Kiriakou writes: "Just before New Year's Day, President Donald Trump signed a sentencing reform bill into law. The First Step Act was just that - a first step. It did away with a handful of mandatory minimum sentences, it clarified how good-behavior time is calculated, and it encouraged the appropriation of funds for job training and education. The problem, though, is that it didn't correct any of the mistakes of past efforts to 'reform' the criminal justice system."
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
27 January 19
ust before New Year’s Day, President Donald Trump signed a sentencing reform bill into law. The First Step Act was just that — a first step. It did away with a handful of mandatory minimum sentences, it clarified how good-behavior time is calculated, and it encouraged the appropriation of funds for job training and education. The problem, though, is that it didn’t correct any of the mistakes of past efforts to “reform” the criminal justice system. It did nothing about sentencing enhancements or federal life without parole for nonviolent crimes, nor did it even pretend to reintroduce federal parole, which was banned in the 1980s. More importantly, it did not reform the little-used “compassionate release” rule.
Over the past three decades, judges and juries have filled America’s prisons with nonviolent offenders. Many are serving draconian sentences for first-time offenses. Indeed, while only about 5 percent of the world’s people live in the United States, our country is locking up nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population.
Barack Obama tried to address this issue by creating the Clemency Project, which connects prisoners with pro bono lawyers who could argue for them to have their sentences reduced. Inmates were eligible if their sentences would have been shorter at the end of the Obama administration than when they received them — as long as they’d already served at least half their time with a minimum of ten years.
That didn’t help prisoners who hadn’t yet served half of their sentences. And there was an especially glaring gap for prisoners who were elderly and gravely ill. Where was their relief?
Obama created — and Trump renewed — a practice called compassionate release, which allowed a small handful of prisoners to go free. To qualify, an incarcerated person must be at least 65 years old and suffering from a deteriorating medical condition that diminishes their ability to function in a correctional facility. And they have to have served 10 years or three-fourths of their sentences — whichever was longer. The compassionate release rule also has been interpreted to mean that the prisoner must be suffering from a terminal illness and be within six months of death. That’s not in the law. That’s just how it’s been interpreted.
Last year, the federal government released 110 prisoners under the compassionate release program. While this was a record high, it was also statistically insignificant because there are more than 2.24 million people behind bars. Donald Trump’s protestations notwithstanding, that’s not “reform.”
To make matters worse, although the regulations for eligibility are clear, the entire program is “clouded in secrecy and bureaucracy,” according to the Clemency Report. In the end, there’s no rhyme or reason for who gets compassionate release and who doesn’t.
I watched the failure of this program unfold in real time when I was incarcerated for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. I was friendly with a prisoner I’ll call Bill. Bill was 68 years old and doing 30 years for a nonviolent organized crime conviction. He’d served more than three-quarters of his sentence.
I saw Bill in the hall one day, doubled over in pain. He told me that he’d never before experienced back pain like this. I suggested that he go to sick call in the morning and ask for Tylenol, the go-to painkiller in U.S. prisons. He did, but he got no relief.
A couple of weeks later, Bill was walking with a cane and was in obvious distress. He told me again that his back pain was excruciating. He’d asked the medical unit for an x-ray, and he’d been denied. The physician’s assistant had just given him more Tylenol.
Two weeks later, Bill was in a wheelchair. I went to the chaplain, for whom I worked as a janitor, and said that Bill was being denied medical care. He agreed to intervene.
Bill was finally sent to an outside hospital for an MRI, which found stage 4 cancer of the spine. Bill applied for compassionate release so he could die at home, surrounded by his family. The warden went to see him in his cell. Would Bill sign a paper agreeing not to hold the prison responsible for failing to diagnose and treat his cancer? He refused.
Two weeks later, Bill died in his bunk in prison, alone.
This shouldn’t have happened. Compassionate release was created exactly for prisoners like Bill. Dying prisoners who pose no threat to society whatsoever should be sent home to be with their families. It’s the only moral thing to do.
Donald Trump, like Barack Obama before him, should stop crowing about his success in sentencing reform. There was no success. America’s prisoners are just as forgotten and abused as they’ve ever been.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
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