They’re Telling Us What They Have in Mind. Best We Listen.

One among many reasons I regularly read Doug Berman’s excellent blog, Sentencing Law and Policy, is the breadth of its coverage.  Today it features an article of great value because of its honesty.  It tells us, without a whole lot of varnish, what our opponents on criminal justice policy have in mind for the country.

We ignore it at our peril.  The people behind these suggestions are going to be eager candidates for politically-appointed sub-Cabinet positions in a Democratic administration, at the Justice Department and elsewhere.  If you want to know what the Biden DOJ is actually going to be pushing  —  as opposed to the relative pablum we’ll be hearing about in the campaign (if the former Vice President chooses to mount one)  —  here it is.

I’ll repeat Doug’s SL&P entry verbatim, with a few comments of my own at the end:

As reported in this new AP piece, headlined “Movement for Black Lives seeks sweeping legislative changes,” a big new federal criminal justice reform bill includes some big new ideas for sentencing reform. Here are some of the details:

Proposed federal legislation that would radically transform the nation’s criminal justice system through such changes as eliminating agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration and the use of surveillance technology is set to be unveiled Tuesday by the Movement for Black Lives.

Dubbed the BREATHE Act, the legislation is the culmination of a project led by the policy table of the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 150 organizations. It comes at an unprecedented moment of national reckoning around police brutality and systemic racism that has spurred global protests and cries for change after several high-profile killings of Black Americans, including George Floyd….

The legislation was first shared with The Associated Press, and is scheduled to be revealed in a Tuesday press conference that is slated to include an appearance by singer John Legend. The proposed changes are sweeping and likely to receive robust pushback from lawmakers who perceive the legislation as too radical.

University of Michigan professor and criminal justice expert Heather Ann Thompson acknowledged the uphill battle, but noted that that the legislation is being introduced at a highly opportune time. “I think those programs that they’re suggesting eliminating only look radical if we really ignore the fact that there has been tremendous pressure to meaningfully reform this criminal justice system,” said Thompson, author of “Blood in the Water.”…

No members of Congress have yet said they plan to introduce the bill, but it has won early support among some of the more progressive lawmakers, including Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, who also are due to participate in the news conference.

The bill is broken into four sections, the first of which specifically would divest federal resources from incarceration and policing. It is largely aimed at federal reforms because Congress can more easily regulate federal institutions and policy, as opposed to state institutions or private prison facilities. The other sections lay out a detailed plan to achieve an equitable future, calling for sweeping changes that would eliminate federal programs and agencies “used to finance and expand” the U.S. criminal-legal system.

The elimination would target agencies such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has come under fire in recent years for its aggressive deportation efforts, and lesser-known programs such as Department of Defense 1033, which allows local law enforcement agencies to obtain excess military equipment. The act, which also seeks to reduce the Department of Defense budget, would institute changes to the policing, pretrial detention, sentencing and prosecution practices…

It would establish the Neighborhood Demilitarization Program, which would collect and destroy all equipment like military-grade armored vehicles and weapons in the hands of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies by 2022. Federal law enforcement also would be unable to use facial-recognition technology, which many communities across the nation already have banned, along with drones and forms of electronic surveillance such as ankle-monitoring.

The bill would end life sentences, abolish all mandatory minimum sentencing laws and create a “time bound plan” to close all federal prisons and immigration detention centers….

The bill would direct Congress to establish a Community Public Safety Office that would conduct research on non-punitive, public safety-focused interventions that would be funded through new grants, and programs like a “Free Them All” Matching Grant Program offering a 50% federal match for projected savings when states and communities close detention facilities, local jails, and state or youth prisons.

According to the document, it also would bring about numerous changes for parents and children, such as removing police, school resource officers and other armed security and metal detectors from schools.

Doug then adds, “I suspect that there is little chance that this entire piece of legislation advances in Congress anytime soon, but there may well be a chance that some pieces of this big bill could get incorporated into other proposals. Even if just a statement of aspirations, this new bill is noteworthy and could prove to be quite significant.”

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Got all that?  Quite a list:  Not reform for, but abolition of: (1)  DEA, ICE, life sentences (some of you will be old enough to remember when the Left was promising LWOP if we would just ditch the death penalty), mandatory minimums (no matter how grotesque the crime or how low the minimum), all federal prisons and immigration detention centers, surveillance technology, police and security officers in schools; (2) divestiture of federal funding for state and local police and incarceration; and, (3) within two years, collection and destruction of military-grade equipment “and weapons in the hands of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies…”

Now last I looked, “weapons in the hands of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies” meant, for the most part, the pistols police officers everywhere in the country routinely carry.  In other words  —  just to be clear  —  the proposal is to disarm the police.  I guess they could still have pea shooters (unless pea shooters also count as “weapons,” which I suppose they could, all depending on the size of the pea).

Doug notes that the proposed bill is, for the moment, aspirational, and I suppose it is, if what we’re aspiring to is a surrender to murderers and child rapists of a kind no polity in the world, ever, has been crazy enough to undertake.