WBFO s Thomas O Neil-White reports.
As the Executive Director of PeacePrints Western New York, McEachon’s goal is to provide a link to services on the outside for people at the end of their journey through the state prison system. A system which overwhelming houses Black and Brown bodies.
McEachon echoes many criminal justice reformers when she said former inmates are often ill-prepared to re-enter society after a lengthy prison sentence.
“But what you know on the outside is a memory,” she said. “Because worlds change. Our world moves at a rapid, rapid-fire pace and in the facility, it doesn’t. It’s very slow, it’s very routine and that is intentional in how it operates. It’s almost a thoughtless environment.”
WBFO s Thomas O Neil-White reports. But as New Yorkers United for Justice Executive Director Alexander Horwitz tells it, sentencing inequalities along racial and socio-economic lines lead to problems in post-release supervision.
“New York’s parole system is costly, it is broken and it is racist, he said.
NYUJ is a bi-partisan criminal justice reform coalition.
“New Yorkers spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year on a system that fails to deliver on its actual purpose,” Horwitz said. “Which is to safely bring home people from incarceration, permanently.”
The coalition launched a statewide public campaign to urge the state legislature and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to make parole reform a top priority for the 2021 legislative session.