First Step Act Achieves Laudable Goal Of Only Pissing Off Tom Cotton

It's literally better than nothing.

(Photo by Zach Gibson – Pool/Getty Images)

It has been so long since Washington passed a meaningful criminal justice reform bill that I can hardly blame people for celebrating the passage of the First Step Act. Most crime bills actually make the injustice in the system worse. Not passing even more Draconian punishment decrees counts as a “win” under most administrations. Getting a bill that helps, even minimally, feels like an occasion for backslapping. I mean, if you haven’t eaten for a week and somebody gives you a bowl of quinoa, you’re going to be all, “Thank you. I was so hungry. I am so lucky to have this.”

If you were nourished and healthy, and somebody gave you the same bowl, you’d say, “Get this dried gruel out of my face. I didn’t order of bowl of Colon Blow.”

Both reads of the First Step Act are fair. It is an important victory for criminal justice reformers, and it is a watered-down piece of legislation that is merely a shadow of real reform. It is… the least we could do, and the least is both underwhelming and infinitely more times useful than literally nothing.

Given that both points are equally valid, I am choosing to focus on the good parts of the First Step Act, as explained here in the New York Times:

In all, it includes four changes to federal sentencing laws. One would shorten mandatory minimum sentences for some nonviolent drug offenses, including lowering the mandatory “three strikes” penalty from life in prison to 25 years. Another would provide judges greater liberty to use so-called safety valves to go around mandatory minimums in some cases. The bill would also clarify that the so-called stacking mechanism making it a federal crime to possess a firearm while committing another crime, like a drug offense, should apply only to individuals who have previously been convicted.

Finally, the bill would allow offenders sentenced before a 2010 reduction in the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine to petition for their cases to be re-evaluated. The provision could alter the sentences of several thousand drug offenders serving lengthy sentences for crack-cocaine offenses. That would help many African-American offenders who were disproportionately punished for crack dealing while white drug dealers got off easier for selling powder cocaine.

That’s the positive. The negative is aptly explained in this New York Mag piece, but even that more-sobering take includes this ray of sunshine:

Sponsored

The most vocal of the 12 holdouts was Senator Tom Cotton, a “tough on crime” Arkansan who has made a habit of opposing reform using language strikingly similar to Senator Biden’s. “If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem,” Cotton said in a 2016 speech at the Hudson Institute. Earlier this month, he castigated the First Step Act as “criminal leniency legislation.”

Tom Cotton is a vile and dangerous man with retrograde views about crime, punishment, race, and science. Anytime you can do something that pisses him off, you are probably doing something good.

First Step agonizingly suggests that there needs to be “other” steps taken to reform our criminal justice system. This bill does not accomplish nearly all that needs to be done. As NY Mag laments, the fact that the Overton Window has shifted so far that First Step is viewed as a “victory” is itself a declaration of failure.

But Tom Cotton sitting there red-faced while people get to challenge their racist crack sentences is the best holiday present Congress has given to reformers in decades. I’ll take it.

Senate Passes Bipartisan Criminal Justice Bill [New York Times]

Sponsored


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.