes for the Virus': ICE Detention Centers Threaten the Rural South". On May 9, 2020, the ''Los Angeles Times'' reported that 70% or 792 of the 1,162 male inmates at Lompoc Federal Prison in California had tested positive for COVID-19, surpassing the 644 cases at the federal prison on Terminal Island, with Lompoc and Terminal Island prisons accounting for 47% of all federal inmates who tested positive. California has been the leading state in the number of cases, totaling 49,395, sincACLU projection of COVID-19 incarceration fatalities
Partnering with epidemiologists, mathematicians and statisticians, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) presented an epidemiological model suggesting that as many as 200,000 people could die from COVID-19—double the government estimate—if federal, state and local governments dismiss prison and jail inmates in the public health response. The ACLU predicted thousands of lives could be saved, as many as 23,000 people in jail and 76,000 in the larger community, if law enforcement stopped arrests for all but the most serious offenses and doubled the rate of release for those already arrested.Police "Cite and Release" protocol
In a ''Washington Post'' editorial, Rosa Brooks, a law professor, author and former police reserve officer in Washington, D.C., described the job-related health risks when making an arrest:I put my hands into strangers' pockets during searches; ran my fingers inside waistbands, bra bands and shoes; put handcuffs onto wrists and held those I was arresting by the arm as I escorted them to the patrol car. People coughed, sneezed, vomited and bled on me.Brooks argued police agencies should immediately "suspend enforcement measures that require physical contact between law enforcement personnel and members of the public", unless not arresting or detaining someone poses an immediate danger of death or grave injury. Several police departments adopted strategies to reduce arrests: Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Denver, Miami, Nashville, Tucson and Rockford, with departments issuing citations and court summons, rather than making arrests for low-level or non-violent crimes ranging from "narcotics to theft to prostitution". Decarceration proponents advocate for "cite and release" police protocols to become the post-COVID-19 norm in order to reduce the pretrial jail population.
The COVID Prison Project
The COVID Prison ProjectDecarceration Rates During the Pandemic
According to data from theRelease of non-violent offenders
In May 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported dozens of counties had purposefully decreased their jail populations to stop the spread of COVID-19 among inmates, guards and their families who could be exposed to the virus. Examples of non-violent jail population reductions included: Hennepin County, Minnesota: 44%; Denver, Colorado: 41%; LA County, California: 30%; Maricopa County, Arizona: 30%; Mulltnomah County, Oregon: 30%; Anderson County, Tennessee, and Franklin County, Ohio: more than 30%; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 17%; Washington, D.C.: 21.8%. To reduce their jail populations in order for inmates, normally living in close quarters, some sharing cells and double-bunked, to practice social distancing, county law enforcement released inmates nearing the end of their sentences on misdemeanor charges; inmates held on low-level and non-violent offenses; people over 60; pregnant women; inmates with health conditions; people held for technical violations of probation and parole.Decarceration Activists During the Pandemic
San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, son of imprisonedArgument against mass decarceration
Need for incapacitation
The Manhattan Institute, a pro-free market think tank espousing welfare and tort reform, opposes mass decarceration on the grounds that violent criminals must be incapacitated. Rafael Mangual, the institute's Deputy Director of Legal Policy, argues most inmates are held in state prisons, where a majority of inmates are serving time for violent crimes (murder, assault, rape, robbery or burglary), dwarfing the number of inmates convicted of drug and property crimes. Dramatically reducing the prison population to match the incarceration rates of Western Europe, Mangual argues, would require freeing large numbers of violent and repeat offenders for crimes the American public agrees should lead to incarceration. Reducing or eliminating sentences for violent criminals would endanger society, exposing the American people to criminals who are only likely to commit more violent acts once released. The Department of Justice in its "2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism: A 9-Year Follow-up Period (2005-2014)" examined the cumulative percentage of prisoners convicted of violent crimes who, upon release in 2005, were re-arrested during the following nine years for an offense of an equally violent nature. Findings were as follows:Rebuttal to incapacitation argument for mass incarceration
Danielle Sered, author of ''Until We Reckon: Violence, Incarceration and the Road to Repair'' serves as the Executive Director of Common Justice, a New York organization that suggests alternatives to prison for those charged with felonies. In her book, Sered writes, "If incarceration worked to secure safety, we would be the safest nation in all of human history. We would not be a nation where, by the most conservative estimates available, every year nearly three thousand young men of color are murdered before their twenty-fifth birthday; more than 57,000 children survive sexual violence; nearly half a million women are beaten in their relationships; nearly three million men are robbed or assaulted ..." In a March 2019, interview on radio show ''Democracy Now'', Sered urged the nation to pursue new solutions—restitution, community service, amends to the victim—to the problem of violent crime, adding that the core drivers of violence: shame, isolation, exposure to violence and economic struggle are only accentuated in prison, perpetuating a criminogenic cycle of violence that allows no one, not the perpetrator nor the victim, to heal. In "The Prison Paradox: More Incarceration Will Not Make Us Safer" Loyola University (Chicago) criminology professor Don Stemen argues that "in states with high incarceration rates and neighborhoods with concentrated incarceration, the increased use of incarceration may be associated with increased crime" resulting from a breakdown in family bonds, income deficit due to parental incarceration and greater resentment of law enforcement. According to Stemen, there is no evidence to show that higher incarceration rates lower violent crime rates. Whether prison itself is criminogenic is a question debated among criminologists, though Stemen argues prison may perpetuate criminal behavior because in prison inmates learn criminal habits and connect with criminal networks, only to eventually return to their communities without jobs or housing to face families torn asunder.Decarceration and substance use
In 2010, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse issued its second report on substance among the country's prison and jail populations, noting that "65 percent of the nation's inmates meet certain medical criteria for substance abuse and addiction, but only 11 percent receive treatment for their addictions." The report, lamenting the lack of prison treatment programs as "inane and inhuman", said federal, state and local governments spend less than one percent of their correctional budgets on inmate substance use, even though alcohol and other drugs are common denominators in most crimes, "including 78 percent of violent crimes, 83 percent of property crimes and 77 percent of public order, immigration or weapons offenses as well as probation and parole violations"—with eight out of ten inmates involved to some degree with drugs or alcohol and those with addictions more likely to reoffend. Susan E. Foster, the Center's Director of Policy Research and Analysis, criticized state governments for failing to address an obvious challenge within and beyond the walls of correctional or carceral institutions. "States complain mightily about their rising prison costs, yet they continue to hemorrhage public funds that could be saved if they provided treatment to inmates with alcohol and other drug problems and stepped up use of drug courts and prosecutorial drug treatment alternative programs." Specifically, the report recommended: * More substance use programs as alternatives to incarceration * Addiction programs for inmates * Mental health treatment for inmates with co-occurring mental health problems * Follow up care for released inmates with drug and alcohol addictions More recent studies on the relationship between substance use and incarceration also note the lack of mental health resources and call for "smart decarceration" efforts to address substance use disorders.Adverse childhood experiences (ACES)
In 2013,Trauma
In 2016, psychologist, researcher and writer Dr. Stephanie Covington began working with male inmates at California's Corcoran State Prison to address childhoodWomen in prison
In addition to working with male inmates, Dr. Covington developed a multi-week Gender-responsive prisons, gender-responsive curriculum for California Institute for Women inmates (and other penal institutions) suffering psychological trauma from abusive relationships (2017) Although women only constitute 7% of prison and jail inmates in the United States, the incarcerated female population of 231,000 (2019) is growing in recent decades at twice the rate of male incarceration. Even though 80% percent of women (113,000) in jails are mothers and primary caretakers, Yale law professor Judith Resik writes women are incarcerated further from their homes and families than male inmates, only to face the threat of sexual assault by male guards. These anxiety-producing conditions, according to mental health service providers, can compound pre-existing trauma experienced by female inmates, who are more likely than their male counterparts to have been the victims of physical or sexual abuse. Comparison of female vs. male prison inmates (''Published at National Resource Center on Justice Involved Women, based on statistics from 2005 to 2015'') According to Covington, women in custody are five times more likely than men to wrestle with mental health challenges, one in three female inmates is a victim of sexual abuse, more than one in two a victim of domestic violence and half tried to commit suicide. Covington believes in the ideal world only a handful of the most dangerous women inmates would be confined in prisons and jails; those who had been victimized would learn to live in the general population, grounding themselves in the present and learning to self-soothe. The "Beyond Trauma" female gender-specific trauma therapy curriculum includes: * Educating inmates about abuse; they may be unaware that they were victimized * Normalizing reactions (It's okay to feel anger and resentment.) to abnormal abusive behavior * Creating a safe environment to develop self-soothing skills to better cope with challenging behavior and avoid being re-triggered * Affirming boundaries Formal evaluation of trauma-informed therapy in correctional institutions is limited, though in a 2016 UCLA-sponsored pooled study of three sample groups (one using Covington's CBT curriculum) of racially diverse incarcerated women with an average of 14 prior arrests and exposure to at least two traumatic events (assault by a family member or stranger, serious/life-threatening accident or illness), social scientists Christine Grella and Nena Messina concluded gender-responsive trauma-based cognitive behavioral therapy showed significant improvements for the participants on scales measuring self-efficacy, substance use and community re-entry, stressing the importance of a continuing care model involving treatment in prison and upon release." The Bureau of Prisons, at its women's prison in Danbury, Connecticut, offered a gender-responsive trauma treatment program.Federal laws to decarcerate
Fair Sentencing Act
Passed by Congress in 2010, the federal Fair Sentencing Act reduced the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine offenses, with crack more common among African Americans and powder cocaine more prevalent among whites. The Act eliminated the five-year mandatory minimum for possession of crack cocaine.First Step Act
TheState laws and mandates to decarcerate
''Brown v. Plata'': California ordered to reduce state prison population
In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in '' Brown v. Plata'' that California's overcrowded penitentiaries violated the Eighth Amendment's protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Built to house 85,000 inmates, the state prison population numbered 156,000, almost twice the appropriate amount in facilities where "lines for prison health clinics often snake 50 men deep" and "prison gymnasiums and classrooms are packed with three-tier prisoners' bunks." Upholding an order issued by a three-judge panel in a prisoner class action lawsuit, the Court ordered California to reduce its prison population by 46,000 inmates. In its decision, the Court concluded that overcrowding was the main cause for the inmates' inferior medical and mental health care. To comply with the ruling, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) sent inmates to private prisons in other states like Mississippi, transferred inmates back to local jails, diverted inmates to rehabilitation and treatment programs and halted incarceration of parolees for noncriminal technical parole violations.Mandatory minimums
Since the prison expansion era, 23 states have enacted laws to either revise downward mandatory minimum sentences or repeal laws related to non-violent offenses, such as drug use and sale. In addition, states have increased opportunities to earn good-time credit for early release and established specialized courts to sentence defendants to rehabilitation and treatment, rather than prison, for crimes resulting from mental health, domestic violence or drug problems. While some states like New York and New Jersey decreased their prison population, other states such as Louisiana and Alabama increased their incarceration rates. Advocates of decarceration credit Maryland's 2016 Justice Reinvestment Act for dramatically reducing the state's incarceration rate. Under the legislation, nonviolent offenders are diverted from prison into drug treatment and other programs and mandatory minimums for drug offenses are eliminated. Below is a more detailed account of reforms adopted by states and local governments, as well as non-profit criminal justice organizations:Types of decarceration reforms
Smart Justice Campaign
In 2018, theThe Sentencing Project
Decriminalization
In response to public outcries over the criminalization, arrest and incarceration of marijuana-related offenses, 50 localities and dozens of states—including Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri and Nebraska—have either legalized or decriminalized marijuana possession—often resulting in no arrest, prison time, or criminal record for the first-time possession of a small amount of marijuana for personal use. Despite the changes in state laws with a majority legalizing medical marijuana, marijuana remains illegal under federal law, the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) (21 U.S.C. § 811), which classifies cannabis as a highly addictive Schedule I drug (joining heroin and cocaine on that list) of no medical value that carries a possible misdemeanor or felony charge regardless of the amount of possession or sale. According to the FBI, arrests for marijuana nationwide were on the rise in 2018, even though many states had legalized or decriminalized its use. Recreational marijuana use and sale was still illegal in most states. The American Civil Liberties Union—charging Blacks are almost four times as likely as whites to be arrested for marijuana use—calls not only for legalization of marijuana but also expungement of drug offenses from criminal records, with reinvestment of public dollars in the communities most damaged as a result of the War on Drugs, a government initiative that dramatically increased the sentences for drug use and sale.Opposition to decriminalization
David Mineta, Deputy Director with the government's National Drug Control Policy, says the criminalization of drug use and sale serves more than a punitive purpose. "Penalties, or even the threat of them, frequently spur individuals struggling with addiction or substance use to get the treatment they might never seek or receive on their own." Mineta points out that referrals to substance use recovery programs are often the result of court referrals. Law enforcement opponents of marijuana legalization argue recreational users too often drive under the influence, risking roadside safety, and that legalization creates a criminal black market for distributors exporting marijuana to states where it is still illegal.Bail reform
Proponents of eliminating cash bail for misdemeanors and non-violent offenses argue cash bail creates two tiers of justice, one for the rich who can either pay the bail themselves or pay a bonds person a percentage,10-15% in cash, the rest in collateral, to put up the bail; the other for poor people—often marginalized people of color—who struggle to pay rent and cannot afford to pay bail or a bonds person, leaving the less advantaged to live behind bars for days before being charged with a crime; for months, even years while they wait to be charged and tried in court. According to the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative, in 2016, 70% of the 646,000 people locked up in more than 3,000 local jails throughout the U.S were being detained pretrial. Advocates of no cash bail argue that money should not determine who can be released and who must remain behind bars, but whether the court deems the defendant's release poses a risk to the community's safety. States the American Bar Association, "Deprivation of liberty pending trial is harsh and oppressive, subjects defendants to economic and psychological hardship, interferes with their ability to defend themselves, and, in many instances, deprives their families of support. An alternative to cash bail enables judges to release defendants on their own recognizance, sometimes conditioning the release on the defendant's participation in a diversion program, but requiring the defendant to sign an agreement promising to show up in court as required or face possible arrest or fine.California-No Cash Bail legislation
On August 28, 2018, former California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the California Money Bail Reform Act, which directs local courts to rely on risk assessment tools, not cash bail, to decide whether to release felony arrestees on their own recognizance. Additionally, the law says the courts, with few exceptions, must allow pre-trial release for those arrested or detained for misdemeanors. Opponents of the 2018 California Money Bail Reform Act have qualified a referendum for the November 2020 ballot to overturn the law that replaced bail for misdemeanors with a system based on public safety risk. Referendum supporters charge the bail reform law affords judges too much discretion in determining if bail is necessary and allows dangerous criminals to re-enter the community.New York's bail reform law
For most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, judges in New York are required to release people with the "least restrictive conditions necessary to reasonably assure" the person will appear in court on a specified date. For misdemeanors and non-violent crimes, cash bail is prohibited, unless the crimes involve sex trafficking, sex offenses, witness tampering, child pornography, vehicular assault or a charge that is alleged to have resulted in the death of another person. In other cases, it is a matter of judicial discretion to release or detain people, with or without pretrial conditions, such as electronic monitoring, participation in drug treatment programs or payment of bail.Hennepin County, Minnesota bail reform
On December 2, 2020, Hennepin County Attorney, Mike Freeman, announced that beginning January 1, 2021, he will no longer request bail for 19 felony level crimes including: fifth degree possession or sale of Narcotics, dishonored check, and counterfeiting currency.Economic justice
Decarceration advocates charge that prison guards unions have fueled escalating incarceration rates by contributing to initiative campaigns to repeal bail and parole reform. as well as to politicians who support tough on crime legislation, increased pay for guards and prison expansion. To address correctional officers union's concerns about job security, advocates of decarceration posit that "ensuring economic justice for those who lose their jobs, must go hand and hand with curtailing incarceration" and call on the government to ensure mass employment and job guarantees for displaced workers.Green New Deal for decarceration
In 2019, proponents of decarceration allied themselves with environmentalists to oppose the construction of a new prison on a mountaintop in Letcher County, Kentucky, jointly celebrating when the Trump administration deleted from its proposed 2020 budget $500 million to build the prison in Appalachia. In ''AJPH'', a publication of the American Public Health Association, assistant professors Brett Story and Seth Prins write, "The devastation wrought by blowing up mountaintops to extract buried fossil fuels parallels the community ruin caused by forcibly removing residents from their neighborhoods to be warehoused in massive, faraway, high-security institutions." In their article "Connecting the Dots Between Mass Incarceration, Health Inequity, and Climate Change", the authors call for an alliance between opponents of mass incarceration and environmentalists to support a Green New Deal for decarceration that would redirect money for prisons and jails into housing and mental health. For rural cities and towns—where prisoners outnumber farmers and incarceration brings jobs to depressed coal mining areas, Story and Prins argue the economic benefits of prisons are questionable, fostering a dependence on carceral institutions and increased incarceration rates to the detriment of developing a more diverse economy.Diversion and sentencing reform
In highlighting states (Connecticut, Michigan, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Rhode Island) that reduced their prison population 14-25% in 2016,Michigan as a model
The State of Michigan in a 2018 annual report described its 188 problem solving courts as vehicles to provide substance use treatment, mental health and intense supervision as alternatives to sentencing offenders to state prison or local jails. In lauding the success of the problem-solving drug courts, the report notes that of the 2,984 2018 participants in a drug or sobriety program 65 percent had successfully completed the treatment, while 29 percent were discharged because they did not follow the rules or committed a new offense. Maintaining a steady job was a critical factor in whether the participants were successful. Graduates of the drug courts were two times less likely to be convicted of a new crime during the following three years. Michigan's drug courts have changed over time to include a variety of models: * Drug courts that address drug-related non-drunk driving felonies (Ten Key Components of Drug Courts) * Sobriety courts that only take offenders driving under the influence (Ten Guiding Principles of Sobriety Courts) * Hybrid courts using both an adult drug court and sobriety court model * Juvenile drug court * Healing to Wellness courts, with a cultural awareness component, in Native American communities * Family dependency courts target child abuse and neglect cases involving parental substance useProbation and parole reform
Decarceration advocates refer to "prison churn" or the revolving door in which at least one in four people who go to jail are arrested again within the same year—often those struggling with mental illness, substance use and poverty, problems that only worsen with prison time. Technical violations of probation or parole—missing an appointment with a parole officer, staying out past curfew, unpaid fees or fines—are the primary reasons for recidivism. In response to the outsized role of technical violations, California implemented Senate Bill 678, which gives grants to county probation departments to implement restorative justice programs to reduce the number of people on probation who are sent back to prison. The Chronicle for Social Changes, a non-partisan criminal justice news publication, reports that in the first year of implementation, the state probation violation rate declined by 23 percent or 6,182 prisoners, saving the state $179 million.Re-Entry programs
Research on relationship between education, employment and recidivism
In 2012, researchers with the Indiana Department of Corrections conducted a longitudinal five-year (2005-2009) follow-up study to analyze the role of an offender's education and post-release employment on recidivism among various categories of offenders (i.e., violent, non-violent, sex, and drug offenders). The research involved 6,561 offenders, which constituted 43.2 percent of a total of 15,184 offenders released from the Indiana Department of Correction (IDOC). Research results revealed that recidivist offenders were more likely to be unemployed or under-educated—and that the employment status, age, and education level were the most significant predictors of recidivism, regardless of whether the offender had been convicted of a non-violent or violent offense. Of utmost importance was the offender's level of formal education because that was a critical factor in obtaining and sustaining employment to prevent a return to prison. The "post-release recidivism rate among offenders who had an education below high school was 56.4 percent among violent offenders, 56.8 percent among nonviolent offenders, 63.6 percent among sex offenders, and 51.7 percent among drug offenders."Call for randomized control trials
In 2018, the Trump Administration's Department of Justice issued a skeptical review of the success of job-based re-entry programs, calling for randomized control trials to prove the effectiveness of programs touted as successful in reducing recidivism. The reviewer, David B. Muhlhausen, head of the National Institute of Justice—the research, development, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Justice—identified several potential case management alternatives to job based re-entry programs, commenting, however, that more rigorous research and evaluation was needed to evaluate the efficacy of the case management programs.Prison abolitionists
Led predominantly by modern-day Black feminists, theRestorative justice
Restorative Justice, adopted in schools and communities, rejects traditional retributive punishment—suspension, expulsion, humiliation—to focus on the rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation with victims and the larger community that was harmed. In response to efforts to improve school safety through the use of metal detectors, video cameras, random backpack sweeps, uniformed police and referrals to other law enforcement in what critics term the "Black Lives Matter at Schools
One of the 13 guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement is a commitment to restorative justice. Activists with Black Lives Matter at Schools, a coalition of students, teachers, parents and community members, want to end school zero tolerance policies that expel students for a single disruptive incident, and instead promote restorative justice. Black Lives Matter at Schools organized a national week of action in February 2018, to teach lessons about "structural racism" and the school to prison pipeline that it described as "more invested in locking up youth than in unlocking their minds."Evaluations of restorative justice
In 2019, The West Ed Justice and Research Center published an evaluation of restorative justice after conducting a "comprehensive review" of research, interviewing experts and administering a survey to educators in the schools. The Center concluded published research "lacks the internal validity necessary to exclusively attribute outcomes" to restorative justice. The Center added, however, that preliminary evidence suggests the program may improve outcomes related to discipline, attendance, graduation, climate, and culture. A Department of Justice 2017 study, "Effectiveness of Restorative Justice", concluded restorative justice programs demonstrated a moderate reduction in future delinquent behavior when compared to more traditional punitive juvenile approaches.Transformative justice
Advocates of transformative justice believe government responses to crime—prisons, jails, police, courts—often lead to more violence, traumatizing what they describe as marginalized communities of color already targeted by the police. One of the tenets of transformative justice is that society must accept collective responsibility for violent crime; individuals are not born knowing how to murder, rape or torture–these are learned behaviors, not the product of a few bad apples. Rather than rely on a system that reproduces more violence inside the prisons and jails, as well outside in the community, advocates of transformative justice say they hope to prevent crime by addressing the social conditions that undergird criminal behavior while building the capacity of individuals and communities to address inequality and injustice. Activists with Generation Five, an organization working to end inter-generational child sexual abuse, write in their 2007 report "Toward Transformative Justice" of the importance of survivor empowerment, public education, prevention and "cross movement building" in ending child abuse. The report stresses the significant role of the collective—a group of select community members engaged in ending child abuse by naming and defining child abuse, raising consciousness about what constitutes child abuse, developing a personal safety strategy for the child (food, shelter, freedom from physical abuse), as well as a political safety strategy (freedom from deportation, racist, sexist and homophobic attacks), an economic safety strategy (access to money) and public safety strategy (protection from the state and community violence), holding the child abuser accountable (amends) and supporting healing for all those involved in a specific case.Justice reinvestment
Increased prison and jail populations, and the attendant costs to house inmates who, according to the Department of Justice (2010), too often return to prison within three years, has spurred lawmakers to tap into federal dollars under the Justice Reinvestment Initiative to rethink ever-expanding correctional budgets that consume dollars needed for other state priorities. Hence, the data-driven policy of justice reinvestment has gained traction, with states increasing funding for community programs—housing, substance use treatment, employment training, and family support for released offenders—that reduce recidivism and end crime. ''State Legislatures'' magazine reports a dozen states that pursued justice reinvestment have reduced their prison and jail populations, with Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, Nebraska and Utah implementing reforms in 2014 and 2015 that collectively avoided estimated costs of more than $1.7 billion over the next 20 years. Darris Young, a former 17-year prison inmate and organizer with the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center—a group behind the "Books not Bars" network to close California's youth prisons—worked on the Justice Reinvestment Initiative to fund counseling, housing, employment and life skills training for offenders re-entering their community. "Why not invest in the resources that will help give people dignity and pride? If you have a stake in your community, you're less likely to be trying to tear down your community," said Young.Movement to abolish ICE and divest from its contractors
While some decarceration proponents call for reducing the number of detainees in federal detention centers that detain 50,165 immigrants on an average day, other decarceration advocates want the detention centers closed and ICE abolished, charging that immigrant detention, an historic anomaly, strips migrants of their dignity.Demands to abolish the agency gained traction in the summer of 2018, at the height of public outrage over the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy that led to thousands of children separated, some permanently, from their mothers and fathers at the U.S-Mexico border. Calls to abolish ICE, the agency that works with the U.S. Border Patrol to implement the Trump Administration's deportation orders, grew louder as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rode to victory over an entrenched Democratic Party incumbent on the issue of immigrant rights. Declared Ocasio-Cortez, "It's time to abolish ICE, clear the path to citizenship, and protect the rights of families to remain together." While most prisons are government-run facilities, ICE relies on private profit-making corporations to operate detention centers. ICE spent over $6 billion in 2019 to contract with publicly traded GEO Group, Core Civic and Management and Training Corporation to operate detention centers, some of them in California where a new California law—that went into effect after the contracts were signed—bars the operation of private prisons. Politico reported in 2018 that, according to polls, a majority of voters—aside from the activist base of the Democratic Party—did not support calls to abolish ICE. Republicans in Congress passed a resolution in support of ICE, saying "calls to abolish ICE are an insult to these heroic law enforcement officers who make sacrifices every day to secure our borders."Protests over detentions
On August 5, 2019, the Jewish organizationSee also
*References
{{reflist Criminal justice reform in the United States Incarceration rates in the United States