Criminal Justice Reform

   

https://www.sandersinstitute.com/issues/criminal-justice

  

   

   

   

   

   

We agree with the 2018 New Mexico Democratic Party Platform:

1. ​Encourage the federal government to remove marijuana from the list of “Schedule I" federal controlled substances and to appropriately regulate it, providing a reasonable pathway for future legalization; 
2. Support the decriminalization and legalization of cannabis in the State of New Mexico; 
3. Support the use of DNA Testing and timely Rape Kit processing to protect the wrongfully accused, set free the wrongfully convicted, and prosecute the perpetrators; 
4. Advocate for sufficient funding to hire and train more competent public defenders to ensure every case can  be timely and thoroughly represented and processed; 
5. End mandatory minimum sentences; 
6. Abolish the death penalty and solitary confinement, which are cruel and unusual forms of punishment; 
7. Eliminate life without possibility of parole for youthful offenders and end incarceration of youth in adult facilities; 
8. End policies based on racial profiling that target individuals solely on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin, which is un-American and counterproductive; 
9. Prevent conflicts of interest by creating an independent oversight process for the investigation of crimes involving law enforcement, including designating a chief DA position and/or civilian oversight boards chartered with investigative authority; 
10. Remove barriers to help formerly incarcerated individuals successfully re-enter society by preventing employment discrimination based on criminal history during the employment seeking process, expanding reentry programs, and restoring voting rights.
11. Strengthen and adequately fund diversion and treatment programs as alternatives to arrest and incarceration; 
12. Address all health care needs of arrested and incarcerated girls and women, including pregnancy-related care;
13. Require that all incarcerated individuals, including youth, are afforded medical and mental health services, education, substance use recovery, and rehabilitative services;
14. Treat prosecution and defense equally by providing balanced funding for District Attorney and Public Defender Agencies;
15. Create and adequately fund an Independent Wrongful Conviction Review Commission;
16. Provide adequate mental health facilities and services so as to reduce the incarceration of the mentally ill;
17. End the exploitation of prison labor programs by private industry;
18. Promote expansion of legal aid services in rural communities;
19. Demand all law enforcement personnel receive implicit bias training initiated in the academy and continue throughout their years of service;
20. Demand minimum qualifications for Federal Judge Appointments;
21. Support specialized courts that focus on unrepresented groups which need special expertise such as the homeless and mentally ill.

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We agree with the Justice Democrats:
"America imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. With 4.4% of the world’s population, America incarcerates 22% of the world’s prisoners (716 per 100,000). Even as the national crime rate remains on a steady decline, incarceration rates continue to climb. On top of that, our criminal justice system currently targets Black and Brown people leading to higher arrest rates and longer sentences. That needs to end.

Criminal justice reform requires sweeping and comprehensive policy changes that reverse our nation’s trends of unjust mass incarceration, and works to address the root causes of criminal behavior while mitigating the negative consequences of inappropriate policing practices."

   

   

We agree with the 2014 Vermont Progressive Party Platform:
• Invest in prevention and anti violence programs.
• Discontinue the failed “war on drugs.”
• Limit incarceration to offenders who pose a threat to public safety.
• Re-evaluate the sentencing structure, which often imposes sentences that are purely retributional and not conductive to rehabilitation.
• Advocate for vocational and workplace training for offenders and youth at risk.
• Remove barriers to employment for those who have served their time.
• Provide education and literacy support in all corrections settings."
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We agree with the 2016 Democratic Party Platform:
​"Something is profoundly wrong when almost a quarter of the world’s prison population is in the United States, even though our country has less than five percent of the world’s population. We will reform mandatory minimum sentences and close private prisons and detention centers."

"We will fight to end federal, state, and municipal contracts with for-profit private prisons and private detention centers."
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We agree with the 2016 Libertarian Party Platform:
​"Criminal laws should be limited in their application to violations of the rights of others through force or fraud, or to deliberate actions that place others involuntarily at significant risk of harm. Therefore, we favor the repeal of all laws creating “crimes” without victims, such as the use of drugs for medicinal or recreational purposes."
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We agree with the 2016 Green Party Platform:
"The United States has the highest incarceration and recidivism rates of industrialized countries, while our nation’s criminal justice system in general is too often inhumane, ineffective, and prohibitively expensive. With less than five percent of the world’s population, the United States locks up nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Our law enforcement priorities place too much emphasis on drug-related and petty, non-violent crimes, and not enough on prosecution of corporate, white collar, and environmental crime."

"The majority of prisoners are serving terms for non-violent, minor property and drug addiction crimes, or violations of their conditions of parole or probation, while the poor, the under-educated and various racial and ethnic minorities are over-represented in the prison population. The negative effects of imprisonment are far-reaching. Prisoners are isolated from their communities and often denied contact with the free world and the media. Access to educational and legal materials is in decline. Prison administrators wield total authority over their environments, diminishing procedural input from experts and censoring employee complaints."   
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We agree with the 2016 Green Party Platform:
"Our priorities must include efforts to prevent violent crime and address the legitimate needs of victims, while addressing the socio-economic root causes of crime and practicing policies that prevent recidivism."

"A government that works for us would provide critical goods and services that should not be run for profit. [We] oppose the increasingly widespread privatization of prisons. These prisons treat people as their product and provide far worse service than government-run prisons. Profits in privately run prisons are derived from understaffing, which severely reduces the acceptable care of inmates. [We] believe that greater, not lesser public input, oversight and control of prisons is the answer."

"Encourage and support positive approaches to punishment that build hope, responsibility and a sense of belonging. Prisons should be the sentence of last resort, reserved for violent criminals. Those convicted of non-violent offenses should be handled by alternative, community-based programs including halfway houses, work-furlough, community service, electronic monitoring, restitution, and rehabilitation programs."
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We agree with the 2016 Green Party Platform:
"Reduce the prison population, invest in rehabilitation, and end the failed war on drugs."

"Treat substance abuse as a medical problem, not a criminal problem. Free all non-violent incarcerated prisoners of the drug war. Provide treatment to parolees and probationers who fail a drug test instead of re-incarceration."

"Release prisoners with diagnosed mental disorders to secure mental health treatment centers. Ensure psychological and medical care and rehabilitation services for mentally ill prisoners."

"Release prisoners who are too old and/or infirm to pose a threat to society to less expensive, community-based facilities."   
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We agree with the 2016 Green Party Platform:
"Make reduction of recidivism a primary goal of parole. Treat parole as a time of reintegration into the community, not as a continuation of sentence. Provide community reentry programs for inmates before their release. Provide access to education, addiction and psychological treatment, job training, work and housing upon their release. Provide counseling and other services to the members of a parolee’s family, to help them with the changes caused by the parolee’s return. Prevent unwarranted search without reasonable cause to parolees and their homes."

"Increase funding for rape and domestic violence prevention and education programs."

"Never house juvenile offenders with adults. House violent and non-violent juvenile offenders separately. Continue the education of juveniles while in custody. Substantially decrease the number of juvenile’s assigned to each judge and caseworker to oversee each juvenile’s placement and progress in the juvenile justice system."

"Ensure prison conditions are humane and sanitary, including but are limited to heat, light, exercise, clothing, nutrition, libraries, possessions, and personal safety. Meet prisoners’ dietary requirements."

"Minimize isolation of prisoners from staff and one another only as needed for safety. Make incarceration more community-based, including through increased visitor access by families. Establish and enforce prison policies that discourage racism, sexism, homophobia and rape." 
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We agree with the 2016 Green Party Platform:
"Ban private prisons."

"Implement a moratorium on prison construction. Redirect funds to alternatives to incarceration."

"Require that each state prison system install a rehabilitation administrator with equal authority as the highest authority."

"Ensure that all prisoners have the opportunity to obtain a General Education Diploma (i.e. high school equivalency diploma) and higher education. Education has proven to reduce recidivism by 10%."

"Ensure the First Amendment rights of prisoners, including the right to communicate with journalists, write letters, publish their own writings, and become legal experts on their own cases."

"Provide incarcerated individuals the right to vote by absentee ballot in the district of their domicile, and the right to vote during parole."

"Restore the right to hold public office to felons who have completed their prison sentence."

"Abolish the death penalty."

"Repeal “three strikes” laws. Restore judicial discretion in sentencing. Abolish mandatory sentencing."

"Establish and fund programs to strengthen self-help and community action through neighborhood centers that pro- vide legal aid, alternative dispute-resolution practices, mediated restitution, community team policing, and access to local crisis/assault care shelters."   
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We agree with the 2016 Green Party Platform:
"Establish elected or appointed independent civilian review boards with subpoena power to investigate complaints about prison guard and community police behavior. Sharply restrict police use of weapons and restraining techniques such as pepper spray, stun belts, tasers and choke holds."

"Prohibit property forfeiture and denial of due process for un-convicted suspects.'

"Establish freedom on bail as a right of all defendants charged with non-violent crimes. Incorporate mental health and so- cial services in bail agreements."

"Increase compensation for jurors and provide childcare for those serving jury duty."

"Protect victims’ rights. Ensure the opportunity for victims to make victim-impact statements. Consider forms of restitution to victims."
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We agree with Our Revolution:
"It is morally repugnant that we have privatized prisons all over America. Corporations should not be allowed to make a profit by building more jails and keeping more Americans behind bars. We have got to end the private for-profit prison racket in America."
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​"We must end the over-incarceration of nonviolent young Americans who do not pose a serious threat to our society. It is an international embarrassment that we have more people locked up in jail than any other country on earth – more than even the Communist totalitarian state of China. That has got to end."

"The measure of success for law enforcement should not be how many people get locked up. We need to invest in drug courts as well as medical and mental health interventions for people with substance abuse problems, so that people struggling with addiction do not end up in prison, they end up in treatment."

"For people who have committed crimes that have landed them in jail, there needs to be a path back from prison. The federal system of parole needs to be reinstated. We need real education and real skills training for the incarcerated."
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​We agree with the 2016 Republican Party Platform:
"Two grave problems undermine the rule of law on the federal level: Over-criminalization and over-federalization. In the first case, Congress and federal agencies have increased the number of criminal offenses in the U.S. Code from 3,000 in the early 1980s to more than 4,500 today. That does not include an estimated 300,000 regulations containing criminal penalties. No one, including the Department of Justice, can come up with accurate numbers. That recklessness is bad enough when committed by Congress, but when it comes from the unelected bureaucrats of the federal agencies, it is intolerable. The power of career civil servants and political appointees to criminalize behavior is one of the worst violations of constitutional order perpetrated by the administrative state."
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We agree with the 2012 Constitutional Party Platform:

"St. George Tucker was the pre-eminent constitutional scholar of the American founding era. He published View of the Constitution of the United States in 1803 as a comprehensive review of the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights.

Felonies not enumerated within the United States Constitution are, in Tucker’s view, left within the jurisdiction of the state.
“. . .the very guarded manner in which congress are vested with authority to legislate upon the subject of crimes, and misdemeanors. They are not entrusted with a general power over these subjects, but a few offenses are selected from the great mass of crimes with which society may be infested, upon which, only, congress are authorized to prescribe the punishment, or define the offense. All felonies and offenses committed upon land, in all cases not expressly enumerated, being reserved to the states respectively.” (View of the Constitution of the United States, p.210-211)

US Constitution, Article I, Section 8 Clause 6:
“To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;”

US Constitution, Article III, Section 3, Clause 2:
“The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason”

Amendment 10:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Crime, in most cases, is to be dealt with by state and local governments. 

Federal involvement in state and local criminal justice processes should be limited to that which is constitutionally permitted.

All who are accused of crimes, petty to capital, shall have a trial by jury upon request, and the jury shall be fully informed of its right to nullify the law. Furthermore, we oppose defendants being charged and tried by both state and federal jurisdictions under different laws for the same alleged criminal act, thus violating the constitutionally secured prohibition against double jeopardy.

We are opposed to “hate crime” legislation and to enhanced penalties for so called hate crimes. We recognize that a real result of the designation of "hate crime" is to extend federal jurisdiction to crimes which would otherwise be in the province of the states."
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​We agree with the For a People's Party Platform:

1. "Incarceration has devastating effects on individuals and families. It should not be a business. 
2. Abolish private prisons, which incentivize inhumane conditions and high recidivism.
3. Shut down the school to prison pipeline, which targets people of color.
4. Replace punitive incarceration with a restorative justice system that focuses on rehabilitating people which studies show is the most effective criminal justice system in the world.
5. Ban the practice of using arrest and incarceration quotas.
6. Abolish the death penalty and restore felon's rights, including the right to vote.
7. Ban the felony checkbox on employment forms and help pave a path to jobs upon release from prison.
8. Demilitarize police by banning and reversing the transfer of military weapons to domestic police forces.
9. Demilitarize our police forces and create new laws for the allowable use of force.
   
10. Promote community policing and employ special prosecutors for all police killings.
11. Legalize marijuana and end the drug war, which targets communities of color. Take marijuana off the federal government’s list of outlawed drugs.
12. End what amounts to slave labor at prisons, where inmates are forced to work for pennies an hour producing goods for large corporations.
13. Eliminate mandatory minimums which result in sentencing disparities between Black, Latino and White people.
14. Review all forced mandatory sentencing cases and release prisoners convicted of nonviolent minor drug charges.
15. Blacks are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police. Blacks and Latinos comprise well over half of all prisoners, even though Blacks and Latinos make up about one-quarter of the total U.S. population. We must end the private for-profit prison industry, which incarcerates young non-violent Black men at a disproportionate rate."

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​We agree with the Peace and Freedom Party Platform of 2014:
"No prison labor for private profit. Living wage and full union rights for any prison labor."

​"We demand:"

1. "Repeal the Patriot Act.
2. Abolish the Department of Homeland Security.
3. Stop state-sponsored spying on and violence against progressive organizations.
4. Democratically-controlled police review boards with powers of subpoena and discipline.
5. Abolish the death penalty.
6. Repeal the Three Strikes law.
7. Stop trials and imprisonment of juveniles as adults.
8. Treatment of prisoners as human beings; rehabilitation, not vengeance.
9. Decriminalize victimless activities including drug use and consensual sex.
10. Legalize marijuana.
11. End the "war on drugs," which is primarily directed against poor and working-class people.
12. Stop unwarranted searches and seizures of persons and property. Restore constitutional rights.
13. Prosecute crimes of the wealthy and powerful against workers and the environment.
14. Freedom for all political prisoners.
15. Abolish all torture in prisons.
16. Uphold prisoner rights."

We agree with Andrew Yang 2020:
"America imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than almost any other country in the world, and minorities are disproportionately represented in this group. Incarceration doesn’t just set someone back for the time they’re imprisoned; with our current felony laws, they follow someone throughout their life.

Mandatory minimum laws, the war on drugs, and other misguided policy decisions over the years passed by politicians with an eye towards being “tough on crime” have resulted in a glut of Americans behind bars. Instead of focusing on what sounds or feels good, we should focus on results. While individuals should be punished for committing crimes, the end goal should be to prevent people from committing crimes, and to lower recidivism rates for those who are convicted.

Outside of my social policies such as Universal Basic Income, which will eliminate poverty and thus reduce one common driver of crime, there are many things we can do to ensure the safety of Americans by preventing people from becoming criminals.

• Review the current mandatory minimum laws to bring them in line with what data shows us is effective
• Shift federal drug policy away from punishment and towards treatment
• End the use of for-profit, private prisons
• Fund programs targeted at reducing recidivism and increasing reintegration
• Push for a reconsideration of the harshness of our felony laws, including an investigation into any civil rights issues raised by the disproportionate amount of minorities convicted of these crimes"

We agree with Brand New Congress:
"Rather than work to extricate our criminal justice system from the darkest part of our nation’s history, establishment politicians have worsened the problems at all levels, from policing to sentencing to prisons, all which disproportionately affect the most marginalized members of our society. We need to fix our broken criminal justice system now to guarantee that the law is truly just.

America imprisons more of its own people than any other nation in the world. Even as the crime rate is on a steady decline, incarceration rates continue to climb. Our system currently targets marginalized population with longer sentences and higher arrest rates. This trend has left devastation in its wake, as more and more Americans find themselves barred from employment and disenfranchised after serving their time. Children and partners lose their parents and loved ones to the system, perpetuating negative social and economic outcomes. We will address this crisis through a comprehensive plan that protects the rights of ALL Americans by ending the War on Drugs, demilitarizing the police, legalizing marijuana, and expanding due process protections."

  

ORGANIZATIONS:

The Sanders Institute
https://www.sandersinstitute.com/issues/criminal-justice

Innocence Project
Works to achieve the exoneration and release of factually innocent inmates through post-conviction DNA testing and works to create a network of schools, organizations, and citizens that can effectively challenge wrongful convictions.

Sentencing Project
An independent source of criminal justice policy analysis, data, and program information for the public and policy makers.

Prison Policy Initiative (PPI)
Documents the impact of mass incarceration on individuals, communities, and the national welfare, and produces accessible and innovative research to empower the public to participate in creating better criminal justice policy.

Justice Policy Institute (JPI)
Works to enhance the public dialog on incarceration through accessible research, public education, and communications advocacy with the goal of ending society’s reliance on incarceration.

Critical Resistance
Seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.

Grassroots Leadership
Seeks to put an end to abuses of justice and the public trust by working to abolish for-profit private prisons.
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Justice Strategies
Promotes humane, effective approaches to criminal justice and immigration reform through rigorous analysis, high-quality research, and practical policy solutions.