State Criminal Justice Advocacy in a Conservative Environment
This publication documents successful advocacy strategies employed in campaigns in Indiana, Missouri, and Texas. Victories including reducing enhanced penalties in drug-free zones in Indiana by shrinking the limit of zones from 1,000 feet to 500 feet, and eliminating all zones except those around schools and parks; modifying Missouri’s federal lifetime ban on food stamp benefits for persons with felony drug convictions; and closing two Texas prison facilities: the Dawson State Jail and the Mineral Wells Pre-Parole Transfer Facility.
Related to: Drug Policy, Youth Justice, Collateral Consequences, State Advocacy
Today’s climate for criminal justice reform offers new opportunities for state-based criminal justice and civil rights organizations to identify and implement policy solutions to scale back the rate of incarceration and develop reform strategies that broaden approaches to public safety. In recent years, a national dialogue has surfaced on fundamental questions regarding the size of the nation’s prison population, the collateral consequences of a conviction, and resulting impacts on public resources for education, health care, and other vital services.
The criminal justice policy challenges facing state and local governments will not subside anytime soon. While the pace of criminal justice reform has accelerated at both the federal and state levels in the past decade, current initiatives have had only a modest effect on the size of the prison population and narrowly address the civil sanctions that marginalize persons with a prior conviction. The scale of incarceration provides a key moment for the advocacy community to call for a change in criminal justice policy and practice.
