The Slow Drip of Decarceration: Reversing the Flood of Mass Incarceration and Its Racist Impact

Authors

Olinda Moyd, American University Washington College of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Journal

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

Volume

23

Issue

2

First Page

211

Last Page

279

Abstract

For the last four decades, the flood of African Americans pouring into our jails and prisons can be likened to a watershed where someone turned on a faucet full force and opened the floodgates to all the prison doors. Despite the multitudinous efforts to secure the release of people unwittingly swept up in this flood, most spending decades behind bars, their releases have been mediocre and only a few have slowly dripped towards freedom. Racism seeps into every facet of American life and nowhere is it more prevalent than in our criminal legal system and the crisis of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration and egregiously long sentences cause irreparable harm, and racial disparities exist in every stage of the criminal legal process, from policing, pretrial, prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration, through the extensive supervision period and collateral consequences that follow. African American families have been ripped apart by these nefarious wars that target African American communities and strip us of valuable resources, remove heads of households, interrupt college plans, destroy marriages, and expose children to cycles of incarceration from a young age. Traumatic and oppressive criminal legal encounters are often passed down akin to how generational wealth is passed down in other communities. Mass incarceration steals dreams and encages future aspirations.

This article examines the efforts to liberate people from overincarceration, many of whom have been detained long after rehabilitation has been achieved and well beyond the point when punishment has been satisfied. A healthy criminal legal system punishes people no longer than absolutely necessary and leaves room for transformation and rehabilitation. The U.S. criminal legal system, on the other hand, spreads the net so wide that the innocent are unwillingly snatched up and people are found to be detained well beyond the expiration of their sentence. Fundamentally, our system creates and exacerbates the very harm that its proponents allegedly seek to prevent. Substantial research has been devoted to racial disparities in the sentencing process, but little attention has been focused on the racial inequities that exist in liberating people from those unjust sentences.

This article will explore the numerous endeavors to correct the harmful impact of mass incarceration by filing petitions for clemency, parole, juvenile lifer release, and compassionate release. In each practice area, we examine the law or statute creating such relief options, review the current landscape, and analyze denials from the courts or government officials involved in the decision-making process. While other avenues for post-conviction relief are available constitutionally, statutorily, and via litigation, this article is limited to these four practice areas. Emancipating men and women from the watershed flow of incarceration and bringing them home has been a valiant but slow drip effort, especially as compared to the powerful tides that swept them up into the criminal legal system in the first place. This article proposes that the courts and other decision-makers act with a sense of urgency to decarcerate in order to uproot racist policies and practices.

Recommended Citation

Olinda Moyd, The Slow Drip of Decarceration: Reversing the Flood of Mass Incarceration and Its Racist Impact, 23 University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class 211 (2024).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/2258