« MD: Parole Fee Burdens People Trying to Rebuild Their Lives | Main | "The Jim Crow Laws of the 21st Century": Will New York Change? »
March 26, 2009
The National Criminal Justice Act of 2009- will undertake a top-to bottom review of our entire criminal justice system and offer recommendations for reform"
Senator Jim Webb of VA has introduced The National Criminal Justice Act of 2009 today.
I encourage you to take a few minutes and read the full-bill http://webb.senate.gov/email/incardocs/CriminalJusticeReform_Legislation.pdf
Here is a fact sheet on the Bill (http://webb.senate.gov/email/incardocs/FactSheeti.pdf), which according to Senator Webb will be "undertake a top-to-bottom review of our entire criminal justice system" and to offer recommendations for reform."
Please encourage your Senators and Congresspeople to support passage of the Act.
Here is part of Webb's statement:
The National Criminal Justice Act of 2009 that I introduced in the Senate on March 26, 2009 will create a blue-ribbon commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom. I believe that it is time to bring together the best minds in America to confer, report, and make concrete recommendations about how we can reform the process.
Why We Urgently Need this Legislation:
With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses 25% of the world's reported prisoners.
Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980.
Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.
Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country.
Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society.
America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.
We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration.
Posted by lois at March 26, 2009 05:31 PM