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| US criminal justice system: Turning a profit on prison reform? |
| By aljazeera.com - Charlotte Silver |
| Published: 09/27/2013 |
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A little more than two million people in the United States - that's one out of every 140 - are locked up, making the US the biggest jailer in the world. Some hope that this obscene rate of human incarceration might begin to decline as reform of mandatory sentencing laws is close at hand. Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder denounced mandatory minimums and then backed up his words on September 19, with a directive to prosecutors to not apply mandatory sentences to low-level drug offenders. The day before, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimonies from advocates for sentencing reform urging the Committee to approve the Justice Safety Valve - a law that would restore sentencing discretion to judges. That legislation not only enjoys bipartisan support, but an endorsement from none other than ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC has even authored its own version of the Justice Safety Valve. Unlikely ally As others have pointed out, ALEC might seem like an unlikely ally to a bill that seeks to take the mandatory out of mandatory minimum sentencing laws. As the stewards of America's two largest for-profit private prison corporations, ALEC - a so-called bill mill for "free-market" legislation - was a champion of many of the harshest sentencing laws passed throughout the 1990's, including "truth-in-sentencing" and "three-strikes" laws. These laws locked judges into a rigid matrix of sentencing guidelines that have been one of the primary causes for the swollen numbers in federal and state prisons over the past two decades. But in fact, ALEC's apparent change of heart has been a long time coming: according to Julie Stewart, President and Founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), David Koch, a significant donor to ALEC, "has donated generously and without fanfare to FAMM for many years". Read More. |
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