The Criminal Justice System in the United States fails to ensure safety, deliver justice, and address systemic issues such as poverty and racial injustice. It emphasizes the need for comprehensive reform, advocating for measures to prevent entry into the criminal justice system, overhaul policing practices, address substance use disorders, and promote rehabilitation and reintegration of the incarcerated population. Key proposals include ending mass incarceration, reimagining policing, decriminalizing drug use, eliminating cash bail, reforming sentencing practices, and supporting reentry programs. The text also stresses the importance of accountability, transparency, and equal access to justice for all individuals, regardless of race or socioeconomic status. Overall, it presents a vision for a fairer, more equitable, and compassionate approach to criminal justice in America.
In the Democratic party platform, the fingerprints of the Black Lives Matter movement and Bernie Sanders are apparent, in calls for independent investigations of police-involved shootings, more body cameras, and de-escalation training. There is a declaration that “states that want to decriminalize marijuana should be able to do so.” There is also a call for the end of the death penalty, something President Obama and Hillary Clinton have not endorsed. Parts of the Democratic draft platform repudiate the tough language their party embraced a generation ago, when their current candidate’s husband was president. The mother of Sandra Bland, who died at a Texas jail last year and became a symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement, is scheduled to speak at their convention next week in Philadelphia.
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The Republican platform reflects recent tensions in conservative circles. It includes the language of conservatives who call for reducing incarceration — influential Republican patrons like the Koch brothers, politicians like Rick Perry, Rand Paul, and Newt Gingrich — but it also includes plenty of traditional invocations of law and order. An ambitious bipartisan sentencing reform effort in Congress, which Sen. Ted Cruz supported and then abandoned.
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According to a recent Gallup Survey Americans are more critical of the US Justice System than Democrats. In the current survey, three-quarters of Republicans think the criminal justice system is not tough enough, 16% say it is about right, and 7% believe it is too tough. Democrats are more divided in their views, with a 42% plurality saying it is not tough enough, 35% about right, and 20 percent too tough.
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The private prison system lobbies heavily to Republican candidates. During this election cycle, private prison PACs, employees, and their families have given $2.1 million to candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The for-profit prison business was booming under the Trump Administration, which had increasingly relied on prison companies to hold immigrant detainees.
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