Recapping some notable Senate hearings on prisons and pot

Yesterday saw two notable hearing on Capitol Hill on criminal justice concerns, and here is some press coverage providing a partial summary of some of what transpired:

From the AP, "Prisons chief deflects blame for failures, angering senators":

With just days left in his tenure, the embattled director of the federal prison system faced a bipartisan onslaught Tuesday as he refused to accept responsibility for a culture of corruption and misconduct that has plagued his agency for years.

Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal, testifying before the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, insisted he had been shielded from problems by his underlings — even though he’d been copied on emails, and some of the troubles were detailed in reports generated by the agency’s headquarters.

Carvajal, who resigned in January and is set to be replaced next week by Oregon’s state prison director Colette Peters, blamed the size and structure of the Bureau of Prisons for his ignorance on issues such as inmate suicides, sexual abuse, and the free flow of drugs, weapons and other contraband that has roiled some of the agency’s 122 facilities.

From Courthouse News Service, "Marijuana decriminalization takes center stage at Senate hearing":

[Senator Cory] Booker, chairman of the subcommittee and the only Black senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that the federal criminalization of cannabis has “miserably failed” and has led to a “festering injustice” of selectively enforced drug laws disproportionately targeting Black and brown communities.  Nationally, according to a 2020 report by the ACLU, a Black person is nearly four times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than a white person, despite the fact that marijuana use is equally common among racial groups. “Cannabis laws are unevenly enforced and devastate the lives of those most vulnerable,” Booker said during the Tuesday hearing....

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Missouri hit out against the legislation, alleging it “would wipe clean the criminal records of illegal alien traffickers.”  “When these criminals trafficked marijuana, they broke the law. Whether some find that law unfashionable or even unfair, what they did was illegal,” Cotton said.

Weldon Angelos, who was sentenced to 55 years in prison for possessing several pounds of marijuana as well as a firearm and was later pardoned by former President Donald Trump, told the committee that expungement is a critical part of the legislation in order to address what he sees as a racially motivated ban on marijuana.  “Each arrest, prosecution, conviction and sentence makes the world a little bit smaller for those bearing the modern scarlet letter,” Angelos said, referring to what it’s like to live with a drug conviction....

Edward Jackson, chief of the Annapolis Police Department, testified in support of the bill, saying “there is nothing inherently violent” about cannabis.  Jackson asserted that decriminalization would both improve community trust in police and allow officers to focus on higher priority and violent crimes.  “I have spent far too much time arresting people for selling and possessing cannabis,” Jackson said.