In the face of fiscal crises, state governments are making smart investments in alternatives to mass incarceration. The ACLU’s unique and powerful network of state affiliates has been and continues to work on the frontlines to reduce the number of people behind bars while protecting public safety, saving taxpayer dollars, and ensuring fairness for all.
Starting a conversation about reducing reliance on prisons
The ACLU of Ohio has been taking on the state’s bloated criminal justice system through legislative advocacy, community organizing and litigation. In 2010, the ACLU of Ohio released two groundbreaking reports. In Reform Cannot Wait: A Comprehensive Examination of the Cost of Incarceration in Ohio 1991-2010, the ACLU of Ohio confronted the state’s legislature and policymakers with the harsh facts about just how counterproductive and wasteful overreliance on incarceration has become. The report added to a bi-partisan chorus of voices calling for an overhaul of the state’s criminal justice system. Although proposed reform legislation did not pass in 2010, Ohio’s legislature is again considering broad-scale criminal justice reform in 2011, including eliminating the state’s sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, making offenders eligible for parole after they have served 85% of their sentence, increasing earned good-time credit and addressing the large number of elderly inmates in the state’s prison system. The ACLU is working hard to ensure these proposals become a reality. In 2008, the ACLU of Ohio and the ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project commissioned a study revealing how unequal charging decisions by prosecutors resulted in disparate outcomes, which resulted in the report Selective Enforcement of Drug Laws in Cuyahoga County, Ohio: A Report on the Racial Effects of Geographic Disparities in Arrest Patterns. As a result of the study and the ACLU of Ohio’s advocacy, Cuyahoga County prosecutors voluntarily changed their charging protocols to make them fairer.
Related Content:
> In For a Penny: The Rise of America's New Debtors' Prisons
> ACLU of Ohio: Criminal Justice
> ACLU of Ohio: Drug Policy Reform
> Reform Cannot Wait: A Comprehensive Examination of the Cost of Incarceration in Ohio from 1991-2010
> Selected Enforcement of Drug Laws in Cuyahoga County