In November 2025, the Prison Policy Initiative sent a package to 650 state legislators across all 50 states. The package contained 34 specific, evidence-based policy reforms organized into eight categories, each one addressing a documented failure of the legal system. The package was titled Winnable Criminal Justice Reforms for 2026. It was called winnable because every reform in it had already passed and been adopted somewhere. None of them required inventing something new. They required the political will to follow the evidence.
At CripJustice, we’ve spent building a Stolen Lives gallery that documents what happens when that political will is lacking. Damon Lamarr Johnson, 52, died in prone restraint during a mental health crisis in Portland, when no non-police crisis response was available. Katelyn Hall, 28, was shot in Louisville because the city’s mental health deflection program determined her call was too dangerous for a non-police response. Osaze Osagie, 29, was shot at State College, Pennsylvania, after his father called for police to help him get to a hospital under a mental health warrant. Stephon Watts, 15, was shot in his own basement after his father called the police following advice from social workers.
In every case someone called for help. In every case the only help available carried a gun. The Prison Policy Initiative’s report identifies exactly what it would take to change that. This is what it says.
The disability and mental health reforms.
The report’s first and most directly relevant recommendation for CripJustice’s work is to build non-police crisis response systems. Every year, people with disabilities and mental illnesses are disproportionately arrested and detained. Yet, police and jail staff lack the necessary training and mandate to treat mental illness or accommodate individuals with other disabilities. Between 2015 and 2020, over one-fourth of individuals killed by police were experiencing a mental health crisis at the time of the shooting, and suicide is the leading cause of death in local jails. The report recommends that cities, counties, and states build non-police crisis response systems, citing CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon, and the Denver STAR program as evidence-based models that reduce police contact with people in mental health crises while maintaining public safety.
The report also advocates for the end of solitary confinement, calling it as torture with demonstrated long-term psychological harm and linking it to the development of mental illness in people who did not have it before incarceration. The United Nations condemned solitary confinement in American prisons and jails as a form of torture. Nonetheless, torture is still a popular method of punishment in prisons, jails, immigration detention, and youth detention centers around the country. We recorded this pattern in the Stolen Lives gallery across numerous cases: Kalief Browder spent 700 days in solitary confinement at Rikers Island before committing suicide two years after being released. Ahmad Manasra developed schizophrenia, attributed by his physician directly to years of solitary confinement in Israeli custody. Layleen Polanco died alone in a solitary confinement cell at Rikers after staff failed to check on her during an epileptic seizure.
The report also advocates for improved healthcare in detention, noting out that states fall well short of their responsibilities to meet the health requirements of detained persons, as well as the elimination of jails and prisons as the primary mental health treatment system in the United States.
The cash bail reforms
The report documents that cash bail disproportionately impacts disabled people, the poor, and people of color, who are detained pretrial, not because they constitute a flight or public safety risk, but because they cannot afford the cost of their freedom. The bail business takes advantage of legal cracks and loopholes to avoid accountability while growing its profits.
Kalief Browder couldn’t afford $900. He served three years on Rikers Island. The accusations were dismissed after the only witness left the country. The report advocates eliminating cash bail for most offenses in favor of evidence-based pretrial evaluation, citing states that have done so without increases in crime or failure-to-appear rates.
The sentencing reforms
The report calls for reduced sentences, the elimination of mandatory minimums for nonviolent offenders, and the creation of paths to early release for the elderly and medically vulnerable persons. The medical release perspective is directly related to the ICE custody deaths detailed in the gallery and blog. Nhon Ngoc Nguyen has severe dementia and couldn’t answer intake questions. Pete Sumalo Montejo, 72, was transferred between hospitals and detention centers until his death. Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani suffered end-stage renal failure and was returned to detention in between hospitals rather than being granted medical parole.
The reentry reforms
According to the report, reentry is one of the most important but often overlooked parts of the criminal justice system. People are released from jails and prisons with no medication, no mental health referrals, no housing support, and no assistance with Medicaid or SSDI, which might take months to activate. The gap between release and activation of community support is where disabled people cycle back into to the system.
This is the part of the story that the Stolen Lives gallery has not yet covered. The gallery captures what occurs inside. The reentry crisis captures what happens after. The same individual, the same disability, the same lack of community care, returning to the same system that caused the harm in the first place.
What the current federal context means for these reforms
With the federal government abandoning proven public safety strategies and doubling down on punishment, state policymakers and advocates must fight even harder to reduce and improve the criminal justice system.
The Prison Policy Initiative sent its study to 650 state legislators. The federal government is dismantling the Department of Education, gutting Medicaid, expanding ICE detention, and removing oversight from facilities where people are dying. Reforms at the state level alone are insufficient. However, here is where the work is now possible, and the proof for what works is in legislators inboxes.
The Stolen Lives gallery is a record of what happens when these reforms do not pass. The Prison Policy Initiative’s report outlines what it would take to improve it. The difference between the two is not a secret. It is a political decision made frequently by legislators who have access to evidence but choose not to act on it.
That choice has a name. They’re in the gallery.
Sources
Disability research — Prison Policy Initiative
Mental health research — Prison Policy Initiative
Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2026 — Prison Policy Initiative, March 2026
Examining the Justice System’s Impact on Disabled People — MacArthur Foundation, July 17, 2025
