Criminal Justice: Green Party Leaders Call For Radical Reforms

While Republicans generally continue the "tough on crime" hard line that has served them so well for decades and Democrats can barely be bothered to vote against DEA raids on medical marijuana providers, the US Green Party is calling for radical reforms in the criminal justice system to slow the mass incarceration juggernaut and undo biases against blacks, Hispanics, and the poor.

Green leaders this week called the US's status as world leader in incarceration -- in both percentage terms and real numbers -- a "shame on America" and expressed alarm at the systematic racial bias in the American criminal justice system. While they used the case of the "Jena Six" -- six black high school students from Jena, Louisiana, now charged with attempted murder for a schoolyard brawl in which no white students were charged -- as a hook, the Greens quickly honed in on the broader issues of criminal justice fairness and the drug war.

"The case of the Jena Six is emblematic of how people of color in the US face prosecution and sentencing," said Clifford Thornton, , Green candidate for governor of Connecticut in 2006 and cofounder of the drug reform group Efficacy. "The Jena Six prosecution is one of the more blatant and scandalous examples of how our justice system regularly criminalizes black and brown people -- especially children."

The Greens also cited a recent Sentencing Project study that found severe racial and ethnic disparities in how people are treated by the criminal justice system. The report found that blacks are imprisoned at a rate more than five times that of whites and Hispanics are imprisoned at a rate nearly double that of whites.

Green leaders listed several urgent measures to overhaul the justice system:

• Federal monitoring of prosecutorial practices and sentencing patterns in all jurisdictions where such disparities are evident, in accord with civil rights laws.
• Cancellation of the war on drugs, which Greens have called "a war on youth and people of color." The party notes that: "According to the DEA, FBI, Department of Justice, police agencies, and numerous public interest groups and researchers, 72% of all illegal drug users and most of those involved in the drug trade are white, while African-Americans make up only 13% of all illegal drug users and a tiny percentage of drug importers. Despite these numbers, the overwhelming percentage of those incarcerated for drugs are black."
• Abolition of the death penalty.
• Repeal of zero tolerance and mandatory sentencing statutes, which enlarge the power of prosecutors and erode judicial discretion.
• An end to abuses of the plea-bargaining system, which have resulted in the imprisonment of innocent people who lack the financial resources to defend themselves sufficiently in court.
• An end to the privatization of the prison system, which creates economic incentives to put more people behind bars, since corporate prison owners and contractors increase their profits when more cells are filled up. Greens have drawn links between privatized prisons and draconian drug laws, the targeting of poor people and people of color for prosecution, mandatory and severe sentencing, high death penalty rates in some states, and other policies.

Does your party have these platform planks? Why not?