The Youth Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education Act (“Youth PROMISE Act”), addresses the root causes of crime, and gang violence by focusing on the critical issues underlying gang crime.
Under the Youth PROMISE Act, communities facing the greatest youth gang and crime challenges will come together to develop and implement a comprehensive local plan to support young people and their families and make our communities safer, reduce victimization, and help young people to lead law-abiding and healthy lives, free from gangs, and/or criminal involvement.
The Youth PROMISE Act provides for an authorization of $2.9 billion per year over five years. Significantly, the Youth PROMISE Act calls for a thorough evaluation of the local, state and federal expenditures in incarceration and related criminal justice costs made before implementation of the Youth PROMISE Act programs.
The bill will yield significant cost savings through reduced incarceration and recidivism rates. 100% of all cost savings will be reinvested in the Youth PROMISE Programs.
Additionally, the proposed Act provides for thorough evaluation, including analyses of the cost-savings to our society yielded by investing in prevention and intervention rather than in after-the-fact prosecution and incarceration. After decades of increasing reliance on incarceration, there are currently 2.2 million people in federal and states jails and prisons in the United States – more than any other nation – and, according to the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics, with costs annually equaling $65 billion. The Act will sustain investment in evidence-based prevention and intervention practices by authorizing $2.3 billion per year over five years.
The Youth PROMISE Act’s savings from investments and prevention and intervention programs will be reinvested in promising evidence-based programs aimed at reducing entry into the criminal justice system and reducing our outsized jail and prison population.
