WE NEED REAL POLICING & CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM
THE SAD REALITY
In the United States today we have more people in jail than any other country on earth. We are spending $80 billion a year to lock up 2.3 million Americans, disproportionately African American. To my mind, it makes a lot more sense to invest in education and jobs than in jails and incarceration. It’s time for real criminal justice reform.
The sad reality is that racism has plagued the United States since before its founding. The atrocities committed against the Native Americans who inhabited this land long before Europeans arrived are beyond appalling, as is the abomination of slavery perpetrated against Africans brought to this continent to labor in servitude, as well as their descendants. Racism has affected people who immigrated to this country from Latin America and Asia. It has affected the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews. Racism has afflicted our nation for centuries, and it continues to afflict our nation today.
There is no question that in recent decades we have made significant progress in creating a country where we judge people not by the color of their skin, not by the language they speak, not by the country they came from, but, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged, by the content of their character and their qualities as human beings.
But make no mistake about it. While we have come a long way, there is still a long distance to go before we fulfill Dr. King’s dream.
POLICE DEPARTMENT REFORM
Among many other struggles we must engage in to combat racism in this country, we must stop police brutality and the killing of unarmed African Americans. This has emerged as one of the great civil rights issues of the early twenty-first century.
Violence and brutality, particularly at the hands of the police, are unacceptable and must not be tolerated.
TWEET BY BERNIE SANDERS,
MARCH 25, 2016, 6:12 PM
The names and the incidents are all too familiar to us—innocent people who should be alive today, but who died after contact with the police. Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Jessica Hernandez, Tamir Rice, Jonathan Ferrell, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Oscar Grant, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, Laquan McDonald, Samuel DuBose, and Anastacio Hernandez-Rojas—and many others. We know their names. Each of them died at the hands of police officers or in police custody.
Eric Garner was choked to death in New York City after selling single cigarettes. Alton Sterling was shot while pinned on the ground by Baton Rouge police, who were called because Sterling was selling CDs outside a store. Freddie Gray died of a spinal cord injury while in Baltimore police custody. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police officers within two seconds of their arrival on the scene.
Sandra Bland was ordered from her car, handcuffed, and thrown to the ground. Three days later, she was found dead in her Texas jail cell. Samuel DuBose was fatally shot in Cincinnati during a traffic stop for a missing front license plate. Philando Castile was killed by an officer in a Minneapolis suburb during a traffic stop for a busted taillight. Walter Scott was pulled over for a broken brake light in South Carolina and shot in the back by an officer. And on and on it goes.
Across the nation, too many African Americans and other minorities find themselves subjected to a system that treats citizens who have not committed crimes like criminals. Because of overpolicing in minority communities and racial profiling, African Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and three times as likely as whites to experience the use of force during encounters with the police. Although there is no national database of police shootings, one group that tracks these cases says that in 2015, police officers killed at least 102 unarmed black people, five times the rate at which they killed unarmed whites.
Violence and brutality of any kind at the hands of the police are unacceptable and must not be tolerated. It is no wonder that a growing number of communities of color do not trust the police.
Being a police officer is an extremely difficult and stressful job. Many officers are underpaid and undertrained and have irregular schedules that hurt their family lives. The vast majority of those who serve in law enforcement are decent, hardworking people who want to make their communities better places to live, and many have sacrificed much to do their jobs.
To my mind, that is all the more reason we must stand up and denounce acts of illegal behavior when they are perpetrated by the police. Police officers must be held accountable. In a society based on law, nobody can be above the law, especially those who are charged with enforcing it.
WE MUST END THE WAR ON DRUGS
Of course, the intersection of racism and criminal justice is not limited to police violence. An even bigger issue is the failed war on drugs, which has over the decades harmed millions through the arrest and jailing of people for nonviolent crimes. The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980, and this “war” has disproportionately targeted people of color.
According to the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same overall rates. However, blacks are arrested for drug use at far greater rates than whites, largely because of overpolicing, racial profiling, and—according to the Department of Justice—the fact that black motorists are three times more likely than whites to be searched during a traffic stop.
Take marijuana use. How many encounters between young people and the police begin with officers detecting the odor of marijuana? According to the best research, blacks smoke marijuana at a slightly higher rate than whites. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, however, blacks are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.
And marijuana is inexplicably a Schedule I drug—the designation for highly dangerous and addictive drugs such as heroin—under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Now, people can argue about the pros and cons of legalizing marijuana, just as we can argue the merits of the legality of tobacco, which causes cancer and other terrible diseases. But no sane person thinks that marijuana is equivalent to heroin, a killer drug, in terms of its health impact. But that is the way it’s treated. To fully grasp how this affects our criminal justice system, consider that in 2014 there were 620,000 total marijuana possession arrests. That’s more than one every minute. And that’s a major reason why African Americans account for 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses when they only comprise 14 percent of regular drug users.
Overall, blacks are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites. In fact, according to recent statistics, one of every fifteen African American men is incarcerated, compared with one in every 106 white men. If current trends continue, one in four black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. This is the destruction of a generation. This must change. Sadly, the situation is not that much better for African American women, who are three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated.
Moreover, African Americans face more serious consequences when sentenced. Even when convicted for the exact same crimes, black offenders receive sentences that are on average 10 percent longer than those received by white offenders. These statistics, needless to say, raise serious doubts about equal treatment under the law. Just look at the outcomes: African Americans and Latinos together comprised 57 percent of all prisoners in 2015, even though neither of these two groups makes up even one-quarter of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, African American youth alone make up 40 percent of all confined youth today.
Further, what has to be understood is that, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, just 6 percent of African American arrests in 2015 were for violent crimes and another 14 percent were for property crimes. What is driving the incarceration of blacks is nonviolent drug-related crimes. In fact, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons in January 2017, 46.4 percent of all federal prisoners are locked up for non-violent drug offenses. This is expensive. It is a waste of human potential. We must end the over-incarceration of nonviolent young Americans who do not pose a serious threat to our society.
And if anyone thinks that a criminal record for marijuana is some small matter, think again. There are a lot of people out there who apply for jobs and don’t get them because they have such a record. There are real consequences.
ADDRESSING THE MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
The time is long overdue for this country to understand that we cannot jail our way out of health problems like mental illness and drug addiction. Our country is facing an opioid crisis, both in terms of prescription pain medicine abuse and heroin addiction. People are dying every day from overdoses. But the solution is not to lock up addicts. We have to treat substance abuse as what it is—a serious public health issue rather than a criminal issue—so that all people, regardless of their income, can get the help they need.
In terms of treating addiction, we put far too little emphasis on coordinated treatment and support programs that combine medication-assisted therapies, such as methadone and buprenorphine, with counseling and behavioral therapies.
We must also understand that we have a mental health crisis in this country and that many mentally ill people are ending up in jail because there is no place else for them to go. Over the last several decades we have made a bad situation even worse by cutting back on the programs and support systems that mentally ill people need in order to survive and improve. Of the more than 43 million adults with a mental illness, fewer than half received the mental health services they needed in the past year. We think we’re saving money by cutting back on housing and treatment for the mentally ill, but we spend far, far more when vulnerable people end up in jail.
The end result of the war on drugs and our failure to treat mental illness in a rational way is that the United States of America has more people in jails and prisons than any other country on earth. We have around 4 percent of the world’s population, yet we have more than 20 percent of all prisoners. We now have more people in jails and prisons than does the communist totalitarian state of China, which has a population four times our own.
It is a national tragedy that the number of incarcerated Americans has more than quadrupled since Ronald Reagan first ran on a “get tough on crime” platform—from about 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.3 million today. And we spend $80 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxpayer dollars to lock them up. Eighty billion dollars a year! I can think of an awful lot of real needs that can be met with $80 billion a year.
ENDING PRIVATE PRISONS
Private corporations should not be making profits off of the incarceration of human beings. But that is exactly what is happening today in our country. According to the ACLU, as part of the movement toward privatization that we are seeing in sector after sector, the number of adult prisoners housed in private prisons has jumped almost 1,600 percent between 1990 and 2009. In 2015, there were about 126,000 federal and state prisoners in private facilities.
According to a February 2016 report by In the Public Interest, the two largest private prison operators in the United States made a combined $361 million housing these prisoners. The Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest private prison operator, collected $3,356 in profit per prisoner, while GEO Group, the country’s second largest, made $2,135 in profit per prisoner. And yet, study after study has shown that private prisons are not cheaper, they’re not safer, and they do not provide better outcomes for either the prisoners or the state. What they do provide is an incentive to keep prison beds full. They interfere with the administration of justice. No one, in my view, should be allowed to profit from putting more people behind bars.
The private prison racket extends to the Department of Homeland Security, too. More than 60 percent of all immigration detention beds are in prisons operated by for-profit corporations. These include two of the country’s three family detention centers that house unaccompanied minors and mothers with babies, where there have been reports of inadequate food and medical treatment, sexual abuse, and other serious human rights abuses.
ENDING THE DEATH PENALTY
It is long past time for the United States of America to join almost every other advanced country on earth in abolishing the death penalty. The death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. It is applied disproportionately to people of color. It has been proven to not deter violent crime. The inevitable endless judicial appeals tie up the courts for years at the taxpayer’s expense. And far too many of those executed by the states are now thought to have been innocent.
We are all shocked and disgusted by some of the horrific murders that we see in this country. When people commit horrendous crimes, we should lock them up and throw away the key. But the state, in a democratic and civilized society, should not itself be involved in murder.
Frankly, we should not be in the company of China (the world’s leader in use of the death penalty), Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Egypt, and Somalia. Rather, we should be in the company of virtually every other major democratic society that understands that even when confronted with unspeakable violence, we must move beyond ancient concepts of revenge. We must recognize, as Mohandas Gandhi did, that in the end an “eye for an eye” simply makes everybody blind.
ENDING THE SCHOOL-TO-JAIL PIPELINE
In this country, we treat our children shamefully. We have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty among the major countries on earth, and we maintain a dysfunctional child-care system. But as bad as the situation is for kids in our country as a whole, it is far worse in minority communities.
Black children make up just 18 percent of preschool enrollees, but 48 percent of the preschoolers who received multiple out-of-school suspensions. We are failing our black children before they even start kindergarten. Even though we know that 90 percent of brain development occurs between birth and five years of age, we allow early-childhood education in minority communities to remain a total disgrace.
Black elementary and high school students are more than four times as likely as whites to attend schools where more than 20 percent of the teachers are not certified. They are more likely to attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers. They are suspended or expelled at three times the rate of white students. According to the Department of Education, African American students are more likely to suffer harsh punishments—suspensions and arrests—at school.
There is a pipeline from school to jail that we have to turn into a pipeline from school to a promising future. If current trends continue, nearly 70 percent of African American men who drop out of high school will end up in jail. We have to make certain they do not.
REAL REFORM
We must come together with a sense of shared purpose and demand policies to transform this country into a nation that affirms the value of all our people, regardless of race, income, or national origin. We need a criminal justice system that not only protects our people from crime but is also based on justice for all, nondiscriminatory policies, and the understanding that preventing crime is a much worthier approach than punishing for it.
We must reexamine honestly how we police America, and the federal government can play an important role in establishing a model police-training program that reorients the way we do law enforcement. First and foremost, we must develop new rules on the allowable use of force. Police officers need to be trained to de-escalate confrontations and to humanely interact with people, especially people who have mental illnesses. Lethal force should be the last response, not the first.
Every effort should be made to have police forces reflect the diversity of the communities they work in. And that must include in positions of leadership and training departments. We must demand greater civilian oversight of police departments and ongoing and meaningful community engagement.
We must demilitarize our police forces so they don’t look and act like invading armies. Police departments must be part of the community they serve and be trusted by the community. Too often, we see local police forces with military-style vehicles and weapons that make them look like occupying armies trying to conquer some faraway country.
We should federally fund and require body cameras for law enforcement officers to make it easier to hold everyone accountable, while also establishing standards to protect the privacy of innocent people.
We must ensure that police departments do not shield bad actors from accountability and that they instead show zero tolerance for abuses of police power. All employees deserve due process protections, but departments must vigorously investigate and, if necessary, prosecute allegations of wrongdoing, especially those involving the use of force. Every death that occurs during an arrest or while someone is in police custody should be investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice.
We must stop cash-starved communities from using their police forces as revenue generators. In many cities, the incentives for policing are upside down. Police departments are bringing in substantial revenue by ticketing poor people for minor offensives and by seizing the personal property of people who are suspected of criminal involvement. When policing becomes a source of revenue, officers are often pressured to meet quotas that can lead to unnecessary or unlawful traffic stops and citations. And civil asset forfeiture laws allow police to take property from people even before they are charged with a crime. Even worse, it is often difficult and expensive for innocent people to get their property back. We must end these abusive practices.
The time is long overdue for us to take marijuana off the federal government’s list of outlawed drugs under the Controlled Substances Act. Eight states and the District of Columbia have already legalized the recreational use of marijuana, and the federal government shouldn’t stand in the way of states deciding to regulate it the same way that they do alcohol and tobacco. The current federal prohibition means that businesses in states that legalized marijuana often cannot find banks willing to take their money for fear of U.S. prosecution.
We have got to end the tragic reality that the United States of America has more people living in jail than any other country.
TWEET BY BERNIE SANDERS,
OCTOBER 2, 2015, 11:02 AM
We must invest in drug courts and interventions so people end up in treatment rather than prison. We must end mandatory minimum sentencing and give judges the discretion to better tailor sentences to the specific facts of a given case. The federal system of parole needs to be reinstated because people who are serving long sentences need incentives to make productive choices and earn their way to shorter sentences.
We must make it easier, not harder, for people who have served sentences to be reintegrated into society. They need a path back from prison that will allow them to lead productive lives rather than returning to a life of crime and to jail. People who leave jail need jobs, housing, education, and a real chance to make it in civil society.
Giving former inmates a real chance means “banning the box” to prohibit employers from discriminating against job applicants because of a prior conviction. “The box” is a common element on job applications that people must check if they have a criminal record. Individuals reentering the workforce should be able to compete for work based on their current merits without regard to their past wrongdoings.
And once people get out of jail, their full voting rights should be restored. As many as six million Americans, largely poor and minority, who have served their time in jail were not able to vote in the 2016 election. This has nothing to do with criminal justice. It is a partisan political decision. When people do their time, their rights as citizens in a democratic society should be reinstated.
MOBILIZE
Campaign Zero works to end police killings of citizens. Its site, joincampaignzero.org, provides research and reports on police policies around the country, including use of force, body cameras, and broken-windows policing.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s Criminal Law Reform Project outlines current justice issues and updates breaking news at aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform. As part of its efforts to reform policing and sentencing, the rights group is petitioning the U.S. Justice Department to require police departments to collect and disclose data on police shootings and deaths in custody.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp.org) focuses on disparities in economics, health care, education, voter empowerment, and the criminal justice system while also continuing its role as legal advocate for civil rights issues. Local chapters organize actions and disseminate information.
The Equal Justice Initiative provides legal representation to inmates and help reentering society for former prisoners. Its website, eji.org, aims to educate the public about mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and economic and racial injustice with reports and videos on such topics as children in adult prisons and sentencing reform. It also suggests ways to get involved, including hosting discussions on social justice and urging companies to divest from private prison industries.
LEARN MORE
Campaign Zero publishes in-depth reports on many aspects of criminal justice reform on its website, joincampaignzero.org.
Harvard’s criminal justice program explores the social context and consequences of incarceration at hks.harvard.edu/centers/wiener/programs/criminaljustice/research-publications/incarceration-social-context-and-consequences. In addition to scholarly research, the site provides links to news articles on incarceration, including a separate section on young-adult justice.
The 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival took a deep dive into criminal justice reform with a panel of experts, including a former inmate, and an opening presentation of research by Harvard professor Bruce Western, youtube.com/watch?v=bZiQtnvAmS8. You can read about Western’s work with prisoners here: harvardmagazine.com/2013/03/the-prison-problem.
Pete Brook, a prison photojournalist, recommends twenty-three prison documentaries on his website: prisonphotography.org/2013/11/17/the-20-best-american-prison-documentaries/.
