The Vera Institute of Justice issued A New Paradigm for Sentencing in the United States,. a report examining how sentencing practices have driven the nation's unprecedented surge in incarceration over the last 50 years and offering principles to "to rectify this ongoing crisis." At the current rate of prison population decline, it would take 75 years to reach the prison population levels of the early 1970s. The report makes seven proposals to Congress and state legislatures to dramatically reduce incarceration.
The actions include setting a maximum prison sentence of 20 years for adults and 15 years for young people, based on research showing people “age out” of crime; allowing people to earn one day off their sentences for each day of positive behavior; and abolishing mandatory minimums. “Our retributive and punitive approach to sentencing does not make communities safer in the way proponents claim and the public assumes,” said Vera president Nicholas Turner. “This report is intended to disrupt the system’s proclivity for long, harsh sentences that are ineffective, which is why Vera calls on legislators, prosecutors, and judges to help advance sentencing reform.” Vera said its modeling on the federal corrections system shows that enacting five of the reforms in 2006 would have resulted in a federal prison population merely 22 percent of what it was in 2016—roughly 38,000 people instead of the 176,000 then in Federal Bureau of Prisons custody.
Instead, the U.S. prison population has ballooned by 500 percent since 1973—growth due in large part to the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Latinx men.
Vera argues that the "result has not been a safer country, but cyclical disruption, trauma, and instability that marks families and communities nationwide."
Among other suggestions in the report are allowing any conviction, regardless of severity, to be eligible for a community-based sentence, creating second-look resentencing options for those behind bars; and mandating racial impact assessments for crime-related bills.
Vera says it is proposing "a new approach—a North Star—to sentencing, one in which incarceration is the limited exception rather than the rule, and grounds this approach in the principles of safety and repair."