What Happened to Biden’s Ambitious Criminal Justice Reform Plans?
In the January 2025 issue of Reason, we’re giving performance reviews of Joe Biden’s presidency. Click here to read the other entries.
To win the Democratic primaries four years ago, Joe Biden had to take a left turn on criminal justice, offering voters a smorgasbord of reforms to a carceral system he had helped build over his decades as a tough-on-crime senator. As Biden’s presidency sputters to an end, the White House has made strides on some of those goals but failed to deliver on many others.
Biden’s voluminous 2020 criminal justice platform (now scrubbed from his website) advocated eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, cash bail, and the federal death penalty. It called for ending the “school-to-prison pipeline” and heavily investing in mental health counselors at schools and in juvenile justice programs that provide alternatives to incarceration. Biden also promised to use the Justice Department to investigate systemic misconduct by police departments, and he vowed to use his clemency powers to free “individuals facing unduly long sentences for certain non-violent and drug crimes.”
Biden’s platform was still moderated by his old drug-warrior tendencies. For instance, it called only for decriminalizing marijuana rather than legalizing it, and it insisted on diverting individuals to drug courts and involuntary treatment. Still, The Marshall Project, a criminal justice news outlet, called it “the most progressive criminal justice platform of any major party candidate in generations.”
Criminal justice advocates were dismayed, then, when Biden’s belated moves on marijuana failed to fundamentally alter the drug’s illegal status or the lingering in
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