Cose: Reform criminal justice now
Dirty Harry approach gets too many gunned down by their protectors as more die in custody.
From demonizing young black “superpredators” to rallying around “black lives matter” is a journey that has taken America some 20 years. And it covers territory even more daunting than we have seen on the twisty road from Ferguson, Mo., to Cincinnati (where a cop was just indicted in the killing of an unarmed black motorist).
The virtually non-stop commotion around policing, justice and race is part of a much bigger phenomenon — and one that is forcing us, at long last, to question policies that have made America into the most jail-happy democracy on the planet.
In a major study last year, the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences pointed out that our incarceration levels were five to 10 times higher than those in Western Europe. The majority of our prisoners are black and Hispanic. And keeping many of those people in jail has little to do with keeping us safe. So why are we here?
“We are here because we chose to be here. Our mass incarceration reality is a matter of choice … not … crime. Once you come to that bracing realization, then you have to say … Can’t you choose something else?’” observed Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and chair of the NAS committee, during a recent interview.
In the 1990s, as politicians took aim at "child predators," Travis’ question was nowhere on the table. We were essentially sold on the notion of being tough on criminals — even child criminals. “The murderers, robbers, rapists and drug dealers of yesteryear were typically adults. Now they are typically juveniles,” declared Sen. (and later U.S. Attorney General) John Ashcroft in 1997 in arguing for legislation to make it easier for children to serve adult time.
We are now at a very different moment. We are more capable of seeing that many children in desperate circumstances look more like victims than perpetrators. Glenn Martin believes this growing consciousness has created a unique possibility for change. Martin, a former vice president of the Fortune Society, which works with the formerly incarcerated, has started a new organization called Just Leadership USA. He is recruiting a cadre of former offenders to help him achieve his mission of cutting the prison population in half in 15 years. He notes that we have already seen a dramatic drop in the number of juveniles incarcerated.
“Young people are … a little bit more politically palatable,” admitted Martin. But he believes the trend bodes well for the adult incarcerated population. And he credits former president George W. Bush for helping to make that possible. In his 2004 State of the Union Address, Bush proposed a prisoner re-entry initiative, calling America “the land of second chance.”
Since then, the issue has garnered attention from people all over the political spectrum. This Congress, which can’t agree on much of anything, seems primed to pass a sentencing reform bill. And President Obama has become increasingly outspoken. Last month, he visited a federal prison in Oklahoma only days after telling the NAACP that we were locking up too many people for too long. Low-level drug dealers, he said, owed society a debt: “But you don’t owe 20 years. You don’t owe a life sentence."
Republican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner has said that he intends to cut his state’s prison population by 25% in 10 years. The American Civil Liberties Union has launched a campaign, backed by a $50 million grant and state lobbying efforts, to cut America’ prison population in half by 2020.
For all the new energy, some think this moment might soon pass — that an outrageous crime by an ex-offender could easily derail us. “We just live in fear of the Willie Horton moment,” Travis said. JoAnne Page, president of the Fortune Society, recalled that when a parolee in Massachusetts killed a police officer in 2010, the state sharply reversed course. Gov. Deval Patrick removed five parole board members who had voted for the killer’s release, and parole rates plummeted. “This is fragile,” Page said
Indeed, most politicians are compelled less by common sense than by the passions of the moment. Even so, this particular moment has lasted for a while. Even before Ferguson, people were increasingly questioning a justice system that seemed to bring out the worst in many Americans — that led police to shoot innocent black men, led politicians to condemn errant children to an earthly hell and reinforced bad behavior in felonious adults. One reason this moment has not quickly gone away is that we have been hit with almost constant reminders (often captured on video) that something is not quite right about our Dirty Harry approach. It is getting too many people gunned down by their presumed protectors as others die in custody. And it has left too many former prisoners (and most inmates do get out, as Bush observed a decade ago) with no road to salvation.
For decades, we told ourselves that in showing the world the most vindictive and biased version of our collective selves that we were being tough on crime. Now, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that we were just being foolish and hardhearted. That awareness, I suspect, will not soon or easily go away. And it could lead us to conclude, as has much of the civilized world, that vindictiveness and hope rarely go together.
Ellis Cose, senior adviser to the Pinkerton Foundation and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is the author ofThe End of Anger, The Rage of a Privileged Class and numerous other books.
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