Trailer: Combatting Mass Incarceration

When someone commits a violent crime, the solution is incarceration and for a long time. According to Professor Rachel Barkow of NYU Law, being locked up tends make the people more of a public safety risk after they come out than when they went in. With the world’s largest prison population and recidivism rates above 75%, the United States' prisons are packed and ineffective. Barkow explains the causes of mass incarceration and the reforms that can actually bring about change.

Watch the full interview with Prof Barkow free here: https://www.talksonlaw.com/talks/conf...

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TRANSCRIPT

Joel Cohen: When people talk about justice reform, you almost never hear them mention violent crime.

Rachel Barkow: Well, I think the reason that people don't talk about violence is that's politically much tougher. You know there's a lot of sympathy now, a lot of people use marijuana, and so a lot of people have a lot of sympathy for decriminalizing that. But it gets more difficult when you're talking about someone who's physically hurt somebody else. There should be consequences when somebody engages in that kind of behavior ,but we need to talk about what those consequences should be and how we should deal with it because, again, our approach does not work as a violence reducer. You know, it's not good to send people who commit violent acts into prisons where they're not going to get any kind of treatment and they're going to be around other people who may have engaged in violence, and there's an environment that's making them more prone to do it. You want to have an approach to it that really tries to get at some of the root causes, and what is the right sentence for someone who does something like that because if you think of long sentences as what you need for public safety, that's just not true.