The Sentencing Project, a national criminal justice research and advocacy organization supports Senate Bill 649. The bill expands sentencing options for certain drug offenses. The proposed legislation would afford prosecutors the option of charging low level drug possession as a misdemeanor and authorize judges to deem a non-violent drug possession offense to be either a misdemeanor or felony after consideration of the offense and the defendant’s record.

Justice Reinvestment was conceived as part of the solution to mass incarceration.  The intent was to reduce corrections populations and budgets, thereby generating savings for reinvestment in high incarceration communities to make them safer, stronger, more prosperous, and equitable.

From 2000 to 2009 there was a dramatic shift in the racial composition of the women’s prison population.  In 2000, African American women were incarcerated at 6 times the rate of white women. By 2009, that disparity had dropped by half, to less than three times the white rate.

For more than forty years, the correctional system has been dominated by growth.  All correctional populations are the result of two key factors—admissions and length of stay (or LOS).  That is, how many people are sentenced to prison and how long do they stay there.  As either, or both, of these population drivers change, so too will the resulting correctional population.  The science that frames policy solutions for downsizing prisons is rooted in policy initiatives that have been implemented at the state level.

Felony disenfranchisement is not only unjust and undemocratic, but it is counterproductive to the goal of increasing public safety.  The Sentencing Project submitted comments to a Tennessee panel studying how the state might bring more of its citizens into the electoral process rather than excluding them through felony disenfranchisement.