It’s something Bevin had long pledged. In 2016, Bevin set up a panel to study criminal justice reform. In an op-ed for the Washington Times that year, Bevin touted legislation that lets some former inmates expunge their records. “The practice of ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ in our criminal justice system is an approach whose shot at effectiveness has run its course,” he wrote. “This misguided mantra propelled the United States’ prison population to unprecedented heights, far outpacing the rest of the world in per capita incarcerations.” [...]
Kentucky’s story, however, isn’t atypical. There has been much discussion of criminal justice reform in the past several years. And there has been a lot of talk about treating the opioid epidemic — the deadliest overdose crisis in US history — as a public health, not criminal justice, issue, unlike past drug crises. The cliché about the crisis, said by both Democrats and Republicans, is that “we can’t arrest our way out of the problem.”
Yet the rhetoric doesn’t tell the whole story. In my own investigation, I found at least 13 states, including Kentucky, that passed laws in recent years that stiffened penalties for opioids painkillers, heroin, or fentanyl — largely in response to the epidemic. In sharp contrast to all the talk about criminal justice reform and public health, these laws risk sending even low-level, nonviolent drug offenders — many of whom are addicted to drugs and need help for that addiction — to prison for years or decades. [...]
But as the opioid epidemic continues to kill tens of thousands of people in the US each year, many state lawmakers have gone back to the old criminal justice playbook to fight the crisis — even as the empirical evidence remains clear that tougher prison sentences are not an effective means to stopping the epidemic. The new laws are just one example. Several states have also dusted off old laws to lock up more opioid users and dealers. [...]
This is happening at the federal level under President Donald Trump. In 2014, the Obama administration told prosecutors to avoid charges for low-level drug offenders that could trigger lengthy mandatory minimums. But the Trump administration, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has rescinded those instructions — letting prosecutors pursue the most stringent penalties even against low-level, nonviolent drug offenders.
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