The Challenge of Criminal Justice Reform

• In Event: History and Justice Reform: Square One Transformation through Reckoning

Abstract

After three decades of growth in the U.S. incarceration rate, we have entered a period of criminal justice reform. However, efforts to reverse mass incarceration need to address the social conditions of poverty, racial inequality, and violence in which punitive criminal justice policy has expanded. Efforts that aim only to reduce prison populations, or neglect the harsh socioeconomic conditions in poor communities of color, will fail to sustainably reduce the burdens of over-imprisonment. A new, socially-integrative, vision of community health and economic flourishing is the best way to respond to the problem of violence in contexts of poverty and racial injustice.

Author

• Bruce Western, Columbia University