Blog of Rights
Inimai
Chettiar
Inimai Chettiar is an Advocacy & Policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she serves as a national legislative counsel working to end mass incarceration in states across the country. She has published extensive scholarship on using economic analysis to advance progressive legal reform. She received a B.A. from Georgetown University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago School of Law.
06/13/2012
Elderly Prisoners

Why Are We Spending So Much To Lock Up Elderly Prisoners Who Pose Little Threat?

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU & Vanita Gupta, Center for Justice at 3:07pm

Elderly prisoners are the least dangerous group of people behind bars but the most expensive to incarcerate. Yet despite this truth, the number of elderly prisoners is skyrocketing. Harsher sentences for less serious crimes – one defining characteristic of our failed “tough on crime” and “war on drugs” policies – are responsible for this staggering increase in the number of older prisoners, and taxpayers are taking the hit.

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06/06/2012
Overincarceration

Blame Mass Incarceration on Sentencing Policies, not Mass Crime

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU & Alex Stamm, ACLU Center for Justice at 5:16pm

Any competent explanation of why our prison population has grown by 700 percent since the early ‘70s will involve a number of factors, including changes in demographics and in the way prosecutors charge defendants. But new research confirms what sentencing reform advocates have been saying for years: we have so many more prisoners because we’re locking people up for longer than ever before.

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06/04/2012
Overincarceration

States Take Sizeable Steps in 2012 to End Overincarceration

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU & Alex Stamm, ACLU Center for Justice at 3:48pm

As states begin to realize that they can reduce their prison populations safely, the pace of reform has begun to pick up a bit this year. State legislative sessions are coming to a close, which makes it a good time to review the actions lawmakers have taken to reduce their unsustainable prison populations in 2012. Here are the some of the legislative reform highlights:

Alabama

Faced with a system of overcrowded prisons and fearing the same sort of court order that forced California to reform its prison system, Alabama took an indirect route toward depopulating its prisons. The state passed SB 386 inMay, which will allow the Alabama Sentencing Commission to set sentencing guidelines for nonviolent crimes that judges would generally have to follow. Under the new law, the Commission can make sentencing changes for nonviolent crimes, which will take effect unless the legislature takes action to reject any such the changes. The Sentencing Commission, which is insulated from the electoral pressure to reject proposals to soften criminal sentences, may now be poised to take action to reduce prison sentences for nonviolent offenses.

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05/04/2012
Overincarceration

Georgia Chooses Path Toward Criminal Justice Reform; Oklahoma Misses an Opportunity

By Vanita Gupta, Center for Justice & Inimai Chettiar, ACLU at 1:51pm

This year, both Georgia and Oklahoma took up criminal justice reform, but ended up in two quite different places.

In Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal signed a bill this week that takes a smart approach to criminal justice. The new law creates less severe penalties for drug crimes, expands drug courts, and provides alternatives to incarceration for low-level, non-violent offenses. The package is projected to save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars over the next five years by reducing the prison population.

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05/01/2012
Overincarceration

"Tough on Crime" No Longer the American Mantra?

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU & Alex Stamm, ACLU Center for Justice at 4:35pm

Politicians over the last quarter-century have held strong to the conventional wisdom that being "tough on crime" will win elections and appease the public's appetite for safety. And for the most part, it seems Americans did feel this way (if you don't think so, just ask Michael Dukakis). To alleviate the public's overblown fear, or even to slake a thirst for retribution, our lawmakers have repeatedly deemed more private acts criminal and doled out harsher punishments for a generation. They selectively enforced these laws against the "feared" Black and brown communities, and in the end gave us a massive, unsustainable prison population unlike anything the world has ever seen.

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04/03/2012
Search And Seizure

Supreme Court Says Jails Can Strip Search You – Even for Traffic Violations

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU at 2:18pm

Yesterday a divided Supreme Court ruled in Florence v. Burlington that any person arrested can be subject to a strip search — even for a minor offense or traffic violation — without any reason to suspect that they may be carrying a weapon or contraband.

As disturbing as the practice of subjecting people accused of minor offenses to degrading strip searches is, it wouldn’t be a problem if those people weren’t thrown behind bars in the first place. Unfortunately, U.S. jails are full of people accused of minor, nonviolent crimes. One such person was Albert Florence, a 35-year-old Black man erroneously arrested in 2005 for failing to pay a traffic fine he had already paid — and whose experience is the center of the case decided by the Court.

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03/09/2012
War on Drugs

Is Ending Mass Incarceration a Christian Imperative?

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU at 11:02am

Christians such as Pat Robertson believe it is a moral imperative to address mass incarceration, especially in the face of stark racial disparities.

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02/23/2012
Celebrate Black History

Why Mass Incarceration Really is the New Jim Crow

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU at 3:41pm

Black Americans are twice as likely to be arrested during a traffic stop and nearly four times as likely to experience the threat or use of force.

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01/11/2012
Overincarceration

Downsizing Incarceration is Good for Fairness, Safety, and our Wallets

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU at 11:25am

It’s no secret that the United States is the largest incarcerator in the world. It’s also no secret that our government selectively enforces criminal laws disproportionately against poor people and people of color, resulting in the mass incarceration of black and brown Americans. Now, one in nine black children has a parent in prison; there are more black men under the control of corrections than were enslaved in 1850. Our addiction to incarceration has decimated the social and economic futures of generations of Americans.

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10/07/2011

The Legacy of Derrick Bell

By Courtney Bowie, Racial Justice Program & Inimai Chettiar, ACLU at 4:50pm

The following is an excerpt from a longer article appearing on ACSblog:

Professor Derrick Bell, who passed away on Wednesday, was a racial justice pioneer and teacher who enlightened many. His actions spoke as loudly as his words and influence the work we do today at the ACLU.

Professor Bell was not afraid to state the truth: that structural and insidious racism pervades our society, institutions and thinking. He pioneered the development of critical race theory — which recognizes that racism is embedded deep beneath the surface of our laws and legal institutions. He explained that, even where there is no de jure segregation or explicit racism, there are often far more harmful subtle forces that hinder access to equality and result in de facto segregation.

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