Despite all the negative aspects that remain within the United State’s prison system, there has been recent legislation that has looked towards substantial prison reform. In 2018, President Donald Trump passed the First Step Act, a piece of legislation that was meant to decrease mass incarceration along with preventing it from increasing in the future. Now that it’s been about 3 years since it was put into place, America is able to look back on the legislation and the effects it has had on our criminal justice and prison systems to see if change has been enacted.

In regard to problems in the criminal justice system, the First Step Act reduced the mandatory minimum sentencing for many drug-related crimes. The change I’m most happy to see, though, was the reduction in sentencing for crack offenders. In my previous blog post, I discussed the great disparity between people who are charged for crack vs cocaine offenses. To refresh your memory, this sentencing difference was a ploy solely based on racial discrimination, as crack was a cheaper alternative to cocaine more commonly found within impoverished Black communities. In 2010, the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) was passed to eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack vs cocaine offenses from that year on. However, the First Step Act has allowed for the FSA to be applied retroactively, which would allow for the release of 2,600 federal prisoners who were convicted for crack prior to 2010.

Although that was the most prominent change brought by the First Step Act (in my opinion), the legislation had many other positive changes while reinforcing previous laws. Mandatory minimum sentences for repeated drug offenders with one previous conviction was decreased from 20 to 15 years, and repeated drug offenders with two or more convictions had a reduction in their minimum sentencing from life-in-prison to 25 years. This change simultaneously works to reduce mass incarceration while also attempting to lower future recidivism rates. Additionally, the First Step Act also looked to support previous laws that weren’t always being followed correctly. Some examples of this are putting prisoners within 500 miles of their residence and increased the amount of days removed from sentencing for good behavior to 54 days per year. If you would like to read more about the changes enacted by the First Step Act, you can read a brief summary from the Federal Bureau of Prisons here.

Now that you know what the First Step Act has tried to change, how effective has it been really? Ames Grawert analyzes this in his article What is the First Step Act – And What’s Happening With It?, published nearly two years later. He claims that there have been some immediate effects, such as the changes to mandatory minimum sentencing and the increased release of crack offenders. But the aspects of the law that focus on prison reform, such as the idea of rehabilitation, need to be actively worked towards as they haven’t been implemented enough since its enactment. Now that Trump’s term is over and President Joe Biden is now in office, I hope that he will continually fight for prison reform and use the First Step Act to enact more change within our system in order to make a lasting impact.

To continue on my blog of injustices in America’s criminal justice system, I’d now like to turn the topic towards one of its biggest offenses: racism. It would be ignorant to say that this racial discrimination doesn’t play a role in the system our country currently uses. This prejudice has been around for hundreds of years, but was amplified in our modern prison system thanks to President Richard Nixon’s 1971 campaign called the “war on drugs.” John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s right-hand men, admitted that this was a blatant attack against Black people. He said, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be … Black, but by getting the public to associate … [Black people] with heroin. And then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [the] communities.” It was clearly a diabolical plot in order to increase anti-Black sentiment in the U.S. by labelling them as “dangerous druggies.” Many have tried to emphasize the importance of this issue, including famous rapper Jay-Z who narrated a YouTube video that explained the effects of this policy firsthand.

Ronald Reagan’s following presidency only continued to worsen the already racist system. It was during the 1980s that Reagan emphasized to the people the disparity between powder cocaine and “crack,” the latter being a more inexpensive version of the traditional drug that’s typically sold and used in poorer communities. This was once again another obvious attack on the Black community, as the criminal justice system decided to give out worse sentences to those arrested for crack rather than powder cocaine. This lead to a huge spike in non-violent drug offenses since its implementation, approximately 400,000 by 1997 compared to just 50,000 in 1980 according to the Drug Policy Alliance.

This evident racism is not just something of the past when it comes to America’s criminal justice system, we are still in need of improvement. However, the U.S. is beginning to move towards more reasonable drug offense sentences in the future, starting with the legalization of marijuana in 15 states (along with Washington D.C.). This is only the first step, though. It is not only necessary to decriminalize non-violent drug offenses, and in turn remove the racial disparities within the United States’ criminal justice system, but also to help these drug offenders receive treatment to combat their difficult addictions. Like I said in my previous blog post, we must look towards rehabilitation as the answer to fix our system, and along the way fight the coinciding racial discrimination and drug criminalization that currently plagues our country. To end on a hopeful note, in 2020 Oregon passed the first ever “all-drug decriminalization measure” called Measure 110. This is a huge win, as it allows for drug offenders to have more accessibility to treatment instead of being criminalized. We must all look toward a better future ahead of us.