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The Left’s Well-Meaning Betrayal of Criminal Justice Reform
2020 was a major opportunity for criminal justice reform. Elite progressives squandered it.
Even before George Floyd was murdered on the streets of Minneapolis in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses, there was a growing appetite to reform policing and the U.S. criminal justice system.
In 2018, the FIRST STEP Act, the first meaningful criminal justice reform effort in over a decade, was passed by a Republican Congress. It was signed into law by a sitting Republican president- one who admitted from the White House that sentencing in America is racially biased against Black Americans, no less.
Prior to 2018, an awareness had been growing for some time in sectors which never before had been willing to entertain such a thing as institutionalized unfairness in the crown jewel of the U.S. Constitution- the U.S. legal system.
Admitting flaws in the legal system wasn’t even the half of it, either.
Over the past decade, local police departments had been inundated with surplus and leftover military equipment- and people were finally starting to notice. No-knock warrants were in the cross-hairs. Civil asset forfeiture- that ill-considered policy which turned local police departments into bounty hunters concerned with seizing property from…