Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders released plans, within days of each other, to reform the troubled criminal justice system and reduce mass incarceration. Both candidates highlight the massive number of people incarcerated or under the supervision of the criminal justice system as a key problem to be addressed. Both plans highlight many of the same issues, from the school-to-prison pipeline, the criminalization of mental illness, racial discrimination and disparities, the suicide crisis among police officers, and private prisons. Both would end cash bail, end the death penalty, and end or reduce mandatory minimum sentences. But they’re framed differently and each candidate has some distinct proposals, as civil rights attorney Tahir Duckett lays out in a helpful Twitter thread.
Sanders' plan, which seeks to “move away from an overly-punitive approach to public safety and start focusing on how to safeguard our communities, prevent the conditions that lead to arrests, and rehabilitate people who have made mistakes,” starts with abolishing private prisons, something Warren had already addressed in a separate plan. By contrast, Warren opens by “reimagining how we talk and think about public safety,” with a focus keeping kids in school, keeping families off the streets in affordable housing, mental health and addiction services, and more.
“It is a false choice to suggest a tradeoff between safety and mass incarceration,” she writes. “By spending our budgets not on imprisonment but on community services that lift people up, we’ll decarcerate and make our communities safer.”
Both candidates emphasize how many roles police officers are expected to fill, often without training. As Sanders writes, police are “doubling as social workers, conflict negotiators, and medical responders.” Warren emphasizes mental health care that will keep people from the moments of crisis that often lead to interactions with police—something she notes Medicare for All would provide—and pledges to “increase funding for ‘co-responder’ initiatives that connect law enforcement to mental health care providers and experts.” Sanders takes this a step further, pledging to “create civilian corps of unarmed first responders, such as social workers, EMTs, and trained mental health professionals, who can handle order maintenance violations, mental health emergencies, and low-level conflicts outside the criminal justice system, freeing police officers to concentrate on the most serious crimes.”
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