Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy is a nationally recognized leader when it comes to criminal justice reform. Since taking office in 2011, he’s implemented several initiatives, including reclassifying most drug offenses as misdemeanors and enacting bail reform. The state’s prison population has also declined from 18,000 to 14,000. WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with Michael Lawlor, the Governor’s Criminal Justice Advisor. Lawlor said that Connecticut’s criminal justice reforms have been a long time coming.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s on any given day, Connecticut had about 3,000 people incarcerated. In 1980, it was 3,000. In 1986, it was 6,000. In 1996, it was 16,000. And in 2008, it was 20,000. Today, as we sit here, there’s 14, 186 inmates, so that’s down almost 6,000 over the course of nine years. The main reason why our prison population is dropping is because our crime rate is dropping, there’s fewer and fewer people being arrested, there’s fewer and fewer people being sentenced to prison, and we think a lot of that has to do with the variety of reforms that were made here in Connecticut.
Do you see us getting back down to a level like we were in the 1980s?
Yeah, so, there’s a national advocacy movement called Cut50, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. Van Jones, Newt Gingrich, believe it or not, are the co-chairs of this Cut50 initiative. And the goal is to reduce the U.S. prison population by 50% by the year 2020, right? I’m pretty confident the national prison population’s gonna go down by 50%, but Connecticut, we’re already down 29% and dropping. And it seems like it’s reasonable to believe that within 4, 5 years, if all the current trends continue, that we’ll be down to about 10,000 inmates.
What’s different about the way we’re approaching crime now?
It used to be the case that if you were a convicted felon, you couldn’t get a barber’s license. Now, just think about that for a second. And, oddly enough, one of the vocational programs in our state prison system is how to be a barber, right? And so, if you’re doing a prison sentence, you’re a convicted felon. And you couldn’t get a license to do that when you get out. And the same applies to like home improvement contractors and a whole variety of things that require licenses. So you can’t be a house painter.
So these are all state licenses?
Well, I mean, depends on the specific license, but by and large, yeah. And so, the laws have now been changed to eliminate that categorical prohibition. Now, it’s one thing, I mean, if you’re a convicted child molester and you want to be a school bus driver. I mean, that’s based on what you actually did and a risk assessment, etc., etc. But the one-size-fits-all prohibition is gradually being eliminated. Because, as is the case with who goes to prison, we wanna make sure that these decisions, these sanctions, these punishments fit the crime. So it’s gotta be based on that.
We have with the Trump Administration, we’re supposedly getting tough on crime again. And President Trump himself says he’s a “law-and-order” president. Does that affect what we do in Connecticut in any way, the fact that federal policy is kind of moving in a different direction?
Yeah, well, a couple of things. First of all, it’s true that President Trump and even more so the Attorney General Jeff Sessions are articulating criminal justice policies that might have seemed like a good idea in the 1980s but are completely out of date in the 21st century. The good news is that in Congress, in the leadership in both parties, recognize this for what it is, and that is bad criminal justice practices that will only accomplish one thing and that is increase crime and increase our prison population. So I think although the President and the Attorney General give lip service to this stuff, the odds that they’re actually gonna be able to change many federal policies at all, like for example sentencing laws or even the way the Department of Justice incentivizes criminal justice practices through the grants, I don’t think they’re gonna be able to successfully reorient the national criminal justice debate in the short term. It’s not gonna happen. And you know, I think many people wonder how long President Trump’s gonna be in office in the first place. So hopefully, they won’t be successful, but the good news is that the leadership in Congress in both parties is not gonna allow these things to happen.
Well thank you so much Mike Lawlor.
Sure, Ebong.
That was Michael Lawlor, Governor Malloy’s Criminal Justice Advisor, speaking with Ebong Udoma.
