Florida under consideration for ACLU push on sentencing reform?

Criminal justice reform has become a hot topic this year, and Rand Paul isn’t the only Republican talking about such efforts on the GOP campaign trail.

Crime rates have been dropping across the country over the past decade, but in Florida the state’s incarceration rates have continued to rise.

The ACLU will soon pick three states with high incarceration rates and then sponsor ballot initiatives next year aiming to force sentencing reform, the Washington Post reported last week. Five states are being considered, but they’ll pick just three so that the group can go all-in and score some tangible victories.

“We are aware of it, and we’re very excited about it,” says the ACLU of Florida’s Baylor Johnson, when asked by Florida Politics about the report.

The national ACLU has received $80 million in funds or commitment to create a 501(c)(4)  group that will focus on ballot initiative campaigns regarding criminal justice reform and banning discrimination against the LGBT community. Karin Johanson has been hired as its first ever national political director. She’ll lead those efforts from Washington D.C.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero told the Post that neither litigation nor “old-style lobbying” is going to kickstart sentencing reform. “The gridlock in Washington is suffocating … Sitting down with legislators, walking through the pros and cons of a particular bill and trying to cajole them to do the right thing increasingly draws limited dividends. The place to light a fire under them is in their home district.”

“Though the hiring of Karin Johanson means a greater political focus from our national office at the federal level, there is also plenty of work to do at the state level as well,” says the ACLU of Florida’s Johnson. “Everything that Anthony Romero said in that interview about Washington could just as easily apply to Tallahassee, and there is no shortage of opportunities here to fight back against attacks on Floridians’ rights and personal freedoms.”

A study conducted by the Reason Foundation earlier this year suggested that Florida legislators eliminate mandatory minimum sentences in order to give judges more discretion in sentencing.

This would allow judges to prevent the imposition of arbitrary and unjust prison terms, but retain the option of imposing long terms of imprisonment for those offenders whose crimes warrant such a punishment, such as violent or serious offenders. Eliminating mandatory minimum prison terms does not mean that individuals will suddenly stop being sent to prison for these crimes, but it will instead allow judges to make individual determinations in sentencing, so that a convicted offender receives a punishment that is proportionate to the crime committed.

The report also called for legislators to significantly increase the threshold necessary to trigger certain drug trafficking offenses and subsequent mandatory minimum prison terms so that they are targeted at higher-level dealers as intended, not low-level offenders.