How the First Step Act could make you safer
Everyone – not just those of us involved in the criminal justice system – has an interest in improving and reforming the system to make it work better.
We are former prosecutors in Arizona who have decades of collective experience making charging decisions and prosecuting criminal cases. And we are thrilled about the federal government’s effort to enact the First Step Act.
It’s encouraging to see bipartisan support for the federal criminal justice reform. The Senate recently approved it with an 87-12 vote and the House of Representatives with a 358-36 vote. These tallies demonstrate broad consensus that the government must do more to ensure that people do not return to prison.
More than 90 percent of current prisoners eventually will be released. We all benefit when former inmates are reintegrated successfully.
The First Step Act incentivizes prisoners to par-
ticipate in programs designed to assist with reintegration and rehabilitation. It also increases potential good time credit, the reduction of a sentence for good behavior.
The act encourages greater reliance on halfway houses and home confinement as less costly alternatives to prison and essential steps toward reintegrating former inmates.
The act requires evidence to be collected and analyzed to determine how we can do a better job of improving our efforts to decrease recidivism.
One of the required reports relates to assessing the ability of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to treat heroin and opioid abuse through medication-assisted treatment. The reliance on evidence and research to implement more effective treatment will help to make all of us safer and address the staggering health crisis presented by the opioid epidemic.
Congress must oversee this process to make sure that the evidence is gathered and that is in fact reliable.
Calling for the creation of a report by an agency is not self-executing, and vigilance is critical to the reform effort.
Time will tell if these reports lead to progress or amount to little more than window dressing.
Admittedly, the First Step Act won’t fix all the problems facing our criminal justice system. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, there are nearly 180,000 federal inmates and there have been 34,530 prisoners released this year.
Yet, the number of people in federal custody is a relatively small percentage of the approximately 2.3 million people locked up in the United States.
Not preparing those individuals to reenter society is a public safety hazard that has been historically ignored. The vast majority of incarcerated people are in state prisons and county jails, and a total of more than 625,000 people walk out of prison every year.
It is heartening to see such overwhelming support at the federal level and a general acknowledgment that improvements can and must be made. It is also encouraging that this is recognized as merely a first step.
Our own state and county should take a hard look at the rate at which we lock people up and steps we can take to make us all safer by making sure that people who are leaving those facilities may be rehabilitated and reintegrated.
Arizona alone has more than 40,000 inmates in state prison, and more than half of those people have served a prior prison term.
The costs are too high to be ignored. For the sake of justice and public safety, we can and must do better. We hope that our state and local leaders will also take necessary first steps toward addressing criminal justice reform in Arizona.