Four Reasons Congress May Bring Criminal Justice Reform Back to Life
It’s no wonder criminal-justice reformers woke up from Election Day 2016 with a sense of existential gloom.
Given candidate Donald J. Trump’s law-and-order bluster, his dystopian portrayal of rising crime and an ostensible war on the police, and a posse of advisers who think the main problem with incarceration is that we don’t do enough of it, the idea that justice reformers have anything to look forward to is at best counter-intuitive.
It is reasonable to expect that President Trump and his choice for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, will dismantle at least some of what their predecessors leave behind. Based on what they have said, the Trump-Sessions Justice Department may well roll back federal oversight of troubled police forces, escalate the war on drugs, enlarge the share of the corrections business that goes to private companies, accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants and use the threat of financial sanctions to challenge so-called sanctuary cities.
Some combatants in the fight for a less punitive approach to crime will probably redirect their energies to the states and localities, where most criminal justice is dispensed and where officials — in red states and blue — have proved more receptive to change.
But those inclined to look for silver linings may find one on Capitol Hill.
The current, expiring Congress began with a groundswell of bipartisan support to reduce mandatory minimum sentences, give judges more discretion to suit the punishment to the offense, invest more in alternatives such as drug and mental health treatment, and encourage programs that prepare the incarcerated for life after prison. In months of negotiations, a package of sweeping criminal justice reforms was whittled down and some new mandatory sentences were grafted on. Then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, declined to bring it up for a vote ...