Mass incarceration is a civil rights crisis in the United States. The United States incarcerates people at a rate seven times higher than the European average, as a result of the rise of overly punitive policies in conjunction with the gutting of social services. Furthermore, low-income individuals and people of color are overrepresented in our jails and prisons. In fact, almost half of prisoners in New York are African American, despite the fact that they make up only 14% of the population overall. The effects of incarceration spread far beyond the individual, profoundly affecting families and communities in a vicious, debilitating cycle.  

We can - and must - do better. Anna believes that as a State, we must shift our focus away from a purely punitive justice system and make changes to the way we perceive criminal justice and rehabilitation. To accomplish this, our priorities must be investing in and developing alternatives to prison, expanding re-entry programming, as well as working within prisons themselves to ensure the fair and humane treatment of all incarcerated individuals, just access to health services, and reasonable parole requirements:  

• Encourage incarcerated individuals to pursue personal transformation by providing increased time credits toward their sentence for good behavior and enrollment in educational, vocational, and treatment-based programming (A1128, Kelles)

• Ban medical professionals from involvement in improper treatment or torture of incarcerated individuals, and give them a means to insist on proper care (A4863, Kelles)

• Ensure that exonerated individuals have access to the same services, critical to reentry into society, as those offered to formerly incarcerated individuals (A4867, Kelles)

• Remove the upper limit on the amount of money a charitable bail organization can provide (A4874, Kelles)

• Incentivize the hiring of those that have been convicted of a crime, by providing tax credits to small businesses for doing so (A4951, Kelles)

• Create a statewide system for electronic medical records to be used in correctional facilities, in order to make them more easily accessible to healthcare professionals, less vulnerable to being lost, and reducing the costs of maintaining them individually (A5902, Kelles)

• Designate jail-based substance use disorder treatments as necessary services, to ensure that incarcerated individuals have access to life saving treatments (A6226, Kelles)

• Establish that the results of a urine test for drugs are to be confidential, to prevent unproductive punishment during an individual’s recovery from substance use disorder (A6830, Kelles)

• Expunge the records of individuals convicted for possession of hypodermic needles, which was decriminalized in 2021, to remove barriers to housing, employment and education (A7466, Kelles)

• Provide immunity from prosecution for prostitution to sex workers who are victims or witnesses of crimes, to encourage the reporting of crimes without fear of repercussion (A7471, Kelles)

• Establish a drug checking services program to allow individuals to ensure the drugs or controlled substances they possess do not contain hazardous substances, to prevent unnecessary deaths and promote exposure to available substance use disorder programs (A7487, Kelles)

• Require that alternatives to incarceration be used in the case of pregnant or postpartum individuals, to protect their health from the detrimental effects of incarceration (A7585, Kelles)

• Establish an Office of Pretrial Services to create guidelines in support of the 2019 Bail Reform Law, in order to provide support to legally innocent New Yorkers accused of crimes to ensure their return to court through court hearing reminders and support services (A8424, Kelles)

• Require that the commissioner of corrections make water testing results for correctional facilities available to the public, to facility staff, and to incarcerated individuals (A9611, Kelles)