"Top Trends in State Criminal Justice Reform, 2020"

The title of this post is the title of this short paper from Nicole Porter at The Sentencing Project. Here is how it gets started and its concluding paragraph:

The United States is the world leader in incarceration and keeps nearly 7 million persons under correctional control.  More than 2 million are in prison or jail, and 4.6 million are under community surveillance on probation or parole.  At least 19 million persons are living with a felony conviction while an estimated 100 million have a criminal record.  The persistence of extremely punitive sentencing laws and policies, not increases in crime rates, sustain the nation’s high rate of incarceration.  Ending mass incarceration requires a transformative change to sentencing policies and practices aligned with the scaling back of collateral consequences of conviction, and challenging racial disparities in the criminal justice system.  In recent years most states have enacted reforms designed to reduce the scale of incarceration and the impact of the collateral consequences.  This briefing paper highlights key reforms undertaken in 2020 prioritized by The Sentencing Project....

Lawmakers advanced policy reforms to address mass incarceration and scale back collateral consequences.  Too few policy changes were adopted to address COVID-19 and its impact on the incarcerated in overcrowded congregate lock ups.  While reforms help improve criminal justice policy, most measures will have a modest impact on the scale of incarceration.  It will take substantial changes to significantly reduce the nation’s rate of incarceration.  Given the limited impact of incarceration on crime, there continues to be potential for substantial reductions in state prison populations.  Lawmakers and advocates must explore key changes that limit the use of incarceration by retroactively ending mandatory minimum sentencing, adopting universal sentencing review policies, challenging racial disparities through structural reforms, and addressing collateral consequences.