Criminal Justice and Public Safety

A report byThe Sentencing Project released this week shows that the number of African-Americans in state prisons for drug crimes dropped 21.6% from 1999-2005, a reduction of more than 31,000 individuals.

As with our health care system, a generation of conservative control has left a broken and bloated criminal justice system for progressives to mend. Current systems are both ineffective and wildly expensive. The US now incarcerates one out of every one hundred adults.  And newly released numbers from the Pew Center on the States shows that an even greater number - 1 in 45 adults - is on probation or parole.  Adding the two together, 1 in 31 adults in the US is under some form of correctional supervision.  When men (1 in 18) and blacks (1 in 11) are even more stupefying.  Many states have rates significantly higher than the national average. Georgia ranks first in the nation with 1 in 13 adults under correctional supervision, and high ranking states include liberal bastions like Massachusetts (1 in 24).

The Vera Institute of Justice recently released a report, Making Court the Last Resort: A New Focus for Supporting Families in Crisis, that outlines the significant improvements some states are making in how they respond to chronically disobedient children.

The most recent edition of the American Bar Association's magazine, Criminal Justice, highlights a new tool -- racial impact statements -- that states are using to address the racial disparity in their criminal justice systems.  The problem of disparate treatment was highlighted in two 2007 reports detailing the critical failure of states to administer justice without regard to race or ethnicity.

Take 1200 prisoners from Arizona, hire Indiana at $64 per day to house them, then ship them 1500 miles from home and loved ones to a private prison in New Castle, Indiana run by the GEO Group, a private prison company that has been repeatedly cited for substandard conditions. When a riot among 500 prisoners broke out last week, with prisoners taking over the facility for two hours, it was hardly surprising to observers.