A bipartisan push for criminal justice reform is echoing through the halls of Congress.
Democrats and Republicans are realizing that drug rehabilitation programs could have avoided ballooning costs and saved many lives ruined by lengthy prison terms, The New York Times reports.
Nearly one in three Americans have an arrest record, and one in every 132 Americans is in prison or on parole, said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. “No nation on Earth has imprisoned this many of its own people,” Booker added.
Former Democratic President Bill Clinton addressed an NAACP gathering recently, saying legislation he signed went too far for far too long. He disavowed part of a crime bill that sent criminals with minor offenses to prison. At the time he signed the bill, it was considered a major achievement for domestic policy, the newspaper reported July 28.
“We’ve got a lot of people in prison, frankly, that don’t really in my view need to be there,” stated former House Speaker John A. Boehner, a Republican.
The rise in prisoners has been a direct outgrowth of changes in sentencing laws, said Shannon Dolovich, a law professor and sentencing expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Democrats and Republicans propped up the “War on Drugs” and increased in crime throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, which created tougher sentencing, the newspaper noted.
The ideas suggested for the “SAFE Justice Act” is evidence-based with data from “32 states that have already reduced both their crime rate and their prison rate in the last five years, with a cumulative cost savings exceeding $5 billion,” according to Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., and Robert C. Scott, D-Va.
