How to Make Every Offender an Ex-Offender

Keeping Parolees Out of Prison Takes Jobs, Housing, and Cold, Hard Cash

Immediately after Californians voted in favor of Proposition 47—which redefined nonviolent felonies—last November, lawyers’ phones started ringing. The goal of this legislation—called the “The Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act” by its supporters—is to keep low-risk, nonviolent offenders out of prison in the first place. But for thousands of Californians, it means less time behind bars, and reentry into the outside world sooner than expected.

In advance of the Zócalo/California Endowment event “How Will California’s Sentencing Reform Affect Communities?”, we asked criminal justice scholars the following question: What is the most important …

Prison Reform Advocate Prophet Walker

If You Want to Hold People Accountable, You’ve Got to Speak Up

Prophet Walker helped create a Youthful Offender Pilot Program in California prisons and is a founding member of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition. After being incarcerated as a teenager, he went on …

UC Irvine Criminologist Keramet Reiter

Where Does Someone Who Studies Solitary Confinement Go to Be Alone?

Criminologist Keramet Reiter studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems at UC Irvine. She also has done a great …

How Do We Put Fewer Californians in Prison?

From Texas and Mississippi to New York and Georgia, Other States Are Finding Alternatives to Incarceration

In 2009, overcrowding in California’s prisons had gotten so bad—140,000 inmates crammed into prisons built to house just 80,000—that federal judges ruled it violated prisoners’ civil rights. Under order to …

Mark Kleiman on How to Reduce Crime, and Punishment

Forget 'Tough on Crime,' We Need to be Smart

 

In When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment,`4 Mark Kleiman argues for a smarter approach to crime. Below, he explains why our current method of …