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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.
EDITORIAL: Parole reform is needed, but do it correctly | The Daily Gazette
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Remember what happened the last time, when the state Legislature took a whack at bail reform?
Not a lot of people were paying close attention. Lawmakers didn’t invest a lot of effort getting input from all those with a vested interest in the issue. And they didn’t fully explain their justification for the reforms to the public.
Yet they quickly passed a law, just so they could say they got it done and to cross it off their list.
Not surprisingly, it turned out to be a big flop, filled with loopholes and inconsistencies that actually allowed killers in some cases to go loose without having to post bail.
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Prisons are hotspots for COVID-19, and criminal justice advocates are calling for reform to minimize ongoing spread.
The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) only recently began testing asymptomatic prisoners. Horwitz explains how this change in testing revealed the drastic increase.
“The sudden increase as a result of this change validates what we have been warning about for months, which is that these infections are going unchecked, undocumented and untreated in DOCCS facilities. And that is a totally unacceptable outcome.”
Horwitz is also worried about the virus spreading to the community, as one documented case in Greene County spread from a prison to a nursing home. Correction officers’ health is also at risk. About 65% of them at one prison reported being unsatisfied with DOCCS’s response to COVID-19. Horwitz suggests a different approach.