VOTER REGISTRATION

The Voter Registration Goals, set by the Upstate/Downstate Coalition for Criminal Justice Reform, are:

• To raise the political awareness, and the importance of participating in the democratic process.
• To register people to vote, particularly socially conscious citizens, including youth, those in the many communities that have been hard hit by the NYS drug laws (such as those in poor neighborhoods, African American, and Latino communities).
• To achieve higher voter turnout in 2005.
• To put pressure on public officials to support reform of the NYS criminal justice system.

Reform of the NYS drug laws is one of the Coalition's primary objectives. The drug laws are well known to skew law enforcement efforts. Guilt is by the amount of drugs in the offender’s possession, not by their role in the drug transaction. This creates an incentive to concentrate on poor communities where most drug transactions take place on the street. Police generally ignore middle and upper-class areas where people buy and use drugs behind closed doors.

Another result is the shift of state resources away from socially beneficial projects into prison payments. It cost the state about $2 billion to build new prisons for drug offenders, and the finance costs for this lasts for decades. In addition, the operating costs for confining drug offenders amounts to nearly $700 million each year.

Hundreds of millions of NYS dollars can be saved each year by reforms that provide greater justice - money that is urgently needed to offset budget cuts in education, health, and the support of those in greatest need..

College students are also important candidates for voter registration, since they feel the pinch as tuition at state and CUNY colleges are forced up and up.

We now have much more urgent uses for our taxpayer moneys, instead of wasting them on ineffective, overly-expensive, overly punitive, and racist criminal justice policies!

Work on voter registration drives everywhere.

Urge new voters to make criminal justice reform a top priority.

Get more info on other reforms at the CURE-NY home page