Janos Marton has spent most of his career advocating for citizens who are often overlooked – inmates.
As state campaigns manager at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Campaign for Smart Justice, Marton, 36, works with staff across the country to helps create local criminal justice reform policies. The goal is to reduce the United States incarceration rate by 50 percent. Although Marton has only been at the ACLU for about three months, most of his career has focused on criminal justice reform. A graduate of Fordham University School of Law, he joined JustLeadershipUSA in 2016 to manage its campaign to close the jail complex at Rikers Island. He also worked on prison reform in St. Louis for five months before moving back to New York for the ACLU job.
WAS THERE A MOMENT IN YOUR CAREER THAT INSPIRED YOU TO GET INVOLVED IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM?
Glenn Martin [the founder of JustLeadershipUSA] … gave a speech about how he was going to lead a campaign to close Rikers, and that really struck a chord with me because I first spent time on Rikers working with incarcerated 16 [and] 17-year-olds there when I was in law school …
I was just appalled by the place and … always sort of wondered why there was not more of an outreach around it, why there wasn’t more of an effort to do something about it.
WHAT IS SMART JUSTICE DOING TO ACHIEVE ITS GOAL OF REDUCING THE U.S. JAIL AND PRISON POPULATION BY 50 PERCENT?
It’s [a] very challenging goal. … So how do we get there? In some ways it varies from state to state but, in other ways, the problems that we have are universal, right? So there’s pretrial detention, largely driven by our country’s bail system. Some individual cities and counties have worse bail practices than others in terms of locking people up pretrial with high bail charges that they can’t pay. And there’s a lot of lawsuits happening around that. …
In [the] United States we sentence people to extremely long prison sentences for crimes. … Sentencing reform is something that we are looking into in a lot of the states that we’re doing work in. Parole is another issue that plagues most states where, essentially it may seem like somebody is out of prison, but they are still in the correctional system in that they’re really a misstep away from going back into prison. …
The way the parole system is set up, it’s dooming people to failure and to get caught back up in the system. …
We actually just released a blueprint … which has, for 24 states, very particular solutions about to cut the population in half. …
There aren’t really silver bullets, like if you pass X, you’ll cut the population in half. But you can see that there are certain statutes and certain types of crimes that really drive the prison population. And if you were to reduce, for example, the sentences for certain types of crimes, you could make a huge reduction in the prison population.
WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST REWARDS AND THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES YOU’VE FACED IN YOUR CAREER SO FAR?
When you’re working on an issue that really drives you, then it’s very easy to get up and go to work in the morning. …
There was a brief period where I worked at a law firm and even though the law firm was working on some issues I cared about, the actual practice of law can be really tedious and difficult in ways that aren’t particularly inspiring. … It felt like a drag to go to work in the morning, whereas I’ve never felt that at any of the recent jobs I’ve had. …
This is a large organization, so [there are] difficulties navigating things sometimes here. Obviously, the challenge in the field is that there are still major opponents of criminal justice reform at every level of government.
