NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — The Prison Policy Initiative released a report this week outlining 34 criminal legal system reforms for 2026, identifying strategies advocates say could reduce incarceration and reverse decades of harmful “tough-on-crime” policies. The organization, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group, promotes the “national conversation about criminal justice reform and over-criminalization” through research and advocacy, according to its website.
In the report, the Prison Policy Initiative identifies “reforms that would reduce the number of people needlessly confined in prisons and jails,” and “offer straightforward solutions that do not require further investments in the carceral system.” The group also notes that it “selected reforms that have gained momentum in recent years, passing in multiple states.” The full report is available at https://www.prisonpolicy.org.
An article by Sarah Staudt and Emmett Sanders, both staff in the organization’s Policy and Advocacy departments, explains that the recommendations are divided into eight categories. Under the first category, “expand alternatives to criminal legal system responses to social problems,” the organization identifies strategies such as implementing non-police responses to mental health crisis calls and decriminalizing drugs.
In the article’s description of non-police emergency response models, the Prison Policy Initiative recommends that all cities implement crisis response systems without law enforcement involvement, instead of the “co-responder” models now widely used. The group cites data from the Safety and Justice Challenge and the National Alliance on Mental Illness that states people with disabilities and mental illnesses are disproportionately arrested and jailed and that “between 2015 and 2020, approximately a quarter of people killed by police were in a mental health crisis at the time of the shooting.” The report cites several studies to support these recommendations.
The Prison Policy Initiative also points to successful existing programs, including the CAHOOTS model in Eugene, Oregon, which dispatches trained medical and behavioral health responders instead of police to calls involving mental illness, addiction and homelessness.
In the same article, the Prison Policy Initiative writes that “we’ve curated this list to offer policymakers and advocates straightforward solutions that would have the greatest impact on reducing incarceration and reversing harms experienced by people impacted by the criminal legal system.” The organization said it has already “sent [its] report to roughly 650 lawmakers, in all 50 states, from all political parties, who have shown a commitment to reducing the number of people behind bars in their state and making the criminal legal system more just and equitable.”
Staudt and Sanders write that the report “comes at a time when hard-won victories in criminal legal system reform are under coordinated attack by a presidential administration and Congress, as well as governors and state legislators of both political parties, that are hellbent on returning to the failed ‘tough-on-crime’ policies that defined the 1990s.”
They add that they hope the strategies in the report will help “advocates around the country [who] have been working tirelessly to beat back [the] unrelenting tide of rollbacks that would worsen mass incarceration.” The report is also intended to serve as a resource for organizations and individuals working to expand or implement new reforms.
Through this publication and other advocacy efforts, the Prison Policy Initiative states that it seeks to advance broader goals of reducing over-criminalization, shrinking the prison system and promoting evidence-based solutions. By presenting policy options and directing them to lawmakers and advocates, the organization aims to support the development and implementation of “actionable solutions to some of the most pressing challenges their states’ criminal legal systems face.”
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