NEWS: Bernie Sanders Releases Justice and
Safety for All Plan
Blueprint
aims to reform every aspect of America’s
dysfunctional criminal justice system, ridding
it of institutional racism and corporate
profiteering
COLUMBIA, SC – Bernie Sanders will release a
comprehensive plan to reform the entire American
criminal justice system today in the Greenview
neighborhood of Columbia, South Carolina. The plan
is designed to root out the institutional racism
and corporate profiteering that is plaguing the
existing system.
During his speech, Sanders is expected to say:
If we stand together, we can eliminate private
prisons and detention centers. No more
profiteering from locking people up. If we stand
together we can end the disastrous “war on drugs.”
If we stand together we can end cash bail.
No more keeping people in jail because
they’re too poor. If we stand together we can
enact real police department reform and prosecute
police brutality. If we stand together, there is
nothing, nothing, nothing that we cannot
accomplish.
Sanders has fought mass incarceration during his
decades in Congress, and he
campaigned for
president in 2016 on a pledge to end
for-profit prisons -- a pledge that other
Democrats have subsequently decided to support 4
years later. Sanders’ new plan reiterates his
original call to ban for-profit prisons, and
builds on his leadership on criminal justice with
new proposals for a top-to-bottom reform of
America’s law enforcement, judicial and
incarceration systems. They include:
End for-profit
greed in our criminal justice system, top to
bottom
- Ending for-profit
greed in our criminal justice system, top to
bottom, including banning cash bail and
banning civil asset forfeiture, which allows
police departments to seize property from
people who have not been accused or convicted
of a crime.
- Ensure the
criminal justice system is not the “best
justice money can buy” by vastly increasing
funding for public defenders and creating a
federal formula to ensure populations have a
minimum number of public defenders to meet
their needs, and working with states to set a
minimum starting salary for public defenders.
End Mass
Incarceration and Excessive Sentencing and
Inhumane Incarceration and Transform the Way We
Police Communities
- Reversing mass
incarceration and setting a goal of cutting
the incarcerated population in half.
- Transforming the
way we police our communities, creating an
unarmed civilian corp of first responders to
handle mental health emergencies,
homelessness, and other low-level issues that
should not require contact with the police and
criminal justice system.
- Creating national
standards for use of police force that
emphasize de-escalation rather than violence,
and holding police misconduct to strict
federal standards, including limiting
qualified immunity for police officers,
creating a federal deadly use of force
database, and a registry of disreputable
officers.
- Ending the War on
Drugs, including legalizing marijuana and
expunging past convictions for
marijuana-related offenses and finally ending
the sentencing disparities for crack cocaine
and powder cocaine offenses.
- Abolishing the
death penalty and solitary confinement.
- Enacting a
Prisoner Bill of Rights for incarcerated
individuals, including living wages, access to
families, access to educational and vocational
training, and the right to vote.
Reverse the
Criminalization of Communities, End Cycles of
Violence and Provide Support to Survivors of
Crime
- Reversing the
criminalization of disability, addiction, and
homelessness.
- Treat children in
the criminal justice system as children. This
means raising the age to charge children in
adult court to 18, ending long mandatory
minimum sentences and life without parole
sentences for youth, decriminalizing truancy,
and investing in youth diversion programs and
alternatives to the court and prison system.
- End cycles of
violence and interrupt them before they begin.
This means focusing law enforcement resources
on solving homicides and other serious crimes,
funding Cure Violence programs and similar
proven violence interruption models, and
ending the national rape kit backlog.
- Support the
victims and survivors of crimes by providing
sustained resources to survivors and their
families, including mental health care, trauma
recovery services, relocation services, and
assistance with basic needs.
Sanders will release his plan during a major
speech at a town hall meeting in the Greenview
neighborhood of Columbia, South Carolina at 2pm.
Read the full plan
HERE.
Watch the speech
HERE.
https://berniesanders.com/justice-and-safety-for-all/
Justice and Safety for All
“It is said that
no one truly knows a nation until one has been
inside its jails.” – Nelson Mandela
For most of our history as a country, the United
States incarcerated people at about the same rates
as other western democracies do today. In the
early 1970s we had the same low crime rate as
today, but we now have an incarceration rate five
times higher. Indeed, America is now the world’s
leading jailer. We lock up more than 2 million
people in America, which is more of our own people
than any country on Earth. And that does not
include another 5 million people who are under the
supervision of the correctional system.
Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people in
America have not been convicted of a crime and are
solely in jail because they can’t afford their
bail. We are criminalizing poverty.
Due to the historical legacy of institutional
racism in this country, mass incarceration
disportionately falls on the shoulders of black
and brown people in America. In fact, black
Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate
of white Americans, and even though people use
drugs like marijuana at roughly the same rates
across all races, black Americans are nearly four
times more likely to be arrested for marijuana
possession than white Americans. These disparities
pervade every aspect of the criminal justice
system. Black Americans, and especially young
black men, are more likely to be stopped by the
police, subjected to excessive force, arrested,
and jailed than whites.
When Bernie is president, we will finally make the
deep and structural investments to rebuild the
communities that mass incarceration continues to
decimate.
We must move away from an overly-punitive approach
to public safety and start focusing on how to
safeguard our communities, prevent the conditions
that lead to arrests, and rehabilitate people who
have made mistakes
End Profiteering in Our Criminal Justice
System
We must end the practice of corporations profiting
off the suffering of incarcerated people and their
families. The private prison industry is growing —
and so are the horror stories. In Mississippi, the
rate of violent assault in private prisons
was
two to three
times that of publicly-run facilities.
At one facility, juveniles as young as
13 years old were
common targets of sexual assault. No one should be
able to profit from filling our jails and prisons.
As has been reported, private prisons also act on
their profit incentive by advocating for longer
sentences for people convicted of a crime.
Additionally, corporations and police departments
rake in billions in fines and fees from
disadvantaged communities. The prison phone
industry, for example, is a monopoly business
worth more than $1 billion a year, with companies
charging sky-high fees for telephone calls that
many families can’t afford to pay to keep in touch
with their loved ones. Today,
1 in 28 children has
an incarcerated parent — a fifth of which are
under four years old. Children with incarcerated
parents tend to do worse in school, experience
anxiety and depression, and develop behavioral
issues.
Corporations and cities alike rake in hundreds of
millions of dollars in fines and fees off the
backs of our most vulnerable communities. But it
should not be this way. Everyday people who
already are struggling to get by should not be
made to subsidize the criminal justice system.
Right now, a person charged with an offense who
cannot afford a lawyer is often charged a public
defender fee and levied court costs, even if that
person is not convicted of any crime. More than 40
states use driver’s license suspension as a means
of pressuring people to pay various court fees,
which means people cannot drive to work to earn a
living. The inability to pay fines or fees also
can lead to people spending far more time
incarcerated, effectively creating modern-day
debtors prisons. Fines and fees for people who
cannot afford them are counterproductive, serve no
legitimate government interest, and leave already
vulnerable people even more vulnerable.
As president, Bernie will:
- Ban for-profit prisons.
- Make prison phone calls and other
communications such as video chats free of
charge.
- Audit the practices of commissaries
and use regulatory authority to end price
gouging and exorbitant fees.
- Incentivize states and localities
to end police departments’ reliance on fines
and fees for revenue.
- Remove the profit motive from our
re-entry system and diversion, community
supervision, or treatment programs, and ensure
people leaving incarceration or participating
in diversion, community supervision, or
treatment programs can do so free of charge.
End Cash Bail
Right now, hundreds of thousands of people without
a criminal conviction are in jail simply because
they could not afford bail. Young people can
spend
hundreds of days in
jail, only to be acquitted — yet the severe damage
to their lives cannot be undone. This is why
Bernie introduced the No Money Bail Act of
2018to end cash bail and to end the
criminalization of poverty in America.
As president, Bernie will:
- End the use of secured bonds in
federal criminal proceedings.
- Provide grants to states to reduce
their pretrial detention populations, which
are particularly high at the county level, and
require states to report on outcomes as a
condition of renewing their funding.
- Withhold funding from states that
continue the use of cash bail systems.
- Ensure that alternatives to cash
bail are not leading to disparities in the
system.
Transform the Way We Police Communities
The people who serve our country as police
officers deserve our gratitude and respect. As a
country, though, we are asking them to do far too
much. As human beings, we all share common
vulnerabilities, and we all share basic needs to
live a stable and dignified life.
In America, we have not made the necessary
investments to secure a strong enough social
fabric to ensure that people’s basic needs are
met. So, in lieu of addressing problems directly,
we ask police officers to address every societal
issue that results from the tears in the fabric,
whether it be mental illness, addiction,
homelessness, or poverty. We ask these
overstressed police officers to fill roles they
are not trained or equipped for — doubling as
social workers, conflict negotiators, and medical
responders. Last year, more police officers died
of suicide than in the line of duty. We need to
shift our emphasis toward solving problems in ways
that don’t rely on policing and incarceration as a
first option by supporting alternative strategies
to make individuals and communities safer and
healthier.
In other ways, we must hold our police and
sheriff’s departments to a higher standard. And we
must end harmful policing practices like racial
profiling, stop and frisk, oppressive “broken
windows” policing, and the militarization of
police forces — all of which actively undermine
public safety and community trust in law
enforcement. Widespread use of excessive force,
including deadly shootings of unarmed civilians,
undermine the integrity of and public trust in the
police. Violence and brutality of any kind,
particularly at the hands of the police meant to
protect and serve our communities, must not be
tolerated.
Ensure Law Enforcement Accountability and
Robust Oversight
- Rescind former Attorney General
Jeff Sessions’ guidance on consent decrees.
- Revitalize the use of Department of
Justice investigations, consent decrees, and
federal lawsuits to address systemic
constitutional violations by police
departments.
- Ensure accountability, strict
guidelines and independent oversight for all
federal funds used by police
departments.
- End federal programs that provide
military equipment to local police forces.
- Create a federally managed database
of police use of deadly force.
- Provide grants for states and
cities to establish civilian oversight
agencies with enforceable accountability
mechanisms.
- Establish federal standards for the
use of body cameras, including establishing
third-party agencies to oversee the storage
and release of police videos.
- Mandate criminal liability for
civil rights violations resulting from police
misconduct.
- Limit the use of “qualified
immunity” to address the lack of criminal
liability for civil rights violations
resulting from police misconduct.
- Conduct a U.S. Attorney General’s
investigation whenever someone is killed in
police custody.
- Establish a federal no-call policy,
including a registry of disreputable federal
law enforcement officers, so testimony from
untrustworthy sources does not lead to
criminal convictions. Provide financial
support to pilot local and state level no-call
lists.
- Ban the use of facial recognition
software for policing.
Provide More Support to Police Officers and
Create A Robust Non-Law Enforcement Alternative
Response System
- Establish national standards for
use of force by police that emphasize
de-escalation.
- Require and fund police officer
training on implicit bias (to include biases
based on race, gender, sexual orientation and
identity, religion, ethnicity and class),
cultural competency, de-escalation, crisis
intervention, adolescent development, and how
to interact with people with mental and
physical disabilities. We will ensure that
training is conducted in a meaningful way with
strict independent oversight and enforceable
guidelines.
- Ban the practice of any law
enforcement agency benefiting from civil asset
forfeiture. Limit or eliminate federal
criminal justice funding for any state or
locality that does not comply.
- Provide funding to states and
municipalities to create civilian corps of
unarmed first responders, such as social
workers, EMTs, and trained mental health
professionals, who can handle order
maintenance violations, mental health
emergencies, and low-level conflicts outside
the criminal justice system, freeing police
officers to concentrate on the most serious
crimes.
- Incentivize access to counseling
and mental health services for officers.
- Diversify police forces and
academies and incentivize officers to live and
work in the communities they serve.
Ensuring All Americans Due Process
The criminal justice system is rigged. The United
States has a criminal justice system that is built
to put the profit interests of billion-dollar
industries like the bail bondsman over the
interests of everyday, working people. It’s time
to tell the bail industry, and the private prison
industry, and the private probation industry, and
anyone who profits from incarceration, that we are
going to put the well-being of the people first.
But that’s not enough. The size of your bank
account too often determines the quality of
representation that a person will receive. If you
cannot afford to pay fines and fees associated
with criminal justice involvement, you can end up
in a spiraling cycle of debt, with a suspended
driver’s license, or even locked up in a modern
debtor’s prison. We need a system that works
equally well for the workers and the wealthy.
Right to Counsel
In 1963, the Supreme Court decided
Gideon v.
Wainwright, guaranteeing all felony
defendants counsel, yet today 90 to 95 percent of
criminal cases are
decided by
a
plea
deal,
too
often
without
the
defendant playing an active role.
Across the United States,
more than 80
percent of felony defendants cannot
afford a privately retained lawyer and have to
rely on state-administered public defenders or
court-appointed counsel. Yet in states across the
country, public defenders have far too many
clients and too few resources to offer adequate
representation. Despite the often heroic efforts
of public defenders and other appointed counsel,
the workload makes it impossible to provide the
quality of representation that each defendant
deserves.
77 percent of black Americans and 73 percent of
Latinos in state prisons had a
public defender or
court-appointed counsel, yet 75 percent of
county-based public defender office have
exceeded the
maximum
recommended
limit
of
cases
received
per
attorney.
America must not be a country where only the rich
enjoy the protections of the Fifth Amendment. We
must not have a court system that offers “the best
justice money can buy.” We must guarantee all
Americans their Sixth Amendment rights.
As president, Bernie will:
- Triple national spending on
indigent defense, to $14 billion annually.
- After a review of current salaries
and workload, set a minimum starting salary
for all public defenders.
- Create and set a national formula
to assure populations have a minimum number of
public defenders to assure full access to
constitutional right to due process.
- Establish federal guidelines and
goals for a right to counsel, including
policies that reduce the number of cases
overall.
- Create a federal agency to provide
support and oversight for state public defense
services.
- Authorize the Department of Justice
to take legal action against jurisdictions
that are not meeting their Sixth Amendment
obligations.
- Cancel all existing student debt
and cancel any future student debt for public
defenders through the Public Service Loan
Forgiveness Program.
Ensure Accountability and Fairness in
Prosecution
Prosecutors today have undue discretion in
deciding which cases will be charged, and they are
largely protected from liability when they break
the rules.
They also have an advantage in plea bargaining
cases. People in jail without financial sources
are more likely to plead guilty than fight the
case. And they are more likely to receive harsher
penalties than those who aren’t detained.
The
vast majority of
cases — 97 percent of federal cases and
94 percent of state cases — end in plea
agreements. We must ensure that our system is fair
and that prosecutors are accountable.
As president, Bernie will:
- Rescind former Attorney General
Jeff Sessions’ orders on prosecutorial
discretion and low-level offenses.
- Appoint an Attorney General
committed to public safety and creating a more
just and humane criminal justice system.
- Limit “absolute immunity” for
prosecutors, which is used to shield
wrongdoers from liability.
- End the practice of jailing
material witnesses.
- Place a moratorium on the use of
the algorithmic risk assessment tools in the
criminal justice system until an audit is
completed. We must ensure these tools do not
have any implicit biases that lead to unjust
or excessive sentences.
Ending Mass Incarceration and Excessive
Sentencing
Today, the United States imprisons people at a
higher rate than any other nation, in no small
part due to extremely harsh sentencing policies
and the War on Drugs. But mass incarceration has
not made us any safer or reduced drug use and
addiction. On the contrary, it has cost lives and
diverted resources that could be used to prevent
crime through social investment.
We must end the War on Drugs that has
disproportionately affected black and brown
people.
The U.S.
ranks highest in
incarceration rates among Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
countries, twice as much as Turkey, which has the
second-highest rate of incarceration.
Capital punishment has failed to reduce violent
crime and is disproportionately apportioned to the
poor and black and brown people. It has also cost
innocent lives. According to the
Equal Justice
Initiative, for every nine people executed
in this country since the reinstatement of capital
punishment, one innocent person on death row has
been identified and exonerated.
As president, Bernie will:
- Abolish the death penalty.
- Reverse the Trump administration’s
guidance on the use of death penalty drugs
with the goal of ending the death penalty at
the state level.
- Stop excessive sentencing with the
goal of cutting the incarcerated population in
half.
- End mandatory sentencing minimums.
- Reinstate a federal parole system
and end truth-in-sentencing. People serving
long sentences will undergo a “second look”
process to make sure their sentence is still
appropriate.
- End “three strikes” laws. No one
should spend their life behind bars for
committing minor crimes, even if they commit
several of them.
- Invigorate and expand the
compassionate release process so that people
with disabilities, the sick and elderly are
transitioned out of incarceration whenever
possible.
- Expand the use of sentencing
alternatives, including community supervision
and publicly funded halfway houses. This
includes funding state-based pilot programs to
establish alternatives to incarceration,
including models based on restorative justice
and free access to treatment and social
services.
- Revitalize the executive clemency
process by creating an independent clemency
board removed from the Department of Justice
and placed in White House.
- Stop the criminalization of
homelessness and spend more than $25 billion
over five years to end homelessness. This
includes doubling McKinney-Vento homelessness
assistance grants to build permanent
supportive housing, and $500 million to
provide outreach to homeless people to help
connect them to available services. In the
first year of this plan, 25,000 Housing Trust
Fund units will be prioritized for housing the
homeless.
End the War on Drugs and Stop Criminalizing
Addiction
The disastrous policies that make up the War on
Drugs have not reduced drug use and violent crime.
We must use effective therapeutic, not punitive,
solutions to address drug addiction.
As president, Bernie will:
- Legalize marijuana and vacate and
expunge past marijuana convictions, and ensure
that revenue from legal marijuana is
reinvested in communities hit hardest by the
War on Drugs.
- Provide people struggling with
addiction with the health care they need by
guaranteeing health care — including inpatient
and outpatient substance abuse and mental
health services with no copayments or
deductibles — to all people as a right,
not a privilege, through a Medicare-for-all,
single-payer program.
- Decriminalize possession of
buprenorphine, which helps to treat opioid
addiction, and ensure that first responders
carry naloxone to prevent overdoses.
- Legalize safe injection sites and
needle exchanges around the country, and
support pilot programs for supervised
injection sites, which have shown to
substantially reduce drug overdose deaths.
- Raise the threshold for when drug
charges are federalized, as federal charges
carry longer sentences.
- Work with states to fund and pursue
innovative overdose prevention
initiatives.
- Institute a full review of the
current sentencing guidelines and end the
sentencing disparity between crack and
cocaine.
Treat Children Like Children
We must end the school-to-prison pipeline. Black
students, even in preschool, are nearly four times
as likely to be suspended as white students,
putting them at greater risk of falling behind and
getting caught up in the juvenile justice system.
Black and brown students and students with
disabilities are more likely to be subjected to
exclusionary discipline measures than their peers.
When a child is pushed out of school they lose
instructional time and are more likely to become
involved with the juvenile and adult justice
systems.
As president, Bernie will:
- Ban the prosecution of children
under the age of 18 in adult courts.
- Work to ensure that all juvenile
facilities are designed for rehabilitation and
growth.
- Ensure youth are not jailed or
imprisoned for misdemeanor offenses.
- Ensure juveniles are not be housed
in adult prisons.
- End solitary confinement for
youth.
- Abolish long mandatory minimum
sentences and life-without-parole sentences
for youth.
- Eliminate criminal charges for
school-based disciplinary behavior that would
not otherwise be criminal and invest in school
nurses, counselors, teachers, teaching
assistants, and small class sizes to address
disciplinary issues.
- Ensure every school has the
necessary school counselors and wrap-around
services by providing $5 billion annually to
expand the sustainable community school
model.
- End the use of juvenile fees.
- Decriminalize truancy for all youth
and their parents.
- Eliminate federal incentives for
schools to implement zero-tolerance
policies.
- Invest in local youth diversion
programs as alternatives to the court and
prison system.
- Work with teachers, school
administrators, and the disability rights
movement to end restraint and seclusion
discipline in schools.
Reform Our Decrepit Prison System to Make
Jails and Prisons More Humane
Incarceration should always be a last resort, but
when it is necessary, the conditions of
confinement should be safe, humane, and designed
for rehabilitation. Yet, too often, jails are
violent and deeply destabilizing places. They not
only fail to prepare people to reintegrate into
society, they affirmatively make people more
traumatized, sick, and vulnerable.
America’s prisons are hotbeds of human rights
violations, torture, sexual assault, and wrongful
imprisonment. Prisoners are being crammed into
overcrowded cells and made to live in unsanitary
conditions. They are not getting the medical
attention they need and are being forced to work
as modern-day indentured servants while
corporations rake in profits. We must put an end
to this barbarism and respect the rights of all
human beings and treat them with basic dignity.
As president, Bernie will:
Enact a Prisoner Bill of Rights that guarantees:
- Ending solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement is a form of torture and
unconstitutional, plain and simple.
- Access to free medical care in
prisons and jails, including professional and
evidence-based substance abuse and
trauma-informed mental health treatment.
- Incarcerated trans people have
access to all the health care they need.
- Access to free educational and
vocational training. This includes ending the
ban on Pell Grants for all incarcerated people
without any exceptions.
- Living wages and safe working
conditions, including maximum work hours, for
all incarcerated people for their labor.
- The right to vote. All voting-age
Americans must have the right and meaningful
access to vote, whether they are incarcerated
or not. We will re-enfranchise the right to
vote to the millions of Americans who have had
their vote taken away by a felony conviction.
- Ending prison gerrymandering,
ensuring incarcerated people are counted in
their communities, not where they are
incarcerated.
- Establishment of an Office of
Prisoner Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
within the Department of Justice to
investigate civil rights complaints from
incarcerated individuals and provide
independent oversight to make sure that
prisoners are housed in safe, healthy,
environments.
- Protection from sexual abuse and
harassment, including mandatory federal
prosecution of prison staff who engage in such
misconduct.
- Access to their families —
including unlimited visits, phone calls, and
video calls.
- A determination for the most
appropriate setting for people with
disabilities and safe, accessible conditions
for people with disabilities in prisons and
jails.
Ensure a Just Transition Post-Release
This year, three-quarters of a million people will
return home from prison and millions more from
jails. Most of them will face enormous barriers
that make successful re-entry nearly impossible.
We must put an end to employment discrimination
and eliminate barriers to training and education.
Once someone has served their time they should not
be excluded from social programs, public housing,
medical care, and the right to vote and serve on
juries.
As president, Bernie will:
- Make expungement broadly
available.
- Remove legal and regulatory
barriers and facilitate access to services so
that people returning home from jail or prison
can build a stable and productive life.
- Create a federal agency responsible
for monitoring re-entry.
- “Ban the box” by removing questions
regarding conviction histories from job and
other applications.
- Enact fair chance licensing reform
to remove unfair restrictions on occupational
licensure based on criminal history.
- Increase funding for re-entering
youth programs. We will also pass a massive
youth jobs program to provide jobs and
job-training opportunities for disadvantaged
young Americans who face high unemployment
rates.
- Guarantee safe, decent, affordable
housing.
- Remove the profit motive from our
re-entry system and diversion, community
supervision, or treatment programs, and ensure
people leaving incarceration or participating
in diversion, community supervision, or
treatment programs can do so free of charge.
- Guarantee jobs and free job
training at trade schools and apprenticeship
programs.
End Cycles of Violence and Provide Support to
Survivors of Crime
America has a crisis of both too much punishment
and too little accountability. Despite popular
assumptions that victims of crime only support
long sentences and prison expansion, a
national
survey of
crime
survivors
revealed
that
what
people
harmed
by crimes want most is to ensure that they are not
harmed again and that no one else will be harmed
either. By a significant margin, crime survivors
prefer fairer prison sentences, greater
investments in crime prevention, rehabilitation,
schools and education, and mental health and drug
treatment.
Crime survivors also want the support they need
and deserve to get back on their feet, like trauma
and recovery services to help stop cycles of
violence and crime. Roughly half of all sexual
assault victims lose their jobs or are forced to
quit their jobs. In the United States, about
two-thirds of those injured from intimate partner
violence, predominantly women, do not receive
medical care. Of all domestic violence victims who
need housing, more than half do not receive this
help, and about 40 percent of them become homeless
at some point in their lives.
To provide justice and support to crime survivors,
and to interrupt the cycle of violence so that
there are fewer crime victims in the future,
requires a realignment of policing priorities and
deep investments to get survivors the support that
they need.
When Bernie is in the White House, he
will:
Stop The Cycle of
Violence by Prioritizing the Most Serious
Offenses
- Focus law enforcement resources to
dramatically increase the solve rate of the
most serious offenses, such as shootings,
homicides, and sexual assaults.
- Fund Cure Violence and similar
proven effective violence interruption models
to stop violent incidents before they begin.
- Fund programs for people who are at
serious risk of being either the perpetrator
or victim of gun violence, provide non-law
enforcement-led services including job
training and placement assistance, education,
and help covering basic needs such as housing,
food, and transportation.
- Provide funding to end the national
rape kit backlog and institute new rules
requiring that rape kits be tested and that
victims are provided with updates on the
status of their rape kits.
- Address gender-based violence on
college campuses by reversing Education
Secretary Betsy DeVos’ decision to weaken
Title IX protections. We will protect and
enforce Title IX.
Provide Adequate Support to Crime Survivors
- Provide real options and sustained
resources to crime survivors and their
families, including mental health care, trauma
recovery services, victim relocations
services, and help covering basic needs such
as housing, food, and transportation.
- Funding sex trafficking research
and prevention programs that include early
identification of vulnerable populations, like
foster children and youth in transition, as
well as Native American women.
- Immediately reauthorize the
Violence Against Women Act.
- Provide housing assistance and paid
leave for victims of sexual assault.
- Expand non-police interventions for
domestic violence, including a national help
hotline and state-funded, long-term
counseling.
Reverse the Criminalization of Disability
According to the Department of Justice, one in
five inmates in prisons are people with a
cognitive disability, while another one in five
inmates have a serious mental illness. Instead of
incarceration, we should be providing people with
disabilities with the services and supports they
need to stay in the community, including mental
health care and home and community-based services.
Not only is it the right thing to do, but it costs
significantly less to provide someone with the
necessary supports and services to stay in the
community than it does to incarcerate them.
Reversing
Criminalization
- All too often, people with
disabilities, especially people of color with
disabilities, face violence from law
enforcement. This requires more than just
training — it requires accountability.
Approximately half of
all people who die in police-involved
shootings have a disability. In order to
protect the rights of people with
disabilities, we intend to make discriminatory
law enforcement interactions with people with
disabilities a major enforcement priority of
the Civil Rights Division.
- Recognizing the humanitarian crisis
in our country created by the incarceration of
people with mental illness, we will use the
Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision to
challenge states that have failed to
adequately support the voluntary,
community-based mental health services that
can divert people with mental illness from
ending up in the criminal justice system.
- Bar criminal charges for
school-based behavior that would not otherwise
be criminal and invest in school nurses,
counselors, teachers, teaching assistants, and
small class sizes to address disciplinary
issues. We will ensure every school has the
necessary school counselors and wrap-around
services by providing $5 billion annually to
expand the sustainable community school model.
- Work with teachers, school
administrators, and the disability rights
movement to end restraint and seclusion
discipline in schools.
- Invigorate and expand the
compassionate release process so that people
with disabilities are transitioned out of
incarceration whenever possible.
- Invest in diversion programs as
alternatives to the court and prison system
for people with disabilities and ensure those
people have the community-based supports and
services they need.
- Stop the criminalization of
homelessness and spend over $25 billion over
the next five years to end homelessness. This
includes doubling McKinney-Vento homelessness
assistance grants to build permanent
supportive housing, and $500 million to
provide outreach to homeless people to help
connect them to available services. In the
first year of this plan, 25,000 Housing Trust
Fund units will be prioritized for housing the
homeless.
- Create an Office of Disability in
the DOJ focused on coordinating these efforts,
including the reduction of incarcerated people
with disabilities, reducing recidivism and
guaranteeing a just re-entry for people with
disabilities, and ensuring every aspect of our
criminal justice system is ADA compliant.
Investing in
Community Living
- Guarantee mental health care to
people with disabilities as a human right,
including all the supports and services needed
to stay in the community. Mental health care,
under Medicare for All, will be free at the
point of service, with no copayments or
deductibles which can be a barrier to
treatment. The plan will also provide home-
and community-based long-term services and
supports to all and cover prescription drugs.
- Train, recruit, and increase the
number of mental health providers to provide
culturally competent care in underserved
communities.
- Guarantee that people with
disabilities have safe, accessible, and
integrated affordable housing.
- People with disabilities deserve
jobs that pay a living wage. It’s time to end
the subminimum wage and guarantee truly
integrated employment opportunities for people
with disabilities.
- Triple Title I funding, expand the
IDEA, and make other major investments in
public K-12 education as outlined in the Thurgood
Marshall Plan for Public Education and
Educators. Crucially, the plan will
provide mandatory funding to ensure that the
federal government provides at least 50
percent of the funding for IDEA and guarantee
children with disabilities an equal right to
high-quality education by enforcing the
Americans with Disabilities Act.
- Guarantee tuition- and debt-free
public colleges, universities, trade schools,
and apprenticeship programs and the end equity
gap in higher education attainment for people
with disabilities by ensuring all our students
get the help they need so they are ready for
college and receive the support they need when
they are in college.
- Increase educational opportunities
for persons with disabilities, including an
expansion in career and technical education
opportunities to prepare students for
good-paying community employment.
Investing in Our Communities
Today, we spend billions of dollars on jails and
prisons — including $38 million a day detaining
people awaiting trial—but too often do not make
the investments while neglecting the upfront
services and infrastructure that communities need
to thrive. We know that a lack of quality
education deficiencies in our education system can
play a major role in mass incarceration. For
example, in places like South Carolina, we spend
twice as much on incarcerating people than we do
on educating them.
We also know that we have a racial economic
disparity within the broader economic disparity in
America. Black Americans currently have ten cents
for every dollar white Americans have. Latinx
Americans currently have thirteen cents for every
dollar white Americans have. Redlining prevents
businesses owned by people of color from getting
loans, and predatory lending results in higher
interest rates in low-income communities of
color.
Prison is not a solution for social problems. We
need to address the deeper structural problems
that give rise to crime, such as joblessness,
income inequality, lack of education, and
untreated substance abuse.
As president, Bernie will:
- Enact a federal jobs guarantee to
provide good jobs at a living wage
revitalizing and taking care of the community.
- Pass a $15 minimum wage.
- Guarantee mental health care to
people with disabilities as a human right,
including all the supports and services needed
needed to stay in the community. Mental health
care, under Medicare for All, will be free at
the point of service, with no copayments or
deductibles which can be a barrier to
treatment.
- Provide people struggling with
addiction the health care they need by
guaranteeing health care, which includes
inpatient and outpatient substance abuse and
mental health services with no copayments or
deductibles, to all people as a right, not a
privilege, through a Medicare-for-all,
single-payer program.
- Provide transportation benefits to
and from health services for those who need
it. We will invest in our health care
workforce and infrastructure to ensure that
all communities have access to these
services.
- Enact paid family leave, so people
can take time off from work to help themselves
or a family member as they go through
treatment.
- Ensure that people who interacted
with the justice system are still able to get
the rehabilitation services they need and are
able to find housing and employment.
- Triple Title I funding, expand the
IDEA, invest in afterschool programs, and make
other major investments in public K-12
education as outlined in our Thurgood
Marshall Plan for Public Education and
Educators. This plan will expand the
sustainable community school model which will
fund trauma-informed care and services in
schools, especially those schools which have
been impacted by the War on Drugs, immigration
raids, and shootings.
- End the exploitative practices of
payday lenders and ensure all Americans have
access to basic financial services through the
Post Office, and capping interest rates on
consumer loans and credit cards at 15 percent
across all financial institutions. States will
be empowered to cap rates even lower than 15
percent.
- Tie Department of Transportation
funding to integration and improving commuting
in urban centers, and restore the TIGER
program to focus on public
transportation.
- Create a $10 billion grant program
within the Minority Business Development
Agency to provide grants to entrepreneurs of
color.
- Pass the WATER Act to create a $35
billion annual fund to remove and replace lead
pipes in communities throughout the country.
- Ensure federal resources are
focused on the Americans who need it most —
often as a result of structural disadvantage.
We will implement the 10-20-30 approach to
federal investments which focuses substantial
federal resources on distressed communities
that have high levels of poverty.