Law enforcement leaders from throughout the nation are promising a kinder, gentler, more discriminating approach to policing and prosecuting. They’ve formed a group, Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, whose cochairs include Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy.
“The changes needed to achieve an incarceration rate in line with the rest of the developed world are staggering,” Coates writes. “The popular notion that this can largely be accomplished by releasing nonviolent drug offenders is false—as of 2012, 54 percent of all inmates in state prisons had been sentenced for violent offenses. . . . One 2004 study found that the proportion of ‘unambiguously low-level drug offenders’ could be less than 6 percent in state prisons and less than 2 percent in federal ones.”
In 2006, when the United Nations voted on a resolution calling for abolition of life-without-parole terms for juveniles, the vote was 185 to 1 in favor. Guess which nation was the 1. We currently have an estimated 2,500 people serving life without parole terms for crimes they were convicted of committing when they were juveniles. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court said in Miller v. Alabama that such sentences should be “uncommon.” Some of those 2,500 convicts will be eligible for new sentencing hearings, but it’s not certain yet how many will be. When McCarthy and the new law enforcement group come out in favor of sentencing relief for convicts such as these, it’ll be clear they’re serious.
