J. R. Woodgates
Tag Archives: overcriminalization
More courageous Christian organizations should follow the lead of this Florida group.
New York’s Seventies-era “Rockefeller Drug Laws” were among the most punitive anti-crime, anti-drug legislation ever passed.
Today in many parts of the USA, civil rights advocates condemn overly-aggressive practices used by police to enforce similar laws, saying they too often target poor and inner-city blacks for punishment.
In his book, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, political scientist Michael Javen Fortner uncovers the inconvenient truth that the impetus behind the adoption of those harsh Rockefeller laws came mostly from black residents, themselves, in Harlem and other black and minority inner-city neighborhoods where rehabilitation-oriented policies of the day were often seen as being too soft on drug pushers and other neighborhood criminals.
Fortner…is hoping to complicate the story that the Rockefeller laws, and others like them, were foisted on black people by white people.
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?
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:
It’s not just “the war on drugs” that has expanded America’s prison population. CBN News reports that a steady increase in new categories, classes and kinds of actionable offenses is also responsible.
“Overcriminalization” is making felons of Americans like never before.