The movement “about rethinking about what we do with our criminal-justice system is nonpartisan,” John Jay College of Criminal Justice President Karol Mason tells the Washington Post. “It’s not a conservative issue. It’s not a liberal issue. People realize it’s a people issue.” Mason notes that many jail inmates “are really drug addicts,” adding, “The opioid epidemic has opened up an opportunity for us to think about drug addiction differently, and see it as a health issue and not a crime issue.”
“The challenge for me,” Mason says, “is getting people to think of our criminal justice system in that right framework of what’s gonna create safer communities. And we know from research that locking people up for long sentences, arresting people and putting them in jail for drug crimes are not what produces safer communities. What produces safer communities is looking at what are the causal factors putting people into our criminal justice system: lack of opportunity, lack of jobs, health care, education poverty. We’ve got so many people in our criminal justice system simply because they’re poor, and what we ought to be doing is investing upstream in keeping people out of the system and providing opportunities.”