I. INCARCERATION AND JUSTICE
The NCGP stands for dramatically reducing the prison population, investing in rehabilitation, and ending the failed war on drugs.
- The United States has the highest incarceration and recidivism rates of all the industrialized countries.
Our nation's criminal justice system in general is too often inhumane, ineffective, and prohibitively expensive.
With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the United States locks up nearly a quarter of the world's prisoners.
U.S. and North Carolina law enforcement priorities place overwhelming emphasis on drug-related and petty, nonviolent crimes, and very little emphasis on prosecution of corporate, "white collar", environmental crime.
The majority of prisoners are serving terms for nonviolent, minor property and drug addiction crimes, or violations of their conditions of parole or probation, while the poor, the undereducated and various racial and ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the prison population.
Corporate executives should be held personally responsible for the social and environmental consequences of their company's actions.
- The negative effects of imprisonment are far-reaching. Prisoners are isolated from their communities and often denied contact with the free world and the media.
Access to educational and legal materials is in decline. Prison administrators wield total authority over their environments, diminishing procedural input from experts and censoring employee complaints.
- Our priorities must include efforts to prevent violent crime and address the legitimate needs of victims, while addressing the socioeconomic root causes of crime and practicing policies that prevent recidivism.
- The NCGP opposes the increasingly widespread privatization of prisons.
These prisons treat people as their product and provide far worse service than government-run prisons.
Profits in privately run prisons are derived from understaffing, which severely reduces the acceptable care of inmates.
We believe that greater, not lesser, public and community input, oversight and control of incarceration must be an integral part of the answer.
- The NCGP calls for an end to the "war on drugs," legalization of drugs and for treating drug abuse as a health issue.
The war on drugs has been an ill-conceived and institutionally racist program that has wasted billions of dollars, misdirecting law enforcement resources away from apprehending and prosecuting violent criminals, while crowding our prisons with nonviolent drug offenders and disproportionately criminalizing youth of color.
- The NCGP also calls attention to the fact that more than 40 percent of those 2.3 million locked down come from America's black one-eighth.
The incarnation rates for African Americans is nearly six times that of whites.
The incarceration rates for LatinX people is over 2.5 times that of whites.
- The NCGP recognizes that our nation's ostensibly colorblind systems of law enforcement and crime control—from police practices to prosecutorial prerogatives to mandatory sentencing and zero-tolerance—have effectively constituted an ubiquitous national policy of racially selective mass incarceration, a successor to Jim Crow, as a means of social control, a policy that must be publicly discussed, widely recognized, and ultimately reversed.
The nearly universal though largely unspoken nature of this policy makes piecemeal reforms not accompanied by public discussion of the larger policy ineffective outside the context of a broad social movement.
- The NCGP firmly stands behind the affirmation that Black and Brown Lives Matter.