Advocates push sentencing reforms to reverse 1994 crime bill

The legislative session will not start till January, however activists are starting their push on three payments to eradicate necessary minimal sentences and create extra alternatives for incarcerated folks to be thought of for launch. 

Advocates will rally in New York City subsequent week on the twenty eighth anniversary of the signing of the 1994 Crime Bill signed by then-President Bill Clinton. The measure incentivized expansions to prisons and jails and imposed harsher legal sentences — fueling a legacy of mass incarceration within the state and nation.

“It’s extremely important to make a system of corrections truly about corrections,” stated Assemblywoman Anna Kelles, a Democrat from Ithaca.

Kelles sponsors the Earned Time Act, permitting folks in jail to scale back their sentences with good habits, programming or different rehabilitation.

“We have systems in place that promote rehabilitation that will promote transformation and will help someone re-enter into society, into the community and into their family in a healthy way and set them up for success,” she added. “That is the point of corrections.”

David Delancy, of the Bronx, spent 20 years behind bars in most and medium-security services in Connecticut and New York and says the present carceral system leaves an individual in jail feeling hopeless and discourages rehabilitation.

“If I gotta wait 10 years if I do the right thing, if I make the changes and it could actually be seven years instead of 10, that gives a person something to push for,” stated Delancy, coordinator for the New York County Re-entry Task Force Service. “And it doesn’t take away from our criminal justice system — it enhances it.”

Activists on Tuesday will even march urging lawmakers to go the Second Look Act that permits folks in jail to apply for a sentence discount, and a proposal that eliminates mandatory minimum criminal sentences.

Delancy says the payments would encourage incarcerated folks to do the work and alter themselves to scale back their sentences. 

“It didn’t take me 20 years to decide that I wanted to turn my life around…that I didn’t want this type of life to be mine,” he stated.

The measures died in committee this session. Kelles says the deep politicization of the state’s bail reform legal guidelines has prevented different legal justice reforms to take maintain. 

“If we really, really want to reduce crime, we’re having the wrong conversation,” she stated.

She’s hopeful conversations to garner help for sentencing reform will happen subsequent yr after the November elections, including the proposed legal guidelines will give folks in jail higher accessibility to applications that promote transformation.

Delancy says the measures would have helped him be launched from jail and return to his neighborhood sooner in the event that they had been in place whereas he was incarcerated.

“It would have allowed me to return back into my community without being away form it for so long and missing so much,” he stated. “It would have allowed me to come again to my neighborhood and be more practical and doing the correct issues sooner.

“…God says ‘Forgive — I forgive you for yourself, come back to me,'” Delancy added. “We’re the only people that says ‘You know what? You messed up in our society, and we don’t want nothing to do with you, and in fact, we’re going to hold you accountable for the rest of your life.’ If we’re a real rehabilitative system… we have the opportunity to change, if we’re willing to say that we really want to stand for what we stand for.”

Neither the Assembly nor Senate Democrats returned requests for remark Friday about their conferences’ help for any of the proposals.​