Intriguing comments about the politics and persons around FIRST STEP Act and federal criminal justice reform efforts

The Marshall Project has this notable new Q&A under the full headlined "Van Jones Answers His Critics: The CNN host defends his involvement with a controversial prison reform bill and the Trump White House." I recommend the piece in full, and here are snippets reflecting intriguing parts of Jones's thoughtful perspective on the politics and people impacting federal criminal justice reform efforts:

[W]e need a stable bipartisan consensus to undo mass incarceration. In order to get there, we have to break this logjam that existed under President Barack Obama and in Congress. When we had Obama in the White House and [former U.S. Attorneys] Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch in the Department of Justice, we had a pretty robust bill that I fought tooth and nail to try to get passed. It had sentencing reform, prison reform, and every other kind of reform in there. In the fall of 2016, a bunch of people said, “Well, let's not pass this right now. The Democrats are going to have an epic victory. We'll have Hillary Clinton, more Democrats, and we can get an even better bill.” You see what happened. The lesson I learned from that was take the reform you can get when you can get it and keep going....

[Debates over which bill to support] became more of a split between some of the inside-the-Beltway organizations that have a particular worldview that is important, versus a lot of the grassroots groups who are really dealing on a daily basis with incarcerated people looking at the actual content of the bill. There were black people and white people on all sides of that. So as somebody who has been frontline 25 years on criminal justice, you would want people to give you the benefit of the doubt. But if folks choose not to, that's just called democracy.

I get outraged when people like Topeka Sam, an African American woman who was incarcerated, brings a dozen formerly incarcerated women to the White House to advocate for reform and is attacked. I get outraged when Shaka Senghor, who did 19 years in prison and almost 10 years in solitary confinement, speaks up for the bill and gets attacked. On Facebook they were called sellouts, Uncle Toms. I don't think it's appropriate when formerly incarcerated African Americans are vilified this way....

Where is this strong bipartisan coalition for sentencing reform [that some claim exists]? I know that they were able to get the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act out of committee in judiciary, which is good on the Senate side, but there is zero chance that that bill is going to be brought for a vote by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in its present form, and there’s not even a strategy to get McConnell to check it out, that I can tell. A lot of the Republicans do want sentencing reform, but they can't start there with a critical mass of their other colleagues.

I think that because this is one of the very few areas of bipartisan agreement, there will be multiple opportunities to come back again on criminal justice reform and to make progress.... I would love to see sentencing reform. Fought for it my whole life. Fought for it before it was popular. I just didn't understand why some people in the Senate want us to try to carry a camel through a keyhole in the House. If they have the votes to get sentencing reform in the Senate, God bless them. We couldn't find those votes in the House. We had to carry through the House what we could carry through the House. Nobody would be happier than me to see sentencing reform taken up by either chamber. But we had to get through the House what we could get through the House.

Here's the irony: If sentencing reform does now get taken up, or it's introduced as a part of the First Step Act, or there's some amalgamation between the two and something does get passed with sentencing reform in it, it will only get passed because we got something more modest through the House first.

Some of many prior related posts:

• House Judiciary Committee approves FIRST STEP Act by a vote of 25-5 after lots of discussion of amendments
• FIRST STEP Act passes US House of Representatives by vote of 360-59(!), but its fate in Senate remains uncertain
• Interesting new US Sentencing Commission analysis of possible impact of Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017
• On eve of House Committee consideration, distinct advice from criminal justice reform groups on latest federal prison reform proposal 
• Five prominent congressional Democrats write in opposition to federal statutory prison reform without broader sentencing reform
• The latest political back and forth, on both sides of the aisle, as federal prison reform efforts gain momentum 
• Prez Trump pledges to sign prison reform that will be "best in the world"
• On eve of planned House vote on FIRST STEP Act, NY Times editorial misguidedly asserts a "partial bill could end up being worse than nothing" 
• An (encouraging?) update on the state of federal criminal justice reform in US Senate 
• Disconcerting update on Senate's (lack of) progress on federal statutory criminal justice reforms
• Large group of former prisoners urge Senate leaders to move forward with FIRST STEP Act