CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM

The Firm works as a member of several coalitions, including Justice Roundtable, the Prisoner Reentry Working Group, the Stop Abuse and Violence Everywhere (SAVE) Coalition and the Faith in Action Criminal Justice Reform Working Group, to wage a Campaign for Safer Communities and Fewer Victims. The purpose of this campaign is to collaborate with policy makers and opinion leaders to effect common sense public policy reforms that add intelligence to the corrections equation. For the last several decades this country has been very tough on crime, with an extreme focus on punishment and too little attention on rehabilitation. Now it’s time to add effective rehabilitation to become tough AND smart on crime in order to reduce the recidivism rate, increase public safety and decrease the costs to taxpayers.

We are fighting for legislation that will result in:

• A restoration of the proper federal role in crime and law enforcement;
• Common sense reforms to federal sentencing laws;
• Prison reforms that will result in the establishment of effective rehabilitation programs in prisons so non-violent offenders who commit to turning their lives around have a chance to regain their self-respect and gain life skills they need to succeed upon release;
• The establishment of effective prisoner reentry programs that help those individuals just released from prison to successfully reenter society and become self-sufficient so they do not need to turn back to drugs and crime to survive.

The need for such common sense reforms is evidenced by the disturbing upward trend in the prison population statistic in the United States the last few decades. The prison population has grown 700% since 1970. The cost of corrections alone has risen from $9 billion in 1982 to more than $65 billion today. And these numbers continue to grow each year.

A large majority of the more than 2.2 million individuals incarcerated in American prisons are released and return to our communities, and most of those released end up back in prison. Approximately 650,000 inmates are released from American prisons each year, and roughly 68% of them are rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years of their release. The cost of recidivism has been estimated to be close to $100 billion per year.