I have had the great honor and pleasure for many years now of working with folks at the Aleph Institute, a national nonprofit that works on various criminal justice reform and recidivism reduction efforts. Hanna Liebman Dershowitz, who is director of special projects for the alternative sentencing division of the Aleph Institute, has this new New York Law Journal piece headlined "Our Country Grapples With Deepest Challenges Around Sentencing," discussing work on alternatives to incarceration and an event on the topic in the works for summer 2019. Here is an excerpt:
The nonprofit I work with, the Aleph Institute, harbors a vision we call “Rewriting the Sentence,” wherein the cultural and political shift that has already taken hold in this country produces a complete reordering of our punishment priorities. Once this shift is complete, we would view incarceration and other separation from community only as an option among many to be used sparingly, only when needed.
At present, we are such an outlying world incarcerator that we rank with the most heartless regimes on the planet. It always bears repeating that we are not 5% of the world population and yet are responsible for almost a quarter of the world’s imprisoned population. Across history, incarceration has not always dominated the punishment landscape — indeed, in Biblical law there is no such punishment as incarceration because of the inhumane collateral damage it wreaks.
We at Aleph think there are often legal and humanitarian reasons for the avoidance of custodial methods of correction at every stage of our system — from bail reform and law enforcement assisted diversion upfront to diversion programs, specialty courts and sentencing advocacy at the disposition stage to clemency, reentry support and compassionate release toward the back.
A system that uses evidence-based tools at each stage can deliver the optimal levels of supervision and services to allow each person to thrive and stay out of trouble. Ideally — and I truly get that all of this sounds idealistic — we can use freed-up incarceration resources to support healthy communities, understanding that equity and thriving neighborhoods are the best prevention tools for crime.
What Aleph has learned from delivering care and support to thousands of individuals and families in prisons and jails all over the country for decades is that helping people function better is superior to an outmoded and misguided approach that inexorably leads to negative results, especially for the children left behind.
Here’s why I am not idealistic, but actually a pragmatist. If we don’t envision how we want the system to work, we will continue to incarcerate people none of us ever intended to incarcerate and to not know who we are incarcerating in a meaningful way.....
Why do I think I will see a true culture change in my lifetime on alternatives to incarceration too? Because we are already seeing the seeds of the change, to wit: in a recent meeting with the chief of alternatives for a major metropolitan district attorney, I was told that in recent years incoming prosecutors ask whether there are alternatives they can offer to defendants. In a decade, perhaps they will expect them.
So policy wonks and idealists alike, please stay tuned as we seek to rewrite a legacy of sentencing myopia. Aleph is convening criminal justice stakeholders next June at Columbia Law School for the Rewriting the Sentence 2019 Summit, and we will announce significant new initiatives thereafter. For more information, please visit askssummit.com.
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