J. R. Woodgates
Tag Archives: sentencing reform
The full story is in Gene McGuire’s book, UNSHACKLED, which I have added to my Recommended Readings in Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path.
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?
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?
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:
In recent years, federal sentencing guidelines have been revised, resulting in less severe prison terms for low-level drug offenders. But…tens of thousands of inmates who were convicted in the “war on drugs” of the 1980s and 1990s are still behind bars.
The average annual cost of housing a federal inmate in general population is $27,500. The price tag for an older inmate who needs medical care – including expensive drugs and treatment – is $59,000.
THE PAINFUL PRICE OF AGING IN PRISON
Why are we keeping someone behind bars who is bedridden and needs assistance getting out of bed and feeding and clothing himself?
In 1984, I was 33 years old. I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning…
The clear reality is that the death penalty is an anathema to any society that purports to call itself civilized. It is an abomination that continues to scar the fibers of this society and it will continue to do so until this barbaric penalty is outlawed. Until then, we will live in a land that condones state assisted revenge and that is not justice in any form or fashion.
After unnecessarily languishing for three decades on Louisiana’s Death Row, Glenn Ford has at last been exonerated as an innocent man.
Now, former state prosecutor A.M. Stroud III says Ford deserves to be compensated for what he suffered because of Stroud’s refusal 30 years ago to even consider that Ford might have been innocent of murder.
This is his personal letter to The Shreveport Times:
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.
There are more African-American men in prison and in jail or on parole and probation today than were enslaved in 1850 – a decade before the start of the Civil War.
In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that minority (especially black) men are being deliberately targeted for disenfranchisement via America’s criminal justice system.