America needs to reduce many non-violent felonies to misdemeanors to help reduce the number of prison inmates, says Grammy Award winner John Legend.
“Once you have that tag of a felony on your name, it’s hard for you to do anything,” Legend said. “Getting those reduced to misdemeanors would really impact a lot of lives, and we hope to launch more initiatives like that around the country.”
Legend is quoted in an April story on Recordnet.com by Matthew T. Mangino.
California voters last year approved Proposition 47, which reduced many non-violent felonies to misdemeanors. It gives thousands of prisoners and former prisoners the chance to petition a court to reduce felony convictions to misdemeanors.
“We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country,” said Legend. “When you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration.”
“Since the early 1970s, the nation’s prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the world’s biggest. That is five to 10 times the incarceration rate in other democracies,” Mangino wrote, quoting the New York Times.
He also quoted the Washington Post as reporting minorities constitute 60 percent of the U.S. prison population. Also overrepresented are men under the age of 40, the poorly educated, people with mental illness and those dependent on drugs and alcohol.
“There are more people locked up in the U.S. than in China. In fact, the U.S. is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite accounting for just 5 percent of the overall global population,” Prison Policy Institute states.
Americans are currently spending $80 billion on mass incarceration, state spending on incarceration has increased 400 percent between 1980 and 2009, the story says. The current corrections budget for California is $10.2 billion.
“Spending at the state level has outpaced budget increases for just about every other function of government, including education, transportation and welfare. Only spending on Medicaid at the state level has grown faster in the last 20 years,” Recordnet.com reported. Legend said he is scheduled to travel to various prisons throughout the U.S. along with press events to raise awareness.