The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing Monday on a bill aimed at curbing mass incarceration by easing mandatory minimum sentences.
The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act was introduced by a bipartisan group of senators, led by key conservative Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, as well as the liberal Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
The legislation also garners support from numerous groups, including the Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Justice Fellowship.
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“[T]he question isn’t whether we punish those who break the law, but how we punish them — for how long, under what circumstances, and toward what end,” Lee said in remarks at the Heritage Foundation after the bill was originally introduced.
According to the Bureau of Prisons, the prison population suffers from a 30 percent overcrowding rate overall, while the Department of Justice spends more than a quarter of its budget — $7 billion — on corrections.
Research by the Urban Institute found that in addition to mandatory minimum sentences being a major contributor to a high federal prison population in general, those sentenced for drug offenses were half of the prison population between 1998 and 2010.
“Our mandatory minimum drug laws sweep broadly, and result in many prisoners serving long sentences,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates told the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday, adding, “Every dollar that we spend imprisoning a non-violent drug offender for longer than necessary is a dollar that could be spent investigating emerging threats, from hackers to home-grown terrorists or to support state and local law enforcement, victims of crime, and crucial programs for prevention, intervention, and reentry.”
According to Yates, the modest revisions in the Sentencing Reform Act “will help ensure that, in those [low-level, non-violent drug] cases, the punishment more closely matches the crime.”
Some of the bill’s provisions include:
- Reducing the mandatory life without parole sentence for a third drug or violent felony offense to a mandatory minimum term of 25 years in prison
- Reducing the mandatory minimum 20-year sentence for a second drug or violent felony offense to a mandatory minimum term of 15 years in prison
- Narrowly define which prior offenses can trigger longer mandatory minimum drug sentences
According to Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, the bill tries to replicate reforms done at the state level in places like California, New Jersey and New York. It will also address unjust racial and ethnic disparities in federal sentencing, he argued.
“By applying the provisions of the Fair Sentencing Act to an estimated 6,500 individuals currently incarcerated in federal prisons this legislation would reduce excessive incarceration overall and that of African Americans in particular,” Mauer told the committee.
On Saturday, President Obama renewed his push for criminal justice reform, announcing a nationwide tour in the coming weeks “to highlight some of the Americans who are doing their part to fix our criminal justice system.”
Obama also pressed for congressional action on criminal justice issues, touting the Sentencing Reform Act as “progress.”
The president has said he wants a criminal justice reform bill on his desk by the end of the year. Though this is one he seems to support, it will have to be reconciled with one of the bills on this topic in the House.
The committee will meet on Thursday morning to consider amendments to the bill.
