Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history. At the ACLU, we cheered Attorney General Eric Holder's long overdue acknowledgement on Monday that this addiction to incarceration was ineffective and unsustainable. It's about time we hear a top level government official call our bloated prison system broken. We understand, however, that it's going to take tremendous work to undo the damage that so called "war on drugs" and "tough on crime" policies have caused.
The ACLU's deputy legal director, Vanita Gupta, writes in today's New York Times that while Holder's announcement is important, it's only a first step. True lasting reform is going to need to come from the states, where most criminal defendants are sentenced. Criminal justice reform is a key priority for us at the ACLU of Maine and we are optimistic we can see substantive change in the coming years.
