the FIRST STEP Act

[hermionesviolin]

So, the Senate passed the FIRST STEP Act tonight. I had not especially been following this (I Googled juts now, and it stands for "The Formerly Incarcerated Reenter Society Transformed Safely Transitioning Every Person" Act #SomeoneReallyWantedOurInitialsToSpellOutSHIELD), and via prisonculture I first saw "The Senate Finally Passed A Bill To Give Nonviolent Offenders The Chance To Get Out Of Prison Early" (from a congratulatory thread I think she was actually shaking her head at) and then "The First Step Act Is A Step Not Worth Taking" (from Dec 7). Excerpt from the latter:

I realize my position puts me at odds with many of my friends on both the left and the right in the criminal justice reform movement. They argue that many of these reforms would improve opportunities for a few thousand people and that is enough. But even supporters recognize that the sentencing reforms in the First Step Act may affect only a couple thousand of the 181,000 people currently in federal custody. I see the short-term gains as much smaller and the long-term losses as much greater.

[...]

Third, once the First Step Act is passed, there are not going to be any additional steps on the federal level anytime soon. The legislators who barely support criminal justice reform are not going to feel any need to address it again once they can point to their vote in favor of the First Step Act.

The 2015 SRCA, which already cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 15-5 vote last Congress and was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to save more than $700 million over 10 years, should be the starting point for discussions on any criminal justice reform legislation. With Democratic leadership in the House coming soon, something even more ambitious should be our target. If the Senate refuses to move on it, then let the many new governors continue to do great things on criminal justice reform, which is going to positively affect more people anyway, and let criminal justice reform be a federal campaign issue in 2020.

The desperate passage of the First Step Act would be a Pyrrhic victory that would leave the vast majority of those currently in the system and most of those who will be touched by the criminal justice system in the future exactly where they are: at the mercy of an administration that has no real interest in reform.

I admit that I am inclined to side with "this is Problematic" in most contexts, but even setting aside that impulse I do feel like the point about the disinclination of lawmakers to do anything more now that they've done this one thing is compellingly worrisome. At the same time, I hate that we end up asking people to languish in bad conditions while we build up the political will to fix things more. (The tension between reform and abolition came up a lot at the queer prison abolition conference I went to a couple months ago -- improving conditions for people who are currently suffering is important, but that also unfortunately has the side effect of making the systems seem "not so bad" and making it harder to convince people that abolition should be the end goal.)

Addendum: And newly from prisonculture's TL: "The First Step Act Opens the Door to Digital Incarceration"