As California grapples with a prison system so broken that the U.S. Supreme Court has mandated reductions in the number of prisoners it holds, the three-part “Smart Justice: Rethinking Public Safety in California” discussion begun this past week at the University of Southern California is examining both consequences and possible solutions to the state’s mass incarceration mess.
Moderated by Tomás Rivera Policy Institute director Roberto Suro, the first session—titled “California’s Corrections Systems and the Lives They Impact” and organized by Californians for Safety and Justice and USC’s Students Talk Back program—featured presentations by James Austin, president of the JFA Institute and author of a ground-breaking report on reducing prison populations, Susan Burton, former inmate and founder of A New Way of Life Reentry Program, and USC graduate students Emily Reisner and Jennifer Moore.
A New Way of Life
“Each time I got out of prison,
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How will America, which espouses the virtues of forgiveness and freedom, successfully deal with the thousands of people who leave its prisons every year? As the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world, the United States has a unique responsibility to chart a different, more humane course towards incarceration. Fifty years after the historic March on Washington helped usher the end of legally sanctioned discrimination, the formerly incarcerated remain stripped of basic rights. In many states they can’t vote, live in public housing or receive public assistance. And so they end up recycled in and out of some of America’s most deplorable institutions.
In the same way that Mississippi or Alabama were vital battlefronts in the struggle for civil rights a half century ago, California, with the country’s largest prison population, is ground zero for what many see as the major social and political issue of today. Like other states in the 1980s and 1990s,
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