By Brent Griffiths
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After several months of attempting to pass a bipartisan prison sentencing reform bill, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s measure is at a standstill.
Beth Levine, the Grassley communications director, said the senior Iowa senator is still trying to reach out to both Republicans and Democrats who are not on the Judiciary Committee to back the bill.
The deal, as written in October, would not completely ditch mandatory minimum sentences, which explicitly require judges to sentence offenders to a minimum number of years in prison. Instead, the bill narrows the scope to focus on serious drug offenders and violent criminals.
“We’re here today because of a lot of hard work and a strong desire of those us here to make the Senate work,” Grassley said on Oct. 1, 2015, introducing the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 flanked by eight of his colleagues. “There are things in here that each of us like, and there are items that each of us would rather do without, but this is how the process works here in the Congress.”
Mandatory minimums for drug trafficking can range from five years for first-time offenders to life in prison.
Such laws are in place at both the state and federal level, but the bill would only apply to federal charges — a small section of the large number of inmates incarcerated nationwide.
As of 2014 (the most-recent statistics), 210,600 people are incarcerated in federal prison, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That same year, approximately 1.3 million were incarcerated in state prisons.
Around 85,400 — 46.4 percent — of inmates are charged with drug offenses, according to March 2016 statistics from the Federal Bureau of Statistics.
Grassley, R-Iowa, has been long skeptical of reducing or eliminating many of the mandatory minimums blamed for the current incarceration situation.
But in early October, he gave his blessings to what may be one of the few bipartisan bills to pass Congress in recent years. Grassley has an immense power in the conversation because he is in many ways the decider as the influential Senate Judiciary Committee chairman.
In Congress, a committee chairman such as Grassley is usually given significant leeway to decide and discuss the agenda for his fellow members. Put bluntly, if Grassley had said no to such a compromise, it is unlikely a bill would be able to pass the Senate — let alone get brought up in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
The inclusion of Grassley meant that the calls to completely overturn minimum sentences were left unheeded. In fact, the original bill added minimums for violent crimes, and Grassley has stressed he is open to calls from in his party to make sure violent offenders do not fall through the cracks.
Starting in the 1980s, federal mandatory minimums grew increasingly more severe for drug offenses with broad bipartisan support, said Christopher Larimer, an associate professor at the University of Northern Iowa.
But in recent years, lawmakers, former judges, and national experts have argued that such penalties are ineffective, have led to a massive growth in the prison population, and have disproportionately affected people of color.
The issue of criminal-justice reform is at its most prominent and raw stage in perhaps decades. The images of police armed to the teeth outside of Ferguson, Missouri, and activists confronting presidential candidates, usurping news coverage for days, have been hard to avoid.
As one of the faces of #BlackLivesMatter movement, DeRay McKesson, put it on Twitter, “The movement has fundamentally changed electoral politics by forcing conversations about race and justice to the forefront.”
In addition, some activists maintain the bill does not go far enough.
Molly Gill, the director of federal legislative affairs at Families Against Mandatory Minimums, gave an example of Molly Martinson, a woman from Mason City, Iowa.
Gill said Martinson was a drug addict and was held accountable for all of her boyfriend’s drugs. She was sentenced to 15 years to prison, 10 years for the amount of drugs in their residence, plus another five years for guns found in their residence.
“Sen. Grassley has come a long way in supporting sentencing reform. He’s made really commendable efforts,” Gill said. “Some of the reforms in [the bill] are positive and things that we should be doing, but any effort to characterize it as some kind of jailbreak is just misinformed.”
Approximately 4,000 people each year will see slightly different sentences, and 12,000 people in prison now could go back to court and try to change their sentencing time if the bill was to pass, Gill said.
Despite the bill altering mandatory life without parole for drug offenses, some sentences will range from 30 years to 25 years, Gill said, and people will still go to jail for a long time with this legislation.
“It has a pretty narrow impact in term of both going forward; if they do pass [it], it will be retroactive,” she said. “If you get a reduction, it doesn’t mean you’re coming outtomorrow; it’s not like 13,000 people will be walking out of federal prison. It’s a pretty rigorous standard in terms of getting out.”