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.
New York has allowed a human rights crisis to fester in its prisons. Each day, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision subjects nearly 4,500 prisoners to solitary confinement...
By Kara Dansky, Senior Counsel, ACLU Center for Justice at 3:35pm
As everyone who follows criminal justice policy knows, the last 40 years have witnessed an American correctional system dominated by tough-on-crime policies and unrelenting growth. Under this four-decade long regime, criminal justice reform has faced an unrelenting wall of resistance.
But there are signs that change is on the horizon. State lawmakers, strapped for resources, have been forced to scrutinize proposals to increase their prison populations. And other issues, such as health care and immigration, have to some extent replaced fear of crime in the public discourse.
By Ian Kysel, Aryeh Neier Fellow, ACLU Human Rights Program at 5:07pm
There are more than 80,000 people in solitary confinement in the United States. Last week, the widespread misuse and abuse of solitary confinement in jails and prisons across the country drew international condemnation when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights criticized the United States following weeks of hearings on human rights practices across the Americas region.
By Hilary Krase, ACLU National Prison Project at 10:01am
The world will get a glimpse this week into how the United States treats those we lock in solitary confinement, when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights hears ACLU testimonies on how our treatment of vulnerable prisoners violates international human rights norms. The short story: we should be ashamed. For a more detailed picture, check back throughout the week for an ongoing blog series on the issue.
On any given day, more than 15,000 federal prisoners are in "the hole."
With a population of over 215,000 prisoners, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is the nation's largest prison system. At a Congressional hearing chaired by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il) last summer, Bureau Director Charles Samuels said that the Bureau holds about 7 percent of its population in solitary confinement at any given time. That's a shockingly high proportion. Many states have a much smaller percentage of prisoners in solitary, even though state prisoners are far more likely than federal prisoners to be serving time for a violent offense.
