Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history.
Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history.
In 2010, 22-year-old Jamel Dossie served as a middle-man in a series of hand-to-hand crack sales. After three transactions involving a federal informant, Mr. Dossie had handed over – “sold” – a total of 88.1 grams, or 3.1 ounces, of crack. For his part, he earned $140.
Unfortunately for Mr. Dossie, selling more than 28 grams of crack triggers a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. This March, after a short sentencing proceeding in which federal Judge John Gleeson wasn’t allowed to consider Mr. Dossie’s very minor role in the transaction, his remorse for the offense or his personal background, the prosecutor called for a five-year prison sentence, and that was that.
By Mike Tartaglia, Paralegal, National Prison Project & Andrew Waks, National Prison Project at 5:31pm
As America’s prison population has grown to unprecedented levels and imposed record-high costs on taxpayers, it is time to evaluate what we hope to achieve through incarceration: is it revenge, or safety? The two values appear to be in conflict as objectives of our criminal justice system. After decades of tough-on-crime policies, we have experienced little return on our investment— as rates of incarceration have continued to rise, rates of recidivism have increased since the early 1980s, remaining relatively unchanged from the mid-1990s through the present.
Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history. And yet, our criminal justice system has failed on every count: public safety, fairness and cost-effectiveness. Across the country, the criminal justice reform conversation is heating up. Each week, we feature our some of the most exciting and relevant news in overincarceration discourse that we’ve spotted from the previous week. Check back weekly for our top picks.
By Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 10:20am
Every cartographer has to leave something out. Street names, landmarks, tiny inlets — a two-dimensional rendering of our world can’t possibly include everything. This kind of selective exclusion reminds me of a specific khaki-colored mass of unmarked land on a map that I often find myself puzzling over during my commute. It hangs on the wall of every train car in New York City’s subway system, and I suspect a few of the other millions of people navigating this city glance at it occasionally, too.
The Louisiana Senate has just passed H.B. 138, which will enable some prisoners to go before a parole board upon turning 60. The board can then decide to grant parole to those individuals it determines would pose no danger to the community upon release. Louisiana’s House of Representatives passed the bill two weeks ago. It now heads to the desk of Gov. Bobby Jindal, and we hope that he will go along with the will of the legislature.
H.B. 138 addresses an ongoing problem in Louisiana and across the nation: a growing geriatric population in our prisons, most of whom pose little to no risk to public safety, and cost taxpayers three times as much to imprison, on average, as younger inmates.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state of California to reduce its prison population in order to alleviate extreme overcrowding that endangers the health and safety of the state's prisoners and prison staff. The decision in Brown v. Plata affirms a lower court ruling in two long-running cases in which the medical and mental health care provided in California's prisons was found to be so deficient that it endangers the lives of prisoners and violates the U.S. Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case before the Supreme Court.
Prisoners across America are getting older, experiencing all the same ailments that afflict those of the same age who aren't behind bars. Extreme sentencing policies and a growing number of life sentences without the possibility of parole have effectively turned many of our correctional facilities into veritable nursing homes — and we're paying for it.
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By Carl Takei, ACLU National Prison Project at 3:12pm
New Orleans' incarceration rate is the highest in the country — the city locks up three times more people than the national average. The city jail, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), holds nearly 3,200 prisoners and remains the largest per-capita jail in the nation. But Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman wants to use hundreds of millions of dollars in post-Katrina Federal Emergency Management Adminstration (FEMA) reconstruction funds to make it even bigger.
