Three years ago, a national study of probation and parole called out Pennsylvania as a stark outlier. The Columbia University Justice Lab found that Pennsylvania was the third-most supervised state in the country. And Philadelphia, where one in 22 adults was under supervision, was the nation’s most supervised big city.
Too many people get sent behind bars for trivial parole offenses — and too many are being released directly to our city’s homeless shelters without jobs, housing or other resources needed to build a new life and stay out of trouble.
Numerous studies have shown how Black Americans have been negatively impacted by the criminal justice system. Bruce Western, a professor at Columbia University and Co-Director of the Justice Lab, explains how the prison system has created second class citizenship.
As members of the Justice Lab at Columbia University, we stand in solidarity with the over 3,000 graduate students who are members of the Graduate Workers of Columbia University (GWC-UAW Local 2110).
Columbia Justice Lab praises historic Washington Supreme Court ruling requiring judges consider youth before imposing life without parole sentence.
New York spends billions operating prisons and jails with disappointing public safety benefits and severe racial inequities. Our state sends more people back to prison for technical parole violations — things like missing appointments or staying out past curfew — than any other state. [...] This is a costly and ineffective way to improve safety and help people succeed after prison — the two purposes of parole. Our just-released research found that, in 2019, New York spent at least $319 million incarcerating people for parole violations.
New York imprisons more people for technical parole violations than any other state, and at a rate almost three times higher than the national average. A new report from Columbia University, shared with the Times Union, estimates there are about 35,000 under parole supervision at a given time. Two years ago, more than 7,200 people were re-incarcerated for rule violations. The re-incarceration of those individuals cost taxpayers at least $683 million, the report estimates.
Now with President-elect Joe Biden positioned to take office this upcoming January, he has a chance to rewrite history by rebuilding a new type of justice in America. This will require taking on our nation’s historic obsession with prisons and mass incarceration and gutting a criminal justice system that was never intended to protect Black, Indigineous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.
Tens of thousands of prison inmates in Massachusetts will be among the first to be offered coronavirus vaccines, before home health aides, seniors and medically vulnerable residents of the state.
The District of Columbia Council passed legislation on Tuesday that would give people who committed crimes as young adults a chance to have their sentences reduced, reflecting a growing national debate over whether offenders in their late teens and early 20s should be treated the same as older people when it comes to sentencing. [...]
As Americans grapple with how — or whether — to gather with loved ones this holiday season, the roughly two million people confined in the nation’s prisons and jails face an even grimmer challenge: how to stay alive inside a system being ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. [...]
Over 50 current elected prosecutors joined 90+ current and former probation and parole chiefs in signing on to the statement spearheaded by Executives Transforming Probation and Parole (EXiT) calling for probation and parole systems to be smaller, less punitive, and more equitable.