Hope in Congress for Sentencing Reform?

      Criminal justice reformers have joined with fiscal conservatives in an improbable alliance to reduce the population of the nation’s federal prisons. It turns out that sending low-level drug offenders into overcrowded prisons for years on end, based on mandatory minimum sentences with little leeway for judges to exercise discretion or even common sense, is both expensive and counterproductive. Who knew?
      The broad agreement on federal sentencing reform is behind the impending release of some 6,000 drug offenders at the end of the month under a policy adopted more than a year ago by the U.S. Sentencing Commission with acquiescence by Congress. The long-planned release made front-page news last week, but it “barely scrapes the surface” of the problems in the 30 percent overcapacity federal prison system, according to the Marshall Project, the invaluable compendium of criminal justice news.
      Sentence reformers are now turning their lonely eyes to Congress after broad measures with bipartisan cosponsors were introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Douglas Berman, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and author of the comprehensive blog Sentencing Law and Policy, was so encouraged as to foresee the possibility that a bill could reach the president’s desk for signature by the end of this year.
      Berman’s optimism seems at odds with the evidence of dysfunctionality on Capitol Hill, accentuated by Republicans’ chaotic inability to choose their candidate for Speaker of the House. Still, the reformers appear to have succeeded in overcoming their biggest single obstacle by getting the very skeptical Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Iowa’s Charles Grassley, to sign on as lead sponsor of the Senate measure along with three other Republicans and five Democrats.
      The Senate bill, introduced Oct. 1, runs 141 pages, so long that Berman confessed on his blog that he was not yet ready to analyze it in detail. Grassley confirmed his support in an op-ed in his home state Des Moines Register by describing the provisions as “carefully crafted sentencing reforms . . . that do not compromise public safety or national security.”
      The House bill, a more compact 18 pages, was introduced on Oct. 8 with bipartisan support from the chairman, ranking Democrat, and other members of the House Judiciary Committee. On his blog, Berman described introduction of the Senate bill as a “huge development.” The House measure made him “a bit more optimistic” about possible enactment in 2015.
      Both bills take significant swipes at the mandatory-minimum craze in Congress from the 1980s and ’90s that gave drug offenders and armed felons long sentences beyond federal judges’ ability to soften. Both bills reduce some of the mandatory minimums for drug offenses and eliminate the current three-strike mandatory life provision. That provision parallels laws enacted in several states and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003 against a challenge under the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause (Ewing v. California, Lockyer v. Andrade).
      The two bills also widen somewhat the existing “safety valve” provision to give federal judges somewhat more leeway to soften sentences in individual cases. The Senate bill creates a second safety-valve to allow judges to sentence some offenders below 10-year minimums, but stresses that defendants convicted of “serious violent and serious drug felonies” will not benefit from the provision. And both bills would apply the provisions retroactively.
      Smooth passage of bills is by no means assured in either chamber. Writing on the blog Crime and Consequences of the pro-law enforcement Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, former federal prosecutor William Otis began picking the Senate bill apart by noting a provision to ease add-on minimums for defendants convicted of using a firearm in a drug felony.
      Otis, an outspoken opponent of sentencing reform as the issue has gained support, noted that senators introduced the bill on the same day as the mass shooting at a community college in Oregon. “What were these people thinking?” Otis asked, even while acknowledging that the Oregon shooter had no apparent connection to drug-dealing.
      Criminal justice reformers have long argued that the long, mandatory sentences that Congress authorized and presidents of both parties signed into law scooped up many low-level offenders. The advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums lobbied to soften the terms and slowly picked up support from libertarians and fiscally-minded conservatives.
      Congress took a modest step in 2010 by passing a bill that eliminated the racial disparity between sentences for crack and powder cocaine. With support for broader steps increasing among conservatives, the Republicans’ gains in the 2014 midterm elections stirred speculation that sentencing reform’s time could be coming.
      Earlier, however, the Sentencing Commission, the independent judicial agency, had voted in April 2014 to authorize two-step reductions in sentences for some federal drug offenders. Once Congress had failed to block the so-called “drugs -2” policy, the seven-member commission directed that releases were to begin in November 2015. The one-year lead time gave federal judges time to rule on individual cases; about 2,000 applications for reduced sentences have been denied so far.
      With bills pending in Congress, Berman raised the question whether the Sentencing Commission could institute some of the reforms on its own. Berman is entitled to his optimism, but longtime Capitol Hill observers may rightly see the latter suggestion as more fruitful than hoping for Congress to act.