Criminal Justice Reform

Criminal Justice Reform

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama asked Congress to heed his longstanding call for criminal justice reform. His allies are now pushing the Senate to pass the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. But this bill isn’t a criminal justice reform bill. It’s a criminal leniency bill that will make Arkansas and America less safe.

The call for criminal justice reform at the federal level is born out of false stories of young, first-time offenders sentenced to decades in federal prison for minor drug offenses because of mandatory sentencing requirements. Supporters of the bill say this ultimately leads to unnecessary mass incarceration and prison overcrowding. But the numbers tell a different story: only one-eighth of all prisoners in America are in the federal — as opposed to the state and local — prison system, and less than one half of one percent of those prisoners are there for drug procession charges. Those who are most likely pled bargained for a lesser charge to avoid a longer sentence for drug trafficking or other violent crimes.

The reality is that those in prison for federal drug crimes are almost certainly drug dealers or traffickers — participants in an illegal industry built on an entire edifice of violence stretching from the cartels of South America to drugrelated killings in our communities. This bill would substantially reduce mandatory minimum sentences for these types of criminals and narrow the range of predicate offenses that can be used to make a case for harsher sentences. It would also lead to the release of thousands of other criminals convicted of a wide array of armed crimes. The result would be devastating: the release of thousands of violent felons across the country.

Regrettably, the United States has already seen the damage this brand of criminal leniency causes. In 2007, 2010, and 2014, the independent Sentencing Commission — which publishes sentencing guidelines for federal judges — issued more lenient guidelines and applied them retroactively. These revisions will lead to the release of tens of thousands of criminals. It’s because of those changes that we have heinous crimes like a brutal triple murder in Ohio committed last month by Wendell Callahan, a man who should have been in jail until 2018 on drug charges. Instead, he was released early and killed a woman and her two young children with a knife.

There are some commonsense changes we could make that would help our justice system — including prison reform. Prisons should not be anarchic jungles that endanger both corrections officers and inmates. They should be places that punish and deter crime, while simultaneously offering rehabilitation and redemption to those who desire it. Rehabilitation programs should be comprehensive and truly seek to heal those who will eventually return to society.

But what we should not do is release thousands of drug

traffickers and other violent felons back out on to the street where they will harm Americans and ravage our communities.

Rest assured, I am committed to your safety and security. I will continue to fight to keep violent felons in prison and work to stop the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act.

By U.S. Senator Tom Cotton