J. R. Woodgates
Tag Archives: criminal justice reform
Fostering this kind of inmate-to-inmate ministry is exactly what Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path is all about.
The Colson Task Force was established by Congressional mandate in 2014 as a nine‐person, bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel charged with developing practical, data-driven recommendations to enhance public safety by creating a more just and efficient federal corrections system.
If the United States released all drug offenders from federal and state prisons, the country would still have the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world — by a significant margin.
Changes are likely coming soon to the laws governing sentencing and mandatory minimums. But how many current and future prisoners will actually be affected?
The Obama Administration will soon announce the return of Pell Grants for federal prisoners. Those with fewer than five years left on their time will be able to pay for classes taught by accredited colleges.
Here’s what a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Maryland’s Goucher College has discovered teaching prisoner’s about the Bible:
John Oliver says, while NOT significantly deterring crime, they ruin the lives of those who receive them…while infrequent presidential and gubernatorial pardons only enhance the agony of those who must remain locked up. (Topic begins at 2:13) (Obscene language advisory)
We know without doubt that the vast majority of innocent defendants who are convicted of crimes are never identified and cleared.
Most prisoners are guilty. What about the innocent who deserve a break?
Black defendants are 15% more likely than white defendants to be imprisoned for misdemeanor offenses and drug offenses, and 14% more likely than their white counterparts to be imprisoned for felony drug offenses, according to a July 2014 study.
New York City’s police chief says so many young blacks have arrest records, it’s hard to find qualified recruits for the NYPD. Others fault the chief’s own stop-and-frisk procedures that criminalized harmless behavior:
Judge Bennett [considered] the weight of 10 years: one more nonviolent offender packed into an overcrowded prison; another $300,000 in government money spent. ‘I would have given him a year in rehab if I could,’ he told his assistant. ‘How does 10 years make anything better? What good are we doing?’
Nearly half of all federal prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders. Many federal judges who sentence them feel coerced by the congressionally mandated sentencing laws that lock away so many men and women.
This is a long read about one Iowa judge but it’s worth your time: