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Sentencing Reform

Senate Votes on Crucial Justice Funding

By Molly Alarcon – 10/18/11

The Senate will vote today and tomorrow on an appropriations bill that will influence two important federally supported programs: the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), which provides free civil legal aid to the poor, and Second Chance, a program that supports prisoner re-entry programs around the country. In addition, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia will introduce an amendment to create the National Criminal Justice Commission to study the country’s criminal justice system and make non-binding recommendations to Congress and the President.

The Legal Services Corporation distributes funds to legal aid programs around the country to assist low-income Americans facing civil legal problems, including foreclosure, domestic violence, and child custody disputes. LSC is meagerly funded by the federal government and, as a result, cannot keep up with demand for legal services. As the Brennan Center reported, programs around the country have been forced to lay off staff and cut back on services at a moment when a record number of Americans — 67 million — are eligible for LSC-funded help. In addition, a 1996 restriction bars LSC grantees from operating as effectively and efficiently as possible. The restriction bars grantees from using state, local and private funds for critical forms of representation, including class actions and legislative and administrative advocacy. In many states, justice planners have had to set up entirely separate organizations and law offices, funded by state and local public funders and private charitable sources, to do the work that LSC-funded programs cannot do, resulting in wasteful duplication of overhead, personnel and administrative costs. Read a short primer on the “non-LSC funds restriction,” here, and a full report by Rebekah Diller and Emily Savner on the restrictions here.

Currently, the Senate appropriations bill for Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies preserves a minimal level of funding for Legal Services Corporation, and includes a provision to remove restrictions on how LSC grantees can use non-federal funds. This is good news. The Brennan Center has advocated lifting the LSC ban on non-federal funding since its adoption in the mid-1990s. For the third year in a row, the Senate bill’s inclusion of a short line to remove these restrictions, which was approved by the Appropriations Committee, is a significant accomplishment for legal aid supporters. While the Brennan Center would have liked to see funding for LSC increased to help the organization meet unmet demand, the funding level in the Senate bill is preferable to the House version, which includes only $300 million (as opposed to the Senate’s nearly $400 million). We urge the Senate to support the Legal Services Corporation clauses of the current spending bill.

The proposed appropriations bill also defunds the Second Chance Act, which is an unfortunate set-back for criminal justice reform advocates. As The New York Times editorial board noted, the Senate has its “priorities backward” on matters of criminal justice: in addition to removing all funding for Second Chance, it has proposed a $300 million increase in funding for the federal Bureau of Prisons to build new prisons. This would be a huge step backward, and the Brennan Center urges the Senate to restore funding for Second Chance.

The United States incarcerates more people — per capita and in total numbers — than any other country in the world, and since 1980, the federal prison population has increased 700 percent at a cost increase of 1,700 percent. Our criminal justice system has not been systematically reviewed since the Johnson administration in the 1960s. The National Criminal Justice Commission Act, which will be included as an amendment on the Senate spending bill, would create a blue ribbon commission to review the criminal justice system and recommend consensus-based, bipartisan reforms. Its passage would be an important first step toward developing evidence-based and cost-effective policies to increase public safety and improve our justice system.

Call your Senator today to voice your support for the Legal Services Corporation, the Second Chance Act, and the National Criminal Justice Commission Act.

Tags: Justice, Criminal Justice, Sentencing Reform, Civil Legal Aid

Thousands of Prisoners Now Eligible to Receive Fairer Sentences

By Molly Alarcon – 07/01/11

The United States Sentencing Commission voted unanimously yesterday to reduce racial disparities in drug sentencing and bring fairness to the nation’s federal drug laws. The vote will apply the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced disparities in sentencing for powder vs. crack cocaine offenses, retroactively to people currently incarcerated for those offenses. Now, those convicted under the old, harsher laws can petition a judge to adjust their sentence according to the new, fairer guidelines.

In a bipartisan effort, and after 17 years of advocacy by civil rights groups, including the Brennan Center, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 to rectify a severe disparity in cocaine sentencing laws. The now infamous 100-to-1 sentencing disparity, where an offender could have 100 times the amount of powder cocaine as crack cocaine to trigger the same mandatory minimum sentence, had harmful racial implications. The old laws put thousands of African Americans and Latinos in prison for longer sentences for crimes involving relatively smaller amounts of crack cocaine, a disparity that exists in other areas of the federal criminal justice system as well. The Fair Sentencing Act ameliorated this 100-to-1 disparity, but did not eliminate it. Crack offenses are still treated more harshly, but the ratio has been reduced significantly to 18-to-1.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s decision to allow the new law to apply retroactively to current prisoners will go a long way toward rectifying the injustice of the old law. Of the approximately 12,000 current prisoners eligible for sentence reduction come November 1, 2011 (when the retroactivity provision takes effect), 85 percent are African American. Reprieve is not guaranteed for those individuals: each must petition a judge to reduce their sentence, and the judge must consider the public safety implications of releasing each prisoner on an individual basis.

Nonetheless, the Sentencing Commission’s vote was consistent with the desires of Congress — and all of the advocates who worked to pass the Fair Sentencing Act — to see fairness restored to federal drug sentencing laws.

Tags: Justice, Criminal Justice, Sentencing Reform

Congress Calls for Examination of the Nation’s Criminal Justice System

By Brennan Center for Justice – 04/27/10

The U.S. criminal justice system is burdened by myriad problems ranging from over-incarceration to racial and ethnic disparities in prosecutions. In the long term, the high costs of incarceration and the effects of a flawed system are unsustainable. At a press conference the morning of April 27, a bipartisan group of Representatives announced the introduction of a bill that aims to create a transparent, bipartisan Commission that will make recommendations for reform based on a comprehensive national review of our Criminal Justice System. Read more about the bill and the Commission it aims to create.

Tags: Justice, Racial Justice, Criminal Justice, Indigent Defense Reform, Sentencing Reform