Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act

Initial Provisions

The bill would, if passed:

The bill would only apply to federal prisoners, not state prisoners.

Sponsors

In addition to Grassley, other sponsors of the bill when it was first introduced included:

Revisions

To gain more support for the measure, bill sponsors announced revisions on April 28, 2016. Most notably, the proposed amendments remove provisions related to armed career criminals, add new sentence enhancements for crimes involving fentanyl, and remove the retroactivity of additional proposed safety valves. The provision making the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 retroactive remains intact.

Timeline

Congressional opposition

Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, has led a group of other Republican congresspeople who are opposed to the bill. Cotton has argued that the reason rates of murder and other violent crime have decreased so much since the 1990s is because of "higher mandatory minimums put in place in the 1980s coupled with vigilant policing strategies pioneered by Rudy Giuliani and other American mayors and law enforcement officials." He has also argued that the bill, if passed, would lead to the release of thousands of violent felons, a claim that has been rated as "Two Pinocchios" by the Washington Post's fact checker for "creat[ing] a misleading impression of this complex legislation".

Positive

On the day the bill was introduced, Molly Gill, of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said that although her group was supporting the bill, "it doesn’t go as far as we would like – which is a full repeal of mandatory minimums." On October 3, 2015, two days after the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act was introduced, Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, told NPR that the bill "is the most substantial criminal justice reform legislation introduced since the inception of the 'tough on crime' movement and is the best indication we have that those days are over."

On January 19, 2016, 67 former federal prosecutors and senior government officials—including former FBI directors Louis Freeh and William Sessions, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and former Rep. Bob Barr—signed a letter to Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid in support of the bill.

In a February 6, 2016 editorial, the editorial board of the New York Times criticized some Republican legislators who insisted that a provision making it harder to prosecute corporations and their executives be included in the bill in order for them to vote for it. The editorial also criticized Republicans for "fearmongering" about the potential consequences of the bill with respect to its alleged effect of releasing violent criminals into the streets. The editorial stated that, contrary to the concerns about the release of violent criminals, "Most of the provisions are focused on low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, who make up nearly half of all federal inmates."

In a similar editorial, the Los Angeles Times editorial board stated that Congress should pass the bill, calling it "a historic and humane reform of the federal criminal justice system," and criticizing those, such as Tom Cotton, who opposed the bill on the argument that it would, if passed, lead to thousands of violent felons being released. Bernard Kerik has also criticized Cotton's arguments about the bill being "dangerous for America," stating in a letter to Cotton that "The theory that federal mandatory minimum prison sentences are necessary to keep our streets safe is simply false." In February 2016, Mukasey and Ronal W. Serpas, the former Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, wrote an op-ed supporting the bill, arguing that, contrary to the claims of the bill's opponents, "sentencing reform done right will not harm public safety. In fact, it will enhance it."

Faith groups have also announced their support of SRCA as a good first step towards criminal justice reform. The Interfaith Criminal Justice Coalition sent a letter to Senate leadership on May 5, 2016 which included denominational and organizational signatories from Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, Peace Churches, Mainline Protestant, Unitarian, and Evangelical communities as well as several state councils of churches and the National Council of Churches.

Negative

Writing in Mother Jones the day after the bill was introduced, Shane Bauer described the bill as "remarkably unambitious" in addressing mass incarceration and argued that it "doesn't live up to its own hype". The bill has been criticized by Nicholas Wooldridge, a defense attorney from Las Vegas, for, according to him, "creat[ing] the appearance of reform without doing much of anything to effect actual reform." In March 2016, Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, asked Congress to delay action on both the House and Senate versions of the bill until the Urban League can obtain information about what the possible effects of the bill would be on blacks and Hispanics.