Criminal Justice
The Constitution guarantees that the government cannot take away a person's basic rights to “life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” Due process is the principle that the government must respect all of the legal rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution. These include your right to be treated fairly if you are under arrest and to be considered innocent until proven guilty.
The ACLU has long been in the forefront of challenging police abuses and failures of the criminal justice system to protect due process rights. We have also worked to end excessively harsh crime policies that result in mass incarceration and stand in the way of an equal and just society.
Our nation’s punitive drug policies have failed to achieve public safety while putting unprecedented numbers of people behind bars and eroding constitutional rights. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. The ACLU is concerned about this statistic, as well as the fact that drug law enforcement disproportionately impacts communities of color even though rates of drug use do not differ for whites and African Americans.
The ACLU is committed to comprehensive reform of our criminal justice system, including preventing unnecessary involvement of juveniles in the system, ending profiling on the basis of race, re-thinking overly harsh mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws, ensuring adequate representation for people accused of crimes, diverting substance abusers from prisons to treatment, respecting the human and constitutional rights of people in our correctional facilities, and advocating for dignified community re-entry.
Read more about specific Criminal Justice topics:
Legal Cases:
Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Bernardo B.
Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Martin
Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Porter P.
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