Articles & Press

This end-of-session report chronicles a historic year of advocacy and organizing to advance sentencing reform in New York.

The Justice Roadmap is a collectively created legislative agenda of priority bills designed to shrink the size, scope, scale and harm of the immigration and criminal legal systems in New York State.

The Compassionate New York agenda outlines immediate actions the state legislature can take to save lives and billions of dollars in the wake of the COVID public health crisis.

As New York faces a new fiscal crisis, it is critical that funding for urgently needed community-based services not be on the chopping block. Instead, we must commit to decarceration and decriminalization and a corresponding re-allocation of resources from the carceral system back into communities.

By funneling millions of dollars into local and state elections, law enforcement unions and associations secure undemocratic influence over the decisions of elected officials and block desperately needed reform to New York’s racist, cruel, and discriminatory “justice” system.

New York State’s new bail reform laws present a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a fundamental shift away from the ineffective and immoral use of jails as a response to failures of our social safety net, including acute housing, drug user health and mental health needs.

As we work to protect New York's bail reform law, we must re-examine the staggering sums counties have historically spent on jailing compared to community-based resources.

Half-Stepping Criminal Justice Reform, written by CCA Senior Policy Fellow Marsha Weissman in collaboration with Deputy Director of Project New Opportunity (PNO) Norman Brown, draws upon the experience of PNO, a program intended to help individuals released under the Obama administration clemency initiative and federal drug law sentencing reform.

Published in May 2015, this report investigates how colleges are using high school disciplinary information in the admissions process and how high schools are responding to requests for such information about their students.

CCA and the Education from the Inside Out Coalition published this study in March 2015 to help explain how the use of the criminal history box on college applications.

This 2013 study sets out to understand, in the individual’s own words, precisely how the punishment of prison and its collateral consequences affect individuals’ financial situations and stability.