CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM IS HAVING A (LONG OVERDUE) MOMENT
LAST MAY, REALITY TV mega-celebrity Kim Kardashian arrived at the White House and successfully lobbied President Donald Trump to grant clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, a grandmother then serving life in federal prison for a nonviolent drug crime.
It would be easy to read that sentence as an encapsulation of the deeply absurd times we’re living through, but 2018 was full of similarly unexpected and encouraging turns in the fight to reform the criminal justice system. Along with Kardashian getting lifers out of prison, Republicans and Democrats hugged on the Senate floor to celebrate the passage of a bill rolling back some mandatory minimum sentences, and former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones stood in the White House with conservative and evangelical Christian leaders to applaud the signing of that bill. Johnson, who served 21 years in federal prison before Kardashian got her released, was an honored guest at Trump’s State of the Union speech this January and published a book about her experiences.
The U.S. criminal justice system railroads innocent people and petty offenders every day. People die in jails and prisons due to neglect or plain malice by public officials. Even if the U.S. released every single nonviolent drug offender currently behind
