This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 7th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Congress is currently grappling with how best to handle criminal justice reform in 2015.

Mike Riggs with Families Against Mandatory

Minimums argues that any criminal justice reform adopted in 2015

should have sentencing reform as a major component.

I feel like the community that is working and has been working for so many years on issues of criminal justice reform are very interested in having a win of some

sort and getting some sort of reform because the last time we had a substantive reform was when.

2010, passage of the Fair Sentencing Act if we're talking about through Congress.

And yeah, we, I mean, every win no matter what the legislation is means that people get to go home to their families.

Right now we're basically have two options I won't get too specific but one

option sends a handful of people home to their families a little earlier. The

other option has a potential to send tens of thousands of people over the next several decades

home to their families earlier. So we want the most people to go home the

soonest. Okay so to what extent is sentencing reform, that is to say a sort of a front-end issue,

where does that fit into the discussion currently about criminal justice reform and prison reform?

So we have this tug-of- war that sort of started last session as continued into this

congressional session with two options.

One is front-end reform, which is sentencing, change, how long people go to prison when they're standing before a judge.

The other side is back in reform, which is provide more opportunities for people who have received a sentence to have time taken off that sentence

by engaging in programming while they're incarcerated

that could reduce the chance that they'll re-offend.

...