What if we actually enact criminal justice reform?
Would we have a system that didn’t ruin lives for relatively minor mistakes? Would we spend less tax dollars caging fewer humans “to make them better?” Would we be better of?
Politicians seem to think so. Or at least they’ve said as much through the last election cycle. Whether it be genuine belief or riding the rising tide of the concerns of their constituents, everybody from former prosecutors who did nothing to change the criminal justice problem from the inside to born-billionaires who took on the cause prior to election (despite not having previously used any of their billions to make a difference in the past) are trying (or at least pretending) to make the criminal justice system a little more hospitable.
The politicians are throwing out all sorts of neither new nor novel reform. “We need to overhaul the bond system.” “We can decriminalize cannabis possession.” “We should eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing.”