Pubdate: Sun, 07 Dec 2014
Source: Buffalo News (NY)
Copyright: 2014 Washington Post
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/GXIzebQL
Website: http://www.buffalonews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/61
Author: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Special To The Washington Post
Note: Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of the Nation 
magazine and writes a column for the Washington Post.

TIME TO END MASS INCARCERATION

The Moral and Political Case for Reforming the Criminal Justice System

There isn't much room for optimism among progressives these days. 
President Obama's avenues to legislative achievement in his final two 
years are narrow and seem mostly to lead to the right  toward a 
corporate tax reform in one instance, and a NAFTA-style trade deal 
with the Asia-Pacific region in another.

But in these dark days, there is, as we are already witnessing, 
reason for hope  in the form of last month's landmark climate change 
deal with China and Obama's executive action on immigration. And 
today, increasingly, there are signs that the United States could 
make greater strides on criminal justice reform than at any time in a 
generation or more.

 From a moral standpoint, the need to reform the justice system is 
clear. During the past four decades, the U.S. prison population has 
quadrupled even as the crime rate has dropped. We have some 2.4 
million people behind bars, far more than any other country, costing 
about $80 billion a year to maintain.

Worse yet, as a result of racial disparities in sentencing, more than 
half of U.S. prisoners are minorities. These staggering statistics 
stem from the failure of the "war on drugs," the true impact of which 
can only be measured in destroyed lives and devastated communities, 
especially among the most marginalized segments of society.

 From a political perspective, the issue unites people along 
"transpartisan" lines - not a centrist-style compromise, but a cause 
that aligns with the priorities of both parties for different 
reasons. For progressives, mass incarceration is not merely a legal 
problem; as Michelle Alexander describes in "The New Jim Crow," it is 
a civil rights crisis.

Two-thirds of the Republican Party's fabled three-legged stool 
support reform, too: fiscal conservatives, from a budgetary 
perspective, and religious conservatives, increasingly, from a moral one.

In 2010, for example, a conservative reform initiative called Right 
on Crime launched with the support of Republicans including Jeb Bush, 
Grover Norquist, Tony Perkins and Ralph Reed. And though the issue 
has not yet broken through the gridlock in Congress, a growing number 
of Republicans are abandoning the party's traditional tough-on-crime posturing.

Earlier this year, Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., 
teamed up to introduce the REDEEM Act, a comprehensive bill that aims 
to keep children out of the adult criminal justice system and 
incentivizes states to seal the records of nonviolent offenders.

Meanwhile, Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Mike Lee's, R-Utah, Smarter 
Sentencing Act, which would reduce certain mandatory minimum 
sentences and allow judges more discretion in nonviolent drug cases, 
attracted 30 co-sponsors. Congressional aides expect Paul to continue 
pressing the issue in the next Congress, which may create additional 
momentum for reform as he moves toward an expected presidential run.

Indeed, across the country, public support for criminal justice 
reform is becoming increasingly clear. Midterm voters in Alaska, 
Oregon and Washington, D.C., approved the legalization of marijuana, 
which will help protect thousands  particularly minorities, who are 
disproportionately arrested for simple possession. New York police 
recently announced that they will stop making arrests for simple 
marijuana possession.

And California voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot initiative, 
Proposition 47, that reclassified a number of nonviolent and 
drug-related felonies as misdemeanors and is expected to affect about 
40,000 offenders a year. The campaign for Proposition 47 brought 
together a diverse collection of supporters, including rap icon Jay 
Z, Newt Gingrich, the American Civil Liberties Union and conservative 
billionaire B. Wayne Hughes.

Criminal justice reform could become an important issue in both 
parties' primary contests. The likely Republican contenders include 
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a vocal critic of reform who recently 
railed against "careless weakening of drug laws that have done so 
much to help end the violence and mayhem that plagued American cities 
in prior decades."

On the Democratic side, one of former secretary of state Hillary 
Clinton's opponents may be former senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who 
worked to create a commission  which Republicans blocked  to tackle 
mass incarceration. If Webb continues making noises about running in 
the Democratic primary, Clinton will face increasing pressure to 
address his signature issues, with criminal justice reform near the 
top of the list.

Whatever happens in the next two years, however, the movement for 
criminal justice reform is not going away. In November, the ACLU 
announced an ambitious plan to force the issue into the electoral 
debate, with the goal of cutting the incarceration rate in half in eight years.

George Soros' Open Society Foundations contributed $50 million to 
support the campaign, the largest grant in ACLU history. While any 
connection to Soros, a longtime bogeyman of the right, would 
typically send Republicans running, the billionaire Koch brothers 
have also shown support for criminal justice reform initiatives, such 
as Families Against Mandatory Minimums. This coincides with the 
launch of the Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom headed up by 
Bill Keller, formerly of the New York Times, which will focus on 
criminal justice issues.

The odds are still against any major legislation passing in 2015. 
There are partisan battles brewing over immigration and the budget, 
and Republicans may well revert to their favored strategy of all-out 
opposition to the president. Still, criminal justice reform is one of 
those rare instances where moral decency, popular opinion and 
political incentives all align.

For progressives, who see few opportunities for near-term victories 
at the federal level, this is a winnable fight - and one very much 
worth fighting.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom