Equitable dispensation of justice for all
The NAACP advocates for smarter, results-based criminal justice policies to keep our communities safe, including treatment for addiction and mental health problems, judicial discretion in sentencing, and an end to racial disparities at all levels of the system. Disproportionate incarceration, racially motivated policing strategies, and racially biased, discriminatory, and mandatory minimum sentencing will end. Incarceration will be greatly reduced and communities will be safer.
The United States is home to the world’s largest prison population. As “tough on crime” laws have put an unprecedented number of non-violent offenders behind bars in recent years, our neighborhoods feel no more secure.
We pursue police accountability on their treatment of African American citizens, provide legal rights seminars for the formerly incarcerated, and creating a more diverse law enforcement project-training recruits to take law enforcement tests monitoring police body camera implication in law enforcement agencies.
The Committee on Criminal Justice shall:
- Seek to eliminate harsh and unfair sentencing practices that are responsible for mass incarceration and racial disparities in the prison system,
- Support and seek to increase trust and public safety by advancing effective law enforcement practices
- Fight for the restoration of the voting rights of formerly incarcerated people and the removal of barriers to employment
- Elevate the voices of crime victim survivors in order to identify and advance systemic breakdowns existing in the criminal justice system that perpetuate crime
- Resolve to end the war on drugs for its disproportionate collateral consequences harm communities of color
- Seek the institution and availability of alternatives to incarceration including education, employment, and mental health services,
- Eliminate zero tolerance policies implemented in our schools which are keeping kids out of the classroom and putting them on a path from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse
- Investigate programs implemented in our local law enforcement agencies which derail from their main purpose of safety and order to conduct the work of federal agencies for which they do not have the capacity
- Seek budget modifications in states where incarceration receives more funding than education