With all of the protests going on, we no doubt need to look into prison reform. Many people are being arrested for minuscule reasons, and some of them are having to go to the same prisons as violent and dangerous criminals. This is unacceptable.

Everyone knows how the prison system is systemically racist, but here's a few statistics to illustrate just how much:

• Black men are on average 2.5 times more likely than white men to be murdered by police (Edwards, F., Hedwig, L. & Esposito, M. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116, 16793-16798 (2019).)
• Black people are more likely to be pulled over than whites, however the ratio is much more equal at night, when it's harder to tell the race of the driver (Pierson, E., Simoiu, C., Overgoor, J. et al. A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States. Nat Hum Behav 4, 736–745 (2020).)
• 24% of Black and 16% of Latino drivers are stopped, compared with 5% of whites in LA, where 48.7% of people are white,11.0% are African American, and 44.6% are Hispanic or Latino (not used as a race, but as a quality people of any race could be.) (Poston, Ben, and Cindy Chang. “LAPD Searches Blacks and Latinos More. But They're Less Likely to Have Contraband than Whites.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 8 Oct. 2019, US Census)

Lately I've been researching laws, and one thing that immensely bothered me is how (according to https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/designations.jsp federal laws allow the Bureau of Prisons to determine what prison inmates will be sent to, without clear, concise criteria, allowing us to hold them accountable. So, those criteria need to be enacted if we want to help our people stay safe.

I'm just a high schooler, so I don't understand the intricacies of the legal process, but laws surrounding prisons need to be looked over and reassessed to allow more transparency and promote safety. Thanks for reading, and please consider signing.