Criminal Justice Reform Is Spreading Across The Country. But Is It Enough to Dismantle Mass Incarceration?
By: News Beat
Tags: Politics, Crime, Criminal Justice, Criminal Justice Reform, Social Justice

“There are all of the things that are called collateral consequences: inability to get work and inability to get licensed in certain things,” Harris says. “Just a myriad of things that a person who has a conviction now find themselves unable to do.”

An estimated 80,000 people are incarcerated in Pennsylvania on any given day in its jails and prisons. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of people funneled back to prison in Pennsylvania because of parole violations increased by 56 percent, according to the ACLU. Tackling parole and probation is next on Harris’ agenda.

When he and Delozier introduced HB1555, the Smart Probation and Parole Act in late May, he cited a Pennsylvania Department of Corrections study that found nearly one-third of prison beds were taken up by people who violated post-release supervision mandates. In Philadelphia County, Harris adds, half of all inmates are held because of parole and probation violations.

The issue transcends Pennsylvania. Nationally, a quarter of all prison admissions are blamed on minor technical post-supervision violations, such as missing an appointment or failing a drug test, according to a new report from the Council on State Governments Justice Center. The financial burden is enormous, estimated at $9.3 billion annually nationwide, according to the report.

“It makes absolutely no sense,” Harris says. “I mean, if it’s a new crime, we understand, yes, you committed a new crime. But if this is just a technical violation, you’re waiting for a violation hearing to determine whether you should be out or not. It doesn’t make sense.”

Harris is bullish about building political alliances, hoping a coalition can muster enough support to begin making significant headwinds.

“This is not a liberal or conservative issue. This is an issue about people,” he says. “When we spend $2.[4] billion out of our General Fund for the Department of Corrections, $2.[4] billion to keep people in caged rooms, I would much rather spend that on roads and bridges, education or other things in Pennsylvania that we know is a return on our investment.”

The Clean Slate Law, which Harris introduced in the House, passed the state Senate 49–0 before making its way to fellow Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf’s desk last June.

He’s hoping for a repeat with HB1555. The bill already has the backing of seemingly strange bedfellows, including the group Cut50, co-founded by CNN commentator and former Obama advisor Van Jones; Justice Action Network, which includes allied progressive and conservative partners; Reform Alliance, founded by rappers Jay-Z, Meek Mill and others; and the Koch brothers-funded libertarian outfit Americans for Prosperity.

“The whole ‘tough on crime’ thing we know doesn’t work,” he says. “It’s time for us to become smart on crime. That is a shift that is a political shift, but I think it’s one that has to be driven by the public.”

PRISON POPULATIONS ARE DECLINING. BUT NOT BY MUCH

Overall, prison populations have been shrinking, including at federal-level and state facilities. But some states went in the other direction, with 19 actually seeing increases between 2017 and 2018, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

The greatest reduction in prison incarceration rates occurred in the Northeast, which at 3.3 percent was nearly double the national average of 1.8 percent. When 2018 ended, there were 20,000 fewer people inside state and federal prisons than the previous year, and 144,000 less than in 2009, Vera reported.

These declines are not solely attributable to legislative solutions. A recent analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found that crime in the 30 largest U.S. cities had fallen in 2018. This follows a Brennan Center report in 2016 that found crime dropped “precipitously” in the last quarter century, after peaking in 1991. Similarly, according to statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the Department of Justice, violent and property crimes both declined by more than 20 percent between 2008 and 2015.

Experts are encouraged by the general decline, even if they are straining not to pour cold water on the movement’s recent successes.

In March 2018, The Sentencing Project released a report titled “Can we wait 75 years to cut the prison population in half?” and characterized the current pace of decarceration as “insufficient.”

At the country’s current rate, the projected federal prison and state population, currently just over 1.5 million, wouldn’t be halved until 2093, according to the report.

“Expediting the end of mass incarceration will require accelerating the end of the Drug War and scaling back sentences for serious crimes,” The Sentencing Project said.

Groups like Cut50 and the ACLU, through its Smart Justice Campaign, are calling for steeper declines, much quicker.

As part of its Smart Justice Campaign, the ACLU in September 2018 announced a 50-state blueprint to drastically begin decarcerating, featuring a state-by-state analysis. For example, in Louisiana, the blueprint called for reclassifying drug and property offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, while recommending Pennsylvania overhaul parole and probation. Perhaps more than anything, the blueprint, which now includes nearly three dozen states, suggests a one-size-fits-all approach would be foolhardy.

Marton of the ACLU says blueprints should be available for all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., by the end of the summer, providing individual stakeholders and lawmakers with a roadmap to reducing incarceration in their respective states by half.

AGGRESSIVE ACTIONS NECESSARY

The politics of criminal justice reform have indeed shifted, but not enough to make it a full-scale rebuke of punitive practices that defined, even to this day, the country’s political system.

The majority of bills proposed and laws passed are originating from state houses under Democratic control.

And while there’s a growing consensus among people of varying political persuasions that the country needs to reverse the cycle of incarceration, Democrats seemingly have a much larger appetite for such change.

Then there’s the matter of the actual solutions being offered. Only reaching for the low-hanging fruit, such as bail and sentencing reform for nonviolent offenses, leaves out some of the leading drivers of incarceration, such as convictions for violent offenses, experts say.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 712,000 are in state prisons for “violent” offenses that range from robbery and assault to rape and other sexual crimes, manslaughter, and murder.

One way to aggressively decarcerate, says Barkow, would be through major sentencing reforms, especially for violent offenses.

“Until we can get a political discussion that can really think about how we’re going to deal with those kinds of crimes, you’re really just going to see the pace of reform, tinker around the edges of this problem as opposed to kind of get to the heart of it,” Barkow says.

“And that assumes that we continue at the same pace, which seems unlikely because at a certain point you run out of reforms that are politically palatable,” Barkow adds, referring to the 75-year projection to cut the prison population in half.

“And if crime goes up, it’ll be really hard to get some things passed,” she continues. “So I don’t think the reforms we’re seeing right now are sufficient for that, for the kind of large-scale reduction in imprisonment. They are not going to come close to that.”

In her most recent book, “Prisoners of Politics,” Barkow argues for taking the politics out of criminal justice-related policy-making and leaning more heavily on experts, as the country does with other governmental institutions.