Blog of Rights

Chloe
Cockburn

Reducing our Reliance on Incarceration: A Look at Promising State-Level Reforms in 2013

By Chloe Cockburn, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU & Alex Stamm, ACLU Center for Justice at 4:51pm

Good news for criminal justice reform: the 2013 state legislatures have already introduced a number of impressive bills that build on the growing momentum of the last few years. If 2012 was notable for the number of major reforms that passed (see summaries here and here), then an early look at the crop of 2013 bills shows even more promise. While we may not see victories across the board on the bills currently moving though statehouses across the country, the clear message is that legislators are turning away from decades of cripplingly expensive and unjustly punitive incarceration policies and looking for alternatives.

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