Simone Monasebian brings decades of experience across domestic and international justice systems to discussions of criminal legal system reform in the United States. As Chief Program Officer for Sanctuary for Families in New York City, she oversees programs that support survivors of gender-based violence while engaging with policy issues that intersect with policing, prosecution, and incarceration. Over a career spanning more than 30 years, Simone Monasebian has served as a criminal defense attorney, prosecutor, principal defender, and legal analyst, roles that collectively inform her understanding of systemic strengths and failures within criminal law. Her work with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone exposed her to large-scale accountability efforts for serious crimes, while her later leadership at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in New York focused on criminal justice reform, women’s rights, and the protection of marginalized populations. This background provides a grounded context for examining current reform challenges.
An Overview of Criminal Legal System Reform Issues in the US
Criminal legal reform refers to various initiatives designed to improve criminal legal systems in the United States. Criminal legal reform is a complex topic defined by many challenges, including racial profiling, police brutality, prosecutorial misconduct, and unfair sentencing, among many others.
The terms “prison reform” and “criminal legal reform” are sometimes used interchangeably, and while the two subjects share commonalities, they represent distinct and unique challenges. Criminal legal reform involves structural issues that compromise the entire national justice system. Prison reform focuses on improving conditions within American prisons, in addition to developing a more effective penal system and workable alternatives to incarceration. But again, the two issues often overlap – mass incarceration, for example, is a major aspect of criminal legal reform.
Many factors contribute to mass incarceration in the US, a nation that incarcerates approximately 2 million citizens, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. This is the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. Mass incarceration is itself a very complex, multi-faceted problem that underscores broader trends affecting criminal legal systems throughout America. For instance, less than 30 percent of incarcerated people in US prisons are White, according to the US Sentencing Commission, despite the fact that White citizens make up about 75 percent of the nation’s population, according to the Census. Black people, meanwhile, comprise 13.7 percent of the general population, but account for over 38 percent of prisoners.
Beyond matters of racial injustice and inhumane living conditions, particularly those found in privately owned, for-profit prisons, mass incarceration has a highly negative impact on the American economy. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the government spends upwards of $80 billion on incarceration each year, to say nothing of related social costs. A study by the Institute for Justice Research and Development placed the true cost at closer to $1 trillion, nearly 6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Mass incarceration is just one of several pressing criminal legal reform issues in the US. The death penalty is another subject that has both a social and economic impact on American citizens. Whether a person deserves to die for a crime they have committed is only one weighty, element of the death penalty conversation. The nation’s death penalty system has many flaws, ranging from racial biases to errors in justice. A report from the Death Penalty Information Center determined that for every eight individuals executed since 1973, one person living with a death sentence has been found innocent. This equates to 200 people sentenced to death receiving exonerations, an average of 4.29 people per year from 2000 to 2020.
Like mass incarceration, the death penalty also carries a high economic cost. A 2023 Cato Institute study found that each death penalty prisoner costs $1.12 million in 2015 dollars, or roughly $1.55 million adjusting for inflation. This does not account for related costs, such as the hundreds of thousands of dollars states spend on lethal injection drugs.
The nation will continue to face many more issues of criminal legal reform in 2026 and beyond. Important topics include, but are not limited to funding and implementing alternative response systems for emergency calls, developing alternatives to arrest and incarceration for offenses that pose no threat to public safety, adopting a health-centered approach to substance use, and reclassifying low-level offenses.
About Simone Monasebian
Simone Monasebian is an attorney and senior program executive with extensive experience in criminal law, human rights, and international justice. She currently serves as Chief Program Officer at Sanctuary for Families, where she oversees services and advocacy for survivors of domestic violence, trafficking, and abuse. Her career includes work as a criminal defense attorney, prosecutor, principal defender, and legal analyst, as well as leadership roles with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in New York. She has also taught law as an adjunct professor and contributed commentary on complex criminal cases.
