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ACLU of NEW
JERSEY
Crime and Punishment
From Deborah Jacobs,
Executive Director ACLU-NJ, August 17, 2007
Dear Friends:
I wanted to share this letter to the editor, published in the Star Ledger on
August 5, 2007. It responds to Cory Booker's editorial on crime and
punishment, also found below. This is a tough time here in Newark, and to
make change people will have to find ways within themselves to reconcile the
realities of our failed criminal justice system with the desperate desire to
stop the tragic violence in the city.
Deborah
My Letter:
Drugs, free needles and Jersey's cities
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Thank goodness we have at least one courageous politician in New Jersey willing
to speak out about our nation's failed criminal justice system ("When neither
crime nor punishment pays," July 29). Cory Booker points out what
advocates have known for years: The way we handle the problem of crime,
particularly drugs, is counterproductive from an economic perspective and
ineffective in reducing crime.
Research from think tanks like the Vera Institute has demonstrated that our
sentencing and incarceration policies waste money and human potential.
We must change the way Americans think about crime and criminals. We must
help the haves among us understand the realities for the have-nots and how we
all have, as Booker wrote, interwoven destinies. These truths will be hard
to convey and the solutions hard to accept. We will have to learn to walk
in another's shoes, practicing empathy, sacrifice and generosity.
"Jail costs more than Yale," and if we're willing to put our commitment and
resources into at-risk children's lives early, instead of paying to incarcerate
them later, together we can realize the dream of an America in which each of us
is educated, sheltered, employed and safe.
-- Deborah Jacobs, Newark
Cory Booker’s Editorial
When neither crime nor punishment pays
Sunday, July 29, 2007
BY CORY BOOKER
In barbershops and boardrooms, in newspaper headlines and presidential debates,
Americans are questioning the billions of dollars a month being spent on a
failing war, and the current "surge" in Iraq.
But we, policy-makers at every level of government, should also be questioning
the "domestic surge" at home in the so-called war on drugs and urban crime.
There are more guns, more technology, more cameras scanning streets, and more
money spent on jails, prisons and juvenile facilities every day. The cost
to American taxpayers also rises every day.
The way we have chosen to deal with crime is leading our nation away from its
highest ideals and producing results that stand in stinging contradiction to who
we claim to be.
In the land of the free, we lock up a greater percentage of our population than
any nation. The U.S. prison population has increased 91 percent in the
past 15 years. More than 7 million Americans are under some form of state
or federal correctional supervision, and this does not include the legions of
Americans in county and city facilities.
Is this the America of which we dream?
Our societal resources pour into prisons and police budgets -- the numbers are
staggering. Billions of dollars are spent annually around our state, with
budget growth at a pace far beyond that of our economy. Newark spends over
a quarter of its budget on police, courts and jails.
Is this the America of which we dream?
Our legal system is plundering conceptions of equality. In our America,
one in three African- American men in their 20s is under some form of
correctional supervision. New Jersey leads in racial disparities in
incarceration; while 14 percent of New Jersey's population is black, more than
60 percent of its prison population is African-American.
Is this the America of which we dream?
Our correctional system does not correct. We are the worst nation on the
globe for recidivism. After spending billions incarcerating people, we
release them only to see one in every two ex-offenders return in three years.
We are forcing our proud law enforcement community to engage in a profound
cyclical absurdity of arresting, re-arresting and re-re-arresting the same
individuals time and time again.
Is this the America of which we dream?
Our nation is not expending all of these national resources on violent
offenders. The majority of the Americans clogging our courts and prisons
are nonviolent offenders primarily engaged in the use, sale or distribution of
drugs. Violent or not, offenders should face punishment -- whether they
throw litter on a Newark street or come to a Newark street to buy heroin.
But when the punishment perpetuates the problem, when it destroys lives instead
of correcting them, when it saps taxpayers of their precious resources, when it
perpetuates the hideous legacy of racial injustice, when it aggravates cycles of
poverty and undermines the very principles we seek to uphold, we must seek
change.
Is this the America of which we dream: One nation under God, indivisible, with
liberty and justice for all?
We arrest teenagers for drug dealing and drug use at an alarming rate. But
we make little, if any, investment in alternatives to existing detention
programs, or in drug treatment, counseling, or intensive mentoring and
education. Instead, we lock up these young people and release them back
into our communities and the cycle begins anew, with re-arrest often within a
matter of days or weeks.
New Jersey's largest juvenile facility is in Essex County and based in Newark.
The former warden told me that three of four incarcerated youth have been at the
Essex County facility before. Yet upon re lease, we put them right back
into the environment that created the juvenile drug user or dealer. As a
nation, we then wash our hands of any obligation and shake our heads when that
14-year-old youth offender becomes a 20-year-old offender and is once again
clogging our jails.
When an adult is released and sincerely wants to stay out of prison, he faces a
host of barriers to success that we do little to address. Ex-offenders are
ineligible for numerous public assistance programs. They are stripped of
their driving privileges, which might allow them to get to work; even if their
driving privileges have not been revoked, they cannot obtain a commercial
driver's license. They are entangled in a host of legal challenges, from
parking tickets that turned into warrants for their arrest while they were in
jail to child-support payments that have accrued to tens of thousands of
dollars.
These Americans have a host of urgent needs, from housing to hunger and, of
course, to children and families that desperately need their help. And as they
try to meet these needs, they face a nearly insurmountable hurdle -- a community
stigma that prevents many employers from hiring them.
I meet dozens of men every week with dramatic and painful stories of what they
have been doing to survive, stay out of trouble and try to maintain financial
stability. I see their sense of personal victory that they have resisted
the easy, yet dangerous, call back to criminal activity that can afford quick
but costly answers to their financial needs. However, I also see their
frustration that, despite years of walking the right path, they still face a
persistent punishment that costs them the right to return to society as a full
and productive member and is depriving America of an enormous swath of its
potential human talent. New Jersey's narrow expungement laws have men
caught selling drugs in their 20s still paying the price in their 30s, 40s and
50s.
Enough. As mayor of our state's largest city I have decided to join with
others to do whatever is necessary for a dramatic change in crime and prisoner
re-entry policy at every level of government. In the coming weeks, we will
announce a series of changes we will make here in Newark to reverse this
travesty; however, as important as they are, they will not be enough to
adequately alter the devastating course on which we find ourselves.
We live in a profoundly interconnected world, with interwoven destinies.
This is not an urban problem or a suburban problem. It is not a black
problem or a white problem. If we continue on the path we have chosen in
the years and decades ahead, all of New Jersey will feel greater and greater
pain and be forced to pay the ever-increasing price. American greatness
has always required sacrifice, but we have been sacrificing and bleeding in the
most senseless fashion, diminishing our nation's glory and strength. Now
more than ever we must be united for broad- based reform. Now more than
ever we must be the America of which we dream.
Cory Booker is mayor of Newark.
American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, P.O. Box 32159,
Newark, NJ 07102
info@aclu-nj.org -
www.aclu-nj.org
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