By Vanita Gupta and Ezekiel Edwards
Presidential election season is prime time for predictions. One sure bet is this: neither candidate is likely to make criminal justice a stump issue. But another sure bet -- the candidates' laser focus on the economy -- should make a discussion of criminal justice reform, and its potential to reduce fiscal waste, unavoidable.
Rarely has the intersection of politics and criminal justice produced sensible responses to crime or rational conversations about our criminal justice system. Instead, politicians spar about who is "tougher or softer on crime." See Willie Horton and the 1988 election. Since President Richard Nixon first announced the "War on Drugs" 40 years ago, the United States has adopted "tough on crime" policies driven all too often by political and emotional considerations at the expense of data-driven practices and programs that would have been far less costly and far more effective at promoting the health, safety and productivity of families and communities across the country. As a result, between 1970 and 2010 the number of people incarcerated in this country grew by 700 percent. This massive explosion in our prison population has caused federal and state governments to dramatically escalate their spending on corrections. States have been spending an ever-increasing percentage of their budgets on prison-related expenses, cutting into scarce taxpayer dollars while coming at a great expense. By 2007, states spent more than $44 billion on incarceration -- a 127 percent jump from 1987.
The effects? Mass incarceration has had a particularly devastating effect on communities of color. One in every nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is incarcerated, and one in three black men, and one in six Latino men, will spend some part of their lives in prison. After 40 million arrests and $1 trillion spent, drugs remain readily available, overall usage rates in America haven't declined, global consumption of opiates, cocaine, and cannabis increased between 1998 and 2008, and drug-related violence has only increased in many Latin American countries. No other state-sponsored program has a 1/3 to 2/3 failure rate as exemplified by recidivism rates and yet been perpetuated by the government with such gusto. Polls show the public agrees: in a survey of more than 1,000 Americans, 66 percent think the War on Drugs has been a failure.
Today, however, as states struggle with budget shortfalls of historic proportions, a growing number of them are rethinking their decades-long obsession with incarceration. For the first time in forty years, conservative leaders and think tanks are talking about taking smarter, rather than tougher, approaches to crime, and touting reform legislation that promotes alternatives to incarceration and expansion of parole eligibility for a host of offenses. Recent bipartisan reform efforts in several states are demonstrating that there are alternatives to mass incarceration that keep communities safe and that make much more sense for taxpayers in these cash-strapped times:
Crimes rates have remained down in all of these states. If states as diverse as Texas, New York, Mississippi, Michigan, and New Jersey can engage in rational criminal justice reform, other states can follow suit and the federal government can take note.
Obama and Romney should support smart, data-driven legislative and administrative reforms that help states and the federal government reduce their incarcerated populations and corrections budgets, while keeping our communities safe. These reforms will end wasteful spending and reform ineffective government policies, and that should be something all presidential candidates can come together on. These reforms include "front-end" reforms that focus on reducing the number of people entering jails and prisons, as well as reintroducing proportionality and judicial discretion into sentencing; and "back-end" reforms that increase the number of people exiting and staying out of prison. Below are just a sampling of smart reforms:
Presidential candidates love to talk about stopping wasteful spending and saving the economy. The need for financial austerity has created an unprecedented opening for advocates to promote fair and more effective criminal justice policies that protect public safety, reduce recidivism, keep communities intact, and move away from our overreliance on incarceration, all while saving taxpayer dollars. It's time to stop gambling away taxpayer dollars on the failed drug war and start implementing rational, evidence-based, cost-effective, humane criminal justice policies.
Vanita Gupta is ACLU Deputy Legal Director and Ezekiel Edwards is Director of ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project.
This post is part of the HuffPost Shadow Conventions 2012, a series spotlighting three issues that are not being discussed at the national GOP and Democratic conventions: The Drug War, Poverty in America, and Money in Politics.
HuffPost Live will be taking a comprehensive look at America's failed war on drugs August 28th and September 4th from 12-4 pm ET and 6-10 pm ET. Click here to check it out -- and join the conversation.
After slavery, the powers to be experimented with the justice system to place Blacks in jail. This system has mutated over the years to a justice system not based upon fairness but upon wickedness.
Persons of color are given a deal even though they did not make the crime, or told to face a jury selectively picked upon racist views to assure a conviction.
Drug war has provided this growth industry with a vital kick, so much so that private prisons have risen to answer the demand of a wicked system of justice.
Whites use and sell more cocaine than Blacks but make up a small percentage of arrest and convictions, and when caught are given lighter sentences or probation. Blacks and Hispanics are not so lucky under this system of justice.
The myriad of problems associate with the eradication of this scourage. There are too many corrupted players in the gov, law enforcement, business enterprises whom profit off the arrest of drug suspects, in other words, drug business is to lucrative to stop and eradicate it.
Courts, Jails, Judges, Cops, Dealers, Growers, Lawyers, etc.
Nice Food Chain, leave it alone, a Monopoly, like Medicine, it pays well !
Due to the huge gang culture, which are overwhelmingly Hispanic and lack, these people of color are committing a share of the crimes that is way out of proportion to their share of the population. THAT"S why so many of them are in jail. And remem er-the majority of their victims are people of color, too. These victims are the ones the police are trying to protect when they put the "people of color" criminals in jail.
The left never goes to minority groups and criticizes them for their dysfunctional households and criminal ehavior. Too un-pc.
Then, let's look at the root causes. The average dollar spent on education, per child, is almost twice as high for whites than "people of color" that you demean, though claiming to be one. (I am a white woman, for the record.)
Silly me though, I thought it was poverty and fatherlessness that led so many of my, newly found, racial colleagues to commit crimes in disproportionate numbers.
You may be surprised to learn though that, even when us Latins commit the same crime as whites, we get a longer criminal sentence.
There's an even bigger bias against males vis a vis females than there is against blacks compared to whites... but no one likes to talk about that one.
At the risk of landing in 'pending' purgatory, let me say that this still comes back to the issue of money. The money goes to corporations which, yes, create jobs, and that donate a lot of money to the career politicians. We all have to have a career, so can we really blame them?
Of course it doesn't really make sense, it's fairly counterproductive, and yet, the profits are still being made somewhere, and that's incentive enough to keep things the same.
But I do agree with these solutions.
We need a change.
I would like to see these programs expanded, oh and alex... I'm a liberal.
What would YOU do with these criminals?