Dear Headway reader,
It was called the “McDonaldization of punishment.”
In the 1990s, alarm over high crime rates led to a raft of laws that limited the discretion the justice system applied to individual defendants. Measures such as “three strikes and you’re out” laws aimed to ensure that the system wouldn’t be too lenient on those who seemed to demonstrate a propensity for crime.
Then the United States prison population exploded in size, even as anticipated waves of violent crime never materialized and crime levels in the country declined to historic lows.
By the mid-2010s, bipartisan agreement that incarceration had gotten out of control led to support for measures that tackle the tough cases of potential overincarceration. In June, Issie Lapowsky reported for Headway on the lessons of one such initiative that came from an unlikely source: prosecutors.
Whom prison reform left behind
In 2018, California passed the nation’s first prosecutor-initiated resentencing law.
“Bipartisan demand to shrink the ballooning U.S. prison population was mounting,” Issie reports. “Yet prosecutors — who all had old cases with needlessly long sentences weighing on their consciences — were being sidelined from discussions about proposed reforms.”
Hilary Blout, who had worked as a prosecutor under Kamala Harris in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, consulted with fellow prosecutors across California to draft a law that would let them identify cases to the court where lesser sentences might be merited.
Ms. Blout founded an organization called For the People to help promote and implement the law. By 2023, four other states had passed similar laws, and roughly 1,000 people had been resentenced, by For the People’s count. But few of the resentenced individuals were women.
“In some California counties,” Issie writes, “prosecutors screened out anyone convicted of violent offenses, regardless of the circumstances.” But criteria like those inadvertently screened out women and overlooked some mitigating factors.
“Ms. Blout found that women convicted of violent offenses often play subordinate roles in crimes perpetrated by men,” Issie writes. “Those men are frequently their abusers. In some cases, their victims are those abusers.”
You can read much more about what Ms. Blout and others in the justice system learned in Issie’s story for Headway.
Taking defendants’ stories into account
Recent years have brought more efforts to take into account the particular stories of individual defendants.
Starting July 1, judges in Georgia must consider when a history of abuse may have played a role in a defendant’s breaking of the law. Like California’s prosecutor-initiated resentencing law, Georgia’s new law has bipartisan support, Maya Prabhu reports for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
The law passed the Georgia General Assembly with only three out of 236 lawmakers voting against it. That says something, Ellie Williams, an attorney with the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said.
“We had such broad and strong bipartisan support,” she said. “I think that just sends out a really strong message about how we, as a community, feel about criminalizing survivors and that everybody agrees that that’s not the way we should be handling things. The system needed to change.”
Even in cases of egregious violence, individual stories can reveal the societal factors that give rise to criminal acts. In 2023, The Marshall Project published a story by Maurice Chammah offering a rare look into the efforts of mitigation specialists — people who strive to understand the deep backgrounds of defendants in death penalty cases.
Chammah follows a case taken up by a mitigation specialist named Sara Baldwin. He credits the work of Baldwin and her colleagues for helping reduce the number of death sentences “from more than 300 annually in the mid-1990s to fewer than 30 in recent years.”
“I’ve come to see mitigation specialists like Baldwin as ambassadors from a future where we think more richly about violence,” Chammah wrote. “For the last few decades, they have documented the traumas, policy failures, family dynamics and individual choices that shape the lives of people who kill.”
— Matt Thompson
Links we liked
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In the latest story from the 50 States, 50 Fixes climate series, Mira Rojanasakul looks at how communities across West Virginia are cleaning up abandoned coal mines and restoring poisoned waterways.
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The Wall Street Journal explores how a community in Virginia came together to cut overdose fatalities by half in a single year.
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Fentanyl deaths among young people had climbed to catastrophic levels. But last year, NPR reports, federal data revealed a “stunning decline” in the number of fatal overdoses among people under 34.
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Read more of Headway’s coverage here.
A correction was made on June 26, 2025: An earlier version of a picture caption with this newsletter misspelled the given name of a woman who was serving a 28-year sentence for carjacking. She is Dena Hernandez, not Dana.
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
The post How Courts Are Rethinking Criminal Sentencing appeared first on New York Times.
