"What Biden’s Win Means for the Future of Criminal Justice"

The title of this post is the headline of this extended new piece from The Marshall Project, which begins this way:

During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to end private prisons, cash bail, mandatory-minimum sentencing and the death penalty.  Candidate Biden also said the U.S. could reduce its prison population by more than half.  While he didn’t put forward as progressive or as detailed a platform as many of his competitors for the Democratic nomination (including his running mate Kamala Harris), Biden has nevertheless, quietly, been elected on the most progressive criminal justice platform of any major party candidate in generations.  So what can he actually do?

Biden will face the same constraints as all incoming presidents after a campaign of big promises.  Government moves slowly, time and political capital are limited, and his administration will likely need to prioritize the pandemic and the related economic fallout in the early days.  But if he’s serious about tackling criminal justice, here’s what experts say to expect from the Biden administration on key issues.

I recommend checking out the full lengthy discussion, and here are snippets from a few of its sentencing pieces:

The Death Penalty

Biden can’t unilaterally end the death penalty, but he can speed up its demise and use symbolism to signal a new era.  Ultimately, the death penalty is symbolic. It has never been used to punish more than a tiny fraction of the most serious murders, but it makes very long prison sentences appear lenient by comparison.

On the campaign trail, Biden said he’d work to end the federal government’s use of the death penalty.  His record is mixed.... Although only Congress can fully abolish the federal death penalty, the president can do a great deal to speed its yearslong decline across the country.  Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, oversaw the most federal executions of any presidential administration since Eisenhower.  A new attorney general could stop them immediately, and return to the Obama-era practice of seeking no executions. A new attorney general could tell U.S. attorneys to only seek new death sentences for rare crimes like terrorism and mass shootings, which would still apply to defendants like Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev.... — Maurice Chammah

Mandatory Minimums

Biden has said he wants to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences, a legacy of the tough-on-crime ’80s.  To make this happen at the federal level, he’d need to appoint a range of officials who share this view, and get buy-in from Congress....

Biden’s criminal justice platform pledges to eliminate federal mandatory minimums.  Biden hasn’t specified which ones, but advocates say if he does tackle them, he will likely focus on drug crimes.  There are more than 60,000 people currently serving mandatory minimum sentences in federal prison, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. 10,000 entered the system last year alone.  A broad clemency effort or a law change, if it were retroactive, could reduce the federal prison population by a quarter almost overnight.

Repealing mandatory minimums — or passing a “safety valve” law that doesn’t repeal them but gives judges the discretion to sidestep them — would require an act of Congress. Part of the problem, say scholars who study the issue, are the Attorney General and the Department of Justice, whose opinions carry a lot of weight with Congress.  So the first step a President Biden could take to signal his commitment to repealing mandatory minimums is to appoint officials who share his view, says Rachel Barkow, a law professor at NYU and a former member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which helps draft federal sentencing guidelines.  An Attorney General who is skeptical of mandatory minimums could also instruct federal prosecutors to use them judiciously, as Eric Holder did in 2013.... — Beth Schwartzapfel

Clemency

Biden has lots of power to revamp and supercharge the clemency process — but he hasn’t given much indication that he intends to use it. Clemency, which includes reversing criminal convictions (pardons) and shortening sentences (commutations), is the president’s most direct means to reduce incarceration. Biden made no bold promises on these topics during the campaign. He has promised to “broadly use his clemency power for certain non-violent and drug crimes,” as Obama did at the end of his administration....

Biden could ask Harris to take the lead on clemency since she laid out a more detailed plan than his own during the Democratic primary. Harris said she would remove clemency decisions from the Department of Justice and open a federal sentence review unit, where a team of lawyers would be exclusively tasked with reviewing old sentences and considering reductions.... — Jamiles Lartey

Private Prisons

Biden can move the 14,000 federal prisoners currently held in private facilities without too much struggle. After that it gets harder.  Biden and Harris both pledged to end the federal government’s use of private prisons during the 2020 campaign, a position that is extremely popular among Democrats partywide.  Experts say the incoming administration is likely to build on guidance issued under the Obama administration in 2016, rescinded by Trump, that encourages the director of the Bureau of Prisons to stop renewing contracts with private facilities when they expire, in an effort to ultimately phase out their use.... — Jamiles Lartey

Reducing The Prison Population

Biden can’t implement new programs or rewrite outdated sentencing laws at the state level.  But he can use federal funding to send a message.  Crime prevention is a central feature of Biden’s criminal justice plan.  He has pledged to set aside $20 billion in federal funding to states that adopt evidence-based crime prevention programs and that opt for diversion programs over incarceration....

Under Biden’s plan, states would have access to federal funding if they agreed to implement programs designed to keep people out of prison.  The funding comes with some stipulations: States must eliminate mandatory minimums and they must create earned credit programs for people currently serving time.  It’s unclear what kinds of programs states could or should adopt in order to get the funding.  Biden has emphasized the need for states to invest in programs that address several underlying drivers of crime such as illiteracy and limited early education.  Congress would have to enact Biden’s plan.  — Nicole Lewis

Though indirectly mentioned in the Mandatory Minimum section, I am a bit disappointed that appointments to the US Sentencing Commission is not mentioned. The USSC, with the right appointees, could provide to be a particularly important and consequential agency at a moment in which implementation of the FIRST STEP Act is really still just getting started and during which other legislative reforms are being widely discussed.