Cornell Professor: Reform Starts by Releasing Longtime Prisoners

 Cornell University law professor Joseph Margulies believes that reforming the criminal justice system should begin with releasing individuals who committed serious crimes and have been in prison longer than 25 years.

"The kind of person they were when they went into prison often just doesn't exist anymore," Margulies said in an interview with Business Insider.

The Business Insider report said that those long sentences were likely the result of serious crimes, such as sexual assault and murder.

Margulies said no benefit comes from keeping the longtime prisoners incarcerated.

"Keeping them in prison offers no chance for redemption, and no one is a monster," Margulies said.

The Cornell professor said that the older prisoners are less likely to commit crimes and return to prison. He said that much of the focus in prison reform is in releasing nonviolent 

"Emptying the prisons of nonviolent drug offenders will not, by itself, fix the many issues that plague our criminal justice system," Margulies said in the Insider report.

Margulies has gone on record before regarding reforms for the criminal justice system. As part of a Cornell University panel, Margulies said he believed use of the death penalty was on the decline.

"I think the use of the death sentence will decline for a variety of reasons: cost, decline in punitiveness, concerns about innocence, changing demographics, a general liberalizing trend, international pressure."

But he was doubtful that the Supreme Court would do away with the penalty.

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