Jason Hernandez never thought he would see the outside world again.
Since 1998, he had been serving a life sentence in federal prison for selling crack cocaine in his native McKinney, Texas. It was his first criminal offense, but due to the Drug Act of 1986 and the mandatory minimum sentences it required, Hernandez found himself locked up at the age of 21. Then, in 2013, his prayers and petitions were answered: He was granted clemency by President Obama.
Watch the video above and see how Hernandez uses Crack Open the Door, his sentencing advocacy nonprofit, to spotlight and fight for the release of other first-time nonviolent drug offenders serving life without parole.
MORE: Criminal Justice Reform Is Imminent. Here’s Why
Tag: criminal justice
Why Youthful Indiscretions Shouldn’t Result in Jail Sentences, How to Save Babies Born with Opioid Addictions and More
A Prosecutor’s Vision For A Better Justice System, TED
Adam Foss, a prosecutor with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston, recently asked a group of TED participants how many had ever drank underage, tried an illegal drug, shoplifted or gotten into a physical fight. While viewed by most as youthful indiscretions, these same offenses often land black and brown youth in criminal court, viewed as being dangerous to society. Which is why Foss is using prosecutorial discretion to dismiss minor cases that aren’t worthy of a criminal record.
Tiny Opioid Patients Need Help Easing Into Life, Kaiser Health News and NPR
In this country, addiction to heroin and prescription painkillers like hydrocodone, oxycodone or morphine continues to rise, even afflicting new moms. During pregnancy, these mothers must decide between getting clean and risking a miscarriage or delivering a baby that’s likely to experience drug withdrawal. With about 21,000 infants suffering from withdrawal each year, doctors in Rhode Island, nurses in Connecticut, researchers in Pennsylvania and public health officials in Ohio are all working on solutions to help these new families.
Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through, New York Times
Just because the government releases endless pages of data to the public doesn’t mean it’s easy to turn those statistics into something that you can actually comprehend and use. DataUSA, an open source brainchild coming from the M.I.T. Media Lab, organizes and visualizes the information, presenting it in charts, graphs and written synopses. Thanks to this project, instead of just hearing a statistic of how many people in Flint, Mich., live in poverty, for example, you can see it visually represented on a map.
How a Classic Denim Company Is Greening up the Fashion Industry, Why One Judge Went out of His Way for a Convicted Criminal and More
In Its Quest to Decrease Water Use, Levi’s Is Open Sourcing Production Methods, FastCo.Exist
3,781: The number of liters of water required to produce a pair of jeans and grow the cotton they’re made with. To reduce its H2O usage, Levi’s developed a process that consumes 96 percent less water (think: transitioning from roomy boyfriend to super skinny cut). Even better? Instead of sequestering its eco-friendly methods in a top-secret lab, the producer of the classic 501 is sharing its techniques with industry competitors.
A Federal Judge’s New Model for Forgiveness, New York Times
Checking the conviction history question on a job application can make it next to impossible for the formerly incarcerated to gain employment. When issuing a 15-month-long prison sentence to a woman for faking an auto accident in order to collect insurance money, New York judge John Gleeson didn’t mean to issue the lifelong punishment of unemployment. Which is why, 13 years later, he handed her something unusual: a federal certificate for rehabilitation.
The Powerful, Young Gallery Owner Shaping L.A.’s Art Scene, OZY
The Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, which boasts the city’s second highest property crime rate, is also the unlikely home of Michelle Papillion’s art gallery. Showcasing the works of emerging African-American artists, Papillion is out to do more than just bring awareness to creatives that aren’t widely recognized and celebrated; she’s working to beautify the community around her.
MORE: To Reduce Drug Abuse, These Members of the Criminal Justice Community Advocate for Legalization, Not Criminalization
Wrongful Conviction Spurs Texas to Reform Police Lineups, Scientist Discovers Efficient Way to Restore Coral Reefs and More
Recognition, The New Yorker
Texas has the reputation of being tough on crime and even harsher on those found guilty. For those who binged Netflix’s recent “Making a Murderer,” the tale of Tim Cole, an Army veteran who, because of incorrect eyewitness identification by the victim herself, was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault in 1986 (and died while incarcerated), will make it seem like our criminal justice system is broken. Fortunately, there is a silver lining to this tragic story.
This Village of Tiny Houses Is Giving Seattle’s Homeless a Place to Live, Fast Co. Exist
With approximately 10,000 people living on the streets, it’s an understatement to say that there’s a homelessness crisis happening in Seattle. Since affordable and free housing for the homeless is a costly endeavor, the nonprofit Low Income Housing Institute needed to get creative. Their idea? Tiny houses that can house a small family, yet cost just $2,000 to construct.
A Coral Reef Revival, The Atlantic
Helping a century’s old coral reef come back to life certainly sounds like science fiction, but it’s exactly what David Vaughan, Ph.D., is doing off the coast of south Florida. He and his team of scientists are restoring reefs by producing thousands of new pieces of coral using microfragmentation — a new process that he developed by accident.
This One Bill Could Make Criminal Justice Reform a Reality
In 1988, a powerful 30-second TV spot scuttled a presidential campaign and altered American politics for the next three decades. The no-frills ad claimed Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who that summer led George H.W. Bush by 17 points in the polls, offered “weekend prison passes” to first-degree murders like Willie Horton, who while on one of these furloughs, stabbed a man and raped his girlfriend during a brutal home invasion. “The ghost of Willie Horton has loomed over any conversation about sentencing reform for over 30 years,” Sen. Dick Durbin, tells The Marshall Project, revving up incarceration rates and making criminal justice reform seemingly impossible.
But as the consequences of our nation’s tough-on-crime policies have become increasingly clear — in cost and governmental overreach, to Republicans, and for Democrats, in preventing rehabilitation and furthering the racial divide— progress is happening. Last Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators, including Durbin, introduced a bill to accompany the House’s SAFE Justice Act. As we’ve written before, Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presented the largest obstacle to criminal justice reform. But after three years of lobbying and political maneuvering (Sen. Chuck Schumer compared it to putting together “a Rubik’s cube,”) The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 has Grassley’s support and now looks like the best chance of getting a bill to President Barack Obama’s desk.
“The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country on earth. Mandatory minimum sentences were once seen as a strong deterrent. In reality they have too often been unfair, fiscally irresponsible and a threat to public safety,” Durbin said at the bill’s announcement. “Given tight budgets and overcrowded prison cells, our country must reform these outdated and ineffective laws that have cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. This bipartisan group is committed to getting this done.”
The bill is modeled on reforms in Texas that significantly decreased the number of incarcerated in the Lone Star State. If passed, it would reduce mandatory minimum prison sentences for those with drug and firearm offenses. It would also limit the application of Three Strikes, which mandates a life sentence after three felonies, to serious violent and serious drug felonies. Perhaps most notably, these reforms would apply retroactively. Other provisions include rehabilitation behind bars and a ban on the use of solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prison.
Already, the legislation has amassed a powerful set of co-sponsors. On the Republican side, there’s John Cornyn (Texas), Mike Lee (Utah) and presidential candidate Lindsey Graham (South Carolina). On the left, there’s Sheldon Whitehouse (Rhode Island), Patrick Leahy (Vermont), Cory Booker (New Jersey) and Schumer (New York).
These two pieces of legislation aren’t perfect. “Our broken criminal justice system can’t be fixed in one year, with one bill,” says Van Jones, co-founder of #Cut50, a group lobbying to cut the prison population in half within the next decade. And as a staunch defender of ensuring “access to justice for both the victims and the accused,” Grassley won’t let Democrats totally undo mandatory minimum sentences.
“But it is cause for celebration that there are bipartisan bills to discuss at all. And in a town as broken and dysfunctional as Washington D.C.,” Jones says, “we now have actual legislation on the table.” These pieces of “concrete legislation” in both houses should “give Congress the opportunity to go on record and debate these issues. It’s time to schedule hearings, markups and floor votes,” Jones adds. “Let’s not let politics get in the way of progress.”
Criminal Justice Reform Is Imminent. Here’s Why
Van Jones may joke that he’s been an African American “for a very long time,” but it’s impossible for him to ignore the serious racial inequalities in the U.S. criminal justice system. With blacks incarcerated at six times the rates as Caucasians for the same crime, the multi-hyphen Jones co-founded the organization #Cut50, which works to reduce the prison population by 50 percent in the next decade.
During an exclusive interview with NationSwell, Jones discussed how the fight for reform is progressing and which 2016 presidential candidates are mostly likely to bring about change within the criminal justice system.
How has your organization #Cut50 participated in the [criminal justice reform] debate?
“I hosted a summit in March with Newt Gingrich — he and I became friends working together on CNN — and we thought, if we work really hard, we could get 100 people together for an hour, leaders from both sides, to talk about this issue. We got 700 people for seven hours, including 10 members of Congress, three governors, two Cabinet secretaries and a video from the president.
“Out of that summit, three bills were introduced and a channel was opened up between Koch Industries and the White House — mortal enemies, but not on this one issue. On JusticeReformNow.org, we collected 120,000 signatures from people saying Congress and the president should work together to get something done this year. We’ve worked as effectively as the other groups — the Coalition for Public Safety, ACLU, the Drug Policy Alliance or FAMM, Families Against Mandatory Minimums. We’re working very hard, and we’re very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”
In Washington, #Cut50 is lobbying for the SAFE Justice Act. What would that legislation do?
“The most important thing is letting judges be judges again. We so overreacted to the crack epidemic in the 1980s; we stripped judges of their right to judge and instead imposed mandatory minimum sentences. Even if you’re someone caught with drugs because you were forced to by a boyfriend who was threatening your life or you had never made any mistake before, a judge couldn’t say, ‘Well, look, the punishment should fit the crime here.’ In all circumstances, they just rubber stamped it and would give you some atrocious sentence. You can get 25 years for shooting a cop and 30 years for a non-violent drug offense. That’s the kind of thing that this legislation begins to address.”
READ MORE: 7 States Making Bold Criminal Justice Reforms
Even though Congress is talking about criminal justice reform, it doesn’t seem like the presidential candidates are giving it much attention, with a couple exceptions like Rand Paul. Why is that?
“They’re talking about reform more in this election than any other in American history. Even people like Ted Cruz have spoken out against mandatory minimums. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have addressed this issue, after being pushed by Black Lives Matter. But notice on the Democratic side, Bill Clinton in 1992 made his case to the American people by attacking Rev. Jesse Jackson, executing an African-American with mental health issues in his own state and putting more cops on the street. Hillary Clinton is having to speak out about the catastrophic excesses that have resulted from that kind of attitude. Even Bill Clinton himself has had to come out and say that things have gone too far.
“People pretend that Democrats have been good on these issues and that Republicans have been terrible. In fact, it’s the reverse. Some of the worst policies have come from Democrats like Bill Clinton, and Gov. Gray Davis and Gov. Jerry Brown here in California. Meanwhile, Republican governors like Rick Perry, Nathan Deal in Georgia and John Kasich in Ohio have actually been closing prisons. It’s not a traditional debating point, but it’s an issue that’s rising in importance.”
There’s a lot of discussion already, but that doesn’t always translate into reform. Do you think that now’s finally the time?
“Now here’s something that I think nobody knows. President Obama went to a prison, the only sitting president who’d ever been to a prison. Some people thought that was historic, but that was only a third of the history that was made that day. When he came out of the prison, he didn’t come out chastising the people who were locked up. Instead, he came out and identified with them. He himself had done some of the same things that got these kids in trouble. Now that’s history. For a sitting president to identify with incarcerated felons? And to point out, ‘There but for the grace of good and good parenting, go I?’ That’s extraordinary. That a president would have been in prison, that an American president would have been a felon — that’s a remarkable statement.
“Another third of the history that day was that no serious Republican in the United States of America attacked him for it. In fact, John Boehner himself said he wanted to have a vote on bipartisan criminal justice reform. Now this is a president who could put forward a bill that declared kittens are cute and he would be attacked by Republicans. This is a president that cannot get Republicans to agree with him on anything. And yet on this issue a black president goes into a prison and talks to black felons, and he doesn’t get attacked at all. Now that gives you a sense of the level and depth of the sea change on this issue. You can see in that one day how far this issue has moved in a very short period of time.
“We will get comprehensive criminal justice reform signed by this president, if not by Christmas, certainly by Easter. It’s the only thing that a critical mass of leaders actually agree needs to be done. There might be a thousand fights on the details, but everyone agrees it has to happen.”
This interview has been condensed and edited.
(Front page image: John Moore/Getty Images)
Who’s Responsible for Mass Incarceration? Van Jones Weighs In
It could be said that Van Jones is a Renaissance man. Best known for his book “Rebuild the Dream,” a proposal to revive the American economy, Jones also served as President Barack Obama’s special advisor on green jobs, co-founded four nonprofits to tackle the country’s largest obstacles and regularly appears as a commentator on CNN.
Recently, the Yale Law School graduate turned his attention to mass incarceration. He spoke to NationSwell by phone from the Bay Area about the latest in criminal justice reform.
After so many highly publicized events — the shootings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, you could go on and on — people on both sides of the aisle are talking about criminal justice reform. What allowed this historic moment to happen?
“I think that the core values of both political parties have been violated by the massive expansion of the incarceration industry. If our country is a ‘liberty and justice for all’ country in the ideal, then both parties have their roles to play. The Republicans tend to be the part of liberty. They’re concerned about individual rights and limited government. Well, the incarceration industry is rolling over both those ideas every day. The Democrats tend to be very concerned about justice — particularly social and racial justice. Well, obviously the incarceration industry is the antithesis of that. It’s the antithesis of treating marginalized groups fairly. Both parties have their own independent reasons for being concerned. Then you have this explosion of digital media, social media and hashtag activism that has created a context in which both see the salience of the issue.”
For so long, our justice system seemed to rely on fear: We need harsh penalties so criminals aren’t out on the streets committing more crimes; we can’t change our policing methods because crime will go up. How do you combat that pervasive negative emotion?
“Both political parties were stuck on stupid for three decades. Democrats and Republicans were in a footrace with each other off this cliff to see who could propose dumber, longer sentences for increasingly petty offenses, and both parties got completely away from any kind of evidence-based, rational policymaking in this area.
“I think now we’re seeing another set of fears is beginning to counterbalance that. Crime has reached historic lows, both in places where there was excessive incarceration and in places where there was not. Crime’s been going down and so people can be a little more reasonable when they think about this stuff psychologically. But there’s also a growing fear on the right of increasing government power as more of a libertarian strain in the Republican party gets bigger. Their concern for militarized police, people being jailed for personal choices of drugs and even the NSA has created a counterbalancing set of fears within some quarters of the right.”
[ph]
So, do you capitalize on that fear? Or do eventually you need to shift perceptions for a more lasting change?
“It took decades to get a system this big and unjust in place. You now have a lot of economic interests that are baked into the cake here. And it’s not just private prisons. You have public employee unions that are made up of prison guards who have a stake in the status quo. You have whole towns that have now been built up around prisons out in rural parts of America. They’re gonna fight to keep those prisons open because they’re looking at being a prison town or a ghost town. This is going to be a long process of unwinding mass incarceration. What really has to happen is a much deeper paradigm shift.”
Personally, how did you get involved in this issue of criminal justice reform?
“I’ve been African American for a very long time. From that perspective, it’s very difficult to ignore the racial imbalances that have been built up and even accelerated in our criminal justice system. Iowa’s population is two percent black, but 25 percent of its prison population is black. I agree with the author Michelle Alexander when she says this is the new Jim Crow. We had enslavement in the 1700 and 1800s, we had Jim Crow segregation and now we have mass incarceration. It’s another way to deny basic humanity and dignity and equality to people with darker-colored skin.
“I think a lot of people in the back of their minds believe there’s more and more black people in prison because more and more black people are criminals. And yet the numbers don’t bear it out. In fact, African-Americans and whites do illegal drugs at exactly the same rates, literally the exact same rate. So, if 10 percent of African-Americans are using substances at any given point, 10 percent of whites are. And yet African-Americans are not incarcerated at equal rates. Not at double the rate, nor at three times, but at six times the rates of whites doing the exact same thing. Now that’s not ‘These African-Americans should get better educated and pull their pants up.’ That’s literally six times the rate of incarceration.
[ph]
“Now where does that come from? It comes from police assuming the worst about any African-American motorist or pedestrian and giving them extra scrutiny. They’re more likely to be stopped, and in those encounters, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be held without bail, more likely to be given heavier charges by district attorneys. At every step and stage, you end up with unfair treatment. It’s not that there’s a lot of outright racism. It’s not conscious — ‘Oh, I hate all black people. I want them to be in prison.’ It’s just this tiny little tickle in the back of your brain that says, ‘I need to secure this guy,’ or ‘I need to teach this guy a lesson.’ As opposed to the white college student to whom he maybe says, ‘Oh well, boys will be boys,’ or maybe, ‘They’ll grow out of it.’ But black guys appear as marauding, drug-abusing menaces. Those kinds of things make it very important for me to speak up.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
7 States Making Bold Criminal Justice Reforms
No other sitting Commander in Chief, including Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1981 when prison populations spiked upward rapidly, or George W. Bush, the hang-’em-high leader who presided over 152 executions as Texas governor, had ever set foot inside a federal penitentiary. But last month, President Barack Obama stepped behind bars — hinting that he’s conscious of the legacy he’ll leave and is eyeing criminal justice reform as his next issue to tackle.
“When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made,” Obama said after speaking to six nonviolent offenders at El Reno prison, about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City. “The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.” He added, “It’s not normal. It’s not what happens in other countries. What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things. What is normal is young people making mistakes.”
As bipartisan momentum grows in Washington, D.C., reform efforts are also sweeping the nation, many led by conservative governors. Here’s the latest innovations to come out of our country’s statehouses:
TEXAS SHUTTERS PRISONS
Everything’s bigger in Texas, including its correctional facilities. That is, until recently. Starting in 2007, Gov. Rick Perry, Bush’s successor in a “tough on crime” state and now a Republican presidential candidate, led the conservative state in reining in the size of its prison populations. Texas focused on expanding treatment programs and diverting offenders through probation and parole. In 2011, three juvenile facilities were closed, halving the number of incarcerated youth in the state. Cuts continued in 2013, when legislators reduced the corrections budget by $97 million, a clear sign they intended to scale back the system’s capacity. Two prisons near Dallas mired in scandal and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, the country’s largest for-profit prison company, looked to be on the chopping block. When Sen. John Whitimire, the longest-serving legislator, called for the closure of the prisons built during his watch, the decision seemed final. Through the budget process, both were defunded.
UTAH REDEFINES A PRISON-WORTHY OFFENSE
Obama didn’t selected El Reno prison for his visit at random. He picked the institution because half of its inmates are behind bars for drug offenses — the same proportion for the country as a whole. Utah faced the same situation. While crime fell for two decades, the state’s prison population increased without bound: From 2004 to 2013, the number of inmates grew by 18 percent, six times faster than the national average. This March, Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, signed a comprehensive reform package (developed by a commission of state and local officials) that reclassified all first- and second-time drug possession violations as misdemeanors, instead of felonies. Along with creating new guidelines for parole violations and adding “re-entry specialists” to smooth the transition from prison, the Beehive State’s new law is expected to eliminate the 2,700 projected incarcerations and save the public $500 million over the next 20 years.
ALABAMA DOESN’T JAIL FOR PROBATION VIOLATIONS
Alabama has one of the nation’s highest incarceration rates, jailing more than 30,000 people in a system designed to hold only 12,000 prisoners — leading officials to call it a “time bomb waiting to explode.” Almost a quarter of newly admitted inmates were thrown into overcrowded cells because they violated the terms of their parole or probation. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, half of those cases were for “minor technical violations,” such as missed appointments, unpaid fines, moving to a new home without permission or losing a job, “that did not result in a new offense.” A law signed in 2010 by Gov. Robert Riley limited incarceration for those who committed an administrative error but didn’t break any laws. The alternatives saved the southern state an estimated $18 million.
INDIANA RETOOLS DRUG-FREE ZONE LAWS
The signs are so commonplace you might not notice them: “Drug-Free School Zones.” In fine print, they’ll inform you that selling drugs within 1,000 feet of school property, a public park, a housing project or a youth center in Indiana is a Class A felony, automatically upping the recommended sentence to 20 to 50 years in prison. The creation of these areas were one of the government’s first salvos in the War on Drugs, passed by Congress in 1970, more than a decade before Ronald Reagan escalated the battle. Indiana’s reform began in 2007 in an unlikely way: bills in each chamber of the legislature initially set out to expand the drug-free zone to include bus stops and churches. Kelsey Kauffman, a professor at DePauw University, tasked her students with evaluating the law’s effectiveness. Over an eight-year campaign, they presented their findings — that more than 75 percent of the defendants affected by the zones were black — to multiple Senate committees. By 2013, new legislation cut the zones in half, limiting them to a 500-foot radius. A bill last year sought to scale them back even further to 250 feet, but political maneuvering killed the attempt.
NEBRASKA OVERTURNS DEATH PENALTY
Smack in the middle of America’s heartland, the Cornhusker State became the first conservative state in four decades to repeal capital punishment this May. Nebraska’s nonpartisan, unicameral legislature defied Gov. Pete Ricketts, a fierce advocate for the death penalty, with a 30-to-19 vote, just barely enough to overturn a veto. Liberals and conservatives alike believed the death penalty was inefficient, costly and immoral. “Today we are doing something that transcends me, that transcends this Legislature, that transcends this state,” Sen. Ernie Chambers, an independent from Omaha, said before the vote. “We are talking about human dignity.” Along with Washington, D.C., Nebraska joined 17 other states in banning capital punishment.
MISSOURI REPEALS SELECT BAN ON FOOD STAMPS
The federal welfare overhaul in 1996, passed by Rep. Newt Gingrich’s Republican stronghold in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, revoked the ability of felons convicted of drug offenses to receive welfare benefits. The lifetime disqualification from food stamps seemed so vengeful and contrary to public safety that 19 states have chosen to opt out of the provision entirely and 24 states created exceptions, according to a tally by The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Stateline blog. Barring someone from benefits “increases the odds they will commit new crimes by virtue of the fact that you’re creating a significant financial obstacle,” says Marc Mauer, the executive director of The Sentencing Project. A grassroots push, particularly by religious leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City, united lawmakers in values-based support and won the governor’s signature.
GEORGIA WIPES THE SLATE CLEAN
Once a person’s made contact with the criminal justice system, it’s hard to allude its grasp. A criminal record follows you into every job interview. It’s a red flag on every background check for a new apartment or a loan. That’s the case — even if a person isn’t a felon who spent years in the pen or if a judge dismisses the case or a jury agrees the accused is innocent. With prodding from the Georgia Justice Project and others, legislators overhauled the state’s burdensome and limited expungement law. On the day the law went into effect, one-third of Georgia’s population had a record expunged. Bolstered by the success, Georgia Justice Project convinced Gov. Nathan Deal to issue an executive order to “ban the box” asking criminal history questions on state employment applications this February — the first state in the Deep South to change its hiring policy.
Each Day, 731,000 People Are in Jail. How Many Are There Simply Because They Can’t Afford to Make Bail?
Kalief Browder spent three years in jail despite never being convicted of a crime.
He was arrested for a stealing a backpack in the Bronx — a crime the then 16-year-old maintained he didn’t commit. His mother was unable to put up the $3,000 bail, so he was locked in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, New York City’s central jail, for roughly two years as he awaited trial. Browder tried to commit suicide several times — once with shredded bed sheets hung from a light fixture — and suffered physical abuse from guards and inmates alike, as detailed in The New Yorker.
In 2013, prosecutors dismissed the charges, and he was released. Last month, Browder committed suicide, sparking a wave outrage against the system that had imprisoned a young man for years only on the basis of an accusation. With its “unfortunately-long history of horrible abuses,” Rikers Island became an “example of failing to save jail for people who are convicted, as opposed to people who have just been accused,” Karin Martin, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tells NPR. “We’re realizing that we can’t afford, both financially and kind of morally, the horrible impacts of mass incarceration.”
In New York City, the emotional outpouring that resulted from Browder’s premature death recently crystallized into real reform as Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a sweeping, $18 million overhaul of the city’s bail system. Since 2009, the Big Apple had tested alternatives to monetary bail at a jail in Queens, offering “supervised release” through a nonprofit to low-level or nonviolent offenders. The only requirement? That a person had to do was check in regularly. Nearly nine out of 10 defendants — 87 percent — still showed up to court. Similar to programs in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Charlotte and Phoenix and states like Kentucky, Arizona and New Jersey, nonprofits in the Big Apple will be following up with text messages reminders, visits with case managers and other check-ins to ensure that people keep their date with the judge.
“We know that there are thousands of people who are now being held pre-trial in the city’s jails simply because they cannot afford to pay a few hundred dollars in bail. Instead, they are held at great expense in jail and frequently lose their jobs, have to drop out of school and lose daily contact with their children and families,” Michael Jacobson, executive director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, says in a statement. “Using risk as a standard for pre-trial detention as opposed to how much money someone has will increase public safety, reduce unnecessary and costly detention and make our pre-trial system more fair and just.”
Jails don’t get the same attention as their larger counterparts, state and federal prisons, but the average American is 19 times more likely to be locked up locally than thrown in the slammer. On any given day, 731,000 people are in jail; about 12 million people are admitted in the course of a typical year, according to research by the Vera Institute of Justice. Some are serving out a sentence, but most are simply waiting for their case to be resolved, either through a trial or a plea.
Though the cash bail system is intended to ensure that a person shows up for trial, it’s the most significant reason why some remain locked up and others are released. Put simply, if the accused or his family can’t find the cash for baile fast enough (or at all), he or she will remain behind bars. Most of the time, bail isn’t astronomically expensive. In New York, more than half — 54 percent — of inmates held through the end of their case were behind bars because they couldn’t post bail of $2,500 or less, mostly for misdemeanors.
“There’s no reason to keep people in jail at great costs, when they are no threat to anybody,” says Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of New York State. It “strips our justice system of its credibility and distorts its operation.”
To aid cities and states in determining whether a person is likely to reoffend, the John and Laura Arnold Foundation developed risk assessment tools. Among the key factors that are considered are the person’s age and criminal history, including any prior incarcerations and failures to appear in court, as well as whether the current offense is violent, Anne Milgram, the foundation’s vice president of criminal justice, tells NationSwell. Drug use, employment and other criteria traditionally weighed at arraignment hearings are almost meaningless, she adds.
The judges who used the Arnold Foundation’s criteria have seen notable drops in the jail population and correlated drops in crime. In Charlotte, for example, the number of inmates dropped 20 percent.
“The central challenge of our work has been getting people on board thinking a little differently about how these decisions are made,” says Milgram, a former criminal prosecutor. “There’s a lot of individual discretion for police, prosecutors and courts, but we haven’t used objective data to inform those decisions. We’re not taking away any decision making; we’re providing information that you both need and should want.”
New York will likely develop their own “updated science-driven risk assessment tool” in the near future (Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance called for one), pending an update to state law in Albany.
There’s been some criticism leveled at the latest changes in Gotham by some of bail reform’s biggest promoters. Robin Steinberg, executive director of The Bronx Defenders, a legal aid service, and David Feige, board chair of The Bronx Freedom Fund, which assists those charged with a misdemeanor make bail for $2,000 or less, both called the reforms “long overdue” but stressed that the city must not intrude too far into the lives of defendants. There’s no benefit in being released from jail, they say, if an organization can impose even stricter pretrial requirements, the violation of which could result in reincarceration or other penalties.
“Here’s how it works: A young man arrested for shoplifting might plead guilty and be sentenced to perform one day of community service. But that same defendant who is innocent of the charge might, as a condition of his release, be ordered to attend a one-day drug education program, report to a pretrial-services officer every week, and undergo drug treatment or testing — all because he claimed to be innocent and sought to challenge his arrest,” Steinberg and Feige write in an op-ed for The Marshall Project. “The problem with the pretrial-services model is that these ‘services’ … are often identical to, and sometimes far more onerous than the sentence one would receive for actually being guilty of the crime.”
Natalie Grybauskas, assistant press secretary for the city, tells NationSwell that the only conditions for release will be “whatever check-ins are deemed appropriate by the provider.” Any added services, like a referral to drug education, will be voluntary.
The city expects to select providers from a group of applicants in the fall, she adds.
Republicans and Democrats Rarely Agree On Anything. Except This
Republicans and Democrats indicated at the start of last week’s legislative term that 2015 is the year for criminal justice reform.
With an ideological split dividing President Obama and congressional leadership, you can probably expect more bickering than legislation to come from Washington over the next two years. But one of the few issues lawmakers seem to agree on is the need to reduce our prison population, now surpassing 2.3 million inmates. High-profile Republicans are lining up behind sentencing reform at the same time that Democratic leaders, including Rep. G.K. Butterfield, the new chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), announced that the overhauling of the criminal justice system is the top priority.
“We believe Congress has a critical role to play in helping to restore trust in the criminal justice system, ensuring that every American is treated equally before the law,” write Reps. Elijah Cummings, John Conyers, Jr., and Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democratic members on three powerful House committees. “This is a transformative moment for our country.”
Statistics about our country’s prison system are disturbing, to say the least. There are now more black men in prison, jail or on parole than were enslaved in 1850, The New Yorker calculates. The entire populations of Philadelphia and Detroit could fit in the bunks of our jails, Pacific Standard adds. And the costs of all these cells are staggering: Detaining inmates now eats up almost one-third of the Justice Department’s annual budget.
This growing federal bureaucracy has caused many Republicans to pivot away from the party’s traditional tough-on-crime stance. Why? It just makes economic sense. Add the nationwide anger over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the rallying cry for change is louder than ever — from both sides of the aisle.
“There is a well-founded mistrust between the African-American community and law enforcement officers. The statistics are clear. Video clips are clear,” says Rep. Butterfield. “You will see the Congressional Black Caucus make criminal justice reform a centerpiece of our work.”
As solutions, black legislators have promised to push for updates to “outdated” mandatory sentencing laws, accountability for police and “unethical prosecutors” and access to competent public defenders, says Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat.
This progressive rhetoric is expected from Butterfield’s caucus — known on the Hill as the “Conscience of Congress” — but what is unusual this year is that a group from the right, including Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas, Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch of Utah and Rob Portman of Oregon, are also trumpeting reform. Each of these lawmakers has introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at undoing decades of slamming criminals behind bars.
“I say enough’s enough. I won’t sit idly by and watch our criminal justice system continue to consume, confine and define our young men,” Paul, a likely presidential candidate, told the National Urban League last summer. “I say we take a stand for justice now.”
Reform still won’t be easy. Last year, the Smarter Sentencing Act, a proposal to shorten prison sentences for low-level drug crimes, and the Federal Prison Reform Act, a bill that would have given inmates credit for time served in job training and drug rehab programs, both stalled and died without a vote on the floor.
Looking ahead, any future bills will have to win approval from Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the Republicans chairmen of each chamber’s judiciary committee. Both boast reputations for being tough on crime, and both can delay any bill indefinitely with exhaustive reports, hearings and amendments. But in a hopeful sign last month, Grassley introduced a bipartisan bill with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, designed to prevent “at risk-youth from entering the [prison] system” and helping juvenile offenders already “in the system become valuable members of communities.”
As is usually the case in Washington, compromise seems to be the way forward. “There will be times when I will encourage the CBC to reach across the aisle and try to reach some bipartisan deals that will not make us feel good, but will move the needle in our communities and communities of color,” Butterfield tells BET. “The fight for the future is not a black fight, a Democratic or Republican fight; it is a fight that all fair-minded Americans should promote.”
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