Ending the Era of Mass Incarceration: Where We Go from Here

In this final article of our 4-part series on mass incarceration, we’ll look at recent criminal justice reform on federal, state, and local levels and examine where we need to go from here to make mass incarceration a thing of the past.

In one of Barack Obama’s last acts while in office, he published a 56-page law commentary on criminal justice reform in the January 2017 Harvard Law Review. In “The President’s Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform,” he maintains that presidents can have real impact on this issue. He proves this thesis by highlighting policy initiatives made during his administration that span community-police relations to a prisoner’s re-entry into society:

• In January 2016, Obama worked with the Justice Department to overhaul the application process for the largest federal grant funding local and state law enforcement. To qualify for this support, departments must now show commitment to sending fewer citizens to prison by issuing citations rather than arrests, making mental health and addiction treatment widely available, and implementing other measures.

• The White House created the Data-Driven Justice Project in 2015 to help cities and counties identify ways to reroute people with mental health illnesses and addictions from jail cells and emergency rooms into treatment facilities.

• In 2010, Obama signed Congress’s Fair Sentencing Act, which lessened the disparities between the higher sentences imposed upon users and sellers of crack cocaine — more popular among African-Americans — and powder cocaine.

• Astonishingly, Obama was the first sitting President ever to visit a federal prison when he visited Oklahoma’s El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in July 2015.

• By the time he left office, Obama commuted the sentences of 1927 federal prisoners: a higher number than the last 6 presidents combined (not counting Presidents Ford’s and Carter’s mass pardons to Vietnam “draft dodgers”). Unlike most presidential pardons, which are retroactively applied to a sentence fully served, Obama’s commutations shortened prisoners’ jail time. 98% of these revised sentences were for drug-related offenses.

• He directed the Office of Personnel Management to remove the box on early-stage federal job applications that requires an applicant to reveal a past criminal conviction. In doing so, he brought the federal government level with 25 states that have “banned the box” on their public sector job applications. (9 of those 25 have also done so for private sector applications.)

In the commentary, however, Obama also highlights federal criminal justice reform measures that have failed. Perhaps the most important of these was 2015’s Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (SCRA). This bill, authored by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), stalled on the Senate floor, despite having rare bipartisan support.

Had it passed, the bill would have reduced a variety of mandatory federal prison sentences; people with three drug convictions, for instance, would now serve 25 years instead of life, and 20-year drug sentences would drop to 15 years. Federal prisons would also be required to implement measures designed to reduce recidivism, such as minimizing solitary confinement for juveniles. These changes would have saved the Department of Justice $722 million over the next decade.

While Grassley and Durbin plan to send the bill back to the Senate, many campaigners for criminal justice reform are concerned about its future under the current administration. Even though Attorney General Jeff Sessions supported the Fair Sentencing Act, he was one of the Senate stalwarts who undermined the SCRA.

Some analysts, however, have already concluded that the movement against mass incarceration should focus its efforts on state and local channels over the next four years. Since 90% of the nation’s prison population is housed in state and local facilities, moreover, it’s on the state and local level where the most prisoners can be affected — regardless of any progress, or lack thereof, at the federal level.

A wide spectrum of criminal justice policies are in place at state and local prisons. Often, policies both more draconian and more lenient than the federal government co-exist in the same state. For instance, few stories in recent memory have encapsulated the intersectionality of mass incarceration’s racial, economic, and social injustices as heartbreakingly as that of Kalief Browder. Jay-Z, who along with Harvey Weinstein produced the 6-part documentary Time: The Kalief Browder Story currently airing on Spike, described Kalief as a “prophet” whose story “will teach all us grown-ups to love better and have more compassion.” Kalief Browder was a black high-school student from the Bronx who spent three years at Rikers Island awaiting a trial that never came for a crime — stealing a backpack — that he did not commit. His situation became a perfect storm of injustice. First, he was arrested on the flimsiest of eyewitness identifications for an alleged robbery. He languished in Rikers because his mother couldn’t afford the $3000 bail set for the class-C felony, and because New York is only one of two states (North Carolina is the other) that prosecutes 16 and 17 year-olds as adults. Worst of all, inhumane conditions meant that Kalief not only received beatings from fellow inmates and prison guards but spent over 800 days in solitary confinement. Kalief went into Rikers a 16 year-old, but he came out, as he put it, “feel[ing] like 40.” Scarred mentally and physically, he committed suicide in June 2015, at the age of 22. The public reaction to Kalief’s story proved crucial in bolstering the hard work of campaigners for Raise the Age NY, which aims to increase the legal age of criminal responsibility to 18. On February 14th, 2017, the New York Assembly voted 81-40 to pass the “Raise the Age” bill. The bill currently awaits a ruling from the state Senate. Other states have made headway on mass incarceration through sentencing reform bills. For instance, Michigan eliminated mandatory sentences for most non-violent drug offenses in 2002; a decade later, the prison population had fallen by 14%, and violent crime by 16%. South Carolina also ended mandatory minimums for drug possession in 2010; subsequently, violent crime and the prison population decreased 17% and 9%, respectively, over the next 4 years. * Local initiatives have also addressed the numbers of people shuffled through city and county jail systems. Local jails, unlike federal and state prisons, are designed to hold only short-term prisoners. Over 11 million Americans populate the nation’s 3100 jails each year, mostly serving non-violent, misdemeanor sentences. 64% of those jailed are mentally ill, whereas 68% have substance addictions. By combining local justice and healthcare data, for instance, Miami-Dade County identified almost 100 mentally-ill “super utilizers” who accounted for $13.7 million spent in hospitals and jails. The county subsequently trained all police officers and 911 dispatchers to de-escalate mental health crises. As a result, police arrested only 109 people over the last five years, despite answering 50,000 mental health calls. The county’s jail population fell from over 7000 to 4700, and 10,000 people who might otherwise have been incarcerated received mental health care. * However, as Obama notes in the Harvard Law Review, much remains to be done. Improving criminal data collection, reducing gun violence, identifying and reversing wrongful convictions, promoting good community-police relations, and restoring the right to vote to ex-felons are just some of mass incarceration’s under-addressed issues. What should we do if we want to relegate the age of mass incarceration to the history books? In short, we’ll need to commit ourselves to a three-part strategy: donate, educate, and participate. Begin by donating if you can to the following organizations committed to ending mass incarceration: All of Us or None, Critical Resistance, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Essie Justice Group, and the Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People & Families Movement, or any other nationwide effort. Next, educate yourself by reading policy papers and fact sheets on sites like the Brennan Center for Justice, the Prison Policy Initiative, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, and the Sentencing Project. Finally — and most importantly — participate. Support statewide campaigns like Raise the Age in New York or North Carolina Advocates for Justice. If you own a business, “ban the box” on your job applications. You can also use a toolkit put together by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) to support or start a “ban the box” campaign in one of the 25 states without such a policy. Attend public police department meetings to express concerns about drug sentences and stop-and-frisk policies. See if your city or county is one of the 130 jurisdictions nationwide that is part of the Data-Driven Justice Initiative; if not, consider asking your city hall to sign on. Much remains to be done to redress the greatest injustice in 21st-century America, but too much is at stake to become complacent — and thus complicit. As Obama concludes, “how we treat those who have made mistakes speaks to who we are as a society and . . . about our dedication to fairness, equality, and justice.” Only when people of all generations, genders, races, and classes work to end the Age of Mass Incarceration will America become a nation worthy of its ideals.

Featured

Hello, I’m Sara!

Words are the writer’s fabric that weave bridges across cultures, countries, and centuries. I’m happy you’re here to read them! Grab a cup of tea and enjoy. You can relax here.