Sandy Mullins Co-Authors Report on Early Release

Mechanisms During COVID and Their Impact on Mass Incarceration

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Litmus Senior Research Scholar Sandy Mullins co-authored Risk Averse and Disinclined: What COVID Prison Releases Demonstrate About the Ability of the United States to Reduce Mass Incarceration, a report from the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice with support from Arnold Ventures, which looks at case studies in Alabama, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Washington:

We conclude that the back-end release mechanisms offer only a modest opportunity to reduce mass incarceration, and the current system is unlikely to make a substantial difference in addressing mass incarceration due primarily to risk aversion. Instead, state-level carceral policies that focus on diffusing responsibility for back-end release and that reduce incarceration in the first place have the greatest chance of achieving long-term reductions in prison populations.

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