We need to pass bills lowering mandatory minimum sentences, improving prison conditions, and authorizing programs to help formerly incarcerated individuals successfully reenter communities across the country
Criminal justice reform has every element we need to pass this Congress.
Proven, evidenced-based reforms that are working in red and blue states across the country;
Bills that are the process of careful bipartisan work that span more than one Congress;
Conservatives, liberals, and independents, including outside advocacy groups, agree we need to pass bills lowering mandatory minimum sentences, improving prison conditions, and authorizing programs to help formerly incarcerated individuals successfully reenter communities across the country.
The President has begun to pay attention and even mentioned prison reform at the State of the Union. He also sees an opportunity for something that can pass Congress. Comprehensive criminal justice reform should be a no-brainer. We have an Attorney General who is incredibly knowledgeable of the criminal code, the justice system and all the tools available to prosecutors. His awareness does not extend to the root causes of crime or the devastation of mothers, fathers, and young people ripped from communities. Communities do unfortunately face crime, that crime often derives from lack of opportunity or communities dealing with the historical trauma of violence and over-policing. Some of that crime also comes from a criminal code made voluminous by our obsession with punishment, and the extensive resources committed (at the state and federal level) to enforce them and incarcerate.
I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
-Matthew 25:36
Overreliance on enforcement, calling for more mandatory minimums, and rescinding guidance that directed prosecutors to take a balanced approach to crime and public safety are not helpful. The Department of Justice has a wealth of tools to enforce laws, incarcerate, and use force. You cannot incarcerate mental illness, addiction, poverty, or a broken home. You can incarcerate men and women, fathers and mothers, and even children. This creates a vicious cycle that only perpetuates mass incarceration.
This new world where facts are contestable, funding for children’s health is used as a bargaining chip for more war, casual racism is barely covered by a veneer of half-truths and euphemism. The White House seems to think we can only pay attention to the latest scandal involving Russia, the President’s inflammatory remarks about countries that are not white, or his multiple insinuations that black or Hispanic communities live in a hell where anyone can be shot.
The Attorney General sat in a meeting at the White House discussing proposals to reform prisons. Communities suffering from decades of violence, control, and white supremacy will not be healed by more mass incarceration and more trauma that already spans centuries. Bills to address prison programming begin with the words “The Attorney General shall carry out…” Passing these types of bills absent real sentencing reform would “direct” this Attorney General to develop programming, services, and process very limited early releases without the funding to make it happen. The Bureau of Prisons has already cut halfway houses in order to allow more flexibility in the budget to ramp up enforcement.
Yes, that’s the sad reality. Many people leaving prison are returning to little or no assets; family situations that are sometimes unstable; and nearly 48,000 barriers or collateral consequences like an inability to get a barber’s license or inability to access food stamps to get back on their feet and reenter society with a job and dignity.
The Bureau of Prisons is only required to incarcerate someone convicted of a federal sentence. They are not required to help them, provide rehabilitation, or even process early releases for illness or advanced age.
Federal Prisons are not required, nor do they have the resources, to ask (or answer) the questions “What will this human being need to re-enter society after having lost nearly everything? What can we do?”
If we keep taking children of God, those in which Spirit dwells, and relegate them to cages what will be left? There are 70 million people with a criminal record in a country of 310 million. Those people overwhelmingly look like me, black and brown. They DO NOT look like the staff I meet on Capitol Hill or the temporary occupants of the White House. To worsen matters Congress passed a tax bill that will decimate public coffers, is actively requesting more money for the military, and seeking to cut programs that keep people out of poverty and from committing crimes.
I think about the words of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decrying the “white moderate” who “prefers a negative peace (the absence of tension)” to a “positive peace (the presence of justice.)” Quakers aren’t known for being the white moderate, but sadly there are many in Congress and thousands more like them who see little issue with sweeping millions from our communities rather than helping them.
A powerful Quaker by the name of Lucretia Mott traveled to Washington, DC to address the First Unitarian Church long before the question of slavery erupted into Civil War. Invited by former President John Quincy Adams she spoke to legislators, a room full of men, to address southern legislators and slave holders about her abolitionist views.
“Their courtesy led them to bear from a woman what they probably would have resisted in a man…” –Lucretia Mott
We may not be fighting slavery today, but make no mistake that shoving millions of poor people—many of whom are black and brown— in prison is objectionable. Slashing programs that help people and keep them out of poverty is reprehensible. Our over-abundant focus on enforcement: war, deportations, prosecutions, mandatory minimums, over-policing and excessive policing is the complexity of white supremacy of our day.
A late Friend from New York Yearly Meeting, Mr. Barrington Dunbar, informs how we should feel in this moment.
“…some of us can experience peace of mind even when involved in conflict because of the deep conviction that we are part of the process of change and God’s creative energy in the world.”
We should embrace conflict to strongly denounce the white supremacy baked in every segment of our policies and institutions just as we tackle it within ourselves.
Millions of vulnerable families need us to call for justice in this new normal that Washington has created. Continue to ask your members of Congress to urge Chairman Bob Goodlatte to reintroduce the Sentencing Reform Act from last Congress. Additionally, urge your Senators to cosponsor Chairman Grassley’s Sentencing Reform and Correction Act S.1917.
