News FeedSenator Jim Webb Brings a Voice to Prison Reform
Please support this effort by contacting your Congressional representatives! Tell them to support Sentator Webb and embrace prison reform. Find your representatives here: http://www.vote-smart.org.
America has too many people languishing in prisons for too many years, causing social and financial consequences that are destructive and wasteful.
****** Read Senator Webb’s Message to American Citizens******
http://webb.senate.gov/email/criminaljusticereform.html
The National Criminal Justice Act of 2009 that I introduced in the Senate on March 26, 2009 will create a blue-ribbon commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom. I believe that it is time to bring together the best minds in America to confer, report, and make concrete recommendations about how we can reform the process.
Why We Urgently Need this Legislation:
* With 5% of the world’s population, our country now houses 25% of the world’s reported prisoners.
* Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980.
* Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.
* Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country.
Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society.
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 the nation’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.
Clemency is the most powerful tool in criminal justice and we should use it to reform our whole prison system. http://californiaclemency.blogstream.com
Not only can we use it to release NONVIOLENT prisoners in overcrowded prisons we can turn away from punishment that does not work.
Punishment feels good but it accomplishes very little for adults. And we must stop treating adults like children. California releases every prisoner to parole. But not everyone needs to be monitored. Furthermore if 70% reoffend in 3 years of release the other 30% don’t need to be monitored. We can cut this problem in half if we offer CLEMENCY (yes a clean record) to the released inmate if he or she does not reoffend in 3 years. Now I’m not dumb enough to suggest a clean record to sex offenders but the concept of a clean record is an incentive that I would work hard to earn. Too many ex-cons say “No one will hire me with my record.” Give this opportunity to all NONVIOLENT inmates plus well funded rehabilitation programs and you will cut the prison population in half. And we can better monitor violent parolees like Lovelle Mixon who killed four Oakland California policemen. Because the nonviolent that is released will be too busy working on clemency (A SECOND CHANCE).