Police chiefs from six of the largest cities in the nation announced a new partnership Wednesday aimed at ending unnecessary incarceration in the United States.
The group, Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, represents police leaders from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston and New Orleans, but also chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors and attorneys general from all 50 states.
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According to the group, “too many people are behind bars that don’t belong there,” and they are ready to push for alternatives to arrests that lead to imprisonment. Other choices include more mental health and drug treatment programs, reclassifying crimes (shoplifting is considered a felony in many states), and changing mandatory minimums for drug and non-violent crimes.
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Members of the group are set to meet with President Obama at the White House Thursday, and are preparing to go on a criminal justice reform tour around the country.
Garry McCarthy, superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, told an audience at the National Press Club Wednesday during the group’s official launch that when the group goes to the White House, it is looking for common sense criminal justice reform, which starts with policy.
“We’re incarcerating the wrong people. And were measuring the wrong things,” he said. “The criminal justice system is not really broken, it’s producing the results that it was designed to producing, and those are wrong results. We have to change the way we think about crime. We can reduce incarceration and arrest the right people and keep them in jail.”
The group has also garnered support from other criminal justice reform advocates, such as the NAACP, Koch Industries and the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, the nonpartisan public policy group that helped form the organization.
According to the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, the U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and the U.S. prison system costs roughly $80 billion annually to maintain.
Those numbers coincide with a drop in violent crimes and property crimes over the last several years, statistics that some say is proof that higher incarceration rates are working. Still, the group argues that more than 50 percent of the prison population has a diagnosed mental illness, while 65 percent of prisoners meet medical criteria for substance abuse and addiction.
“Many of these individuals need treatment, not arrest and jail time,” the group’s mission statement said. It added that the criminal justice system cannot and should not serve as a treatment plan, since it can often exacerbate illnesses and addictions.
According to Charles McClelland, chief of the Houston Police Department, law enforcement leaders need to create and enforce “pathways to success instead of pathways to prison.”
Reforming the criminal justice system is a bipartisan issue, as seen through the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, introduced by a group of Republican and Democrat senators earlier this month. The bill, which goes through markup in the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday, is backed by Obama.
Benjamin David, a North Carolina District Attorney, said the cycle has to be broken.
“This is about engaging the whole community in protection,” he said, reinforcing the idea that while there need to be consequences for the low-level, non-violent offenses, those who should be in prison, such as someone who commits a crime with a gun, need to remain in prison.
A shift in how law enforcement approaches its job is also needed, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said. “Police departments cannot be at war with the communities they serve,” Beck said.
