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href="https://truthout.org/articles/what-the-latest-bipartisan-prison-reform-gets-wrong-and-why-it-matters/?utm_source=sharebuttons&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=mashshare&fbclid=IwAR0M8681hA9sUBAtMIuvVLeiK0nX7bgVErMMU7wv9pqM2z6OHwUQzPfKdUM">https://truthout.org/articles/what-the-latest-bipartisan-prison-reform-gets-wrong-and-why-it-matters/?utm_source=sharebuttons&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=mashshare&fbclid=IwAR0M8681hA9sUBAtMIuvVLeiK0nX7bgVErMMU7wv9pqM2z6OHwUQzPfKdUM</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">What the Latest Bipartisan Prison
Reform Gets Wrong and Why It Matters</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Dan Berger - November
16, 2018<br>
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<p>A specter is haunting the United States — the
specter of “bipartisan prison reform.” Although the
<span><a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/smoke-and-mirrors-inside-the-new-bipartisan-prison-reform-agenda/">last
effort at bipartisan prison reform</a></span>
stalled out in 2014-15, the US now seems poised to
pass the “First Step Act,” after Donald Trump
signaled his support for the measure in a statement
at the White House on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Passage of the bill would be a major victory for
Trump. A number of liberal and progressive
commentators have gone all in on the legislation,
which has been heavily shaped by Jared Kushner and
Koch Industries attorney Mark Holden. CNN
commentator and <span><a
href="https://www.cut50.org/">Cut50</a></span>
cofounder Van Jones praised Trump. “Give the man his
due,” Jones <span><a
href="https://twitter.com/VanJones68/status/1062852237779554304">tweeted</a></span>,
saying the president is “on his way to becoming the
uniter-in-Chief on an issue that has divided America
for generations.”</p>
<p>Yet, regardless of who is “uniting” around its
passage, the bill itself is both weak and dangerous.
While it offers a few token reforms — some of them,
like the end of shackling for pregnant and
post-partum women in federal custody, necessary and
long overdue — it leaves many of <span><a
href="https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/longsentences.html">the
most pressing issues</a></span> off the table.
It barely makes a dent in terms of reducing the
length of prison sentences or reducing the number of
people in prison. Meanwhile, it heightens the use of
racist and classist assessment mechanisms and
expands the net of surveillance.</p>
<p>The proposed bill includes a few minor reductions
in sentence length for federal prisoners, by
expanding potential access to good time credits and
lowering the age of consideration for compassionate
release However, it will not make any sentence
reductions retroactive (except for the <span><a
href="https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/drug-law-reform/fair-sentencing-act">2010
Fair Sentencing Act</a></span>, which minimized
— but did not erase — the disparity between crack
and cocaine sentences). This means that people who
are currently serving, for example, life sentences
for drug offenses will not get any relief from this
bill. A <span><a
href="https://fop.net/CmsDocument/Doc/FOP%20on%20First%20Step%20Act.pdf">press
release</a></span> from the National Fraternal
Order of Police, which endorsed the First Step Act,
indicates that the organization “engaged” with
lawmakers to ensure that most sentencing changes
would not be applied retroactively. Despite Trump
taking a deserved pot shot at Bill Clinton’s support
for punitive crime policy of the 1990s, the bill
would leave intact the lengthy sentences and limited
legal access that Clinton enacted in a trifecta of
laws (the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act, the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant
Responsibility Reform Act, the Prison Litigation
Reform Act).</p>
<p>The bill also expands the cruelties of “<span><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/.../criminal-justice-reforms-race-technology.html">e-carceration</a></span>.”
These reforms use electronic monitoring and other
forms of often-privatized surveillance to build what
activists have dubbed <span><a
href="https://medium.com/nodigitalprisons">“digital
prisons</a></span>” that fatten the wallets of
prison telecommunication companies while further
extending carceral control into people’s homes and
daily lives. Vivian Nixon, a formerly incarcerated
person and director of <span><a
href="http://collegeandcommunity.org/ccf/">College
and Community Fellowship</a></span>, dubbed
First Step “an insidious move toward expanded
control and surveillance in our homes and
communities.”</p>
<p>Additionally, the First Step Act relies on the same
tried-and-terrible “risk assessment” algorithms that
have been repeatedly proven to reproduce <span><a
href="https://psmag.com/social-justice/removing-racial-bias-from-the-algorithm">racism</a></span>
in <span><a
href="https://www.abtassociates.com/insights/publications/report/federal-sentencing-disparity-2005-2012">sentencing</a></span>.
These risk assessment techniques demonstrate the
deep conservatism driving the bill. Treating
incarcerated people as entrepreneurial supplicants,
the legislation seeks to “incentivize” their
participation in prison programs — except that
people who fail the “risk assessment” cannot access
many of the benefits anyway. The Leadership
Conference on Civil and Human Rights <span><a
href="https://civilrights.org/vote-no-first-step-act-2/">wrote</a></span>
that the Act’s use of algorithms risks “embedding
deep racial and class bias into decisions that
heavily impact the lives and futures of federal
prisoners and their families.”</p>
<p>We are seeing a dangerous combination of
overwhelming Democratic support for this woefully
misguided legislation and terribly misguided
excitement for bipartisan cooperation with a white
nationalist administration. This combination is bad
policy — and bad politics.</p>
<p>In fact, one should scuttle any talk of
bipartisanship. For Republicans, the First Step Act
is a calculated political move. They want, first and
foremost, to rescue their moribund, dying minority
of a political party from the dust heap of history.
The successful, if partial, overturning of policies
that disenfranchise people with felony convictions
in Alabama, Florida, Virginia, and elsewhere poses
new political questions. Republicans can no longer
ignore formerly incarcerated people or their
families as a political constituency: 70 million
Americans have criminal records, and mass
incarceration is increasingly being felt in
conservative white rural communities. Though the US
prison system is thoroughly racist, there are still
hundreds of thousands of white people who have been
in prison or whose family members have. Some GOP
strategists are hoping that they can be convinced to
vote Republican. And indeed, <span><a
href="https://theconversation.com/florida-restores-voting-rights-to-1-5-million-citizens-which-might-also-decrease-crime-106528">many
of them might</a></span>.</p>
<p>The First Step Act needs to be seen in the context
of both what the federal government can do in
general on prison issues — and what <em>this</em>
federal government can, or will, do. The federal
government oversees two primary areas of punishment:
the federal prison system and immigrant detention.
The federal prison system is about 13% of the
overall prison system — so no matter what the bill
does, it will only impact a small portion of those
incarcerated. (That, in and of itself, is not a
reason to oppose it, but it bears mentioning for the
sake of clarity.) Even if it wanted to — which it
most assuredly does not — the federal government
simply cannot enact the massive reductions in the US
prison population that would be required to end mass
incarceration. That fight remains strongest at the
state and local levels.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, when it comes to immigrant detention, of
course, the Trump administration is not even
pretending to attempt to reduce the incarcerated
population. The severity of this administration’s
approach to immigrants and refugees reveals the
punitive foundations of its worldview. This is,
after all, the party of concentration camps for
migrant children. The party of expanded detention
and accelerated deportation. The party of raids on
immigrant communities. The party of border walls,
border fences, border guards, and border
militarization. The party of the Muslim ban. The
party of ending abortion and erasing transgender
people out of legal personhood, both of which rest
on expanded criminalization. The party of “lock her
up.”</p>
<p>None of that has changed, nor will it. Six weeks
ago, the administration diverted nearly half a
billion dollars from medical research, FEMA, and
other necessary federal projects to pay for its
expanded regime of immigrant detention (including
family separation). The First Step Act continues
this nativistic violence by <span><a
href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/22/17377324/first-step-act-prison-reform-congress?fbclid=IwAR3FbVY0Lo88mGr8-vGiboxqgZF_9U-bUXXB_4Bv4GR_DAO40cFz2kqBgTo">excluding
undocumented immigrants as well as “people who
are convicted of high-level offenses.”</a></span></p>
<p>In pushing the First Step Act, Republicans are
hoping to score a public relations victory to
stabilize their power. They are aiming to shore up
their legitimacy while the party otherwise advances
transparently dangerous and historically unpopular
policies to strip people of their health care, right
to organize, and environmental and personal safety.
The First Step Act does not signal any change of
heart or action by the core violence of this
administration.</p>
<p>Such is the way of politics. Even white nationalist
kleptocrats need to adjust to changing
circumstances. Yet progressives do a dangerous
disservice to give any comfort to this agenda. The
First Step Act is only being debated as a result of
the hard work that a large number of grassroots
organizers have put in over the years and decades.
Yet the bill evacuates many of their demands. As
author, activist, and formerly incarcerated person
James Kilgore <span><a
href="https://twitter.com/waazn1/status/1063120714922889218">tweeted</a></span>,
this act aims “to sideline voices of radical critics
of mass incarceration/prison industrial complex. A
moderate reform agenda like this will not bring us
to 1980 levels of incarceration before the earth
boils due to climate change.”</p>
<p>Bipartisanship requires a “middle ground” on which
to find a mutually agreeable solution. And that
middle ground has been fundamental to the
development and maintenance of mass incarceration.
Though Democrats and Republicans have at times
disagreed on the particulars, both have shared what
historian <span><a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/welfare-and-imprisonment-how-get-tough-politics-have-excluded-people-from-society/">Julilly
Kohler-Hausmann</a></span> has called a “get
tough” approach to limiting welfare and expanding
punishment. Both parties have tried to solve social
problems through expanding the power of police, the
scope of prisons, and the scale of surveillance.
Both parties have persecuted working-class
communities of color through domestic wars on crime,
drugs, gangs, and terrorism. Each new front in these
wars has moved the middle rightward.</p>
<p>Ending mass incarceration will require more
partisanship, not less. Stemming the rising tide of
fascism will require more partisanship, not less.
Partnering with Trump and company in the name of
“bipartisanship” to achieve a few tepid reforms
pretends that their extreme violence against Black,
Native, Latinx, and multiracial queer and
transgender communities is somehow separate from the
field of prison rather than central to it.</p>
<p>There is no victory in walking the path of
co-optation. Instead of trying to meet in the middle
with white nationalists and corporate shills,
progressives should be trying to <em>make</em> the
middle ourselves: to build the common sense
reasoning and policy platforms that advance new
paradigms of justice, safety, and sustainability.
We’ve got a world to win.</p>
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<font size="-2">_____________________________________________________<br>
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<a class="domain reader-domain"
href="http://justicelanow.org/trump-firststepact/">http://justicelanow.org/trump-firststepact/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Trump’s Embrace of First Step Act is
Fake Reform</h1>
<div class="meta-data">
<div class="reader-estimated-time">November 17, 2018<br>
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<p><span>As thousands of firefighters, many of whom are
currently incarcerated, battle one of the most
devastating environmental catastrophes California has
ever experienced, Donald Trump embraces the First Step
Act, a bill that reinforces the blistering racism and
capitalistic policies that have subjected millions of
Black, Brown, and poor bodies to local, state, and
federal criminal justice systems.</span></p>
<p><span>Mass incarceration impacts all aspects of life
for so many Californians and Americans. We work in a
collaborative formation that many call a movement,
with the intent and desire to set our communities free
from a system that has devastated our communities for
generations. Currently, we work under a particular
kind of duress, as there is an administration in place
that has not only affirmed and validated the state
violence that we fight, but gregariously celebrated
it. To have Van Jones and others come to Los Angeles
in this moment, and extol the virtues of Trump’s
destructive and amoral administration and call him a
“uniter-in-chief” was an example of irresponsible
advocates supporting a divisive policy that continues
the denigration of people who are incarcerated,
including immigrants. </span></p>
<p><span>“The Trump administration has not and is not
embracing reform,” Phal Sok, a member of JusticeLA and
the Youth Justice Coalition explains. “Characterizing
an endorsement of the First Step Act as such is not
only myopic, it disregards his relentless attacks on
our communities. As part of the collective movement
for liberation, JusticeLA stands in strong opposition
to local and national forces that seek to expand the
reach of incarceration and call reform.” </span></p>
<p><span>Those, like Van Jones, who traffic in policy
efforts that serve to expand the reach of the prison
industrial complex in order to secure political
footing, do so while exploiting the desperation,
vulnerability, and trauma of impacted people and
sanctioning an administration peddling fascism and
white supremacy. Liberal accomplices of Trump-endorsed
policies do so at the risk of obscuring the
administration’s actual agenda – increasing the
criminalization, incarceration and deportation of
LGBTQIA+ communities, refugees and Black and Brown
people from America’s “ghettos” and “shithole
countries.” </span></p>
<p><span>Earlier this year, </span><a
href="http://justicelanow.org/statement-justicela-opposes-first-step-act/"><span>JusticeLA
voiced our opposition</span></a><span> to the bill.
We can only hope that some good can come of it, and we
appreciate those who fought to make key changes to the
bill, namely adding some sentencing reform, limiting
DOJ and warden discretion, and demanding oversight for
disturbing provisions like the development and
implementation of algorithmic based risk assessment
instruments. Those changes are ultimately not enough
to mitigate what is in the end, a harmful bill that
expands the mass criminalization and surveillance of
our communities, or what </span><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/sunday/criminal-justice-reforms-race-technology.html"><span>Michelle
Alexander describes as “the newest Jim Crow.”</span></a><span>
The First Step Act does not represent real reform. It
carves out those most vulnerable to the revolving door
impacts of mass imprisonment, and manages to create
more bureaucracy. This bill is weaker than prior
federal criminal justice reform efforts, while also
placing potential implementation in the hands of an
administration that openly endorses “zero tolerance”
policies that have led to family separation and the
incarceration of thousands. “In many respects, we’re
getting very much tougher on the truly bad criminals —
of which, unfortunately, there are many,” Trump
declared. If Trump does in fact keep his word, the
First Step Act will be yet another tool of a corrupt
and punitive administration.</span></p>
<p>#JusticeLA</p>
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