Texas Tough

Prisons in America are too crowded, too harsh, too isolated, and provide too little treatment and education. But mostly they are too big. With 2.4 million Americans living behind bars (and with 5 million more on probation or parole), the most important step we can take to reform the country’s out-of-control criminal justice system is to shrink it. Sentencing reform and alternatives to incarceration are vital steps, but improving the quality of legal representation at trial—and, more importantly, before trial—could play an even larger role. That’s why Eric Holder’s announcement that the Department of Justice is ramping up a new program to improve the quality of indigent legal defense is so important. Some 80 percent of criminal defendants can’t afford to pay for their own attorney. Give those defendants a fighting chance, and we could end up with a truly adversarial legal system that will produce not just inmates but justice. From NPR: Justice Dept. To Launch Indigent Defense Program : NPR.

A peculiar artifact of the severity revolution in criminal justice is that the United States has returned to a two-tiered model of citizenship, a sort of legally inscribed segregation in which convicted felons are permanently denied basic rights. We see this in extremely long sentences meted out to juveniles, felony disenfranchisement, and in the myriad legal restrictions placed on ex-cons upon their release. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of sex offenders, who in some jurisdictions are effectively banished from the free world forever, long after the expiration of their sentences. In the case of Miami, profiled in this New York Times piece, many ex-felons returning to society find they are permitted to reside only in an encampment under a bridge: a convict Bantustan in post-civil rights America.