ArcaMax

Thank you, Mr. President.

In this season of giving thanks, I want to express my gratitude to President Donald Trump for softening his longstanding knee-jerk lock-'em-up attitude toward criminal justice, whether he admits to softening or not.

The president has vigorously endorsed a proposed criminal justice bill that doesn't stink. That's saying something for a guy who famously thought the Central Park Five, young black and Hispanic males wrongly accused in the 1989 assault and rape of a jogger, got off easy, even though another man confessed to the crime.

As president, Trump has called for Chicago to return to aggressive stop-and-frisk policies, which New York successfully abandoned under Democratic Mayor Bill De Blasio, and joked in a speech to police officers that it was OK to bump handcuffed suspects' heads when putting them into patrol cars. Not nice.

But it was a very different Donald Trump who last week enthusiastically endorsed the bipartisan First Step Act, which he described as "reasonable sentencing reforms while keeping dangerous and violent criminals off our streets."

Send him the bill, he said to lawmakers, and "I'll be waiting with a pen."

Good. The bill takes important steps to reduce the number of elderly and other low-risk inmates, many of whom were swept up in the mass-incarceration policies that dominated the 1980s and 1990s.

The comprehensive First Step Act builds on a measure that passed the Republican-controlled House by an impressive 360-59 in May. The new package includes language that lowers mandatory minimum sentences for drug felonies, including reducing the "three strikes" penalty from life behind bars to 25 years -- although Democrats had to give up a proposal to make that provision retroactive.

Language added in the Senate would retroactively apply the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 to reduce the disparity in sentencing guidelines between crack and powder cocaine offenses, a disparity that disproportionately has penalized more black and Hispanic offenders than whites.

Among other changes, the bill would allow judges more discretion to issue shorter sentences for low-level crimes. In sharp contrast to the panic over the crack epidemic and drug gang wars that produced a prison population explosion in the 1980s and 1990s, the proposed legislation exemplifies the cooler heads and more rational arguments that have emerged since violent crime began to decline in the mid-1990s.

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