Building a National Conversation on Smart Decarceration

As the era of mass incarceration nears an end, there is an urgent need to build the field of decarceration.  Developing decarceration strategies that are effective, sustainable, and socially just will require integrating the best conceptual and empirical contributions from a variety of disciplines.  Given that decarceration is a nascent field, it is critically important to develop conceptual frameworks for the field and consensus about how to best operationalize core concepts into actionable strategies.

This ePoster session will present findings from two major efforts to begin a national conversation about decarceration.  First, we share highlights and key contributions (including video clips) from the inaugural conference of the Smart Decarceration Initiative.  This conference takes place September 23-27, 2015 at Washington University in St. Louis and brings together leaders in research, practice, policy, formerly incarcerated individuals, and advocacy. The goal of this conference is to develop a roadmap to launch the decarceration movement.  Second, we present findings from a national concept mapping study, in which 120 experts on criminal justice reform participated in brainstorming, sorting, and ranking activities to identify key strategies to move the decarceration era forward. This study yielded 12 concept clusters and “hot spots” to maximize initial decarceration efforts.