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By Yannick Wood<\/b><\/p>\n
Fifty-five years ago this March, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the City of Newark to promote the Poor People\u2019s Campaign.<\/a> Eight days later, he was dead \u2013 assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn.<\/p>\n As we mark Dr. King\u2019s birthday this weekend, Newark \u2013 and all of New Jersey \u2013 continue, despite our progress, to suffer from some of the same racial injustices that existed on the day of Dr. King\u2019s visit.<\/p>\n During our modern-day \u201cracial reckoning\u201d just two years ago, the nation had its eyes focused on this enduring challenge. While sparked by the murder of George Floyd,<\/a> the outcry became a clarion call to finally address the overall structural racism that causes America\u2019s racial inequities \u2013 some of the worst of which are found in New Jersey<\/a>.<\/p>\n And then the moment passed \u2013 and it became incumbent upon us to turn the moment into a movement, a newly invigorated continuation of Dr. King\u2019s civil rights fight.<\/p>\n New Jersey, in many respects, is failing that challenge.<\/p>\n Nowhere is that more apparent than in the area of criminal justice, where many public officials have fallen right back into the old worn-out groove of knee-jerk \u201ctough on crime\u201d policies that are often unfounded in fact, unlikely to work \u2013 and structurally designed to devastate our Black and Brown youth and adults.<\/p>\n For example, legislators are currently proposing bills that will roll back New Jersey\u2019s successful bail reform, which has been a model for the rest of the country. Our old system of bail meant that people of lower means \u2013 often people of color \u2013 were disproportionately locked up before their trials and before being found guilty (or not) of anything, while their wealthier white counterparts were set free.<\/p>\n When the state reformed this system, it eliminated cash bail for criminal offenses and created a system where judges, in select instances, could still detain people pre-trial. Notably, overall crime in New Jersey, which had been decreasing prior to bail reform\u2019s implementation in 2017, continued to plummet<\/a> in the subsequent years.<\/p>\n Yet legislators today, based on a false narrative that crime in New Jersey is uniformly increasing, want to once again make it easier to detain more people before trial, going down the tired road of over-incarceration and community devastation.<\/p>\n The fact is that \u201cviolent crime\u201d in New Jersey\u2019s cities like Newark<\/a> and Trenton<\/a> has decreased. Yet we are seeing bills like S3347<\/a> and S3385<\/a> which, if enacted, will increase pre-trial detention at a time when New Jersey\u2019s courts are dealing with backlogs<\/a> and bail reform is actually working to ensure that 97% of released defendants<\/a> make court appearances. These bills will likely exacerbate the racial disparities in New Jersey\u2019s jails where 60% of detained individuals are Black<\/a>.<\/p>\n Other proposed legislation like S3006<\/a> and S3028<\/a> would create mandatory prison provisions for both youth and adults convicted of specified auto crime bills. While car theft is certainly serious and a violation of personal security, auto crime rates are actually decreasing<\/a> after rising in the previous year.<\/p>\n But regardless of crime rates, bills like these would likely not deter crime, would remove discretion from judges to evaluate the specific circumstances of a case, and would incarcerate more people of color in a system where both adult<\/a> and youth<\/a> prisons already have the worst racial disparities in the nation.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time we finally learned that we cannot over-incarcerate our way out of behavior that is largely born from structural deficiencies in opportunity and investment. That means prioritizing creative policies that invest in infrastructure and programs to prevent adults and youth from engaging in harmful behaviors in the first place. And it means investing in diversion programs that steer young people who have already been arrested away from prosecution and into programs that target mental and behavioral health issues.<\/p>\n Finally, when proposing any new criminal justice legislation, New Jersey must comply with the law requiring a racial and ethnic impact statement<\/a> (REIS) if the bill impacts \u201cpretrial detention, sentencing, probation or parole policies concerning adults and juveniles.\u201d Lawmakers routinely and illegally ignore<\/a> this requirement, as has been the case with the recently proposed bills.<\/p>\n In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King said, \u201cI am sure that each of you would want to go beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.\u201d<\/p>\n On what would be his 94th birthday, let\u2019s finally heed that call.<\/p>\n Yannick Wood is a former prosecutor and the current director of the Criminal Justice Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.<\/i><\/p>\n Our journalism needs your support. 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