The Point

Barriers to employment, housing, and basic necessities make stability difficult, if not entirely out of reach, for individuals returning to their community after prison. States can improve public safety and increase postrelease success by providing a temporary guaranteed income to people exiting prison. 

Manhattan’s next district attorney should consider less punitive alternatives instead.

Larry Krasner’s clear win in the Philadelphia District Attorney primary election should have been a wake-up call to journalists who spent weeks breathlessly painting the race as a referendum on progressive prosecutors and their decarceral policies. Instead, they doubled down, redirecting their fearmongering to other cities. This reckless reporting needs to stop. 

Arrest, prosecution, and incarceration have long been wielded against sex workers, with Black, brown, and LGBTQ sex workers disproportionately bearing the brunt of this abuse. Manhattan’s next district attorney must stop prosecuting offenses relating to sex work in order to scale back this system of harm.

The filing of an eviction—even without merit—can prevent someone from renting a future home, ruin a person’s credit, and even hurt employment and insurance prospects. It is time for government officials to put protections in place to prevent the long-term damage that eviction records cause.

Since District Attorney Larry Krasner took office, Philadelphia has seen a significant drop in drug prosecutions, focusing attention instead on treatment and evidence-based practices. Whoever wins the Democratic primary must continue down this corrective path.  

One-third of Connecticut’s residents are renters, leaving them vulnerable to eviction and its devastating consequences. Lawmakers can help renters remain in their homes by passing the statewide renters’ right-to-counsel bill.    

On May 18, Philadelphia will choose a Democratic nominee for this year’s district attorney race. While incumbent District Attorney Larry Krasner has taken steps to reduce Philadelphia’s probation and parole population, whoever wins the primary must do more work to address Philadelphia’s mass supervision problem.

Last year, thousands of incarcerated people were returned to their families and communities in order to reduce the spread of the coronavirus in federal prisons. The Biden administration should reverse the last-minute Trump administration policy that would send them back.

Some states still allow judges to sentence children and adolescents to die in prison. Maryland just became the 25th state to abolish juvenile life-without-parole sentences—the other 25 should follow suit. 

With the passage of HB18 on April 12, 2021, Maryland is positioned to become the first state to provide its renters with attorneys during eviction proceedings. Governor Larry Hogan should sign this bill to help keep people housed, employed, and safe.

A growing number of Americans oppose the death penalty, but prosecutors—even some who call themselves “progressive”—continue to seek it. All prosecutors should stop pursuing and protecting capital convictions.  

Prisons and jails routinely use prolonged solitary confinement—holding someone in a cell for more than 22 hours a day with no meaningful human contact. New York just passed the HALT Act to limit this inhumane practice, and others states should do the same. 

“Technical violations” of probation or parole are by definition minor—forgetting to update your address, showing up to a meeting late, or missing a curfew—but often get people locked up. State lawmakers should ban incarceration for technical violations of probation and parole.

Legal representation during an eviction hearing significantly improves a person’s chances of remaining in their home. Among other ways, cities can use the funding from federal pandemic relief bills to ensure their residents have this critical legal representation. 

Millions of students go to schools with a constant police presence but no readily available counselors, nurses, psychologists, or social workers. States should remove police from schools and shift that funding to professionals trained to support students.

Violence interruption programs rely on community outreach and engagement to stop violence before it starts. Local officials can make their neighborhoods safer by funding community-led violence interruption programs.

A person who didn’t commit murder shouldn’t be charged with it—but felony murder laws allow prosecutors to do just that. States should repeal these draconian and unjust laws.

Oakland plans to shift mental health crisis response from police to a new civilian unit within its fire department. This new pilot—MACRO—should be expanded to further minimize the role of armed police officers in responding to people who need medical attention or are struggling with homelessness. 

Last year, the Utah legislature passed a bill to help decrease the number of people incarcerated simply because they are too poor to buy their freedom. This month, the legislature passed a bill that would repeal the 2020 law. Governor Spencer Cox can save bail reform with a veto.

Over the past 32 years, more than 2,500 people have been exonerated—many of whom were convicted because of police or prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecutors have a responsibility to meaningfully review claims of innocence and swiftly correct those injustices.

President Biden’s decisions about who to nominate as federal prosecutors must reflect his campaign commitment to criminal justice reform—and the changed national focus on progressive prosecution. A broad group of organizations released a letter on Wednesday calling on Biden to do just that. 

The right to vote is critical to our democracy. States must restore it to incarcerated citizens.

Cities can keep people housed, employed, and healthy by giving them lawyers to help guide them through eviction proceedings.  

COVID-19 has spread rapidly through the Harris County Jail, increasing the risk of infection and fatality not just in the jail, but the surrounding community. Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg and Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo must immediately take steps to reduce its jail population.

Many cities have laws that require landlords to kick people out of their homes if the police are called too many times—even if the calls are the result of domestic violence or racial discrimination. Cities need to get rid of these so-called “crime-free” housing laws.

43 million people face difficulties buying homes, starting businesses, completing their education, or supporting their families because of federal student loans that collectively amount to $1.57 trillion of debt. Biden can get rid of it entirely.

Safe injection sites are a proven method for reducing overdose deaths, but the Department of Justice has been using a 1986 law that President Joe Biden championed in the Senate to prevent their operation. DOJ should step aside.

FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps created three million jobs and planted over three billion trees. Biden’s Climate Corps should be even bolder, as we face dire economic and climate crises.

Thousands of people are locked inside prisons serving sentences that would never be imposed today. Prosecutors can help right the wrongs of our past by establishing sentencing review units to review and correct extreme, disproportionate, and unjust sentences. 

In the Trump administration, criminal justice data was hidden, manipulated, and politicized. If President Biden wants to enact meaningful criminal justice reform, he must fix—and fully fund—the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

States should pass legislation and direct their budgets to programs and services that create real community safety instead of asking law enforcement to respond to problems that armed officers are ill-equipped to solve. 

A key part of public safety is making sure the right people respond to the right needs. St. Louis’s next mayor can ensure that trained civilian responders, instead of armed police officers, respond to mental health and substance use crises. 

The goal of traffic enforcement is safety. To keep residents safe, cities should shift enforcement to a civilian agency and increase automated enforcement.

Giving people money so that they can meet their basic needs—food, shelter, clothing—is an old idea that is gaining new momentum. Cities should implement guaranteed income programs.

One of America’s most populous counties is providing an income guarantee to young adults who age out of the foster care system, providing much-needed support for vulnerable youth transitioning into adulthood. Other cities and counties should follow Santa Clara County’s lead.

Biden wants to end the death penalty. His first and most important step must be commuting the sentence of every person on federal death row. 

President Biden is looking to nominate public defenders, civil rights attorneys, and legal aid lawyers to the federal judiciary to offset the current corporate- and prosecutor-heavy bench. Senators should help him do so.