GOP Fools the Media Again: Why Prison Reform Is Not Really a Bipartisan Issue
Some in the GOP are tied at the hip to the prison industrial complex, so I don’t expect meaningful reform either.
We currently have more than a million and a half people behind bars in federal, state and local jurisdictions. And as Think Progress reported:
In the federal prisons, more than half of those sentenced to a stints of a year or longer are still there for drug crimes. In states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, and Georgia, at least 1 percent of male residents were in prison on December 31. And across the country, racial disparities persist. Black men are six times more likely than white men to be in prison. Hispanic men are 2.4 times more likely, according to a Sentencing Project analysis of the data.
Those last two data points are the most salient when it comes to questioning the Beltway optimism on this issue. Is it really likely that the Republicans, at this moment in their political trajectory, are going to take up this particular reform? It’s possible. But then it’s also possible that they’ll decide to embrace Obamacare. Highly unlikely is more like it. The bill that seems to have everyone feeling so positive about bipartisan comity is the Smarter Sentencing Act, which has the backing of such disparate groups as the ACLU and the Heritage Foundation. Ted Cruz says he’s for it too. It basically will give courts more discretion in sentencing and lower the daft mandatory sentences for drug crimes from 20-, 10- and five-year mandatory minimums to 10, five and two years. Considering the tremendous overcrowding in federal prisons this seems like a no-brainer.
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