Thanks to Joe Biden’s 1986 crime bill increasing mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders involved in cocaine trafficking, Alice Marie Johnson, then a single mother and first-time offender who had only been drawn into a drug scheme after losing her job, was sentenced to life, and eventually death, in prison. Only after then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates approved a pilot program for female inmates to make video calls to the outside world did Johnson land under the radar first of Mic, then Kim Kardashian West and, through her, President Trump himself.
And so the story goes: Our frequently curmudgeonly commander in chief, both enraptured by the genuine passion of the ethereal social media mogul and the heart-wrenching plight of the unfairly incarcerated grandmother and great-grandmother, commuted Johnson’s prison sentence and set her free, putting his administration on course to abandon plans to beef up the border with tools considered too inhumane for literal war zones and instead pass the first piece of sweeping criminal justice reform legislation in generations.
