USA: the criminal justice reform bill you’ve never heard of

Mitch McConnell’s Senate has quietly passed juvenile justice legislation that would ban states from holding children in adult jails.

The criminal justice buzz on Capitol Hill this week is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, after stalling for weeks, will finally allow a prison reform bill called the First Step Act to come up for a vote. The legislation, which would reduce some federal mandatory-minimum sentences, could make it to President Trump’s desk by the end of this year.
But that’s not the only perpetually-in-limbo crime bill that, in the span of a few days, suddenly appears likely to make it through a logjammed Congress and get signed into law.

With much less fanfare, the Senate on Tuesday passed major juvenile justice legislation that has been postponed and picked over for more than a decade—and that would ban states from holding children in adult jails even if they’ve been charged with adult crimes. The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which is expected to pass the House as soon as today, would also require states receiving federal dollars to collect data on racial disparities in the juvenile system and to come up with concrete plans for addressing those inequities.

It would ban the shackling of pregnant girls, as well as provide funding for tutoring, mental health, and drug and alcohol programs for kids.

Despite the president’s usual tough-on-crime rhetoric, congressional staffers and youth advocates said he appears unlikely to veto the bill, which has bipartisan support and hasn’t generated much attention on Fox News or among his base supporters.
“After hearings and briefings and votes and re-votes, finally, this hundred-page bill, this huge lift, which matters so much for kids, is actually going to be passed in a bipartisan and bicameral fashion,” said Marcy Mistrett, CEO of the Campaign for Youth Justice, an advocacy group. “In the current political environment, that’s a really big deal.”
The passage of the juvenile reform bill just as the First Step Act moves toward a vote comes at a pivotal time for federal oversight of local youth court systems. The legislation is a new version of a law that first passed in 1974 but expired in 2007.

In the decade since, racial disparities in juvenile justice have dramatically worsened, and the Trump Justice Department has taken a quiet but decisive turn away from its mandate to try to reduce such inequality.

According to a Marshall Project report in September, a little-known DOJ agency called the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has, under Trump appointee Caren Harp, cut back on its data-gathering and monitoring of states’ attempts to fight racial inequity.

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