The Sentencing Project

If America is to truly be a land of the free and just, our legal system needs close, close scrutiny. Our drug laws currently warehouse millions of non-​violent offenders, 75% of which are disproportionately non-​white. None of that makes us a safer, more orderly society and only fosters the disenfranchisement that leads people towards criminality.
When people get out of jail after serving time for bloodless, victimless crimes and cannot find employment or housing or even vote, more problems are created than solved. And don’t think that there aren’t people banking on that to happen. For-​profit prisons are thriving for a reason, and those who own them are more concerned about bottom lines than they are about protecting the public.
If you want an end to violent crime, buying more guns, building more jails, enacting Draconian laws, and locking more people up will not achieve that end. The United States imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth, yet carnage and hopelessness continue to plague our inner cities.
For almost 25 years, The Sentencing Project has fought to amend our tragically faulty penal system through important published articles supported by meticulous research and by lobbying for positive, progressive change within that system.
Do we really want a nation in which a person’s race or class determines whether or not they get help or incarceration for their addiction?
Is a country where lawbreakers are merely caged instead of rehabilitated truly a democracy?
The Sentencing Project addresses those questions and in doing so, is mindful of a new way, one where a profound fairness wins over the myopically punitive.
Restoration, not retribution.