The criminal justice reform plan of Bernie Sanders, explained

Bernie Sanders is unique among the Democratic presidential candidates as the first critic of mass incarceration. His criminal justice reform plan, released over the weekend, explains how he acted.

The proposal covers a variety of issues, including seclusion of long prison terms, the end of the pecuniary bond, improved police control, the strengthening of public defenders, the legalization of marijuana and the use of marijuana. 39, prohibition of private for-profit prisons.

The plan underscores the unique position of the United States in the current situation: the country encloses more people than anyone in the world, even authoritarian regimes like China, Cuba and Russia. Sanders points out that this has disproportionately hurt black and brown Americans, facing racial disparities in arrests, incarceration, use of force by police and other types of law enforcement.

The rise of Black Lives Matter and a broader bipartisan push for criminal justice reform, which most Democrats argue, have led Democrat candidates in 2020 to adopt a more aggressive stance at the same time. criminal justice. Sanders is far from being the first candidate to publish a criminal justice reform plan; Joe Biden released a similar plan in July, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker unveiled the leniency reform proposals and Kamala Harris released a proposal focused on marijuana reform.

But unlike candidates who might try to reduce the support of "tough on crime" policies (like Biden, Harris and Klobuchar), Sanders' plan reflects his more progressive story on these issues. Although Sanders voted for a controversial crime law of 1994 that helped increase incarceration, he always said that he opposed his massive elements of incarceration – and wondered if the United States should start by locking up so many people.

"We have the highest percentage of Americans in prison per capita among all the industrialized nations of the world," Sanders said in 1991. "We beat South Africa." We defeated the Union What should we do, put half of the country behind bars? "

More than two decades later, Sanders incorporates these criticisms into a policy proposal that begins to reduce incarceration, even if it does not solve – and can not – solve all the problems that have made America the world leader incarceration.

What would Bernie Sanders' Criminal Justice Reform Plan do?

Sanders' plan aims for a radical change: it is an attempt to deal with the long list of complaints and criticisms made against the US criminal justice system for decades.

Sanders has also set a rather ambitious goal: "halve the number of people in prison". The Sanders campaign said that it was not just for the federal level, but also for the states.

This is important because the federal system is a relatively small part of the US prison system, accounting for about 12% of the total prison population. It is also very different from state and local prisons: although about half of those incarcerated in federal penitentiaries are guilty of drug-related offenses, the majority or the majority of prisoners in local institutions and of the state incur violent crimes.

Sanders' plan is generally focused on federal drug offenses, which could potentially halve the federal offender population, but certainly not the local or national offender population. The Sanders campaign, however, has announced plans to work with states to reduce their prison populations.

The plan includes the following proposals and many others:

• Establish an independent clemency council: Sanders promised to create an independent clemency committee, outside the Justice Department, to release people from prison earlier – an idea presented by experts as one of the few areas in which a president can unilaterally have a significant impact on the prison population. This would go hand in hand with other efforts to reduce prison sentences: abolish mandatory minimum sentences, create a federal parole system, devote more money to rehabilitation, ban prosecution children under the age of 18 in adult court, discouraging prosecution of persons with mental illness and homeless, promulgating a "Prisoner's Rights Charter" to "make prisons more humane", and more.
• End of the deposit in cash: Sanders' multi-part criminal justice system attack that create profit opportunities. One of them is the cash bond, which imprisons hundreds of thousands of people simply because they can not afford to pay. The cash bond is not often used at the federal level, but Sanders plans to encourage states, with financial incentives, to stop their use. It also plans to prohibit private for-profit prisons (though they represent only a small portion of all US prisons), to prevent states and cities from using their police to generate income, and to allow detainees to make free phone calls.
• Strengthen police surveillance: Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the Justice Department withdrew its investigations of abusive and potentially racist police departments, which the administration of President Barack Obama had used to expose bad practices and reform the local police. Sanders promises to resume these investigations, as well as to reform the police, including setting standards for body cameras, ending programs that give the cops military equipment and demanding a federal investigation after the death of the police. a person in custody.
• Strengthen public defenders: Public defenders are supposed to be supporting people who can not afford private lawyers, but this system is terribly underfunded – to the point that public defenders in some parts of the country have only a few minutes on average to deal with every case. Sanders promises to "triple national spending on the defense of the poor, $ 14 billion a year," as well as other reviews of the workload of public defenders, as well as new federal guidelines and goals for the law Americans to a lawyer.
• Legalize marijuana: Sanders promised to legalize cannabis at the federal level and to remove previous convictions. Declaring that US drug policy is "disastrous", he also stressed the general need to no longer incarcerate for drug addiction, but to devote more resources to treatment, particularly under its Medicare for Medicare regime. all. And he promises to support harm reduction policies, such as supervised injection sites and needle exchanges.
• Abolish the death penalty: Sanders, who has long criticized the death penalty, plans to get rid of it at the federal level and encourage states to do the same.

Despite its ambitious goal, Sanders' plan does not generally mention how to encourage states to reduce incarceration. In contrast, Biden's plan included a $ 20 billion grant program to encourage states to reduce incarceration and crime. These types of financial incentives for criminal justice policy have been difficult in the past, but it is one of the few levers that the federal government must have to influence the systems that make up the bulk of the criminal justice policy. incarceration in the United States.

Another question is whether these ideas could really be approved by Congress. Although Sanders could do some of them alone, the majority of the plan would require congressional action. Given that Congress took years to negotiate a fairly modest criminal justice reform bill in the First Step Act, it is unlikely to produce such a dramatic result as Sanders proposed.

At the very least, Sanders says he is taking a holistic view of the criminal justice system and how to reform it.

Sanders has always criticized mass incarceration for decades

Sanders has long been independent on a host of issues, from health care to education. But this is also true for mass incarceration – an area in which Sanders criticized both Democrats and Republicans, even as "crime suppression" policies that increased mass incarceration were widely popular.

In 1991, the Congress debated a bill on punitive crime that would, among other things, broaden the use of the death penalty and strengthen prison sentences. The final bill – a compromise after Democrats and Republicans quarreled to see who could look more severe – was sponsored by the Democrats, actually getting more votes from Democrats than Republicans in the House.

Sanders, then Vermont's representative in the House, argued that the bill was "not a crime prevention bill" but "a punitive bill, a bill aimed at punish the victims, a bill on revenge ". were returning it or terminating it. He joked that America was on the way to "put half of the country behind bars."

He suggested that the United States, instead of focusing on locking up more people, should try to focus on "the root causes of crime." He finally voted against the 1991 bill, which died in the Senate.

Sanders voted for a major law of 1994, which President Bill Clinton strongly urged at the time, which also increased the use of prisons and lengthened jail time.

Sanders pointed out, however, that although he thought some people were "horribly violent … deeply sick and sociopathic", he did not support the approach of mass incarceration. "I also believe that, through neglect of our government and a set of extremely irrational priorities, we are now facing tens of millions of young people a future of bitterness, misery, despair, drug, crime and violence, "he said at the time. He added, "We can educate or electrocute. We can create interesting jobs and rebuild our society. Or we can build more prisons. "

Instead, Sanders said that he had voted for the 1994 law because he had supported some parts of it, such as the Violence Against Women Act, which had allowed to fight against domestic violence and rape.

This was well ahead of his time. In the 1990s, there was a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of mass incarceration. The 1994 law was one of the greatest legislative achievements of Bill Clinton and Biden.

The campaign to lock up more Americans was linked to crime waves fueled by racial and economic disparities, the crack epidemic, mistrust of the government and others. factors. These waves of crime led to a massive increase in crime that caught the public's attention. According to Gallup polls, in the early 1990s, crime was one of the main concerns of Americans.

Criminal justice expert Mark Kleiman explained the national attitude of the time in a Washington Monthly article:

Nobody knew then that we had seen the worst. All we knew was that the number of murders had more than doubled, that the total number of violent crimes had increased six-fold in the last 30 years, that no reversal of the trend seemed to be in sight and Street level weapons The race funded by the crack trade had expanded the age bracket of killers and their victims until adolescence. If you did not seriously worry about crime in 1994, you were not paying attention.

This has led politicians on both sides to seek "harsher" solutions – not just the 1994 Crime Act, but all kinds of federal and federal laws that provide for sanctions for everything from theft to drugs to murder.

Sanders was a special case against this wider thrust. He voted against the 1991 crime bill and criticized the "harsh" provisions of the 1994 law. He voted against the removal of Pell grants, which fund graduate studies, for prisoners. He voted to amend the 1994 Crime Act to prohibit the federal death penalty. He also voted against the 1996 law on the fight against terrorism and the effectiveness of the death penalty, which limited the ability of defendants and prisoners to challenge court decisions, even when they were unconstitutional.

In 1995, Sanders suggested that penalties for cocaine powder should be higher than those for crack and boast of supporting "harsh" laws, particularly police funding programs, in 2006.

But most of his comments in the 1990s indicate that he was skeptical of massive incarceration, which he said would not be very effective in fighting crime. Research has now proved this suggestion.

"Tough on crime" policies have not really worked to keep America safe

Years after Sanders protested the blockage of much of America, many studies have shown that mass incarceration does not really work.

A 2015 study by the Brennan Center for Justice on research found that increased incarceration – and its ability to neutralize or deter criminals – accounted for about 0 to 7% of the decline in crime since the 1990s. but other researchers estimate that it would have resulted in 10 to 25%. the decline in crime since the 1990s.

Another research study published in 2017 by David Roodman of the Open Philanthropy project revealed that releasing people from prison sooner does not lead to more crime and that keeping them in prison longer can actually increase criminality.

This conclusion corresponds to what other researchers have found in this area. As concluded by the National Institute of Justice in 2016, "research has revealed that prisons can exacerbate, not reduce, recidivism. Prisons themselves can be schools to learn to commit crimes. "

Similarly, other research suggests that more aggressive policing strategies, such as arrest and search, do not significantly reduce crime (although disproportionately acting on black and brown communities, they reduce confidence in the police in minority neighborhoods). In fact, recent studies indicate that more focused policing approaches, associated with social service programs and public health interventions to target the very few individuals at risk of violence, are much more effective in tackling crime and killings. .

To this end, a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice concluded: "Between 2007 and 2017, 34 states simultaneously reduced the rates of imprisonment and crime, which clearly shows that the reduction in mass incarceration is not at the expense of public safety. "Other places that have withdrawn aggressive police and criminal justice policies, such as New York City after it shut down, have seen crime continue to decline.

Since most incarcerations occur at the local and state level, it is unclear exactly what Sanders, as president, could do to combat mass incarceration.

But having a first critic of mass incarceration at the White House would be a boon to criminal justice reformers. A constant concern in the field of criminal justice reform is what would happen if, for example, the crime rate started to increase again. If this happens, lawmakers could put pressure – and at least it would be easier for them – to return to a "tough on crime" stance, by more favorably defining the maintenance of order and rates. higher incarceration.

Sanders' plan and record in a previous wave of crimes suggests that he would not, at the very least, use the tyrannical pulpit of the presidency to demand more incarceration. This could add an extra layer of resistance to the blocking movement if the crime increases under President Sanders.