In December 2020, more than 150 New York advocacy groups and multiple state legislators unveiled the Justice Roadmap, a progressive wish list of criminal justice reform measures ranging from legalizing cannabis to eliminating parole fees.
“The idea that someone could be incarcerated for [more than] thirty years and not even be given the possibility of parole, for some of them, no fair parole hearing, is fundamentally unjust to me. It really calls into question the entire function of the carceral system.”
In January, the proposal’s odds of passage got a shot in the arm when Julia Salazar, a progressive Democratic state senator from Brooklyn, assumed leadership of the powerful Crime Victims, Crime, and Correction Committee, which oversees the state’s incarceration facilities.
Salazar tells The Progressive that promoting the Justice Roadmap will be one of her committee’s main focuses this year. About half a dozen of its items fall within the committee’s purview, including bills to severely restrict the use of solitary confinement, increase eligibility for parole, and mandate more frequent parole hearings for senior inmates. Salazar hopes to see all of them pass.
“For generations, Black and brown people, and people in low-income communities have suffered disproportionately from policies that resulted in the criminalization of poverty and contributed to mass incarceration of entire communities,” Marvin Mayfield tells The Progressive. Mayfield is an organizer with the criminal justice reform group Center For Community Alternatives, a leading sponsor of the Roadmap. “The Justice Roadmap is a legislative agenda to create equity, justice, fairness, and decarceration in New York State,” he adds.
Momentum for criminal justice reform has been building for several years in New York State. In 2019, the state legislature passed a historic bail reform package; in 2020, it repealed the state’s notorious 50-A law, which shielded police records from public view.
New York voters elected a historically progressive legislature in 2020, giving rise to hopes that 2021 will be a historic year for state criminal justice reform. Already this session, legislators repealed the state’s anti-loitering law, which was dubbed a “Walking While Trans” ban because of its use by police to harass transgender individuals.
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Julia Salazar
Salazar, who was first elected in 2018 with the backing of groups including the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, has a history of criminal justice advocacy. Before her election, she was an organizer with the Communities United For Police Reform coalition, which sought to promote police transparency and create accountability for officers involved in killings of civilians.
During this time, she lobbied members of the very committee that she now chairs. Once elected, on a platform centering criminal justice reform, she was a strong supporter of the bail reform law, the repeal of 50-A, and the repeal of the Walking While Trans law.
Criminal justice reform “is a really strong interest of mine,” Salazar says. “I have experience working with people who are directly impacted by the kinds of policies that we’ll be reviewing in the committee.”
Last month, in one of her first acts as chair of the Crime Victims, Crime, and Correction Committee, Salazar and other legislators revealed plans to make a series of unannounced surprise visits to incarceration facilities throughout the state to inspect conditions.
On January 31, Salazar and Assembly member Carmen de la Rosa, Democrat of Manhattan, spent four hours at the Fishkill Correctional Facility in New York’s Hudson Valley, meeting with both staff and incarcerated individuals.
Salazar says that visiting Fishkill, in addition to being part of her role as committee chair, was also a way for her to represent her Brooklyn district, which includes many “communities that have been impacted severely by mass incarceration.”
Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood partially in Salazar’s district, has one of the highest rates of incarceration in New York State, and Salazar said that many of the incarcerated individuals that she met at Fishkill were themselves residents of Brooklyn, including some from her own district.
“I met a lot of men at Fishkill incarcerated for longer than my entire life,” Salazar, who is thirty, says. “I met people like an eighty-one-year-old man who has severe dementia and has been incarcerated since he was thirty-six.”
“The idea that someone could be incarcerated for [more than] thirty years and not even be given the possibility of parole, for some of them, no fair parole hearing, is fundamentally unjust to me,” she says. “It really calls into question the entire function of the carceral system.”
Marvin Mayfield says Salazar’s visit to Fishkill, and her plans to conduct further visits, demonstrates her commitment to the cause of reform. “She’s leading by example,” he says, adding that her and other legislators’ visits are “not only a fact-gathering mission, but also letting people who are incarcerated know that they are not forgotten. They are still human beings. They are still people no matter what they may have done.”
Passing the items in the Justice Roadmap won’t be easy—especially with a governor, Andrew Cuomo, who has previously opposed ambitious criminal justice reform measures. But Salazar still considers the odds of passage “really high.”
Mayfield, also a leading organizer for the Justice Roadmap, says the changing composition of the legislature will help. “There’s been a big influx of legislators we just voted in, and we have been developing relationships with them, letting them see stories firsthand” about the effects of mass incarceration in New York State, he says.
Some freshman legislators have already endorsed proposals in the Justice Roadmap, such as Democratic State Senator Jeremy Cooney of Syracuse. On February 4, Cooney announced his support for the progressive version of cannabis legalization endorsed by the Justice Roadmap, in which cannabis tax revenue would go directly to communities impacted by the war on drugs, in opposition to the version of legalization proposed by Governor Cuomo, in which the Governor would largely maintain control over new revenue.
And Mayfield points to the Justice Roadmap’s past successes as reason for hope. “Some of the things that were on the 2020 Justice Roadmap are not there anymore,” he says. “And you want to know why? It’s because we got those things passed.”