USA: here’s what the prison reform bill actually does — and doesn’t do

Prison reform advocates are hailing the Senate passage of the bipartisan First Step Act as a watershed moment for American criminal justice, which could positively impact the lives of thousands of federal prisoners.

The sweeping legislation passed Tuesday proposes easing racial disparities in sentencing, dismantling some of the systemic holdovers from the war on drugs, and implementing programs aimed at reducing recidivism. To be clear, the reforms proposed in the First Step Act would affect only the federal prison system, which houses just 181,000 of the approximately 2.1 million total incarcerated population including state prisons and jails.

For every 100,000 people residing in the U.S, about 655 are behind bars, according to a 2018 report by the Bureau of Justice statistics – a 20-year low, but still far outpacing the incarceration rates in every other country.

Soaring incarceration rates have disproportionately impacted communities of color: Black people account for 38 percent of the federal inmate population but make up 13 percent of the overall population.

Incarceration is also incredibly expensive: The annual cost per federal inmate is around $36,000, according to the Federal Register, putting the total cost of the federal inmate population at around $6.5 billion per year.

Still, reform advocates say the bill, which sailed through the Senate on Tuesday night in an 81-12 vote and is expected to easily clear the Democrat-controlled House, moves the needle in a significant way.

“Now that moderate sentencing reform is being positioned as a Trump criminal justice bill, it really moves the entire political spectrum on the issue to the left in terms of what reform-minded candidates and progressives should be bringing to the table,” said Inimai M. Chettiar, director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. “I think we’ll start to see a lot more bolder proposals at the federal and state level.”

Addressing racial disparities¶

The last major piece of federal legislation on criminal justice reform was the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, which reduced the sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1.

Because crack cocaine impacted black neighborhoods so heavily in the 1980s, addressing that disparity was seen as a necessary way to begin rectifying racial imbalance in the criminal justice system.

Only problem: The new rules didn’t apply to federal prisoners convicted for crack cocaine offenses prior to 2010.

The First Step bill would make those reforms retroactive, meaning that some 2,500 federal inmates could be eligible for release or sentence reductions.

Easing “three strikes”¶

The First Step bill also looks to ease the penalties under the controversial “three strikes” law, a holdover from the war on drugs that sent anyone with three federal convictions to prison for life – even if those convictions were for nonviolent drug offenses. Under the bill, the mandatory minimum sentence for a federal drug offense if the offender had previous convictions for federal drug offenses or violent felonies would be 25 years rather than life. The reform won’t be applied retroactively, however.

Inmates stay closer to home¶

Another reform to reduce recidivism is that federal prisoners have to be housed in facilities within 500 miles from their homes, which makes it easier and less expensive for family members to visit them. A study from 2016 found that in-person visitations reduced recidivism rates by 26 percent.

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