‘Decarcerating America’ Is a Powerful Call for Reform

Criminalization is frequently America’s answer to social issues. This country criminalizes people experiencing drug addiction and homelessness, women seeking abortions, people who are LGBTQ, students who skip school, immigrants and refugees, and more.

Decarcerating America, edited by Ernest Drucker, collects essays by criminal justice leaders who argue that public health, not retribution, is empirically and morally the correct frame for protecting public safety

The United States is in the midst of an incarceration crisis — in a chapter on the failures of America’s drug policy, Gabriel Sayegh writes that with 5 percent of the world’s population, we hold nearly 25 percent of the “people in cages on the planet.” 2.3 million people are in American prisons and jails, and, as Drucker notes, an estimated 4.7 million adults were under community supervision at the end of 2014 — “approximately 1 in 52 adults in the United States.

Statistics are particularly startling around incarcerated women. More than 65% of women in state prisons report being parents of children under the age of 18; 1 in 25 women in state prisons and 1 in 33 in federal prisons are pregnant when admitted to prison. Elizabeth Gaynes and Tanya Krupat of the Osborne Association make a chilling observation: “America’s incarceration policies have led to the greatest separation of families since the end of chattel slavery.”

The fallout from miscarried criminal justice tears at our social fabric. No punishment seems enough; people who have served their time are handicapped with criminal records that render them unable to obtain jobs and housing, unable to vote and rejoin society, often leaving them no choice but to re-offend. Families are destroyed and communities of color devastated.

Read the full review here.