Decarceration in the United States
[4] The COVID-19 pandemic has reinvigorated the discussion surrounding decarceration as the spread of the virus poses a threat to the health of those incarcerated in prisons and detention centers where the ability to properly socially distance is limited.
[6] While reforms focus on incremental changes, abolitionist approaches include budget reallocations, prison closures and restorative and transformative justice programs that challenge incarceration as an effective deterrent and necessary means of incapacitation.
Abolitionists support investments in familial and community mental health, affordable housing and quality education to gradually transition prison and jail employees to jobs in other economic sectors.
Among sentenced state prisoners at year-end 2017, the most recent year for which crime-related data was available, an estimated three-fifths of Blacks and Hispanics (61% each) and nearly half of whites (48%) were behind bars for a violent offense.
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.
[42] 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.
"[43][44] Barkow traces the pivotal moment in transpartisanship back to 2012, when conservative politicians Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, influenced by Watergate felon and "evangelical celebrity" Charles Colson, issued a "Statement of Principles" that judged the American criminal justice system as broken[45] with prisons and jail expenditures the fastest growing area of state budgets, second only to Medicaid expansion.
[46] Despite what critics called the race-based politics of the campaign, scholars assert Republicans and Democrats, in the years that followed, competed to see which party could prove tougher on crime,[47] culminating with the passage of the 1994 crime bill signed by President Bill Clinton, that provided incentive grants for states to construct more prisons, "funded 100,000 more police officers, and supported grant programs that encouraged police to conduct drug-related arrests"—in what some have called an escalation of the War on Drugs.
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.
On the other hand, advocates of "community control" argue[58] electronic monitoring is humane—sometimes allowing pretrial detainees, who have not been convicted yet but make up most of the local jail population,[20] as well as offenders on probation and parole, an opportunity to live at home with their families, enjoying freedom to move from one room to the next rather than confined in a six-by-eight foot cell.
[59] In 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) in coalition with 60 organizations published a policy platform calling for decarceration in the United States through long-term investment in universal health care and public education, not incarceration.
The Black Lives Matter Movement's policy statement supported reallocating federal, state, and local monies currently invested in "prisons, police, surveillance, and exploitative corporations into long-term safety strategies" such as jobs programs, employment training and restorative justice.
[68] Fox News host Tucker Carlson denounced calls to defund the police, saying that while he agreed with public outrage over Floyd's murder, the United States would fall apart without law enforcement,[69] leaving "thugs" in charge to fill the power vacuum.
[83]San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, son of imprisoned Weather Underground member David Gilbert, said he reduced his city's jail population by 40%[84] during the COVID-19 outbreak.
on a platform of eliminating cash bail, establishing a unit to re-evaluate wrongful convictions and refusing to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with raids and arrests.
[88] Attorney General William Barr criticized Boudin and like-minded DA's, accusing them of undermining the police, letting criminals off the hook and endangering public safety.
Findings were as follows: 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.
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.
[97][98] In 2013, Kaiser Permanente and Centers for Disease Control conducted a study in which offenders (child abusers, sexual offenders, stalkers) were asked to fill out a questionnaire about adverse childhood experiences—exposure to violence; abuse; living with family members who used substances, mentally ill, suicidal or incarcerated[99]—to determine if adverse childhood experiences (ACE's) played a significant role in mental health problems and criminal behavior.
The program, titled "Building Resilience", employed cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a therapeutic approach to identify triggering events and develop coping skills, in facilitated peer-groups to help inmates understand their early childhood trauma and the wounding effects of their adult traumatization of others.
[106] 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.
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.
§ 811), which classifies cannabis as a highly addictive Schedule I drug (joining heroin and cocaine on that list) of no medical value[124] that carries a possible misdemeanor or felony charge regardless of the amount of possession or sale.
[138] 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.
[142] In highlighting states (Connecticut, Michigan, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Rhode Island) that reduced their prison population 14-25% in 2016, The Sentencing Project emphasized the importance of "creation or expansion of specialty courts and/or other alternatives to incarceration.
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".
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.
[175] Darris Young, a former 17-year prison inmate and organizer with the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center—a group behind the "Books not Bars"[176] 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.
[179]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.
