Criminal Justice Reform

The United States incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners even though it accounts for five percent of the world’s population. The burden of this nation’s prison industrial complex overwhelmingly falls on African-American communities. African-American men are incarcerated at more than six times the rate of White men, and African-American women are incarcerated at more than double the rate of White women. America spends $80 billion on incarceration every year, taxpayer money that would be better spent on preventing crimes in the first place by getting youth on the right track and keeping them on the right track. The CBC Criminal Justice Reform Task Force focuses on the systemic reasons behind this issue – from the cycle of poverty, to the disinvestment in public education, to discriminatory and overly aggressive policing practices –in an effort to identify effective policies that help reverse the mass incarceration that plagues Black communities. The Task Force also promotes end-to-end, comprehensive reform of our criminal justice system, including bridging the gap between police departments and the communities they serve, strengthening prisoner reentry support, and every facet in between.