, Columnist
The Moral Horror of America’s Prisons
Congress isn’t doing enough to fix the current U.S. penal system, which is a failure of historic proportions.
Not something America should be proud of.
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Now that President Donald Trump has signed a bipartisan criminal justice bill into law, it is worth looking at this issue in more fundamental terms. I would like to suggest a radical — but to me commonsensical — conclusion: Much of the American penal system is an unconstitutional moral horror.
The law, called the First Step Act, will expand early-release programs and change sentencing laws, for instance by weakening mandatory minimum sentences for some classes of nonviolent offenders. I’m all for those changes, but most of the bad features of the current system will remain intact.