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President Donald Trump
Unlikely Alliances Are Formed in Service of a Common Cause
What do Kim Kardashian and Charles Koch have in common?
Posted September 17, 2021 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Key points
- The need for criminal justice reform has resulted in unlikely alliances.
- Both Democrats and Republicans have identified criminal justice reform as an important issue.
- The current system is costly and manages to be both too harsh and too lenient on crime.
Kim Kardashian West believes the American criminal justice system needs to be reformed. She is now studying to be a lawyer by apprenticing for #Cut50 (now Dream Corps JUSTICE), which aims to end America’s mass incarceration. Kardashian has paid attorneys to fight for the early release of numerous prisoners, and famously visited President Trump in 2019 (despite endorsing Hillary Clinton during the election) to advocate for sentencing reform. She is also developing a Spotify podcast dedicated to the topic of criminal justice reform.
Charles Koch believes the American criminal justice system needs to be reformed. Criminal justice reform has always been a focus of the Charles Koch Foundation (established in 2011). He recently committed another $25 million toward criminal justice reform, including the federal legalization of marijuana (adding Americans for Prosperity among those in the Cannabis Freedom Alliance). Though still seen as a partisan figure, Koch has even partnered with President Barack Obama to advocate for sentencing reform.
A common cause
Bipartisan issues are becoming exceedingly rare. In the age of social media, any issue can become a lightning rod by which individuals must be sorted into those for and those against. Criminal justice reform has become the rare issue on which we can all unite.
Democrats
The Democratic party’s interest in criminal justice reform has been long-standing. Democratic politicians and self-proclaimed liberals have long bemoaned America’s problem with mass incarceration. As part of his campaign, President Biden proposed a plan “… for strengthening America’s commitment to justice”. The Democratic Party also includes criminal justice reform as part of its party platform, highlighting (among other issues) historic racial disparities. Black and Hispanic individuals are over-represented at every phase in the legal process (e.g., they are more likely to be stopped by police, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be imprisoned, etc.). Many mainstream Democrats tout criminal justice reform as a critical issue.
Republicans
In December of 2018, President Trump signed the First Step Act—a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill approved by a House and a Senate with a Republication majority. This bill provides prisoners with the opportunity to earn reductions to their sentence by participating in empirically-supported programs that will increase their post-incarceration opportunities. The legislation also returns more sentencing power to judges by reducing mandatory minimum sentences. Many Republicans even campaigned on criminal justice reform issues, featuring success stories in prominent campaign ads. Why would so many Republicans join the calls for criminal justice reform?
Fiscal conservativism
In fiscal year 2017, the average annual cost of incarcerating one individual was $36,299.25. Today, approximately 1.8 million people are incarcerated (down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2008). Americans are spending billions of dollars a day to keep people behind bars. While this cost is clearly justified in some cases, in others, those dollars could be better spent elsewhere.
Alice Marie Johnson was sentenced to life in prison (with no possibility of parole) as a first offender. She was convicted on nonviolent drug-related offenses. At the age of 63, after 21 years in prison, President Trump, encouraged by Kim Kardashian, granted her clemency. But, there are thousands more like her: individuals convicted of nonviolent drug-related crimes, serving decades-long sentences.
Not-so-tough on crime
While an overly-punitive system of justice might be preferable to one that lets criminals off too easily, in many cases, our system is both. While individuals like Alice Marie Johnson are sentenced to life in prison, truly dangerous criminals can still evade severe punishments if they are resourceful. Due to the prevalence of guilty pleas and plea bargaining (discussed in my first blog post), wealthy individuals can avoid the judgment of their peers by hiring legal teams to negotiate favorable terms with district attorneys.
The best demonstration of this asymmetric administration of justice is Jeffrey Epstein’s now-infamous plea deal—a non-prosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to avoid any federal charges. Although Epstein was incarcerated, a work-release contingency allowed him to leave jail for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week. Even the requirement that he register as a sex offender was regularly skirted with his infinite resources. In other words, the punitive nature of the current system still allowed a man with multiple counts of rape and human trafficking to escape real punishment. No tough-on-crime conservative could look at this case and state that reform is unnecessary.
Libertarianism
Libertarians also believe that the system is in need of reform, joining calls to reduce the criminalization of drugs (the Reason Foundation, a Libertarian group, is also part of the Cannabis Freedom Alliance). Libertarians believe that The War on Drugs has been ineffective, and that many of those who abuse drugs should be directed to rehabilitation rather than incarceration.
Multi-partisan
Regardless of where you are on the political continuum, you have a reason to be dissatisfied with the American criminal justice system. So, in a time at which everything is politicized and everything is divisive, can we all agree that it is time to fix our broken justice system?
