Compromise at last

The urgency of criminal-justice reform has become a rare matter of bipartisan consensus in Washington. Yet a reform bill introduced two years ago with support from both sides of the aisle failed to make it through the Senate. Now the bill’s backers are renewing their effort to reduce the federal prison population.

The bill seeks to lower mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses and limit those enhanced sentences to only “serious” drug crimes—though mandatory minimums would newly apply to offenders with serious violent crimes on their records. Judges could retroactively reduce the sentences of those who received a lengthy prison term under these requirements, except for prisoners who had committed a violent felony. Likewise, the bill would allow judges to reduce harsh sentences handed down for possession of crack cocaine by retroactively applying the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity between criminal penalties for crack and powder cocaine. And courts would have flexibility to impose sentences lower than the minimum requirement in an increased number of drug cases.

These are responsible proposals that deserve bipartisan consideration by Congress. But the problem of overincarceration will not be solved by curbing federal drug sentences. To begin with, the overwhelming majority of prisoners in the United States are incarcerated in state rather than federal prisons. And while about half of federal inmates were convicted of drug crimes, such offenses account for a much smaller proportion of state prisoners— more than half of whom, in turn, have been imprisoned for violent offenses.