Five Things This Week: New Tool Shines Light on Prison Deaths, The War on Drugs Failed & More

“Providing economic opportunities to returning citizens who have served their time or earned early release is an easy solution to the crisis our economy is staring down.”
 
As unemployment continues to inch downwards—achieving a new historical low with seemingly every jobs report—and the economy refuses to cool off, congressional leaders are shining a fresh light on second chances hiring. 
 
While both parties have viewed employability of returning citizens a moral imperative in public policy for quite some time, Former Congressman Doug Collins argues in an op-ed published in the Washington Examiner this week that we’re at a perfect juncture to address the economic imperative too. In fact, opportunities abound to bolster business by expanding the number of available workers through both state and federal initiatives that get formerly incarcerated people into the workforce faster and more efficiently. Collins encourages lawmakers to seize these opportunities and praises the leadership of the House Second Chances Task Force in particular.
 
“Prisons are becoming nursing homes. Who is incarceration serving at that point? Do we want a system that is humane?”
 
NPR published a story this week that highlights the use—or lack thereof—of a federal compassionate release law for incarcerated individuals who are nearing the end of their lives. The passage of the First Step Act in 2018 established a federal compassionate release law, which allows incarcerated individuals to be released for “extraordinary and compelling reasons," like terminal illness or old age.
 
However, recent data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission shows judges rejected more than 80% of compassionate release requests filed from October 2019 through September 2022.
 
The U.S. Sentencing Commission was delayed in providing guidance to judges on how to apply this compassionate release statute due to several position vacancies that lasted for more than three years. As a result, academic researchers, attorneys, and advocates for prison reform said the law has been applied unevenly across the country.
 
Read more from NPR here. 
 
“Drug use is soaring. More Americans are dying of overdoses than at any point in modern history. It’s time to reverse course.”
 
This week, the New York Times Editorial Board published an editorial that declares the “War on Drugs” a failure, and lays out alternative options for refocusing our efforts on the root causes of addiction and overdose deaths. 
 
“Drug use and addiction are as old as humanity itself, and historians and policymakers likely will debate whether the war on drugs was ever winnable, or what its true aims even were,” the Editorial Board writes. “In the meantime, it’s clear that to exit the current morass, Americans will have to restore public health to the center of its approach.”
 
You can read the full editorial here. 
 
“New Mexico should consider reforms to improve its fine and fees procedures and ensure that its criminal justice system does not punish individuals simply for being poor.”
 
A new study released this week by the American Bar Association and Arnold Ventures highlights the ways in which the administration of fines and fees in New Mexico’s Misdemeanor Courts fail to adequately distinguish between those with the ability to pay and those for whom payment causes grave hardship. The result is a damaging cycle of justice involvement that disrupts indigent defendants’ ability to hold a job, pursue education, and maintain family commitments and ties. 
 
Among the report’s most striking findings were two one-week surveys of county courts that found as many as 93% of defendants “paid” their fines and fees exclusively through incarceration. 
 
“Most of these people, they didn’t go in there with death sentences, but they’re dying.”
 
A new database published by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project this week provides a comprehensive look at prison deaths nationwide. 
 
Their findings showed deaths in state and federal prisons across America rose nearly 50 percent during the first year of the pandemic, and in six states, they more than doubled.
 
In a summary published by the New York Times, the paper noted, “The tremendous jump in deaths in 2020 was more than twice the increase in the United States overall, and even exceeded estimates of the percentage increase at nursing homes, among the hardest-hit sectors nationwide. In many states, the data showed, high rates continued in 2021.”