BECOMING POLICY ADVOCATES IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SECTOR

Chapter 14 of your text book addresses policy maters related to incarceration and lists agencies and organizations dedicated to helping incarcerated individuals who may have been wrongly convicted. These agencies and organizations play a vital role in the pursuit of justice and the protection of human rights. These groups, often comprised of legal experts, activists, and volunteers, work tirelessly to identify cases of potential wrongful conviction and advocate for the exoneration of innocent individuals.

Jansson, B. S. (2019). Social welfare policy and advocacy: Advancing social justice through eight policy sectors. SAGE Publications.

With regards to this, chapter 14 lists the following organizations:

American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Amnesty International

NAACP Legal Defense Fund

African Americans.National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

National Legal Aid and Defender Association

Pew Research Center

The Sentencing Project

The Vera Institute of Justice

Other than those listed above, please tell us about an organizations that helps those in-justly imprisoned.

For example:

Equal Justice Initiative is a non-profit organization in Montgomery, AL .

They provide legal representation to those thought to be wrongfully convicted or who have extensive sentences that are unreasonable for the crime. They also provide services to formally incarnated individuals. This organization focuses on changing how race influences incarceration.

Requirements: 1000+

14 BECOMING POLICY ADVOCATES IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SECTOR

This chapter was coauthored by Gretchen Heidemann, Ph.D., and Elain Sanchez Wilson, MPP Note: Gretchen Heidemann, Ph.D., and Elain Sanchez Wilson, MPP, made invaluable contributions to this chapter in this book’s first edition. Bruce Jansson was the sole author of the second edition, editing and updating contributions from each original contributor. Learning Objectives In this chapter you will learn to: 1. Understand the evolution of the health care system in the United States 2. Understand how mass incarceration is powerfully linked to economic inequality in the United States 3. Describe the political economy of the corrections sector, including powerful players and interests as well as underrepresented ones 4. Identify seven problems encountered in the criminal justice sector as well as the policies, regulations, and organizational factors pertinent to them 5. Develop Red Flag Alerts for each of the seven problems at the micro advocacy level . Identify policy resources available to policy advocates with respect to each of the seven core problems 7. Identify strategies for moving from micro policy advocacy to mezzo and macro policy advocacy in the criminal justice sector . Engage the eight challenges in the multilevel policy empowerment framework in the criminal justice sector Many policy makers and advocates are reconsidering the harshness of the American penal system that places far more people in jails than any other industrialized nation. American prisons hold 22% of all incarcerated persons in the world even though Americans make up only 4.6% of the world’s population (Lussenhop, 2016). With many competing domestic and international priorities, many politicians on both sides of the aisle are looking for ways to cut the costs of running jails and other institutions that house roughly 2.3 million inmates in the United States. If a growing number of “prison abolitionists” want to terminate all prisons, other critics seek incremental reductions of inmates as well as prison reforms (Arrieta-Kenna, 2018). If the United States does reconfigure its penal system so that it focuses on rehabilitating its prisoners and downsizing prisons, social workers will likely become a larger part of its workforce. As Gumz (2004) noted, “The tenets of social work practice—the innate dignity of the individual, self-determination of the client, confidentiality, moral neutrality, and social justice— were, and are, challenged by a criminal justice system that values order, control, and punishment” (p. 451). As you read this chapter, reflect on ways that social workers can engage in addressing the seven core problems of the policy advocacy framework in the criminal justice sector. Developing an Empowering Perspective about Criminal Justice Many Americans subscribe to a punitive mission for their criminal justice system. This is understandable: No one likes to have property stolen, monies robbed, and lives ended through criminal action. Some people are violent. Some people do commit fraud. People and pharmaceutical companies do market illegal and addictive drugs. Bank officials caused the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and the Great Recession in 2007 through rampant speculation and bank fraud. Some people commit crimes so heinous that many onlookers favor a death penalty. We all agree that the United States needs a network of laws, as well as police forces and courts, to detect criminal behavior. It needs courts to enforce these laws. It needs to incarcerate some criminals for varying lengths of time. Yet the United States can ill afford a criminal system that houses 2.3 million persons. Nor should the nation rely almost exclusively (US) © on a system that fails to rehabilitate hundreds of thousands of inmates who leave correctional institutions with almost no job preparation, housing, mental health services, and medical care or that houses hundreds of thousands of person awaiting court hearings simply because they cannot afford bail (Wagner, 2015). A good case can be made that the United States incarcerates many people who commit relatively minor property crimes, smoke marijuana, or have driving infractions. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that as many Americans have criminal records during their lifetimes as college diplomas, such as the 70 million persons arrested and fingerprinted by local, state, or federal agencies (Jansson, 2019a; Friedman, 2015). Most of the 70 million persons are not incarcerated, but many do end up in correctional institutions. This “arrest epidemic” morphed into mass incarceration from the mid-1970s to the present, increasing numbers of persons in jails and prisons from roughly 600,000 inmates in 1975 to roughly 2.3 million inmates in 2016. An excessively strict code of justice has other shortcomings on several counts. Take the decision decades ago to declare use and distribution of marijuana to be a criminal offense under federal law—a decision that led hundreds of thousands of persons to be incarcerated, often for many years in federal prisons. Or take the movement that enacted “three strikes and you are out” in many states, leading to incarceration of many persons who had committed three crimes even if all of them were nonviolent, like petty theft. Realize, too, that bias and prejudice often enter into the arresting process. Law enforcement arrested and incarcerated large numbers of African Americans for using or distributing crack over many decades while not arresting or incarcerating many white Americans for using cocaine powder. They incarcerated large numbers of Latinos as well. Corporations that financed for-profit prisons became a huge industry and hired many lobbyists to pressure local, state, and federal officials to fund more prisons. Unions of jail and prison workers pressured local, state, and federal officials to build jails and prisons. Wanting more jobs in their jurisdictions, many politicians from semi-rural and rural areas pressured public officials to build prisons to create jobs for their constituents. Americans have often resorted to incarceration rather than other forms of punishment even when data shows that incarceration is less effective than community-based penalties, such as specified hours of community service and keeping persons in their homes with electronic ankle bracelets. Data shows that persons who are incarcerated are more likely than other persons to re-commit crimes that bring them back to jails and prisons (Kann, 2018). Employees of prisons and jails often expect inmates to return. Other inmates socialize newcomers to crime. Incarceration often destroys family relationships. Inmates often find it impossible to find jobs when they exit prisons and jails because employers do not want to hire ex-prisoners or people who lack employment records. Jails and prisons, moreover, cost extraordinary amounts of money to build and maintain. It is difficult to decide what penalties to impose on people for specific criminal behavior. How many years, for example, should an alcoholic driver receive who causes severe injuries to a pedestrian versus a person who robs a bank versus someone who uses an illegal drug? When is leniency acceptable versus strict enforcement to the letter of the law? All too often, judges resort to excessive sentences for a variety of reasons. They are not versed in psychology or social work, so they often wrongly assume that persons cannot be rehabilitated. Courts often lack sufficient numbers of psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists to determine if specific persons are good candidates for immediate release, community service, or speedy release. They are often harsher in their sentences for persons of color than for whites. Released inmates often cannot find health and mental health services, much less help in finding jobs and housing. A huge number of inmates are housed in local jails awaiting a court hearing but unable to afford bail. Considerable controversy has long existed about the most extreme sentence—the death penalty. Critics contend that many murders are crimes of passion rather than calculation—and many of them take place when the murderer is high on drugs or alcohol. Some murders are defensive in nature, such as when women murder spouses or partners who are physically abusing them or threatening to kill them. Some murders are unintentional such as when someone shoots a rifle into the air only to have the bullet kill someone when it descends. Some wardens of prisons trust some convicted murderers sufficiently that they have them babysit their children—a decision that suggests that some, even many, murderers on death row have been rehabilitated. Yet other murderers, such as Charles Manson, a cult figure who planned and executed the murders of movie actress Sharon Tate and others in the 1960s, appeared unrepentant even after spending 48 years in prison (Gilbert, 2017). Many critics of the death penalty contend that life imprisonment is preferable to killing human beings, no matter how “humane” the drugs or other means of killing may be. Pope Francis US) © came to this conclusion in late 2018 when he vowed to oppose death penalties around the world. Many Americans also came to this conclusion when they learned that many prisoners on death row and many executed prisoners were exonerated by DNA analysis or by belated confessions of other persons. A study estimated that DNA and belated confessions exonerated one in 25 persons who were sentenced to death, resulting in an untold number of innocent persons to be executed and many others to “languish in prison and never be freed” (Levy, 2014). Many nations and 18 American states have abandoned the death penalty in favor of life imprisonment—and Colorado, Oregon, and Washington have formed moratoriums on executions imposed by their governors. Yet others, such as Norway, do not favor life imprisonment except in extraordinary circumstances. Probation officers are charged with working with inmates after they have been released to the community as well as with persons who receive sentences that require them to work for a specific number of hours in community service. Probation departments often lack sufficient staff to monitor ex-inmates, much less to help them obtain job training, social services, and resources from the safety net sector. Many probation officers restrict their work to discovering whether released prisoners commit crimes rather than helping them find jobs and housing. Other factors skew the American criminal justice system toward punishment rather than (also) rehabilitation. Correctional personnel are often primarily charged with keeping law and order in correctional institutions rather than helping prisoners surmount mental health, economic, familial, and other problems that led them to commit a crime in the first instance. They often view themselves as law enforcement officers rather than persons who work with prisoners so that they thrive in society after their release. They have to deal with prisoners who live (in effect) in cages, have minimal exercise, receive little education and job training, and realize they will leave prison with almost no money and no imminent employment. Some end up on the streets. From Mass Incarceration to Lower Numbers of Inmates The momentum toward mass incarceration began in the United States in the mid-1970s when roughly 600,000 persons were incarcerated, but it grew markedly from 1980 to 2010 when it had roughly 2.4 million inmates. It was a mass incarceration because the United States came to have a far greater percentage of its population in jails and prisons than any other industrialized nation. If the United States has a prison population of 655 per 100,000 persons, other industrialized nations had far fewer. In descending order, they have these levels: New Zealand (219), Australia (167), Scotland (143), England and Wales (140), Portugal (127), Canada (114), France (104), Austria (98), Italy (96), Greece (94), Switzerland (81), Ireland (79), Germany (78), Norway (74), Denmark (59), the Netherlands (59), Sweden (57), Finland (52), and Japan (45) (Kann, 2018). The United States has 2.3 million prisoners or almost the size of Chicago’s population. It has more than three times the number of inmates as a percentage of its population than the next closest industrial nation—New Zealand. Many Americans contend that they cannot learn lessons from other industrialized nations because they are so different from the United States. They ascribe their low incarceration rates to their small populations and their socialist economies. None of these arguments are valid. France and Germany have substantial populations, respectively 67 million and 81 million persons. None of these nations are socialist: They all have capitalist economies and rely heavily on exports. Many nations had death penalties and large populations of inmates but chose to move in the direction of rehabilitation, such as Norway in the 1990s. Take the case of Norway, which has the official goal of getting inmates out of its penal system (Benko, 2015). It has none of the sights that are characteristic of American prisons, such as coils of razor wire and towers with snipers. Halden, a Norwegian prison, seeks to prepare inmates for life in the community. It has no death penalty and a maximum sentence of 21 years, even for Anders Breivik who killed 77 people and injured hundreds more in an attack in Oslo and a nearby summer camp—although Norway allows additional years of incarceration if an inmate is judged to be dangerous to others. Halden develops post-release plans for each inmate that include help in securing homes, jobs, and access to a supportive social network. It spends $93,000 per inmate as compared with $31,000 per inmate in the United States. Yet the United States could save roughly $45 billion per year if it incarcerated prisoners at the same rate as Norway. But it wasn’t always this way; the Norwegians had a criminal justice system akin to the American one as recently as 1998. It was then that they set the goal of using education, job training, and therapy to rehabilitate prisoners. They chose in 2007 to help inmates find housing and jobs with a steady income before they are released in a process they called “reintegration.” By contrast, American inmates are often placed on buses with petty cash, (US) © no jobs, and no housing when they are discharged, not to mention inadequate job and educational preparation in prison. Every feature of Halden is geared to reduce stress, mitigate conflict, and minimize interpersonal friction (Benko, 2015). It is placed in a park with trees and blueberry bushes. It seeks interpersonal relationships between staff and inmates to maintain safety within the prison. It has no surveillance cameras. Inmates move around unaccompanied by guards. Its isolation cell has not been used in five years. Of its 251 prisoners, half are imprisoned for violent crimes including murder, rape, and assault—and one-third for smuggling and selling drugs. Although two-thirds are Norwegian, many prisoners come from different nations such as from the Middle East; some prisoners are transferred to psychiatric facilities if they cannot live with the other prisoners. A special unit focuses on addiction recovery. Prisoners cook many of the meals. Each inmate’s cell has a small refrigerator to store food obtained from communal suppers and weekly visits to the prison grocery shop. Furniture is similar to that in college dorms in the United States rather than the lack of furniture found in cells of most American jails and prisons. If inmates violate rules, they experience swift, consistent, and evenly applied consequences such as cell confinement and loss of TV. A brief reform movement to make the American criminal justice system more humane was initiated by President Lyndon Johnson as part of his War on Crime when he established the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1967. The commission’s members concluded that the American correctional institutions were “at best barren and futile … and are the poorest possible preparation for [inmates’] successful re-entry into society” (Benko, 2015). It advised the nation to develop model correctional institutions that would resemble “a normal residential setting [… with] doors rather than bars [where] inmates would eat at small tables in an informal atmosphere [with] classrooms, recreation facilities, day rooms, and perhaps a shop and library.” The federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) constructed model correctional centers in the mid-1970s that placed groups of 44 prisoners in self-contained units with single-inmate cells, a day room, only a single, unarmed correctional officer, wooden and upholstered furniture, porcelain toilets, and other amenities (Benko, 2015). The tide soon shifted, however, in a coercive direction. Drawing on correctional data, a researcher simplistically concluded that rehabilitation did not work—a conclusion that was rapidly accepted by many public officials. By the time the researcher concluded that his first analysis was erroneous and that data confirmed that “some treatment programs” do rehabilitate inmates, the damage was done (Benko, 2015). The nation quickly moved toward mass incarceration. President Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs led to incarceration of many drug dealers and addicts, including for use of marijuana, which was classified as a Schedule 1 substance with high potential for abuse and with no accepted medical use even under the direction of a physician. It joined cocaine and heroin as drugs whose users and dealers were criminalized (Jansson, 2019b). A war-on-crime movement arose among public officials at all levels of government that imposed minimum sentences on persons as well as longer sentences, three-strikes laws, and prosecuting juveniles as adults. These coercive policies were disproportionately imposed on African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans who came to be a large majority of inmates. President Ronald Reagan’s antidrug abuse acts established mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. President Bill Clinton enacted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that included a threestrikes mandatory life sentence for repeat offenders, hiring of 100,000 new police officers, providing $9.7 billion for funding of prisons, and expanding death penalty-eligible offenses. Whereas Clinton’s legislation also provided $6.1 billion for prevention programs designed by “experienced police officers,” it overwhelmingly reinforced mass incarceration by causing a large increase of prisoners in federal prisons. His legislation also stripped Pell Grant college scholarships from prisoners as well as required prisoners to be evicted from public housing if they were involved in any criminal activity (Lussenhop, 2016). It is not surprising that many leaders of African American, Latino, and Native American advocacy groups view the American correctional system negatively. The vast majority of inmates came from these three groups for decades to the present time. Many white persons who are convicted of crimes can pay their bail and hire attorneys that allow them to exit the correctional system pending a court hearing, whereas persons of color depended on public defenders who have huge caseloads. Judges’ and juries’ biases against persons of color often lead them to give them longer sentences than white people who committed the same crime. A swing toward a less coercive correctional system is currently under way in some states and at the national level. California sought to cut the number of inmates in its correctional institutions when it enacted “realignment legislation” in 2011 by enacting Assembly Bill 109. Large numbers of prisoners in state jails who had not committed acts of violence or serious crimes or sexual crimes were turned back to California’s 58 counties—or 30,000 inmates 2016 (California Radically Revamping, 2016). Researchers sought to determine whether placing more inmates on the streets increased or decreased crime—or had no effect on levels of crime. Researcher David Roodman, after he examined existing data, decided that “decarceration has zero net impact on crime.” But he acknowledged that this “estimate is uncertain, but at least as much evidence suggests that decarceration reduces crime as increases it.” He argued that “while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase criminality after release. As a result, ‘tough-on-crime’ initiatives can reduce crime in the short run but cause offsetting harm in the long run” (Lopez, 2018b). Yet another factor has to be considered. Some states are cutting the number of inmates in state prisons but not in local jails. Or some states reduce prison and jail populations in their large cities, such as New York City and Rochester in New York State, but not in jails of relatively small towns and counties. Moreover, huge increases in incarceration are occurring in some states and some counties. Moreover, some states “simply reclassified felony crimes as misdemeanors, emptying prisons while filling up jails.” Or some states send more people to prison than jail because the state foots the bill for the former (Exstrum, 2018). It is premature in late 2018, then, to declare a significant erosion in mass incarceration in the United States. However, the U.S. prison population fell from a peak of 1.6 million in 2009 to 1.5 million people in 2016 (Lopez, 2018c). Bipartisan support for reduction in the federal prison system existed in 2018 after President Obama had initiated the release of some federal prisoners who had not committed violent offenses and only had minor drug offenses. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act by a 16–5 vote in early 2018. The bill would decrease mandatory minimum sentences so that judges could use their discretion in setting sentences below a certain threshold. It would make retroactive reductions in the disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine to reduce the harshness of sentences for some African Americans for use of drugs. It would increase educational and other preventive programs in federal prisons. But even this modest legislation ran into opposition from law-and-order persons and groups including Jeff Sessions, the U.S. attorney general, as well as law enforcement groups (Watkins, 2018). The House enacted legislation that allowed eligible inmates in federal prisons to earn time out of prison, expanding access of prisoners to educational and other programs and strengthening protections for female prisoners. Many Democrats found the Senate and House bills to be too cautious: They believed major reductions in sentences were needed to stop the flow of persons into prisons in the first place, including Senators Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, who are recently seated on the Senate Judiciary Committee as well the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. President Donald Trump opposed sentencing reforms, not to mention Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Eric Young, president of the Council of Prison Locals, insisted that measures to rehabilitate prisoners are unsuccessful unless legislation includes sufficient new revenues to allow these measures to be successful (Lopez, 2018a). The First Step Act was finally signed into law in late 2018, relaxing “three strikes laws,” easing crack sentences, and allowing inmates in federal prisons with good behavior to leave prisons earlier. Major prison reforms are unlikely to be enacted unless the flow of inmates into prisons is decreased through major sentencing reforms, the prevention of future crimes is achieved by massive increases of education and counseling within prisons, and major supportive employment, housing, counseling, and medical services are provided to released prisoners. It is highly unlikely that major prison reforms will be enacted unless congressional elections of 2018 and 2020 and the presidential election of 2020 provide strong majorities of public officials who want to end mass incarceration. It would be helpful, too, to have some public officials who want to abolish prisons to put pressure on their moderate colleagues to enact reforms that are not just incremental adjustments. They include “young, mostly black lawyers, academics, artists, authors, and community organizers” that often have family members who were incarcerated or who themselves were incarcerated. Georgetown law professor Allegra McLeod views their work as a continuation of the earlier movement to abolish slavery. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted, “There are more African-Americans under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850—that is, before the Civil War” (Arrieta-Kenna, 2018). Analyzing the Evolution of the American Criminal Justice Sector Figure 14.1 depicts the evolution of the correctional systems in America, beginning with antiquated notions of “an eye for an eye” as the appropriate punishment for crime up through the present era of mass incarceration in the United States. Description Figure 14.1 Evolution of the Criminal Justice Sector Of note in the history of corrections in America are prevailing notions of the reformability of those who violate the law; shifts in what behaviors constitute criminal behavior; and the appropriate amount of public spending on enforcement, punishment, and surveillance versus services to address social ills and public health problems that contribute to crime. Identifying Connections Between Mass Incarceration and Economic Inequality An understanding of the criminal justice sector would be incomplete absent a discussion of mass incarceration and its connection to two phenomena: the deindustrialization that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s and the so-called War on Drugs. Unemployment rates skyrocketed in the mid-1970s to early 1980s when many manufacturing facilities pulled out of urban centers and moved their operations overseas where labor was cheaper (Western & Wildeman, 2009). Unemployment benefits and the shrinking welfare state were insufficient to handle the social problems that arose from mass unemployment among men, who at that time were often the family breadwinner. The drug trade became a source of economic opportunity where a vacuum of legitimate employment existed. When President Richard Nixon characterized the abuse of illicit substances as “America’s public enemy number one” in 1971, a wave of anti-drug legislation ensued (Nixon, 1971). The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 reclassified drug users as “criminals” rather than persons in need of treatment, imposed tougher and longer mandatory sentences for drug-related crime (even for first-time offenders), provided the opportunity for higher-level traffickers and dealers to receive lesser sentences by turning in their accomplices, and targeted low-income communities through the crack and powder cocaine disparity (Sudbury, 2002). Individual states also enacted mandatory sentencing laws (i.e., mandatory minimums) that removed judicial discretion and required automatic prison terms for drug offenses. This tough-on-crime mentality thus criminalized certain segments of the U.S. population— namely poor persons and persons of color who used and sold illicit substances—and contributed to skyrocketing levels of incarceration. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), in 1980, U.S. prisons held roughly 330,000 inmates. By 1990 that number had doubled to 774,000, and by 2015 the number of people incarcerated in the United States topped 2.2 million (Beck & Gilliard, 1995; Carson & Golinelli, 2013). Today, the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country in the world, and its prison population makes up nearly one-quarter of the world’s 8.5 million total prisoners (Nation Master, n.d.). These dramatic statistics have led some to call this the “era of mass incarceration” (Alexander, 2010; Western & Wildeman, 2009; Wacquant, 2002). Racial and ethnic minorities were disproportionately swept up in the broad net cast by the “war on drugs.” While white Americans represent about 73% of the total U.S. population, they represent only 32% of the prison population. African Americans, on the other hand, compose only about 13% of the total U.S. population but 38% of all prisoners, and while Latinos/Hispanics compose 16% of the total U.S. population, they make up 22% of the prison population (Guerino, Harrison, & Sabol, 2011; Humes, Jones, & Ramirez, 2011). Indeed, one in three African America

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