Prison reform bill expected this month

Lawmakers in the Senate are putting the finishing touches on a prison reform bill that is expected to be unveiled soon after Congress reconvenes on Sept. 8. The bipartisan legislation, according to congressional insiders, will attempt to reduce U.S. prison populations by giving judges more sentencing discretion in low-level drug cases and offer certain inmates opportunities for release.

Lawmakers have been negotiating the prison reform legislation for months; the final product is expected to be an amalgamation of previously introduced prison reform bills from both congressional chambers.

Likely influencers of the forthcoming bill include Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) Smarter Sentencing Act of 2015 and the Corrections Oversight, Recidivism Reduction, and Eliminating Costs for Taxpayers in Our National System (CORRECTIONS) Act introduced by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

Lee’s bill, introduced in February, dealt primarily with giving judges the ability to sentence nonviolent drug offenders below existing mandatory minimums without doing away with mandatory sentencing altogether.

The Cornyn/Whitehouse legislation, meanwhile, was an attempt to reduce the prison population by offering convicts reduced time in return for participation in recidivism reduction programs.

The new bill would create a rare opportunity for President Barack Obama, who has made justice reform a priority for his remaining time in the White House, to accomplish a policy objective with the help of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

In July, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison when he traveled to a facility in Oklahoma to bring attention to the issue of criminal justice reform.

“When [these prisoners] describe their youth and their childhood,” Obama told The Associated Press at the time, “these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made.”

Obama’s visit was filmed by Vice News and is slated to air on HBO Sept. 27. By then, lawmakers should be well into debating the prison reform bill.

Prison reform has also been a top priority of longtime Obama critic Charles Koch, who’s nonprofit Charles Koch Institute has been working alongside groups like the Center for American Progress and the ACLU since last spring to change harsh sentencing requirements.

Such rare bipartisan agreement that the nation’s incarceration rates are out of control stem from the shocking 500 percent increase in the U.S. prison population since tough-on-crime legislation was rushed through Congress in the 1980s.

Even so, criminal justice reform isn’t a done deal, and you can bet the prison-industrial complex’s multimillion-dollar lobbying machine is working overtime to make sure that cells remain overstuffed.

The nation’s two biggest for profit prison companies — GEO and Corrections Corporation of America — make a combined $3.3 billion in (most of which directly from taxpayers) each year thanks to the nation’s harsh sentencing laws.

Since 1989, when Congress passed those tough-on-crime laws, the two companies have spent more than $25 million lobbying and donated more than $10 million to candidates to make sure they stay on the books whether they reduce actual crime rates or not.

The post Prison reform bill expected this month appeared first on Personal Liberty®.

from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/prison-reform-bill-expected-this-month/

from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/prison-reform-bill-expected-this-month/