The U.S. criminal legal system suffers from so many health and human rights abuses that many advocates have stopped calling it the criminal “justice” system. The Prison Policy Initiative is a nonprofit that researches many of these problems and proposes solutions. The group has just released a report titled: “Winnable criminal justice reforms in 2026.” The report lists 34 criminal legal system reforms and model legislation that can and have succeeded in being passed by state legislatures across the U.S.
The group acknowledges that their report this year comes at a time when hard-won past criminal legal system reforms are under coordinated attack by the Trump administration and Congress, as well as governors and state legislators of both political parties. Some policymakers, they maintain, are determined to return to the failed “tough-on-crime” policies that defined the 1990s.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with The Prison Policy Initiative’s communications strategist, Wanda Bertram, who describes the eight arenas for action and some specific proposals detailed in the report.
WANDA BERTRAM: We do this report every year. It’s called Winnable Criminal Justice Reforms. And what we do in it is aggregate a list of criminal justice reforms that have succeeded in state legislatures that we believe have the potential to succeed in more state legislatures. And we send this out to several hundred state legislators across the country as a way of encouraging them to pursue criminal justice reform and also to give them a reference sheet for what can actually be done. Because obviously right now we’re not in a moment where a lot of people have progressive offensive reform strategies on their minds.
A lot of legislators and advocates are playing defense as the federal government and state lawmakers also seek to roll back a lot of what’s been done across the board politically, but including lots of criminal justice reforms like bail reform. But nevertheless, we do see that there are still areas where legislators can work with pre-existing legislation and get their colleagues on board with things that are just common sense.So we put this report together as kind of a reference sheet for those folks. This year we have about little over 30 reforms that we suggest. It’s not a comprehensive criminal justice reform platform, right? We are not laying out here our vision for the perfect system. What we’re doing is curating reforms that we think can win and that don’t allocate more resources, vastly more resources to the criminal legal system. We’re trying to make the criminal legal system fairer without making it bigger. And so things like building bigger jails or building shiny new jails that have more state-of-the-art services, you won’t find those in our report.
MELINDA TUHUS: They fall into eight categories. Is that right? And can you just run ’em down and then we’re going to focus on a few.
WANDA BERTRAM: So the categories that we’re looking at, expanding alternatives to criminal legal system responses to social problems; protecting the presumption of innocence; decreasing the length of prison sentences. These are all ways of either diverting people from the criminal legal system or getting them out of prison if they’re there and don’t need to be. We also have a couple sections about the conditions in prisons, treating people humanely during incarceration and treating people on supervision fairly. We have a section about setting people up to succeed in re-entry so that they don’t come back to prison. And then we have a section about giving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people a political voice. So that has to do with things like voting and also with prison gerrymandering. And then finally, we have a section about reducing spending on the criminal legal system and increasing investments in communities.
MELINDA TUHUS: Just as a quick note, prison gerrymandering is, I guess when prisoners are counted for voting purposes— for allocating representation—are counted as residents of the prison rather than residents of where they come from. Is that right?
WANDA BERTRAM: That’s correct. And it leads to a disproportionate electoral power being given to communities that host prisons and taken away from communities that send people to prison.
MELINDA TUHUS: Absolutely. Let’s just focus in on a few of these.
WANDA BERTRAM: What we recommend in our report is a combination of things. States have a few options. One of those options is called “Second Look Sentencing” reform. That allows courts, and this can work a couple of different ways, but it allows courts to take a Second Look at the sentence that was given to someone who has already served a certain amount of it. There’s a federal congressional bill. This would allow federal courts to revisit the sentence of anyone who has served more than 10 years behind bars. A surprising number of states, I believe 14, have some kind of Second Look Sentencing in place. Those kinds of policies, they basically create a way out of the system for people who were sentenced by laws or at a time when the system was very punitive and maybe punitive in ways that we don’t consider to be fair or just anymore.
States can also expand good time credits and that’s a system that allows people to earn their way out of prison earlier through good behavior, participating in programs. You can also expand compassionate release. That’s something that states might choose to do if they’re trying to target populations of people with more health issues, right? So narrowing down the criteria to people who are terminally ill or facing some kind of a serious infirmity. This is not just something that legislators should think about doing out of the kindness of their hearts. It’s also something that makes a lot of sense from a financial standpoint and also just from a logistical standpoint because prisons are very quickly these days turning into nursing homes for quite a lot of people.
For more information, visit the Prison Policy Initiative at prisonpolicy.org.
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