ALBANY — Darnell Epps is an Ivy Leaguer. He graduated from Cornell last year and is currently enrolled at Yale Law School.
Those would be major accomplishments for anyone, let alone someone who served 17 years behind bars.
Epps was 20 when he was accused of being an accessory to a murder committed by his brother in Brooklyn. Like the vast majority of people facing a criminal trial in New York, Epps accepted a plea deal and due to the charges the judge in his case, while sympathetic, had almost no say in his sentencing.
“The judge did not want to impose such a hefty penalty,” Epps said. “But in New York we have a sentencing regime where judges have very little discretion to part from the mandatory minimum term.”
As with Epps, 98% of convictions in New York are the result of plea deals and a majority of the near 30,000 people behind bars are Black or Latino.
A relic of the 1970s Rockefeller drug laws, mandatory minimum sentences transfer power from judges to prosecutors and give them leverage in plea negotiations, advocates argue.
Epps, paroled after 17 years in part thanks to a note his judge added to his file two decades earlier, is part of a growing movement hoping to overhaul sentencing statutes in the Empire State.
“I changed. I entered the prison system at the age of 20, I didn’t think I’d ever get out,” he said. “There’s broad consensus that just incarcerating people is not an answer to crime, and our sentencing policies need to reflect that.”
A coalition of more than 100 advocacy groups, including Center for Community Alternatives, New York Communities for Change, and Release Aging People in Prison, are joining forces behind a new campaign called “Communities Not Cages.”
The groups are backing a trio of bills aimed at eliminating mandatory minimum sentencing, allowing incarcerated people to petition for resentencing and encouraging rehabilitation through the expansion of “good time” and “merit time” laws.
Sen. Zellnor Myrie (D-Brooklyn), who will be the lead sponsor on the sentencing bill set to be introduced this week, said the state’s current laws are remnants of the failed war on drugs and Rockefeller-era racism.
“This is about removing what I believe to have been a racist approach to incarceration and to our public safety problem,” Myrie said. “This also serves as a pillar of justice to allow each individual to have cases examined individually.”
His bill would do away with mandatory minimum sentences for prison, jail and probation, and end New York’s two- and three- strike laws, which require lengthy periods of incarceration based on prior convictions.
The move is a change decades in the making.
In 2004 and 2009, the Legislature passed partial repeals of the Rockefeller drug laws, including eliminating mandatory minimums in lower-level drug cases and reducing mandatory minimum penalties in other drug cases.
Lawmakers, however, left other mandatory minimum sentences and the two- and three-strikes laws in place.
In 2019 alone, over 9,000 people were subjected to a two- or three-strikes law. Three-quarters were people of color, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.
A Brennan Center analysis published last year found New York’s sentencing laws “excessively punitive and hopelessly convoluted.”
The second bill in the package is dubbed the Second Look Act. It would allow incarcerated people to apply for a resentencing hearing after they have served 10 years or half of their sentence, if more than a decade.
If a person is otherwise ineligible, a prosecutor can consent to their resentencing application. Under the bill, cases will be heard by a different judge than the initial sentencing judge.
The third measure, the Earned Time Act, would significantly increase the ability of incarcerated individuals to shave time off of a sentence through prison programs, college credits and other means.
New York slashed prison programs, eliminated financial aid for incarcerated college students and limited the time people could earn off their sentences to just six months back in the 1990s.
Kerry Gant, whose husband has served 24 years of a 25-to-life sentence for 2nd-degree murder, said the state’s current restrictive laws simply don’t encourage those behind bars to better themselves.
“What kind of people do we want to reenter society? Do we want our neighbors to be rehabilitated and prepared to come out, or do we want to just house people?” she said.
Gant’s husband, Thomas Gant, has spent the past two decades earning his associate’s degree, learning and become certified in sign language, serving as a facilitator for anger management classes and a hospice aide among a multitude of other things.
Last year, he was picked by the superintendent of Wende Correctional Facility to be part of the prison’s COVID response team.
But all of his work to improve himself has done nothing to reduce his time inside.
Kerry Gant said if New York used earned time credits or allowances her husband might have made it home before his mom passed away of cancer a few years ago.
“She wanted nothing more than to see her son as a free man before she passed, and he wanted nothing more than to prove to his mom that he is the man that he has become while in prison, that he could be that man out here,” she said.
The Earned Time Act would increase time allowances, but also create protections limiting abuse of discretion in taking time earned. It would also incentivize facilities to offer programs that allow incarcerated people to earn time off.
New York trails several other states when it comes to time credits, like Oklahoma, where time-off sentences are offered to inmates who obtain job skills, earn degrees or participate in and complete drug abuse programs, or even donate blood.
Gant added that increasing access to prison programs and college credits could also help change the narrative and cut costs for New York in the long run.
“We need to start to change the narrative about the purpose of prison and focus more on a restorative model, not only because we will benefit but also we can see the value in terms of changing the culture,” she said.
