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.
01/28/2011
Debtors Prisons

Sending Your Kid to the Wrong School Could Land You Five Years Behind Bars

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU & Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 5:34pm

Last Tuesday, something happened in Ohio that should shock the conscience of every American. After a seven-day jury trial, Kelley Williams-Bolar was found guilty of two third-degree felonies — with a sentence of five years in prison each. Williams-Bolar must have done something pretty heinous, right?

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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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06/04/2012
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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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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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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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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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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04/01/2011
Overincarceration

Mississippi's Vicious Cycle of Overincarceration

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU & Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 4:05pm

This week, on the steps of the capitol in Jackson, ACLU of Mississippi Executive Director Nsombi Lambright unveiled a new report and urged lawmakers to take action to reform Mississippi's harsh and ineffective criminal justice system.

Mississippi has some of the most draconian sentencing laws in the nation. Sentences under these laws have resulted in overcrowded prisons, the overincarceration of African-Americans, and a ballooning financial strain on the state, making Mississippi the second-largest incarcerator in the nation. The state is fast on the heels of Louisiana, the current leader in this dismal race. This is quite a feat, considering the U.S. is the largest incarcerator in the world — higher than Russia, Cuba, Iran, and yes, even China.

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03/04/2011

States' Brilliant Budget Solution: Sacrifice Public Education to Spend More on Ineffective Prisons

By Inimai Chettiar, ACLU & Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 5:32pm

California's governor wants to eliminate the entire $30 million the state spends on public libraries, while spending more than $50 million to imprison two dozen bedridden inmates who pose no threat to public safety.

Unfortunately, these types of absurd budget "solutions" are more common than you might think. There's no shortage of debate about how to deal with fiscal crises around the nation; the protests in Wisconsin and other states over budget cuts reflect the passion surrounding this hot topic.

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06/17/2011
Overincarceration

Are Saggy Pants Really a Threat to Flight Safety?

By Elana Fogel, ACLU & Inimai Chettiar, ACLU at 6:32pm

On Wednesday, a college student was removed from his U.S. Airways flight and arrested at San Francisco International Airport. The scholar-athlete, Deshon Marman, was attempting to return to the University of New Mexico after attending a childhood friend's funeral when he was arrested for "trespassing" after being removed from a plane that he had a ticket to be on.

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