The Political Dynamics of Justice Reform in The U.S.

One guest who watched the presentation with particular interest was Elizabeth Glazer,
director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, which is overseeing the
closure of the notorious Rikers Island complex and restoration of jails in several
boroughs. Unlike prisons, jails are designed for short stays — the average at Rikers is
60 days — but many of the challenges are the same: preventing violence, easing
access for families and lawyers, attending to mental health and addiction, and fitting the
facilities into the neighborhoods around them. Glazer said she was struck that the
student projects treated prison as not just a place for rehabilitation but as a “civic asset.”
“You look at the jails that we currently have and they don’t feel like a part of our urban
landscape,”she said. “Either we’ve put them far away, like Rikers, or we’ve made them
forbidding, like the Tombs.”
“Even though we may not be building those fabulous Gehry-like designs in our jails, the
principles are something we need to pay very close attention to. We should try to
normalize life inside as much as we can, because people are going to come back.”
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The Marshall Project
Nonprofit Journalism About Criminal Justice
01 December 2014
Will Millennials Embrace Prison Reform?
A couple of Harvard guys aim to find out.
Instead of spending their gap year zip-lining in Costa Rica or rail-passing across
Europe, Scott Johnston and Pete Davis have decided to spend the year between their
Harvard graduation and law school mobilizing students in support of prison reform.
Using small grants from the Ford Foundation and other benefactors, the pair plans to
visit ten campuses in the deep South to recruit “student ambassadors,” to stage events
where former prisoners talk about the obstacles they faced returning to freedom, to
create a Story-Corps-style bank of incarceration stories, and to build a “millennial prison
reform agenda” for 2016. They held their first campus event last month at Georgetown
University.
“Millennials – a generation free from the baggage of old ‘tough on crime’ debates – have
attitudes especially receptive to the project of revitalizing the rehabilitative mission of
prisons,” they wrote in their mission statement. If the generation emerging into
adulthood is introduced to the failings of American prisons, the two men believe, it can
do for prison reform what it has helped to do for marriage equality and Dream Act
immigrants.
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