Sentencing change backed by Koch billionaires

A strange-bedfellows alliance of Republicans and Democrats led by President Obama is pushing to reform federal laws that have packed prisons with legions of aging, nonviolent drug dealers.

Mandatory minimum sentencing laws and guidelines, along with so-called “three strikes, you’re out” statutes, have helped fill US prisons with drug offenders.

But warehousing them costs the government big money - up to a million dollars each in the case of teens locked up for life.

They are the legislative legacy of the crack epidemic that raged in the ‘80s and ‘90s - federal sentencing statutes meant to clear the streets of rampant crime.

Proponents of reform include lawmakers from both parties, and even staunchly conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch.

On Thursday, he will become the first sitting president to visit a prison.

Obama will meet with prison officials and inmates inside the federal penitentiary in El Reno, Oklahoma, to “underscore the administration’s focus on the need to reform and improve America’s criminal justice system,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday.

And as early as Monday, the president may announce his latest round of clemencies of nonviolent offenders.

In March, he shortened the sentences of nearly two dozen drug inmates, including eight who were doing life.

With prisons overcrowded by almost 40 percent, and more people behind bars - 2.3 million - than in any other country in the world, sentencing reform simply makes good fiscal and humanitarian sense, said Mike Riggs of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

“The Bureau of Prisons is spending 25 percent of the DOJ budget - much of it on nonviolent drug offenders,” Riggs said. “Do we really need to do that, when we’re trying to fight cyberterrorism and ISIS?”

Sentencing reform would benefit New York state, said veteran defense lawyer George Goltzer.

“We deal with these guidelines every day, and the catalog of human tragedy is amazing,” he said. “These are not major drug dealers; these are not the leaders of a cartel.”

President Barack Obama is expected to argue for revamping U.S. sentencing guidelines during a speech to the NAACP annual convention on Tuesday in Philadelphia. Top officials from the Justice Department, including Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, have recently met with members of Congress to express support for sentencing reform legislation. Key lawmakers from both parties have been invited to the White House next week to discuss strategy.

“Engagement with the president has been lacking for the past six years, but this is one topic where it has been refreshingly bipartisan,” Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who heads the House Oversight Committee, said in a phone interview.

Obama came to office promising to reduce the number of Americans imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, and in 2010 signed a law reducing disparities in sentences for possession of crack and powder cocaine. Some Republicans and police organizations criticized the moves as too lenient, but now a bipartisan coalition that includes Obama’s chief political antagonists, billionaires Charles and David Koch, have joined him to support relaxing federal sentencing guidelines.

More than 2.2 million adults are imprisoned in the United States, the most in the world, and the incarceration rate is between five and 10 times higher than in Western European countries, according to the National Research Council. Lawmakers in both parties have been raising alarms about the cost of mass incarceration to taxpayers and to minority communities that are disproportionately the source of prisoners.

About 60 percent of all prisoners are black or Hispanic, and black men under age 35 who did not finish high school are more likely to be behind bars than to hold a job, according to the research council. More than 100,000 people are currently in federal prison for drug-related crimes, at a cost of about $30,000 per person each year, the United States Sentencing Commission said in a May report.

That price tag has drawn a cadre of fiscally-conservative Republicans to join with Democrats in a bid to overhaul sentencing. Success would mean a rare bipartisan legislative victory for Obama and a concrete policy achievement to match recent speeches urging the nation to focus on racial and criminal-justice issues.

Chaffetz said he was optimistic that a package of bills would advance because of a diverse coalition of supporters lined up behind it. The president dubbed the legislation “a big sack of potatoes” in a meeting with lawmakers in February, Chaffetz said. The composition of the legislation isn’t final.

The Koch brothers, billionaire Republican donors, support a bill introduced last month by Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, and Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat, that would encourage probation rather than imprisonment for relatively minor, non-violent offenses and improve parole programs in order to reduce recidivism.

The Sensenbrenner-Scott bill is modeled on state efforts to reduce incarceration. While the federal prison population has grown 15 percent in the last decade, state prisons hold 4 percent fewer people, according to Sensenbrenner’s office. Thirty-two states have saved a cumulative $4.6 billion in the past five years from reduced crime and imprisonment, his office said in a report.

The legislation “is the result of years of efforts to identify, compile and bring to the national level the best, evidence-based practices in criminal justice reform,” Representative Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat said in a statement.

Bob Goodlatte, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, held a meeting in late June to listen to proposals from lawmakers in both parties. And Chaffetz, who described Republican leadership in the House as “very optimistic and encouraging,” scheduled hearings on the issue by his committee for July 14 and 15.

“I don’t normally do two days of hearings, we’re giving it that much attention,” Chaffetz said. “So it has more momentum than anybody realizes.”

There is a significant obstacle on the other side of the Capitol: Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who chairs his chamber’s Judiciary Committee.

An effort in February to advance legislation that included across-the-board reductions in minimum mandatory sentences met with resistance from Grassley, who wouldn’t put it to a vote in his committee. But supporters of the House legislation have reason for optimism: last month, Grassley announced he would work on a compromise in the Senate.

While Grassley has indicated a willingness to reduce penalties for some crimes, he wants to increase mandatory minimum sentences for other offenses, a Senate Republican aide said. The person requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

That could make sentencing changes an easier sell to tough- on-crime voters, but endanger the support of lawmakers who see mandatory minimums as bad policy.

“There does appear hope for a bipartisan compromise,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday. “We obviously welcome that opportunity.”

Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who has long championed criminal justice reform, is leading negotiations with Grassley. He’s backed by Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on Grassley’s committee, and Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second- ranking Democrat in the Senate.

The talks remain sensitive. During a Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Leahy - admitting he already knew the answer - asked Yates, who was testifying before the panel, to restate her support for sentencing reform.

“I was born at night, but not last night,” Grassley interjected. “And I know that question was in reference to me, and I want everybody to know that we’re working hard on getting a sentencing reform compromise that we can introduce. And if we don’t get one pretty soon, I’ll probably have my own ideas to put forward.”