Mitch McConnell Appears to Be Killing Bipartisan Sentencing Reform
Advocates claim that the bill would pass with a supermajority in the Senate, but the majority leader says it’s dividing his caucus.
A series of tough sentencing laws in the 1970s and 1980s sent incarceration rates soaring. Congress imposed mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes including drug offenses, leaving aging offenders serving life terms as the federal prison population swelled from 25,000 in 1980 to 210,000 three decades later. Though federal incarceration rates grew more quickly than state rates, states hold most of the country’s 2.3 million total inmates.
In recent years, a coalition of liberal and conservative reformers have pushed for changes with arguments both moral and fiscal. Some success came during the Obama years, such as reducing the sentencing disparity between forms of cocaine. Despite President Donald Trump’s “tough on
