President Donald Trump and Congress may be on the verge of passing actual bipartisan legislation that would ever so slightly ease mass incarceration — though opposition from some Republican holdouts in the Senate could quash the bill’s chances of passage as the clock runs out on this session of Congress.
The bill, known as the First Step Act, would take modest steps to reform the criminal justice system and ease very punitive prison sentences at the federal level. It would affect only the federal system — which, with about 181,000 imprisoned people, holds a small but significant fraction of the US jail and prison population of 2.1 million.
The bill has come a long way since it was introduced earlier this year, when it passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Back then, the bill made no effort to cut the length of prison sentences on the front end, although it did take some steps to encourage rehabilitation in prison that inmates could use, in effect, to reduce how long they’re in prison. But Senate Democrats and other reformers took issue with the bill’s limited scope, and eventually managed to add changes that will ease, albeit fairly mildly, prison sentences.
[For more on this story by German Lopez, go to https://www.vox.com/future-per...reform-bill-congress]
For another story on this topic, see How the FIRST STEP Act Moves Criminal Justice Reform Forward.
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