WBFO s Thomas O Neil-White reports.
The cost accounts for the county’s Holding Center in downtown Buffalo and its Correctional Facility in Alden.
On average, individuals spend 100 days in jail for parole violations while they go through court hearings. But more than just the monetary cost behind that time, it’s the human cost that Peaceprints Western New York Executive Director Cindi McEachon, sees as most detrimental.
“If you are removing somebody from their family, from their community, from their job, from their home,” she said. “And placing them in jail for 100 days because you have the discretionary authority to do so, and then we find out you don’t have enough to hold them and you let them back out, you have disrupted their opportunities for growth, for success, for maintaining their lifestyle in the community.”
Being late for a meeting with a parole officer, missing curfew, using drugs or alcohol. Those are all non-criminal acts that can land a parolee back behind
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.