Would be to stop jailing African Americans at a 4-1 rate over drugs(mainly pot) Than whites are. There are several 1000 people surviving a life sentence. Some of them over pot possession because of 3 strike drug laws that came during Bill Clinton White House stay.

There are 211,000 people in prison at the federal level period. Not a single other person. The rest of them are in state prisons many sentenced under laws that pre dated Clinton and in any case, he didn't vote for, he didn't sign.

Get those that need treatment into treatment.

Stop the war on drugs (Bernie's vowed to do that). Decriminalize or legalize MJ (another Bernie proposal). Just stopping arresting non-violent drug offenders will drop our prison population by 20,000/year.

Begin aggressive campaigns with those groups committed to ending mass incarceration like Partners for Prison Justice who are active on the state levels.

Begin closing for profit prisons and work actively with schools to end the school to prison pipeline (another Bernie proposal).

Prison experts who've evaluated Bernie’s plan say he's easily able to get to his target of releasing 500k prisoners in his 1st term by releasing federal non-violent drug prisoners and stopping MJ arrests alone.

And yes, there's been numerous threads on this but these are policy discussions that always sink.

lets assume all 211,000 federal inmates are in for that, and no they aren't, but lets assume they are. That leaves 2,000,000 in state and local jails and prisons.

Also, California's prison population got so high it was ruled unconstitutional.

States can't afford their prison populations and want/need the political cover to reduce them.

downward?

many states are struggling with budgets, I am sure it can be done.

I am against promising to do things which we have no power to do. States, and only states, run state prisons. The Medicaid expansion ran into trouble because SCOTUS ruled that the only funding that could be linked to the expansion was that which was being spent upon it. Thus, there is no financial leverage to be had. We can't deny them funds for prisons as a whole to get them to let people out of prison. If we want state prisoners released we need to elect state officials who will release them.

States with Republican governors that passed the medicaid expansion.

You've already stated you agree with the overall premise that we need to reduce the prison population. It sounds like you just want to reduce it by less and over a longer period of time.

Stop the war on drugs (stop arresting non-violent drug offenders) and legalize MJ will easily get us to his target of reducing incarceration by 500k in his 1st term.

honest question for you. Is reducing the prison population in the US a desirable goal in your estimation? If so do you have some method of doing so?

but that would require actually helping elect down ticket candidates.

It's silly to pretend he doesn't understand the importance of that.

and even during the townhall he provided no plans at all for increasing our ranks at the federal level let alone the state level. If he finds this important he sure isn't showing it by his actions.

if she did, she shouldn't have. I recall her saying she would work to reduce the population (not giving a rank or number) and work to help those who were out of prison but had been in prison.