Equal Rights
From criminal justice to civil rights and immigrant rights, Working Families strives to ensure equal rights for everyone. Read more below:
New York’s state prisons currently hold over 70,000 inmates. Add in local prisons, and New York has over 100,000 behind bars, the fourth highest in the nation. The vast majority of these New Yorkers have been incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. Maintaining this vast prison system is enormously costly, yet there is no evidence that it is effective in reducing crime.
On December 7, 2004, the state legislature took one of the most important steps in years toward a more humane and sensible criminal justice system by passing long-overdue reforms to the Rockefeller drug laws. These laws had sentenced first-time, non-violent drug offenders to mandatory sentences of 5, 10 and even 15 years. These laws were not effective in reducing crime. But they did destroy the lives of untold thousands of young New Yorkers, often for just a single mistake.
Rockefeller drug law reform was long overdue, and was one of the WFP’s top legislative priorities for the 2004-05 legislative session. The upset victory of Albany County District Attorney David Soares in 2004 on a drug law reform platform was one of the major factors in this important victory.
There is no evidence that the death penalty is an effective deterrent to crime. And there is evidence that capital sentences fall most heavily on minorities. Accordingly, the Working Families Party supports an immediate moratorium on the death penalty.
Historically, women, people of color and other minorities have not enjoyed the full protection of the law in the America. Through heroic struggles for justice, full civil rights and equality before the law have gradually been extended to millions of people were once denied equal rights. The Working Families Party believes that the extension of civil rights to gays and lesbians is in this honorable tradition.
The right to marry the person of one’s choice is a basic freedom. Marriage is one of society’s most important social institutions, and — with a healthcare system in crisis — marriage is also a key economic benefit gays and lesbians can’t be excluded from.
The Working Families Party supports efforts to open marriage to all Americans, regardless of sexual orientation.
For centuries, New York has been a destination for immigrants from all over the world. Immigrants brought with them dreams of a better world and a better life for their families. Through their hard work and sacrifice, immigrants have been a major source of our state’s prosperity and cultural vibrancy. The Working Families Party believes that immigrants have contributed enormously to America, and they should be welcomed, treated with dignity, paid fairly, and offered a path to becoming full participants in our society.
The Working Families Party believes, despite occasional frictions, that the economic interests of native-born and immigrant workers are fundamentally the same. We all want an economy that works for working people; one with family-supporting jobs and affordable, quality healthcare for everyone. We all want politicians to look out for us, not big-money contributors.
Accordingly, the Working Families Party resists policies which unfairly target vulnerable groups, and supports those that bring our diverse state closer together:
- Legislation to extend to farmworkers, most of them immigrants, the same rights under labor law as other workers.
- Legislation ensuring that legal immigrants are eligible for the social services their tax dollars help pay for, including Food Stamps and programs for the homeless.
- Legislation requiring public agencies and private businesses to accept appropriate identification issued by foreign consulates (“matriculas consulares”) in place of a New York-issued photo ID.
