Justice reform bills may have to address race

Under measure filed by OKC lawmaker, racial impact statements would be required

To address racial disparities in Oklahoma' s justice system, future criminal justice legislation may have to go through an additional step before being approved.

State Sen. George Young, D-Oklahoma City, filed Senate Bill 1184, which requires a racial impact statement to accompany any bill that would lengthen sentences, create a new offense or change penalties for existing offenses.

Young said lawmakers must play a vital role in criminal justice reforms by looking critically at how bills might disproportionately impact communities of color, which are incarcerated at higher rates than their white counterparts.

“These problems may not be purposeful,” Young said. “But if there was a purposeful attempt to do something harmful to certain communities, things would look a lot like they do right now .… So we have to do everything we can to lower our incarceration rate .”

The impact statements would include information like the number of criminal cases that the bill would affect, impacts on minority communities and potential changes for correctional facilities and other services.

If a bill was found to have a severe impact on a certain community, legislators would need to decide whether to amend the bill. If legislators did not change the bill's language, they would have to explain why.

“I hope out of this we can see the truth,” Young said. “Let's be careful that we aren't putting forward legislation that impacts certain vulnerable communities in a negative way.”

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and other groups would be involved in creating the impact statements, Young said.

Damion Shade, a criminal justice analyst for the Oklahoma Policy Institute, said these types of statements are already required in some states, including Florida.

And for Oklahoma, which incarcerates one in 15 black men, this move could play an important role in using data to make informed changes, he added.

“It is really hard to develop a system to deal with these disparities and reduce them and get to the core of the problem if you don't have data,” Shade said .“And this would be as important to rural Oklahoma as it would be to urban environments and indigenous lands throughout the state.”

Young filed several bills dealing with equality and criminal justice reform, including a bill to prohibit life sentences without parole for individuals under 18 and another to create a commission on race and equality.