Using Data to Achieve Justice Reform

Americans have grown uneasy with our ranking as the world’s leader in incarceration, which has made way for thoughtful discussion and debate around how to reform our sentencing and corrections systems. To adequately measure progress toward ending mass imprisonment, federal and state prison data must become more readily available and transparent. The Sentencing Project embarked on the work of documenting the number of people serving life sentences after observing a large gap in adequate information or concern about expansion of long prison sentences. We now know that long-term imprisonment is a driver of mass incarceration and that one in seven prisoners is serving life. Though all states can provide aggregate figures on populations of prisoners upon request, this information is insufficient to fully understand the life-sentenced population, including shifting dynamics within the population. Going forward, simple access to de-identified administrative prison records can serve as a bridge between policy reform ideas and their implementation.

Philosophy and Policy

Punishment theories and policies have marched in different directions in the United States for nearly 50 years. Philosophers and others who try to understand what justice requires, policymakers who create the rules for dispensing it, and practitioners who try to achieve it don’t communicate with each other very well, or at all. They lack a common vocabulary. More importantly, they lack a shared understanding of what punishment is and does, and what it should aspire to be and to do. This is unusual. Shared understandings exist in most countries and did in the United States through the 1960s. The costs have been high. They include mass imprisonment, extraordinary injustice, assembly-line case processing, and moral impoverishment.

Rethinking the “Crisis” of Indigenous Mass Imprisonment

In R v Gladue, the Supreme Court of Canada famously remarked that the incarceration of Indigenous people represents a “crisis.” Since Gladue’s release, the language of “crisis” has been used with frequency in Canadian legal discourse. In this article, I analyze how this language has shaped the broader legal understanding of Indigenous mass imprisonment. My focus is not on specific iterations or uses, but on the cumulative impact of the language of “crisis” over the last twenty years. I suggest that however well-meaning these representations may be, their cumulative impact is harmful. In the face of the relentless intensification of Indigenous mass imprisonment, the language of “crisis” has operated to subtly entrench the colonial structures it purports to disrupt. Urging a shift away from its use, I argue that the language of “crisis” is not only ill suited to address the problem, but is part of the problem.

Mass Incarceration in the United States: From Punishment to Public Health

Mass imprisonment in the United States is an epidemic that has spread across five generations affecting millions of individuals, their families, and hundreds of communities. The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world—with over 2 million behind bars and another 5 to 7 million under community supervision on parole and probation. With 5% of the world’s population, the United States has 25% of all the world’s prisoners. This U.S. system imposes many punitive policies, holding more of its citizens in isolation and solitary confinement than all the other prisons of the world combined and imposing the highest rates of life sentences of any nation. This public health analysis of mass incarceration in the United States (first proposed in Ernest Drucker’s 2011 book, A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America) must therefore also address the high rates of prisoner reentry that accompany it—with over 600,000 U.S. prisoners reentering society each year—with the highest recidivism rate of any nation. This population is disproportionally poor and members of America’s large minority populations (African Americans and Latinos). The public health model provides a new tool for ending the American epidemic of mass imprisonment and, of equal importance, healing those who have survived its blows. This stage of the American story of mass incarceration is covered in Drucker’s 2018 book, Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to Public Health. But releasing people from prisons is not enough—the taint of punishment has a long-lasting and debilitating effect on the millions who return from prison to their home communities—facing social stigma and the many restrictions placed upon them as part of the conditions of parole—including limits of their access to public education, healthcare, and housing—as well as convicted felons’ loss of the right to vote. The United States badly needs a paradigm shift that replaces these impediments to successful reentry after prison, creating instead a positive place and normal life for this population in the outside world.