Reentry Central received information from Cure National on a paper by David Cole of Georgetown University. In his essay, Cole addresses the need for going further with reform measures to ensure that America’s trend of reducing the number of prisoners, and its effort to combat racial disparity in our criminal justice system, is successful. Cole has given Reentry Central permission to post his work. The abstract to his paper follows. The complete essay can be read by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page and then clicking on Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No.11-141.
David Cole
Georgetown University Law Center
Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Vol. 9, 2011
Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No. 11-141
Abstract:
For the first time in forty years, the national incarceration rate is flattening out, even falling in state prisons. For the first time in three decades, the number of adults under any kind of correctional supervision — in prison or jail or on probation or parole — fell in 2009. At the same time, legal reforms that might have seemed impossible in prior years have increasingly been adopted, reducing penalties for certain crimes, eliminating mandatory sentencing for others, and increasing expenditures for reintegration of prisoners into society. And racial disparities, a persistent and deep-rooted problem in the American criminal justice system, after rising for decades, have begun to drop from their highest levels.
This essay examines these trends and asks what might be done to accelerate them. I survey the reforms that states and Congress have adopted and look at the interplay of such reforms with the historic racial disparities that have characterized the criminal justice system. I then speculate about the forces that have contributed to these developments, including drops in crime rates, budget pressures, and, paradoxically, the war on terror.
We still have a long way to go. If we are to reduce incarceration in any significant measure, it is essential that legislatures (1) authorize more non-incarceration responses to low-level crimes, especially drug offenses; (2) shorten sentences substantially for crimes generally, to bring them more in line with those of other industrialized nations; and (3) invest in inner-city communities where children face the biggest barriers to achieving law-abiding, productive careers. In the essay’s final section, I discuss strategies that might encourage such developments.
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