New Leaf – New Life, Inc. is dedicated to transformational change of our criminal justice system through volunteer action...

• A jail or prison sentence is a commitment to spend taxpayer dollars comparable to a college education from a top school.  Let's make those dollars count!  Let's not warehouse people!   Let's eliminate enforced idleness in our jails and prisons.   Let's work to make people more capable to function in society when they get out than when they got locked up.  

• A person denied work, housing, medical care or adequate food has no alternative but to commit illegal acts to survive.  Let's create opportunities for those released from jail to meet their basic needs legally to help them to not return to jail. 

Hal Taylor, President, NewLeaf-NewLife

NewLeaf-NewLife, Inc. has republished Karl Menninger's landmark book The Crime of Punishment - MORE....

In the 1960s, Dr. Menninger made a very persuasive case for a therapeutic paradigm in the criminal justice system. Almost 40 years later, Menninger’s ideas may be even more relevant since the nation has tried the paradigm of punishment for more than a generation without success.

It is a well-known fact that relatively few offenders are caught, and most of those arrested are released. But society makes a fetish of wreaking ‘punishment’, as it is called, on an occasional captured and convicted one.

This is supposed to ‘control crime’ by deterrence. The more valid and obvious conclusion – that getting caught is thus made the unthinkable thing – is overlooked by all but the offenders. We shut our eyes likewise to the fact that the control performance is frightfully expensive and inefficient. Enough scapegoats must go through the mill to keep the legend of punitive ‘justice’ alive and to keep our jails and prisons, however futile and expensive, crowded and wretched.

- Karl Menninger

The Crime of Punishment, 1969 republished 2007