The sentencing reform bills that died is John Kiriakou’s account of the legislative moment that came and went while he was serving his sentence at FCI Loretto.
On the table were a bipartisan bill called the Recidivism Reduction and Public Safety Act, sponsored by the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and the Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas, and a US Sentencing Commission vote to lower the drug sentencing guidelines for all drug offences. The Commission’s recommendations, Kiriakou says, would have granted relief to thousands of federal prisoners convicted of drug crimes — with conditions, caveats and criteria, but with thousands serving time “far beyond what was reasonable” getting their freedom back.[1][2]
What the legislation would have done
Speaking about it in 2017, while it was still nominally alive, Kiriakou described a bill that had been before Congress since 2015 and had passed committees in both the House and the Senate — under Democratic control and again under Republican control. Its purpose was to reform the sentencing laws and “to do away with most mandatory minimum sentences.”[3][4]
The abuse it was aimed at, in his description, is the first offence that ends a life: “you can be a first-time non-violent drug offender — first time, non-violent drug offender — and get 10 years, 20 years, 30 years in prison. First time. There’s no second chance.”[4]
Why mandatory minimums produce the result they do
Kiriakou’s technical objection is that a floor operates as a ceiling. “Mandatory minimum really means maximum.” Where one judge might give six months for an offence and another twelve years for the same offence, creating a federal mandatory minimum makes twelve years the number rather than six.[5][6]
He gave that explanation in the same week that Attorney General Jeff Sessions reinstituted the Bush administration’s mandatory-minimum policy and undid the Obama administration’s work to move away from it. His prediction was immediate: the prisons were going to fill right back up — and the beneficiaries would be the private prison companies, whose only way to make money is to cut spending on food and medical care.[6][7]
The limiting principle
Kiriakou is careful to bound the argument, and does so without hedging. If you have attacked and raped a child, “yes, you should die in prison.” If there is violence in the case, definitely; if there is a gun in the case, prison.[8]
What he objects to is the other category: someone caught smoking marijuana, or caught for the first time manufacturing methamphetamine, or with a substance-abuse problem — “you shouldn’t be in prison, at least not for these ridiculous stretches of time.”[8]
He treats the reform as second in a sequence, the first step being to end the war on drugs: legalise marijuana, treat it like alcohol, sell it in liquor stores and let the government tax it, on the ground that it is less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol.[9]
How they died
Both the Recidivism Reduction and Public Safety Act and the Smarter Sentencing Act died in the Senate without so much as a vote. Kiriakou assigns the responsibility to both parties in turn: the then majority leader, the Democrat Harry Reid, never brought them up; when power changed hands and the Republican Mitch McConnell became majority leader, he said the bills would no longer even be considered. “And that’s where it all remains to this day.”[10]
In the 2017 telling he places the veto one step further back, at the Justice Department rather than the Senate leadership: Eric Holder was against the bill and Jeff Sessions was against it, “and so neither Harry Reid nor Mitch McConnell would allow it to come to the floor of the Senate for a vote” — despite its bipartisan support.[3][4]
The case he makes for them
The argument Kiriakou made for them was the one he makes about American incarceration generally — that the people concerned are not nameless and faceless, that their families are victims too, and that the money spent holding them could be earned and taxed instead.[2]
Asked what he would most like changed in the legal system, he named the abolition of mandatory minimum sentencing first, and supported it with the arithmetic he returns to repeatedly: one in every four black men in the country is on parole, on probation, or incarcerated; one in every two has spent time in jail or prison; and one in every nine adults has a felony conviction.[11][12]
Sentencing is not the only reform on his list. He also wants something done about charge stacking, overcharging, venue shopping and prosecutorial discretion — the last of which he describes as “ganging up on somebody whose politics you don’t like.” The problem, he concludes, sits in the Justice Department.[12][13]
He has also described the campaign itself as a matter of persistence rather than persuasion: with a radio show, a weekly column and regular bookings on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, his plan on prison and sentencing reform was to “keep talking until they’re sick and tired of hearing it, and they either do something or they stop inviting me onto these shows.”[14]