The Political Dynamics of Justice Reform in The U.S.

V. Juvenile Justice Reform
on Life-Support
The Marshall Project
Nonprofit Journalism About Criminal Justice
12 February 2016
Justice Reform, RIP?
The vaunted bipartisan drive to enact federal criminal justice reform
is not quite dead. But its pulse is faint.
Among advocates
campaigning to reduce the
country’s bloated prison
population and invest in
rehabilitation, there is a
growing sense that a)
Congress is unlikely to
pass anything this year
worthy of being called
reform, and b) it might be
better to start over in 2017.
Even the decidedly
modest reforms that had
some momentum a few
months ago – measures
that would mainly reduce
mandatory minimum
sentences for some drug
offenders – have run into
fierce opposition from lawand-order
hawks such as
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark,
who credits mandatory
minimums for the 25-year decline in violent crime.
Major reform still has a formidable array of advocates. President Obama yearns to
make justice reform part of his legacy and has lobbied for it in public and in private.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has also professed support, as a way of slowing the
community-destroying cycle of poverty, crime and punishment, not to mention a way of
demonstrating that the GOP is not indifferent to the blacks and Latinos who are
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