Why Can’t We End Mass Incarceration?
With the recent chaos in House leadership, the bill’s fate is uncertain. “Guessing how House Republicans are going to act is extremely difficult,” says Danyelle Solomon, of the Brennan Center for Justice. “It depends on who their next speaker is, and what their priorities are going to be before we can discuss how this moves forward.”
Unfortunately, time isn’t a resource in great abundance for the passage of a sentencing-reform bill. Next year is a federal election year, and it’s only a matter of months before that process sucks all the air out of Washington. “If we’re going to get enactment before the election grinds everything else to a halt, it’s going to have to be the House acting on the Senate bill before the year is out,” predicts Haile, of the Sentencing Project.
With all of the negotiation and speculation at the policy level, it’s easy to forget the real lives that are at stake here. Stephanie George was a 26-year-old mother of three when she was convicted on drug-conspiracy charges because the man she was dating had kept drugs and money in her house. George had previously pleaded guilty to state charges that she’d sold $160 worth of cocaine to a police informant, so under the federal three-strikes-and-you’re-out law, she was sentenced to life in prison. George was locked up nearly 18 years before Obama commuted her sentence, along with a handful of other nonviolent drug offenders. One of her sons died shortly before her release. Out for more than a year now, George is still struggling to find a good job, to reconnect with her remaining children and to rebuild her life. She says she doesn’t think most politicians consider the costs a mandatory-minimum sentence brings, the widening circles of suffering and loss that ripple out from a case like hers.
“I would definitely tell them that they need to do away with the mandatory-minimum,” she says. “I don’t think they’re thinking about the damage that this does to the kids and to the family. Not everyone who has made a mistake needs to have a life sentence.”
For the tens of thousands of federal prisoners spending decades of their lives behind bars on a mandatory-minimum sentence, the stakes for meaningful reform could not be higher. And even if the legislation does pass before the end of the year, advocates say, it’s only a beginning. “This is a first step,” says Molly Gill, government affairs counsel of FAMM. “We still will have mandatory-minimums. Unless we significantly reduce the number of drug prosecutions, the math is inevitable: Over time, we’re going to keep filling up our prisons.”
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