<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"></head><body><div>Criminal justice "reform" is in the news, and a vote is expected in the Senate this week, maybe today.</div><div><br></div><div>I just called the offices of Sen. Durbin (202-224-2152) and Sen. Duckworth (202-224-2854). They haven't been getting many calls on this.</div><div><br></div><div>If you can, please urge our Senators to vote No on the First Step Act. Though it has bipartisan support and does make some actual improvements, it includes some poison pills - entrenching mass supervision and biased risk-assessment algorithms which are based on data from decades of past discrimination, among others.</div><div><br></div><div>Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow" on mass incarceration, wrote a Nov 8 2018 NY Times op-ed, "The Newest Jim Crow":</div><div><br></div><div><div>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/sunday/criminal-justice-reforms-race-technology.html</div></div><div><br></div><div>A detailed review of the First Step Act's provisions, pro and con, from Just Leadership USA:</div><div><div>https://www.justleadershipusa.org/first-step-act-and-sentencing-reform-and-corrections-act/</div><div><br></div><div>It provides for moving low-risk prisoners out of prisons and onto "home confinement" - electronic monitoring. They are still effectively incarcerated, but at their own expense. (Electronic monitoring can cost more than rent.) </div><div><br></div><div>Risk assessment algorithms look race-blind and dispassionate, but they are built using data from a criminal justice system with a long discriminatory history, using factors that correlate with race and class.</div><div><br></div></div><div>As it stands, this bill will do far more long-term harm than good.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div id="composer_signature"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> -- Stuart</div></body></html>