The House Judiciary Committee will this week unveil sentencing reform legislation to align the panel’s efforts with its senate counterpart, and then it will seek to advance even more criminal justice reform.
The panel’s leaders said in a press release announcing the “companion legislation” that they intend to introduce more bills “over the coming weeks.”
Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) said they hope to use the proposals to address: issues with prison and re-entry; problematic law enforcement strategies and procedures; over-criminalization, and abuses of civil asset forfeiture.
“For the past several months, the House Judiciary Committee has been working on a bipartisan basis on several bills to ensure our federal criminal laws and regulations appropriately punish wrongdoers, are effectively and appropriately enforced, operate with fairness and compassion, protect individual freedom, safeguard civil liberties, work as efficiently as possible, do not impede state efforts, and do not waste taxpayer dollars,” the pair said.
Last week, after months of negotiations, members of both parties on the Senate Judiciary Committee agreed to a legislative package that would reduce certain federal mandatory minimums while making others more strict.
Committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who had long been resistant to any relaxation of mandatory minimums, described the bill as “the biggest criminal justice reform in a generation.”
The Senate bill, in its current form, would also grant more opportunities for early release to lesser criminals, and many of its provisions would apply ex poste facto to those currently incarcerated.
The House Judiciary Committee has itself since June been working on the language of a criminal justice reform initiative.
While many proposals to amend America’s criminal justice have been knocking around Capitol Hill for years, the blossoming of nationwide anti-police brutality demonstrations–both violent and peaceful–have made them more politically viable in recent months. The movements were launched last summer after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was repeatedly shot, fatally, by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
