In July, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and
Representative Karen Bass of California, both Democrats, introduced the Second Look Act. The bill was considered groundbreaking because it expanded the opportunity to
be considered for resentencing available to anyone in federal prison who has
served at least 10 years. It also created a presumption in favor of release for
anyone 50 years or older. Significantly, it did not exclude people who had been
originally sentenced for violent crimes. One advocate, Kara Gotsch of the
Sentencing Project, told the Daily Appeal shortly after the Second Look
Act’s introduction in Congress that she hoped it would offer a model for states
to emulate.
Of the voters surveyed this month, 69 percent support
“states adopting laws that allow for the re-examination of old sentences to
provide a second chance for people who have been in prison for more than 10
years and who can be safely returned to the community.” Support even among
“very conservative” voters was above 60 percent, while support among “very
liberal” voters was above 80 percent. Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters
expressed support.
There were similar levels of support for the second policy
on which voters were surveyed—sentence review by prosecutors. In jurisdictions including Brooklyn,
Philadelphia, and Seattle, prosecutors have sought to remedy past injustices in
the form of excessive sentences. In 2018, California passed a law giving
prosecutors the power to recommend that judges reduce sentences “in the
interest of justice.” Last year in New York, state Senator Zellnor Myrie
introduced a bill to give similar power to prosecutors.
Despite a national movement to end mass incarceration, the
pace of decarceration has been slow. In 2018, the Sentencing Project pointed
out that, at the current rate, it would take 75 years just to cut the number of people
in prison in the U.S. in half. And that would still leave more than a million
people in prisons and jails.
The report’s authors describe the scale of the problem. Some
of the most vivid illustrations of the United States’s outlier status are
included: More people are sentenced to life in prison without the possibility
of parole in Philadelphia than in every other country in the
world. There are more people today condemned to die in prison than the entire prison population five decades ago. And nearly
half of them are Black, a large overrepresentation not just relative to the
general population but also to the population of people who are incarcerated.
Nor do these millions of prison years mean greater public safety. A 2016 report from the Brennan Center for Justice posited
that of the nearly 1.5 million people in state and federal prison, well over
half a million of them could be immediately released or placed in programs
instead.
The authors also review how we got here. In terms of
policies, they write that, while the causes are manifold, “one key driver has
been the use of excessive sentences and the failure to do anything about them.”
A web of “mandatory minimums, ‘habitual offender’ and
‘three strikes’ sentence enhancements, and truth-in-sentencing laws” made
sentences of extraordinary harshness possible for a wide array of crimes. The
enormous discretion handed to prosecutors, and their willingness to use it in favor of incarceration, are
other culprits.
Even amid a historical decline in crime, fearmongering
around criminal justice reforms is the norm, as ongoing efforts to reverse
recent reforms in New York demonstrate. Yet, the survey published today shows
that for a majority of voters, of all ideological stripes, policies that allow
prosecutors and judges to reassess a person’s sentence, in light of subsequent
reforms and who that person is today, are common sense, not controversial.
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