Criminal Justice Reform Bill Hailed as Bipartisan Breakthrough
A bill reducing mandatory minimums for nonviolent offenses has been years in the making.
Sen. Tim Scott, right, and Sen. Cory Booker shake hands as Sen. Chuck Grassley, center, looks on during a news conference for their sentencing reform bill on Thursday.
A Senate bill that would re-examine federal sentencing laws and reduce mandatory minimum terms for nonviolent offenders was heralded by criminal justice reformers Thursday as a major bipartisan breakthrough.
Years of negotiations culminated in the introduction of the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, pushed largely by two freshman senators from opposite sides of the political spectrum who were ultimately able to convince skeptical leaders in both parties to back their cause.
"This historic reform bill addresses legitimate overincarceration concerns while targeting violent criminals and masterminds in the drug trade," Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a longtime skeptic of reducing mandatory minimums, said in remarks at a press conference Thursday.
"For decades, our broken criminal justice system has held our nation back from realizing its full potential," added Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has become a face of the reform effort. "Mass incarceration has cost taxpayers billions of dollars, drained our economy, compromised public safety, hurt our children and disproportionately affected communities of color while devaluing the very idea of justice in America."
Grassley, Lee and Booker were joined by heavyweights from both sides of the aisle who cosponsored the bill, including Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas; Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.; Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Pat Leahy, D-Vt.
Lee, a former prosecutor, and Booker, who served as mayor of Newark, spoke Thursday at the Aspen Institute's Washington Ideas Forum about seeing the different sides of the harm done by excessive sentencing practices.
"I look at it more for the human costs," Lee said, recalling the case of a young father who was was caught selling marijuana three times within a 72-hour period, while in possession of a gun, and got a 55-year sentence. "There's no reason we should lock him up until he's 80. We can be tough on crime by being smart on crime."
Many advocates cheered the news as an important and promising first step to address overincarceration. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. is home to one of every five of the world's prisoners, despite being just 5 percent of the global population. "Tough on crime" laws put in place in the 1980s amid an epidemic of violent crime fueled by the sale and use of crack cocaine led to an explosion in the number of U.S. persons incarcerated, a figure that has increased by more than 400 percent since 1978.
"Thirty years of 'tough on crime' sentencing has created an unjust system that imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, a disproportionate number of whom are black, Latino, low-income and non-violent," Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in an email. "We have learned that we cannot imprison our way to safety; the bill makes important strides to address the most egregious mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenders."
But as reformers cheered the announcement of a bipartisan Senate bill, they also acknowledged its limits.
"A mens rea provision, requiring criminal intent for conviction of a crime, is key to criminal justice reform," said Marc Levin, director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, in an email.
While such a provision is not in the Senate bill, it does appear in the SAFE Justice Act, introduced in the House by Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Bobby Scott, D-Va., in June.
"It should be Congress' goal to take the best elements of each bill," Levin said.
Furthermore, there's little the proposed federal law can do to reduce incarceration rates at the state level. In 2014, just over 200,000 of the 1.5 million prisoners were in the federal system, according to Department of Justice statistics; the other 1.3 million are held by states.
"If you release every federal prisoner, the U.S. will still have the largest prison population in the world," says John Pfaff, a sentencing law expert at Fordham University.
States have resisted changing their laws, despite indications that they are disproportionately applied to minorities and the poor compared to white, wealthy offenders.
While state mandatory minimums can be less harsh than federal law, prosecutors more often use them as leverage to negotiate a plea deal.
Pfaff says a real effort to reduce prison populations will require a serious attempt at reducing sentences for violent offenders, not just those whose crimes are nonviolent. Most violent offenders are in the state system, not federal, and the political incentives for criminal justice reform are even lower.
"Voters aren't going to pay attention to the 99 cases that work, they'll pay attention to the one case that fails," he says. "It has all of the downside risk and none of the upside benefits."
Pfaff praised Booker for being one of the few elected officials willing to consider how to reduce sentences on violent crimes without sacrificing public safety. But Booker himself seemed wary of overreaching what is practical and possible.
"I'm trying to find those areas where there is bipartisan support so we can move the ball forward on those issues," Booker said at the Ideas Forum on Thursday. "My strategy when I was going to the Senate is to do only the things you can get done."
