"Tough on Crime" No Longer the American Mantra?

[ProSense]

"Tough on Crime" No Longer the American Mantra?

Posted by Inimai Chettiar, ACLU & Alex Stamm,

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.

But the pendulum of public opinion is starting to swing in the other direction. A Pew survey in March found that not only do 73 percent of Americans who have not experienced violent crime think that too many people are behind bars, but they're joined in that opinion by 70 percent of violent crime victims. Further, 88 percent of respondents agree that we have too many low-risk, nonviolent offenders behind bars, and 87 percent support increased access to reentry programs, such as job training.

The vast majority of Americans are ready to end our addiction to incarceration. What Americans want now is common sense and proportionality. Two factors have contributed significantly to the shift in opinion. First, Americans are increasingly aware of our appalling incarceration rate and its racial injustices. We have the largest prison population on the planet; we have 5 percent of the world's people but 25 percent of its prisoners. Our criminal justice system locks up Black and brown people for drug crimes at a far higher rate than their white counterparts – even though white Americans use drugs at a higher rate. Our prison system is one of the largest human rights atrocities in the world.

Second, more Americans know that our incarceration rate is not only egregious but also unnecessary. Social scientists and policymakers have a generation of solid data proving that we can have fewer prisoners and less crime, and showing that unnecessary incarceration can actually increase recidivism. States have proven this over and over. New York did it; between 1999 and 2009, it reduced its prison population by 20 percent and its crime rate fell by 29 percent during that time. Texas did it too; thanks to smart reforms beginning in 2003, prison population growth stalled while its crime rate fell by 13 percent to its lowest level since 1973. These examples are a sample of a larger and growing trend—states and large cities are locking fewer people up, and their communities are getting safer.

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http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/tough-crime-no-longer-american-mantra

The country is moving in the right direction, though not keeping pace with public disdain for mass incarceration.

There are a lot of other related trends too:

The U.S. Death Penalty — An International Human Rights Wrong?

Posted by Avinash Samarth

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Despite our government's own admission and acknowledgement of such overrepresentation, some federal and state government officials seem shockingly unconcerned. Philip Alston, the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, visited the United States in 2008 at the invitation of the Bush administration and met with federal and state officials, judges, civil society groups (including the ACLU), victims, and witnesses throughout the country. He too found that "the weight of scholarship suggests that the death penalty is more likely to be imposed when the victim is white, and/or the defendant is African American." Yet when Alston raised racial disparity concerns with individual federal and state government officials, he writes:

I was met with indifference or flat denial. Some officials had not read any specific reports or studies on race disparity and showed little concern for the issue. […] These responses are highly disappointing. They suggest a damaging unwillingness to confront the role that race can play in the criminal justice system generally, and the imposition of the death penalty specifically.

But the evidence is just too clear and too extraordinary to justify such nonchalance. In a recent ACLU briefing paper, we explained:

A 2000 Justice Department study [found] wide racial and geographic disparities in the federal government's requests for death sentences. In 2011, racial minorities constituted 56% of the 3,220 people on death row. In 96% of states where race studies have been conducted, involving either race of victim or race of defendant, both disparities have been observed. […] Immediately, the Obama Administration should fulfill its explicit commitment to undertake a new federal study examining the racial disparities in the application of the death penalty.

When the Supreme Court first struck down the death penalty in 1972, it castigated capital punishment as so arbitrary as to be akin to "being struck by lightning." And after the reinstatement of executions in 1976, studies by European and U.N. human rights bodies, and even the United States government, have conclusively shown something much more alarming: that these lightning strikes are guided by race, class and geography.

It is therefore unsurprising that the legitimacy of our death penalty is imploding on the world stage, especially as the number of countries that still practice executions dwindles. Only 20 countries still carry out the death penalty, down from 31 a decade ago. In 2011, the top five executioners were China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and the United States, which executed 43 people out of the 676 known to have been executed worldwide that year. This is not the company we want to keep. Worse, we are showcasing to the world that race discrimination is at the core of our system of capital punishment, and our own judicial system is still voluntarily blind to its poisonous presence.

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http://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/us-death-penalty-international-human-rights-wrong

As Public Opinions Turns Against The Death Penalty, Number Of Capital Sentences Hits 35-Year Low
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/12/15/389917/as-public-opinions-turns-against-the-death-penalty-number-of-capital-sentences-hits-35-year-low/

More Than One-Third Of All U.S. Executions Took Place In Texas
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/04/22/468941/more-than-one-third-of-all-us-executions-took-place-in-texas/

North Carolina Judge Finds Racial Discrimination in Death Penalty, Commutes Death Sentence to Life Without Parole
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002588189

Criminal Justice Reform 2011 – The Good, the Bad, and the Work Ahead

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• A new report out from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) this month revealed that the number of adults behind bars, on probation, or on parole in the U.S. declined 1.3% in 2010, the second consecutive year of decline since BJS began reporting this data since 1980.
  
  
• The same report revealed that the total U.S. prison population fell to 1.6 million, a decline of 0.6 percent during 2010 – the first decline in the total prison population in nearly four decades.10,881 fewer people were in state prisons in 2010 – the largest yearly decrease since 1977.
  
  
• <...>
  
  
• The United States Sentencing Commission took another step toward creating fairness in federal sentencing by voting to retroactively apply the new Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) guidelines to individuals sentenced before the law was enacted. This decision will help ensure that over 12,000 people — 85 percent of whom are African-Americans — will have the opportunity to have their sentences for crack cocaine offenses reviewed by a federal judge and possibly reduced.

The bad news:

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http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/criminal-justice-reform-2011-good-bad-and-work-ahead

Justice Is Served
http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/justice-served

[ProSense]

1. Kick! n/t

[Blue_Tires]

2. it's sadly still a way of life in the south...

[gratuitous]

3. I'll believe it when I see it

It's still far too profitable for some interests to maintain our status as the world's leader in locking up citizens. Private prisons need to be kept stocked, and prison guard unions have a stake in making sure their jobs are in high demand, and politicians rarely run afoul of the electorate by using the language of the jailer and implementing programs to make sure jails are plentiful and occupied. One year of decline in the number of folks incarcerated is good, but all it takes is one Jeffrey Dahmer or even just one New Black Panther to crank up the fear machine and get the lock 'em up train rolling again.