Three reports from three organizations making it clear that reducing excessive prison sentences for violent crimes is critical to ending mass incarceration and its racial disparities: 🧵 1. @CouncilonCJ: "By 2019, nearly two-thirds of Black adults in state prisons were held for violent offenses."
counciloncj.foleon.com/reports/racial…

Here's a summary of some research that took me 8 years(!) to complete. It's now a journal article titled "Cell Phones and 'Excessive Contact': The Contradictory Imperatives Facing California’s Parole-Eligible Lifers," and began as a dissertation chapter. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… Punchline: Parole and prison policies in CA create an incentive for parole-eligible lifers to break prison rules by using cell phones and engaging in physical contact with visitors that's deemed "excessive." When detected, these behaviors contribute to parole denials.