News

A Veteran Journalist on Criminal Justice Reform, Critical Issues

By James Chang
Spectrum staff

Since May 2007, Stephen Handelman, 62, has been director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College, overseeing training and fellowships for criminal justice journalists from across the country; hosting conferences on an array of criminal justice topics; and serving as executive director of The Crime Report, the nation’s first online news site for criminal justice news.

Over the course of his career, he’s also done award-winning coverage of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia. His articles and op-eds have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Independent and Foreign Affairs, among other publications. He is a frequent commentator on criminal justice issues.

Handelman spoke with The Spectrum reporter James Chang, a senior at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, who is interested in journalism, politics, criminal justice and the law.

What is the Center on Media, Crime and Justice’s mission? Why have you chosen to lead it?

Very often, what happens is that a journalist who covers criminal justice as a beat—whether the courts, cops, prisons, or anything related to criminal justice—is under deadline [and other pressures]. And they may not necessarily have the background they need to understand the different issues. What happens is that they write stories very sensationally. While not necessarily wrong, those stories might headline, for example, a TV news report that makes it look like this is a terrible crime or that the community is in danger. A smarter approach to reporting might look at the context in which these crimes occur and different aspects of the system—such as racial inequity—that some journalists won’t know without doing the background research.

Over the last 10 years or so, we’ve had about 850 journalists from all over the country in our fellowship and training programs. We bring working reporters together with experts, researchers and practitioners for really intensive sessions that educate them on the emerging issues and research that helps their reporting. We believe that the best reporting on criminal justice is evidence-based or fact-based or statistics-based or data-based.

How long have you been covering criminal justice? What is its appeal for you?

I have been a journalist for about 40 years and, during that time, covered criminal justice on and off, both overseas and in the United States. I believe it is a main issue of our democracy in these times.

What are the major criminal justice issues right now?

Well, we have too many people in prison, for one. We also have too many people who get out of prison but go back to prison too quickly because of … new crimes … recidivism. Another major problem is how we deal with people who commit different kinds of crimes. The usual approach, as seen through the last couple of decades, is that if you commit a crime, you’ve got to do the time. There’s been this tough-on-crime approach. The biggest challenge now is how to deal with [certain kinds of non-violent] felony offenses in a different, more humane way. This particularly applies to young people who have one offense on their record that pretty much screws them for a lifetime; it’s very hard to get that off their record. You end up becoming a repeat offender and you end up in the adult prison system.

How can rates of recidivism be lowered?

I’m not a criminal justice academic. But when somebody comes out of jail, you have to give him or her alternatives. You can’t put them back into the same neighborhoods and the same situation where they have no jobs and are on welfare, and expect them to suddenly mend themselves and change their behavior overnight. The big challenge when people come out of prison [is] to … give them options and alternatives so they don’t re-offend … There are evil people in prison who have committed terrible crimes, but the majority of people in prison have made mistakes when they were young, whether it’s robbery or drug offenses. Those people should be dealt with and addressed as individuals. This should be important to us as fellow citizens.

What, in your opinion, is a more humane way to treat young people who have committed offenses?

First, we have to find alternatives to [incarceration], sometimes through approaches like restorative justice. There are many alternative courts out there. [And] community courts have a very innovative approach that allows first-time youth offenders to restore any harm they have done to the community through community service, rather than going to jail.

What about current efforts at criminal justice reform?

It’s not justice when people are being punished according to the crime they commit. Very often, people end up in jail who shouldn’t be jail. People end up in prison for a long time who shouldn’t be in prison for a long time. I suppose you can call that an unfortunate truth, a part of our system for the last two or three decades. [There’s a notion that] you should punish him or her to the point they cannot stand. The truth is that that often doesn’t work. Rehabilitation—and not punishment—should be our overriding goal.

What are some critical, recent changes in the criminal justice system?

We are seeing reductions in prison populations in certain states. We are seeing alternatives to detention centers. Thousands of people churn through our jails every day because they can’t make bail, so we are seeing changes in how people are given bail. We are seeing policy-makers looking differently at how to treat people when they’re arrested but are not threats to society; and that changes what happens to their cases when they come up for trial. Very often, they don’t end up having to plead guilty through a plea-bargaining arrangement, and they can avoid really serious punishment.

In a lot of cities around the country, people are changing their approach to the entire system … and are not looking at courts, cops and jails as their own separate silos.

Why should the general public be concerned about the convicted, the formerly incarcerated and criminal justice, in general?

Well, because they are our neighbors. They are family members or siblings. Millions of people in the U.S. have criminal records.