Trump Admin’s Criminal Justice Reform ‘Overwhelmingly’ Helping Black Prisoners

BY JOE SAUNDERS, CONSERVATIVE TRIBUNE 

These are the kinds of numbers that give Democrats nightmares.

With their hopes for defeating President Donald Trump in 2020 depending largely on turning out the black vote in its usual monolithic numbers, Democrats have been relentless in trying to paint the Trump administration as an unadulterated evil for African-Americans.

But a report released this month by the U.S. Sentencing Commission just made that job many, many times harder.

The report found that the First Step Act of 2018, a criminal sentencing reform bill passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Trump in December 2018, had benefited black prisoners incarcerated in the federal prison system in numbers far greater than other races.

Among the key findings for all prisoners, as highlighted by Washington Examiner commentator Paul Bedard in a piece last week headlined “Feds: Kushner’s criminal justice reform working, blacks benefit overwhelmingly”:

• 1,051 motions were granted for a reduced sentence.
• 78.9 percent of granted motions were made by the defendant, 11.8 percent by the attorney for the government, and 9.3 percent by the court.
• Offenders received an average decrease of 73 months (29.4 percent) in their sentences.
• The original average sentence was 239 months.
• The new average sentence was 166 months.

More to the point when it comes to the political optics, though, the beneficiaries of those sentence reductions have been mainly black inmates, according to the report.

Only 4.3 percent of prisoners receiving reduced sentences have been white. More than 90 percent have been black.

And more than 98 percent of them have been male.

Those numbers reflect cases processed through April 30, according to the report, so that’s the effect of the law after only four months in existence.

But even in that short time frame, it’s pretty clear that the law’s impacts are a direct challenge to the Democratic Party’s accusations of racism against the Trump White House.

This is an administration, remember, that has overseen an economy that has brought the unemployment rate among black Americans to historic lows.

It’s even drawn support from surprising places, such as rap superstar Kanye West.

Now, black Americans are the main beneficiaries of a sentencing reform bill that was passed when Republicans held majorities in both houses of Congress and signed by a president whom liberals, Democrats and their propaganda arm in the mainstream media have spent years now vilifying as a “racist.”

One of the chief offenders in that canard has been 2020 Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden.

As a senator, Biden was one of the authors of the 1994 crime bill that is the main reason for the country’s high incarceration rate today, particularly among black Americans (it’s a contribution he continues to defend, as CNN noted last week).

He’s also the former vice president famous for, among other things, telling a black audience that a Republican White House — if Mitt Romney were elected president in 2012 — would “put y’all back in chains.”

As usual when it comes to Democrats, exactly the opposite is true.

The party that fought the Civil War to keep black Americans enslaved in the United States, then spent more than 100 years after that defending Jim Crow laws that enforced a very real kind of second-class citizenship for black people in the South, has been disgracefully successful at painting itself as the champion of civil rights for minorities for two generations now.

It’s a propaganda victory that couldn’t have happened without the complicity of a leftist education system, a dishonest media and, of course, the lies of the Democratic Party itself.

But the numbers don’t lie.

It was the Trump administration that helped spur the American economy in ways that have undeniably benefited black Americans.

It was a Republican Congress and Trump’s signature that enacted criminal sentencing reform that’s benefited black Americans in more than nine out of 10 cases where it’s been applied.

And all the Democratic pandering and mainstream media caterwauling about “racism” can’t change that.

Democrats typically get about 85 percent of the black vote — a number that’s been crucial for them to be competitive in the past and will be even more so in 2020, given the way Democratic presidential candidates have made so little effort to attract the kind of traditional white voter the party lost in 2016.

Branding Trump as “racist” and stoking the black vote will be key to the Democratic strategy for the 16 months between now and Nov. 3, 2020.

With the economy benefiting blacks with jobs and the First Step Act taking away one argument for a “racist” criminal justice system, the numbers aren’t going to be helping the Democrats at all.

In fact, for them, these numbers are the stuff of nightmares.