This is the Kaderie Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 22, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Republican US Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is a vocal opponent of sentencing reform

and even modest prison reforms, putting him at odds

with members of his own party who appreciate the expense and damage done by wildly disproportionate

sentencing. Kevin Ring is president of Families Against Mandatory disproportionate sentencing

reform has been languishing on Capitol Hill.

It's has been a priority for many senators for some time and

representatives for some time and I haven't seen much about it but what

gives me hope that it might actually be happening is the fact

that Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton is so very much against it.

Yeah, Tom Cotton emerges like a troll every couple years when he thinks sentencing reform is about to happen and blasts it.

As much as like a three-year-old would approach two people working on a puzzle and just start throwing pieces.

He doesn't have much constructive to add to the debate.

He doesn't know a lot about the topic, but he has this sort of ideology of, know crime bad safety good as if nobody understands that except for him and so

he throws these tantrums and it starts accusing everybody of being soft on crime.

And we're talking about people like former prosecutors, police, Senator Mike Lee, who was a

former federal prosecutor, all sorts of people who he

smears as being soft on crime because they don't agree with him that we should just

dump the federal treasury into the Bureau of Prisons and lock everybody up for life sentences.

All right, so what is it specifically? What is the piece that is moving through the process right now that he is so

opposed to? Well, it's really everything.

...