The New Yorker: Trump's Prison-Reform Push Has Divided Washington On A Rare Bipartisan Issue
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Despite the current division in Washington, the political appetite for prison reform has come a long way in a relatively short time. The emergence of now discredited terms such as “super-predators” and “wilding” in the nineteen-nineties fuelled popular fear and a moral panic that led President Bill Clinton to sign the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, in 1994. A January poll from the Justice Action Network, a criminal-justice-reform group, showed that eighty-seven per cent of registered voters support reforms to mandatory minimums; seventy-six per cent strongly support reforming the criminal-justice system; and seventy-three per cent that think Americans spend too much money on prisons instead of treatment, rehabilitation, and victims’ services.