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This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Late on Tuesday, the First Step Act, a substantial prison and sentencing reform passed the US Senate.

It has support from a broad range of interest groups and perhaps critically the president.

What's in this reform?

Why has it apparently taken decades to achieve? Sean Hopwood is a

professor of law at Georgetown University. We spoke yesterday. This is the first

significant rollback of any mandatory minimum sentencing at the federal level in at least 20 years or is it ever? Well, I think they cut back on one provision in 2010,

which they then did not make retroactively applicable on the First Step Act actually makes that retroactively

applicable but it is this was the crack to powder cocaine disparity in sentencing that we saw such profound effects in terms of racial disparity in

sentencing in that area, right?

There was and this is the first bill that

significantly reduces several sentencing provisions that had mandatory minimums

and it's the first comprehensive prison reform bill of my lifetime.

I tell people it's both things at once.

It's both modest reform on the one hand and on the other the best federal criminal justice

...