U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, with support from President Obama, “created the federal reentry council in 2011 as part of an effort to reduce sentences for drug and other nonviolent offenders, and thereby reduce prison populations,” explained Katti Gray in an article for The Crime Report.
According to Gray, eight formerly incarcerated persons and officials from the Obama administration met in late October to discuss America’s prison crisis and tough-on-crime lawmakers.
The meeting was arranged by the U.S. Attorney General Office’s Interagency Reentry Council to focus on equitable sentencing and introduce Washington policymakers to the shareholders of nonprofit organizations like Just Leadership USA.
INTERVIEW
In an interview with Gray, former inmate Glenn Martin, who participated in the meeting, said, “What we are asking for is a system … that is really based on social justice.” He contends that “hoped-for reduction is not as farfetched as it may seem, considering that New York state has cut its prison population by about 25 percent over the last 18 years.”
Martin, who launched Leadership USA, hosted a 10-month-long training for ex-inmates wanting to participate in the national debate over crime, courts and corrections policy and reform. Their training focused on organizational development, fundraising, marketing, public relations and other skills that would help them make their voices heard.
DIALOGUE
One of the officials at the meeting in Washington D.C. was Amy Solomon, a senior adviser at the U.S. Justice Department, who administers Holder’s federal reentry council. She “agrees that it’s important that anyone with a stake in criminal justice be a part of the dialogue about that system.”
Martin told Gray that Just Leadership USA’s mission is to shift the paradigm of the criminal justice debate by appealing to the compassion and common sense of Americans.
According to The Crime Report, momentum for changing America’s sentencing and incarceration policies got a boost with a $50 million Open Society Foundation grant to the American Civil Liberties Union “for its efforts to tackle incarceration rates that have remained relatively steady even as the nation’s crime rate overall has declined in recent years.”
–By Charles David Henry
