The First Step Act, signed into law on December 21, 2018 by Donald Trump, only happened after

years of bipartisan frustration with an overly punitive federal prison system.

The act had three majoral structural components, correctional reform, sentencing reform, and reentry support.

What really interests me about this act is who supported it? The ACLU, the Koch brothers, Van Jones, Kim Kardashian, evangelical Christians, and the Trump administration, strange bedfellows no matter how you cut it.

In fact, the ACLU would join forces with another unexpected acronym, the NRA, six years later to protect free speech.

As we know, reform is slow in a bureaucracy.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin introduced a precursor to this act in 2015

that proposed significant changes to mandatory minimum sentences.

While it received overwhelming bipartisan support, it was blocked in 2016 by Republican senators Tom Cotton and Jeff Sessions.

Then Donald Trump was elected on his Law and Order platform, and Sessions was appointed

Attorney General. Many believe the bill to be dead.

Yet within two years, an unlikely coalition pushed the bill further than it had gone before,

and they got it passed. I'm not here to make a kumbaya statement. Even after it became law, the bill had many problems.

It only covers federal prisoners, which represents less than 10% of the U.S. prison population.

The assessment tools used for credits has documented racial biases, which is kind of fuck

since the prison system also has documented racial biases, which is kind of fuck since the prison system also has documented

racial biases. The exclusion list is said to have locked out 59,000 inmates. Immigrants were

explicitly excluded, which isn't surprising given it's the Trump administration. Unsurprisingly, the

implementation was mismanaged and the entire project was underfunded. So it had problems

across the board. Yet as of 2024, over 44,000 inmates had been released due to this act, and I don't think it's healthy to discount wins when they appear.

I started thinking about this piece of legislation and a few others after watching the online discourse over Hassan Piker.

I'm not going to talk about him because I don't watch enough of him to offer any

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