The Justice Department’s upcoming release of some 6,000 nonviolent drug offenders is an unprecedented move that has been hailed by proponents of criminal justice reform. A top attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union called it “nothing short of thrilling.” The general counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums said it is a sign that the U.S. is “serious about rethinking our approach to crime and punishment.”
Hardly. With 2.2 million inmates nationwide, this release doesn’t make a dent in the country’s prison population. The U.S. incarceration rate is seven times higher than the median for the economically advanced nations of the OECD, so reforming it in a meaningful way requires more than a token gesture. It means changing how we use jails and prisons in sentencing and drastically reducing the prison population by not 1 or 5 percent, but 60 or 80 percent.
This is an achievable goal. There are several incarcerated populations for whom jail and prison is an unnecessary, even damaging, approach. Releasing some of them and using more productive and reasonable measures to rehabilitate others while protecting public safety is necessary to truly reform criminal justice in the U.S.
[For more of this story, written by Keri Blakinger, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...east-a-million-more/]
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