Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Friday, March 27, 2009

Parade Magazine: What's Wrong With Our Prisons

Parade Magazine

America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a
national disgrace.  Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion
that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness.

Our failure to address this problem has caused thenation’s prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.
We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to
prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration.
Twenty-five years ago, I went to Japan on assignment for PARADE to write a story on that
country’s prison system. In 1984, Japan had a population half the size of ours and was incarcerating 40,000 sentenced offenders, compared with 580,000 in the United States. As shocking as that disparity was, the difference between the countries now is even more astounding—and profoundly disturbing. Since then, Japan’s prison population has not quite doubled to 71,000, while ours has quadrupled to 2.3 million.

The United States has by far the world’s highest incarceration rate. With 5% of the world’s population, our country now houses nearly 25% of the world’s reported prisoners.
We currently incarcerate 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, a rate nearly five times the average worldwide of 158 for every 100,000. In addition, more than 5 million people who recently left jail remain under “correctional supervision,” which includes parole, probation, and other community sanctions. All told, about one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, in jail, or on supervised release. This all comes at a very high price to taxpayers: Local, state, and federal spending on corrections adds up to about $68 billion a year.

Our overcrowded, illmanaged prison systems are places of violence, physical abuse, and hate, making the breeding grounds that perpetuate and magnify the same types of behavior we purport to fear. Post-incarceration reentry programs are haphazard or, in some places,
nonexistent, making it more difficult for former offenders who wish to overcome the stigma of
having done prison time and become full, contributing members of society. And, in the face of
the movement toward mass incarceration, lawenforcement officials in many parts of the U.S.
have been overwhelmed and unable to address a dangerous wave of organized, frequently violent gang activity, much of it run by leaders who are based in other countries.
With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only
two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something
different—and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Its pretty obvious our leaders, state and federal have been leading us in the wrong direction. djw

Anonymous said...

Oh, but look at the money being made by the Prison Industrial Complex. Look at the jobs created, whole new industries, cell building, drug testing, electronic monitoring, more police, more guards, police, DEA.
Plus the fear factor created by the police and the media.
It will be tough to change as money talks.

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