5 Facts You Need to Know About Criminal Justice Reform
Last Friday, the White House hosted a half-day Prison Reform Summit with the goal of reducing the number of incarcerated Americans and making societal reentry easier for prisoners. This summit came on the heels of the House Judiciary Committee’s approval of the FIRST STEP Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to reduce recidivism and reform incarceration practices.
On both sides of the aisle, there is little debate that the country’s criminal justice system must be reformed; the U.S. has just 5 percent of the world’s population, but is home to almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Last week, the FIRST STEP Act was endorsed by the 48 members of the Problem Solvers Caucus.
Here are five facts on the state of American prisons, and why prison reform is an increasingly urgent issue.
1. Today, close to 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated. According to the nonpartisan Prison Policy Initiative, more than 1.3 million Americans are imprisoned in state correctional facilities, 615,000 are in local jails, and 225,000 are in federal prisons or jails. This figure also includes the 48,000 youth who are currently in juvenile detention facilities. On top of the 2.3 million Americans who are incarcerated, 3.7 million are on probation and 840,000 are on parole. The U.S.’s inmate population wasn’t always this large; since 1970, it has risen 700 percent.
2. The recidivism rate for American prisoners is 77 percent within five years of being released, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Roughly 39 percent of these rearrests were for drug offenses, 38 percent were for property offenses, and 29 percent were for violent offenses, according to the Bureau.
3. It is exceedingly difficult to find a job after prison; as many as three out of four people remain unemployed a year after being released. The estimated 70 million U.S. adults with felony records face hurdles that make finding employment a struggle. A recent CityLab article reported that just 12.5 percent of employers would accept a job application from an ex-offender, noting that hiring him or her would be “bad for business.” These ex-prisoners also encounter employers who don’t want to assume any legal liability should the employee commit a crime, and doubt their ability to not get rearrested.
4. Prison reform differs from sentencing reform. Prison reform calls for changes to the prison system to better equip inmates to reenter society. These policy changes enjoy widespread support; a recent poll conducted by the MacArthur Foundation found that the majority of Americans think jails should provide treatment and rehabilitation. Sentencing reform calls for changes in how crimes are sentenced at the state and federal levels. If enacted successfully, both prison and sentencing reforms will reduce the number of prisoners in the country’s penal system.
5. Other countries have vastly different criminal justice systems from the U.S. Following disease outbreaks and overcrowding in its prisons in the late 1990s, the Russian government took deliberate steps to lower its inmate population. Today, the country incarcerates roughly 681,000 inmates, about the same per capita as the state of New Jersey. According to the New York Times, Germany and the Netherlands incarcerate citizens at a rate roughly one-tenth the rate of the U.S., and sentence prisoners to jails that focus on rehabilitation and reentering society. And many Latin American countries, from Brazil to Costa Rica to Mexico, have banned life imprisonment altogether.
No Labels is an organization of Democrats, Republicans, and independents working to bring American leaders together to solve problems.
