Category: Prison

Jared Kushner, senior adviser to President Donald Trump, discusses US Mideast policy, prison reform, and what it’s like working for the President with CNN’s Van Jones at the CITIZEN by CNN forum in New York.

Our organization’s goal is to facilitate conversations that explore these issues from a fundamental and analytical perspective. The way we approach each issue is to conduct primary research, recruit experts from all sides, seek supporters to help fund the discussions, and invite as broad and public of an audience as we can get. Through that process it is Impact’s view that we can help people put down political biases and seek first to understand the issue, agree on areas of improvement, and solutions to achieve those outcomes.

My view isn’t necessarily Impact’s so that’s important to separate. From my 6 months working on that issue my biggest reflections were:

1. There is more support on the topic of prison reform than almost any issue. It is a uniting issue vs. a dividing one and I was very impressed to see how many people from different backgrounds wanted to improve our approach.
2. The role of crime and punishment in any society is important and any reforms must not forget that there are victims who need comfort, compensation, and justice.
3. We should ask ourselves more rigorously if there are populations we are seriously trying to rehabilitate or introduce back into society after incarceration and whether our systems are really designed and operated to actually facilitate that. I think we could make significant progress here.
4. I worry that we have over-criminalized certain behaviors in areas of particularly low socio-economic means. This must be done as a careful study not a broad brush. Tools to address this might be supervised release, community service, reduction of bail, investigatory statistics etc. especially for non-violent offenders.
5. The role of the private sector in housing prisoners should probably be reviewed. At the same time, I’m fairly open to private organizations assisting with education, training, and rehabilitation. I’m broadly open to efforts to train, educate, and prepare the incarcerated to be reintroduced to the working world and to try to reduce the stigma of that in early job applications etc.

Taser set out to reduce the death rate from police interactions with suspects. They now power most police cameras in the country under their new brand Axon. Can they make the bullet obsolete?

With a focus on fairness in prosecution, John Jay President Karol V. Mason and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., today announced the appointment of Lucy Lang as Executive Director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution(IIP) at John Jay College. The IIP (@iip_johnjay) is a groundbreaking partnership between the Manhattan District Attorney and New York’s preeminent college of criminal justice.

Founded in 2016 to support the development of next generation ideas and training for the leaders in the field of prosecution, IIP brings together prosecutors, academics, law enforcement officials and community leaders to examine and develop practical solutions to the critical issues facing the criminal justice system in the 21st century. Including public safety and accountability while improving fairness in the system.

Many countries have recently adopted electronic monitoring (EM) as an alternative sentence in order to reduce incarceration while maintaining public safety. However, the empirical evidence on the effects of EM on recidivism is very scarce but allows home within range…

Between 1993 and 2013 America’s crime rate fell from around 52 crimes per 1,000 people to 23. Prisoners are entitled to health care, but it is often expensively and inefficiently delivered…

Between 1993 and 2013 America’s crime rate fell from around 52 crimes per 1,000 people to 23. At the same time, largely because of America’s penchant for handing out long sentences, the number of people over 55 in state prisons rose from 26,300 to 131,500, and their share of the total more than tripled. According to the Osborne Association…

The bill earned diverse support from conservative groups – like the Charles Koch Institute and the Faith and Freedom Coalition – as well as progressive leaders like commentator Van Jones and his Dream Corps’ #cut50 initiative. But the ACLU and NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund opposed the bill, arguing it doesn’t go far enough.

The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017

Gov. Cuomo announced Wednesday that he’s signed an executive order to give convicted felons on parole the right to vote. Appealing to his left flank, Gov. Cuomo announced Wednesday that…

The Mayor of New York City has announced a plan to locate four jails in each borough except Staten Island. Last March he announced plans to close Rikers Island, but said at the time that it would take 10 years to do so. Will this announcement of the fourth jail site in the Bronx speed up that timeline? Here’s what the Mayor said.