“Joe Biden Hasn’t Kept His Promise to Reduce the Prison Population”

The title of this post is the title of this new opinion piece in the Daily Beast authored by Nazgol Ghandnoosh and Bill Underwood.  Here are excerpts:

For thousands of people in federal prisons and their loved ones, the last session of Congress ended on a heartbreaking note.  Despite high hopes and bipartisan support for several sentencing bills, Congress failed to pass any meaningful reform during 2022.

That repeated failure — coupled with the Bureau of Prisons’ refusal to make adequate use of compassionate release, and President Joe Biden’s limited use of executive clemency — has translated into the federal prison population increasing for the past two years (after nearly a decade in decline), despite the president’s promise to cut it by half.

This year, Congress must do better.  It’s time to pass the EQUAL Act, the First Step Implementation Act, and the COVID-19 Safer Detention Act.

We know firsthand the profound need for sentencing reform.  One of us served 33 years of a life sentence in federal prison before receiving compassionate release.  The other is a sentencing researcher who has documented the growth and harms of lengthy prison sentences. We’ve lived and studied the dramatic rise in the federal prison population and we know the urgency of finding solutions.

Federal prisons imprisoned 25,000 people in 1980.  Today, they imprison more than six times that — nearly 160,000 people. (Fortunately, today’s count does represent a 27 percent reduction from 2013, when the population was at its peak of 219,000 people.)

The past decade of legislative reforms and policy changes, amplified during the early pandemic, have downsized federal prisons. But in the absence of new reforms by Congress and bold action by the administration, the federal prison population has grown again for the past two years.